My mother was born in Ottowa or Montreal- I’m not sure which – in 1906. She was the second child of six. Her father, the only son of W.T.R.Preston (there was also a daughter, Ruby, who married an Englishmen. When he was mayor of Croydon, he gave my parents their wedding reception). He was Anglican and rather unfortunately married a Catholic girl by the name of Genin, a French American family from St. Albans ,Vermont but originally from the Isere in France. I say ‘unfortunately’ because my grandmother was an ardent church-goer, dragging the children to Mass on empty stomachs of a Sunday morning, and my grandfather increasingly anti-papist. The arguments raged in the house in Port Hope and when my mother was a teenager they separated and grandmother left together with her eldest daughter. At first my mother, being the eldest remaining child and the most competent member of the family, took over the running of the house and getting the younger children off to school. Alas, she had to abandon her plan to go to college and so never received a proper formal education, though her life certainly provided her with an informal one.
At some point, the family broke up and the children scattered to the four winds. My mother and her eldest sister, Evelyn, were sent off to India to be cared for by one of her mother’s sisters who had married a British Army officer. At the time he was a Colonel, and the ADC to General Ironside, Viceroy of India and living in Viceroy Lodge in Delhi. Among my mother’s accomplishments was that of seamstress. She had such a good eye that she could look at a woman and cut a dress without a pattern, from the material. In a way it was her undoing as she became a slave to her aunt who soon acquired the reputation of being the best dressed army wife in India and was determined not to lose this spurious honour. Unlike her poor sister, who was a nice enough person but without so-called sex appeal, my mother had ‘it’ in abundance. At regimental dances, she would have a string of young men wanting to dance with her, whereas her sister was the proverbial wallflower. She told me she would say to her suitors, ‘you can have a dance with me if you dance with my sister first’.
I’m not sure how she avoided capture; she had several offers of marriage. Perhaps it was that in Canada she had been in love with a young man by the name of McNulty, who said he would marry her but only when he had graduated at McGill and established himself as a lawyer.
At the very moment when she met my father-to-be ( see his history to understand how they swam into each other’s orbits) and was swept off her feet by him, McNulty must have been considering his letter to her to say that now he was ready and would she marry him. She received the letter two weeks after she had accepted my father and decided that, whatever her feelings were, she could and would not break her word. And, may I say, she never did. My father’s nerves must have been affected by his years in the trenches in the 1st WW and this made him very difficult to live with. He lost his temper frequently, and during my school holidays it seemed to me that he got cross every day. However he was absolutely devoted to my mother and subsequently to me, making great sacrifices to give me a good education and support me financially through my student years. When he was in Singapore, where I was born, he became almost unbearably difficult, to the point that my mother sought help from the RAF station doctor, but she was absolutely determined to stick it out and not to let her marriage break up like that of her parents.