They say my mother Jean was a gentle and kind person. I would have liked to have known her. My kind of woman, but increasingly hard to find in Britain today! Veronica Jill told me she adored being around `mummy`. Jill was four when she died and I don't think she ever got over it. What a strange word `mummy` is to me, a word that everyone around me seems to take for granted. Apparantly Jean was something of a tomboy in her youth. She enjoyed fishing on the family loch in Dumbartonshire, often hauling in record-breaking trout on a fragile fly line. Coming from a notable landowning family and educated at St Leonards School in Fife, she was in her mid-twenties when she eloped with my father who was a dashing handsome man and part of the Edinburgh university elite.
However, he was regarded as socially inferior by Jean's landowning family, being a humble schoolmaster, despite coming from a Church background. Curiously his father, a priest had turned down the offer of a Bishopric in order to help the poor in Edinburgh. Class snobbery is a strange thing. Jean's father, the laird of Carbeth, apparantly told her not to darken his door again 'if you marry this man'.
I don't really know much about my mother. I can't remember anyone ever talking about her except Jill on rare occasions. I suspect there was too much pain and guilt. Certainly my father must have felt guilty as the doctor warned them not to have any more children because of her weak constitution. He really wanted a son. This is hard for me to understand as I felt strongly resented by him throughout my childhood.
It was only around the time of my my sister Jill's death in 2010 that I set eyes on copies of letters from Jean to my father (they were very much in love). This was the first time I saw her handwriting. In one letter she wrote just before going into hospital to give birth to me, she intimated quite strongly that she thought she might not survive and mentioned provisions for caring for my sisters. She was right, she died.
Jean Barns-Graham
I don't really know much about my mother. I can't remember anyone ever talking about her except Jill on rare occasions. I suspect there was too much pain and guilt. Certainly my father must have felt guilty as the doctor warned them not to have any more children because of her weak constitution. He really wanted a son. This is hard for me to understand as I felt strongly resented by him throughout my childhood.
It was only around the time of my my sister Jill's death in 2010 that I set eyes on copies of letters from Jean to my father (they were very much in love). This was the first time I saw her handwriting. In one letter she wrote just before going into hospital to give birth to me, she intimated quite strongly that she thought she might not survive and mentioned provisions for caring for my sisters. She was right, she died.
Jean Barns-Graham
An extract from 'Missing Jean' by Jeremy Broun
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