The Trouble with my Sister

The Trouble with my Sister

I don't remember the time when my parents delightedly showed me my baby sister. I remember seeing all the photos of us very little and I was smiling and affectionate, and she is not. Even though I was barely 9 months older than her I had it pressed into me I was supposed to look after "your baby sister".

The first "slight" she can remember was before we were three. She was whining to go on the roundabout, she whined the whole time I was on it. So I got off the roundabout and placed her on it. Then I turned on my heel and went home. I do not remember where my parents were or why as children under three we were entirely alone outside of the house in a small park near the common.

Even after the age of 30 my sister had not forgiven me for this childish abandonment. 

It wasn't a nice thing to do, but I was tiny child, with no parent around to look after us. 

My sister detested being "the baby" and while nothing I ever did was "good enough" my sister could do no wrong, at least no wrong that was punished. 

She was a whiny bratty child that did as she pleased and my father didn't much like that but was not often allowed to parent. When he did, he would lose his temper.

I remember her at the farm face down on the hood of his car getting a thrashing. This would be the pattern. She was wind people up, refuse to do anything, whine and sulk for hours until my parents snapped and acted out violently.

Still she was my best friend, my closest ally, and I was sort of her nurse maid. If she wet the bed, I would change the sheets, put down towels. If she had a bad dream I would soothe her back to sleep. If my step-dad and mum fought I would hide her behind me, after I gathered all the sharp knives. 

She was the only person I told my darkest secret to.

I had crawled into my mother and step-dad's bed. My mother had got up and my step-dad asked me to "get a hold of that 'eld one" (old one) and pushed his genitals into my tiny hand. I can still recall the smell of him of Golden Virginia rolling tobacco, cheap whisky and man-stink. 

I felt confused and sick and weird. I only told my sister.

I don't remember how long passed before we were sat in my father tiny Ealing flat. His bright sunny kitchen with a table cloth of gingham and a large round clock above the cooker. I father's striped dressing gown almost falling open as he adjusted himself for our shared breakfast.

"You don't want to see that!"

My father beamed.

"Lucy's already seen one of those," with a big grin.

Time slowed down and I remember staring intently at a crumb on the blue square of the tablecloth. I burned with shame and betrayal. The ticking of the clock made me uncomfortable with the noise for years to come.

Slowly I begin to explain what happened.

My sister wasn't grinning any more.

The police came and I told my story over and over. In the end I was too young to go to court. I was an "unreliable witness".

I remember being in an old fashioned train carriage as my mother ranted and raved. My sister and I exchanged a look. The look pleaded, "don't tell her it was me". 

I tightened my lips and let the vile torrent of abuse against me and my father continue. I never did tell her. The dynamic between my sister and I got weirder. If I did something "wrong" I was swiftly and viciously punished, my mistake used like a weapon to beat me with over and over. If my sister did the same thing it was either ignored or we were both punished "because your the eldest and you should know better". 

I because nursemaid, whipping boy, and on occasion punching bag. She couldn't play my games, and when we played hers she either won, or table flipped. I never wanted to be seen as competitive if that was what competitive was.

I wanted to die. I was eight years old. I was about that age when my mother told my sister to stop kicking me "because social services will think I'm battering her." I was about eight when I started judo, my sister insisted though she was under age to join too. Of course she excelled at it.

When puberty kicked in her favourite trick was to punch me repeatedly in the same tender breast. This went on weeks until my mother kindly asked her to stop "or you might make her deformed". My mother had all but given up disciplining her. If I was grounded I was grounded for two weeks straight, she barely had to do three days. When I asked her about this she said it was because "she was just too annoying to have in the house".

This was her way, she manipulated people either by making them want to do things for her by charming them or by making them fear her.

My sister got in a couple of fights at school but never got in trouble. The only time I did was with her.

She would spend hours baiting me, torturing me, poking and prodding, until I snapped. I spent a lot of my time avoiding my sister, but for the most part we were made to share a room. She could make anybody crazy. She re-named me h'Ugly, for a whole year. She played Shakin' Stevens at me hour after hour after hour. I had a whole list of things that were not "allowed" in my room so I had to keep them on a window sill on a landing. It was an altar before I knew what that meant. If she was asleep and you woke her she would swing for you, she was never in trouble for this. She would practice her choke holds, sometimes until I almost blacked out.

Even my mother would joke about how she would have "made the Pope swear". The C.I.A or MI6 would have loved her as an interrogator. Maybe that is what she does, she does work for the Government. She takes pleasure in hurting others. 

She was nicer after she started her serious judo training. Having a different punching bag seemed to mellow her a little. She got a boyfriend and it was all consuming, the way it is as a fifteen year olds are prone to do. It ended badly and something happened to her, it was like she promised herself no-one would ever hurt her like that again. She and my bitter divorced mother of forty plus were the same amount of jaded. It was like the tiny amount of light that was in her was extinguished. She revelled in the darkness of it. She no longer needed to hide her cruelty. Except when she need to charm someone. 

I suppose it had the opposite effect on me. It made me very aware of the masks and insincerity of people. 

I got into a relationship just as I turned eighteen. It wasn't a good relationship but it was "away" and better than home. In fact my first year of university aside (that's a shit-sandwich for another day) my sister was the reason I moved out.

She did what she does, she prodded and poked me until I was so furious, so incandescent with rage rather than hit her, which was what she wanted, I walked out. I walked twelve miles in that rage, my hapless teenage fiancee in tow. 

To this day I don't know why she did it. He was a pretty shitty guy but why attack me? She became the wedge that drove me and my mother ever further apart. 

I never lived with her or my family again, I was just nineteen. There were a couple of times that we almost got reconciled and then she would do or say something truly awful and it was destroyed again. 

I meet Ken and got married, she was my witness and I even gave my daughter her name as a middle name. Yet a less than a year later she is on the phone to me tell me I have "ruined my life" by getting married and having a family. That I was a "disappointment" and my life was now "a waste".

Some people think those things of young parents ( I was twenty two) but nobody says them.

Six days after we buried our youngest daughter she takes the carefully constructed trifle I had made in it's cut glass bowl I had borrowed, topped with silver balls and sprinkles for the Christmas dinner for my living daughter out of the fridge and takes a spoon and ate it from the fridge.

I sort can see into the kitchen while she is doing this. She looks at me, and gives me the "what are you going to do about it?" look as she does so. I think I just stood there for a moment; mouth agape. Then I go and pick up the frying pan that is on the hob and put it down. I pick it up again, then put it down. I go out and take some air. My mother comes out and starts making her usual excuses.

Something broke in me, that night. A thread, a connection to both of them.

It wouldn't be the last time she pulled this stunt, she used it to ruin the relationship between me and my father too.

After telling me that marriage and babies was a "waste of my life" I shouldn't be surprised I wasn't invited to her wedding in Cuba. Neither should I have been surprised that when she struggled with fertility she told me I "should be glad I had a child that died". 

I didn't think she could have ever hurt me more. I thought it impossible.

Yet when she told all the staff at the hospital where my mother lay dying that she was sole next of kin, and I was asking what was happening to her they said "you will have to ask the family". 

In that moment I was that eight year old child again, in so much pain she wanted to die.

She threatened people so thoroughly I could not find anyone willing to tell me when and where my mothers funeral was. My daughter couldn't go to her grand mothers funeral. Even in death she kept us apart. She pulled the same stunt when my father died six months later. She called the police on me. Even though I have more legal right than she to know the when and where, and have access to his body. I even told the officer (whose tone changed drastically) "I suppose she did the damsel in distress did she? Big bad sister, trying to take advantage? I bet she didn't tell you she stopped me from attending my mother's funeral? Or that is what she is trying to do with my father?"

She won of course.

That's she does, win or flip over the table. She still has not produced or sort out my mother or father's estate. My father had a will, and it has not been submitted to the right authorities. It's been a year. 

In the truest purest sense my sister is dead. She is still breathing as far as I know, but that girl, the one I sang and soothed back to sleep, is dead. It is an odd thing to lose your whole family. To have nothing from them save your bad sinuses, dodgy left ankle and auto immune disorder, it sort of feels like panic, like you have lost your handbag, with all of the things that identify you as you. 

I have been wrestling with my pain and my anger. Trying to refuse to allow that final twist of the knife. She is the product of a strange childhood, one that distorted and hurt her too. She was so very different than me. She couldn't imagine, literally can't do it, which is a real thing that happens. She couldn't play my games, couldn't empathise, couldn't read and be transported into a whole different life. 

I pity her. All that money and power, all that important career, all that and she has no idea what it is like to imagine better; or enjoy getting lost in a book riding dragons soaring above the world.

The precious joy of being "mum".

  

  

Darkness and Betrayal

Darkness and Betrayal

I have many students over the years. Most naturally come to a point where they move on and it is fine. No hard feelings, for endings are beginnings too. Death is part of the process.
Somewhere along the line in the muddle of pain and confusing when I thought my marriage was ending someone reached out to me. At the time I thought it was a boon, but like all abusers she was quick to exploit this emotional mess to her advantage. She cockooed my friends, ate up my time and attention and I got sucked into her dramas and man-made miseries.
At first she didn't want anything and then she wanted an initiation. I felt obligated, honoured even. Yet she was never willing to do the work and it was I who had to travel and to cover the costs.
Warning bells were ringing but I was in this dark cloud of gloom. I wanted to make her happy. (Only now do I see parallels with my relationship with my "mother".)
I worked really hard (hello, not my initiation) but she just didn't get it. What ever she saw, felt or was drawn to was dark, shadows and misery. There was no balance at all. I called all the light Goddess I could to aid her. Strange I remember this smell, I always thought it was the awful cigarettes she smoked but under that was something else, something like an abscess. Something rotten.
She found a new relationship but even this was high drama and drinking blood. There was no room for air. No room to breathe.
It makes me sad when I think of it now. Genuinely sad. Darkness is not night. Night is stary and full cool dreams and misty forests. That was not her darkness. She was so full of rage.
She stopped calling me for 2 hours every day (I know right) and was wrapped in this married man. It was not my place to judge.
In the end I did the initiation, and I called on so much light and beauty. There were so many spirits stood there. So many fae.
It went off without a hitch.
Then nothing.
I mean her boyfriend drove me home the next day, but she barely said word.
Days past.
Then weeks.
Then I get weird emails.
Emails that tell me in no uncertain terms that "I know what I am doing."
It was like waking up from a dream. The alarm bells were still ringing and now I was awake to them.
Once someone gets to that point you have lost them.
It was one of those moments where you know it doesn't matter what you say because this person will twist it to fight with you because that is what they are looking for (oh, just my "mother"? as you were).
Then the magickal attacks started.
What is strange to me is this person is still angry with me.
I never raised a hand.
I never said a bad word.
Never did anything.
I just let her go into the smoke and black fog or her own boiling pit. I cried. I wallowed about it for a bit. I missed her.
It got so bad (in terms of attacks) that teachers, friends and the like from all over the world stepped in. I just couldn't believe someone I been nothing but good to would do this. I still can't.
I let her go.
I began to heal, found my own power and light again. Worked on my books and on teaching but every 6 months or so I get weird messages, angry emails, icky stuff on my feed.
I got angry. I got depressed. I got attacked, again and agian and again.
Then I did some work with B and had this weird ephany. I spent months healing and cleaning and slowly I healed some of the damage.
Away my wards a jangled today and it turns out she (and her new gang) has been up to the usual tricks.
I just don't think after all these years I can still be to blame for all the things she has wrought on herself (she never actually got to the witch learning part and is making it up as she goes along). For life is three-fold, a magickal life especially so. Still she is not my problem any more I suppose. I do worry about the poison she brings into the lives of others to feed her own addiction to misery and pain.Yet they are making their own choices.
If you do not find the light within yourself, your will never find it without.

Death of Mother

Death

I know Death well. As someone who speaks to the dead fairly regularly it has never been something I was afraid of. Of course I grieve when someone I love dearly dies.

It's hard to pinpoint when I first saw Death, but I remember sitting on the floor of a stable in dry straw feeding a sickly calf. H wouldn't drink from the bucket but if I stuck my fingers in the milk and offered them to him he sucked them clean. I don't know how long I did that for. He seemed to brighten. He nuzzled me affectionately. He died before I came to find him in the morning. There had been this light, this smell around him over the smell of hay and damp and earth. Something else. Almost sweet but not the milk either. It was Death.
I remember sitting waiting in an A+E once watching this glow from a very elderly man with a cut on his head. I even went to speak to the nurses who snapped at me. He was dying, just sat there already staring at the other side.

My "mother" and I had always had a difficult relationship but we hadn't spoken for over a year, mostly down to my sister. My heart was sore and I grieved. I mourned. I healed. Then I had this dream one night. It was so vivid and it was so violent!
I was standing in my "mother's" bed room and I was watching me beat her over and over with a golf club ( a golf club, no-one I know plays golf). Blood sprayed everywhere, up the walls, along the windows across my face. There was almost nothing of her left. Just the smell of her cigarettes and clean sheets.
I awoke mortified. How could I have dreamt such a horrible violent thing? I cried tried to explain it to Ken and he just shrugged.
"Just a dream."
I love Halloween. I love almost everything about it. As a witch and mother Samhain is like New Year, Yule and Day of the Dead and Halloween all mixed together.
I love the crafting and making things, the dressing up. The way mirth and reverence brush up to each other mischievously in the dark.
As a family we spend more time and money at Samhain than Yule in general. We tend to have a big party with friends coming from all over the country to eat, drink and be merry. There are dangerous alcoholic cocktails, mulled wine, loads of food and fireworks too.
I don't know why none of that happened the year my mother died (of course I began decorating very early and making papermache pumpkins) I just planned on having a quiet one. A little trick or treating and our own altar of missing loved ones.
I was asleep when the call came in. I had not taken any of my medicines so I was foggy.
It was a day or so before Samhain.
I got most of the conversation. My mother had had a bleed in her brain, she was being taken to Liverpool. A special hospital.
I was very quiet and very calm (something I kind of have to be). This was interpreted as indifference. I had no way to get to Liverpool (it was something like 4 trains). I also couldn't figure out why my sister was already there. She would have had to come past where I live to get there. So many things didn't make sense. I also was looking after my soul sister's boy for Samhain.
I knew I couldn't drop everything and run of alone to Liverpool. I had only just come out of hospital for near kidney failure and I knew my darling little angel of a sister, would emotionally beat the shit out of me. She had done it when my father had taken sick some 10 years ago and I knew I couldn't risk it.
I tried to be polite and civil, apparently this made things worse. I got the details of the hospital but as soon as my sister got there she told them she was sole next of kin and told the nurses to refuse to tell me anything about my mother's condition.
This went on for about a week.
It was torturous and even in the brief snippets I was "allowed" to know she was getting much worse. In the end a friend offered to drive me. I accepted only to be informed my mother's life support was being turned off the only day I could go.
I waited all day to hear news.
In the end 36 hours afterwards I received a text message.
She was gone.
If I thought that was painful, she had only just begun.
All of her pain and grieve she channelled into refusing to allow me to grieve my mother in death.
She threatened the funeral home (I rang every one in North Wales) with a law suit if I was given any details. I was not considered family.
I had been disowned before of course. It was one of their favourite punishments for me.
I tried to focus on my daughter's birthday but I was a struggle.
It was as though her death ripped open the oldest deepest wounds in me. It was an agony and my daughter suffered too. She was unable to grieve.
We held a Bardo, my mother had been nominally Buddhist. We bought a Buddha statue and meditated and chanted for her. I found some peace with her passing. I found forgiveness and hope.
It took a few months. I couldn't write. I found it hard to settle. I had nightmares of finding my mother's body almost every night. I would be walking and trip and I would find her that way. Time passed.
The Veil of grief was lifting from me.
I get a phone call and my sister informs me my father is dead. In fact he was found dead yesterday morning. No more. Call ends.
I try to swing into action. Everyone allies round but she threatens us. Gets the police to call us twice.
We were doing nothing wrong. Nothing illegal, in fact she was keeping my father's body from me, which was just as illegal as last time.
I travelled to his home. I tried.
In the end I was barred from his funeral too.
It is one thing to be disowned in life but disowned in death rips something from you.
I did better with my father's death because I could no longer believe that my sister was incapable of such cruelty. The sweet girl I knew, my sister, was also dead.
What ever the monster walking around in her meat suit was beyond help. Beyond reason. Once the rage ebbed from my body and soul I felt an odd pity. That her response to losing someone who loved her, who adored her was to cause pain. That her lesson in grief was madness and destruction.
She took no joy in the special personal bond they shared. Or that she was the only person my mother ever truly loved. She took no comfort at her charmed existence in the warm glow of that maternal light denied to me all my life.
It took sometime to heal again but it was the Fae who lifted me when I was ready (along with my wonderful family and friends).
They leaped back into my life. They told me it was time. I started meditating every day again. I called on them and their wisdom and care was endless.

The Wendy House.

The Wendy House.


"John lived in a boat turned upside down on the sands, Michael in a wigwam, Wendy in a house of leaves deftly sewn together" Peter Pan

A long time ago, I had two kids under the age of two and a husband who worked shifts. My "family" lived miles away (a blessing, because they are horrible people) and none of my friends had kids.
I was happy. I am not saying life was perfect. It was however pretty good.
The bane of my existence at the time?
My in-laws. Actually my mother-in-law.
Twice a week both would come round and she in particular would want to be waited on, make horrible comments and generally make me feel shitty, uncomfortable and miserable.
Long after Kara died they kept coming (but now only once a week).
This woman would pinch, poke and even smack my child and if I told her NO, or tried to get her to stop she would turn her face to the wall and ignore me. In my own home.
I had never had to deal with someone as difficult before or since.
I took to hiding in a Wendy house with little E. We would be "quiet" as mice.
A grown woman, a mother, a witch, a force of nature, crawling into my daughters play house so I didn't have to deal with that. I would just not answer the door and hope they would leave.
My husband for a while (he was sick and had some deep issues of his own with her) would say things like

"She's always been that way."
"She's just deaf."
"It can't be that bad."
"She won't listen to me either."

Looking back there were whole worlds of things I could have done about it.
Not least of which was not waiting on people hand and foot.
Yet that pressure, that desire, and quite frankly fear was pretty awful. I out grew the Wendy House and eventually hubby had to deal with her too. From poison pen birthday cards, to the constant scrawled letters of nastiness her toxicity became something he had to overcome.
Which he bravely did.
So much of her life and his is still a mystery. Where was she when he was rushed to hospital? Or when his brother broke his leg? Where was she? She never did anything in the home (from cooking to ironing Pop's did it all even after working at the pit all night).
Something was very wrong and as yet we don't know what, or why.
It is peculiar the things that floor us.
"Demons", dark magicks, the restless dead and I would not have batted an eyelid. That knock on the door at 10 am every Sunday gives me a cold shudder to think of even now! Her face would be somewhere between Sam the Eagle (From the Muppet show) to Bishop chess piece, with bright red lipstick.
I could have gotten up at 6 am to start cleaning (and some days I did) and there would always be a comment.
"She could have done *******, sniff."
I was mortified.

Taking the time to forgive myself as a young mum, with no support network, and a husband struggling to deal with abusive mother, I could almost laugh; except it is so sad.
The world is so big and loud sometimes, maybe we all need a Wendy House to hide in. 

Faery Plants

Faery Plants

"The wee-folk, the fey-folk trouping in their colour..."

There are lots of reasons why a plant or tree might be a faery tree. Their multi-dimensional reality where mountains, waterfalls, and trees are doorways into the web of worlds they live in and travel through means what looks like an old tree here might be something else, or several something else's where ever they are.

In general (very general, many differing faery have very differing preferred habitat); fae love wildness, other small animals, butterflies and birds and plants that attract those are also likely to attract fae.

I never quite got a clear idea why and have been given many reasons over the years (none of which or all of which might be true). 

They like to eat the same foods as some of these creatures. They like to eat some of these creatures. They like to hide in the flurry of golden dust and wings. They like to shapeshift into some of these animals. It's pretty.

There do seem to be plants that attract them, and plants (mostly trees) that they use as doorways.

Oak Trees

Elder trees (especially in flower)

Hawthorns 

Blackthorns

Blackberry brairs

Gorse

Growing up plants like bluebells ( Hyacinthoides non-scrita, not Harebells) were known as faery (fairybells) and were full of faery spells and magick. Poisonous (tends to be a faery theme) and spectacular both close up (many a faery illustration show them wearing them as tiny hats) and as a whole mass of sweetly scented blue carpet in May, it is easy to see why these flowers have such a long history as a faery flower. Picking them in the U.K. is now illegal, which is no doubt faery approved as they don't like their plants disturbed. Noticeable blue and green together was seen as a faery colour before St Patrick adopted the blue.

Foxgloves were also known as a faery flower (it helps they tend to grown in the same places as bluebells, ferns and other faery plants. In our house the purple ones were considered the "proper" faery flowers with random white one having had their magick drawn from them. I have no knowledge if this is the cases but it was certainly the folklore at the farm.

Fearns (Bracken)
Bracken (as I have always known it) is an interesting plant. It is lush and green in gentle but tough leaves that animals don't like to eat, that ripple in spirals, that transforms into this strange golden, brown plant, often on mass, when the weather changes. It gives shelter to many small creatures and has huge amounts of lore. It is one of the few faery plants you could pick that didn't kill or give you bad luck.   

Don't disturb faery flowers if you can help it. This is not some quaint superstition. Having had to help a friend deal with a distinctly unhappy bunch of faeries after some hapless human peed against their door tree (an huge old oak), they are very creative when it comes to vengeance and "stupid humans".

A Troubled Child

A Troubled Child

After the sexual abuse came out I had a social worker come out and visit me twice. It had a lasting impression on me. It gave me some quite negative ideas about myself and unfortunately social workers too.

I can only record my own experience rather than those heroic souls who see the fragile beauty in all children.

She was short (though tall to me) with a sharp long black bob hair cut and small mouth which was emphasized by her bright red lipstick and severe black eyebrows. I was sat crosslegged on the swirling coloured carpets (unusually) watching television when she entered the room. She didn't speak to me she just stood there and glared at me.

I felt this glare keenly, deep to my bones. She looked at me and she saw there was something very, very "wrong" with me. That glare was like ice, like a piece of steel in my me. Much of how I have developed over the years, much of my adult fears in truth come back to that moment. That women who name I never knew the taste of looking at me like I was something to scrape off her high heeled patent shoes.

I knew that something bad had happened to me before that. I had known that. I had known something not right and icky had come to pass but until then it had been something done to me. From then on, it was something I had caused or courted. It was something wrong, broken, wicked in me. Barely 8 years old and I wanted to die. I tried a few times, sitting with my legs hanging from my bed room window feeling like I wanted to erase myself from the world. When I found I couldn't do it, I felt even worse about myself. I was too much of a failure to even die. I wanted to jump into oblivion.

My mother made light of this deep self loathing and suicidal feeling by calling me a "drama queen" who needed to just be "ignored".

After I found I couldn't erase myself I started on my quest to "fix" myself. To be "unbroken". To be right instead of wrong.

Meditation was certainly part of that and learning how to "not be" and essentially not exist for a limited time was beneficial in more ways than one.

You can imagine my delight in having to deal with not one, but two such women in my home this week. I would like to say I dealt with it gracefully but I swung between Mother Wolf's fury, uptight and insincere politeness and one one or two occasions soul racking fear I was terrible and didn't deserve my own wonderful life, family and daughter.

It has been two days and I woke up still in "it".

So I had to pick at the scab of it. Find the barb still in their deep from one look, one woman gave me nearly thirty years ago. Realise that, it her problem, you view of me that was wrong. That it was her, bad day, her need of new glasses, or inability to see me that was her problem, not mine. That how she looked at me was far, far about her than it was about me.

I do not know if that thorn is completely removed, I just know it doesn't hurt as deeply. That I feel more calm and relaxed than I have in about a week.

It's a full moon tonight, E and I have been talking about all this and she suggested I draw of this woman and burn the picture. My daughter is so wise.

I feel I could sleep in a way I haven't for a while, the restful kind of dreamlessness. 

The Art of Constant Cleansing is what I call this process. Where you find what is really hurting and draw it out, look at it. Washing, cleanse it and let it go. Target your daily practice to help heal that wound.

The Peculiar People

The Peculiar People...

I come From.

My father was born in a cottage hospital in 1942 Ruabon (Rhiwabon) not two miles from the farm I ended up growing up on. This Father was a mechanic in the R.A.F, who fixed Spitfires and saw action all over the world. Thomas O'Malley was also of Irish Catholic stock (though he "reformed") to marry Dylis Lewis (of feverish Methodist stock). He was not allowed to see his family, though there was an Aunt Lucy my father saw, and a cousin Patrica he saw on occasion.

He lived in a nice semi-detached house, next door to his also devoutly Methodist in-laws. The Lewis's were "well to do", strict and rather poe-faced people. My Great-Grandfather Lewis was a fireman, a hero, all brass buttons and saving men's life from terrible mining tragedies, notably Gresford Colliery fire (Gresford Disaster). Several Lewis's were killed and I wonder if we were related.

Dylis was for my father a figure of intense dislike. She was snobby, smothering, self-centered, petulant and weak. She was too close to her family and I know my father blamed her for his father's early death. Thomas had the vicious Irish temper, but he was also very funny, with a quick witted and course tongue when the mood struck him. After the war he worked his way up from shop keep to area manager of Co-op, at least according to my father.

My father grew very anti-religious (especially when he found jazz) but he also was very fond playing practical jokes and stunts, especially against teachers at his grammar school. Sometimes he got caught but mostly he didn't and he would tell me stories with relish.

On Smithy Lane I can remember Uncle Jason that when we were small we visited. I never heard his surname. Yet looking it he was likely a Lewis. He was a whistley old man with a couple of very annoying yappy (and nippy) tiny black poodles.

My father was an actor and he left school and joined a rep theatre company. He was amazing at voices and impersonations. That was his bread and butter when I knew him. It is odd but true to say where most people could not have told the impressions apart, I could recognise his voice, even as someone else when it came on the television, as sometimes it did.

I wonder sometimes at the characters he sometimes did, his booming baritone thumping out a sermon, or bursting into feverish song, being a reflection of the Lewis side of his life.

He was very "anti-welsh", in so much as he refused to allow me to gain a Welsh accent, and adopted the clip up the ear first, explain why later approach. Yet he met my "Mother" at the Welsh club in London where she was working as a bar-maid as a student. 

I remember nothing of being spoken to about my great-grand-mother, and I don't know her name.

I do know that I have many of the traits, good and bad from this muddled side of the family. My father, much to his own horror I imagine, is a terrible snob, and rather petulant and self-centered too. I could never figure out how you could love jazz and be so mind-meltingly racist. I certainly saw myself more Irish than Welsh as a child (which is silly as the O'Malley's had been Wales a couple of generation marrying other Welsh born, Irish Catholics long before my Granddad).

I always felt like an outsider, but maybe that was not about who I came from. It was only when I left that I felt my Welshness more keenly. With a sense of wonder and pride.

My "mother" is a Beynon. Her mother was a Jones (though her own mother was some sort of blue-blood who was disowned for marrying Albert Jones, a foundling found nearly naked wandering the mountain.)

Their own stories make my father's appear a series of Just William stories. In truth I have coal-dust, liquid copper, milk, blue blood, and magick in my veins.