Ginty

Bailey family at 10 Weir gardens

From left to right we have yours truly, my dad, Ginty, my mum, my older sister Margaret, Aunty Mary and Nana behind the camera.  I started by writing about my father but soon discovered that a necessary precursor was an introduction to his family and in particular his father who we children called 'Ginty'. Ginty is an Irish name (as in Paddy McGinty had a goat) but it does not appear to mean grandfather as I had imagined.

Prior to meeting Nana Ginty worked on the railroads in Canada and it was in a sawmill there that his lost two fingers on his right hand. This did not stop him being a reasonably accomplished church organist and carpenter. He passed on his love of organs to his son and grandson.

He also played the violin.

On returning from Canada Ginty could not have had much money because it was a Miss Knight, who I think was Nana's aunt, who put forward the money to buy 10 Weir Gardens. Although she passed away before I came on the scene, she exists in my memory as a kind of dark but necessary shadow over the Bailey side of the family.

My father had a younger sister, my Aunty Mary, whose influence on my life deserves a post of its own, and an even younger brother who died in early childhood. Mary cared for Nana through her final years suffering with breast cancer which she had refused to disclose to the medical profession until it was too late, and continued to live at 10 Weir Gardens until she was too frail to look after herself.

Our family would alternate between spending Christmas at Rayleigh or having them stay with us. The latter arrangement almost drove my poor mother insane, and being at Rayleigh was little better. We children also suffered but differently. It was not exactly that they disliked children - it was more that they made us feel like we were a nuisance. As a result we hated going to Rayleigh. Even when visiting Mary in her later life, as soon as I came within about five miles of Rayleigh a terrible feeling of desolation and foreboding came over me, as if the very air had become heavy and grey.  Even the place names still seem grey to me: Essex, Billericay, Wickford, Eastwood, Rochford, Chelmsford.

I have mentioned before that there were five dogs and cats without number. The cats had free access 24/7 to the kitchen (a window was left open) and this included all the work surfaces. So dog or cat hairs in the food were par for the course. And the washing up facilities were best not thought about - if it wasn't that hunger lends a rosy tint I might not have eaten at all whilst there. Actually this was more my mum's and my sister's experience as I was too young to make the connection. I could never understand then why Ginty always did the washing up - but I think I know now.

My memories of food at Rayleigh include smoked fish with bread and butter (swimming in the juice) - often a quick meal on arrival after a day long drive from Alresford (no motorways in those days). Nana's steak and kidney pie had a totally different taste to my mother's and yet it was one of her better meals in spite of the cat hairs. On one occasion I remember my sister and spreading butter on our toast and, on tasting, finding the butter was way off - I can vividly remember the taste being similar to strong blue cheese. When we pointed this out the grown ups told us there was (of course) nothing wrong with it and forced us to eat it (which we kind of did) - but curiously recanted when they got to taste it!

Unlike our visits to granddad's house or to Aunty Bee and Uncle Elf we were not showered with toys when we arrived at Rayleigh. Having said that there was the monkey up a palm tree - he would jiggle down the trunk when placed at the top; and a trolley on a ramp that would fill with sand (it had to be dry and clean) from a hopper, then run down the ramp under gravity, deposit its load and return to the top.  Both were made of tin plate and had to be constantly supervised by grown ups which lessened their usefulness as toys.

It is my theory that the dark side of my memories came from the Knight influence. I have often wondered what Ginty made of all this. An example of the strangeness of Nana and Mary was that both appeared to dislike female company but positively adored both Ginty and my dad: they could do no wrong in their eyes. As a child one did not question such behaviour and yet it left a bad taste. It was OTT.

10 Weir Gardens had a very distinctive smell - a Rayleigh smell. It was a small house and rather too full of stuff, not to mention the dogs and cats which doubtless helped the smell along. And not just the house - the garden also smelt. It was an untidy garden, as if whatever you did in the way of weeding and edging it would still remain untidy. At the end of the back garden there was a stream - more mud than stream and also untidy as was the undergrowth beyond this through which you could get to the field beyond.

Interestingly my younger sister (seven years younger) does not have the same memories.

But the subject of this post is Ginty. He was the most normal Rayleigh-ite. He played music, kept a bevy of tape recording machines and made things out of wood. Although he, too, was somewhat distant from us children he did at least try to make me feel at ease.

When I was a bit older I overheard a conversation in which Ginty was telling my dad about meeting a man who spoke in tongues. I pricked up my ears and was pleased to find that Ginty had an open mind about such things: this raised him a peg or two in my estimation.

Ginty never learnt to drive (I know not why) and Nana's driving was hardly up to long distance so it was not unusual, when we were staying there, for my parents to take us for a drive and thus escape from the tendrils of 10 Weir Gardens. But everywhere I remember going in Essex was flat and dull and grey. Here is Nana in a typical stance on one such trip at Maldon, a particularly grey spot in my memory. Maybe that's why this slide has become so moldy. One bright memory though - here it was that Mary might possibly have saved my life - I had wandered out into the vast areas of mud and had started to sink: I wailed (I was very small at the time and knew no better) and it was she (may God rest her soul) who ran to my rescue.

I think I may have mentioned that Ginty loved organs. His ambition was to build an organ, but he neither had the financial resources nor the space to do this. He did make a few organ pipes and kept books on the subject, and during outings in the car would want my father to stop at random churches to check out their organs.  I have in my possession a hand-written copy he made of the 1887 book 'Organ Building for Amateurs' by Mark Wicks. Strange to think that even photocopying was not an option then and yet you can now download this book for free from the 'net.

For interest here are some pages from the downloaded version compared with Ginty's copy.

Ginty's title page

Sample pages

I hope you can tell which is the original!

I used to have a book entitled something like "1001 things for a boy to do" which came from the same era - one of the things a boy could apparently do was to build a fully working steam engine from scratch. The nearest most children get to this sort of thing now-a-days is to create virtual civilisations using high-level tools in a computer game. Unobtainable as making a real steam engine might seem, some young people really do make organs and have found this book invaluable, see for example:

I found this invoice in Ginty's copy of the book.  Nice to see pounds, shillings and pence again.

As for the violin... the house had only two bedrooms and a small bathroom upstairs so getting us all bedded was a challenge: typically I would be on a camp bed in Nana and Ginty's room, under which was the back room aka music room. There was a large wall clock at the foot of the stairs with a large tick and a loud and creepy chime on the quarter. It was here that I learnt how to not be able to get to sleep - I lay there unable to shut out the wailing violin downstairs punctuated by chimes and loud ticks and fearful of steadily approaching midnight when, I had helpfully been informed, all the woodwork in the house would come to life and would start to move around. Children can believe that stuff. The same as I seriously believed that (back at home) our neighbour (who shot game on Alresford lake) might shoot us when he mock brandished his shot gun, and for a while I lived in fear of meeting him in case he had his gun.

I am glad to report that I have since learnt to be able to get to sleep - but it took a fair bit of unlearning what Rayleigh had taught me.

Eschatology was another bee in Ginty's bonnet and another bee that my father inherited. On one occasion I begged to differ from my father in his eschatological beliefs and got such an ear-full that it has affected my opinion of the subject ever since. Here is the only other tangible memory I now have of Ginty (apart from a reed puller which is very useful for getting things out of small spaces): this time not a copy. Amazingly you can still buy this book and it is still highly regarded.

Frontispiece (click to view larger version)

This book is full of complex charts of which I include only one. I cannot claim to have read the whole book as it somewhat blows my mind: it is not that I necessarily either agree or disagree but rather that it is, well OTT.  Here is the chart in question:

It is an explanation of the image that King Nebuchadnezzar dreamed (Daniel 2:31). Ginty made a humongous  copy of this picture and coloured it beautifully, doubtless using it as a sermon aid (yes, I forgot to say, he was a Reverend for part of his life). Some while after his death Mary decided to give this masterpiece to my older sister, possibly because her husband is a Baptist pastor and she though he could or perhaps should use it. I have to record that in the course of time my sister disposed of said artifact. To Mary this was an unforgivable sin, such was her adoration of all things Ginty. This adoration was, well, OTT. It was not worth discussing anything that Ginty had done or made because it would almost certainly be taken the wrong way.

I have mentioned in a previous post the way Ginty saved my face when I fell into the watercress beds and wetted my "pants" as he called them: this above all other memories is when I started to respect him.

He had a particular smell: odd the things children remember.

Before 10 Weir Gardens and before my time they lived in a timber structure they called the "Cottage" in The Chase. Here it was that Ginty and my dad made wooden toys for a living. My own workshop in the Top Garden at home was a section of a larger workshop in which were cupboards full of half finished wooden trains and suchlike, left over from those days.

In my time Ginty had a workshop - it was only a small garden shed but it packed with floor to ceiling with boxes of this and that and all in perfect order. These things suffered from damp and neglect after his death so by the time I got to being offered anything there was little of any value, but I do still have some brass chain and some brass gimp pins from his collection.

On one occasion, when they were visiting us at home, I was drawing one of my marvelous mechanical inventions in my random free-hand style and Ginty saw it and tried to teach me how to draw proper engineering drawings using a ruler and a scale. On another occasion I was making a small box to house a battery and lamp to illuminate a china model lighthouse I had been given, and Ginty gently scolded my imprecision and helped me joint the corners properly.

Thus I have some fond memories of Ginty mingled with the horrors of Rayleigh.

Ginty died peacefully whilst sitting in his chair in the back room. They say he had some premonition and put his affairs in order beforehand. He lay in his coffin in the back room for several days before the funeral, Irish style - it was so when we arrived from Alresford for the funeral and I found the idea of a dead body in the house somewhat horrific. This was the first funeral that I experienced emotional feelings in.