I have my grandmother’s autograph
book which was given to her on her 20th birthday by a girlfriend,
Venus Veronica Von Sierakowski. I don’t know too much about this lady’s life.
She lived nearby to my grandmother, and may have gone to school with her
although she was a little younger. Her father ran a decorative wire-work
business in Columbo St, Christchurch New Zealand for many years. Venus, later
calling herself ‘Vena’ appears to have lived at home with her parents, and
never married.
My grandmother, Mabel Clarkson
nee Joyce (always known as ‘Joy’) was born in 1897 although she fiddled the
date a little. Until I sent for her birth certificate, our family always believed
she was nearly three years younger. Her autograph album has suffered a bit:
some water damage on the front cover and my cheeky father (I think he must have
been about 4 or 5 years old at the time) practiced writing in it himself and
cut out some of the pages towards the back for some project or other. I notice
that there was a preference for the pink pages for those who wrote verses…
‘L. Reed’ wrote a verse or quote I can’t place as
yet:
Keep sweet, dear girl, the
world’s great need
Are those who will this maxim
heed;
Sweetness is more than greatness
far,
Can’t be a sun? Then be a star
Someone Bradshaw wrote ‘Live like
the rose’ which I can’t find anywhere either
A quite indecipherable friend
wrote a quote from James Witcomb Riley with some underlining on the ‘rejoice’
which is an illusion to my grandmothers surname and Evaleen Munro misquotes
Ralph Waldo Emerson with “What I must do, in all that concerns me..”
I didn’t have much luck finding
out about her other friends either: Trixie Gidley and Annie Bradshaw both wrote
in it. Grandma was a great one for socialising with her friends – always going
to picnics and teas. Her recipe books are full of hand-written notes, cuttings
from newspapers and torn pieces from shopping lists with instructions for
dainty sandwiches, hors d’oeuvres and little cakes for entertaining. She liked
everything ‘just so’. I’ll be writing more about her and her parents in time on
this Blog. Her background was not as genteel as she would have liked to
portray…. There is no doubt that her childhood was disrupted and painful, and
that the family hushed up a big scandal relating to her own mother, Elizabeth
Charlotte Scott, although it leaked out in the papers - into the Truth, no less (not a respectable paper!).
Gordon H S Clarkson wrote on the
11.7.20 “smile, and when you smile…” I think at this time he was my
grandmother’s fiancé, or soon to be. Mabel Joyce and Gordon Hua Samuel Clarkson
apparently had a long engagement and did not marry until 1925. There is family information that they quarreled frequently and although they were together for the rest of their
lives, my grandmother had a quick temper – possibly a family trait of the
Joyce’s: when she was riled, dishes would fly in the kitchen, according to
my late father. Maybe this verse in her autograph album was a hint?
At Christmas 1920 Gordon gave her
a custom-bound book of soprano songs composed by Amy Woodforde-Finden, Herbert Oliver
and Daisy McGeogh. They could have been her favourites – my grandmother sang at
amateur concerts (it was a popular social pastime of the day) and even when she
was about 80 years old I remember her whistling and trilling like a bird when she was in the
bath, in perfect tune. This leather-bound volume falls open to a song called ‘Till I
wake’ one of the ‘Four Indian Love Lyrics’ by Amy Woodforde-Finden . The musical
pieces of this composer are described as:
“… noted for their
sentimentality, their romantic fluidity and how they blend a particularly
British, middle class sensibility with an Asian pastiche” Woodforde Family
I was delighted to find this
website which offers lovely versions of the songs here:Indian Love Lyrics
The words were by Adela Florence Nicolson née Cory aka Laurence Hope and Violet Nicolson
who appears to have been an equally romantic, passionate and possibly eccentric
poet who wrote her formal verse “steeped in the Indian landscape and Sufi
symbolism, [and] often assumes the voices of Indian dancers and slaves to
engage themes of passionate love and loss.”
In Christchurch 1917 Mary
Pickford was playing in ‘Less than the Dust’ featuring the song of that name,
also by the same composer and lyricist. From the
advertisements, it appears to have been hugely popular and its odds on that
Mabel went to see it at the Empire Theatre – with a box of chocolates, of
course!
