Tidying my writing shed, I came across an old notebook in which I had recorded the results of three trips to psychics I had made in the 90s when researching an article. More than ever I needed to know what happened to him. In the third, taken on his brief, sad return to England in 1953, he is a ravaged shadow of a man, evidently toothless, shabbily dressed in second-hand clothes. In two, taken during courtship and early fatherhood, he is young and really rather beautiful. So it was doubly odd that my trawl should have produced just three pictures of Harry Cane. Now that my mother has Alzheimer’s, her own albums have become one of the surest ways of striking sparks in her faltering mental engine. These photographs were such a ritualised part of my growing-up that to this day I have trouble teasing out genuine memory from photographic record. There was a family tradition of photography, fostered by Granny’s aunts, the Wells sisters, who were vain and fashion-conscious. The memoir petered out but now I was obsessed. ‘I started using my own personality to join the dots in the little I could glean of his nature’ … Gale’s great-grandfather Harry Cane, pictured around the time he was courting Winifred Wells. What had become of him there? How had he coped? Why was there no question of his daughter joining him when her mother died of breast cancer? And how had the bearskin gloves come into our dressing-up box?
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Using maddeningly scant detail, she recounted how Harry had left her and her mother in order to become one of the hundreds of eager homesteaders lured out to the Canadian prairies in the 1900s by easy railway access and the offer of free land. There was the story I had never heard, of her parents’ sad marriage – a rich young man, Harry Cane, urged to marry a girl still secretly in love with another man rejected by her family for being “trade”. It wasn’t brilliantly written, partly because it adopted a stilted tone-for-strangers quite unlike the one she used when talking to me, but there were the stories I remembered: of my great-great-grandmother and her tribe of 12 surviving children, of sadistic nursemaids, marital hypocrisy and thwarted love.
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This was a nondescript plastic ring-binder full of lined paper on which Granny had been encouraged at some point to begin her memoirs. Tucked away in the messy muddle of it all lay a treasure. I stopped cursing, however, when I realised the letters were both sides of an unbroken correspondence, begun when my mother’s school was evacuated during the Blitz and only ending with Granny’s slow descent into dementia. Among the antiques my mother passed on to me was a pretty Georgian chest of drawers and I cursed her on discovering it to be stuffed to bursting with ancient jigsaws, seed catalogues and a mass of old letters. She died when I was a student and it was only decades after that, when my mother elected to put herself into a retirement home, that I thought about Cowboy Grandpa again. My stay often coincided with a protracted visit from one of her many cousins, involving much lunchtime drinking and impenetrable, fascinating gossip on which I could guilelessly listen in from behind the sofa. She was raised by nasty nannies and an army of ambiguously teasing aunts and uncles, some of whom had behaved so badly that she would occasionally break off a story with a maddening “ pas devant les enfants”.
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She seemed to have no father – at least she never mentioned him – and, like a fairytale princess, had a beautiful mother who died tragically young.
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I never tired of these stories as they were about her childhood. Gale’s great-great aunt Pattie ‘during her years of glory as a Gaiety Girl’.