My mother, Thelma, was born to Victoria May HUDSON, in 1928, in the Islington Workhouse Infirmary (although the workhouse was by then a thing of the past and the infirmary served as a hospital to the borough). I am ridiculously proud of her for keeping my mum, born out of wedlock, and raising her at a time when young women who bore "illegitimate" children were reviled and cast out. I don't think that happened to her, as she kept close ties with her parents (her mother witnessed her marriage, her father lived with her for a few years before his death), and with her sisters and brothers; but it must have been a difficult time to be a young mum.

Victoria (or May as she was known in the family) and Thelma lived for a time in the village of Shalford, just to the south of Guildford, with Mrs Lilian South who kept a sweet shop and general store next to the Parish School in Station Road Shalford. Subsequently, when Victoria May married Henry James FOSTER in September 1930, Lilian South was one of the witnesses. Thelma kept in touch with Lilian, whom she knew as 'Auntie South', throughout her life. Victoria had met Henry James ('Jim') when she answered his advertisement for a housekeeper-cum-childminder. He was a young widower with three children to support, living in Vegal Road, Englefield Green, Surrey. There were two boys, his stepsons Gordon and Cecil, and a daughter Phyllis. Add Thelma to this, and you have a substantial family right at the start of the marriage! Over the next eight years, Evelyn, Georgina, Margaret and Edith were born; I don't know how Victoria managed, although the two eldest boys had probably left home by this time.

Henry worked as a gardener on the Wentworth Golf Course, and Victoria worked as a housekeeper in various of the big houses on the Estate, doing any task in order to make ends meet. In taking on Jim's existing three children, and adding four more daughters to the family in the following years was a huge undertaking, but Victoria seemed to revel in a big boisterous family.

I remember Victoria May, or Nana Fos as we used to call her, very clearly. She taught me to knit when I was only 6 or 7 years old, and was a prolific knitter herself, producing garments for her numerous grandchildren (I think there were 12 of us) at regular intervals.

I never knew Henry James, he died a few months before I was born, but my mother mentioned him often with great fondness. He had been a gardener and groundsman on the Wentworth Golf Club. Just before the Second World War, the family moved from Vegal Crescent Englefield Green, to Crown Road Virginia Water, which backed onto the Wentworth Estate, and was very convenient for Henry's work.

Henry smoked all his life, after the fashion of the time, and eventually he developed lung cancer, dying in Dec 1951. Thelma recalled visiting him in hospital, and how he knew without being told that she was pregnant with me.

After the death of Henry James in 1951, Victoria May lived for many years in a small bungalow in Staines, just a few minutes walk from her daughter Phyllis's home, with her dog Trixie. I cannot remember the circumstances which caused her to move to London, but some time in the 1960s she relinquished her bungalow and went to live with her daughter Georgina in Queensway, near Golders Green. She continued her habit of perambulating the country, staying for a few weeks with one daughter, a month with another, always with her knitting to hand.

In 1974 she became ill and was in Colindale Hospital for some months before she died of kidney failure. I was working in central London at the time of her illness, and regularly took a half day holiday to get the tube to Colindale so that I could spend an afternoon with her. She was the happiest, most cheerful person I knew; she never let anything get her down, not her profound deafness nor the illness that stopped her doing the things she loved.

Victoria May was one of five daughters and three sons born to Walter and Rosina HUDSON, of Islington. Rosina was born Rosina Jane BRYER, and this is the link into the BRYER family.

Henry James had been born in the little village of Dorchester close to the Berkshire - Oxfordshire border on 27th August 1900, to Henry Edward and Mary FOSTER. He died as a result of Bronchopneumonia at the tragically young age of 51, on 14th December 1951, in St Luke's Hospital Paddington.