Strangely, all four of the people I knew as my grandparents were Scorpios: one opposite M/F pairing being born a week apart in October, and my maternal grandmother and paternal grandfather being born a day apart in November. On a poignant day, a mini family remembrance…
The waters of the South of France are relatively calm today, thankfully.
Due to its strategic position where Eurasia meets Africa and the Atlantic, the Mediterranean has played a central role in the history of Western Civilisation. Through the Roman Empire and the journeys of the crusaders, to later modern ‘conflicts’, the history of war on Europe’s most southern sea is as old as the civilisations that have for millennia occupied the banks of its shores, with the region becoming a theatre of war for the 20th century’s major disputes.
Not much more than a hundred years ago, the First World War saw the cerulean expanse of the Côte d’Azur I look out to awash with German U-boats as they fought for control against Britain, its imperial forces and allies.
At the eastern end, Gallipoli, in what is now the recently re-named Türkiye, is a shocking reminder of the futility of war. November 11 marked the end of WWI in 1918 and is, of course, better known as the universally-observed Armistice Day.
No stranger to Ottoman aggression, the date was also said be the birthday of the original literary James Bond (born 1920, though Ian Fleming shifted those sands when it suited him). What is certain it that it’s very definitely the birthday of my Greek grandmother Πολύμνια Βικτώρια Λαγούτη — Polymnia Victoria Lagoute — born in 1928.
Polymnia — or Paula as she anglicised herself after marrying and coming to England — hailed from the Hellenic Republic’s second city: Thessaloniki in Greek Macedonia, where my mother would later attend school. She married a Briggs from Nottinghamshire, and then a Parsons — a North Macedonian-born Yugoslav Serb himself self-anglicised from his slavic Popović — and died in the rather less exotic Aylesbury aged just 54, 40 years ago today in fact.
The extended Briggs family, circa mid 1950s
On a fairly run-of-the-mill mid-April afternoon in 1983, I came home from Sir Frank Markham — I was two thirds of my way through my second year of secondary school, in fact, — to find my ten year-old sister at home before me, as per normal. (The previous Springfield middle school I’d briefly attended being a darn sight nearer to our village than the ‘big school’ that was a 35 minute walk away.)
Only this time something wasn’t exactly normal. I could hear the sound of sobbing, and caught sight of Stella hovering at the foot of the staircase, awkwardly nodding her head in a sideways motion towards the kitchen, as if to say “It’s coming from in there.”
There I found my mother in floods of tears, a rare sight for sure. When I asked her what was wrong she replied, “Nanny’s dead.”
“Which one?”
“Nanny Parsons”.
Crikey, that was a shock and and a half. The loss of the first immediate family member, plus, I should have realised Mum wouldn’t be that emotional over the loss of her mother-in-law. In my defence, factor in that said English paternal “Nanny Pafford” was almost twenty years the Greek’s senior, so age before beauty and all that. She lived another 20 years to boot, hanging on until November 2003.
Damn heart complaints. They run in the family too.
As I write this I’m acutely aware that I turn 54 myself in June and that last Christmas 2022 I passed the age another slightly more famous Greek died at: Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou a.k.a George Michael, whose guilty feet shuffled off at 53 and six months exactly.
Curiously, today in 2023 happens to be Yom HaShoah, the Jewish Holocaust Remembrance Day, which, like Easter, is a shifting date but which marks the Warsaw ghetto uprising in Poland.
Winding further back to ancient Greece, Polymnia was the goddess of music, song and dance. It’s true she liked music — though being the classy cultured type she was more into opera and classical as opposed to my English Gran’s Sinatra and Elvis.
In Latin mythology, her middle name Victoria is the Roman equivalent to the Greek Nike, the goddess of victory. Except there’s never really any victors in war – only casualties, victims, consequences and division. How much human nature has learnt from the mistakes of past is a moot point, frankly.
Miss you Gran x
Steve Pafford
