Helen Edith Toull is my great-grandmother and the family poet. She lived from 1888 to 1978, and rather than allow her memory and poetry to remain hidden in a box, I shall share it with you.
I’m massively into ancestry. But I’ve always been keen to learn more about history. Together, Dad and I have delved deep into our family tree.
We can try to empathise with our ancestors’ joys and tribulations, but the past feels removed and often reads like a dull narrative. They were born here, lived there, married this person, had these children and then died.
Looking into the past
The past can feel like a foreign land, but I always find a solid footing there in the human emotion. Rarely, you might be lucky and find an old newspaper article and catch a glimmer of their life.
I’ve found one ancestor on my husband’s side who made the papers and she makes Tess of the d’Urbervilles hardship look tame (but she, as far as I can tell, got a happier ending). Army records note physical appearances, dodgy tattoos and gallant (or not so gallant) efforts. I was very excited when I discovered an ancestor who fought at Waterloo, and I found his eventual reasons for discharge: worn out.
On my mother’s side, I have boxes of photographs and little else. On my father’s side, my grandfather destroyed all the photo albums. However, my great-grandmother, Helen Edith “Edie” Toull, wrote poetry and two notebooks of her poems survived.
Helen Edith Toull
Edie was born in 1888 in Dublin, and moved to Portsea, Hampshire at an early age with her parents William and Helen. She was the eldest of five children, and the only one to survive infancy. At fifteen, she lost her father and at twenty-six; she married Robert. They had a son, also Robert, who grew up to marry only to lose his new wife to illness shortly after their honeymoon. He married again and had a son (my dad). Edie would lose her husband, but also see her grandson marry and start a family of his own before she died in 1978, a few years before I was born.
For Helen, we are luckier because her poems survive and reflect on who she was. The facts above suggest she and her mother were likely to be close. Her poetry reveals it in her personal poems she penned over the anniversaries of her mother’s death. She wrote her most poignant poem in 1945, on the tenth anniversary. Edie still dearly misses her mother. Yet she would not wish her back again to witness the horrors of the war.
As the photographs Edie took are all long destroyed, I will share her poem about how much they meant to her.
My Snapshots
I love to sit and dream awhile,
Sweet thoughts which bring a pleasant smile.
Of happy hours and days well spent,
In healthy fun and merriment.
And so I take another look,
At all the snapshots in my book.
Such pleasant memories they awaken,
Of all the spots where they were taken.
Beloved faces crowd around,
The dear familiar trodden ground.
Sounds of voices, wind and sea,
Are pictured thus in front of me.
And I remember where we walked,
And how we joked and laughed and talked.
Of how we scrambled over the rocks,
Regardless of our shoes and socks.
And how we wandered in the heather
Our hearts as light as any feather.
Up little winding paths that wound
Over the coastlines rocky ground.
I hear again the sea-gulls cry,
I see the glorious sun-set sky.
And feel the power and mystery,
Of mirrored gold upon the sea.
I feel again the silken sand,
And see it trickle through my hand.
There’s the sand-wall where we sat,
All in a row, in one small snap.
And there we go all in a line,
Our legs and arms all keeping time.
While the “Crocodile” ran around,
And then collapsed upon the ground.
I tried to picture all the fun,
At cricket with them in the sun.
The leap-frog over rows of backs,
I did my very best to snap.
Of Bob and Emily hand in hand,
Galloping across the sand.
And so again at memory’s will,
Those pictured frames no longer still.
Move amid remembered scenes
And I am left with happy dreams.
St Ives Holiday, 1937
Do you have any creatives in your family? I’d love to hear about them.