Andrewes with an Extra 'E'

By Simon Andrewes

I was working in London, in the City of London, I had just come back from lunch, the second lunch session,from 1 till 2. That session could be extended a bit, because you didn’t have to relieve anybody (who would be waiting anxiously for his or her lunch break). Those sessions could end in boozy afternoons in the local and, as often as not, did. There wasn’t much to do in the afternoon in the couple of hours or so you had to fill out til knocking off time. And so it was on that afternoon in 1964 on returning to the office that I lazily decided to look up in the London telephone book how many Andreweses there were with the extra ‘e’, like me. There were five. And there among them: Andrewes, F.N. (vet) - and an address in East Finchley. This casual discovery would set me off on the long, slow investigation into my ancestors that I hope to have drawn the line under with the publication of this lightweigh probe into my family tree. My conclusion has to be that these people do not define who I am.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Simon Andrewes
• Release date: Jun 2, 2020
• ISBN: 9780463282397

Simon Andrewes

Simon Andrewes is retired and lives on his own in Granada, Spain, in a little house with fabulous views of the Sierra Nevada in front and over the Vega, the wide river plain that extends far out to the west, at the back.A good part of his life was dedicated to the teaching of English as an international language, in England, Germany, Spain, where he has lived for most of the last thirty years, and Vietnam. He speaks Spanish, German, and Norwegian well.He is a socialist with ideas aligned to the British Socialist Workers Party.

Book preview

ANDREWES WITH AN EXTRA ‘E’.

[OR: WHO DO YOU THINK I SHOULD THINK I AM?]

Simon Andrewes

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2020 Simon Andrewes

Smashwords Edition License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment. It may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share it with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading it and did not purchase it, or if it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favourite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the work of the author.

I acknowledge the invaluable contributions of Tony Hale, Jackie Fewtrell, Nigel Walkington, and Alastair Gibbons in providing feedback and comments on, and corrections (of grammar, style, and content) to this manuscript.

Cover page design: Paco Quirosa ([e-mail])

Cover page photos: Pascal Meier on Unsplash, and author

LIST OF CONTENTS

INTRO

FATHER FRANCIS NESFIELD.

GRANDFATHER FRANCIS.

GREAT GRANDFATHER NESFIELD.

GREAT GREAT GRANDFATHER CHARLES.

GREAT GREAT GREAT GRANDFATHER CHARLES.

NESFIELD.

GREAT GREAT GREAT GREAT GRANDFATHER ROBERT.

FAMILY TREE PATERNAL SIDE

BEFORE MR AND MRS ANDREWS

TOPOGRAPHY

THE ASHMORES

THE ASHMORES AND THE ANDREWESES IN BRITISH HISTORY

SO ... THANKS FOR THE SPERM?.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

CONTACT ME

INTRO.

My father’s name was Francis Nesfield Andrewes. It says so on my birth certificate. It did not occur to me that my parents had not been married even though my mother’s name was given on it as ‘Florence Elsie Kirk formerly Ashmore’, Kirk being the surname of her legally-wedded husband. I think the first inkling I got was when an uncle, a younger brother of hers, let drop: ‘I didn’t even know she was calling herself Andrewes’. He was over on a rare visit from Canada and was talking about the visit he had paid us in Malvern, just before he emigrated in 1955. His comment made me go back to that birth certificate and consider its implications: father’s name Andrewes; mother’s name Kirk, née Ashmore.

My uncle’s innocently let-out remark dates back to 1968 when I was living in a shared flat in Earls Court. By then, the stigma of illegitimacy had been swept away in the cultural revolution of the 1960s, so the remark prompted my curiosity rather than any feelings of shame or discomfort. And by then, I had found out that my father was still alive. That had happened in 1964, when I was working for an insurance company in the City and was bored out of my head one afternoon after a boozy lunch. ‘I’ll look up how many Andreweses with the extra ‘e’ there are living in London,’ I thought. There were five. And there among them, the entry ‘Andrewes, F.N. (Vet.)’ with an address in East Finchley.

I called the number. ‘Is that the veterinary practice of Mr Francis Nesfield Andrewes?’ (I said carefully.) ‘Yes.’ (My father answered, impatiently). And I put the phone down. There it was then. Certainty. I had eliminated the remote possibility that FN stood for something else. It could have done. I already knew my father was a vet, and that he had this strange middle name that sounded like a surname.

.

That weekend I got the tube out to East Finchley and went to the address given in the phone book. It was a big house, not well kept, but not seriously neglected, without memorable features, - or any that I can now remember. What made a greater impression on me was the unkempt garden behind a high wall to the left of the house. (If it was behind a high wall, how do I know it was unkempt?) High trees stood randomly about, looking despondent and forlorn, as trees tend to in the late months of an English winter, making you think that, this year, they’re not going to make it. I approached but did not call at the front door. I did not stay there very long. I took the tube back to my bed-sitter in South Kensington.

This anti-climactic episode has a similarly feeble coda. A couple of years later I was doing an evening course for an Institute of Export professional qualification; I was working for Heinz 57 in Great Portland Street now. At the start of each class you had to sign a register of attendance. ‘That’s a funny way to spell Andrews,’ the boy (young man) sitting next to me said. ‘Our neighbour spells it the same way. With the extra ‘e’. His neighbour was my father. ‘He’s a bit eccentric by all accounts, and very fond of his red wine. He lives there with about six offspring.’ All of them were older than me, I was able to verify, unobtrusively. ‘Are you related to him?’ ‘No,’ I said.

Was it a traumatic experience, to find out my father was alive in such a fluky way? The first thing I did was to write to my Auntie Dora, who wasn’t an aunt but my mum’s best friend. My mother had told me that my father had died in a car crash. Otherwise she didn’t talk about him and I didn’t ask. I grew up with my mother and two older sisters, who had a different father; that I knew. And that was us: There were no questions to ask. My auntie Dora told me that yes, my father had had a car accident, but he had not died; he had broken both his legs. But after the accident, he could not handle the big farm animals and had gone back to London where, before the War, he had had a practice that dealt with house pets, which he could more easily cope with in his invalid state.

Not long after, I went up to see my mother for a routine weekend visit. Now, after we had all left home, she was working in a live-in job, as a matron at a female students’ hall of residence in North Wales, if I remember right. I didn’t bring up the subject but of course her friend Dora had tipped her off. So on the Sunday evening before I left she said she could see something was bothering me and asked what was it? So it came out in the open. But I don’t remember learning anything more of substance, not about him, not about their life together, nor about his or her life prior to their relationship, which could not have lasted more than a couple of years, around my birth on 2 June 1945. She ‘just wanted me to be happy’, she said.

They had lived together at Pear Tree Cottage, I thought I knew: from my birth certificate and from the very occasional anecdote from that time that my mother had shared with me. For much of my early life it had had a rural and idyllic ring, that Pear Tree Cottage, Amblecote. Rural, in a domesticated way. It never made me think of cattle and farm horses and food production and