Just Me Read online

  We have been gay, going our way;

  Life has been beautiful, we have been young,

  After you've gone, life will go on

  Like an old song we have sung

  When I grow too old to dream,

  I'll have you to remember;

  When I grow too old to dream,

  Your love will live in my heart.

  When we visited with the crew, there were but three customers. One had been there since I was a child, perched on a barstool, concentrating very intensely on his drinking with scarcely a glance at us. The resident glazed drunk moved very slowly and carefully towards me and, nose to nose, mouthed, 'I know you.' In the corner was another old boy, supping barley wine, and watching over his glass, barking the odd irrelevant comment. The trains rattled under the building, shaking the glasses, but the fat, slightly dusty barmaid, clad in a voluminous black top over tight woollen black leggings, took no notice. How long it will be able to remain in this time warp without becoming a gastro pub I dread to think. Where will the locals go then? They are creatures left behind by a frantic world.

  Our next trip was to Bexleyheath: much changed. Our house in Latham Road has acquired a garage and back extension on to the now through-lounge. The garden is very smart. Gone are the air-raid shelter and vegetable plot, to be replaced by lawn and flowerbeds. The owner said that, during the conversion, he had found remains of extensive bomb damage. Other than that, no traces of that dramatic era were to be found; although, not long after our visit, people were sent to a local school hall whilst an unexploded bomb was defused.

  The director led me into discussing my two grannies, who had lived in our front room and shared our lives. One, Nanny Woodward, ' Louisa tickle an' squeeze 'er', was down-to-earth and helped take care of me as a child, whilst my mother worked, first in the pub and later in a shop. The other, Grandma Hancock, 'all fur coat and no knickers' was rather grand and condescending, and never lifted a finger to help, swanning around in a moth-eaten fur tippet, and unsuitably dressy clothes.

  Starting on Grandma Hancock, we visited a place I had passed thousands of times when I lived in a nearby basement flat with my first husband, Alec Ross – the Pimlico pumping station. Resembling a charming Venetian palace, I had no idea that it was actually part of the London sewage system built following the three cholera epidemics in London in 1831, 1848 and 1853. The last one alone killed 20,000 people. The river was awash with raw sewage and the stink in the city was overpowering. Joseph William Bazalgette was charged with solving the situation and he came up with a plan to divert the waste from the Thames via new sewers, pumping it along to reservoirs and treatment centres outside London. The palace in Pimlico was one of the pumping stations. The whole place, inside and out, is a wonderful memorial to the Victorians' industrial vision; even for the dispensing of shit they built something truly beautiful.

  My great-grandfather Benjamin Croft, an engineer who had served his apprenticeship in various dockyards, was appointed as the first superintendent of the pumping station when it opened in 1875. Behind the works was a small house where the Crofts lived and my grandmother Emma Easter was born. I had often seen it when the Gatwick Express pulls into Victoria and wondered what it was – this Victorian building now submerged under a complex of very expensive flats. I suspect that if Nanny Woodward had known of Grandma Hancock's childhood, there would have been some pretty crude jokes flying around, but the fastidious Emma Easter would have kept it quiet. She always insisted that she was 'used to better things', which I took with a pinch of salt as one of her fantasies, all of which got more elaborate as she sank into senile dementia. But the next stage of the filming had me rethinking my dismissal of her stories about knowing royalty and going to grand balls.

  When she married my grandfather George Thomas Hancock, she took a step up socially. Not that his background was grand – no education that could be traced, his father a strange combination, according to the census, of station master and hosier – but George was about to join a very good company, Thomas Cook and Son, the travel agents. This the researchers discovered from his marriage certificate. Thomas Cook was a strict Baptist, dedicated to leading people away from the demon drink. To introduce them to a healthy lifestyle, he organised temperance train trips and teetotal excursions, at first in Britain and then venturing abroad. It was the beginning of popular tourism. Ironic, considering my aversion to holidays.

  In 1885 when my grandfather joined the company in a lowly position in the office, it was considered a job with a great future for someone who worked hard. And work hard they did, from 8 to 6 o'clock in the winter and 9 to 9 in the summer. But it was a good firm to be with, promoting promising employees, regardless of education or pedigree. They had a Mutual Improvement Society, with debates, lectures and music, which I suspect my grandfather took full advantage of, judging by the skills he used later. Before long he ended up as branch manager in Italy.

  So the next stop for filming was Milan, where my father was born. I was given a suite at the ornate Grand Hotel, all red plush and gold. Verdi had died in a suite here and Toscanini and Caruso were regular visitors. Another of Grandma Hancock's stories was that Enrico Caruso was Dad's godfather. Sitting in the front room in Bexleyheath it seemed unlikely – but then so was my father's name, Enrico.

  The night we arrived, I was wandering around with the crew and Mary the director, when I commented that a little mink scarf in the window of one of the shops was an upmarket version of my dotty grandma's tippet. A lot of nudging took place, which was explained when filming the next day. Coincidentally the very chic shop that the fur was in was previously the headquarters of Thomas Cook.

  To be a branch manager, as the Cook's archivist explained, was akin to being an ambassador in those days. It would involve accompanying VIPs, including royalty, to the opera, and on sightseeing expeditions to art galleries and the like. I was shown the impressive apartment my grandparents lived in overlooking the Duomo, where they would have entertained regularly. Grandfather, and probably Grandma as the hostess, would have been expected to speak Italian and, when he was previously based in Nice, French. How and when they learnt those languages, heaven knows. Could it be that he had an actor's ability to learn lines and fill out with improvisation? Whatever, he was obviously a bit of a performer.

  These early days of Cook's tours are astonishing. There are photos of people dressed up to the nines, camping in tents in the desert, and in long dresses being yanked up the steps of the Pyramids by native servants. The demands on the representatives could be onerous, as Cook's insisted on nothing being deemed impossible. Piers Brendon in his excellent book on the subject describes one such challenge.

  G. M. Piccoli, who served in Cook's Rome office between 1905 and 1951, was a model courier to royalty. When the Maharaja of Mysore demanded not only to meet the Pope but also to have his orchestra perform in front of his Holiness, Piccoli arranged it. He also shepherded the Maharaja through further European adventures, featuring a performing parrot, a banished relative and assorted chorus girls. Acting on the orders of the British Government when the war broke out, Piccoli at last got the Maharaja home, together with his sixty tonnes of baggage.

  Through the archives we discovered that my grandfather assisted in opening up the Italian lakes for tourists. Now, if I had known that when we were pedaloing across Lake Como, I would have been very cocky with John.

  So why, after all this grand living, was my grandmother penniless, living with us, sharing one small room with another old lady? Why did we discover that my grandfather ended up in rented rooms in Bournemouth, moving steadily down the social ladder, eventually dying in one room in a boarding house? He died of pernicious anaemia, often associated with heavy drinking, which gives me one clue to his downfall. That struck a chord: alcohol has played a large part in my life with both my husbands and my father having problems with it. Another possible reason for his poverty made me sorry but proud. He is recorded as campaigning for pensions for the em
ployees of Cook's. Quite a bold thing to do in such a paternalistic organisation. The pensions were granted the year after he left, so despite a lifetime's service he was not deemed eligible.

  He is buried in a churchyard in Bournemouth. When I contacted them it was suggested to me that he should be added to a tour they conducted of famous people's graves on the basis of being tenuously associated with John Thaw. I protested that Grandpa Hancock had claims to fame in his own right. Similar to John, he held his own in a glittering world, using his personality and self-taught skills. So, too, my grandma. When I watched her dancing with a lamppost in Latham Road, little did I guess that she really had tripped the light fantastic in elegant soirées in Nice, Genoa and Milan.

  Then the programme turned to my Nanny Woodward. Her no-nonsense exterior concealed a tragic secret. Census records and birth and death registers revealed that she gave birth to twin girls. Daisy Octavia died at one month old of premature birth, attended by Nanny and her sister Emma. Violet Hettie died in an overcrowded boarding house in Greenwich when she was seventeen months old of whooping cough, which lasted for five weeks, culminating in pneumonia and convulsions. Little could then be done for babies with this dire illness. I had it as a child and remember the horror of trying to breathe whilst racked with the endless wheezing cough that the name implies. Watching a second baby die in such agony, without being able to alleviate her suffering, is one's worst nightmare. While we were filming my daughter Joanna was anxious about giving her baby son all his injections, and I reminded her of how blessed we are that so many childhood illnesses have been stamped out by the brilliance of medical science; and the courage of the people who subjected their children to the crude methods of early inoculation when the concept of giving your child a dose of the disease to prevent it was a new and challenging one. Yet, thanks to them, polio, measles, scarlet fever, and smallpox, which were dreaded diseases when I was a child, have all but disappeared.

  I doubt whether even my mother, who was born some five years later, knew of this awful period of her parents' life. Nanny's husband, Albert, was a cutler journeyman, and along with my mother they moved around various rooming houses in Lewisham, Greenwich and Woolwich. I remember Nanny as a tough, taciturn, bustling little woman, who apparently pulled a good pint, and took no nonsense from tricky customers. She was also a milliner and dressmaker and always worked, a constant bone of contention with her lady-of-leisure roommate.

  Nanny Woodward's birth certificate proved a major breakthrough in the mystery of the portrait – which it was decided was a photo of a painting – of the lady with the funny name. Although Nanny's mother's name was Louisa Octavia Zurhorst she was not the woman in the portrait. Digging deeper into the archives, one generation further back, unearthed her even more bizarrely named grandfather, Hamnett Pinkney Octavius Zurhorst, 1817–1903. He was married to a milliner. Perhaps she was the lady in the portrait? But the subject of the picture didn't look like a woman who made hats for a living. It seemed even less likely when we discovered that Hamnett died a pauper in the Penn almshouses in Greenwich – he would never have been affluent enough to commission a picture of his wife, and then have an expensive photo taken of it. Kerry Taylor, the costume expert at Sotheby's, noted the huge sleeves, high waistline and frilly hat, all of which would be worn by a fashion-conscious woman between 1830 and 1835. Obviously a woman of wealth, but flashy. Pointing out how she is showing off her jewellery and posing with an open book, Kerry observed that our woman lacked the refinement and aplomb of an upper-class lady. More likely to be nouveau riche, possibly a wealthy merchant's wife. She shows signs of age, and to have a portrait painted when one is old suggests she is either vain or has only now made it from working-class poverty.

  After much searching through the beautifully handwritten city archives it turned out that Hamnett's father Frederich was indeed a merchant. Before that, Frederich's father Hermann, my great-great-great-great-grandfather, had come from somewhere called Malgarten in Westphalia, a region of Germany. I had to stifle my reaction to this discovery.

  At the beginning of the nineteenth century the City of London was buzzing. It was at the root of the spreading tentacles of the British Empire. And Frederich was right in there, wriggling his way to the top of his trade. It can't have been easy for him as a German. For instance, when he was admitted to the Guild of Scriveners in 1815 he had to enlist several friends to sign as to his probity 'by reason of his being the son of a foreigner'.

  All merchant ships would congregate to unload and reload in the Pool of London by London Bridge next to the Custom House. The magnificent Long Room inside was described by Daniel Defoe as the best meeting place in Europe. It was in fact the first trading floor, where Frederich would have operated. The noise must have been pretty deafening with everyone babbling in different languages. The oil dripping from the lamps, the stink of the river outside (which my great-grandfather Croft had not yet cleared up) as well as fish in nearby Billingsgate market, plus a coal-burning fire in the middle, cannot have made it a very pleasant place to be. In fact many people suffered from Long Room Fever. One important entry on the payroll was a cat, to deal with the rats.

  The Long Room now is a much quieter place, with people working silently on computers. Their quest is still to trap smugglers, but they use the web for worldwide communication, and the traders they trap deal in drugs, pornography, guns, endangered species and children for the sex trade – less attractive commodites than the brandy, spices and tea of the old days.

  There were several Zurhorsts in the trade dictionaries, relatives of Frederich, all of which we identified. One in particular puzzled me: 'A. J. Zurhorst. Ready-made linen warehouse. Equipment for East and West Indies.' I eventually realised it must be Ann Judith Zurhorst, Frederich's wife. It was one of several shots that had to be re-taken because of my expletives. It was unheard of for a woman to trade in her own right, unless she was a widow.

  So here, at last, was the subject of my picture. What a character she turned out to be. We found evidence of at least thirteen children, not counting those that would have inevitably died. It was clear she had a child every year, as well as running her business, and helping her husband in his. We went to Idol Lane, one of those lovely backwaters in the City that survived the Blitz, where they lived for some time. An impressive home, with the stores on the ground floor, so yet again one of my ancestors had lived over the shop. With all these children, it must have been much easier to work and entertain in the same place, while keeping an eye on the kids. The names she gave her children seemed to tally with the rather flash image of the portrait. As well as Hamnett Pinkney, there was Augustus Darby, Cornelius Felix, Octavia Augusta and Alphonso Gustavus. Perhaps she was aware, as our researchers discovered, that the Zurhorsts could be traced back to Charlemagne.

  After making, and certainly earning, a great deal of money Frederich and Ann Judith had moved to Guernsey. So off we went, too. Guernsey is a beautiful island. Buildings rather like Bath or Brighton, smart restaurants with a French flavour and flashy yachts in the harbour. It is now, as it was in my great-great-great-grandparents' day, a tax haven. Which is why the shrewd Zurhorsts were there. Having made their pile, they wanted to hang on to it. I imagine this is where she had her portrait painted and almost certainly so did Frederich, although there is no record of his. Doubtless she had it made into the fashionable new photographs, to give copies to her numerous offspring. She could never sit still long enough to be painted when working in London.

  Not that she was idle in her supposed retirement. One delightful census entry puts her first, as head of the household, listed still as a trader, obviously not embracing the concept of retirement. Poor Frederich is last on the list but has earned the title of 'gentleman'. I suspect that dear feisty Ann Judith was never deemed a lady.

  We finished filming at a tranquil graveyard in the Guernsey countryside. I was told to look at the gravestones. I guessed what I was going to find, and was resolute that I would be unmove
d. I wasn't going to be caught out like Paxman. Why should I cry? I didn't know this woman. But over the two weeks, I had built up such a vivid picture of her that, when I found her grave, I dissolved. I felt ridiculous but she had really been alive to me as we pored over all the ancient records and discovered her existence. The cruelty of mortality overwhelmed me. This woman had been such a vibrant, active being, surrounded by a huge family and respected by business partners. Even in her so-called retirement, she was caring for a sickly grandchild, who was buried with her, as is another splendidly named son, Alfred Septimus, who died at thirty-two. All that love – all that life – and now she is completely forgotten. Several generations on, we had to dig and delve to prove her existence, and fill in the holes with our imagination. Re-create her. She had disappeared. Does it matter? I suppose not.

  She had a good life by the look of things. Various Zurhorsts became traders in America, Rotterdam, Hamburg, Ireland, even St Petersburg and – who knows – some of her spirit may still be flickering in her descendants. Ambition, the work ethic, a desire to learn and improve oneself despite little education, a love of cities, adventurousness: I see all those traits in myself and my sister. I see her energy and love of children in my daughters. Maybe it was her inherited strength that helped my grandmother through her ordeal with her dying babies. Ann Judith had probably mourned several of her own.

  On both sides of the family is a rootlessness and a curiosity about the world. Above all, the strange discovery for me was that all of them lived and worked by the Thames; since being an adult, I have never been able to settle far from the river, and now live on top of it, and doubt if I will ever leave it. Something deep inside me connects to its muddy old depths.