Category Archives: Isle of Wight

Arresting Beauty, by Heather Cooper

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Heather Cooper’s excellent historical novel invites the reader into maverick, pioneering photographer Julia Margaret Cameron’s Isle of Wight home, and into the lives of illustrious artists like the neighbouring Tennyson, through the eyes of Mary Ryan – a beggar girl scooped up by Cameron from the streets of Putney. Mary progresses from parlourmaid to photographer’s model to gallery assistant, but even if she can walk the downs and talk poetry with the Poet Laureate, she can’t shake off her humble origins. Or can she?

Cooper’s intelligent prose matches her bright, plucky, unpretentious heroine, Mary Ryan, who finds herself serving in the household of Julia Margaret Cameron. Here she meets the great and the good – Tennyson, Browning et al – and becomes a model for her mistress’s stylised, allegorical photography.

‘I longed to arrest all beauty that came before me and at length the longing has been satisfied.’

Julia Margaret Cameron

Cooper, like her character, respects society’s luminaries rather than idolizing them, preferring to focus on Mary’s private ambitions for self-improvement and security in a world where women, especially those ‘in service’, are unlikely to achieve either. This is a ‘below stairs’ book, not a celebration of the literati. The narrative is beguilingly simple, making Mary’s rapid social progression pleasingly credible, and always engaging. The reader yearns for Mary’s success, and with some nods to Austen along the way, Cooper delivers.

For anyone who knows and loves the Isle of Wight, there had to be a right way to tell the story of life in Julia Margaret Cameron’s Dimbola Lodge, and Tennyson’s Farringford, and Cooper has found it. ARRESTING BEAUTY is a gem.

Published 30 September 2023, Beachy Books.
www.beachybooks.com

21 Things About Dad

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To celebrate his 100th birthday, I decided to write 21 things about Dad, sharing a little of his story.

It’s a mega-thread!

There may be only 21 things, but they take 91 tweets to tell!

It’s an easy read though, promise. A few smiles and maybe a couple of tears along the way.

Click on the tweet below to read it on twitter. Twitter is more ‘alive’ but also you’ll need to click ‘read replies’ every now and then to get the whole thing.

OR scroll down to the PDF reader underneath, zoom in a little, and enjoy.

xx

21 Things About Dad

And here’s the postcript, tweet 91.

A 99 with that?

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Today is my Dad Edward’s 99th birthday.

In the old days on the ice cream vans, he would cheekily ask his customers whether they wanted a 99 with that, or just a flake. Both answers meant a flake, and this man’s mischievous patter sold a lot of flakes.

Here he is winning (and, quite frankly, cheating) at cards, last year.

I’ll tell a tiny story about him for his birthday.

Many people know about his achievements in public life and business on the Isle of Wight. He is much loved there, and the only Freeman of his town, Ryde.

Not so many know that both he and our Mum grew up without fathers.  Edward’s dad, Antonio, died with an unknown fever in 1927, when Edward was only five years old.

So there was no role model, in our family, for how a father should be.

You’d think that would be a recipe for royally screwing up. But Dad was gentle and loving, a true family man, with great belief in, and ambition for, his kids. If I were half as good a father as he has been, my own kids would be lucky. Now and then he takes me to one side and advises me to be kinder, to take a breath when irritated, to see the big picture, and understand the smallness of the child. He’s always right.

Anyway, once when I was at university, we had a couple of games of Scrabble at home before I set off for a new term.  He trounced me, and thought it was hilarious that he could beat me, an Oxford student, in a language which he had not learned as a child (after Glasgow, he was in Paris and then Italy until young adulthood). Furthermore, he had had only three years of school in his entire life, and those before the war in rural Italy. Waving me off, he gave me a card.

Unpacking at Oxford, my friend from a tough northern background came round to say hello. He spotted the card on my mantelpiece. Inside, my Dad had written “Sorry for beating you” and slipped in a fiver, which I had not yet pocketed. My friend was really worried. He looked at me with pity and concern, and asked me if I wanted to talk about it. “What?” I said, still unpacking. “Your Dad,” he said. “Your Dad beating you.”

My friend’s Dad, it turned out, had a temper. A violent temper. My friend was sorry that I too was suffering in this way – and being bought off with a lousy fiver, to boot.

Nothing, of course, could be further from the truth. Machismo and aggression – much more common in those days of course – did not exist in our lives. Our Dad’s self-taught mode of fatherhood was all about gentleness, togetherness, and belief. It wasn’t perfect, of course, but the core of it was the open-armed safety of family, and massive, massive heart.

That little moment at Merton College, Oxford in 1988 made me realise that there are many kinds of fathers, and I was blessed with a great one.

Here, as a bonus flake in your ice cream (or a 99), is a mini life in pictures:

From abject poverty in Glasgow, Paris and rural Italy, to the Royal Army Medical Corps at Aldershot…

.. to a lucky strike with this great woman….

…to a career in civic life, charity and business…

… with a few stop-offs in the movies!

.. and some shattering losses…

… and still going strong, with humour, energy, curiosity, generosity and love.

Bravo, Dad. And thanks for (not) beating me! I got the 99 and the flake!

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Beating a path up the High Street

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My Dad gave me these cuff-links last week.

They’re precious for obvious reasons, but also there’s a little story to them.

As you might be able to see, they commemorate his appointment to Deputy Mayor of the local council in 1970.

As half a century has passed, I hope it’s okay to share the story.

First, a bit of context. Dad was born in Glasgow to a UK-born mother and Italian-born father. They moved to Paris for work, but his father died when Dad was just six. His mother, in desperation, took the children to Italy and Dad had the rest of his youth there. But, such was their poverty, he had to work in the fields – shepherding buffalo! – to help support the family, and he was allowed only one year of schooling.

He returned to the UK just before the War, and served in the RAMC. That’s another, amazing story. Not least because, after so much time out of the country, he spoke no English.

After the War, he settled on the Isle of Wight with my Mum, Gloria. Together they set about running their businesses in the High Street in Ryde, a seven-day a week affair, and when they weren’t working, they were serving (as independents) on the council, on committees, as school governors, and on countless charities.

They were forever conscious of their Italian roots, and name. Mum, born in Leeds, had hardly even visited Italy, but no matter. To be foreign, and so conspicuously so, on the Isle of Wight, was quite a thing. Dad’s accent was, and remains, quite strong. So their energy was thrown into integration. More than that, they were pillars of their community. The term could have been invented for them. They gave and gave and gave.

Sometimes us kids were resentful. We wanted their attention. But it seemed always to be focused elsewhere – on some constituent’s planning application, or a troubled soul’s housing problem. The back kitchen of our cafe was an informal ‘surgery’, and everyone else’s problems appeared to matter more than ours.

Sometimes there was a bit of racism. We were called names. We were referred to as “the Ming-gellies” even though our name ended in an A, not an I. There was worse, but let’s let bygones be bygones. At the same time, we had become well-known and highly respected. By the time my Mum became the Mayor in 1980, and a JP and a DL and was awarded an MBE, etc, it seemed pretty normal. We were still Italian, but we were fully part of the community. (When Mum died in 2014, some of the tributes to her called her the “Queen Mum of the Isle of Wight”. If there is a heaven, she’d have been glowing with pride. She loved the royals. And she loved the Isle of Wight. She even wore a gold chain with a model of the Island for the last many years of her life.)

All of which is to try to communicate what must have been a concerted, determined, exhausting effort to integrate. To overcome their foreignness, to win hearts and minds through decades of service, commitment, and extraordinary warmth. To overcome, too, their lack of education. Dad with his single year, and Mum who, for similar reasons of poverty and absence of father, had left school at fourteen.

But I’ve gone past the story of the cuff-links. It’s only a small thing. In that time, 1970, civic office was bound up with the Masons. When my Dad was elected Deputy Mayor, it was quietly suggested to him that he might like to join the Masons. He politely declined. “But,” they said, “next year you’ll be the Mayor, and the Mayor is always a Mason.” My Dad politely declined. Then he realised what they were saying. If he didn’t become a Mason, he wouldn’t become Mayor. He had to choose.

He never became the Mayor.

I love my Dad, you may be able to tell. He wanted so badly to be a community leader. But he wanted his principles more.

Things changed. My Mum became Mayor with no need for compromise. More recently, Dad was made a Freeman of Ryde. A small honour, you might think, for someone who gave decades of service to the Island’s councils, business associations, charities and schools. It confers only the right to drove sheep up the High Street – which I guess would take Dad full-circle back to his shepherding days in rural Italy!

But somehow it means so much. It shows that there is a collective memory of, and gratitude for, his contribution, even though – at 98 and counting – most of his contemporaries have long since passed away.

Bravo, Dad. And thank you for the cuff-links. When I am tempted to take the easy path, the wrong path, I’ll open up this little box, and remember, and, I hope, think again.

Found on the web, an Alamy image I had not seen until now – Edward in his Deputy Mayor’s garb, outside our house in Ryde.
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