Cleaning the House

Saturday. You sleep in and get up for a lazy breakfast.

First things first, you need to clean the house. Load up the washing machine. Run the vacuum cleaner through the rooms.

Then concentrate on the dining room. It’s one of the rooms you’ve barely used since you moved back, and it’s a room you only superficially dealt with in your initial cleaning extravaganza. {if Harem > 0} But it’s a room you’re planning to use on Tuesday. {endif}

You dust. You polish the dining room table. You open the sideboards and dust around the piled crockery. All standard stuff. All pretty boring.

Hang about. As you’re dusting inside the sideboard you notice a large manila envelope at the back, under some plates. Interesting. You lift out the plates to retrieve the envelope. It’s thick with paper. Odd place to keep an envelope. You hadn’t even noticed it was there until you started examining the plates.

You place it on the table. Then open it up. It’s filled with official looking documents. Old documents.

At the top of the pile is your birth certificate. Looks fine. You’ve seen a copy in the past, kept in the bureau.

The next is a marriage certificate. Your parents’ marriage certificate. You’ve never seen it before. There is your mother’s name. There’s your father’s. Interestingly, the name of the father of bride and groom are blank. Your parents never spoke about your grandparents. Every time you tried to raise their absence, your parents would dismiss it, state that they were dead and then change the subject. You assumed their deaths, however long ago, were still a sore wound to both your parents, and would leave it at that. Yet, you’d expect their names to be on the marriage certificate, even if they were dead.

Yes, your parents married quite late, he was 42, she was 37. Interestingly, your mother is labelled as a spinster, but your father is labelled as previous marriage dissolved. He was married before. You didn’t know that. He never mentioned a previous wife. Neither of them mentioned even the possibility. And there’s your mother’s surname, Tempramia. Odd surname, you’d never known your mother’s surname.

Also, the marriage was done at the local registry in town. You know neither of them were local, and you’d always assumed they got married somewhere else. No, in town. Interesting.

The witnesses are two names you don’t recognise.

Hang about the date. The day is the day you were always told, but the year, that’s different. The year on this certificate is two years after the year they always claimed. In fact, that makes. Yes, it’s five months before you were born. So, your mother was already pregnant with you when they got married.

Maybe your parents were just ashamed of that? Makes sense. Although having a child out of wedlock back then wasn’t as big a deal as it used to be, it was still bigger than it is now. And your parents were always more conventional than most of their contemporaries.

What other documents are there?

Some legal documents. The wording is typically confusing, but if you’re reading this correctly it states that your father legally changed his name. He wasn’t originally John Smith, no he was Reginald Abernathy. He changed it, two months before the marriage. The solicitor is Turkinghorn, Rose and Jaberwocky. Strange name. London based. What?

And this other document, same solicitor, same date, but it’s a legal name change for your mother. From Janet Maxim-Smythe to Martha Tempramia.

So, let’s get this straight. Your parents changed their names. They then moved to this town. You know that they moved here around that time, because Mrs Peterson has told you they moved in just before you were born. Two months after the name change, they were in town getting married. Probably about the time they realised your mother was pregnant with you. In fact all of this is after you were conceived.

It doesn’t make sense. Your parents were boring parents. The most boring parents of all your friends.

Then again, were they boring, or just unforthcoming? As a child you occasionally pressed them on their past but always got quickly dismissed. You learnt not to ask. You learnt to take their dismissal as irrelevance when in truth it meant they were hiding something.

You’d grown up assuming your family were boring. This suggests the opposite.