Moveable Children

Back again! don't know what happened there, but internet is now back.

My ex told me something I thought was very strange when he turned up on Sunday. It seems that when he was only one year old, his parents divorced and he was sent to live with his father and his new wife for two years. When the new wife got pregnant he was sent back to live with his mother and her new husband who had a daughter two years later. When this marriage broke up, he was left with his stepfather and sister until he was around 12 or 13, and his mother, who had remarried again, was now living in England having moved from their native South Africa, and eventually sent for him to live with her there. She then had four more children from her final marriage. I did know most of this, but was surprised that he was left as such a small baby with his father and later with his stepfather. A bit of a 'pass the parcel' existence. He told me that his mother had been very young, and suspects she may have become pregnant, necessitating the first marriage. He must have hardly known his mother until he was much older. I always felt he put her on a huge pedestal, and maybe this is why.

My own childhood was a mobile one: my father having left my mother, who remarried and had my sister. We lived all over the place, from Devon to Cambridge where my first stepfather was doing his degree after the war, to London, then a few years in Trinidad, West Indies where my stepfather worked in the oil business. Then that marriage split up, and my mother brought us back to England and remarried, living in London, Farnham in Surrey, and eventually on the Wirral peninsula, where my brother was born when I was 17. So we were rolling stones. But the one constant in my life was my mother and my sister, and much later, my brother, and despite all the moves, I always had my mother and family so I was very lucky.