Never mind the 3 fathers, what about my mother?

Did she have 3 husbands?

My mother was never so much a mystery as my father. She was half English and half Welsh. We only knew her father, as her mother died before we were born. Grandma left us with a legacy of glaucoma, that was practically all we knew about her, apart from photos. Grandpa had been a gamekeeper and Grandma a housekeeper at some landed gentry house. The grandpa being a gamekeeper always made us a bit giggly. We discovered that about the time (in the 60s) that Lady Chatterley’s Lover was published in the full unexpurgated version, so we always wondered what he had been up to.

My mother became a well-qualified nurse. She said that whenever a man was causing difficulties, she moved to a hospital in another part of the country, and got a new qualification. So during the war, she bicycled round Norfolk as a midwife, then moved to the Cassell Hospital which had moved out of London into Stoke on Trent. There she trained in mental health nursing. And apparently learnt French, as we found a certificate for her qualification in French. It seemed she wanted to write to some Belgian soldiers as a challenge.

After the end of the war, she and her sister set off for a holiday in Brussels in 1946. We always wondered how they managed to find any money, but my sister tells the story that Grandpa gave them the money for an adventure, using the money intended for the stone on his wife’s grave. So Grandma never got a gravestone.

And my mother met Nik, who we shall call father no 1.