Reginald Baird

Here's what I know about mum's father. This is what I've been told about him. He died well before I was born, so I didn't know him. It's funny that just now, in the last few seconds, I realised that he's part of my genetic history. I've got some of this person in me. That kind of shocks me.

Anyway, in order of perceived importance, here's what I know about Reginald Baird

He was handsome.
He was a stock broker.

He was a boozer. He belonged to the "Sunday Morning Drinkers" club. Instead of going to mass with their families, they drank on Sunday mornings. This was told to me as a haha hilarious family story, and that's all I ever thought about it when I was a kid. But when I was a teenager, I was at a school friend's house, and her mother said in passing "but of course your grandfather was a raving alcoholic!" Really? I was kind of offended. I went home and asked mum if that was true. And I don't remember the answer. It wasn't yes, and it wasn't no.
He died in his 40s of sclerosis of the liver. Mum was away with friends for the weekend, and when she got home he had died. She said she laughed when she heard he'd died. I can't remember asking her why, and over the years I've variously thought it must have been a nervous reaction to unexpected bad news, or that she really didn't like him.  

Mum was his favourite daughter. When mum was 10, he gave her a giant sausage for a birthday present. I don't know how giant. But it was spectacular and she was embarrassed that her friends saw it. She loved sausages, though, so it was one of those moments.

If he didn't like what was served up for dinner, he pulled the tablecloth off the table, and with it the plates, cutlery and food. Now, I don't know if he did this once or routinely. Mum said that's what he did.

He was a practical joker. He stole the front seat out of one of the first cars to arrive in Invercargill, and hid it for months, so the driver had to drive around town sitting on a beer crate. He shot a horse inside someone's garage and they couldn't get it out without chopping it up. He nailed a fish under someone's kitchen table and it went rotten and stunk up their house. Haha hilarious.

He gave his kids a sixpence or a penny or some coin if they found a four leafed clover. They devised ways to glue extra leaves onto regular clovers to get the money.

When he died, he didn't qualify for a requiem mass in the Catholic church because he didn't go to mass (because he went Sunday morning drinking instead), but the church gave the family a dispensation and let him have one because nana was such a good Catholic, and took all her kids (8 of them) to mass. Reginald wouldn't let his oldest daughter go into the convent to become a nun. But after he died, that's what she did.

There was a really interesting story about what happened when nana and Reg first got married.
Before they got married, Reg lived with his father. His mother had died, and his father had hired a housekeeper called Molly, who lived in the house with them. When Reg and nana married, they had their own house, but because it was a 'bad look' for Reg's father to be alone with Molly in the house, nana and Reg had to go and sleep the night in the old family home, nana in a room with Molly and Reg in a room with his father. I honestly don't know if this last bit was true, but that's what we were told. Eventually the old guy married Molly, and she became nana's mother-in-law, even though they were roughly the same age. Molly and the old man had some children -- a whole new family who got the 'family jewels' and nana got nothing.

When Reg died, nana was 42, and had 8 children aged 2 - 18. (I need to check those ages, but I believe they are correct.) Mum was the third oldest, 15. They had their own house, but they were poor. Mum says she and her sisters were made to stand at the back of the rows at school because they didn't have the proper school uniform. When they got jobs, they helped nana out, but she lived on the widow's benefit and I'm sure on the kindness of the extended family.

Nana was a beautiful, gracious, funny, energetic woman. If you didn't know she'd been widowed at 42 with 8 kids, you'd never suspect it. There wasn't a whiff of the victim about nana Baird. Not a whiff.

I grew up thinking that it was just as well this grandfather wasn't still alive. He was scary, in a cartoon character kind of way. I knew I wouldn't like him. When I got older and read pop psychology and self help books, I started to think that mum's need to control her children, her environment, her everything probably stemmed from fear and instability in her own childhood, and I wondered if a lot of that had to do with her father -- first when he was alive and larger than life, and then when he died and left them all to it.

I could never reconcile mum and nana. They were so different. I honestly don't know what kind of relationship they had. They spend time together. They didn't fight or have any drama. But were they close? Did they communicate properly, or just chat over a sherry or a cup of tea? I don't know. I do remember nana leaving mum's bedside in tears, only days before mum died. Mum had sent her away to get her hearing aid sorted out, so they could talk. "How can I talk to her if her hearing aid has no batteries??" Mum was visibly upset. I always wondered if mum wanted to tell nana something about Reg. I'll never know.

Not long before nana died, I was visiting her at Calvary, and she said "I'm sorry we didn't talk about the important things. But you girls didn't have too bad a time of it did you?"

I just said "No nana, we are all OK." It was an opportunity for me to get inside my egg shell, but I didn't. I just let it pass, and I'll never know what she meant.

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