Fragments

By Kathy Farmer

Now in her 90th year Kathy’s book contains compelling fragments of her life. Her story vividly chronicles so many aspects of her amazing and varied life across the years - from being a WW2 child evacuee with her twin brother, her first job after leaving school and her first fascinating boyfriends. “Fragments” relates how her parents forced decisions upon her which she regretted at the time. The book explains how Kathy came to meet John - her first husband, and their long marriage of 48 years until his death. Kathy speaks about her exciting experiences as a singer and actress on the amateur stage in the Midlands. In her mid years we learn how Kathy became drawn to the Christian faith, and how she became a Reader in the Anglican Church, where for many years she preached and ministered in the country churches along Offa’s Dyke. The story allows us to appreciate how keen a horsewoman she was and how Kathy was steeped in country lore. Finally Kathy tells how it is possible to live once again after facing the traumatic loss of her first husband.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: May 31, 2022
• ISBN: 9781665599061

Kathy Farmer

Kathy Farmer lived for many years on the borders of the Welsh Marches. She now lives with her husband in Pembrokeshire, in the beautiful seaside town of Tenby. She is a Reader in the Church in Wales within the Diocese of St Davids and is a member of Tenby Arts Club. Kathy is a countrywoman, and for many years she rode her Arab mare around the hills in the Welsh Marches, and along Offas Dyke.

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© 2022 Kathy Farmer. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or

transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse  05/30/2022

ISBN: 978-1-6655-9905-4 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6655-9906-1 (e)

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CONTENTS

Prologue

Fragments

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

More Fragments

Winter

The Rock Cottage

About the Author

PROLOGUE

My mother, Mabel Frances Cooper (nee Buttery), was shocked when, at the age of forty, she found she was pregnant. She didn’t want another baby. They already had a ten-year-old daughter, Beryl, and were now enjoying the freedom of going out together again. Mother played the piano at a popular ballroom dance studio, called, Amies, in Birmingham where she and Father had first met. Never mind, my father soothed, the child could be a blessing to us in our old-age.

To my mother’s greater shock, the child turned out to be twins, a boy and a girl. My poor mother could not bring herself to be part of the excitement and joy that this brought to the Sorrento Nursing Home in Moseley, Birmingham. She was in disbelief and shock on that day, the fourth of July 1932, when my brother and I first put in our appearance. So disenchanted was she, that there was no name ready for one baby, let alone two!

In the end my brother was named after the doctor who delivered us, John Brian, and I was named Kathleen Mary after the Irish nursing sister.

After our birth, my mother became ill and it was thought best for us twins to be looked after in a nursing home for sick children. I have a vivid recall of this, perhaps because it was such a shock. We were put into cots on a ground floor ward with a lot of other children. We faced long French windows which opened out onto beautiful lawns with flowered borders and sandy paths along which we and the sick children convalescing there were wheeled out in chairs but not before we had performed on a potty. My frustration was such that I was always trying to force my head through the bars of my cot to escape or trying to dodge the nurse by not staying on the pot. I knew beyond any doubt that I was not sick or crippled like the other children and yet we were confined to the cot or the wheelchair and I screamed the place down with frustration.

Many years later when I was driving my father somewhere, and I was passing a long tree-lined drive around an island at Canwell, Bassetts Pole, near Tamworth, and which I always thought looked familiar to me, and yet I didn’t know why, he told me that the convalescent home which we had been sent to had been there. He was amazed that I could even remember it, for we must have been babies. I sometimes wonder if we were not sent there twice, first as babies and later at a time when I could remember. Strangely, I later learnt that Beryl our older sister, as a child, was also placed in a convalescent home for her nerves because she blinked a lot. My sister remembers the experience with horror as she wrote to tell mother how unhappy she was and to come and get her. Unfortunately the matron read the letter and stood over her while she re-wrote the letter saying how happy she was. My mother left her there for another fortnight!

My mother was a romantic, she loved reading books, Jefferey Farnol, Baroness Orczy, Rider Haggard, Pearl Buck and she loved the cinema. I remember her taking us to see Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and The Little Princes in the Tower, which I found morbidly romantic.

My mother was classically beautiful with black, naturally wavy hair, she told me that it fell in ringlets as a child. She had a broad brow and a thin aquiline nose and light hazel eyes. She was born in 1895 close to the Cathedral in Lichfield, at her maternal grandparent’s home. Their name was Sillitoe. My mother recalled many happy times when she stayed with them and all the cousins would come and they would be taken out in a pony and trap. But generally as a child her upbringing had been hard, her father was a heavy drinker and they had to do many moonlight flits, from the Midlands, up to the north and back when they couldn’t pay the rent.

Nevertheless she adored her father, John Henry Buttery, a tall dark handsome man, like herself. Her mother Frances Jennie Sillitoe born in Lichfield, died in Bradford Yorkshire, on one of their many moves when my mother was a schoolgirl and her father subsequently married his wife’s sister, Maria Elizabeth Sillitoe. There was no love lost between my mother and her step-mother.

My father, also born in 1895 in Handsworth Birmingham, was the steady rock that had been missing in her childhood and they created a stable home for us. He had none of the traumas that my mother had experienced as a child, although his father died when he was thirteen, He was level-headed and wise in his way, short in stature and plain. His mother, Eliza, my grandma had been a teacher, somewhere in the inner city of Birmingham. She would often tell us of barefoot children and how they used to provide a breakfast of bread and jam for children they suspected of going without.

She was born a Rosson, the sporting gunmakers in Birmingham. She married a Charles Cooper, and I’m sure it must have been a shock to her when her tennis-playing son married this tall, strikingly beautiful woman who played the organ in cinemas for the silent movies and piano in dance studios.

My father, Herbert Rosson-Cooper, had been gassed in the first World War and was not only in poor health but out of work too, when they first met, like so many others who came back from the war to unemployment.

Eventually he became a skilled foreman pattern-maker. He smelt of the wood that he engineered, shaved and planed. My father’s cousin was a Charles Rice, a stained glass restorer and artist who lived and painted in Germany. A few of his paintings came down through the family to him, and hung on our walls. I always thought how very beautiful they were. One was of a lace- maker with her spindle sitting outside her door. Another was a detail of her head, rather like ’the girl with a pearl earring.’ Another full length portrait was of a young man beautifully dressed in lace and pale blue silks. I liked to study the faces of these people from another age.

I remember on several occasions being taken by my mother to collect the rent from houses that her father owned in the Alum Rock area of Birmingham. The families living there were mainly Irish tenants. Today they are black, Muslim, and Asian. I also remember being taken by mother to see her cousins, the Sillitoe’s who still lived in Lichfield. One of her cousins, Rose served as a nursing sister in the Colonial Service in Trinidad. I loved going to Lichfield to see them because you went through a wide archway off the road into a courtyard and I could imagine the horse and carriage swinging into it.

There was such a difference of age, ten years between us, and our sister, Beryl, that she hardly seemed to figure in our lives until after the Second World War was over and we had moved house. She was pretty with blonde wavy hair, deep violet blue eyes and a fair complexion. Shown off and admired when she was taken by my parents as a little girl, to Amies School of Ballroom Dancing, where mother played the piano, I’m sure that at the age of ten, our appearance was somewhat of a disruption in her life too.

FRAGMENTS

CHAPTER ONE

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Hitler invaded Poland on the 1st September 1939 and on the 3rd September war was declared by Great Britain. Shortly after this a mass evacuation of children from all the major cities in England took place.

Looking back, I cannot now remember feeling any dismay or anxiety as we marched in crocodile lines to Perry Barr railway station. Perhaps it was because I, at least, had the familiarity of my twin brother John, beside me. Mother stood on the platform and waved us off, together with all the other mothers.