A sad day for Musbury

We heard today that my mother's great friend from Musbury, Jeni de Meester, has died.
They first met at Queenswood when my mother went to work at her old school immediately after the war, and Jeni was a new girl being cared for in the sanatorium by the young assistant matron, Pat Dench.
When Pat and Peter first came to Musbury, Jeni and Flores were the first neighbours to come round to Laurel Cottage to welcome them. Chris and I had at least three engagement parties at their home South Cross, or so Jeni used to claim, and it would always be Jeni who remembered our wedding anniversary. She and my mother would sing, "Sisters, sisters, never were there such devoted sisters", linking arms and high-kicking at parties. They were both hopeless romantics
When Flores died so shockingly suddenly, in his early fifties, the ground fell from beneath her feet.  But later when she and John Waters found each other in their respective widowhood, it was like a love-companionship made in heaven
My Welsh great aunt Rya used to say to me, "I had several offers after Arthur died, but I would never marry again....what will I do when I get to heaven and two men come towards me, arms outstretched?"
My belief is that we all reunite in a single heavenly embrace when we get there
Our family seemed to have a psychic connection with Jeni, she adored my grandmother Molly who had a strongly psychic mind. Jeni's father was a Canon in the Church of England and she was a deeply spiritual person though not necessarily in an 'organised' way. In fact, nothing about Jeni was organised. She was very loving, a true eccentric. "Love" was the word she used most.  She loved Flores, she loved her two sons, she loved John, and I know she loved all of us
It makes me weep to think that all that is gone from the world
I have already wept for all that has gone from Musbury over recent years with the passing of so many good friend — Flores, my mother, Ray Thompson, Pamela Thompson, Pat Sant, and most recently Margaret Hargreaves — to name only a few
I sometimes feel the best party is happening 'over there', and am even quite looking forward to the day I get my invitation (although I hope not for some time yet....)

I have a little prayer card on my desk in front me. It is next to a picture of my mother and gives me strength and happiness, because I know this is what she would want to say to me:

John with Chris outside The Old Bakery in Musbury on New Year's Day 2010, and the letter he gave to us to post

Photos - thinking of Simon on his birthday

Second posting, a message for my Dench cousins

I've been dipping into my Grandmother Molly Dench's diary. It is a key to our family history, although I find it is full of riddles which I sometimes try to figure out by following through successive entries in a particular year. For example, I was recently looking at entries for 1946 to discover more about my mother Patty's "nervous breakdown" (as they euphemistically called it), when she jumped overboard from the steamship bringing her and her older sister Gilly back from Dublin, where they had gone to get her 'trousseau' for her forthcoming wedding to my father, Peter
There's an entry on July 23rd which simply says: "Patty's second chance - S.S. Hibernia"
and two days later: "London to Northampton (St Andrew's Hospital)"
I wept when I read this
But thanks to the internet, one is able to start to build a picture from what is hidden between the lines, and what was kept from our knowledge as children by our parents, the 'secretive generation' who thought they were protecting us, but actually (and more likely) were protecting themselves.
I found a picture postcard of the SS Hibernia and also looked up St. Andrew's Hospital in Northampton, which is now part of a leading mental health consortium in the UK.  Our great aunt Cally (née Dench) - my grandfather's artist sister whom I never met - lived in Northampton and my father Peter would go down from Oxford where he was doing his post-war degree in 1946 and stay with Cally at weekends so that he could visit Pat during the period of her confinement and treatment there. They had to cancel their original wedding date in August that year because of her breakdown. I came across a copy of the wedding invitation not so long ago among my father's papers
I've been partly motivated to start this blog because Facebook is beyond me, in fact I can't stand it. It's like being on a crowded beach with lots of noisy holiday-makers shouting nonsense at each other.  I suppose it's good to be able to track down lost friends and keep in touch, but I would delete myself from it if I knew how. I don't like the way friendships are becoming public affairs (and no longer private) these days and think it is fatally undermining the very essence of friendship
This Blog is not being forced on any captive audience.  I can talk to it, as I do in my diary or  notebooks, and if my occasional musings and stories reach one other person out there who wants to hear them (most likely a friend or relative, as I know no stranger will want to read it), then that's enough for me

Our grandfather William George (Will) Dench at Trinity College Dublin c.1905

Our great-great-grandmother, Will Dench's paternal Grandmother (hence Peter, Jeffery & Judi's Grandmother) c. 1900

Our grandmother Molly Huggard-Dench c. 1899

The Huggard family gathered on the shore of a Co. Kerry lake in Ireland c. 1899
My grandmother Molly aged 4 (centre), with her mother Joan Martin (who had 16 brothers and sisters), Grandmother Huggard & Great Aunt Izzie Huggard. Her father (centre standing) was John Turner Huggard, and she had 5 brothers: (to be Sir) Walter Clarence, William,  Harold (Hal), John Turner and Billy who died in childhood

Starting my new Blog

It's Saturday 24th September 2011, and I am starting a Blog at my husband Chris's insistence
We talk everyday with each other about the ways of world, God, the Meaning of Life, human experience and Truth, without ever reaching definitive answers of course, and wonder if others are having similar conversations
Two hours of my day are spent in reading and studying, and about an hour walking across fields in the open countryside.  This is when I commune with nature, with the trees and the insects, and my clearest thinking happens. This Blog will be my means of sharing my thoughts and questions to myself with others who may be asking themselves similar questions, and happen to stumble across it
I don't know yet what it will become, or what its main purpose will be, because there are other things I'll want to talk about from time to time, such as my film project for nuclear disarmament (www.talkworks.info) which I do in association with Anne Piper and Andy Russell of Different-Films.com
This is what TalkWorks is:
We make short films for the internet of influential people explaining why they are backing a radical step-by-step programme of global nuclear disarmament, leading to zero.  Security experts and policymakers from across the political spectrum have become newly alarmed in recent years at the dangerous crisis ('Nuclear Tipping Point') the world has reached with tens of thousands of nuclear weapons left over as a legacy of the Cold War, and the uncontrolled spread of nuclear materials and technology into 'unsafe' hands and to very unstable parts of the world.
We want ordinary people to know about this, and to join in the call to get rid of nuclear weapons once and for all because, as one of our contributors Sir Jeremy Greenstock says in his recent interview for TalkWorks, political leaders cannot do it on their own: they need strong public demand behind them in order to drive such a complex international policy as nuclear disarmamenent through.
I've worked on nuclear disarmament and the non-violent conflict resolution for the past 30 years, ever since I left teaching and joined the Oxford Research Group in 1982. It is my singular passion for the 21st century that the monstrous invention that has cast its terrifying shadow over the second half of the 20th be dismantled and outlawed, and the enormous scientific and financial resources that are expended in feeding the monster be turned instead towards creating and applying constructive new technologies that can help to save the planet.
At the same time, of course, human awareness (or lack of it) and the thinking patterns that created the nuclear problem, and the other man-made messes we've landed ourselves in, have to change fundamentally. 'Consciousness changing' is what my mentor and former colleague at Oxford Research Group Scilla Elworthy works on now, with her fellow global peacebuilders and consciousness raisers, Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu and their fellow Elders, an initiative Scilla helped Richard Branson and Peter Gabriel to set up.
For the moment, I am simply aiming with TalkWorks to raise awareness about the nuclear threat, so that the commitment made by President Obama in his Prague Speech in April 2009 to work with other nuclear nations, by a series of concrete steps, towards a nuclear weapon-free world in the 21st century has a chance of being fulfilled

It would have been my brother Simon's 59th birthday today, and it is also the anniversary of our mother Pat's death in 1999. They are the inspiration for everything I do — at least that is what I'm feeling as I start this blog on Saturday 24th September 2011

Simon Truman Houldsworth, violinist
b. 24th September 1952  d. 4th July 2001

My mother Pat Joan Dench-Houldsworth, artist
on the terrace at Burnaston Cottage c. 1995

in her studio at Bourne Street, London SW1 c. 1993

Woodcut expressing the struggle of living, which proved too much for Simon

— and (below) Simon and Irene with our youngest nephew Sebastian aged 9
meeting our middle nephew Dominic at Heathrow airport for Christmas 1999