Down in the Forest

I have spent half-term in the Forest of Dean. My mum was born a Forester and has a huge store of anecdotes about her girlhood. A vast clan of my ancestors hung out in a place called Primrose Hill, which has better views and a more friendly ambience then the one in London and has probably never been visited by Sadie Frost/Law or Kate Moss. Most of the clan worked in the tinplate works or on the River Severn, but they also had a good time drinking homemade alcohol, betting, bickering and going to chapel.

A few years ago I started to research the family history, concentrating first on such mysteries as "Why did Aunty Ivy have to be hidden every time a man called Fryer on a bicycle came up the road?" (he was her estranged father) and "Who was the lamented and absent Aunt Lizzie from Saul?" (the abandoned wife of a seaman whose unfortunate marriage had left her stranded on the wrong side of the Severn).

To my amazement my bemused Forest second cousins often knew the people I had found out about on Genes Reunited, but had sometimes forgotten that they were related to them: "O yes she's that nice woman from the chemists in the Co-op" or "Curly-haired big bloke, drives a green truck". Having grown up with not that much family around and now a bit short on descendants, it seemed incredibly careless to have forgotten that nice people with trucks were your own flesh and blood. I began to realise that when my mother's family had had to move away she had only kept up with a few of her favourites amongst the vast smorgasbord of relatives on offer.

This has left me brooding about my displacement: would my life have been different if I'd grown up in a place where ties of blood bound me to half my neighbours and been really fearless and outspoken? Would we still have been hiding kiddies to avoid access visits from unreliable men and have banded together to stop Primrose Hill Post Office from being closed? Would we be fighting together to stop the Government selling off the Forestry Commission and half the Forest of Dean with it? Sorry parents but I like to think my Big Soc. mentality has its origins in a genetic memory of what was lost when you reinvented yourselves as Londoners!