Chapter 24

Family 5 - Small Faces - It’s all about the kids.

It’s easy to remember the family highlights from the Nineties: just look at the calendar where, fortunately, Sue has dutifully recorded all the birthdays. It paints a picture of a whole new generation of brothers, sisters and cousins all tumbling out and about into the quickly growing wider family.  This sudden influx of new, rather demanding, small faces also partly explains why it’s equally difficult to remember some of the detail of what else was going on.  The music scene for instance, is pretty much a complete blank.

The Noughties weren’t much easier.  In the blink of an eye, toddlers had turned into teenagers, leaving the adults wondering how that had happened and where all the time had gone.  Most modern-day parents would tell the same story; once you clamber aboard the train, it’s a one-way ticket for a journey that doesn’t stop. The stations fly by.  Nursery, Primary school, Beavers, chicken-pox, Cubs, Brownies, swimming lessons, tonsillitis, Junior school, football club, pony club, birthday parties, music lessons, parent-evenings, cricket, sleep-overs, drama-class, school fetes, GCEs; it’s hard to keep track of where you are and who is getting on and off.   For Jackie and Nick, me and Sue, and Rick and ‘Carla’ it was just a case of trying to guess which combination of stations were suited to their own family’s journey.

Who is Carla I hear you ask?  Last time Rick was mentioned, he had just taken up a position with Price-Waterhouse in Brussels.  Sue and I had visited him in 1992 and he seemed to be enjoying the continental lifestyle.  His image as an international businessman was enhanced further when, after two years in Brussels, he moved in 1993 to their operation in Moscow; his knowledge of the language and of global finance clearly assets.  Two years later he persuaded PW that he should set up an office in St Petersburg and duly moved there, living in a fine apartment situated quite close to the centre of what is, apparently, a beautiful city.  Joining him there was another PW employee, an American girl from Texas called Carla Jones and a working relationship turned into close friendship, so close in fact that they married in 1997.  They even had two ceremonies; a civil one in Moscow (anyone else got a marriage certificate written in Cyrillic?) and a blessing at Malmesbury Abbey.  Why Malmesbury?  Apparently it wasn’t too far from Cardiff and Bristol for family, or London and Heathrow for their friends and colleagues.  The reception at Whatley Manor was a real international affair and was followed up the next day with a family event at the local village hall in Llangwm that enabled all the various uncles, aunts and cousins on Mum’s side to be involved.  A nice touch was that Joan was in Europe on a business trip and was able to drop in before heading back Down Under.

By 2001 Dad could lay claim to seven grandchildren plus the four step grandchildren who had been born in the eighties and were now living in Guernsey or Spain.  It had been a good call to decide to retire in 1992.  He was beginning to find it an increasing effort to maintain a profitable business and so, with plenty of other things on their ‘to do’ list, he opted to windup the consultancy.  Aged 59, he and Mavis, who at 68 was showing no signs of slowing up, were then able to immerse themselves even more in their social scene and take what seemed a never-ending sequence of European holidays.  They became committed caravaners during the nineties and, whilst I admire their willingness to try something a bit different after more than ten years of ex-pat comfort, I can’t help cringing when I think of the conversations that must have gone on whilst manoeuvring onto a pitch.  However they weren’t finished with global travel just yet.  When old friends, Ted and Joan Mills, whetted their appetite for New Zealand, it didn’t take the pair of them long to put together a RTW itinerary for the winter of 93/94 that included extended stays in NZ, Australia and Thailand, so ensuring another chance to link up with his brother, sister and their families and check up on a still sprightly Roland and Somchit in Bangkok.   Needless to say, they didn’t miss the opportunity to visit Rick in Russia (twice) and also enthusiastically signed up in 1997 for a six-week caravan safari in South Africa with a bunch of friends from the Rotary organisation.  I really am impressed that they still had the energy, especially as they were in constant demand for child-minding duties and, having moved in 1995 from Staunton Harold to the village of Llangwm, just a few miles down the road from Jackie and Nick, they were also in the middle of a multitude of home and garden improvement projects.

Now let’s wind back to 1990 and meet the new faces as they arrive on the scene.  For ‘simplicity’ we’ll just stick to the latest generation of the immediate family and pick out the highlights of the journey through the following two decades whilst at the same time acknowledging that, over in Australia, a similar train was loading up as my cousins, Andrew and Donna (Roger and Jill’s children) and Duncan and Avril (Joan and Ken’s) were getting married and starting their own families.  There’s a family-tree in an appendix.

First to arrive was Dan and there’s absolutely no doubt that he’s had a rather complicated and tricky journey.  The courage, fortitude and positive outlook of his parents, his siblings and not least Dan himself have been an inspiration.  He was born in 1990 with Apert’s Syndrome, a rare genetic condition that causes the bones of the skull, fingers and toes to coalesce.  It was obviously a shock, but Nick and Jack dealt with it and commenced a series of regular visits to Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital that would sometimes last for several weeks.  Over time the surgeons eased open the skull and the facial bones to provide space for growth and did their best with separating the webbed fingers and toes.  By a remarkable coincidence, Nick’s sister, Jan, was the ward sister at GOS on the craniofacial ward where Dan would spend many weeks.  It wasn’t just Apert’s that Dan and the Budd family had to deal with; related to the condition was the fact he also had autism and Asperger’s syndrome, some limitations on his learning and speech, and a few behavioural traits that need a watchful eye.  It’s remarkable, considering all these obstacles, that he has developed into such a pleasant, caring chap with a loveable attitude and a number of attributes and talents that are peculiar to him.  He’d win Mastermind if the special subject was Disney and Pixar movies!

During all of this, Nick had changed jobs several times, finally settling on a senior HR role with the Thomson Newspaper Group, and Jackie had opted to go free-lance, combining writing for horsey magazines with caring for Dan.  And, not without some heart-searching, they had decided, based on the evidence available that the chances of a second child having a craniofacial condition were slight, and opted to try for a second: Joe duly arrived in September 1992.  In 1993 Nick found himself appointed Personnel Director at The Western Mail based in Cardiff, a big career step but one that also required the family to move to south Wales.  After a few months in temporary accommodation, they found Trem Hafren, a large stone house in about five acres of land on Earlswood Common, about half-way between Usk and Chepstow near the village of Shirenewton.  It’s high up but not isolated, with spectacular views across the Severn Estuary to Exmoor and west to the Brecon Beacons, assuming of course the clouds haven’t engulfed the property.  At last Jackie could now stable her horse on their own land and, over the next decade, they slowly modified the property, converting some run-down buildings and a large semi-derelict chicken shed into decent stables and an indoor riding school.  A few years later they constructed a ménage (look it up) for outdoor schooling and dressage, built a large chicken coop for their 20 plus hens and the green houses, vegetable patches and garden are a testament to Nick’s horticultural skills.  With two young boys, several horses, at least a couple of dogs, a cat, the hens and even a few goats, clearly another child would hardly be noticed and their daughter Tiri joined the menagerie in 1996.

Over in Bristol, as documented elsewhere, Sue and I had been doing our bit.  Stuart had arrived on the scene in 1992 and two years later, Murray joined him to complete our team. By this time Sue, fully occupied with the boys whilst they were toddlers, had given up work and taken a redundancy package from BT that largely funded the extension we had built to the house. Work for me was becoming more full-on with responsibilities and consequent pressures steadily increasing throughout the decade.  Inevitably our weekends rapidly became less about adventurous activities for the two of us and much more about gentle family time out and about in the countryside, at the sports centre, or on the beach.  It’s easy to see one of the main factors that persuaded Dad and Mavis to move to Llangwm; within the space of a few years they suddenly had a handful of grandchildren all within a short drive.  Luckily they’d sometimes step in to give us a break from the boys enabling us to grab the occasional canoe trip or hill walk.

It was a longer trip to see their other granddaughter.  Ekaterina ‘Katya’ was born in 1998 and spent her first year in Moscow before Rick and Carla decided it was time for pastures new and moved to the PW office in Buenos Aires, the capital of Argentina.  Whilst they enjoyed the culture and Spanish influence and made a number of friends, it wasn’t an ideal time for business and a couple of years later they returned to the UK.  Rick was based at PW HQ in London, and after renting a house in Richmond for a year they bought a large new property in the delightful village of King’s Somborne near Winchester in Hampshire.  Completing their family was Sebastian Sergei (Seb) who arrived in 2002, about the time Rick decided to bail out of PW and set himself up with a colleague in their own firm Independent Audit.  They’d perceived a niche in the market for the assessment of corporate governance and risk assessment in large, often blue-chip, companies and, with new legislation on the horizon and the previous experience and contacts they’d made in the City, the omens were good.

And so we rolled through into first decade of the 21st century. 

Dad and Mavis, now in their seventies, swopped the caravan for B&Bs but still were managing plenty of excursions around Europe, and seemed to be continually finding the time to visit friends and family in the UK.  By now fully immersed in the local community, they really did manage to pack in a lot, passing along the way in 2004 their 25th Silver Wedding anniversary and Mavis’s 80th.  They’d also finished tinkering with the house and garden at Llangwm and were able to spend even more time on hobbies and entertaining.  Dad would take himself off to his office and plug away, researching his pet subjects and producing a number of journals and missives on a variety of topics including the history of their former home TOSH and the origins of our surname. In 2004 he started writing his biography and two years later we were amazed and impressed at the publication he produced.  Meticulous in detail, honest about events and feelings, it is a fantastic record of his life and his relationships with family friends and colleagues.

Meanwhile on top of the hill at Trem Hafren, the Budd family was continuing to tackle everything head on.  Nick was working in London for the Mirror Group and would travel up early on the Monday morning and back on Thursday evening.  Somehow at the weekends he found time to ride, do essential maintenance jobs on the house or fields, and get fully involved with the children’s activities.  He even coached at the local swim club where Joe and Tiri trained.  Jackie too appeared to find the magic formula to slow time down sufficiently to allow twice as much to be done than the normal rules of physics allowed.  In addition to running the house with all the associated animals, and ensuring the kids were in the right place at the right time (not quite so easy in a rural location where schools, clubs, activities and friends are far more dispersed and definitely not ‘walkable’), she had also started writing books.   No surprise they were based on equine subject matter and ranged from books for the young pony enthusiast to a more intellectual offering on horse psychology.  They’re still available from Waterstones and Amazon apparently.  If she’d wanted to, she could also have penned something on being hit from behind by a car whilst riding on a local country lane, catapulted into a hedge and knocked unconscious.  She broke her shoulder and some ribs and spent a week in hospital; the horse was killed. 

Dan, too, had had more than his share of hospital beds.  A major mid-face reconstruction was always going to be necessary before he reached adulthood to help not just with appearance but also aid breathing and as a preliminary to some subsequent dental work.  It was a big deal; the relatively new ‘distraction’ procedure involved cutting bones, attaching them to an external frame and then gradually easing them to the new desired position by adjusting the length of the screws.  It was test of the skills of the GOSH surgeons.  Complications arose and he needed 36 caches of blood and huge amounts of care before he was out of danger.  Jackie stayed in London for the six weeks he was in hospital and he wore the frame for a further seven weeks, seemingly unfazed despite the fact he had a tracheotomy for the entire period.  Dan might not appreciate just how brave he has actually been; he’s far more concerned about his video collection, that there’s plenty of food on his plate, that everything is going according to a well-ordered routine and that everyone else (and the animals) are okay.  His behavioural and learning issues meant that he needed to go to a specialist school for his secondary education.  Jack and Nick had to battle to get him a ‘statement’; ridiculous bureaucracy when a five minute chat with Dan would have revealed the necessity, but eventually he headed off to ‘board’ at the school in mid-Wales where they focused more on teaching life skills and coping strategies than anything academic.  Incredibly supportive of their elder brother, Joe and Tiri got increasingly stuck into their activities as they entered their teens.  Needless to say, they could both ride and Pony Club triathlons, swimming and local drama were the dominant leisure themes and they both opted to go to the secondary school in Chepstow.

Over in Kings Somborne, life was equally hectic.  Rick was jet-setting; in addition to the Independent Audit business which was growing successfully, he’d been co-opted as a non-exec director of a huge Russian cement company, presumably to try and ensure some legitimacy and acceptable business practices to an organisation that had come about by fair, or probably foul, means in the aftermath of the Soviet collapse.  He’d be in Chile or Mexico one week, Siberia the next, before returning to London to catch his breath and meet up with his own customers, blue chips like Rolls-Royce, British Sugar and the FA.  Carla kept things on track at home and Katya and Seb were doing well. Smart kids, they were good at most things they tried whether it was diving, fencing, music, art or languages.  They worked hard and holidayed harder, converting what was clearly a rewarding business income into a series of trips to places like Beijing for the 2008 Olympics, Patagonia, Egypt and Australia, combining comfortable hotels in the cities with some very basic living accommodation in the wild.

Every so often we’d link up with step-brother John and Mags.  John had tapped into a rich vein in Guernsey; by 2000 he was a director of BDO Reads, a firm providing international financial services, and they had the security (and more) to indulge in pretty much anything they fancied.  Mags is an excellent wildlife photographer and they travelled the world, ticking off all the best exotic locations.  They were a travel agent’s dream and John’s attention to detail ensured that every possible eventuality was always considered.  I can’t help but smile when I imagine him coming through customs, burdened with all Mags’s camera equipment and giving earache to some unfortunate airport official who dared to place a bureaucratic obstacle in their way.  Daughter Katie finished school on the island and went off to Cardiff University in the autumn of 1999 to study English.  Having got the travel bug from numerous trips with her parents, it wasn’t much of a surprise that she found a career in the travel business.  Of course it wouldn’t be package holidays to Spain for her; she was involved in the high-spec’, high-cost side of the business, specialising in custom-made adventures to Africa and other exotic long-haul locations.  Nick had chosen to study Zoology at Aberdeen, graduating in 2007 and dabbling in accountancy before opting to pursue a teaching career.  Apart from Mags getting thrown from her horse and breaking her collar bone, which slowed down the travelling for a few months, they were all in good shape.

It was a bit harder to figure out how things were going in Spain.  Step-sister Mary, never the world’s best communicator, seemed to getting along okay.  She’d found a new partner, a Brit called Cam, and they’d moved to a new, more rural location outside of Callela.  With his income as builder and hers as a nurse, they appeared happy enough and Dad and Mavis enjoyed several visits over the decade.  Their children, Mark and Laura, didn’t follow an academic path and found themselves picking up a variety of job opportunities.  It’s been a source of frustration, not only for Mavis and Dad, but also for the rest of us, especially John, that keeping in touch is not higher on Mary’s radar.  Apart from the rare occasional trip home for the odd big family event, her mother’s 70th and 80th birthdays, we hardly saw Mary or the others over the two decades; there wasn’t any underlying tension or reason: it was more that staying in touch wasn’t a high priority for Mary.

The opposite was true for the folks in Australia; Rog, Jill, Joan and Ken did their best to maintain strong links.  We were all helped by the improvement in telecoms and the arrival of the internet.  The days of stuttering phone calls caused by delays on the line were over; it was now possible to dial direct and have decent conversations.  Joan was always the letter-writer but email and the ability to add photos and newsletters as attachments was more suited to the others who were always keen to share their adventures and news of their children, my cousins, and their increasing number of grandchildren.  Good news, too, was their determination to make the occasional trip back to the UK. Joan in particular seems to have managed at least one trip per decade, acting as a catalyst to bring together the friends and family of her generation, still largely centred around Nottingham.

And in Bristol the years were also flying by, dominated by the activities of the children.  We shouldn’t complain; we squeezed in plenty of memorable experiences, got huge satisfaction from their involvement in all sorts of things, met a bunch of other parents, some of whom are now close friends, and above all managed to stay fit and healthy.  Once the boys were in the juniors, Sue picked up a variety of part-time jobs, before training as a classroom assistant and being taken on by the local primary school.  And, whilst I was dealing with the pressures and the high-level of commitment required to run the factory, it did at least pay well enough for us to afford to treat ourselves to some ambitious family overseas trips, go skiing each year, have a campervan for escapes in the UK, and generally enjoy a comfortable standard of living.

Of course the characters we’ve been following so far have all been from my side of the family so let’s not forget what’s been happening with Sue’s parents and brother.  The good news was that John and Liz got along well with Dad and Mavis whenever they met up and so things were always harmonious.  Sometimes they’d link up with each other independently of us and we’d could always relax without any tension if was convenient to have both sets of grandparents round at the same time.

And even better news was that they were the ideal grandparents: quick to offer to help, protective and encouraging of the boys, always happy to spend time with them and importantly lived only 25 minutes’ drive away.  There’s more about them elsewhere but for a short summary, John finished work in 1992, taking a redundancy and early retirement deal from DRG, and they filled their time enthusiastically.  Excursions to Europe on organised trips; a long haul train journey across Canada, and regular annual visits to Cornwall ensured they didn’t just sit at home.  Not that this would be a problem for them; they had a great group of local friends, many of whom they’d known for years, and were never short of people to enjoy a social evening, country walk or pub meal with.  Despite not being overtly religious, they were nevertheless quite heavily involved with one of the local churches and much of their social life involved people from the congregation. 

We didn’t see a great deal of Sue’s brother Steve, his wife Sian and their daughter Rebecca.  They’d moved to Matlock in Derbyshire in the early nineties when Steve had taken up a position within the council traffic planning department and Sian, a radiographer, had started at Chesterfield Hospital.  Rebecca was born in 1994 and fortunately grew up exhibiting the same enthusiasm as her parents for the outdoor life.  They immersed themselves in the local fell running scene and spent their holidays in the more ‘off the beaten track’ hills and mountains of Europe. We’d sometimes meet up for family events and visited them on the odd occasion when they were always good hosts but it’s never been quite the same close, easy-going relationship that exists with Jack and Rick.  I guess they have different perspectives and priorities but it’s a pity that Stuart and Murray don’t know Rebecca remotely as well as they do their other cousins.

Two decades, gone in a flash, and the ‘small faces’ of the nineties were now those of young adults on the verge of making decisions about A-level subjects, universities, hairstyles, music and where else to focus their energies.  As parents, despite still holding the purse strings, we could no longer exert much influence and could only hope they were prepared well enough for a rapidly changing world.  One thing was for sure: the family bonds were still strong and had continued to be reinforced several times each year when we could all get together, usually still at this point using Llangwm as the rendezvous point.  Dad and Mavis lived for these events and worked hard to ensure that the threads that kept the family bonded together never became too stretched. 

And while, through necessity, we were focusing inwards on growing families, challenging careers and trying to retain a modicum of fitness, we could only watch from the side-lines as events unfolded on the wider scene. 

Tory sleaze had given Tony Blair the chance to give us a breath of New Labour, riding high for a couple of terms on substantial progress in Northern Ireland, NHS waiting lists and education investments.  One of my best ever evenings in front of the TV had been on election night in 1997 as the results rolled in and the scale of Labour victory became apparent.  Sadly, the goodwill and political common-sense didn’t last far into the next decade as Blair allowed himself to be sucked into adopting an increasingly presidential style and blew most of his credit with his wrong call on the Iraq war and factional disputes with Gordon Brown, the guy who would have made a good PM but lacked the necessary charisma.  His worthy efforts to hold the global economies together in the aftermath of the financial crash were masked by the subsequent debt into which we’d sunk in trying to stave off recession and protect the vulnerable, the innocent majority.  Of course the Tories and their media friends weren’t going to offer any sympathy or honest assessment of his predicament and so any realistic hopes he had of re-election in 2010 were doomed.  There was little to cheer about elsewhere, the lowlights can be summed up in single words; Rwanda, Bosnia, 9/11, Iraq, Diana, Gaza, Katrina, Lehmann's….

Without us even realising it, we’d ditched VHS for DVDs, Walkmans for MP3s, Nokias for iPhones, dial-up for broadband, and Nintendos for X-Boxes.  Google, Apple and Facebook had crept up on us, mounting a stealthy but later, brazenly arrogant campaign to steal our identities.  And as the USA’s power diluted in factional acrimony and Europe dithered in comfortable bureaucracy, on the other side of the planet in China their stone-faced leaders were reflecting with satisfaction on how their new capitalistic communism strategy was powering growth and influence.  It was just a shame if you lived there and didn’t like it, or had the wrong face or beliefs.  They could always send you to be re-educated.

To take our minds off the gloom and doom we escaped to discover adventures elsewhere.  Our boys never really took to Never Never Land or Narnia; their heroes were Buzz Lightyear and Jack Sparrow as they saved their toys, sailed with the Pirates around the Caribbean or avoided rampant dinosaurs in Jurassic Park.  They never bothered reading Tolkien but were more than happy to sit through the epic fantasy trilogy of Lord of the Rings films.  On the other hand, they devoured the Harry Potter books and, like every family in the country, we followed Harry, Ron and Hermione through their school careers.  And before I knew it, the boys were explaining to me how the Matrix worked and talking about Avatars as though they already existed.

We just couldn’t keep up with the music scene; with no spare time to invest in what was actually going on outside of the repetitive stuff we heard on the radio we dropped into a world of Coldplay, Amy Winehouse, Travis, Kaiser Chiefs, and the Arctic Monkeys, doing our best to pick out some decent sounds from amongst the proliferation of boy and girl bands that dominated the scene.  By the late nineties we were also having to put up with Busted and S Club 7 and so completely missed the rise of Rap, Grunge and the rest.  I still don’t know if I should try and give Eminem, Jay Z, or Snoop Dog a fair hearing.  And what was both amusing and refreshing: by their mid-teens the house was once more rocking to Led Zep, The Who, Deep Purple and Pink Floyd as the boys started to wake up to the difference between Pop and Rock.

Only a generation, a cool 35 years, between me listening to ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ and trying to persuade Dad that it was ‘real music,’ or Mum that Floyd weren’t just a bunch of hippies, and the boys stumbling across it and recognising it as something at least half-decent.  But they’ll never have the satisfaction of holding the actual vinyl record, carefully lifting it from the turntable, lovingly sliding it into the paper-like envelope, placing it into the actual folding album cover with the printed lyrics, the iconic prisms and spectrums, before finally, for good measure, protecting it further with a transparent plastic sleeve.  Oh and then slotting it neatly into a bulging record case and fastening the clasps so your brother or sister aren’t tempted to borrow it and get it scratched.  It’s just not the same experience on I-tunes but try telling the boys that.