Mum was born 97 years ago today. She was, sadly, beginning to fail in her 90th year, and so it must be doubtful how she would be today, presumably after nearly two years locked away from those she knew. Just as the period “before Covid” seems already to be becoming a past age, her life, and especially her active life before 2014, seems to be receding and becoming a matter of history.
Much of the “stage set”, of the places she knew in Wallasey, has disappeared. Some of this went “in her time”, like the Hotel Victoria in New Brighton, which was demolished in 2006-7: her wedding reception took place there, and she attended many events, in Rotary and Masonry, in which my father was the host. The house in Grove Road that she lived in from 1964 to 2014 has been extensively altered and modernised, including the demolition of its garages. In the same road, the Grove House Hotel, which featured a number of Inner Wheel events, my wedding reception, and both Dad’s and her funeral receptions, was closed and sold last year. Back in New Brighton, the Hollins Hey Hotel, near the Hotel Victoria, was one that she attended for Inner Wheel meetings (and at which the funeral reception for my late sister was held in 2019); this too was sold last year, and the new owners have firm plans for redevelopment. Similarly, the Queens Royal on New Brighton front also closed last year, with redevelopment plans; it was badly damaged in recent storms, and it seems inconceivable that it would reopen. This was, I think, the scene of Mum’s last main outing, at Christmas 2016, although we did go out by car after this.
Driving past Parkgate front recently, I realised that a Chinese restaurant there was one that I visited with Dad in the 1980s It was then called Mr Chow’s, but is now Chows Eating House. If she was alive today, Mum would recall and recognise this, and also the cafe in Vale Park House, although the latter has changed hands and character. She often visited the Derby Pool pub/restaurant in later years with family, and again, somewhat remodelled, this is still there and open. Looking for other reminders, one is then reduced to open spaces, like Vale Park, Marine Park (astonishingly similar to its early twentieth century appearance), Harrison Park, the Grange park, and the Promenades. This is a musing essay, and while I will no doubt think of other items for an inventory, these can go elsewhere.
So what does this mean? There is a clear and rational view that stresses that once the main player has (or all the players have) left the stage, the stage set has little meaning. Indeed, its continued existence might be a distressing reminder that places have lived on, whereas Mum has not. I tend towards a different view, which seeks reminders, albeit incomplete, of Mum’s life and especially those parts that I shared, or recall personally. These reminders, however, need to be integrated into accounts of her life in which they form minor components of reconstruction. This has proved odd when I have visited places that have clearly changed greatly, but which Mum recalled. This could prove disconcerting – for instance, Carr Holm, in Prestatyn still stands, but much of the area around it is greatly changed, while Nant Hall, in the same town, had clearly been altered so much that it was difficult to envisage Mum there. I had an odd experience, travelling on the narrow gauge line in the Isle of Man, between Douglas and Port Erin, when I realised that the historic carriage in which I was travelling could well have been one in which Mum had travelled in the 1930s.
Just as Mum’s memory, sharp in some aspects and hazy in others, was fading, and her faculties declining, my perceptions of her past have started to recede. It is for this reason that I started this memorial website – to slowly recover what would otherwise be lost. It is making me into an historian of her past (and also Dad’s, in that earlier website), investigating people and documentation, weighing, and trying to interpret – added to which I am also a source, sometimes an unreliable one, often one who strains to recall, to place in context and seek inspiration.
Many might wonder whether there is any point in all of this – would it not be best to leave these partial memories to fade away? Mum (and Dad) came from a very different world from that which I inhabit, and their idea of the good society was very different from mine. I could never have followed them into the world of service organisations, of dinner dances, charity events, rituals and structures, or their religious affiliations and practices. As these worlds gave meaning to their lives, it is worthwhile sketching something of them, without necessary endorsement. Very much has changed in such organisations (and needed to), and what Mum (and Dad) encountered has been transformed, so that recollections of their earlier incarnations are themselves diminishing. At some point “what is” becomes “what was”, and then “what may have been”, and between the latter points the historian, however untrained and inexperienced, needs to step in. To record and write about the life of a middle-class mother who would now be approaching a hundred is to hold on to, if not preserve, elements of a disappearing world. Whether that gets me (or the odd reader of this site…!) close to the Mum that I knew, and who exactly was the Mum I knew, is another matter – but that is for another day.
25 January 2022
Postscript 18 March 2023:
I would just note that the Hollins Hey Hotel has been completely demolished, while Nant Hall has closed.
Joan Boughey Recalled 