One of the things I love about where we live is that every week, without fail, I can hear bells being rung. Not from a church, but from a rag and bone man. He slowly drives around the streets in his pick up truck, with a passenger ringing the bell out of the side window. I often look out of the window to see what he’s got loaded onto the back of the truck. Usually it a washing machine that’s seen better days or an old bicycle frame which has been left forgotten in someones shed for umpteen years .
I don’t know if that’s the correct term to use any more, I suppose a scrap metal merchant would be more exact. But I know them as rag and bone men.
I remember when I was a little girl, the bells from the rag and bone man would be a familiar sound. If memory serves me well he’d holler “any old iron” as he drove along.
It was about a month ago when the sound of the the rag and bone man prompted me to take a trip through the past. Way back; not just to childhood memories. My great-grandfather was a rag and bone man in South London and my late grandad used to ride on his horse and trap around the streets of Wandsworth as a boy. I grew up listening to tales of ‘my old man Joe’ from my grandad – hearing about keeping billy goats on Clapham Common and chickens in the back yard.
Several years before my grandad passed away he sat down and wrote his memoirs. When I heard the bells of the rag and bone man I went to get the book because I remembered seeing a photo of my grandad with his father on the cart they used to own. But I picked up the wrong book.
My second cousin has devoted his life to genealogy. I really do mean devoted too – he was a full time civil servant working in London but gave up his career to pursue his love of family research. As a wedding present he sent me the book he dedicated the best part of his adult life researching and writing. It’s about his mother’s family which is my paternal family. I’m quite ashamed to say it has been on my bookshelf for almost 6 years and I’d done nothing more but glance through it.
Whatever prompted me to take the wrong book off the shelf also propelled me to read my cousin’s work.
I learnt about a family who in the 1500s were farmers in Oxfordshire and had a different surname to that with which I was born. I read about hardships and survival through church handouts. I witnessed the tragedy of losing a loved one in a freak accident on an engine travelling on the Great Western Railway and the inquest which Isambard Kingdom Brunel attended in person. I walked with my ancestor who decided to leave the sheep farming of beautiful Oxfordshire to make his living in an area not yet incorporated into London.
I read about the journeymen who served their 7 years apprenticeship on the docks of South London so they could become Lightermen in their own right. I experienced the close knit community of a bygone time where a whole street was practically taken up with family including the pub on the corner. There were newspaper reports of fights between spouses and the whipping of one pregnant distant relative who stole some corn because times were hard and her belly empty.
Throughout the pages I was saddened by the deaths of so many children. Often the baptism and burial records showed just days of life. Some were longer like the 3 year old who fell into the Thames whilst playing; his hat was seem floating downstream before his body was recovered. I can’t imagine how distraught the parents would have been to see child after child never reaching adulthood. It made me want to hold onto my own children even tighter and never miss a precious second of their lives. It can be taken away all too soon.
I have a lot to be thankful for the rag and bone man. He was the bridge between this world and the one passed.
It also got me thinking. This family who lived, loved and died are on my paternal side. I also have a good knowledge of my maternal grandfather’s family through my own research (I went back as far as my cousin but no where near as detailed). I know the male lines which ultimately brought about my existence and yet I only know my maternal line up to my grandmother. And I can’t even tell you her maiden name without having to climb into the attic and find out my research papers.
Who are the women in my family – the ones who take the male name at birth and change it again on marriage? I have no idea about the wombs who have carried female children through the generations – the ones whose line currently ends with my Tabitha.
I do intend to find out. I don’t have a great deal of spare time but I want to know my true blood line. I want to know the names of the women who have given me life.
