GWYNETH ROSEMARY CHEESEMAN née DANIEL
5 November 1938
19 July 1957, wedding day
I've had a pretty amazing life, one way or another, about 2% horrible, the rest full of interest. It's hard to boil it down. Despite my best efforts, the 2% occupies 10% of what follows because it was, oddly enough, the aspect of my life that shaped me most and explains how it turned out to be so varied and interesting (to me at least). As Fay Weldon recently said, life and relationships are far too subtle and complex to sum up in one word, so I'll plump for two, gruesome and marvellous.
I had an excellent time as a child. My parents get top marks for devotion – they lived their whole lives around us and our needs, never stinted and went without to make sure we had everything to give us the best start in life. I tried hard to emulate their example, but failed utterly.
My mother wasn't English, I knew from early on. We were raised in Birmingham, Kidsgrove and Norwich in England, with the Daily Telegraph map of the world on the kitchen wall. The outline of Australia and in particular the heart shape of Tasmania, both coloured pink, were 'home'. I knew Mother had an accent from the day I was picked out at school. I wasn't speaking English the way I should.
My mother was Eleanora Lello, an ex-teacher. My father, Frederick Trevor Daniel, was a graduate engineer born in London. His family emigrated to Victoria and New South Wales over quite a long period, and he left for Australia himself in 1923. Known as Trevor, he was two years younger than my mother. He was the tough one, she the gentle one, but he could be a fun – if you kept on the right side of him, which mostly I did – he had a heart of gold. If anything, I was always closer to him than to my conscientious but distracted mother who was never, one felt, exactly keen to marry anyway, being a bit of a career girl.
The fourth girl and second youngest of five, I was born on the warmest November day for years. My mother was 37 and went on to have her last child in 1940 in the thick of war. I must have been a bit of a shock – not only was I over ten pounds in weight, but yet another girl, and strangest of all, very fair indeed with curly hair. Not the milk-man's at all, but almost pure Daniel in colouring, as I later found out.
My parents married in Sydney in 1932, but my mother wanted to see England. I think she couldn't have foreseen how hard that would be – she had five children in seven years, Ryllis, twins Brenda and Deirdre, me and Geoffrey. By then it was too late to return to Australia – war had started. My father, a specialist production engineer, was snaffled early on for the war effort, first in Birmingham – where our house was hit by two fire bombs – then in Kidsgrove in Staffordshire. There we had a large garden and were no longer in danger.
My father was Deputy Superintendent of the Royal Ordnance Factory at Radway Green, something that impressed me terribly. Kidsgrove holds many happy memories. It was a 'latency' period, a bit of a country idyll, although I'm told I suffered from anaemia and had glandular fever (neither for the first time). I clearly recall nearly chopping my leg in half with an axe. It hurt. I also remember the special rations and sun-ray lamp treatment at the doctor's. It didn't seem remarkable to me – that was the way it was. But Kidsgrove was super – we all loved it and when we left, life was never quite the same.
After the war ended, we moved to the beautiful cathedral city of Norwich in Norfolk, where my sisters went to the Blythe School for Girls, and my brother the City of Norwich School for boys. It was by then too late to go back to Australia. The law had changed years before, shutting us out. I rather think by then my mother's love of England took precedence, so stay we did, even though she could have taken us back and put us all through the immigration process.
I was quite a girlie girl, and loved clothes and hair-does and make-up, dancing and flirting with the boys. As I was musical, and a fiddler and piano player as well as keen on singing, my parents sent me to Norwich High School for Girls, a private school with a high reputation for music. I was quite athletic and played in most of the school teams, as well as swimming for the county as the 50-yards breaststroke champion. I gained my Queen's Guide award in 1952, and became Company Leader. We were all sent to Europe each year to live with French, Spanish or German families to improve our languages. I became reasonably fluent in French but didn't want to take up music. Instead, I decided to aim for Cambridge to study Economics, a hard-headed choice that never came off, sadly.
The only one of the children to do so, I took an interest in the garden, creeping around looking at the flowers and small things, studying books on how to prune the roses and the vine, observing shrubs and trees, and writing about them. I'd lie on my back on the grass watching the swallows and swifts and martins high overhead, screaming in the summer air, catching flies. I longed to swoop around like that, and took such an interest in aircraft that I persuade my father to buy me Janes. Very soon, I could identify any aircraft. I also spent a lot of time with our elderly neighbours, listening to their stories of their younger years as missionaries in China. One was deaf and I learned sign language so as to 'talk' to her. I took photographs – one of the house in Norwich by moonlight on an old Brownie box camera, with a long exposure. I designed a toilet-roll holder for the outside loo which Geoffrey made, and used to rig up picture shows with lenses in cardboard tubes. Looking back, I've not changed much.
When I was 16, one summer night in Germany, I was assaulted. It took me over forty years to admit to what happened. My plans evaporated and I gave up the idea of university and went to college on a one-year secretarial course. Once I was 18, my parents wouldn't let me leave home unless I either married my boyfriend or went to back to college to prepare for university, so I opted for the former, silly girl. My boyfriend was nearly seven years my senior, a lively and amusing man, with a great sense of fun, an officer and former jet pilot in the Royal Air Force. I was dazzled – after all he gained a 'double' First Class degree from Oxford the year I turned 19, so he had to be a good bet. He took me flying in Tiger Moths. I was lost.
As he was an atheist, we married in Norwich Register Office, on 19th July 1957. I was still 18 and on top of the world, even though I had niggling doubts. But see the smile in the photo! It didn't last long. My new husband could be impulsive, and he had a swift upper thrust.
Nevertheless, I knuckled down to married life with determination, and had my first baby fifteen months after our wedding. Just over two years later, in 1960, my husband secretly signed up to return to the Royal Air Force, even though I was expecting my second baby. Pretty fed up, I declined to be left behind, so tore myself away from my brand new house which we had to sell, and travelled with my toddler Helen and six-week-old Nicolas to Lincolnshire to be with him. I was still only 22 and a frequent visitor to my parents' home in Norwich, but I never told them why.
Life as the wife of a V-bomber pilot was no bed of roses, even though the money was good and the social life superb. I and my babies had ten homes in ten years. There's a whole book in that part of the story because it was by turns exciting, interesting, and terrifying. But it made me both stronger and more determined to fight for my children's best interests. And I was still terribly in love with my husband.
We lived off the base, as I didn't approve of married quarters segregated according to rank, seeing this as a bad example for my children. I added two more beautiful babies to the two I already had – Helen (1958) and Nicolas (1960). Christopher was born in 1962 in Huntingdon and Alexander in Kings Lynn in 1965. As they grew older and began to forge lives for themselves, my priorities shifted. I was bored and we were all alone far too much, for quite long periods sometimes living in a caravan between regular houses, often with my husband away, no car, no phone, no TV, sometimes not even a radio. Slowly, the balance shifted, and I look back on that period with a sense of pride and achievement. I also made sure I and my babies enjoyed ourselves. The photos show us all grinning. I learned to fly gliders and qualified in sub-aqua – tanks, weights, wet-suits, the lot. To give him full credit, my husband began to come up trumps in all kinds of ways, and certainly showed me life and the world. We had a ball most of the time, even if our outlook on life was poles apart.
When the chance arose, I trained to teach Mathematics and Statistics in Ripon, Yorkshire and set up my own bank account for my grant. This was a turning point for me and gave me my longed-for sense of identity, separate from my husband's.
Studying was super, and I realised I was capable of more. Once we moved south in 1970, and my husband at last decided to quit the RAF to settle his family, I studied part-time for a degree in psychology at Birkbeck College, the University of London. Alongside this I worked in London at the National Institute of Industrial Psychology in the Diagnostic Survey Department and in Test Construction. I loved it. I was in my element, but the pay was poor and I was convinced I would soon find myself the sole breadwinner, so began to look out for better-paid work. A large British printing inks, resins and surface coatings manufacturer head-hunted me as their UK Staff Officer, number two in their head office personnel department. I was delighted, and flew all around Britain overseeing technical and managerial recruitment. My income ratcheted up to the same level as my husband's. I was by now a high-powered lady, one of the pioneer 'have it all' women. And doomed to fail in parts of it, if not in all of it, of course!
The downside of being settled was that my husband went on flying, and was mostly away at weekends, working strange hours, often overnight. We took much of our holidays apart – my husband's preference for skiing, hill-walking and canoeing don't fit too well with a busy town life with teenage children, and it seemed too risky for a working mother for me to go along too. Worst, this way of life meant that my children came home after school to an empty house. It wasn't all bad though – he and I had some great holidays abroad alone together, and it was a busy and stimulating time. But it was no way to raise children, once again. Within a year of graduating, I challenged my husband to help me change the style of life we had created. I hit a brick wall. The tragic repercussions rumble on. There's a book in that too.
While all of this was going on, my children went through school, two later going straight to university, and two into jobs then to university as mature students. One lives in Germany, another in Australia, one in Devon and the oldest in Reading. All are superb and responsible parents, doing well in their careers, and I am terribly proud of them, even though I don't see very much of them any more – sheer distance and their own family commitments get in the way. E-mail is, though, our saviour, and we do meet up, although mostly I have to do the travelling, and that's going to get harder.
The four have given me twelve lovely grandchildren now aged from one to twenty-one, the youngest only a week old as I write this, and still in hospital in Germany. To these, I have added seven beautiful step-grandchildren, making nineteen in total – expensive at Christmas and birthdays. My very sane and sociable stepdaughters, who live closer by, have been a creative and healing influence in my life. They make sure they see us several times a year and bring our grandchildren to spend time with us.
During those tumultuous years between 1969 and 1980, my career became my balm. In 1976, I entered the senior administrative Civil Service as a Principal through their competitive fast-stream scheme. I was posted first to the Manpower Services Commission to lead a training policy team with responsibility for publicity and the retraining of disabled people – a huge budget and a big department, with regional responsibilities. I was next posted to head an Inquiry team at the government’s Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service, investigating and reporting to the Secretary of State for Employment on multi-union and multi-site disputes. These were big jobs, highly paid, and very responsible, but I wasn't happy in the civil service – I much preferred industry. After a second disastrous marriage where I once again lost my home, I spent a long period off work with bad health, so decided to get back to my first love, industry.
With my hopes riding high, I joined a major American company, the Sperry Corporation, close to where my youngest child, still at school, was based. My appointment involved responsibility for employee communication during a time of very tricky industrial and public relations. I loved it. It was everything I wanted although the company still didn't believe in equal opportunity for women, hard for me to accept after the senior civil service, where no-one batted an eye if a woman was in charge of something, and I was in charge of plenty.
After four years, the company was sold to a major British corporation, British Aerospace. There I ran the division's central personnel office and was in charge of recruitment. But I chafed at their insensitive and retrograde style of management. They set about dismantling the lovely old company we all adored working for. By then, I had met and become engaged to Roy who was Strategic Planning Director. My own boss, posted in from the parent company, opened hostilities, told me I couldn't marry and stay on, and when I fought back threw me out. I got the minimum compensation, a truly pitiful amount, and was left with an ache for the career I loved. These days, I'd have won thousands more for discrimination, hurt feelings, and loss of future income and pension. But this was the 1980s, in the early days of the legislation that has made many a capable female ex-employee into headlines.
My husband stayed on to fight his own battle when they tried to throw him out too. As I knew Employment Law like the back of my hand, they were on a loser. He was promoted to the company's head office, doing well for himself in all. I was very chuffed for him.
After a couple of years setting up and running my own recruitment consultancy, I decided it was eating up too much of our joint lives, so sold up and retrained on a post-graduate Diploma course at Reading University. We moved to Wiltshire, where we had a weekend house. There I set up a private counselling and psychotherapy practice, and also worked in primary care in local doctors' surgeries both in Reading and in Wiltshire. My husband took early retirement in 1990. With his support, I devised and set up a new mental health charity, now the biggest provider in Wiltshire. He took over as Chairman. In our spare time, we tamed a huge and beautiful garden, and chased our grandchildren around it. We also did a course in bricklaying, and several in art. We both became heavily involved in voluntary work until it swamped our lives, part of our reason for leaving Wiltshire in 1997 for a smaller house on the south coast. The other stimulus was a really serious breakdown in my health. I laugh about it now, because it sounds ridiculous and has filled my medical records with literally pages of entries about operations, broken legs, acute infections that took me to hospital, heart and thyroid failure, etc. Really boring stuff that got in the way of living. We loved our house and our garden, that's the rub. I still pine for my lost Wiltshire home.
Meanwhile, I went back part-time to Reading university to complete a PhD in Personal Construct Psychology. I loved being a student again, and looked for a way to take up my books once more. When I finally gave up working, I signed on for a much-hyped MA in Creative Writing, thinking there would be one-on-one tutorials, and serious academic study (under the guidance of respected top novelists) of how the best writers have written. Wrong. I'm writing a satire about it. But there was one positive benefit – I now see why there's such an air of pessimism around in Britain. The forty-something generation is more solipsistic than ours was, and I don't begin to understand where the twenty-somethings get their ideas from. They're frankly scary.
Now, we live yards from Christchurch harbour in Dorset in the south of England. My third husband, Roy, is a winner, and everyone loves him. We have been together for twenty-four years, during which time I have been baptised and confirmed. It means a lot to me. Our value systems are a perfect fit – we married in Chippenham, then had a moving Blessing ceremony in the Norman church of St Mary's in Calne. It felt right at last. We now wait for great-grandchildren. I don't think we'll be changing their nappies though – we've reached burn-out on that.
After a few running repairs to clear out rubbish and stitch bits into place, I'm fighting fit, if a few sizes too large, and haven't clapped eyes on a doctor for years. They ring me up and complain about it, as though as a geriatric patient I'm supposed to be on their doorstep regularly. Not a bit of it. I've never been happier, even if I find it hard to cut my toe-nails, and have the odd funny turn with my heart.
Next to the companionship I find with my like-minded husband (we differ only on weeds and untidiness), gardening is my pride and joy. We both 'do' family history, see our children and grandchildren, and just love not having to work. We adore ballroom dancing, and travel a great deal, especially to Australia. I write on and off, and have a cache of books to revive and self-publish. The only novel I ever had published fell flat – the publisher immediately went broke, but I will go on writing, once the family history runs itself into the ground, as it is beginning to do.
As for my colourful life, I look at it this way. Much of it was self-inflicted, much of it unasked for, but who could want for better raw material for writing or psychologising? Je ne regrette rien. Every grey cloud has a silver lining. It will make great reading for someone, someday, maybe even my own grandchildren in sixty years' time, even if they think I'm a rotten writer.
Wynyard, Tasmania, December 2005