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
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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
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