My Gangan and I
My father’s father, whom we refered to as Gangan, was born in 1910. He was born in a northern county of England called Lancashire. I know very little about the first 16 years of his life. All I know is that around about 1925 he ran away from his home in Lancashire and went to London. He ended up in a work house in a small town just outside of London. It must have been one of the better workhouses as they provided him with the training to learn how to cut grass. This was obviously in the day without lawnmowers, he had to cut grass using a scithe. He then got a job at a golf course in the area. And eventually, again through the workhouse got lodgings in a nearby house. In this house lived a widowed woman and her son and daughter. The daughter later became his wife and my Nanna. But not yet because at this time she was about 4 years old and he was 17, which would have been slightly dodgy even in the old days. He became a friend of the family as well as lodger. Just over 10 years later (in 1939) World War Two was declared. At this point when Gangan was nearly 30, he joined the navy reserves, I don’t think he ever had to fight but he was trained to. My Nanna joined the Wrens as soon as she was old enough to. She worked in a place where they were using machines to decode the Germans messages. She was given instructions on what to do with the machines daily, and though what she did aided us cracking their code and consequently winning the war, to this day she has no idea why she was doing what she was doing. In 1944 her and Gangan married. I do not know that much about their life together, my Gangan was always pretty closed up, and though my Nanna loves to talk, there’s only so many stories she can tell. They had two children, my aunt and then my father, who was born in 1955. They lived in London for most of my father’s life. They weren’t very well off, I think my Gangan was a caretaker for a house and was provided a place to live by them.
Fast forwarding a little. My dad moved to the city that we live in now in order to go to college which is where he met and married my mother. They had 4 wonderful children, my two older brothers, myself and my sister in the years 1982, 1984, 1986 and 1988 respectively. And we all grew up, but this is not a tale of my childhood. My Gangan was already quite old when we were born, as he is 13 years older then my Nanna. When I was born he was 76 and by my first real memories he was around 80. I have very happy memories of him, him singing the alphabet with us but saying ‘wobbleyou’ instead of ‘w’ (thats really funny when you are little), and him showing us his half a thumb and telling us how it had been chopped off by a machine in the war. But they are all very childhood memories, because in 1999 when I was 13 and he was 89, he died. So I was unable to get to know him as an adult as I have since done with my other 3 grandparents.
In both mine and my dad’s childhood he had virtually never mentioned the 15 years of his life before he came to London. And what he did tell us turned out to be a lie. He told us that his father had been killed in World War One in 1916 and that he and his mother had come down to London some years afterwards but that she had got ill and died on route. He told us the first names of both his parents and the regiment his father had been in. And that was it. He never spoke any further about it, not even to his wife. Once Nanna apparantly was talking to someone who on finding out her last name said she knew someone with that name (its a relatively rare name). But when she mentioned it to Gangan he got very angry and refused to talk about it. But then a year or so before he died he suddenly asked my dad if he could find out anything about his family in Lancashire. Using the internet we gave it a go but just got dead ends so we gave up. Then some time after he died I decided to try again. I didn’t find much on the internet but it inspired my dad to join the hunt. We made several trips together to the Family Records Centre in London, where we spent hours looking through the huge books of records trying to find something that fitted the dates we had. We found Gangans birth certificate (which actually said that his birthdate was about 10 days after the date he had always told us), and we looked for death certificates around the dates he had told us but found nothing. So we decided to look for marriage certificates a few years before Gangan was born. We found this, and we also looked through birth certificates and found Gangan has an older sister and younger brother that he had never mentioned. But the shock was that the younger brother was born in 1918 when according to Gangan his father was dead at that point. So then came the hunt for their real death dates. So we looked through all the years after 1918 and after much toiling we found that his mother had died in 1946 and his father in 1965. We also found that the regiment his father was supposedly in did not even exist and the regiment he was really in sounded nothing like it.
After this we almost gave up, there wasn’t much else to find after all. But I carried on searching on the internet out of interest and found someone with the name of Gangans brother in an online phone book living in the right area. So my dad phoned him only to find out from his wife that he had just died, but she gave him the number of someone with our last name who had contacted her asking for information about a book he was writing about the history of our surname. So we phoned him and he said he only really knew about the origins of our name not about the individual members, but he gave us the number of his dad who might know. And when we phoned him and explained our story it became rapidly clear that he was in fact my Gangan’s cousin. We had several phone and letter conversations with him and another cousin. Sadly neither of them had met Gangan as they were both born after he disappeared but they had been told the story. Apparantly one evening in 1925, he said good night to his mum, then came back and said good night to her again, and in the morning he was gone. No one knows why and we never will. The father was apparantly quite strict so perhaps it was something to do with him. Everyone said he loved his mum more then anything. But apparantly not enough to even let her know he was OK. They never heard anything from ever again. When his mum was dying she put out a message on national radio asking for him but recieved no reply. And his brother Charles apparantly joined the Navy in WW2 in the hope that he could travel the country and find his brother but to no avail. He then commited suicide in the 1950′s. The sister died in 1998.
And thats as much as we will ever know. It must have been horrible for them, they had no idea if he was living or dead. People tend to assume missing people are dead, when in fact he had started his own family in the south of England that they never had the opportunity to know. I will always be wondering what was going through his head when he left, why he felt the need to go and and never look back and never even tell us about it. Not even his wife, who when he died he had been married to for 55 years. But perhaps he did want to tell us in the end, maybe thats why he decided to ask us to find out some information for him. But even then, he still stuck to the lies he had told us. Maybe he was hoping we would find out the truth and save him admiting it. Or maybe he had been telling the lie for so long that he even believed it himself. We will never know, and it is really sad.
Recent Comments