Transcript for: on the memory of her father, John Clement Gardiner
Interviewee: Mabel Jenkins
Subject: The First World War
Well, first of all he was a true gentleman. You know, being an Army man, he was very tall and, even though he was so ill, he was very straight-backed. He was in the trenches – I think he was in the Royal Field Artillery – and he had some shrapnel in the top of his head until the day he died. Every so often, when it touched the brain, he thought we were all Germans, and he’d bore holes in the bedroom wall with a spoon, thinking he was, like, watching them from the trenches. And he’d beat my mother, who was a very gentle person. He’d lock her in the pantry all night, and sit her on a chair and keep questioning her, but she never had a bad word to say about him. He was suffering from neurasthenia. People would say, ‘Oh, Mrs Gardiner, what are those bruises, or your eye or something’, and she’d say she’d fallen on the fender or something – would never, never – never said a bad word about him, because she remembered him as he’d been. When he was all right, the few months that he was all right, he’d sit us round the fire at night and tell us ghost stories and make us look into the fire and see what pictures we could see, to use our imagination. But then, as I say, it was dreadful when it started to touch the brain, and his personality changed completely.