When I was a small child in the late 1970s and very early 1980s, I would sometimes be ushered into the room of my great-grandmother, Edith. By that time she was in her nineties, bedridden and invariably filled with drink. This latter habit was usually blamed for her propensity to see wraiths of little girls walking out of the wardrobe cupboards. I remember very little about her apart from the fact she scared me and that she had a very distinctive smell, which was a pervasive blend of rose water, whisky and urine.

I’d thought little about her until recently. I knew only the baldest facts about her life: her full maiden name was Edith Allard Jackson; she was brought up in North London; her father was a furrier; she married the son of a Belgian immigrant; she had one son and two daughters, the youngest of whom was my grandmother. That was about it.

So, when I got an invitation to look at, and amend, the online family tree of an aunt (my father’s sister), I experimentally stuck in details of three or four generations of my mother’s family, including Edith’s full name. I thought little of it until this email from a stranger arrived last month:

… Edith Allard Jackson… happens to be the mother of my husband’s mother, who was born illegitimately to Edith two years before she married Gustave, I have been trying for a long time, many years in fact to find what ever happened to Edith and who she married… my mother in law Thelma Keeble Jackson sadly died 8 years ago… she felt abandoned not knowing anything about her birth mother…

Reading that for the first time made the hairs up my spine prickle, and in a way I couldn’t quite define. I wasn’t shocked, largely because I’ve never been one of those people who believe that the middle classes didn’t discover sex until the 1960s. I was surprised, certainly, but that would be too weak a word: throw in a few hefty measures of intrigue, wonder, disbelief, belief, astonishment and the phrase “what the ffff…?” and you’d be getting near what I felt.

When I’d taken it all in, though, I realised there were two things I had to do. First was to let the family know. Second was to find out whether the story was true. Naturally, my priority was to let the family know: you don’t often get a chance to tell older relatives startling news about their grandmothers.

It was excellent fun. I won’t go into details, but when I told my mother face-to-face her jaw dropped as though someone had pierced her chin with a dumb-bell. Emails to aunts and second cousins got a similarly amazed response.

Anyway, the good news is that the story is true. I’ve seen the documents, and there’s no room for doubt. And I’ve seen the photographs. This is Thelma, the child who was given away:

And this is her mother, with the children she had after she married:

It would be too fatuous and sentimental to say that the new discovery goes some way to righting a wrong: by the standards of their time Edith and the child were both lucky, with the former a candidate for the asylum and the latter fortunate not to be smothered at birth.

The discovery is a heartening one, though, and an excellent example of why it’s always better to confront the past rather than cover it up. If we’d done that earlier, perhaps one 90-year-old women wouldn’t have spent her twilight years haunted by visions of a daughter who would have loved to have met her.

I am busy packing boxes, which I am going to put in storage before I decorate the flat.

I have just realised with horror that it is Wednesday.

This is my great-uncle Felix, dressed with panache for a game of football on Hackney Marshes. I wish I’d met him: he was a fine fellow.

I came to live in Hackney in 1999; and whilst that doesn’t make me a dyed-in-the-wool local, I’ve been learning about a few family links with the borough.

This is Holy Trinity Church, Alford Place, Hoxton, where my maternal grandparents got married in December 1944.

My grandmother gave her address as 2 Alford Place and described her occupation as “Girls’ Club Leader”. This is her at the Hoxton Club camp in Chigwell, Essex.

And these are the girls.

Terrifying aren’t they?

I blame strong drink. What else would influence me to agree to my mother’s request to scan in the family photo albums?

It’s a good idea, though. She’s one of five siblings and, between them, they have fourteen children. What better way to share the photos than by putting them online?

Unfortunately, there are at least twelve of these albums and it took a me a day to make hi-resolution scans just three, of which I have now put the first online, divided into the two principal families of my maternal grandparents. In the unlikely event that old photos of other people’s relations interest you, then by all means go and have a look at them.

So who is the boy on the left clutching a fine toy train? He was called William Keith Douglas-Irvine and, if the date on the picture is correct, he can be no older than 10 or 11 months (which I find very hard to believe). Nor would you guess from his photograph that he was profoundly deaf and dumb, like several of his brothers and sisters, and was destined to spend much of his life in asylums. Family legend has it that he had one spoken phrase: “I die never”. I hope he didn’t believe it, otherwise it must have been a shock when he popped his clogs in 1957.

If you’re tuned into Radio 4 this morning, keep an ear out for my wife, Anne, who will be on Woman’s Hour. She’s going to be talking about Hertha Ayrton, first female member of the IEE and first woman to read her own paper before the Royal Society. Ayrton is being commemorated with a blue plaque outside her former home in Norfolk Square.

More info about the broadcast itself can be found here.

When I look at the present members of my mother’s family and see that it is chock full of teachers, social workers, carers, liberal academics and the like, it’s hard to believe that they all spring from (what is now regarded to be) politically insalubrious stock. I’ve mentioned elsewhere that my maternal grandfather’s forebears made a mint out of slavery and sugar in Tobago, but what I’d forgotten until recently were the mutterings about one of my maternal grandmother’s relations who, if the story is to be believed, came over from Belgium in the 19th century and earned a living as a black and white minstrel.

Well, a bit of cursory research shows it to be sort of true. There was a Gustave Chaudoir who studied music at the Brussels Conservatoire and, after arriving in England, composed for the music hall. As this source puts it:

“I Lub a Lubly Girl, I Do” was written by Brandon Thomas, with music composed by Gustave Chaudoir, musical director of the Moore and Burgess Minstrels.

I won’t bore you with further genealogical details, but the snappily dressed man pictured for this week’s Elegantly Dressed Wednesday is my great-grandfather, Gustave Félix Chaudoir. This Gustave was a (British) cavalry sergeant in World War One, during which he was gassed. He claimed to have had only one dream in his life: that he was riding across the Somme on the back of a gigantic rabbit.

In peace time, Gustave was a chartered surveyor who practised in North London, living with his family in Dartmouth Park, near Highgate. And judging by the photographs I have been looking at recently, he was always impeccably dressed. In my wardrobe I have a grey suit jacket that he had made in Savile Row: it’s a bit grubby, but the cut is sublime.

The photograph in this post shows Gus on a trip to Belgium. In case you hadn’t worked it out, he’s the one who’s sitting down, not the waiter who appears to be enveloped in a haze of fag smoke.

My mother lives on the extreme edge of Spalding. If I look out our bedroom window I can see miles of flat fields, dotted with the odd house and thunderstruck tree. The skies are massive and could make the largest crowd of people look like a scattering of rabbit shit on a rollered lawn. But there’s something silty about this place, not just in its drainage channels but in its people. Living here leaves you with a gritty residue wherever you subsequently go.

It also sends you a bit strange, capable of writing paragraphs like the one above. So let me shake my head vigorously, slap my cheeks and start again.

We got here early yesterday afternoon and, when lunch was over, walked the two miles into town. As we approached the centre, my mother veered off and took the baby to Ayscoughfee Hall gardens. Anne and I headed off to the excellent Bookmark bookshop, and the second hand bookshop opposite it. We were gone for less than half an hour.

We went back to Ayscoughfee Hall to rejoin my mother and the baby. We saw them as soon as we veered into the gardens, just after passing a minibus into which some disabled people were being shepherded.

“We’ve had fun,” said my mother.

“Oh really?”

“Yes, it was like that time that woman collapsed in Mablethorpe.”

“God, that was a long time ago. I remember you bringing her around from that heart attack.”

“That’s right.”

“Still, it was her own fault for discharging herself from hospital. I swear she was smoking a fag when she was talking to you.”

“Yes. Anyway, this time we’ve just rescued a man with Alzheimers who drove his wheelchair into the pond.”

“Why did he do that? Was he bored?”

“I don’t know, but when he was in there he obviously thought his wife was getting him out of the bath. The baby was very good though. He watched from the side.”

“So what happened?”

“Well, the baby and I were chatting to a nice lady who’s with her grandson who’s got Down’s syndrome. Then we heard a big splash, and there was the man in the pond. Anyway, we managed to get him out, and I said shall I ring my son, but they said no. So I sent someone into the teashop to get a coat, then I said to the men ‘Can you take his shirt and vest off or he’ll freeze’, but they said no.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. They obviously didn’t think it was the done thing.”

“Well, I suppose it is fairly warm. He’ll probably be OK.”

“I hope so. Oh, there’s that nice lady again.”

And sure enough, she was a nice lady and she had a happy grandson. She told us all about how the child’s parents doted on him although, for some reason, her sister couldn’t accept that the child had Down’s syndrome: “She doesn’t like it. She just says ‘It’s not right’.”

When she left, she said something that was grim because she felt it necessary. Not simply “nice to meet you” or “good to have met you”, but this:

“Thank you for being so nice.”

Dave Hill has given my old blog a warm send off:

The first Hackney-based blog I ever discovered was Quink’s brilliant Hackney Lookout. Mostly, it was pure observational stuff: wry, comic, sometimes incredulous vignettes of encounters with strange and possibly quite dangerous people he met on his patch up in Stamford Hill.

Inveterate Dave Hill readers will have spotted that he wasn’t writing at his usual blog, Temperama, but from a relatively new venture called Claptonian in which he documents day-to-day life in his neighbourhood somewhere near the middle of Murder Mile.

As you may know, Lower Clapton is home to some of the most deprived communities in Britain. It has some great places within it, and some fine people, but it is not somewhere most folks dream of living. Which is why I was surprised earlier this week when I had this conversation with my cousin, who used to live in Upper Clapton, then in Lower Clapton, and who now has a house a bit further south in Hackney. We were sitting in Springfield Park in the sun, trying to keep tabs on our assorted children.

“Why don’t you come down to Homerton?”

“Homerton? I thought you lived in Lower Clapton?”

“No, we’re in Homerton.”

“It’s on the border, though, isn’t it?”

“Yes, but I always say Homerton. If you say Lower Clapton people might think you were putting it on.”

A gnomic note from my 90-year-old grandfather.

I believe you are both true children of your university determinedly striking blow after blow in the honour of European Civilisation.

WD.

I’d better dash. European Civilisation is going to crumble unless I change the baby’s nappy right now.