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Olive Maud Emmerton was the youngest child of James (Jim) Emmerton and Minnie Grace Emmerton (nee Goddard), born on the 8th of November 1917.

I've already talked about Minnie Grace, my great grandmother.

However, there is additional context particular to Olive's childhood that isn't covered in my posts about Minnie Grace.

Chief among them is the fact that Olive was the first person in her family to ever get a place at a grammar school. This was a big deal for both her and the family 2/?

As I mentioned before, both of Olive's parents came from working class #Islington families. Many of her parents and other relatives would have left school by 15, and in some cases even earlier.

Actually gaining an opportunity for what was seen as a comprehensive, properly academic education was not something to be taken lightly.

However, despite Olive's talents, she hit a major obstacle; she didn't pass the matriculation exams taken at 15/16 in grammar schools on the first attempt. 3/?

There was a teacher at that school who was in her corner. She had a meeting with Olive and her mother, Minnie Grace, at the school, in which she strongly recommended that Olive retake the year in order to pass her matriculation.

However, it wasn't to be. Minnie Grace told the teacher that the family wouldn't be able to afford the uniform for another year, but also that her husband had said that Olive would need to start going out to work, to help support the family. 4/?

It was a sudden, almost cruel end to Olive's academic journey.

It was also a key incitement, I believe, of something that would come to define Olive; a deep resentment of her family and London working class culture.

For instance, Olive, at some stage, actively paid for elocution lessons to remove her accent.

She was far from the only person with a 'lower class' or regional English accent to do so in the 20th century. It was often seen as an active barrier to career aspirations. 5/?

My father remembers, when they would go to visit relatives like Minnie Grace, how acutely embarrassed Olive was by how they spoke, not only their accents but the words they used.

She would frequently bowdlerise expressions they used. For instance, Minnie Grace sometimes described things as being 'like a fart in a colander', which Olive would 'correct' to 'like a flea in a colander'. It's a change that's both unnecessary and makes the expression inscrutable in intended meaning, n'est pas? 6/?

The counterpart of this was that Olive was somewhat suggestible if she perceived someone as sophisticated or high status. If they had definable authority.

This directly leads into another defining moment of her life, and also my own existence, indirectly.

Olive was, among other things, a talented singer. Her musical ability might have come from her father, Jim Emmerton, who played an instrument himself. She likely would have made a career from it given enough time. Then came The War. 7/?

It's likely Olive had visited #Kent or #EastSussex at some stage, as many London working class families went there in the summer for seasonal work hop-picking. She might even have visited her sister Grace at some stage, who had married a farmer, Ted Andrews, and moved to #Norfolk.

Nonetheless, going to Carlisle would have been a world away from everything and everyone familiar to her.

It was there that she met the man who would become my biological grandfather. 9/?

It turned out I needed to go to sleep. Having had a proper night's sleep, the #Genealogy will now recommence.

So, let's call my biological grandfather 'John'.

John was from a #coal mining family based near #Newcastle. He'd joined the army young, well before the war, but as a musician. By this time, he'd become a band leader.

The musical section of his regiment was one of the many components lent to this military entertainment unit based out of Carlisle.

He played woodwind instruments. 10/?

What began between him and my grandmother seems, from context, to have been a romantic relationship but not a physical one. Not yet.

Amid the intensity and terror of #WW2 this was a passionate moment in Olive's life.

Not only had she met somebody she had a powerful connection with, the entertainment unit went out on tour to various parts of the country. Her horizons were suddenly expanded, seemingly in all directions at once.

However, one day the unit went on tour to #Birmingham. /11

This is almost certainly when my grandmother found out that John was already married.

She remembered arriving in Birmingham on coach, only to have several of the others on the coach warn John 'look out, it's the wife!'.

This didn't end the affair. This was Olive's first serious relationship, and I think her feelings for John were so powerful that she told herself that she'd find a way to win him over permanently.

She even asked him about leaving his wife for her at least once. 12/?

The response she remembered him giving was 'my old man would kill me.'

Shortly after the war ended, the entertainment unit was disbanded, and John's regiment was deployed overseas to #India.

For the next year or so Olive heard nothing from John.

Then, one day, with no advance contact at all, John was suddenly there on her literal doorstep, back from deployment.

This is the stage when it's likely the relationship became physical, not to put too fine a point on it. 13/?

However, this was the late #1940s. Whilst forms of contraception were available, many of them were targeted at married women.

Likewise, Olive was prudish, for want of a better word. She avoided vulgar words, as shown earlier with her bowdlerising her mother's expressions, a habit that remained her entire life. I suspect she hadn't the foggiest idea about contraception at this time.

The thought of asking her parents about this would have probably felt like willingly pulling out a tooth. 14/?

The end result was that not long after the start of 1947 Olive became pregnant with my dad.

For anyone unfamiliar with 1940s mores, this was not a small deal. To at least some degree it was possible to hide what two people did behind closed doors. A child conceived and born out of wedlock was something else entirely.

I suspect that, however excited either of my grandmother and John were, panic also started to grip at this stage. I can imagine Olive trying to persuade him to stay with her. 15/?

I also suspect that, at this stage, John hadn't actually decided to finally end their relationship either.

The reason for this is that not only was he still present when my father was born, he also went with Olive to the registry office to register my father's birth. Albeit, he tried to wait around outside rather than actually come into the registry office.

However, the registrar twigged that something 'unusual' was happening. Having asked where the father was, he asked John to come in. 16/?

I don't think Olive saw the conversation that transpired, but I'm almost certain that this is the cause of something I have a hard time explaining otherwise.

John's regiment and serial number is listed on my father's birth certificate along with the other 'usual' details. This is what I suspect is that registrar's doing, because it's certainly not usually included on a birth certificate.

In theory, John would thus always have been traceable by my father.

In theory. 17/?

However, something had changed.

John still occasionally visited Olive at this point, but they were becoming less and less frequent. After a few months, Olive outright asked John why he wasn't sending more time with his son.

"Because I've already got one," he announced.

I've since been able to confirm that he did have another child, with his wife, who was born only a few months after my father in early 1948.

I think this is the stage at which John decided to cut his losses. 18/?

He stopped coming to see Olive at all.

Whilst he was willing to undergo no small amount of deception to continue his relationship with Olive whilst already married, I think trying to escape his responsibilities as parent to a legitimate child was beyond his willingness.

This pushed my grandmother's situation from awkward to outright panicked.

Whilst single mothers did exist in 1948, having a child out of wedlock was essentially a kind of social death. This could not happen. 19/?

In my thread on Minnie Grace I already mentioned that the family, now mostly based in #Norfolk and #Suffolk, faked a telegraph to the local post office, letting Olive know about the tragic loss of her husband in a vehicle accident.

Not only was this the story told to the world, it's also what my dad was told had happened to his father growing up.

In reality, however, John was to have one last moment of involvement in Olive's life before finally disappearing forever. 20/?

My grandmother took the frankly courageous step of suing John through civil court. To my knowledge this was in theory both to have him recognise his paternity of my dad, and also to have him pay child support.

However, my dad thinks, and I still agree, that part of Olive still hoped that this would somehow make John come back to her, would keep him involved in her life.

She won the case, albeit with an insultingly low payout in terms of the child support John was required to give. 21/?

I have zero experience in researching #historical civil court cases in England, so if there are any folks experienced with #Genealogy or #histodons who are familiar with researching these kinds of #20thcentury cases, I'd be keen to see if there's any records of the case still milling around somewhere.

After the court case was over, John had one final thing to say to my grandmother.

'No hard feelings?'

And with that, John vanished from Olive's life forever. 22/?

Olive was left holding all of the long term consequences of her relationship with John.

The court case stressed her out so greatly that she became ill.

Not only that, but the child support payments from John, as small as they were, stopped very soon.

Olive attempted to report this to her local police station.

The sergeant on duty looked her up and down dismissively, and asked 'were you wearing a bikini at the time?'

In case anyone thinks that the #police were 'better' back in the day. 23/?

It was somewhere around this time that Olive took another measure to conceal the circumstances of my dad's birth.

A family friend pointed out that not only did her surname not match my father's, who had been given John's surname when registered, it also didn't match the surname of the father listed on the paperwork.

So she actually changed her name by deed poll to match John's surname. To help sell the deception that she'd been married to someone with that name who'd tragically died. 24/?

Olive wasn't fully on her own, of course, she had her family.

However, even ignoring her reflexive embarassment about her family, her parents and sister didn't live in London any longer.

She still stuck it out in London for a few years but I think she was done with the city by this stage, and didn't move to Norfolk/Suffolk either.

Instead, a close friend had told her about an opportunity for teaching training near the town of #Ashford in #Kent. So off she went with my dad in tow. 25/?

Whilst she'd had jobs as a clerk before and after the war, this was Olive's first opportunity since her time at grammar school to prove her personal talents and academic ability.

She passed her teacher training.

She moved into a small village near Ashford (which is now practically within the town's borders) called #Kingsnorth. The house she moved into was one of a series of new build bungalows built in a cul-de-sac off a country lane.

She owned that house for the next half century. 26/?

I'll take this opportunity to talk about a potential question to be asked here.

Why did she raise my father as a single parent rather than giving him up for #adoption?

It was certainly something that happened with many illegitimate children, even in the 1940s.

It's never, however, been entirely as ubiquitous a practice as people assume.

Having experience with #Genealogy at this stage, I'm now familiar with other examples of mothers keeping their children even in the late #19thcentury. 27/?

It's never easy to take the choice of potential social disgrace. Even with the measures taken to conceal what had happened, Olive was always at a little risk of this happening.

Yet Olive, and some other women facing the same social mores, took the decision to risk that nonetheless.

Not to judge those who had no choice, or felt they had no choice, but to give up their children born out of wedlock.

These mores were brutal in their impact on women. There's no real other word for it. 28/?