My sister and nephew have been researching the family tree and I've just acquired a great grandfather.

Charles Grist, obit 1897, aged 38.

He died shortly before or after my grandfather was born. I wish I knew the story.

What I'd like now is to establish a link between my Charles Grist (who lived in Erith) and the nest of 19th century Grists (somes of them called Charles) who fill the churchyard at Brookland on Romney Marsh, about fifty miles to the south.

I would love to find I had my roots in Romney Marsh- A "won'erful odd-gates place" according to a character in Puck of Pook's Hill, with "steeples settin' beside churches, an' wise women settin' beside their doors, and the sea settin' above the land, an' ducks herdin' wild in the diks"

"I've heard say the world's divided like into Europe, Ashy, Afriky, Ameriky, Australy an' Romney Marsh."

I've spent much of the past four days looking at pictures of the dead. Taken before they were dead, I hasten to add. Taken when they were lying in hammocks or walking down streets (there used to be a whole brotherhood of street photographers who earned a living lurking about on busy highways snapping faces in the crowd- unthinkable these days when your mobile phone doubles as a camera) or paddling in the ocean or just watching the birdie.
I was looking for messages. I received a few.

I learned:

That my great great grandfather was an elegant man,
That the fashions of the 1920s were extremely cool; bring back the cloche hat!
That my grandfather, grandmother and father formed an extremely close and loving family unit.
That my father was an unbearably cute little boy,
That I am related to some people by the name of Huggins.

And...?

It's a one way conversation. My grandfather spent months in Bogota- but I can't ask him why. His leather cowboy trousers are memorialized but not the very important work he must have been doing down there. What does it matter now that he traveled to Moscow selling tractors to Stalin or once showed Princess Margaret round an exhibit of earth-moving equipment?

All gone.

I can deal out his life like a hand of cards. I can flip through it in seconds.

Thirteen, fourteen- Maids a courting;
fifteen, sixteen- maids in the kitchen;
seventeen, eighteen- maids in waiting;
nineteen, twenty- My plate's empty.

My mother brought some boxes down from the attic. The first two contained battered toy soldiers and farmyard animals. Some of the animals had odd puncture wounds.

“Looks like someone’s been shooting at them with an air rifle,” I said.

“Ah,” said my mother. “Your grandmother did have two brothers…”

Which takes us back to before the first world war.

Later we were looking through family photographs- and there laid out on a table at my grandmother’s house were the very same toy animals and there was me in the foreground, aged about four- a mere fifty years ago…