Grace Davidson

On May 15^th, 2023, Grace Davidson, aged 95 years, died. She was the mother of 4 and grandmother of 9.

How well do we know our parents? I, who have lived in Canada for the last 32 years, have visited my mother in rural Somerset infrequently. She has visited us here on several occasions. Of course, we have all heard snippets of our parents’ past lives but for most of us the dots are not joined.  I spent a few days in June in her back garden in the village of Walton-in-Gordano trying to join up some of those dots. What did I know beforehand? I knew that she spent 4 of the war years in Victoria with her sister, Anne, and her stepmother, Dorothy. I knew that she went back to the UK in 1944 and straight into a boarding school in Aberdeen.  I knew that she hated it. I knew that she trained to be a nurse at Raigmore Hospital in Inverness and that it was there that she met our father, Wattie Davidson.

While we were discussing her funeral, things came up which I had never thought of before. Our mother was athletic. I can still remember her studied forehand on the tennis courts and her easy defense on the table tennis table. I remember her stamina. But which of us ever think of our parents as having these strengths, after all they are our parents!? And, of course, as she was nearing the end, I remember hearing about the strength and stamina of her heart which, whilst all else was failing, refused to let her slip peacefully into that good night.

 I am a scattered, amateurish historian. World events impacted Grace as they do us all in varying degrees. One could say that the causes of the Second World War had their roots in the 1919 Treaty of Versailles which treated the German First World War defeat with impossible harshness. This terrible war was why Grace Tolmie, as she was then, spent 4 years between the ages of 12 and 16 in the comparative heaven , the certain haven, of Victoria, British Columbia. She left her father as a child and rejoined him as a teenager. He was 64 years old when she returned. Being that old and suddenly having to bring up teenagers who are virtual strangers would be a ‘puffing out of the cheeks’ moment, don’t you think? There must have been a “Where do I start?’. Well, Peter Tolmie did what he thought was best and sent his youngest daughter off to boarding school in Aberdeen. No more sunny upland of fruit picking in the Okanagan, no more freedom to roam. Now was dark, dank, dreich gloom; the puerile pettiness of school rules; a staid stanza of stodgy stoicism in a world which she had left behind four years previously. Our mother was the metaphorical farm boy who had seen Paree and could never go back to the farm. It wasn’t an happy time.

But our mother had the gift of colour and cheeriness.  She loved bright colours. Her sense of humour  always shone through even when she was complaining about something. She created her own breezy upland. She ‘ever with a frolic welcome took the thunder and the sunshine’.

There are not many 95 year olds who can boast a large turn-out at their funeral. Yet the village turned out in force, relatives came in from far and wide and her house was a flurry of memory and reminiscence over sandwiches and drinks.  Then the caravan had passed and I was alone in her abode.

“The Old School’ in Walton in Gordano, Somerset was built in 1816 and done up in 1930. Grace had moved there after our father died in 1986. In fact, the promptness with which she sold the family home   was remarkable. It was a testament to her courage and determination immediately after she had so cruelly and suddenly been widowed. 

My brother, George, who had returned to Cambridge after the funeral asked me to grab a book ‘Between Friends’ which he had given her for Christmas, Could I also have a rummage and see if I could find a bag with letters from friends from her past? I found the book almost immediately.

Grace Tolmie was the daughter of Peter and Grace Tolmie (nee Holtby). She was born in Yorkshire. Her mother succumbed to pneumonia when she was three days old on March 10^th, 1928. She was then brought up by her maternal grandmother until she too died in 1937, at which point her father had married Dorothy Swift and they returned to his native Scotland, buying a large house in Nairn on the Moray Firth. “Between Friends’ is an anthology of letters between her auntie, Winifred Holtby and Vera Brittain. Winifred Holtby was a novelist who wrote “South Riding” amongst others. Her close friend Vera Brittain, wrote ‘Testament of Friendship” and “Testament of Youth”. These works were much acclaimed.  Vera Brittain became the mother of Shirley Williams, a recently deceased, highly reputed Labour politician in the UK.  To my shame I have yet to read any of these much lauded books.

Peter and Grace Tolmie (Our Grandparents)

I searched the house for Grace’s letters. In an infrequently used cupboard in the spare bedroom upstairs, I found a bag which really was nothing more than a large handbag. It was unzipped. As I picked it up an heap of handwritten screeds spilled onto the floor. A cursory glance showed a variety of different styles. Some were easy to read, beautifully crafted by people for whom writing was obviously a joy. Some were scrawled and would need good eyes and slow analysis before they would yield up their secrets. There were hundreds of them.

The weather was hot after my mother’s funeral. I was alone in the house. Sat in the back garden, I overlooked the farm next door, the fields that led up the hill to Walton Common, common grazing ground which had nurtured domestic stock for 1000 years or more until it was no longer economical and was returning to wildness. Reassuringly native flora and fauna were  coming back as if it were 1023 C.E. rather than 2023. There is optimism in that. Over the wall behind me was the churchyard. Beyond the church was the long daffodil -clad driveway that lead to the manor house from which, up until relatively recently, Sir William Miles dispensed noblesse oblige over ‘his’ village. Now it is owned by new money. Up an hilly wooded path, is a metal gate which enters onto a golf fairway. Further up the hill, Clevedon Castle and the Lower Cliff Path which overlooks the Bristol Channel and Wales in the distance. It was in this idyllic surrounding where I sat in my mother’s back garden with a pot of tea and a biscuit or two and made what I could of my mother’s letters from friends of long ago.

I learned that she had a school friend in Victoria nicknamed “Pud”. (At least I hope it was a nickname!).From Pud I learned that my mum steamed away from Victoria to go back to Scotland on Halloween, 1944. Her friends skipped school to see her off, their teacher winked knowingly at their transgression. I learned that Pud was not allowed to go up to Cowichan with her parents over’ Victory Europe Day’ in 1945 because it would have been full of loggers and roughnecks out for a boozy tear. I learnt what I knew already that there was conflict in Nairn about whether or not Grace was going to be forced to return to boarding school.  And then, out of the blue, I stumbled on a photograph, two young girls lying sunbathing facing the camera, one of whom must have been Pud. Sadly, I have no idea which one. There was a plethora of letters, some from boys away from home in the European Theatre of war, unable, because of the censors, to say where they were. There was one from a friend who was attending the Open Golf Championship at St.Andrews in Fife in 1946, the first since before the war. She was seeking the autographs of golf celebrities.  In short, here were writings of a life of which I had only vague inklings. It would have been wonderful to have had mum there to put a face to the picture of Pud and friend, to give me an handle on the character of Pud, to learn what became of Pud. Too late. But I sat and read and delved and tried to set aside my frustration and struggled to envisage with a dispassionate eye, a teenager in Cadboro Bay in Victoria and her sad departure from a place and people she had come to know and love over 75 years ago. She did manage a reunion with some of her old school friends in the mid-1990s but yet again I had failed to glean much from that more recent experience.

My mother’s funeral was a marvelous event. It was a good send off from many who knew and loved her. Her grandchildren spoke eloquently and from the heart. My brother, George, carried off his Master of Ceremonies role with confidence and aplomb. 96 year old Jim Davidson, who had attended my christening in Aberdeenshire in 1952, drove himself down from Malvern to be there and spoke of her and the family with eloquence and affection. The Davidson clan and their partners were a family to be proud of on that day.

Our mother was not a religious woman, never having attended the church which is over the wall from her house but the local vicar has kindly agreed to allow a plaque to her memory to be placed on their shared wall. We are grateful and humbled by that.

 Our mother brightened her surroundings by her presence. We shall not look upon her like again.