2020

Having reached 3/4 of a century I thought I would start sharing some of my family history. I’m going to start with me and my parents and then work back through grand-parents, great-grandparents, etc.

So here goes …

I was born on December 17, 1945 at Royal Northern Hospital to Sarah Ilter/Marlborough and Alfred Edward Marlborough.

Sally Marlborough

I’ll start the family history with my Mum. I don’t really know when she was born.  She told my father that her birthday was September 15, 1919 but she later claimed that she was actually older than him.  I believe she was born between 1913 and 1919.  She was born in Istanbul to Jaques and Marguerite Abravanel.  The family changed their name to Ilter sometime after she was born – probably after the revolution that brought Attaturk to power.  Here are some pictures of Sarah (or Sally, as she was known in England) taken before she was married.

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It’s very unlikely that I will be able to find any records of my Turkish family because many have been destroyed and what’s there is written in Cyrillic or Hebrew.  Most of what I know is anecdotal and I will write about it another time.  The main focus of my family research so far has been my English family. 

Here are some more pictures of Sally and Alf from the time when they were in Istambul.

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Alf Marlborough

Below are a couple of pictures of Alf holidaying with his parents followed by a couple of photos of him in Istambul.

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Alfred was sent to the Middle East with the REME and ended up in Istanbul where he met and married Sarah Ilter on December 14, 1944.  His marriage certificate shows him to be a Staff Sergeant (No. 7617341).   He returned to England with Sarah before the end of the war.  Sarah reported that they expected to live with Alfred’s parents, but they were living in a bomb damaged house.

More later …..

WARNING: Be careful if you try to click on the two links in the next paragraph. The files are huge and take a long time to download! Panning and zooming on the .pdf especially takes a long time, so don’t keep clicking – just wait for something to happen 😉

I have been talking to some old school friends and one of them mentioned the school photo that was taken in 1961. In order to have a really good look during our next Zoom meeting I’ve scanned it at 400dpi. My scanner can’t take anything that long, so I did it in 4 sections and those are shown below. However, I couldn’t leave well enough alone, so I decided to combine it back into one photo using Photoshop, and then exported it to a .pdf so I could pan the photo and zoom in on the details if I needed to. I was amazed to see that the whole photo turned out to be 43 megabytes and the pdf is 186 meg! Each of the original jpegs is less than 2 meg, so it shows how much extra stuff goes into photoshop files and pdfs!

Today, as lockdown 2 ends, they announced approval of the first vaccine. So we’ve had an elated, attenuated, belated Thanksgiving.

Yes, we had our Thanksgiving dinner today. We were planning to have it last Thursday with friends, but lockdown 2 prevented that. We went ahead and ordered the turkey but decided to reduce the amount of food we were planning to cook. And then the appointment came through from the hospital – I found myself booked in to have a minor op to remove some skin cancer from my hand on Thanksgiving day. This is no surprise as we don’t officially celebrate Thanksgiving over here. We just do it because we’ve done it for years and we like the idea of a feast day with no presents and minimal religious overtones.

We’re thankful for a lot of things right now. The wonderful NHS continues to deal with the covid crisis, in spite of all the dreadful things our last few governments have thrown at it. Locally the people of the Strettons have banded together to protect the vulnerable and lonely and to keep everyone safe, well fed and protected.

I’m also thankful to Jackie Banfield for lending me her amazing Limbo! 😉

Now is the time of peak spring flowers in our garden. I’m not going to write anything, this is just a gallery of shots taken in the last couple of weeks. As usual, you can click on a thumbnail to see a bigger version.

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Today I’d like to start in the pond – well beside it, anyway. The frogs spawned in late February and the spawn lasted for some time. Of course, that attracted the newts and we spent several evenings watching them on the hunt around the edges of the spawn mass. The tadpoles continue to eat the spawn “jelly” for some time, but they crowd together for safety in the middle of it. Slowly the tadpoles disappeared. I doubt if they’ve all been eaten, but with all the mighty hunters in the pond they keep a very low profile once they are swimming free. We may see one or two as the summer progresses, or we may see a tiny frog as it leaves the pond later in the season, but if we do it’s just luck.

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Meanwhile the newts have been getting frisky. It’s now the mating season. To attract the females, the males use their tails to flick pheromones through the water towards them. You can see them cruising through the water, with several males following each female in the hope of being the one to pass on their sperm packages. You can see a full description of the process here along with some much better pictures than I have managed to take.

I’m using the lockdown to catch up on various jobs and projects. One of them is to learn to use my camera. I have had it in auto mode for too long! I am learning to do a few more things with it, which is why I was able to get better pictures of the pond life. However, I realise I have a long way to go before I get really adept at changing settings, focusing and shooting quickly!

As the earth warms up, lots of interesting plants are showing up in the garden. I love the young ferns, the bluebells, the red maples and the apple blossom. Here’s a selection of photos taken over the last couple of weeks. Click on a photo to see it more clearly.

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Hello again! May I introduce you to our resident Great Spotted Woodpecker. He spends a lot of time in our garden and in the trees on the bank above our house. Take a good look at the picture and you can see that he is hanging onto the fat feeder with one claw! Yes, he only has one leg. He’s been hanging around since last autumn, so he made it through the winter and he’s a lovely sight to see. He seems to be able to feed himself well enough, in spite of his disability, but from watching how difficult it is for him to perch on a branch I doubt if he will be able to mate or rear offspring.

These are scary times. We have been staying at home and trying to get on with jobs. I have to admit I am bored. I would love to go out for a ride in the car, or visit a friend, or take a trip to another part of the country. But I know that this is going to have to wait till the Covid crisis is over.

At present all we can do is phone, text, email, and skype our friends while we tidy, sort, file, clean and garden. So gardening and and observing the plants and animals in the garden have become even more important than usual.

As the garden grows towards it’s flowering peak in May we can see the other acer is also putting out its leaves. These are a gorgeous deep red which will soon be complimenting the azaleas and rhodedendrons that surround them.

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On the right of the above set of pictures you can see a new arrival. This suddenly appeared in the garden for the first time this year. From the oniony smell of the leaves and the bulbils on the flower stalk I decided it’s an allium, but I was a bit dismayed to find out it’s the invasive Allium paradoxum or “few-flowered leek”. Two clumps have appeared this spring in different parts of the garden. The good news is that you can keep it under control by eating it!

The early daffodils are starting to fade now and I’ve been deadheading them, but there are still plenty about and there are some lovely varieties.

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Meanwhile in the mini meadow we now have cowslips and the red currants are blooming.

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Another flower is doing it’s thing at the bottom of the garden right now. This is Erythronium ‘pagoda’. It’s a relative of the dog-toothed violet here in the UK and of the Trout Lily in the US. Every year it seems to be getting bigger and stronger, and while it doesn’t last long it is truly beautiful while it’s out.

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Dear Paul,

While we’re all isolated I thought I’d just write you a (public!) note and tell you that we miss you. Since others might be reading this, let me just say that we miss all our other friends, too, but are grateful to those who have taken the time and trouble to phone or email. We’re well and enjoying the peace and quiet; John in particular is quite happy to be tucked away in our little dell.

You’ll be pleased that we’ve taken note of your advice to mow more often and John has been out with the mower. Needless to say, after 2 years with no use it took a while to start, but start it did and he got it done!

Today, I decided to take a walk round the garden, as you and I do on Thursday mornings. I thought you might like to see how it’s progressing.

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The marsh marigolds are spreading from the bog to the edge of the pond and this year the wood pigeons haven’t been ravaging the leaves!

Down the back of the house there are violets in the gravel, in a couple of places in the garden, the skimmia shrubs give off a lovely perfume while their tiny white flowers set off the red berries from last year and every now and then you can spot a large vinca flower peeping through the jungle!

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Since I took the pictures I’ve started a new scheme. Rather than work bed by bed, which is difficult because I keep seeing all the beds that haven’t been touched, I’m picking on one species of “weed” and trying to get it all up from all the beds. Obviously, I won’t be able to do that with the ground elder since it’s ubiquitous, but over the last couple of days I’ve managed to collect almost a dustbin full of green alkanet. I know I haven’t eradicated it, but it’s made all the beds look better for the moment.

My next purge species is brambles. Again, it’s impossible to get it all, but clearing it off the paths and out of the shrubs and flower beds makes for easier access and allows us to move around the garden more easily.

Moving on to our mini meadow there are lots of flowers in bloom or about to bloom. Clumps of daffodils, white snakes-head fritillaries and primroses are leading the way. The cowslips will be out next week and the common spotted orchids are starting to push up leaves.

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So Paul, here come some success stories. The new bed in the back garden is looking lovely with daffs and hyacinths. There’s lots of other stuff coming on well, too. Although I don’t have a picture, the “red bush” that you moved (whose name I can never remember) is developing buds so I think it has survived the winter and Pam’s old Pieris is not only covered in white flowers, but also producing new red leaves.

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And finally, I’ve cut back the flowers on the magnificent grass (which you can just see behind the artichokes) and put them in a chimney pot so we can continue to enjoy them for the next few weeks.

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I guess that’s all for now. I hope you and yours are healthy and well and I look forward to seeing you again when the emergency is over.

cheers ….. Joan.