Of Teashops and Grandparents

Though Eliza be impatient for me to tell her more of my story I first must impart some news which hath set the town a-twitter: Brighton is to have a tea-shop!

I recollect I once talked about the tea-parties which the mistress must now conduct each week and how much she and her gossips enjoy this simple pleasure. Yet what should set them all a-quiver now but the news that, just as in London, Brighton is to open a place wherein not only to buy all kinds of exotic types of leaves; but where ladies, unaccompanied by their menfolk, may with propriety eat and drink in public.

I did snigger to imagine how even now those upstairs will be planning all sorts of fashions and furbelows to wear; and how they must feel a little breath of freedom from their gilded cages. (Even though, I daresay, no tea-shop cakes and pastries will ever be the equal of my own.) I can only be glad, however, that those upstairs have stopped moping and mowing about the dire weather and can look forward to outings they can take together.

And so to continue my story: -

 I were minded to assure Eliza that there would be no more shocks for her in this unfolding tale for it grieved me to upset her. I had not realised she did not know her grandsire’s name was unknown; and mayhap there will be other matters new to her as well? Notwithstanding, I shall go on ...

My Grandam was born in the county of Cork in Ireland which she left when my own mother were but a babby. Grandam had married herself a husband of the Roman faith with whom at first she was happy.  It was not until my mother was born, however, that she realised that her husband, though not a regular churchman, was insistent that it were women who should obey his Lord for him.  This, says, my Grandam, was the way of it with many husbands: no matter how lax they were in their own obligations to the church, the arrival there each Sunday and Holy Day of their wives, with an increasing brood of children, proved a husband’s strict observance of holy strictures.

My Grandam therefore, sent her husband packing to the far ends of the earth, to a place in Lower Canada where, she later learned, he took himself another wife who knew her duty to God on behalf of my Grandparent and provided him 16 children.  Thus assured of his place in heaven, and quite content with his lot on earth amongst his brood, this old ancestor never again set foot in his native land.

Once having moved herself from the old country, things changed for my Grandam and my mother too. They found themselves to be restless, foreign spirits who traversed the length of the land of England before settling in the county of Cornwall.