Authors Electric

“On October 6 th , very suddenly, Beedings, Tunbridge Wells, Daphne, dearly loved younger daughter of Francis and Hazel Winstone-Scott. No letters please.” ( Sevenoaks Chronicle & Kentish Advertiser 12.10.1945). Daphne was my mother’s younger sister. She had gone up to her bedroom, that Saturday evening, and shot herself with their father’s WW1 revolver. It was 1945 and she was just fifteen.  I learn now, from checking old newspapers, (oh, the magic of the internet!) that Daphne had suffered periods of illness from the age of six and had spent eighteen months in bed when she was twelve.  I remember that one of my aunts had  told me long ago that Daphne had suffered from kidney disease and committed suicide because she realised she was going to die anyway.  In fact d ialysis was already entering the development stage by 1945 -- but Daphne didn't know that.   A  Daily Mirror  report dubbed her “the girl who would never grow up.” (8.10.1945)...

Rivers was his mother's first child Rivers and June with their nanny My uncle, Rivers Scott, was his mother's first child and his father's third. Not all WW1 wives had been content to stay bravely at home awaiting their husband's return from the front and my grandfather's first wife had left their two small sons and decamped. The second wife, my grandmother, had been nursing in the war. She welcomed the two older boys and gave birth to four children of her own: boy-girl, boy-girl.  Rivers (Bill to his family) and my mother, June, were the first two of the second batch and enjoyed a notably secure and happy childhood. They had ponies and skiing holidays, private theatricals and big summer camps when multitudes of cousins came to stay. My grandfather had been child number twelve in a middle-class family of thirteen and had become a successful stockbroker. There was a nanny and a cook, a butler, chauffeur, housemaid, grooms and gardeners. (I find this oddly ...