Talking about Violet Flora Rose and Family

What I knew before I started:
I always thought that we were Welsh on my grandmother’s side of the family—mum’s mother. I knew that my great grandfather was a coachman for “Hugh Walpole, the politician not the writer,” and had decided myself that he came from Wales to London and found employment there. I also knew that at some point he was left money by an employer, and used it to buy a seed shop in Shepperton, where my grandmother grew up; I knew she was brought up by “four maiden aunts,” her own mother having been sent to an asylum because she “kept wandering off and leaving the baby.” Great Grandma had an extreme sort of post partum depression called puerperal psychosis. All my mother knew about her grandmother was that she was a “Miss Smith from Abingdon.”

I knew the first names of two of the maiden aunts who brought up my grandmother: Kate and Annie. Both of them visited my grandmother in New Zealand. My grandmother, Violet Flora Rose Woods, born in Shepperton (I thought) had married a New Zealand soldier during the first world war, and gone to New Zealand as a war bride in 1919. By then my mother, Brenda Violet Nissen, was a nine month old baby (her father Claus was of Danish descent). Grandma Violet Flora Rose was told as a child that her mother had died, and found out when it was too late that she had been in an asylum for twenty years.

Great great aunt Annie, worked as a companion to the Ross family on a sheep station in Australia. After she visited her niece in New Zealand she died on the way back and was buried at sea. My mother remembers seeing sparkling jewelry spread out on the bed, and suspects that the sailors helped themselves to it before they tossed her off the ship. Great great aunt Kate, the second maiden aunt, survived her visit to New Zealand; my brother Michael visited her in England in the early sixties, at which point she was no longer compos mentis. She thought Michael was coming to live with her and had a hard time accepting that he wasn’t. A couple named the Grays took Michael to visit her. They were some kind of relative of ours, but Michael wasn’t sure of the connection and didn’t care much.
My grandmother’s father, whose name I did not know, remarried after his first wife died in the asylum, and had a son, Tony. I met Tony several times in the late sixties when I was in England. Tony was younger than my mother (his aunt) and died about the same time she did in the late nineteen nineties. When my great grandfather died he left his daughter in New Zealand a hundred pounds. As a result of that, and partly because my mother had sent her food packages during the second world war, when Great Great Aunt Kate died, she left all her money to my mother. It caused a lot of excitement in my family, although it didn’t turn out to be an awful lot of money. I seem to remember nine hundred pounds, which would be about what a young person might earn in a year back then. My parents used it to buy a car. In those days if you lived in New Zealand you needed foreign funds to buy a car.