Interviews with Neil and Allison about Aunt Joan

I learned about some of the problems with oral history recording!  Check the kit before you start!  I messed up the first interview because the batteries ran out and I did not have spares.  

17 May 2017  Interview with Neil McIntyre

What were the reason why you valued your mother?

Latterly … I didn’t always.  The older I got, I suppose, I used to get wise counsel from my mother.  I suppose with age comes different perspective.  My Mother was a difficult woman.  We did not always see eye to eye about things. As I say, with age comes perspective.  She used to give good advice, and act as a sounding board.  Doesn’t make sense that, does it? 

(Recording device ran out of battery)

(from memory)

When I told her I was getting married, she asked me whether it was a good idea.  I was astonished, but she asked whether I was too set in my ways to do it and adapt to being with someone. 

Whenever I think of Mum working in the garden, I think of my Dad too.  They were inseparable when it came to the garden.  He did the hard landscaping and heavy work and she chose the plants and colours, and planted and maintained them.

17 May 2017

Interview with Allison Barnett (nee McIntyre)

Tell me about what it was about your mother that you valued.

Well the sad thing about it is that at certain times I don’t think I did.  I think that it went in and out whether I valued her or not.  I think she did not value herself always and as we have talked about before, she did not rate her qualities which were gentleness and her cretativity and artistry.  She rated the intellect above that and so because she finished school at 14, she did finish her education; she did not go to art college which is what she wanted to do.  She did not do either - she did not finish the education intellectually, and did not go to art college to do artistic skills.  But they were innate in her. 

She taught me a lot – she taught me right from when I was very young, less than 9, I wanted a nurses apron and she was always doing sides to middle with the sheets, and the machine was always drumming away.  She cut up a sheet – she showed me what to do – she cut two squares, showed me how to hem it, put the two together.  Make long lengths of ties to make a neck piece and to tie it around the back.  She found me some red ribbon and we made a cross to put on the front.  There were lots of different activities there, lots of machining, thinking about shapes and sizes, how to put it all together, the construction.  So very early on, I did it. 

She taught me.  She taught me everything I wanted to know about.  So from then on, you know, she taught me to knit and I knitted my first jumper when I was quite young, and everything was …  Her technique was very good.  She was technically competent.  She stuck to the rules – she did not err outside the pattern.  Quite different to me, I would see something and try it once and modify it.  Or not even try it once.  But modify it and jumble a number of different things together.  She would stick within the discipline whereas I would move between disciplines.  If she ever saw me using wool for something other than what she deemed it was designed for, she would try to restrain me.  So, in that respect, there was a restraint on my creativity from her discipline.  Wool was for knitting, material was for sewing and so on. But technically she was very competent with knitting, sewing, … embroidery, dressmaking, soft furnishing, tailoring.  Whereas a lot of people would do any one of those, her ability was sewing and that would go across any of the disciplines. 

She could just turn her hand to anything.  She had a good eye for colour, line.  And she was backed up well by Dad.  He could sometimes be the one who did the mechanics.  Especially for something like her flower arranging – he would create what she needed to display it in or from or around.  So …

But I did not always rate those qualities either.  So whether that was just me, or whether that was something that she generated because she did not rate it?  I suppose I grew up in a scientific environment, so I grew up where money was made by the intellect, and still is, and so I was very largely affected by that, and over the last few years, 10 years, maybe 20, I’ve come to a complete about face about that – the value of the creative arts, music and other things along those lines, is absolutely paramount to our existence, our very being. 

Even when people said how marvellous were the things she did, she would always qualify it.  She did make some amazing things.  Even after she died, it was very difficult to pass things on and knowing that they might not be valued. 

And another thing she did an enormous amount of, was recycling.  That was part of the creativity as well.  I think she saw it as … partly because of growing up in the war, and growing up in a different era to where we live in now … there was not the waste.  When you bought a bottle of something, you took the bottle back to be refilled.  And there was not the extravagance and the waste that there is now.  So, she was always very careful with everything.  Everything that came into the house, it was considered what would be done with it.   Could it be used for anything?  Because when they grew up, anything and everything would be used to make something. Because they did not have anything.  There was a poverty from not having a father, and having to live off very little money.  But it was a time of life that we should never forget – hugely influenced by the two world wars.  She grew up as a child just after the first world war, and was an adult just starting a family after the second world war.  So that started with poverty and restrictions on food and things like that.  You could not go out and buy furniture – you had to have coupons for it.  Everything was valued.  If you bought a settee, it was a really special thing.  It was not “oh we’ll just throw that one away and go and get a new one” it was a completely different way of growing up.  My generation and subsequent generations are not really aware of what that is like.

She was very consistent.  All of the things that I speak about, because we were both Gemini, there’s two sides.  There is the consistency that you can think about, that is boring and never changing, and a consistency that when I look back about her, even the recycling side of things, it was consistent.  She always consistently did the same things.  Um,  I’ve forgotten what the question was.  What were the relationships with family?  They were difficult for her.  She was not naturally outgoing.  Dad was naturally outgoing and she found it quite hard to cope with that, I think, because sometimes he would want to have parties and she did not really want to.  She always enjoyed it when it happened, but it was quite challenging.  Because she was quite socially challenged, although people would not have realised.  She almost always before we went anywhere, it would be that she did not want to go.  But then when we got there, she loved it.  She loved dancing and dancing was a physical connection between people and music.  She loved music, singing in the choir with Dad as well. Listening to it.  That was a lifelong enjoyment.  To listen to music and that was a gift that she gave use – lots of music.  A love of classical music.  And they were happy to accept our choice of music as well, mostly. 

And I think her quietness and sensitivity, I found that .. I won’t say challenging … I’ve come to appreciate that more as I’ve got older.  Similar without realising it – it’s a gift that can be easily be squashed.  It, in itself, isn’t loud, isn’t dominant, it can be dominated and overpowered.  The sensitivity and quiet nature. She was very kind but was very quiet about it.  She did not like show. She chose Dad to get away from the Victorian family upbringing, but she did not like show – he was much more showy.  She was very kind and thoughtful. 

It’s very, very difficult to separate Mum and Dad, because they were united but obviously when we had holidays in Devon they were very inclusive.  I was always aware we were like an extended family.  People like yourself, would come on and join us, and I remember one of Cheryl’s friends was over from New Zealand and Mum invited her to come for Christmas as well so she was part of the group.  That was not always the case, sometimes it spontaneously happened.  She found it quite hard. 

They loved Martin immensely.  In fact, when Ian and Dana had the boys, they invited Mum and Dad to become stand-in grandparents for the American grandparents.  Because of the kindness they had shown to Martin, Ian and Dana asked them to be second grandparents.  Mum was proud of that.  They tried to live up to what they had been offered as a role. 

And she loved her garden.  Gardening was a great joy.  She took the artistic side into the garden.  She would visit places and they might have a white border, or a red border, or a blue border, and she would emulate that.  So a number of the houses they lived in, would have a themed borders.  And she loved plants, loved buying plants, and finding spaces to put them in was quite hard, as they would be pretty full.  And she gardened right up into her 90s.  The garden really only started to deteriorate, and it only starts to become obvious when someone stops doing something, just how much time has been put in before, because it was only in her 90s that the garden started to get a bit of ground elder in it because she was working constantly at keeping it at bay.  It was a joy to her, as she spent a lot of her time in the garden.  And it was a great joy with Dad.  They had a lot of humour working together in the garden.  Well, I can remember one time after Dad died, collecting leaves, with great big plastic hands.  Well something happened and I started to laugh, and Mum said, “Oh I do miss that – I was always laughing with your father, collecting leaves up and doing stuff like that”.  I think there were a lot of sides to her that I did not see because I was the daughter and, there was that element of being the child, I did not always see the adult.  It was later in life that I saw the sense of humour that she had.  We had a different sense of humour – we did not hit it off in terms of sense of humour.  But if you heard her on the phone she was nearly always laughing with people.  But she and I did not.  There was some friction between us so it was difficult for me to see what the values were sometimes. 

She was a homemaker.  She loved making a nice home.  It did not have to be lots of bought stuff.  She made masses amount of stuff.  Both Mum and Dad did.  I grew up thinking you made all your curtains and furnishings, and you made everything you wanted.  And I am lucky in that I value what I inherited.  I inherited a sense of colour, and a sense of being able to create out of nothing, or a few bits and pieces, what I wanted.  I did not really inherit the flower arranging ability, but I inherited the ability to sew, knit and do lots of other things.  And lots of other things that Mum did not do.  I think I inherited her dexterity.

I think towards the end of her life when she could not do everything herself, then the valuing came in, in valuing what she needed and honouring that, and facilitating what she wanted to do.  So for example, she still wanted to go up in the loft and rummage about and find things and bring things down.  Neil and I really did not want her to do that, as we did not think it was safe, so we were able to come to a compromise where she would only do it when we were there, so we knew she was up there so we knew she would be safe and not fall down the ladder when we were not there.  So - valuing her – we tried to enable her to live the same life as she had led by supporting her in her own home.  So, by valuing her, she did not lose her independence.  Independence was a huge asset, value, which, because she was quiet and dependent in certain aspects, it was difficult to see how independent she was.  But that became more apparent to me as she got older.  Even though she needed support, she was still fiercely independent.  Which came from childhood, from not having a father and having to go out to work.  And having to fend for themselves, and do everything for themselves. 

Her values.  She was very, very, er, structure of family was very important to her.  In a church in a biblical sense – you married, had children and stayed together.  That was a very, very strong value in her.  She had wobbles with Dad, I know that much.  She even contemplated clearing off herself but whether that would have happened, I really don’t know.  (Every generation in our family has had a divorce) That’s right.  But one thing that is an anti-value is this sense of denial, in that respect.  She said “We don’t have divorce in our family” when there were already about 10 different examples (May, Audrey, …). It was like trying to hold onto those values even though life moved on beyond.  So she was trying to live in a world of values that was changing, and she did not really change with the times.  So that was both frustrating and also there was an element of admiring because she was trying to hold onto something that was important to her.  So, it did give a structure to society. 

(Do you think this affected her choice in marriage ‘I’ve got to get this right first time’)  I don’t know.  I was not around when she chose him.  People have said she chose him because he was so different.  He took her away from the Victorian structure – however she continued that Victorian structure into our lives – that Victorian upbringing.  I suppose I valued the fact that she maintained a whole range of interests the whole way through her life even when she was struggling with it.  She struggled with it for a long time.  She was a member of the WI, flower club, garden club, fine arts, and lots of craft things with the WI, when the WI was much more about making things.  She struggled socially, so it was quite admirable that she struggled with these things for quite some time, and with health related activities, especially with her eyes.  She struggled on through all of those clubs until she really could not see any more and socially it was nigh on impossible.  She had a lot of health issues and she carried on through that.  Right to the end, she still thought she would get better, because she had an incredible sense that she would be getting better.  It was as if she would carry on forever.  She did not really anticipate death even though she was in her 90s.  I’m already thinking about the pathway to death, not in a morbid way, but in the fact that you start to slow down, less a physical being, more a spiritual being.  Because the physical falls away and I think she wanted to be 100% fit and she was very, very determined. 

Determination?  I suppose looking back at different things that she achieved or overcame.  For example when she had her brain tumour.  That was pretty devastating – the actual operation and the recovery from it – before she had it when she was passing out or losing her speech, getting numbness and things like that.  And afterwards she was in a pretty poor state, having to take drugs but she was determined that she did not have to carry on.  Normally she would have done what the doctor said but she was determined not to take some of the drugs and she slowly cut them down and got off them herself.