A Fortunate Life Read Free Page B

repeat, I can find not a shred of evidence) gets even more romantic: she was said to have crossed the Himalayas back into India in the company of a doctor whom she eventually ran off with (the early Cliffords seem to have had rather a tendency to untidy private lives).

    Solidity, however, was a definite feature of my mothers’ ancestors, the Hudsons. The Hudsons were as steady, Protestant and Northern Irish as the Cliffords were wild, Catholic and from the South. They came to Ulster with the Cromwellian plantation from, we think, Northumbria.The first Hudson we know of was Robert, who lived in the little County Down market town of Rathfriland, under the shadow of the Mourne Mountains. He, like my Ashdown ancestor from Pimlico (and at about the same time), was a boot-and shoemaker by trade – though we may be certain that, as a good Northern Ireland Presbyterian, he did not combine this with a brothel-keeping sideline. Succeeding Hudsons were variously musical reed-makers, grocers, and auctioneers and valuers. My grandfather, Robert Hudson, whose sisters were missionaries in China and India, must have done rather well for himself, for the three Rathfriland houses in which he lived reveal a steady progression up the middle-class ladder. He combined his profession as Rathfriland’s auctioneer and valuer with that of newsagent, bookshop-owner, cycle agent and occasional dancing master, while still finding time to play in the local hockey team, train the church choir, serve on the local School Management Committee, conduct the choral society, be married twice and sire, in all, twelve children. His second wife, my maternal grandmother, was a Hollingsworth. They came over to Ireland, probably also from Northumberland, in the 1660s, were fiercely Protestant and served as clergy with the army of William of Orange.
    My grandfather was largely self-educated, a great believer in the Victorian virtue of self-improvement, and deeply engaged in the affairs of his local community. It is his strong Northern Irish genes that sweep all before them and march largely unchecked through all his grandchildren and my children, right down to my grandson, all of us carrying his indelible mark of a robust frame, a tendency to run to weight, a broad forehead, deep-set eyes and a marked cleft in the chin. He was said to have an extraordinary feel for glass, which he valued for Christies, and to have been an expert in fine furniture, apparently able to assess the age, date and value of a friend’s dining table simply by running his hands along its underside during dinner. He must have been quite progressive, because he went to Paris in 1898 and returned with the first car in Ireland, an Orient Express. It was described in a book of the time as ‘petrol-driven, single-cylinder, leather belt, Brampton chains, 36-inch black wheels and costing £ 210 [sic]’. On my office wall, I have a picture of him sitting in it, outside his stable in Rathfriland in the last year of the nineteenth century. He was fascinated by automobiles and all that went with them, and predicted, in the face of some derision, that they would completely reshape the way society worked. His capacity to predict the future was not, however,flawless. He was once approached by a Belfast friend called John Boyd Dunlop, who told him of his new invention, the pneumatic tyre, and asked him if he would like to join with him in a manufacturing enterprise to produce them. My grandfather took one look at his friend’s new contraption, declared it would never work and declined.
    He is described in a book of Rathfriland reminiscences of the time as being widely read with a well stocked library and as someone who, being ‘forceful of personality, … influenced most of the cultural and social side of life in the district’. His funeral oration adds that, though a weak church-goer, he was a strong Mason. His portrait, in the full regalia of his Lodge (looking, to be honest, rather like a Sicilian