The story of Carol Bonny and her Mother Eileen Johnstone.
Features more than 80 years of memoirs featuring St. Mawes, Cornwall, Bath, Bradford-on-Avon and Bath.
Story of love, heartbreak, hardship, loneliness
These days we feel inconvenienced by the amount of traffic heading to work in the morning or a long lineup at the grocery store… maybe when our favourite ice cream is out of stock.
Imagine being practically torn from your mother’s arms as a young baby & not being able to reunite until you were nearly 11 years old because it was unsafe for a child in a city where air raids were common due to war.
“As the war raged, my mother found work, as a Sister at Greenbank Hospital in Plymouth, tending to the flood of injured servicemen pouring in from the front lines”.
These are the words of my mother in law, Carol, who lived this tale many years ago…
“I cannot remember very much about arriving at Number 2, Seaview Terrace for the first time, but I do remember my first night. I was very, very young, and can remember I had a nightmare. A terrible, terrible nightmare. This big black shadow, I remember, hovered over me and I screamed and screamed”.
I’ve known her over 20 years, but I’ve never gotten to understand her better then when my husband, Andrew, her son, decided to chronicle her life.
I’ve always wished I’d gotten to meet my husband’s grandmother, Eileen, as I too was very close to my grandparents. They were an integral part of making my younger sister & I who we are today. Hearing what my MIL & her mother went through… it makes me even more sad I never got to meet the force of a woman that managed to do her duty to her country and gain back her child once it was safe.
Carol had planned and studied to become a nurse herself, following in her mother’s footsteps (as would Andrew’s sister, Helen) but at that time “the rules” prevented a young nurse from being married… so she left her chosen vocation…
“Perhaps it wasn’t the future I originally planned, but it was very much a future I had begun to shape for myself, proof that sometimes, by stepping off the path you expected, you find a road you never knew you needed”.
Carol became a mother herself, then a grandmother & now a great grandmother. This story is one of love, heartbreak, hardship, loneliness & overcoming things you never thought you’d need to.
It’s sad in parts, yes, but I feel the takeaway is more: what you can do in spite of adversity & how resilience can help you form an adventurous life of your own making, after all.
We think you’ll enjoy reading about the travels, the trials… yes, there were tears of sadness but also in laughter over some of the antics these two strong women got up to, once they were together again.
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