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    Just Keep a Bag Packed: A Memoir
    Just Keep a Bag Packed: A Memoir
    Just Keep a Bag Packed: A Memoir
    Ebook77 pages1 hour

    Just Keep a Bag Packed: A Memoir

    By Edna Carr Green

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    Most memoirs are written by famous menimportant men who have led successful lives. One hears little of their wives except a thank you for your patience or a dedication in the introduction. This memoir is nothing like that. I have been married for fifty-two years, but you will scarcely find a mention of my husband in this book. This is my story. It is the story of a girl who left the still-war-torn United Kingdom and entered the confusing world of the Middle East. New languages, new customs, and a quick shift from the life of a single girl in Regents Park to a mother with a tiny baby in an Arab village with no doctors or other facilities, not even a telephone to call home. A sense of humor was required to survive, so I hope the reader will find the story amusing.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAuthorHouse UK
    Release dateJan 24, 2013
    ISBN9781481781978
    Just Keep a Bag Packed: A Memoir
    Author

    Edna Carr Green

    I was born in 1934 so by the time WW2 started I was five years old and became accustomed to bombs and horror stories. We were evacuated but after a week my mother decided she would rather be bombed than be a refugee so we caught a train home. All this was good training for the life I led after I was married which meant changing countries every few years. Unlike my ancestors who who had lived in Northumberland since 1611 and rarely changed villages. I lived in Beirut, Abu Dhabi, Bahrain, Saigon, India and the Gulf where I worked for various charities since in the 1960s Bank wives were not allowed to work. When I came back to the UK I researched my family and this made me wish I knew more about them. I did discover that all the way back to 1611 the oldest son in the family was christened Fenwick Carr which was the name of my father. If the oldest son died, which in the 17th century was not uncommon, there was usually another Fenwick born a few years later. I wished I had more of their stories so on that basis I decided to write my memoirs. I now work as a volunteer at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and also at the Royal Academy - and I run a bridge group. I have two grown up children and five grandchildren so my life is pretty full and it is my grandchildren who might find the stories the most interesting.

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      Book preview

      Just Keep a Bag Packed - Edna Carr Green

      CHAPTER 1

      1960

      I THINK I have t o make it clear here that the 1960’s compared to today were rather like the Middle Ages. There were no mobile phones and most people though twice about using the phone because it was expensive. Telephone calls went through an operator who would frequently listen in. There was no way of communicating other than by phone or letter and most people wrote letters which could take some time to be delivered if it was Continent to Continent. There was no internet available to everyone. I have to say this because if I was reading my memoirs I would perhaps think why didn’t they just sent an email or telephone. So please try to believe in a world where people were cut-off from each other to a much greater extent.

      It all began when I got married; actually, it all began when I thought about getting married. I was never sure marriage was a good idea, and the more I thought about it the less I liked it, but it was 1960 and there was a lot of pressure. Living together was still living in sin and frowned on. God or fate or something read my mind and laughed. From the moment I tied the knot thunderbolts were thrown. I went into marriage thinking that if it didn’t work out there was always divorce. But for the next thirty years there was always a crisis that moved that possibility to the back burner.

      The Chinese curse ‘May you live in interesting times’ rumbled through my brain on a regular basis.

      I was born and grew up in that usually derided and overlooked pocket of the British Isles known as Northumberland. I also grew up in the 1950s, when the whole of the UK was pretty drear, and the North the dreariest of all. Even potatoes were rationed—that’s how bad it was. Consumers were trying to buy potatoes, not the latest fashion item or some new piece of software. It was not like Russia, but close.

      So in 1956 I moved to London, shared a mews flat in Regent’s Park, and really enjoyed my life there.

      London was enormous fun and a million miles from the gloom of the North. However, towards the end of 1959, the company I worked for was taken over, the lease on the flat was up, and the girl I shared with was getting married, so it was time to go home, where my mother was always pleased to see me. A nice break for Christmas, then come back to London in the new year, look for a job and a flatmate, and start afresh.

      While I was at home another escapee from the North, who had managed to escape farther than I had—to Singapore and Baghdad among other exotic places—came home.

      We had known each other for ten years and had been part of the same group, although I was quite a bit younger.

      There was really no talk of marriage, and I can’t claim wild, impassioned love on either side, but we liked each other and had been friends for years. Neville needed a wife, and I was between jobs. Also, he agreed to my kind of wedding. In later years I constantly met men who admitted that after a three- or four-year posting overseas in some remote area of the world, they came home on long leave determined to find a wife. This accounts for some of the strange marriages we encountered, but most of them lasted a lifetime.

      I knew that if I had to go through the whole white wedding business it would never happen. I had experienced my sister’s wedding and wanted none of it. So we agreed to go on holiday to Spain and marry by special license; and that was really the start of it all.

      Our parents, of course, did not believe we would really do it. The thought of anyone marrying abroad was beyond their comprehension. My sister had married in church, in white, with all the usual trimmings.

      We drove off on a cold February morning in a 1960’s Ford Consul convertible and the colour was ‘sunburst yellow’. It rained all the way down the A1 from Newcastle to the first stop just north of London the first day, and it drizzled all the way across the Channel to France. We crossed the Pyrenees in blinding snow, a condition for which the Consul convertible was not suited, and we slithered very close to the edge of the road on many occasions. We also bickered all the way to Spain, our final destination.

      In 1960 the roads in Europe were not crowded. We rarely saw a British number plate; in fact we rarely saw another car outside the cities.

      We checked into the Hotel Inglaterra on the Paseo de Gracias in Barcelona and then went to the British Consul and asked him to perform a marriage ceremony. A voice from the back room said, ‘And why do you want to get married?’ It seemed like a rather rude question until the questioner appeared and turned out to be John, a friend of Neville’s, recently posted to Barcelona.

      It turned out that they did not dish out special licenses on demand no matter what Neville thought. We were going to have to spend three weeks in the Districts of Barcelona while notices were published. So we spent a few days in Barcelona while John showed us all the best restaurants. Then we decided, for economic reasons, to move out to the Costa Brava. Unfortunately, in those days the Costa Brava closed down between November and March. Even the post office boxes shut up shop, which proved to be something of a problem.

      Eventually we found a small hotel run by a family who were bored and offered to open up for a couple of weeks. So we explored the area, practised our Spanish, learned all about tourist Spanish food, and killed time. We spent quite

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