Misc Magazine: 265 & Me

I never thought I would be faced with the details of how my grandmother was conceived. Yet there I was, sitting in a stuffy military archive, reading intimate details about how my grandmother came into being. Surrounded by sombre academics researching battle tactics and troops’ movements, I wondered how I would ever be able to look my grandmother in the eye again.

There has long been talk in my family about the papers that my great-grandfather left to some archive. Over the years the story about which archive they had been given to and the precise nature of those documents had become increasingly confused. As a History student curious about  my family’s past, I decided to try and find these papers to see if they contained anything interesting. 

Unsure of where to begin, I did what any other member of my generation would do – went to Google. All it took was a quick search of my great-grandfather’s name to find the archive that held these papers: the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives at King’s College London. Navigating archive websites is not easy but luckily this was not my first rodeo, so I quickly found what papers they had of his. 

When I did, I stared at my laptop screen in complete amazement – the archive held two hundred and sixty-five letters that my great-grandfather (Rex) had written to my great-grandmother (Rosemary) during the Second World War, when he spent four years in various German prisoner of war camps. So, that was how I eventually found myself sat in that archive, reading a letter in which my great-grandfather reminisced about the place where he had “initiated” my grandmother. 

A few months later I had to  decide what I wanted to do for my dissertation. I had an idea for a topic, but quickly dismissed it. It felt self-aggrandising. I had no idea  how I would even go about writing a dissertation on sources that no historian had ever analysed. And besides, surely Trinity’s  History department would not allow me to do my dissertation on my great grandparents? 

There was another issue with the letters: where were the ones that Rosemary, my great-grandmother, had written? Nobody knows. As she did not have an ‘important’ career, nobody at the time had cared to preserve them. 

My great-grandparents Rosemary and Rex Madoc

Nevertheless, with the encouragement of a professor who argued the benefits of bringing original source material to my dissertation, I decided to go for it. I submitted my dissertation proposal from my room in the Netherlands where I was on Erasmus, convinced my proposal would be soundly rejected by the history subject co-ordinator. To my great surprise, it was accepted. 

So what is it like to approach my great-grandparents as a historian? In a word, complicated. 

Complicated because Rex, at times, wrote things that I find quite offensive. But, sometimes within the same letter, he would express the torture of being away from those he loved – my family.

There are letters that I know will bring me to tears whenever I read them, no matter how many times I have read them before. My grandmother was Rex’s only child. When he was captured, she was two; when he returned, she was six. A large part of his letters are devoted to his despair at how much of his daughter’s childhood he is missing. In one particularly devastating passage he writes that  reading a book about children the same age as his daughter makes him realise how much of her young life he is missing. 

Rex has also always cast a long shadow over my family – my brother is called Rex after him. My grandmother still uses many of the terms and phrases that he used in the letters, like saying “sucks-eggs” instead of success and calling everyone Popsy as a term of endearment. Popsy, consequently, is the name of our family dog. 

Initially when reading through these letters I felt the weight of all this history and lore clouding the cold analytic skills that one should approach a source with. I found myself irrationally trying to defend my great-grandfather whenever he said or did something offensive. It crossed my mind that I could just, perhaps, leave out the bits of the letters that I found the most offensive? After all, this was the man who held my mother’s hand as she took her first clumsy steps, who had taught my aunt how to swim, who had told my grandmother that she could be whatever she wanted to be and had never judged her for marrying my grandfather (a divorced man) when many people did. Surely, there must be an excuse for the hideously offensive things he said? 

Of course, deep down, I knew. 

I knew that I would not grant someone else I was not related to the grace I was trying to give him. I knew it would be unethical not to discuss and evaluate every relevant part of the letters in my dissertation, even if I desperately wanted  to caveat every derogatory thing my great-grandfather had written.

Fundamentally, having to approach my great-grandparents analytically means having to face up to every aspect of their personalities. My great-grandfather was the man who I have just described but he was also someone who used slurs when referring to Chinese and Japanese people; insisted that “Land Girls” (women who stepped up to farm the land in the place of men who were at war, often for little or no money) were just there to keep the troops cheerful and made jokes at the expense of Jewish people. The jokes about Jewish people were particularly hurtful considering how his beloved daughter would marry a man who was related to at least twenty victims of the holocaust and his granddaughter too would marry a man whose Sephardic Jewish family had to flee Portugal in fear of their lives. 

I think that often when we love people, we try to only see the best parts of them. When relationships end or break down, we tend to blame ourselves, thinking, “How did I not see that part of them all along?” With family – and those relationships we hope never end or break down – we spend our lives focusing on the good in the people life has thrown our way. Having to look at the writings of my great-grandfather as a historian has meant that I have had to accept him for the complicated person he actually was, rather than the idealised figure he is remembered as by my relatives.