Valerie Diane Roseblade
1930 - 2016
Mum was born and brought up in Essex in 1930. Born into a pre-war Essex that was a very
different Essex to today’s Essex. Her
Essex was Marple-esque Essex of bowler-hatted commuters and maiden aunts; an
Essex where the only stilettos were the murder weapons in the detective novels
written by her father and the orange tan was on the weekend brogues.
When war broke out, Mum’s part in the war effort was to
raise chickens and rabbits for the pot.
She had an arrangement with her friend Heather over the road whereby
they’d simultaneously go to each others house to select a rabbit or chicken
for the pot. They had no emotional
attachment to each others livestock and so could select, kill and place the
corpse under a cloth in a wicker basket and then pass each other crossing the
road back home, avoiding all eye contact and then rushing back to check that a
much-loved chicken or rabbit had remained safely hidden.
She was later evacuated to north Essex and spent the rest of
the war corralling her much-younger sister and cousin. She was apparently so mean to her cousin
Andrew that he threatened her that when he was grown up, he’d marry her. Country ways.
In adulthood she moved to work in London – selling
advertising space in the Daily Mirror – but didn’t settle and so she moved into
hotel management in Torquay and then Dartmouth.
Her time in Dartmouth as the manageress / barmaid / chief
cook & bottlewasher of the Royal Castle Hotel seems to have been a riot. She lived on a houseboat and worked all hours
at the hotel, pouring drinks into drunks and drunks into coats. Although a modest women, she came away from
Dartmouth with some world-class name-dropping – had she been the name-dropping
sort.
Dartmouth was the jewel of the British Riviera and the Royal
Castle was the finest hotel. As such, it
was a stopping off point for the stars of the day. When visiting his mother in Bristol, Cary
Grant and an unidentified starlet stayed there.
In order to give said starlet some personal space – allegedly shared
with her chauffeur, Cary Grant asked my mother for a guided tour of Dartmouth. They stepped out arm in arm and finished up
back at in the lounge bar of the Castle, where she played him her Goon
records. She assured me that that’s not
a euphemism.
She was friends with Christopher Milne, who ran a book shop
in Dartmouth and charged tourists a fiver a go to be bitterly reminded that he
used to be Christopher Robin.
She learned to scuba dive.
She described it as freezing to death at the bottom of the River
Dart. The other students on the course
were 3 young men sent by the BBC. Tony
Soper, Johnny Morris, David Attenborough and Mum, all dressed in ill-fitting
rubber and freezing half to death. Mum’s
ears exploded and she never went back. One
can only speculate on the after-dive sessions in the Royal Castle bar. Perhaps Johnny Morris having a conversation
with the stags head on the wall, while David Attenborough crouched underneath
and stage-whispering details of how he was in the natural environment of the
rare Devon Wall Moose.
During a theatrical tour, the British comic actor Jimmy
Edwardes stopped over in Dartmouth. My
mother was so impressed with his act and his outstanding handlebar moustache,
that she wrote a fan letter to him. He
responded and they started a friendship that led to a Wodehousian
‘arrangement’. Jimmy’s heart was in it, but
he was under family pressure to marry ‘well’.
He married another Valerie and was dreadfully and distraughtfully
apologetic to my mother. She may not have actually been his sort but
correspondence suggests that they were very fond of each other.
Dartmouth paled and my mother finished up being dropped off
in Cirencester to take a job at the Kings Head hotel. She was dropped off in Cirencester by a
family friend and was told that if it didn’t work out, he’d be back in a week
to take her home. He never returned.
Life at the Kings Head was less star-filled than Dartmouth
but it had other attractions. In her
letters to her father, she describes having ‘come to the attention of the
locals, who were vying for her attentions’.
One of the locals had had a ginger handlebar moustache for many years
and had been single for many years.
These two facts are connected.
He shaved off the moustache and was noticed by the new barmaid /
manageress at the Kings Head.
It was a meeting of unconventional minds. They stepped out and walked miles
together. According to both of them,
each other’s hearts were won when a heron flew over. Dad was always one for
facts.
“The heron’s wings beat at exactly one beat per second”
Mum was always one for Goonesque surrealism.
“Doesn’t the tomato sauce get all over their wings?”
Despite being built on a left-field joke about tinned fish,
it was a strong marriage. They moved in to my paternal grandfather’s
two-up-two-down terraced house. It
needed a woman’s touch – up until then, my Dad and Grandad were living a
Steptoe and Son existence of tinned food and squalor. Mum introduced vegetables and cleaning. The cleaning was half-hearted and soon went
by the wayside but the cooking was taken very seriously. By her own admission, she was indifferent
about food and had no sense of taste but helped by the Gas Company Cookbook and
the can’t-believe-our-luck appetites of the men in the house, she became a dab
hand at cooking the popular dishes of the day.
She always loved the Goon Show and her favourite song – The Ying
Tong Song – was seriously considered as a song for this memorial service. However, assigning the sole roles would be a
social minefield. Who’s going to be
Bluebottle? And who’d be pleased to find
out that Mum has always thought of them as a perfect Eccles?
She joined in with my Dad’s enthusiasm for gliding and spent
some cold weekends on the old airfield at Long Newnton. She was a happy enough to learn to fly but
found that gliding made her pregnant.
I arrived in 1966, on the same day that England won the
World Cup. Everyone in the hospital was
crowded around the only TV, leaving Mum to brood a strong dislike of football
and give birth to a son.
They sold the two-up-two-down and moved the Tetbury in
1967. She took to Tetbury and Tetbury
took to her. Bringing up small children
without guidance wasn’t easy - there was none of the help that there is now - and
so she joined the WI. She spent the next
40 years with the WI, providing many women with guidance, support and humour.
Humour that sometimes wasn’t that well received. “Did Valerie just say what I thought she
said?”
Yes. Mum was a
swearing sniper – sneaking in with a potty-mouthed bon mot whenever she felt
that the conversation would benefit from a choice word from her extensive range
of profanities.
She became involved in Tetbury Council and spent a time as
the Mayor of Tetbury. She found it to be
a frustrating period. She felt that some
on the council were only really interested in following due processes or “we’ve
always done it this way”. Mum was far
keener on the JFDI approach. JFDI of
course almost standing for Just Flipping Do It.
She moved on from politics and started to work as
housekeeper to a succession of amiable Old Etonians. Over the years, she amassed quite a
collection of them – going so far as to call them ‘a hobby’.
Sidney Kekewich, a delightful man who, when his wife was out
of earshot, enjoyed telling of how he was shot up the Khyber whilst serving in
the Khyber.
Major John Ray. His
wife went into hospital and asked Mum to look after him while she was
away. She never came back and so Mum
became his housekeeper and then nurse.
Through John Ray, she met another Old Etonian, Richard
Shakspeare, who lived in a large tumbledown house in Marston Meysey and desperately
needed a housekeeper – if only to keep down the plague of mice that were eating
all his possessions.
Richard’s house and his overgrown orchard were an Aladdin’s
Cave for Lou and I. We spent many happy
days there, running around the orchard firing guns. Real guns. Not airguns.
The house was filled with toy trains, Turkish cigarettes from the 1930s;
camera, broken gadgets, rooms filled with magazines and a falling-down barn
with two vintage cars and thousands of empty gin bottles…
Richard was a delightful chap without side or
prejudice. He was Bertie Wooster grown
old - not really regretting having spent the family fortune on booze, birds and
Bugattis.
She nursed Richard through his last illness as she nursed
many people through their final months.
After Dad retired, they both took to the canals of the
UK. My mum had always had an interest
in canals and treasured the people that they met during their many travels on
the cut. They bought a small boat and
spent a decade touring the ditches of the West Midlands.
Their boat was a Springer, which I believe has a Tetbury
connection. It also had a v-bottom
instead of the flat hull of most canal boats.
This meant that when coming in to moor, if Mum was standing on one side
at the front of the boat and my Dad moved over to the same side of the boat to
see where he was going, the boat would tip alarming over to one side and Mum
would fall in. Which she did. Three times.
They settled the boat at Braunston, near Daventry and spent
many happy times there in their home from home.
For over 25 years, Mum wrote the Serendipity column in the
Tetbury Advertiser. Every month she
brought her life to life in print and told all of our stories whilst the people
of Tetbury politely pretended that no one knew who Serendipity was. One day, we will publish a collection of
them. I’m stating that publically so
that you can hold me to it.
Louisa married and produced grandchildren who were a delight
to both Mum and Dad. The delight became
greater when Louisa moved her family out of London and into the family
home.
In the late 90s, I married and later on added to the
grandchildren tally. It was touching and
poignant that on the day we cremated my Dad, we felt the first kick of our
first child.
She slowed down as she got older but spent more time with
friends than she had done before. She
met Jean Fenney during a writing course and a very strong friendship developed,
a friendship that I know Mum treasured.
And the group of ladies who would pick her up and take her
out for tea. Di, Frances, Josie - I know
that Mum rather enjoyed the tea and company and going somewhere new. Thank you for spending the time with her.
I mentioned earlier that Mum nursed many people through
their final months. Her own father, most
of her Etonians and Betty Hardwick, who ran the infants school and who provided
so many of us Tetburians with such a good educational start to life. For her own last few months, the medical
professionals of Tetbury, the District Nurses and the ladies of Prestige all
did an outstanding and genuinely involved and caring job. Thank you all.
I’m under strict instructions to not say anything nice about
Louisa and so I won’t. I will say
though, that after Mum’s death, Lou, Lily and I all found that we were coping
by saying the most inappropriate things.
We formalised it into a kind of Inappropriate Top Trumps. Lou won.
Hands down. Although Lily was very close and shows great potential.
Louisa and I were with her in her final days and were with
her when she passed. We’re left with a
space but we’re also left with many great memories. Memories of warmth, of food, of fun, of
holidays and day-trips, sitting for hours in the Talbot corridor and standing
the back of the Citroen Dyane with the roof rolled back, being pushed on the
swings and holding hands walking to school.
Memories of love.
We were lucky to have known her and lucky to have been her
children, lucky to have been her family and lucky to have been her friend.
We will miss her.
