Family

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My grandmother Phyllis Mary Pinnock was born into a middle – or upper middle – class family sometime towards the end of the 19th or beginning of the 20th century, possibly in the Dulwich area of South East London.
Given that her father had been what is known as a gentleman, meaning that he was independently wealthy, it’s probable that she’d been born into that part of the upper middle class known as the lower gentry. And she grew into a remarkably beautiful young woman with dark hair and green eyes, and an exquisitely sculpted mouth.
According to my father's account, her first true love was a scion of a privately owned shipping firm. But like so many young men of that dutiful generation, immortalised in cruelly beautiful poems such as Owen’s "Anthem for Doomed Youth" which speaks to us of "sad shires" decimated by an inexplicable conflict, he died young during the First World War. And she subsequently married an officer in the British army, to whom she bore two children, Peter Bevan and Suzanne, known as Dinny.
When her children were little more than infants, she elected to join her husband as a tea planter in Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, and it was on that breathtakingly beautiful island that she met the two men, tea planters like herself, who were destined to become her second and third husbands. They were my Danish namesake Carl Halling, and a British engineer called Christopher Evans.
Her third child, my father, was born Patrick Clancy Halling in Rowella, Tasmania, in the beautiful Tamar Valley, but raised as Carl's son in the great city of Sydney.
It was in Sydney that Carl contracted the multiple sclerosis that would ultimately kill him, after which, according to family accounts, Mary made a living variously as a journalist - writing for the Sydney Telegraph - and teacher, even running her own primary school for a time. But it was a hard life without a husband to depend on.
One blessing was that all three of her children were musically gifted, Peter as a cellist and Dinny as a pianist; while Patrick, the boy violinist, was something of a child prodigy. For at just eight years old, he won a scholarship to the Sydney Conservatory of Music, soloing, or so I’ve been led to believe, for the Sydney Symphony Orchestra a year later.
However, he reserved his true passion for the water, this love of the sea and ships and specifically sailing being a legacy from Mary, who spent much of her adult life by the sea.
Soon after Carl’s death on the eve of the second world war, Mary and her family set off for Denmark, Carl having expressed a wish to be buried in his native land, and then to London where Pat studied both at the Royal Academy of Music and the Guildhall School of Music, before embarking on a successful musical career.
With Mary and her three children back in London, evidently some kind of reconciliation including financial aid took place between herself and her family. But even at her lowest ebb, she spoke and behaved as if to the manor born, although she was no delicate Victorian princess. Rather, she was of that type of hardy Englishwoman given to a passionate love of the outdoors.
Furthermore, when I was younger, my father occasionally spoke to me of a supposed distant connection to the ancient Anglo-Irish house of Butler on the part of our family. And on at least one occasion, he did so as a means of boosting my morale by convincing me that my destiny was that of a scholar and athlete; one born for great things if you will.
I never fully believed this story until one day in the ‘80s, while my family was being paid a visit by my great aunt Joan and her Yorkshire-born husband Eric, I surreptitiously placed a cassette tape recorder close to her chair during lunch or dinner. I did so in the knowledge that one or another of my parents would quiz her as to the veracity of Mary’s boast of distant blue blood.
If my memory serves me aright, among the truths she revealed about our family that day was that Joan and Mary’s paternal great grandfather had been a coachman by trade; and that he’d been left an enormous sum of money by a grateful employer. Whatever the reason for this quite extraordinary act of philanthropy, it introduced serious money into the family for the first time.
Another was that her maternal grandmother’s maiden name had been Butler, which allegedly links the family to the Butlers of Ormond, a dynasty of Anglo-Norman nobles named after the Earldom they went on to rule in Munster, Ireland, although Walter was the name by which they were first known.
Their saga begins in earnest with the Norman Invasions of Ireland, which took place in 1169 on the orders of Dermot MacMurrough, King of Leinster, one of five kingdoms of pre-Norman Ireland. Contemporary accounts apparently refer to the invaders as English, although they have also been described as Anglo-Norman, Cambro-Norman and Anglo-French.
Among those believed to have taken part in the invasion was one Theobald Walter, patriarch of the Butlers of Ormond. Walter was a direct descendant of Henry II, who set foot in Ireland in 1171, the first English King to do so, and so began over 750 years of English rule. Henry was a grandson of William the Conqueror, which may provide a kinship between the Butlers and the mysterious Merovingian dynasty of Frankish Kings.
If it’s in fact true that I am a lost descendant of the Butlers, then I'm also related to many perhaps even all of the most blue-blooded families not just in Europe but the entire world.
In the end though, all hierarchies erected on the basis man-made distinctions such as class and race are antichrist, because all human beings are created equal in the sight of God. And as to the supposed superiority of nobility, history simply doesn't attest to it.
That said, my grandmother Mary was deeply conscious of her exalted social status, despite a life of hardship, much of which must be blamed on sheer ill fortune. For example, having married the aforesaid engineer Chris Evans soon after Carl’s death, she lost him in 1949, when he died of a heart attack while they were both out sailing together.
I first met her in the early 1960s when I was still just a small child. And by this time, she was a twice widowed divorcee who lived on a yacht in the south of France, possibly Nice, or Cannes, a striking figure, slim, tan and athletic, with a magnificent head of the purest white hair, flecked with natural dark brown.
But by about the middle of the decade, she’d moved into her own house which she named Chartley after her former house in Sydney, situated
near the little town of Cambrils in the province of Tarragona on Catalonia’s Costa Brava.
Our family vacationed with her every summer, often with Peter’s family, which is to say Pete and Marge, and my cousins Rod and Kris who lived opposite us in Bedford Park, West London; and she ruled Chartley
with a rod of iron, insisting that we retire every afternoon after lunch for a siesta.
This was something I for one found very hard to do, because I was naturally hyperactive, and sleeping in the afternoon was anathema for me. I can still see the look in her face when she found me wandering the corridors of Chartley one afternoon when I was supposed to be quietly sleeping along with everyone else. But she could be sweet when her heart was touched, a fantastic spirit given to what could be called Celtic whimsy, which may have proceeded from Cornish origins, which her maiden name of Pinnock certainly suggested. Although the Anglo-Saxons are hardly less inclined to this quality. For after all, did they not produce such icons of nonsense as Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll?
Constant misfortune had toughened her, not just mentally but physically, and she spent long hours in her vast garden at Chartley, clad in battered and patched trousers, her magnificent head of wiry white hair kept defiantly unkempt.
By the early ‘70s, ill health forced her back to Britain, where she lived until her passing in 1973, sometimes with us, and sometimes in her own little cottage in Berkshire, together with her two beloved mongrel dogs whom she’d rescued from the beach towards the end of her Spanish sojourn. These were Charlot, who was sandy-coloured and looked a little like a whippet, and Phillippe, who had long pointed ears like those of an Alsatian.
She was an altogether different person in frail old age, much mellowed and desperately vulnerable, writing tragic poetry for my benefit, or watching old movies with me on TV, such as the sentimental Rodgers and Hammerstein musical “Carousel” which she initially dismissed as “slush”. But the famous climactic tune of “You’ll Never Walk Alone” has a tendency to touch the hearts of all but the most stoical of souls, and Mary herself was not exempt.
For my part, I’d left the room, possibly to softly weep to myself in some secluded part of my parents’ house, only to return to find her in tears. I’ve never forgotten it.
There were times I was able to share some tender moments with her, but looking back, I wish there’d been more, and oh how she’d have welcomed them, but I was young and strong and thoughtless, with little concern for the trials of the elderly, which saddens me greatly today, for does not the Word of God say in Matthew 25:40, “Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me”?
Now I’m almost the same age she was when we first met, and I’ve come to honour the memory of a brilliant tragic woman, larger than life and independent at a time when it was hard for woman to be these things.
A little before her passing, Phillippe disappeared, so Charlot came to live with us on his own in ‘73, and was subsequently renamed Charlie. He proved a gentle, faithful and loving pet, but fiercely independent like his doting mistress, dying himself in 1983 following a short but valiant battle with declining health.

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