Educational resources supporting PHSE Health Education
Before this event disappears forever, before our acknowledgment, appreciation and understanding of this history, our past and heritage is gone, this story aims to negate this negligence. It aims is to help us gain an insight into our personal lives. Each of us has a personal history with connections to an incredible family past. These snapshots and storyboards can haunt individuals. Their legacy may greatly influence the course of our lives. And so, this is the story of Marilyn’s baby.
Marilyn was a bright, young, vivacious girl. She was tall, anorexic looking with long black hair and the whitest of skins. As she walked she would sing, dance and pirouette. There was always a smile on her innocent face and she greeted everyone with warmth,
“Hello, you’re look great today, what’s the news? Have you heard how they are getting on? You only hear politicians and news reporters talking about world events and the implications for the country. What about our boys? How are they doing? Why don’t they tell us?” as she briskly plaited her hair.
Her father George replied,” Because they are more interested in preserving their self-effacing images, voicing their personal opinions and cultivating their vested interests. They are about manipulating, influencing and maintaining, power. What chance have we got on the fringes of society? We are the little people with nothing. Andrew and the boys are their pawns and cannon fodder to keep them in power and get their evil way. The military, the police and the judiciary are the forces to deliver power to the politicians. Everything is about them maintaining a vice like grip to maintain the status quo. Who do the politicians answer to? What do they get out of it? They seem to do very well out of it. We are at the end of the queue. The jingoism of The Daily Mail and the press blinds people. You aren’t listening Marilyn. Why ask a question and then waltz away in your own little world.”
Marilyn longed to be independent, free to think and be able to live a life she thought she wanted. She glided away in her romantic daydream of another world. This was a generation thought difference from her father’s perception. Marilyn’s emotions, perceptions and thinking were at her stage of development, in black and white. These were at a stage, perhaps similar to an egotistical infant child, where every thing centered on the ‘me’. Marilyn, as a young adult, thought she knew about everything, yet she was only in the early stages of her adult emotional and intellectual development. She had a lot to learn. With hindsight and maturity things would have turned out very differently.
As a teenager living in a rural community Marilyn dreamt of moving to the city. The only things in her life that were meaningful were the latest lyrics and sounds from the rock bands. She skipped and danced along the country lanes humming their catchy tunes.
George, her gentle and kind father, gently encouraged her desire to break away from the stifling humdrum. Not much older than his beautiful daughter, he worked in Canada where he blasted rock in the Rocky Mountains for an American mining company. Whilst in Vancouver, Europe was plunged into another twentieth century murderous bloodbath in Sarajevo. During the Balkans war he enlisted into the Canadian army engineers. After being injured in the skirmishing in Kosovo George got demobbed back to his birthplace at Manningtree, Essex. George then brought and developed the family smallholding.
George married and met Ruth whilst serving in the Methodist Chapel in the village. Ruth was always scolding, cajoling everyone for not going to the chapel or completing their domestic jobs.
She did not work. Her duty and role was to run the home and do the domestic routines. To help save money, it involved of planting vegetables and picking fruit.
Each week chickens from the yard were presented for the family’s Sunday dinner. Ruth was an expert at ringing their necks, plucking them and then preparing them for lunch. Other times she was curing hams, making jam, drawing water from the garden well with the hand pump, stocking the large, cool walk in larder with fresh provisions, doing the hand washing, sweeping the lino floors and preparing all the meals.
There were no large stores, just a small grocery store and a butcher on the main road. Every morning, bread and groceries would be delivered by a huge, twenty stone man riding a black bike with a large wicker basket full of fresh bread. You smell the warm bread coming along the lane followed by the squeal of bike breaks as the fat grocery man slowed down. After half an hour of gossip, of he went. I think this is why large super stores developed.
Breakfast would consist of a hunk of ham, bread, butter and marmalade. For lunch there were platters of fresh salad, cold meats and strong cheddars. Evening meals, where the meat was served first, followed by the vegetables. Desserts would be jam steam puddings or bread puddings. Everyone would sit around the table and exchange the day’s news. At six, the large TV would be turned on for the news.
Eddy Jackson
The eScribe Journal• CareersMentor • Educational Resources
0780 9233 688
