Lincolnshire comes in for a lot of bad press. Not only are its roads are among the most dangerous in England, it has also been voted (unaccountably) the fourth most unattractive county in the land. Grantham is famously the most boring town and Boston has the fattest, the laziest, the most racially bigoted and most promiscuous population in the country.
It's also a common calumny on Lincolnshire folk that we - how can I put this delicately? - that we,when marrying, do not take sufficient steps to broaden the gene pool. Only the other day, I heard this repeated on a blog written by a football supporter who is working his way through all the other sides in his own team's division, including Lincoln and Boston. To be fair, he said the same thing about Cambridgeshire.
Well, it's not true of my family.
My father, Ernie, came from Butterwick, five miles north of Boston off the Skegness road. My mother was born in Fishmere End, which is somewhere near Kirton, five miles south of Boston, on the Spalding road.
Fishmere End is not a village. It's an area on the map and consists of vegetable fields, the odd house and a dyke (in Lincs that's a drain, not a mound as in Holland or a levee as in the US). Before WW2 it was the kind of area where the boys were let off school in the autumn term to help with the harvest.
My mother's father was called Walter Moses and worked for a local farmer. I think he reached the rank of foreman because the 'tied cottage' he lived in was, to my young eyes, a real farmhouse, complete with barns and greenhouses. The barn was full of items which served my grandfather in his on-the-side buying and selling business. He was a short but rather fearsome man, with a thick leather belt, which he was not afraid to use on his children when they strayed from the straight and narrow.
He also drank his tea from his saucer and seemed to strain it through his moustache as he did so.
He served in the artillery in the First World War and once gave me his tin hat. Being a silly little boy, I didn't take care of it and a precious family heirloom is now lost.
He had five sons: Walt, Joe, George (known as Podge), Dick and Frank. They all went on to agricultural work and lived in villages like Wrangle, Heckington and Donington. They were all typical south Lincolnshire men, taciturn, close and hard. My first wife could hardly understand a word they said, partly because of their broad accent, partly because their pipe never left their mouth.
Their education was poor and my father would often be asked to write letters for them or fill in their tax returns. But they were no fools. When it came to money they were very shrewd. And they would have nothing to do with credit. I remember that when my grandfather retired, my father persuaded him to buy a bungalow. He accompanied him through the whole process and when the solicitor asked him about the method of payment, my grandfather produced a wad of notes from his back pocket and counted out £1,000 in notes. That was in 1964.
My mother's sister, Nellie, was to my young eyes, very glamorous. She married Leslie Henshaw, the brother (I think) of Alex Henshaw, well-known as a pre-war aviator and Spitfire test pilot. He ran a holiday park near Mablethorpe (Trusville). When they married he renamed Nellie as Lynn.
I've often wondered about the name 'Moses'. My mother used to tell me, when I was growing up, that it was a good thing we'd won the war. Whatever my mother's origins I always like to claim Jewish blood, along with the Viking strain. When you are known as a librarian,you need something exotic to boast about.
I'll write about my own attempts to widen the gene pool next time.
