Jeremy Hardy - My Family and Other Strangers: Adventures in Family History

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First published in 2010 by Ebury Press, an imprint of Ebury Publishing A Random House Group company

Copyright Jeremy Hardy 2010

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To everyone I love

December 2007

I am Jeremy James Hardy. That much I know. My parents are Donald and Sheila and my siblings are Susan, Serena, Joy and Simon. I am the youngest. I am loath to tell you more because once you have my date of birth and my mothers maiden name, you can ring my mobile phone service provider and pretend to be me. Where such an act of identity fraud might get you, I dont know, but it is hardly surprising there is so much of it about. If you asked me to come up with something that only I could possibly know, I might select something more discreet than when I was born and who my mum is. If such facts were not now so readily available, I would not be embarking on a quest to learn more about my ancestors. We have the Internet now. I would not be happy to bugger about in country churches for two years in my search for forebears who were not as ethnically and culturally uninteresting as I am.

From what I know, my heritage is not what you might call diverse. But maybe that is in itself a bit interesting. I am the whitest, most Anglo Saxon Protestant I know. Perhaps that will be the story, but I have to say, Im hoping it wont be. This cant be all there is, surely. I have always thought I should be Jewish, but as far as I know, I am not. I am, along with Barry Cryer, one of Britains most unlikely gentiles. I dont know why Im not Jewish. I should be. I did apply, but I passed the medical.

Im not even Catholic. Ive always thought Id like to be something more exotic than C of E. I cant even say Im lapsed. You dont lose your faith when you are Church of England you just cant remember where you left it. I believe my great-grandfather converted to Catholicism, but also that my grandfather converted back. I know that my dad used to be High Anglican, which seems to involve being a Protestant but with all the camp and theatre of being a Catholic a case of wanting to have your sacrament and eat it.

I also know that my mothers mother, Rebecca Stagg ne Monk, got involved in some sort of sect called Moral Rearmament in the thirties. She became a pacifist in the twenties, a noble stance except that she maintained it into the forties, which smacks of not paying attention. During the First World War, when pacifism had credibility, she served as whatever was the acronym for a woman army volunteer at that time, which is how she met my grandfather, Herbert Stagg. My mother was always puzzled by her mothers inability to cope with the installation of a telephone in the 1960s. Grandma always answered the phone as though its ringing was quite the most baffling event that had ever occurred, and yet in the First World War she was a wireless operator.

She was somewhat other-worldly, Rebecca. She seemed antiquated even for her age. She said things like Hark and Its five-and-twenty past the hour. Everything gave her indigestion. She had me peel grapes for her because of her dentures, and she got the skin off a tomato by sticking it on a fork and holding it over a gas hob. Lunch was a poached chicken breast. She was finicky and methodical, always carrying out her routine in exactly the same way. It took her about half an hour to prepare and drink her glass of Fybogel, making sure that every particle went into the glass, and none remained on the side when she drank it. And she painted her feet with iodine every day, so they were bright yellow. They were sore and deformed from wearing uncomfortable shoes. She was worried my fringe would wear away my eyebrows and once greased my hair back with lanolin. Mum went mental, as she did when her mother lent me a book about Christian martyrs being tortured by the Romans.

Rebeccas husband Herbert, my grandpa, was a hero in the Great War. He volunteered as a nurse in the Royal Army Medical Corps in 1914, and he was in the Battle of the Somme. His ambulance driver was killed by a shell and he had to set up a field hospital in a barn. Well, I think thats the truth. Its possible that he escaped military service on the grounds of split ends and spent the war in Catterick. I doubt it, but well see.

Oh, and apparently he was a mason is that interesting? And if he was, why dont I get off my parking tickets? Its hard to imagine him having been a mason; I guess it came with a job. He was a gentle and charming man and very proper; I cant imagine him up to anything dodgy. He used to help my mum a lot when he was well enough. He would always ask me what I wanted for my tea, which was always peanut butter sandwiches, because thats all I ate; but Mum says he was a really good cook and made wonderful cakes, always with butter, never marge. When he was bedridden, he got Meals on Wheels, but never liked it so I usually ate it.

I suppose I would like to find out more about my grandparents because I knew them when I was too young to grasp that they were interesting people. They were my grandparents, source of treats. Ive always been fascinated by the term Nanny State, because when I was a boy, Nanny was your dads mum, and not only did she let you do whatever you wanted, she fuelled you with Quality Street and Tizer to ensure that you would.

My nanny Audrey and my grandad, Lionel, my dads parents, were lovely. They bickered adoringly for the whole of their life together, and were only ever apart when the other was in hospital. They seemed to me to be very respectable. I once overheard Nan use the word sods to describe local kids who banged on their back door and ran away. I memorised the word and repeated it in front of them and my parents on Christmas Day, to my grandparents great mortification. I was very proud of the new word and found it applicable in any situation, despite gleaning that it referred to a man engaging in unnatural intercourse with another man or an animal.