“As I began to write this at the beginning of 2022, with the Covid 19 Delta and Omicron variants on a rampage through the world, distance and separation had become vexing issues for me. In my eightieth year I found myself separated by an ocean from many of the people who matter most to me, and this enforced separation was a kind of emotional tinnitus, a low-volume hum of distress, and phone calls and Zooms and email could not silence it. 

The distance had been of my own choosing of course. Until the spring of 2020, it was to my liking. My first distancing came in 1961 when I left my parental home in Cardiff and moved to Cambridge to go to university. In miles and hours, those two cities are close together by American standards, but I was the first in my family to be an undergraduate, so the social distancing involved in my move was wide and deep. Then, in 1967, my husband Mike Gill and I, with our new-born baby Christopher, left for Massachusetts, and there, with the addition of our daughter Catherine in 1973, we settled as citizens. By becoming American we put a great deal of distance between ourselves and our families of origin but, with growing affluence on both sides of the Atlantic, the distance was easily managed. Visits of parents and siblings and of the new generation of nieces and nephews often occurred several times a year. When we were together, we were at our best, interested, engaged, skirting conflict, and savoring one another’s company so loving relationships were not only sustained but deepened.

And when tragedy hit, we could be where we were needed to be in a day.  When Mike died, my parents, Bill and Esme Scobie, my sister Rose Wakeling, my mother-in-law Dorothy Gill, and my brother-in-law Adrian Gill, all flew out at once and helped get Chris, Catherine, and me through the worst. When Dorothy died in London, Catherine, who was living in Barcelona, was able to arrive in time to be at her Grandy’s funeral and hold her Uncle Adrian’s hand. When my mother Esme Scobie was unconscious and dying, I was in time to share in my family’s vigil at the hospital. When my sister telephoned to say our dad was dying, I arrived too late to see him alive but at least my nephew Gareth Wakeling was at Heath Row to meet me off the plane, give me the news, and drive me to Cardiff. When my sister Rose died in a road accident in Spain, I was on a plane within hours, and then I had our whole New England family flown in to Nottingham for the funeral. In time of tragedy, we know we have to come together. 

When my two children Chris and Catherine became independent adults, they both had wanderlust and seemed likely to do as Mike and I had done and settle in a foreign country. Christopher went off to Japan for a few years, fell passionately in love with the place, and became engaged to a Japanese woman. Catherine went off to Spain, learned the language, took a business degree at a Spanish university, and found a Spanish partner.  But both those relationships failed and, within ten years of taking their professional degrees, both my children were married to American citizens and had settled down with their families in the Boston area. Today I am the envy of my friends since I am a twenty-minute drive from both my children and most of the grandchildren live in the Boston area.  We in the New England branch are somehow secure enough in our relationships not to feel the need to telephone, text, or email one another frequently but the circle of family care closes quickly around anyone in need. 

Then Covid came in the spring of 2020, and for more than a year we Americans split into separate pods, occasionally waving at each other from a doorway or sitting together around a firepit bundled up like masked mummies. This experience, along with the increasing difficulties travel entails as I age, has led me to look back on my life and reconsider the different equations of geographical distance, psychological intimacy, and emotional warmth that I have known. 

As the following chapters will show, when I was born, three generations in my family all clustered within about thirty miles of one another, but that geographical concentration seemed all too often to result in indifference, conflict, even hatred.  There were members of my father’s family I was never introduced to, including one who lived a two-minute walk away. And how often I have heard my grandmother say, “I shall never forgive my brother Ernie for what he did at Mam’s funeral,” and Nana was as good as her word. Uncle Ernie and his family lived in Bridgend, some twenty miles from my home in Cardiff, but he might just as well have been in Baltimore or Bangkok. 

But the clearest proof I have that one can live very close to someone for years and know almost nothing about them comes from my own relationship with my maternal grandfather. 

For my first sixteen years I lived in the same house as my mother’s parents, known to me as Nana and Bob. For sixteen years I was never more than about twenty feet and a single flight of stairs away from those grandparents, and for my first ten years or so, while my father, a captain in the Merchant Marine, was usually away at sea, Nana was a third parent to me and my sister. But with my grandfather, things were quite different. Bob was an integral part of the structure of my world as child and young adolescent, a feature of my everyday existence. But I did not know him because we did not talk. In all those years I never remember having a single conversation with Bob in which we said what we were thinking and feeling. Today, as I see how close grandfathers can be to their grandchildren, my non-relationship with Bob makes me sad. 

So, the little bundle of biographical oddments, historical context, and imaginative conjecture that follows is my way of reaching out to my grandfather and asking him to forgive me for relegating him to the backdrop of my young life. Here I put together the odd things I observed as a very unobservant child, the things I remember being told, which was not a lot, and recent tidbits of information that Martin Rowland, my cousin-in-law and fellow family historian, and I have found out. It all amounts to not very much, but something at least is being entered into the historical record. ”