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| Willem Maris, Duck with eight chicks |
We were chatting about my family name and how it landed in South Wales when Mrisi played a traditional Welsh song on his phone. He was pointing out the similarities with South African music, the gold and coal both countries have, the choral tradition. So much came together around the table. He wanted me to look at the Wills in the family tree on Ancestry but I was distracted by a name that's come up often when I look into Mum's family - a folk singer called George Blake.
There's another George Blake in her family history, from earlier, but the later George and his brother Moses were the focus of a song collector, Dr George Gardiner in the early 20th century. Both were singers - George, a gardener, who was often drunk as he aged, Moses was more sober in his work as a grave digger and church sexton.
Mum's brother Phil said Ida, her mother, was a great storyteller. Where did that come from? Most family occupations were labouring or similar. But as I know from the cleaning I've been doing, physical work is a gateway to dreaming.
Mum's many relatives on Ida's side didn't move far from Emery Down. Generations lived in the New Forest, working in the forest, the Veals, the Whites, Tinsleys, the Blakes all alongside each other, making alliances, like Aaron Blake in 1858 marrying one of my first cousins five times removed, Kate Sebright. Kate's mother was a Veal.
And this is how I managed to place George, the folk singer. He was Aaron's brother. And the story gets better - George married Maria Mills, whose brother was 'Brusher' Mills, known as the last snake catcher in the New Forest.
It's days before Mum comes back from hospital, and I guess another stint of preparing her house was what mysteriously led me back to the version of Silver Street where her ancestors lived. And Mrisi playing the Welsh song took me to my own past - to Crondall Folk Club and music I listened to as a teenager: Breton singers and harpists, Steeleye Span and Maddie Prior, John Renbourne and Pentangle, and Surrey musician Ian A Anderson who eventually set up Rogue Records - the first UK company to release the work of Baaba Maal. Which almost takes this out-of-time daydreaming full circle.
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