A Bridge to Remember
Written as part of Amy Johnson Crow’s “52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks” challenge. This week’s topic: Bridge
An engraving of the Menai Straits Bridge, found in an antique shop.
I fell in love with this engraving of the Menai Bridge when I found it in an antique store years ago. The bridge joins the island of Anglesey with the mainland of north Wales. The image reminded me of a tale my mother told me when I was quite small..
In September of 1939 my mother and my two-year-old brother were evacuated to Anglesey to escape the bombing of London early in World War II. My father would visit whenever he could from his work in one of the most dangerous locations: between the Woolwich Arsenal and the London Docks, and I can only imagine my mother’s anxiety and her pleasure at seeing him when he was able to visit. But many years later she made a joke of it, informing me blithely that I had been conceived under a bridge. The murky image raised in my tender mind by that story don’t bear repeating, but I thought it was rather funny and a rather unusual claim to fame.
Her story was long forgotten, however, by the time I started to investigate the family’s movements in that period. I found some photos in my father’s photo collections, and the 1939 Register confirmed that Mum and Ian were in Anglesey, while Dad was near London.
The 1939 Register showing my mother, Joan Macnee, living at Sport-y-Gwynt, in Llandegfan, Anglesey in 1939. The “closed” record is presumably of my brother, since children’s records were sealed.
“Sport-y-Gwynt” in a photo taken by my father in September 1939.
A view of the Menai Straits, taken by my father, presumably from the cottage.
By May of 1940 Joan was pregnant with me, and the family was to be re-united in Somerset, where Dad’s employer was relocating its war-related communications engineering works. So, while I may or may not have begun my existence under the bridge, I was born in Somerset where I was to spend the years of my childhood.
I went to Anglesey once, in 2012, when Tom and I spent an hour or two speculating as to where the cottage was. We didn’t find it, but it certainly is a beautiful spot to have begun one’s existence.
THe Menai Straits Bridge, 2012