There's only two people in the world today that know (directly - i.e. pretty much witnessed) what happened forty years ago tomorrow, Monday, August 27th. 2018. That's a soon to be 67 year old woman living in Cox Green, Maidenhead and a 69 year old man living in Lincolnshire. At about that time in 1978 Madge was a 63 year old woman who worked for the, then 27 year old 'Rag Trade Buyer' boss at a South London department store in Peckham called Jones & Higgins in Rye Lane. The building remains but the store has gone, sadly.
The buyer boss was having an affair (or perhaps a relationship might be more accurate) with Madge's son who was then in his late twenties and whom worked for a diamond company, De Beers, in London.
Madge was her abbreviated name - what most people called her - but a wooden toy boat that many years before, when her eldest son was a little boy sitting in the upstairs bathroom filled bath with it's newly installed Ascot gas boiler suspended above it, carried Madge's birth name of Marjorie. Her husband, Harold, known to most people as George had carved and constructed it in some detail with all it's metal stanchions and it's two funnels to while away the time (it was called occupational therapy during convalescence I believe) that he had spent in a mental institution during recovery from one of several nervous breakdowns that he suffered.
Mental illness seemed to run in his family. His sister Blanche had been hospitalised (more than once) in the infamous (now closed) Cane Hill Hospital near Caterham in Surrey. It was regarding Blanche that Madge's son had first heard the expression "sectioned" which he had had to look up as to what that meant. She often referred to how her American husband had tried to throw her out of a skyscraper window in The USA but it was all I knew about him except that her surname was always, in my lifetime, her married name of Goldsborough and I wondered if he was Jewish but I never knew or met him but I got the impression that the house in which for a year or two I had a back room in - in Kelmore Grove, Dulwich was largely paid for out of Blanche's divorce settlement.
Kelmore Grove went downhill and around a corner into The Gardens, a road which I think was probably officially in Peckham, rather than Dulwich, but that was where Madge's boss had her top floor (Tilt-owned) flat where she sometimes shared her bed-convertible sofa in those early days with me when I too lived in South London.
George's other sister, Olive, too, although I don't believe ever hospitalised, also suffered with mental health problems most of her life. - Very understandable when one thinks about how she was engaged to be married to Madge's divorced brother, Cyril, but just before their wedding date, he died of cancer. That might send one 'loopy'. She never married and died about 20 years ago and decided to leave her entire (if very modest) estate, not to her nephew, her brother George's son, but to her other nephew, Alan, (son of her sister Eveline, known as Eve) - Alan being still alive today (2018) and living comfortably in Totnes in Devon. What she did leave her nephew, Madge's son, was all her love letters as she believed that she had to leave proof that she was not a lesbian which in her challenged mental disturbance she became obsessed with - i.e. that George's son thought her of that persuasion (which he didn't, but he was aware of her deep friendships with particular women).
An exit from this story (briefly - but retaining context):
The lesser-spotted woodpecker sits motionless on our bird peanut 'station' (right now as I type) knowing that he is living up to the converse of his name - he has been "spotted" (by me). We also get green woodpeckers too - its always a treat and I well remember how (aunty) Olive used to love her birdlife and her squirrels that visited her flat environs that looked out onto a surrounding green area below her window (Beckenham, near Sydenham [see later] South London). Her solace, no doubt, as she thought about her lover, Cyril and his demise.
A return to the story:
Eve, Madge's third sister-in-law (her husband George's sister) also, I understand at some time had what was then called "Saint Vitus' Dance" (also known as Sydenham's Chorea). This is rather fascinating as Sydenham in South London is where I lived for some time during a tenancy in a Polish woman's home where I met and had a relationship with, her visiting niece called Theresa (I think spelt with an "H") whom Madge typically referred to as "Moon-Face". (Wheels within wheels - all this.) There is more about Saint Vitus (patron saint of dancing) and Thomas Sydenham, a (British 17th. century physician) here.
I was always told or at least given the impression that Saint Vitus' Dance was a mental health condition but that appears to be quite wrong - it is moreso a physical ailment of the brain - so aunty Eve was wrongly placed in my young mind as like her siblings - mentally ill variously.
So who was Madge and what happened to her on August 27th. 1978, the year before her boss, Cherrill, married me on May 19th. 1979 (the year I voted Conservative - the shame of my political life when I thought Maggie Thatcher was required in 'British Society')?
Madge was my mum and she died forty years ago tomorrow.
She and father (Harold) gave me the genes that have resulted in me having to take so many pills to lower my blood pressure and thin my blood - both died of heart related conditions, although I always said that my father died of a broken heart (some months after mum's demise - as she had left him and married another [awful] man to whom I, as her last will and testament executor, handed out, meticulously, his 50% inheritance with the principle, honour and trustworthiness that I have adhered to most of my life (and to which I bear so many scars for that 'life-quality'). In my view - one can be trustworthy, honourable and principled at the same time as being matrimonially unfaithful but many would challenge that concept.
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