Looking in the filing cabinet

yesterday I came across an old photograph. 

I remember seeing it once before but I would not have looked that closely at it.  It was tucked in behind what the Senior Cat had asked me to find and I have taken it out to show him.

It is a photograph of a number of people sitting and standing on the front verandah and steps of a house. It is a big house, the home of a quite wealthy farmer and his family.  The family is my paternal grandmother's family.

The house itself still exists. It has a wide verandah around all sides. Back then it had eight "main" rooms without counting the kitchen, bathroom or laundry areas. Steps lead up to the front door because, beneath the house, there are cellars. They were used for storage, particularly in the summer. You can just see the chimneys. The house would have had open fires in winter using wood supplied by the  surrounding farmland.

 The Senior Cat would once have known the house quite well. He and his brother were taken there and later sent on a number of holidays.  When he was young it was possible to go there by train. It was a big adventure for small boys. 

Looking at it I wondered what my grandmother made of her return trips there. It must have been uncomfortable for her.  My great-grandfather was apparently a "difficult" man. He had nine children, seven boys and two girls.  He seems to have kept tight control over his family. My grandmother was permitted to go to school for just three years before he decided it was time she worked on the farm. Her sister, several years younger, was allowed to have five  years of schooling. I wonder how he would have reacted to the later law requiring children to stay at school until they were twelve? The girls worked as hard as the boys.

My grandfather met my grandmother through one of her brothers. He had done something to help the brother and was invited to the farm. They apparently had to keep their feelings about each other to themselves from the start. My great-grandfather did not want his girls to marry. He wanted them to stay at home and work, unpaid. 

Great-grandpa was so opposed to his daughters being married he refused to even go to the wedding. My grandmother was walked down the aisle by one of her brothers. At twenty-eight she was considered "old" to be getting married in 1915. It was seven and a half years and four miscarriages later before the Senior Cat was born. His brother came three years and three miscarriages later. My grandparents dream of a large family never eventuated. 

I wonder what my great-grandparents thought of all that. My grandmother almost never mentioned them although I think she was in regular touch with her mother. Certainly she helped her sister care for their parents when, old and frail, they came to live in the city. Going back to the farm though, to her father's extreme disapproval of the marriage, must have been hard. It made no difference to my great-grandfather that my grandfather had a good business, one which employed more than thirty people. 

My grandparents were married for almost sixty years. Their love for one another grew even stronger in that time. My grandfather once told me his only regret was that he had not met my grandmother ten years earlier. 

My grandmother and I were making the beds one Saturday morning and having a rare discussion about such things. She mentioned the day of her marriage and how much she loved my grandfather. And of her wedding day and the way her father was not the one to walk her down the aisle she said, "You know, it still hurts."

I am not sure I would have liked that stiff looking mid-Victorian man in the photograph.