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