Different Strokes for Different Folks

It seems that the principal characteristic of the Constant family so aptly described a number of years ago by my brother * remained alive and well through the generations. When I was growing up there always seemed to be an extraordinary amount of distrust operating within the family and layer after layer of lies and fabrications. Attitudes have hopefully changed but what is glaringly obvious is that we each appear to have quite conflicting experiences of some family members. Old Nan’s oldest child, my Aunt Mag who was born in 1906 or 1907 always seemed to me to be a much gentler and more accepting person than my mother and I clearly remember her remonstrations, advising my mother that she was `much too hard’ on her kids and warning `they don’t forget those things Nell’. This advice fell on very deaf ears which was predictable. When, as a teenager I got fed up with running away from home and sleeping rough it was my Aunt Mag I appealed to, felt safest with, and unsurprisingly she took me in, did not ask awkward questions and rather than lecture me on the topic of returning to my own home, waited for me to make the suggestion myself. Recently, realizing that further down the line of time there are family members who had astonishingly dissimilar experiences of her came as a shock.

I was a contrary child and at times I was treated harshly, beaten as a toddler so frequently that when my father came home on leave the neighbours asked him to intervene on my behalf. Given that those were the days when small children were routinely thrashed this was perhaps significant. I was willful and under the stress of wartime it could not have been easy for Nellie Constant to deal with my behaviour on top of the daily problems involved in living in what became known as Bomb Alley. As I grew older I did not improve and when my father returned from the war he too resorted to beating me. Horrifyingly I recall relief at his sudden death, hopeful that life might improve but of course it didn’t. Little wonder that I firmly believed I would have been better off within the more benevolent folds of my aunt’s family.

My younger brother was treated less harshly than me, at least that’s how I remember it, and later on he was infinitely more forgiving. When, long after my mother had died I discussed our childhood with his son, he was astonished and quite unable to visualize the loving grandmother he had known as the more savage individual I was describing. Clearly my mother was able to love him unreservedly.

In April 2016 when my brother died I wrote a blog post describing the deprivation of our early lives and in it made criticism of my mother. It educed an immediate response from a second cousin, Aunt Mag’s grandchild, who had grown up to some extent under the care of my mother. Her reaction was astonishingly venomous, bitter and very hurtful – her experience of my mother did not match my own. She had found her to be attentively caring, sensitive and loving. She told me how ashamed my dead brother would be of me that I described her so ruthlessly. As C.S. Lewis once observed, `What you see and what you hear depends a great deal upon where you are standing.’

Although I have no doubt that her brutal comments were also served by a basic dislike and distrust of me, they also demonstrated the time honoured attitudes that fester within a deeply dysfunctional family, traits that I recognize and if only I had been able to stand in a different position might almost have viewed as comforting and familiar. Furthermore they made me realise that we are imprisoned to some extent by our own experiences and often condemned to see the world through only one lens. As humans we will always be affected by our surroundings, previous experiences, social influences and we can behave vastly differently when an imperceptible change occurs. Yes, I was astonished to read that my Aunt Mag could be that self-same person seen as a `real bitch’ by more than one family member because it is hard for me to imagine her that way. I have always been standing in the wrong place for that.

I think we have to remember that those women born in the first years of the twentieth century experienced life on a vastly different level to ourselves. They grew up in a world where the degree of misery and deprivation that surrounded them was all encompassing. No surprise that some of them resorted to relentlessly beating recalcitrant offspring or mutated into Real Bitches in their old age. What is perhaps surprising is that there still remained a part of them ready to emerge as the sympathetic Aunt to a runaway teenager or the loving grandmother and carer to a new generation of pre-schoolers.

*published on my blog from 7th to 11th September 2016 (see: A Constant Economy of Truth, A Decidedly Constant Narrative, The Constant Family, Further Considerations and Constant Reflections)