Memory Dump - Frank & Patsy

I began thinking about Patsy the other day when Peter, in his unexpected way, asked me for information about her children - that is, the half-brother and two half-sisters whom I never met.
The alert reader will deduce from this that Patsy was my mother. Indeed so. I have known the following few facts about her for all of my life, but it is only now that I have started to realize that they add up to a strange and rather sad story.
She was born Patricia Allen in Vancouver in 1914, the daughter of one Percival Herbert Allen. I had always thought he was Bishop of that fair city, but on one of the few documents I have about Patsy, his occupation is given as "Captain, Royal Canadian Army". It would appear that he died sometime before 1941. She also had a brother John, born in 1912, who was named as one of my godfathers but whom I never met (we corresponded later).
Patsy met my father, Frank, in 1930, when she was sixteen and he was twenty. The photo of Frank was taken some time before then - maybe in 1926 or so. Frank had clearly decided to stretch his wings after leaving his public school (Kings College, Wimbledon), and joined his uncle Donald Bellew on his ranch near Lytton, British Columbia. Donald, brother to my grandmother Lorna, had moved to Canada in 1907 and won the Victoria Cross during the First World War (see Wikipedia for more information if you're interested).
Frank was clearly much taken with Patsy, and looking at the photo of her taken at the time, it is not hard to see why. For all her sixteen years, this is the face of a determined, self-possessed young woman, not that of a child. She was still only seventeen when she and Frank married in 1931, and they settled into marital bliss in a one-room log cabin on Donald's ranch at 83 Mile House, Lytton, BC (in the Caribou country). It all seems very idyllic, but just a little bit hasty, and you have to wonder exactly what drove the relationship and why they chose to marry so soon and so young. Was it truly an incandescent mutual passion? Did Patsy set her cap at this handsome young Englishman to get away from home? Or was Frank was rebelling against his own background, or swept up in a much freer and more uninhibited lifestyle than he was accustomed to - it was still (almost) the Twenties, and I don't suppose there was much liberation in Frank's life at home with his mother. Perhaps there was a scare about a pregnancy. It may have been some of these things, all of them, or none of them; we'll never know now. Whatever it was that drove them to marry, it was not me; I only arrived on the scene in 1933, eighteen months after the wedding.
For all that I was born in Norway, my parents still then gave their address as British Columbia and my father's occupation was "Rancher". But two or three years later, they had given up the log cabin and moved back to live in New Malden, a suburb of south west London. I don't know what my father did for a living; he might have been involved in the family shop that my grandparents had bought for retirement income (Radio Electric, at the top of Wimbledon Hill - the name says it all). In 1938, he gave his occupation as "Salesman".
Unhappily, the marriage did not last. Maybe they just fell out of love; maybe Patsy, who must have been terribly lonely and isolated far from home, just couldn't take it any more; maybe there was someone else for one or other (or both) of them. Again, we'll never know now. But in 1937, the marriage fell apart in bizarre fashion. There was a legal separation (no divorce - expensive, sordid, and slow in those days); my mother went off and never saw, spoke, or wrote to me again; my father enlisted as a private in the Royal Army Service Corps, signing on for seven years; and my grandmother, Lorna, became my legal guardian. All of a sudden, I had become the child of a No Parent Family, an orphan with two living parents, which is a bit wounding when you come to think of it.
Thereafter, my grandmother did her valiant best to bring me up, and a pretty good job she made of it - I never felt unloved or deprived, and it's only sixty-five years afterwards that I wonder just what was going on, especially in my father's mind. He was middle class (that still mattered back then), a former public schoolboy, whose whole background was in the officer class, and whose uncle had won a VC as a machine gun officer. And yet he signs up to be a private soldier in the RASC, not even a regiment of the line. It is all very strange. Later, he gained a commission into the Green Howards with his brother (my uncle) Eric. Frank was killed by a land mine in the Western Desert in June 1942 and Eric went into the bag soon after for the rest of the war.
I suppose it was inevitable that my grandmother blamed Patsy for everything, and detested her until the day she died. She must have been tracking her in some way, maybe by employing a private detective, because I can still remember her glee when she discovered that Patsy had re-married without the benefit of a divorce from Frank, and had therefore committed bigamy. It would seem that Patsy had joined the Womens' Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) during the War, and in 1941 she married a Squadron Leader named John Christopher Millar. On the marriage certificate (I have the copy obtained by Lorna) she gives her condition as "Spinster", which was, of course, untrue - she was still married to Frank. But such things were common enough in war; with Death breathing down your neck, there's no time to hang about waiting for divorce. Of course, the issue of bigamy became moot when Frank was killed.
My information on Patsy now becomes almost non-existent. I gather that she had three children by John Millar, a boy and two girls; the boy went on to win the Sword of Honour at Cranwell. Patsy died young - sometime in the 1950s, I think, and someone told me it was of an overdose of sleeping tablets. Certainly, she pre-deceased her widowed mother, who died in 1969 or 1970, and that led to the final twist in the story. Under the terms of her mother's will, Patsy's share of her estate was to be divided among the surviving children. This included me, as the Allen's family solicitor well knew. But to the Millars, Patsy's second family, the news of my existence came as a complete surprise; they hadn't even known that Patsy had been married before. Nor would you expect them to, if you think about it. To reveal the marriage or the existence of dear little Norman would have led to really awkward questions about why it said "Spinster" on her marriage certificate.
Because we parted when I was so young - four or five - I have only three direct memories of Patsy. One is of playing on a carpet in a sunlit room filled with women - some sort of meeting, I imagine. The second is of her saying the word "satisfactory"; for some reason, this struck me as a totally admirable word and I said it again and again, both in my head and aloud, doubtless making a confounded nuisance of myself. And the third memory is of her sudden reaction when she inadvertently put her lighted cigarette in her mouth the wrong way round. She may well have uttered more words on that occasion, but clearly they were not as satisfactory as "satisfactory".
Patsy had a short life, and I imagine not a happy one - especially if she did, indeed, take her own life. I never know her and I never missed her, but now I look back with melancholy at my missing mother, and wish that I had. As for my father, I have one or two hazy recollections and a hastily scrawled three-line letter telling me to be good. Thanks, Dad.
This is a slightly expanded version of my e-mail Memory Dump of May, 2005. I thought I might as well put in everything I know about my father as well - little enough, in all conscience. I am mildly surprised to find myself so bitter, sixty-four years after his death.