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Authors: Kate McQuaile
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at the brewery, he was almost certainly no longer alive and that there was little point even thinking about trying to find him.
I look again through the albums he has given me, poring over each grainy photograph, trying to imagine this early life of my mother that was so different from anything I had known.
She had never talked much about her childhood, brushing off my occasional questions with short responses and shifting to a different topic. I used to ask her about her parents, what they looked like, whether they were kind, whether I would have liked them. She told me they were nice enough and looked ordinary, like anyone’s parents. Sometimes I persisted, asking question after question, but that was never a good idea because then she would snap at me. So I gradually came to understand during the years of my childhood that her own wasn’t something she was happy to talk about. Some topics were out of bounds.
Until yesterday, I had never seen any photographs of her as a child or of her family. Now, I have several albums, and they keep me absorbed for much of the morning as I study these snapshots of her life as the daughter of a well-off family in an affluent southern suburb of Dublin. Her parents don’t look ordinary at all. Her mother looks haughty, as if her eyes never look in any direction other than straight ahead or down. Her father, too, looks like someone who has never questioned his station in life. In some of the photographs, I catch shadowy glimpses of domestic staff.
And, as the day goes on, I become aware that this entrée into my mother’s family life, through Richard and through the photographs, isn’t lessening my need to find out more about my father. Far from it. It’s true that she didn’t want me to know anything about my father, but if I do manage to find him, how can it hurt her now?
Richard has given me one important piece of information that I hadn’t previously been aware of – where Mamma had worked before I was born. I decide to walk into town and do some research into Tennyson’s at the library.
The library is well endowed with computers and I quickly gain access to a terminal. There’s quite a lot of online information about the brewery, and I learn that it was built in the mid-1930s by a family-run company with headquarters in Northampton. Like other philanthropic industrialists of the time, the Tennysons looked after their employees; in Dublin, the company built workers’ houses laid out over several garden squares.
I key Marjorie Redmond , Tennyson’s Brewery and Dublin into a Google search box, but there are no matches for my mother’s name.
I make one positive discovery, though. I learn that the company still exists, with one plant on the outskirts of Northampton, brewing a small range of real ales.
I check out Tennyson’s website and find a contact email as well as a telephone number and an address. I sit, staring at the screen for a while. I have nothing to lose by contacting the company. But should I call or send an email? What should I say or write? I almost convince myself that I should wait, go back to the house and think about it for a few days. But I’m here now and there’s no time like the present. I start typing.
I write that my mother, Marjorie Redmond, worked for the brewery in Dublin for several years during the 1960s, that she died recently and that I’m trying to get in touch with her former boss, an English manager whose name, unfortunately, I cannot recall, to tell him about her death. Perhaps the company can put me in touch with him.
I don’t mention David Prescott. I don’t know whether it would have been possible in those days, but I’ve often wondered whether my mother had simply made up a name to put on my birth certificate. Better to find out who she had worked for and then contact him in the hope that he can give me all or some of the information I need.
But how likely is it that the brewery will give out a name to someone writing out
I look again through the albums he has given me, poring over each grainy photograph, trying to imagine this early life of my mother that was so different from anything I had known.
She had never talked much about her childhood, brushing off my occasional questions with short responses and shifting to a different topic. I used to ask her about her parents, what they looked like, whether they were kind, whether I would have liked them. She told me they were nice enough and looked ordinary, like anyone’s parents. Sometimes I persisted, asking question after question, but that was never a good idea because then she would snap at me. So I gradually came to understand during the years of my childhood that her own wasn’t something she was happy to talk about. Some topics were out of bounds.
Until yesterday, I had never seen any photographs of her as a child or of her family. Now, I have several albums, and they keep me absorbed for much of the morning as I study these snapshots of her life as the daughter of a well-off family in an affluent southern suburb of Dublin. Her parents don’t look ordinary at all. Her mother looks haughty, as if her eyes never look in any direction other than straight ahead or down. Her father, too, looks like someone who has never questioned his station in life. In some of the photographs, I catch shadowy glimpses of domestic staff.
And, as the day goes on, I become aware that this entrée into my mother’s family life, through Richard and through the photographs, isn’t lessening my need to find out more about my father. Far from it. It’s true that she didn’t want me to know anything about my father, but if I do manage to find him, how can it hurt her now?
Richard has given me one important piece of information that I hadn’t previously been aware of – where Mamma had worked before I was born. I decide to walk into town and do some research into Tennyson’s at the library.
The library is well endowed with computers and I quickly gain access to a terminal. There’s quite a lot of online information about the brewery, and I learn that it was built in the mid-1930s by a family-run company with headquarters in Northampton. Like other philanthropic industrialists of the time, the Tennysons looked after their employees; in Dublin, the company built workers’ houses laid out over several garden squares.
I key Marjorie Redmond , Tennyson’s Brewery and Dublin into a Google search box, but there are no matches for my mother’s name.
I make one positive discovery, though. I learn that the company still exists, with one plant on the outskirts of Northampton, brewing a small range of real ales.
I check out Tennyson’s website and find a contact email as well as a telephone number and an address. I sit, staring at the screen for a while. I have nothing to lose by contacting the company. But should I call or send an email? What should I say or write? I almost convince myself that I should wait, go back to the house and think about it for a few days. But I’m here now and there’s no time like the present. I start typing.
I write that my mother, Marjorie Redmond, worked for the brewery in Dublin for several years during the 1960s, that she died recently and that I’m trying to get in touch with her former boss, an English manager whose name, unfortunately, I cannot recall, to tell him about her death. Perhaps the company can put me in touch with him.
I don’t mention David Prescott. I don’t know whether it would have been possible in those days, but I’ve often wondered whether my mother had simply made up a name to put on my birth certificate. Better to find out who she had worked for and then contact him in the hope that he can give me all or some of the information I need.
But how likely is it that the brewery will give out a name to someone writing out
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