There is a time . . .

Some eight years ago I began charting the family tree that I hoped would add a little structure and insight into how we fit into the world in which we find ourselves. The question that has preoccupied me for the past eight years: at what time and with whose time should I begin relating this history.  It was a case of locating a beginning.  However implicit or latent, this was an opportunity to relate life’s ‘time-pieces’ into some sort of meaningful pattern.

But as I am writing, mother is being nursed on and into the final outcome that awaits us all.  It is her time.  It is this timely end that has provided the final impetus to begin a narrative that offers a glimpse into a family ancestry that traces a more extended sense of shared identity.  And of course, mother was an important starting point and origin of the relations and connections that I have made during this research.

May Fry (with flower in hair) c. 1950

The focus of my initial intrigue and research was prompted by a family story about how a great grandfather met his untimely end.  As a boy, a particular memory that stayed with me was one prompted by mother from the front seat of the car. Whenever  we crossed the Clarence Road Bridge, leading to Cardiff Docks, she would say.

“When your Grampy was a young boy his father died on this bridge trying to cycle across  as it  was opening, fell and drowned in the river below.”

To an impressionable young boy this was a spur to set the imagination racing.  I had the vision of my great grandfather racing full pelt along the road as the bridge began to rise into the air, misjudging the effect of gravity on his speed and momentum, the final crushing realisation of the impending fall and the empty space.  The latter part of this sentence is of course me speaking now and not my childish imagination.  What was his name? How old was he?  Why would he attempt such a reckless act? Writing comprises the bridging of innumerable gaps that we attempt to negotiate in order to make sense of the empty spaces of our past, the disconnections of the present and the hope for future resolution.

The empty space my great grandfather failed to negotiate on a fateful day in 1897 further manifested itself for the family he left behind.  My great grandmother, Clara (nee Eggar) was left with two young children, my grandfather, Leonard and younger brother, Ernest and as then, their unborn sister, Clara.  However, this empty space  was soon filled, first by my great grandmother’s brother and subsequently by a second husband.