The end of an era

October 2007

I heard recently that my last remaining great-uncle, Woodrow Wilson Honey, had died. Uncle Woodie was the youngest of my great-gran's eight surviving children and his death at the age of 97 comes two and a half years after his sister Joan's. 

It is definitely the end of an era. 

As a child I grew up in my grandparents' home with my mum and great-gran, and it was in this home that all the family gatherings - parties would be more accurate - took place. The Honeys loved a party. Food, drink, and song abundant. So I saw plenty of the extended family and can safely say, from what I witnessed and overheard when the grown-ups thought I wasn't listening, Uncle Woodie was a character.

He was a good singer and a member of Dunvant Male Voice Choir. He was a one-time Communist - a member of the party long enough to be refused entry into America. He had 'contacts': he was able to get a council house on demand it seemed. He worked on the trains; he worked as a chauffeur; he worked as a lollipop man outside a school. He was a poet. He had an eye for the ladies. 

As a lollipop man - an elderly one at that - he became smitten with one of the teachers, who happened to be my friend. He wrote her a poem. I told Auntie Joan. She said, 'The silly old bugger.'

He had a car or what passed for one when I was growing up and I remember us all - I assume my mum and me, his wife, and my cousin, John - having to get out and walk up Oxwich Hill because the car couldn't make it with passengers on board. 

I saw something I shouldn't have seen, or rather that he didn't want me to see when I was a young teenager. Let's just say it involved a woman. And he had a lady friend for many years, right until he died. Vera always seemed to be a lovely cheerful person, and we often wondered how she put up with Uncle Woodie who, as Auntie Joan would have told you, could be 'a miserable old sod.'

And now he's gone and the last remaining link with the past gone with him. I'm sorry I never made time to see him in spite of saying at regular intervals, 'I must go and see Uncle Woodie soon.'