WßD ~ Chapter 25 : Christening (Revised Edition)
Windsor Street Days
Chapter 25
Christening
I
WITH Vanessa’s Christening, I realise I move the story into its next stage.
I write not for the family now, so much, as for myself and for our descendants. With family archiving I have in mind my nieces, my nephew and his three sons, my great nephews; that when they’re around fifty or sixty, just as my sisters and I have done, and our parents before us, we start to look back and reconstruct.
Well look at this! Look what’s written here! That’s fifty years ago. But I was there on that day!!
Family life trundles along.
II
I realise, too, that in writing the chapters hereon, I need to cover my own life, as opposed to trying to write on behalf of the entire family. This has come home clearly in reading an reviewing a biography. The biographer has kept along his own flightpath. He has, unbeknownst to him or his co-author, his daughter, made my task easier. It is too easy to try and write from every angle, from every viewpoint. But perspectives differ simply by reason of the numbers of years between siblings. On any given topic, every sibling will have a slightly different perspective.
III
My younger sister (the babe in arms eyeing up the lens) has sent me some photographs of Warwick Castle and also touched the rudder as to generations, and for which I’m most grateful. My elder sister (the one standing behind me in the last photograph) has reminded me, of the huge responsibility to be entrusted with the family archive. I certainly agree. Writer I might like to think I am. Archivist I am not.
IV
The gallery is the generation of we three, and I’ve added the Two Ken Webbs at the end - Senior in 1942, Junior in 1962. Shoes I could never quite fill.
But I also like this photograph because it momentarily captures a similar smile. By the time I received my wings as a 16 year old glider pilot with the Air Training Corps at No 625 Volunteer Gliding School, Royal Air Force South Cerney, Gloucestershire in 1969, my smile was becoming that of Ken’s younger brother, Des, my Dad.
How wonderful to note these changes down the ages, as each year rolls by.
I’m equally proud of the airfield’s long military history. Now the Duke of Goucester Barracks and home to our 29 Regiment, Royal Logistics Corps, it is, nevertheless, good, when I drive by on the A 417, to see that our World War II control tower and “625’s centre of ops plus tea urn” still stands sentinel on the old airfield.
Heavy Bombers (four-engined) flew from South Cerney during the war.
23 April 2024
All Rights Reserved
LIVERPOOL
© 2024 Kenneth Thomas Webb
First written 27 October 2021
Last published 6 May 2022
Where it starts. Grandma Webb ~ Mrs Isabel Alice Webb nee Budd at the Christening of Grandma and Grandad’s Firstborn - Arthur Horace James Webb (1914-2006). The banner photo is Uncle Arthur’s wife, Aunt Bette - Florence Emily ‘Bette’ Webb - (1916-2008) with our youngest sister, Vanessa (Ness) at Ness’s Christening in the garden at Orchard Terrace in December 1958-January 1959. Vanessa still has the christening robe in which our uncle was baptised in 1914.
Archive is always a journey of surprise. It was only when I looked at an enlarged image, did I realise that the lady on the left is Grandma Webb. So what? Simply this. I much prefer finding photographs that are not posed, not contrived for the lens; but instead, seeing the real person as they really are in their natural state, as I remember them.
…and on the same day, Uncle Arthur. ‘We Three’ and our cousin Jenny whose parents went on to become Mayor and Mayoress of Cheltenham in the 1980s.
Ken Webb is a writer and proofreader. His website, kennwebb.com, showcases his work as a writer, blogger and podcaster, resting on his successive careers as a police officer, progressing to a junior lawyer in succession and trusts as a Fellow of the Institute of Legal Executives, a retired officer with the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve, and latterly, for three years, the owner and editor of two lifestyle magazines in Liverpool.
He also just handed over a successful two year chairmanship in Gloucestershire with Cheltenham Regency Probus.
Pandemic aside, he spends his time equally between his city, Liverpool, and the county of his birth, Gloucestershire.
In this fast-paced present age, proof-reading is essential. And this skill also occasionally leads to copy-editing writers’ manuscripts for submission to publishers and also student and post graduate dissertations.
