My Mom, Violet Grundy Thomas deserves a fanfare, some entrance music. The Flight of the Valkyrie would work or maybe The William Tell Overture, but a Fight Song accentuated with drums and bagpipes – mom, being a former Scottish Missionary would like that. This rendition or musical number is a blend of Amazing Grace and Rachel Platten’s Fight Song. Mom would like Rachel’s words and attitude.
This is my fight song
Take back my life song
Prove I’m alright song
My power’s turned on
Starting right now I’ll be strong
I’ll play my fight song
And I don’t really care if nobody else believes
‘Cause I’ve still got a lot of fight left in me
My Mom feeling pretty and confident – I suspect in her late teens.
My mom was a Gypsy, driven by Wanderlust and the compulsion to see what was just over the hill. She loved to learn and was full of questions, if she felt you were an expert. Because of her compulsion to learn and her lust for new experience she would take any risk to hit the road. My mom was an explorer, like Dora. She loved to take off, load the kids up in the car and hit the highway and often the Horners came along.
VI’s Vagabonds hit the road? I guess Mom’s taking the picture, but Aunt Beat might be there – Chris on the left, then me, Cousin Joy, then Richard, Cousin Bill with Marie hiding behind him.
My mom was born at the back end of World War I – 18 of April 1918. Her father George Raymond Grundy was still in the trenches of France. My maternal grandmother Sarah Hughes Grundy, I’m sure was in the crouch, ready to take on the Hun if he made across the channel. My grandma Grundy was feisty lady. She was ready for a throw down and I believe she pasted a tiny little bit of that into my mom, but mom preferred to keep it hidden. Mom would absorb offense rather than Counter Attack, but she would seethed quietly. I think my mom tried to be a peacemaker. But ….
Mom was an original. But she was a late child and when Grandpa came home from the war and met her, she owned him, a Daddy’s Girl. Mom was seen as a girl of privilege by her older siblings and they let her know it. I have never met anyone like her. It may have been a Grundy or Hughes trait, but the world must mold itself to her preconceived conception of it – or whatever! She might not tell you, but if you tried to tweak her, she’d come to a quiet boil. If you watched you’d see it in her eyes and sometimes her face – just too many people had tried fix her! She didn’t need to be fixed.
I don’t know why she was called violet – color or flower, but she was a surprise baby and as noted arrived on the 18th of April 1918 in Birmingham, England. Lloyd George the Welshman was Prime Minister, the Russia Revolution was in full revolt, America was now in the War (World War I) and one more prolonged bloody tussle and it would end. Britain, however, was on the cusp of significant social changes. The Empire would begin to shrink and the ineptitude of the aristocracy would be exposed by the futility of both the first and second wars. Slowly a meritocracy, a society based on ability instead of birthright, would level the playing field as the middle-class began to ascend. Unkowningly, I think my mom caught that wave of ascendancy.
I believe my mom was inordinately bright and her academic abilities lifted her into an elite culture she didn’t understand or know how to function in – School uniforms, starch, spit and polish and the ground rules of snobbery. These tricks and tools were not in my mom’s wheelhouse.
My Mom at maybe ten.
Meanness was beyond my mom. She could get angry and offended, but, as I said, she’d keep it inside. Raised by a mother who grew up just beyond the reach of the poor house and who willfully refused to play by the elites’ or anybody’s rules my Grandmother, lived with her “Dukes Up,” but somehow left my Mom unprepared and she walked full faced into orchestrated upper crust cruelty. Ever misstep every posh rule not understood was noticed, called out and punished. I don’t know if it was how she was taught or genetics, but to cope mom developed a quiet courage and independence that looked, or rather, felt like defiance, to me, but was actually self respect. I believe her reaction to the upper crust, the world of the socially privileged was to encased herself in a “yes I can” armor and see how far she could go. But her bullies were girls and girls could push cruelty to the level of an art form.
She never talked about her school years, but as a alien/victim myself I sensed it in her. She said, ” I had a happy and carefree life, seldom sick except when I was five when I got Gravel Stone” (I looked this one up, antiquated term for Kidney Stones) and was sent to the hospital in Ladywood Birmingham and was operated on. Finally I sat for the (tested) King Edward’s Grammar School and received a scholarship and attended for 3 1/2 years.” (Now this is interesting) “School greatly improved my outlook upon life in regard to manners, clothes and my world of people.” I think mom is doing some memory polishing here. I think for a young unsophisticated “Brummee” (nickname for people from Birmingham) girl it was hell.
Here are some British School Girls in Uniform. My mom had to run the gaulet of POSH girl’s cruelty. My grandma called “hottee toitee” girls. I feel they were relentlessly mean.
But they couldn’t kill her lust for knowledge – Violet took it and hung on for almost four years. She was on the fast track for University, I think she grieved that that opportunity eluded her. But she never lost voracious love for learning and would grab books and horde them, but I don’t know how many she read. I have no memory of her reading. But, as noted and even if you were family, don’t critique or judge anything about her because her self protective “dukes/fists” would come up. She take a combative stance and she would counter punch every word you said. And this would happen if you were lovingly trying to help her. The damage inflicted on her in her girlhood had scarred her deeply.
King Edward VI High School for Girls
My understanding of the English School System suggest the child would go to school from age 5 – 16. Around 12 years old they would test your ability and based on your performance you would be placed in either Secondary Modern or Grammar School. Secondary Modern was for average skilled students and they would be prepared with the understanding that they would enter the trades through an apprenticeship or otherwise prepared for generic jobs. If however you scored well on your 11+exam you would be sent to Grammar School for College Preparation. My mom made the cut and found herself in the rarefied company of the “Elite” of the King Edward VI High School for Girls in Birmingham. She told me that she had gone to the same school as J R R Tolkien, but Tolkien had gone to school for young men. Tolkien had attended the school from 1900 to 1911. My mom was in school 1923 – mid 1930’s.
My mom wasn’t a talker. I don’t remember her ever telling me stuff about growing up, her involvement in the church or her mission to Scotland. But Karl and I both have a memory of her telling us about how she left school, I think early, and finding a job with kind company where she evolved into a book keeper. I sensed a validation in mom about both the appreciation of and the development of her intellectual gifts by some kind people. Mom was lit by this and I think began to bloom. I think the picture posted at the beginning of this chapter is of my mother at the time of her success.
The pictures below shows my mother being silly, something we never saw. See her in the back row last on the right. The group is holding dolls and stuffed animals. I assume it is a Branch Social. I don’t think my mom and dad have got together yet.
I think there were two version of my mother. The mom for us and the woman everyone else would meet. I heard people talk about this other “Vi” as a teacher of young girls, as a Relief Society President and a kind and giving neighbor.
I suspect my mom was a romantic. I loved to see a list of the books she read and the movies she saw and loved. I think my “happy ever after” conviction comes from my mom. Granted every life has its pain and disappointment, but my Disneyesque, “God will see it works out, ” I suspect is in my maternal genetics.
But around the time of my mom finding herself my dad showed up. My mother’s memory of the moment involved a red dress. This moment with a white dress, from the movie The Natural with Glenn Close and Robert Redford, captures at least the the emotions of what she remembered.