Read Online My Life in Middlemarch by Rebecca Mead - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Rebecca Mead
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the contemporary city center. Coventry has a very old foundation—it is thought to have been the site of a Roman settlement, and then a Saxon nunnery, centuries before its most celebrated resident, Lady Godiva, endoweda monastery there in 1043. In the first decades of the twentieth century it became an important center of car and then airplane manufacture, which explains why, on the night of November 14, 1940, German air forces unleashed an incendiary bombardment upon it. More than five hundred people were killed and much of the city center was destroyed, including the fourteenth-century cathedral, which was reduced to a charred shell.
I’m old enough for this piece of history not to feel altogether distant. I grew up in the 1970s hearing stories of the Blitz in London. My parents, who were eight and nine when the war began, both lived in a West London suburb. My mother’s father worked as a panel-beater at a local automobile factory; as a boy he had been granted a scholarship to a grammar school, but his own father had recently died, and at fourteen he had to leave school and learn a trade. During the war, he made tail fins for Spitfire planes. They lived in a terraced house, where my grandfather installed an Anderson shelter, made from corrugated metal, in the front room, displacing the walnut-veneered cocktail cabinet that was among his most prized possessions. He built a brick wall inches from the bay window to protect the shelter against a blast, and moved the furniture out of the bedroom above. My mother was the eldest of three children, and she and her siblings used to sleep in bunk beds in the shelter, while my grandparents slept on a narrow mattress on the floor outside. It was a small house, and surrendering two rooms must have made it feel even smaller. Anti-aircraft guns were stationed in the streets at night, making a terrifying noise. During the safer daytimes my mother and the other neighborhood kids ran in the streets outside, playing a fantasy game they called “being evacuated to America.”
My father’s father, who worked as a commercial artist on Fleet Street, spent the nights of the Blitz as a fire-watcher at the Evening Standard building on Shoe Lane, and whenever I see the famous photograph of the dome of St. Paul’s rising above the smoky devastation of the City, I imagine him on a roof nearby, in heroic pose like a figure from a Stalinist propaganda poster, holding a bucket. He belonged to a different generation from my maternal grandparents. Born in 1888, at the end of the Victorian era, he was old enough to have enlisted in the infantry in the First World War in 1915, and lucky enough to have seen the war’s end, by which time he had been commissioned in the field as an officer. When I was young my father would sometimes bring out a precious relic: a yellowed map that my grandfather had carried in his pack, denoting the landscape of France cut through by the Somme. My grandfather was gregarious and charming, given to wearing a suit of green tweed, brightly colored shirts, suede shoes. He was unafraid of the grand gesture. My father contracted measles at the age of four, and because there was a new baby at home he was sent to an isolation hospital for almost three months, his parents forbidden to visit. My grandfather went to the hospital anyway, and gained access to the ward by putting on a white coat and impersonating a doctor. He died of tuberculosis when my father, brokenhearted, was seventeen. I’ve spent forty years wishing I could have met him.
I found my way through the maze of footpaths and walked across Greyfriars Green. George Eliot and her widowed father moved to Coventry in 1841, when she was twenty-one; she would live there until his death, eight years later. Her brother Isaac had recently married, and Griff House was ceded to him and the new family that he was expected soon to produce. Father and daughtermoved to Bird Grove, a large semidetached house in Foleshill, then an
I’m old enough for this piece of history not to feel altogether distant. I grew up in the 1970s hearing stories of the Blitz in London. My parents, who were eight and nine when the war began, both lived in a West London suburb. My mother’s father worked as a panel-beater at a local automobile factory; as a boy he had been granted a scholarship to a grammar school, but his own father had recently died, and at fourteen he had to leave school and learn a trade. During the war, he made tail fins for Spitfire planes. They lived in a terraced house, where my grandfather installed an Anderson shelter, made from corrugated metal, in the front room, displacing the walnut-veneered cocktail cabinet that was among his most prized possessions. He built a brick wall inches from the bay window to protect the shelter against a blast, and moved the furniture out of the bedroom above. My mother was the eldest of three children, and she and her siblings used to sleep in bunk beds in the shelter, while my grandparents slept on a narrow mattress on the floor outside. It was a small house, and surrendering two rooms must have made it feel even smaller. Anti-aircraft guns were stationed in the streets at night, making a terrifying noise. During the safer daytimes my mother and the other neighborhood kids ran in the streets outside, playing a fantasy game they called “being evacuated to America.”
My father’s father, who worked as a commercial artist on Fleet Street, spent the nights of the Blitz as a fire-watcher at the Evening Standard building on Shoe Lane, and whenever I see the famous photograph of the dome of St. Paul’s rising above the smoky devastation of the City, I imagine him on a roof nearby, in heroic pose like a figure from a Stalinist propaganda poster, holding a bucket. He belonged to a different generation from my maternal grandparents. Born in 1888, at the end of the Victorian era, he was old enough to have enlisted in the infantry in the First World War in 1915, and lucky enough to have seen the war’s end, by which time he had been commissioned in the field as an officer. When I was young my father would sometimes bring out a precious relic: a yellowed map that my grandfather had carried in his pack, denoting the landscape of France cut through by the Somme. My grandfather was gregarious and charming, given to wearing a suit of green tweed, brightly colored shirts, suede shoes. He was unafraid of the grand gesture. My father contracted measles at the age of four, and because there was a new baby at home he was sent to an isolation hospital for almost three months, his parents forbidden to visit. My grandfather went to the hospital anyway, and gained access to the ward by putting on a white coat and impersonating a doctor. He died of tuberculosis when my father, brokenhearted, was seventeen. I’ve spent forty years wishing I could have met him.
I found my way through the maze of footpaths and walked across Greyfriars Green. George Eliot and her widowed father moved to Coventry in 1841, when she was twenty-one; she would live there until his death, eight years later. Her brother Isaac had recently married, and Griff House was ceded to him and the new family that he was expected soon to produce. Father and daughtermoved to Bird Grove, a large semidetached house in Foleshill, then an
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