Uncle Tom's Chair

Mrs M has been in "the attic". Her brother has a big birthday coming up and she wants some artefacts of the past to share during the celebrations. "The attic" goes surprisingly far back into the past. My mother died just six weeks before our son, our first child, was born. She lived her entire life with her parents: farming, housekeeping, rearing me, caring for them as they aged and died. Whatever we did with the contents of her home - her parents home - had to be done in that short window before parenthood consumed us. A lot of things were simply packed into boxes and transferred to "the attic" - a virtual place that has existed in a sucession of physical locations since that day - 37 years ago,. Some of those things were not my mother's, they were my grand-parent's, who were born in the 19th century and married before WWI. Many of the boxes remain sealed, waiting for the day when "we have nothing better to do" 

A "snapshot album" has emerged. Pictures of my family 65 years ago and older. My mother as a young woman; me as a babe in arms, her siblings as young children. Tucked into it is a local newspaper cutting reporting the deaths of a brother and sister, aged 3 and 2 respectively, Frank and Phillys, victims of the pandemic before the last, H1N1 influenza, 1919-20. Two of the 17-50 million (possibly more, no-one knows) who died worldwide (for comparison, the estimated total for Covid 19 is 7 million, from a population 4 times larger). The "Spanish Flu", that actually originated on a Kansas pig farm, was particularly cruel in that it targeted the young and vigorous over the old

The two children would have been my aunt and uncle; Frank would have inherited the farm, had he lived. My grand-parents would have been in their early twenties at this time. My grandfather had already survived evacuation to and hospitalisation in UK due to wounds from the battle of the Somme - the sole survivor of a mortar that killed everyone else in his trench. The trauma of those years is hard to envisage now

The clipping mentions that a two-month old child was also ill. That would have been my uncle Tom. He did not succumb to the flu, but he had what would now be called learning difficulties - the result of a traumatic birth - and never learned to speak in a way that anyone outside the family could understand. Nevertheless, he had many talents, and lived a happy life of farm work, cared for by his parents and then by my mother 

The nature of farmhouse life was that things remained stable, constant, as little changed as possible as day followed day and year succeeded year. Tom liked that, and so did I. So, I suspect, did my grandparents, after the tumult of those early years. For all of us, change was a threat, a cause of anxiety. This was Tom's chair. He sat in it for every meal he ate at the family table - three or four times a day for all of the 19 years I lived in that house, and many before and after. The idea the he might sit on a different one, and someone else use it, never occurred to us. It has now been with MrsM and me for those 37 years, and I like it. It is surprisingly comfortable, but we don't often use it. It's uncle Tom's chair