Island Life Magazine Ltd February/March 2008 | Page 28

life INTERVIEW the firm has got Gloria’s practicality, warmth and intellectual zing; Lillie Jeffrey, her granddaughter, the firm’s intern who understudies all aspects of sales, marketing and design is quietly bubbly; and Ben Minghella-Giddens, her 14-year-old grandson who pops in after school and is prevailed on to make us a cup of tea, carries out the task with cheer exceptional for a teenager. Gloria’s own childhood was dominated by the tragedy that was her parents’ marriage. Her mother Louisa was seen by her paternal grandmother as a safe catch for her somewhat wayward son. And he, Alberto, would do everything to please his mother – even marry a girl he didn’t love. Louisa needed no persuasion. By 1939 when the war broke out, the marriage was on the rocks. Alberto never returned to the family home. And Louisa’s life was spent waiting for him to come back. “She loved him till her dy ing day,” says 28 Gloria. “I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone, to fall in love like that.” Gloria had two sisters, Betty and Leonora, and a boy cousin, John, lived with them when his mother died. Living in Scotland, later moving to Scarborough, all three girls helped in the cafés which their mother ran. Although Gloria cannot – and she tried very hard – recall a happy childhood, the enterprise and sheer zest for life is remarkable. She and cousin John used to go and practise singing in Scarborough’s Italian gardens – all the girls were musically gifted – and, Gloria recalls with delight, people would come by and give us money! “We were doing what we loved to do. But I don’t think mother would have approved of it at all!” For all the hard work, and the certain amount of freedom, Gloria regrets her lack of education. “Children were evacuated during the war, and schools often opened for only half a day. It wasn’t until we went back to Scotland that I had any real education.” The return to Scotland was for moral support from the family and financial support: Alberto didn’t contribute financially. But predominantly it was to try and lure Alberto back. Gloria attended convent school in Glasgow and from there went to an academy she describes as “wonderful”. “I would have loved to have been either a lawyer or a writer,” says Gloria. “It gives me great pleasure to think I’ve got a daughter who is a lawyer and two sons who are writers.” (Her second daughter Edana is an expert in mental health and now a consultant to the Department of Health – though is finding her love of jazz singing hard to repress; Loretta is the lawyer, and Dominic is behind television’s Doc Martin and Robin Hood. Anthony needs no introduction.) Even though Gloria was physically close to her mother, Louisa felt she could not confide in her about the breakdown of her marriage. “She’d try and cover it all up, and pretend everything was fine, to protect the family,” Gloria says. For the girls, the café in Scotland gave them an outlet for their music. Performing to customers, largely servicemen, to the accompaniment of an accordion, they began to do good business. “That’s how we really began to see daylight,” she recalls. By this time Gloria was 17, with a steady boyfriend. “I would have liked to have progressed that relationship. But it wasn’t meant to be.” For Louisa had become convinced that it was Scotland that was putting Alberto off returning to the family. When her sister Leonora became engaged to a man from Portsmouth, Betty suggested they look on the south coast for somewhere their mother would like to live. “That’s how we came to the Isle of Wight,” says Gloria. The desire of the daughters to make their mother happy was overriding. “She was a wonderful woman” is a phrase which punctuates the interview. Gloria was upset about leaving her boyfriend but, as ever, “got on with it.” The girls never complained about their father in Louisa’s presence, “because mother adored him.” Nor did they question that he would come home. It was just a question of when. If you ask Gloria about her happiest memory as a child there is silence. “I can tell you about the worst day of my life,” she says, after a long, searching pause. She was 12. Her father was now living in Ireland. Louisa put them on a plane to visit him, instructing them to tell him they wanted him to come home. “So Leonora and I said ‘we want you to come home’. And he said: ‘Has your mother never told you that we’ve never got on?’ “And that was the first time that we had known. We’d always thought of him as the knight in shining armour. It was like the end of the world.” Their story is a powerful mix of unresolved fairy tale and hard realism. Being a family without a father carried a harsh stigma at the time, and each time they uprooted they needed to ride the ostracism and fit into the community. “In those days the broken families and dysfunctional families didn’t exist. We Island Life - www.isleofwight.net