Gertie Golden Girl Pt. 11

Chapter 11: BURNED

Gertie experiences joy and agony

After settling the Alverthorpe estate Gertie decided that she should concentrate on bringing up her young family, the twins being 10 years old and would soon be moving on to boarding schools and making the contacts that would carry them through into leading independent lives.

There had already been deaths in the family which had far reaching affects on the Winter family and their core business. Gertie felt she needed to take stock of her life and make her family her first priority.

Firstly, Johnnie's father Charles Jacob Winter, who was born at Standhope Manor way back in 1886, died at his beloved birthplace after a second stroke in 1950. This meant that Gertie's husband Johnnie became Lord Standhope and Gertie therefore became Lady Standhope. This also meant that Johnnie's mother Milly became the Dowager Lady Standhope, although everyone informally around the Manor called her Lady Milly and her daughter-in-law, who Milly regarded as a daughter in her own right, was Lady Gertie or simply Miss Gertie to the servants who had known her the longest.

Some six months after Johnnie Winter died in 1953, Gertie gave birth to twins, a boy and a girl. The male twin, the Honourable John (Jonty) Charles Jacob Daniel Henry Winter was declared Lord Standhope, even though his twin sister, the Honourable Mary Muriel Elizabeth Maud Winter, was born half an hour before him. The twins didn't even share a birthday in the same year as Mary was born before midnight on 31 December 1953 and Jonty was born a little after midnight on 1 January 1954.

Alas, within a few weeks of Johnnie's death in the summer of 1953, Johnnie's beloved grandmother Maudie slipped away in her sleep whilst under hospice care, without even being aware that her only grandson had pre-deceased her, nor did she even know that Gertie was expecting twins.

Gertie's very supportive mother-in-law Milly passed away age 82 in 1972, a couple of years before Joe Alverthorpe died and left his particular ticking time bomb of his secret family that had to be defused by Gertie and Standhope's loyal staff. Gertie really missed Milly's influence, advice and affection during this emotional turmoil and suddenly found herself at the head of the Winter family. So, over the next couple of years she groomed her successors at the bank so she could step back from the full time job of manager.

One of the first bank managers to take over from her was actually a Standhope. The male Standhope surname had certainly died out in 1865. when only one of the Lord's three daughters had a son. Jacob Weinstein was only 5 years old when he became a Lord of the realm.

Jacob Weinstein IV (who lived from 1860-1929) was born to Jacob Weinstein III (1830-1900) and Ellen "Nelly" Standhope (1840-1920) who had married in 1858 in London. It was Nelly's diamond engagement ring that was passed down to become Gertie's treasured engagement ring. The centrepiece of the ring was a half carat round cut diamond, 1/5th of an inch (5.1mm) in size that was one of the small bag of diamonds that the first Jacob Weinstein (c1770-1840) brought away from his sacked bank in Mainz in 1798, with his young family, wife Rebecca (c1775-1850) and children, Jacob Weinstein (1795-1872), Solomon Weinstein (1797-1833) and Miriam Weinstein (1802-88) who later became "Molly" Stowell.

In 1865 Charles, Earl of Standhope (1810-1865) died a comparatively young man of 55 and passed the Lord title to 5-year-old grandson Jacob Weinstein. Charles Standhope had already lost his youngest son Thomas Standhope (1842-64) in a ship lost at sea only the year before and his eldest son and heir Charles Standhope (using the honour title of Viscount or Lord Winter) (1836-1862) had died three years earlier during the Civil War in America, an innocent bystander killed when one of the conflicting armies burned his house down along with the rest of his town. By the time the news reached the Manor, it was unclear which army, Union or Confederate was responsible.

Charles Standhope had three daughters: the eldest daughter Elizabeth Standhope, (1838-1902), Ellen Standhope (1840-1920) and Mercy Standhope (1844-1927).

The second daughter Ellen Standhope married ship owner Lionel Evans and they had two daughters, Mary Evans (1863-1918) and Eliza Evans (1865-1928) and, after Lord Standhope died, she had two sons, Lionel Evans Junior (1867-1920) and Charles Evans (1873-1916).

Mercy Standhope married Jose Lopes in 1874 and relocated to Central America initially and later moved into South America; they had several male children, but by then the title of Lord had already passed to Jacob.

Although bearing the Weinstein surname, Jacob was the only male of that generation that could claim the titles, initially Viscount Winter from birth to the age of four after both his uncles died, then on the passing on his maternal grandfather, he became Lord Standhope.

However, there were later grandsons of the other two sisters who were waiting in line to make a claim should the Weinstein male line ever die out. One of these these potential claimants in the 1890s changed his legal name from Evans to Standhope, with the view of being in readiness to make a claim. He also ensured than his own sons worked in either the London branch of the bank or the Orient branch in Istanbul.

So it came to pass that a number of Standhope or Winter relatives became CEO of the bank between 1972 and the present time, a couple of Winters, a couple of Standhopes and even a Challis before Gillian Moorhouse became manager in 2016 and changed her name to Nicholls the following year after her marriage to Gertie's only grandson Jake.

Although Jonty failed to respond to all of Gertie's efforts to put him on the straight and narrow, by the time he was 22, in 1978, he dropped out of college at Cambridge and decided to spend time travelling the world as a poet, only self-published, using his Trust Fund which he had limited access to, basically just the interest without touching the core investments. Although the income was kept relatively small, designed to minimise temptations of excess, Jonty dropped out of society to the extent that he needed very little of the Trust's income to live on. Travelling in the Far East he experimented with drugs and eventually became a heroin addict.

Shortly before dropping out of college, Jonty had actually been caught red-handed paying a male prostitute for services rendered in a London park, a prostitute working with a society photographer in order to make money from victims. This was too big a scandal for even a family as powerful as the Standhope Winters to hush up completely. He later admitted to his mother Gertie that he was confused about his sexuality, that he thought he was more attracted to men than women and wanted to experiment. He visited a gay bar in London and was targeted and seduced.

"Jonty, dear," Gertie said to her son, "I'm sure that a short stay in a specialist hospital will help clear up your 'confusion', there's this wonderful clinic in Switzerland that can do wonders with electro therapy--"

"What, Mother?!" Jonty exploded, "you think that connecting my bollocks to the mains will be the perfect cure-all and I'd emerge from a shower of sparks ready to hunt for totty? We are not in Victorian times anymore. They did that sort of thing in Bedlam and Nazi concentration camps, for fuck's sake!"

"Language, Jonty, language," Gertie soothed, "all right, I spoke out of turn. I'm not an expert on sexuality matters at all and what just popped into my head was probably picked up from a silly woman's magazine article from the 1950s about curing queers. But, I'm sure we can get a modern doctor who specialises in this particular disorder--"

"I'm not suffering from a bloody disorder Mother, and nobody uses the term 'queers' any more!" Jonty interrupted with a sigh, "I'm just not interested in girls. There, I've said it. It's no secret any more. I'm not attracted to women at all, never have been, and I don't think I ever will be. All my life I've been under this pressure that the whole family expects me to produce an heir to bring another Lord-fucking-Standhope into the world and there's absolutely no ... no 'standing hope' of that happening unless I dupe some poor cow into marrying me and try not to vomit whilst attempting to put a bun in the poor bitch's oven!"

Jonty's twin, Mary was also in the room, and she put a hand on Jonty's arm, "Enough, Jonty, please calm down, Mum is just trying to get her head around what to do in this awkward and, embarrassing for her, situation."

"Honestly, Jonty," Gertie said, also trying to calm things down, thinking her son looked cornered and ready to run away, "if that is the way you feel then I really wouldn't want you to deceive some poor girl just to get an heir. At the end of the day, if you are clearer now about who you do or do not want a relationship with, then I will be happy to support you. We are not in the 1950s any more and you can just 'come out' and be done with it."

"Look, I still don't even know if I am gay or not," Jonty said, his voice still full of anger, "I only went to that gay bar in town to see if I fitted in as I don't seem to fit in anywhere else. And the place was full of cross-dressing weirdos wearing clown make-up. That's not me either. The only normal person, if you could call him normal, seemed pleasant enough and, after a few drinks, persuaded me to go off with him. It was so embarrassing. He must've recognised me from the society pages and it turned out he was from the press or something and they took photos of me with my trousers down and published them with my face exposed and just the naughty bits covered up."

"Were you aroused, Jont?" Mary giggled.

"Shut it, Mare," Jonty snapped, "You're only making it worse. Besides, I may have had my secret life that has been exposed to all and sundry, but what about your private life, eh?"

"Oh?" Gertie pricked up her ears, "What have you been getting up to, Mary?"

"Nothing, well, nothing as embarrassing as Jonty's being caught with his trousers down," Mary insisted, jutting her usual stubborn chin out, "my knickers have never been on the Daily Mail front page with an 'Oh my Lord! What a Banker!' headline."

"Well, if we are confessing to Mum what her children have been up to, maybe it's time you told her your secret about Colin, or are you just stringing Cole along because you don't think Mum will ever approve of him?"

"So who's this Colin character?" Gertie asked, "you haven't brought a boy to any of our parties during term breaks since ... well since you started at Cambridge. Have you been seeing this Colin boy for long?"

With Mary now in the spotlight, and hesitating replying, Jonty jumped into the pause--.

"She's been seeing him for at least four years, Mum, she's in as serious a relationship as you can get without being married, and she still hasn't brought him home to introduce to her mother. I think she's just keeping him around as a 'bit of rough' until she tries of him. Anyway, I've had enough of all this bullying, I'm going back to London." Then he stomped out of the room.

"Don't you do this, Jonty, drop a bombshell and then run away," Mary snapped after her disappearing twin, then turned to Gertie.

"Okay Mum, my boyfriend for the last four years is a man named Colin Nicholls, who is the older brother of Christina Nicholls, who was my roomie and best friend at Cambridge. I haven't brought him home yet because he's a British Army soldier and is often way training on some special training or other thing. Currently he's in the Arctic in Norway learning how to survive in those conditions, so I expect he'll be posted to somewhere in Africa for the next six months. At Easter when we got together here he was in Hong Kong on exercise with the Australian Army and last Christmas he was in Germany finishing off a two-year tour of duty there."

"So, is this a serious boyfriend or, as Jonty hints, a filler until you find someone else that you are more prepared to introduce to your mother?" Gertie asked.

"Oh, he is 'the one' as far as I'm concerned but, well, he's six years older than me, he's an enlisted soldier, a corporal, who joined up when he was 17 and he's nearing the end of his second seven-year tour and already agreed to sign on for another seven starting next year. Oh, and he's from the East End of London and--"

"Well, young lady, I'm from the East End of London, as is your Gramps and Nanny Thornton," Gertie pointed out, "so don't go turning up your nose against East Londoners."

"I'm not, Mum, really I'm not, but Gramps and Nanny have lived on the estate here since they retired and any rough edges they might have had once have had the edges smoothed off. Colin is still a little ... undiluted."

"Do you love him?" Gertie asked gently.

"I do, Mum. If he ever gets around to asking me to marry him, then I will whatever anyone says."

"Well, next time he comes ashore, bring him here or to the London flat and introduce us. I'm sure that Aunt Mildred would love to meet him, they could count each other's frostbite scars."

"They've already met, Mum. Aunt Milde told me to tie him down before he gets away."

"When was this?"

"January," Mary replied, "we were in a little pub in Portsmouth and she turned up out of the blue, paid for our drinks, bought a round for the bar and within twenty minutes had everyone up dancing 'knees up mother brown" after they cleared all the chairs and tables out of the way, before leading everyone in a conger around the block, then back to the pub for another round of drinks and a few raucous songs that I was shocked she knew all the words to. Colin thought she was absolutely great. Aunt Milde admitted to me that she thought Colin was the perfect choice for me. She invited us to her apartment in Paris on his next leave and we had a great week there in March, she knew all the places to go and everyone knew her so we were treated like royalty."

"I don't know," Gertie shook her head laughing, "your Aunt Milde spends half the year in another country and she still knows more about what's going on in my family than I do, and seems to be having more fun doing it than I do."

"That's because you are juggling all the family balls in the air, Mum, Aunt Milde picks and chooses where she concentrates her focus. How she knew about Colin and that we'd be in that pub at that time is a complete mystery to me."

***

Well, Jonty was sent into a foul-tempered rage when Gertie suggested that they get psychiatric treatment for him. In Gertie's defence, at the time it was still thought that homosexuality was a mental condition that could be "cured" by extreme psychiatric procedures. Having complained that his Mother just didn't get him at all and stormed out of the room and very soon after left the country. He got as far away from the influence of his family as he could get, never to return until after his death.

***

Towards the end of 1978 Gertie married for the third time, at the age of 48, to a younger husband, Jonathan Albury (1940-2014) who was sweet and honest, describing himself in terms of being a little useless in practical terms but supportive and faithful. He was originally apprenticed as an engineer, but created a comfortable and undemanding career for himself as a freelance writer of technical manuals, be it motor vehicles or manuals for repairing the many electrical and electronic devices and household aids that were coming onto the market from Far Eastern countries and desperately needed manuals written in understandable English.

Being tall and slim, Jonathan was in looks a little like Johnnie, but he wasn't at all athletic, nor did he have Johnnie's luxuriant head of dark hair, Jonathan had thinning sandy-coloured hair at the time of his marriage and was virtually bald by the time he was 50. Jonathan was lean and fit though, being a keen walker and hiker, and Gertie developed an enjoyment of walking as a means of keeping herself fit by worthwhile exercise as well as enjoying fresh air at weekends after spending five days and nights in London.

The Alburys had long been friends of the Standhopes and then the Weinsteins, as both families were landowners in the Midlands during Victoria's reign. Whilst the Weinsteins were involved in banking rather than farming, the Alburys were more mechanically minded and one of the sons set up a small bicycle factory in the Midlands in the 1880s. Eventually they introduced motor bicycles to their range in the early 1900s and by the start of the First World War were producing engines for military vehicles that were starting to replace the horses that had served the Army so well until that terrible war took such a toll on men and horses. After that war the Alburys concentrated on making larger engines for aircraft as well as powering delivery trucks, they even built a limited amount of workhorse diesel-electric engines for shunting engines around railroad yards, most of which were exported to Europe and Asia. Naturally, the Alburys needed capital for these ventures and they used the Standhope Winter bank for launching new projects and for loans.

The Alburys, therefore, as old friends, were often invited to celebrations at the Manor, especially as Charles and Milly Winter so enjoyed parties and dancing. They were invited because of the long-standing friendship of earlier generations. Although most of the later Alburys were quite dull and uninteresting they were still invited out of a sense of duty. And the Alburys weren't all bad, Jonathan Albury was one of the more interesting ones.

Jonathan was always cheerful and upbeat, quick-written and full of interesting stories, many of them quite self-deprecating. Although Gertie wasn't actually looking for romance, she had moved back to the London house by then and Jonathan was renting a flat in one of Gertie's residences. Once the children were settled in schools, Gertie decided to downsize, rented out the London house and moved into one of the larger flats in the same building as Jonathan and they kept bumping into one another.

He was good company, made Gertie laugh, so they started socialising together more and once thing led to another. Jonathan turned out to be a gentle lover and a caring person who comforted her during the series of tragedies that befell her. Once they became lovers, long before they decided to marry (Jonathan left that particular task of "asking the question" up to Gertie, as she was a Lady, and he was what he self-deprecatingly called a "common or garden schmuck, as common as muck". He felt that he could not ask for a Lady's hand and, he said, he was happy simply being her lover. Once she asked him and he accepted, he then confessed to be delirious with joy when Gertie decided she wanted their relationship to be permanent.

Gertie retained the Lady Standhope title, because her son, Jonty, Lord Standhope, never married, she was even able to get special dispensation from Her Majesty the Queen to retain the title after her marriage, so she became Mrs Gertrude Elizabeth Albury, Lady Standhope.

Gertie's daughter Mary didn't go wild or AWOL like her twin, but she did open up about going out with the older brother of a girl she was best friends with at Cambridge University, once Jonty had announced that Mary was not the innocent young woman her mother thought she was. That man was a professional soldier, by the name of Colin Nicholls. He was an active man, indulging in sport and adventure, who loved the discipline and adventure of Army life. They courted for four or five years before Colin, by now a Sergeant, was persuaded by Mary to ask Lady Gertie Standhope for permission to marry her daughter, rather than ask her step-father Jonathan. He did, and so Colin Nicholls was absorbed into the Standhope Winter family.

By the time Colin Nicholls married Mary he was a Staff Sergeant but when Mary fell pregnant in 1984, he gave up his beloved Army career and, being too proud to join the family bank where he felt he'd be a fish out of water, he set up in business providing an office cleaning service in the "Square Mile", the City of London which was the heart of the banking and insurance world. He was happily getting up long before the crack of dawn and driving a minibus to collect his cleaning staff from their homes as early as 4am and get them back home again in time to get their children off to school. By this way he managed to employ staff that were reliable, fast and good at their jobs, grateful that the hassle of getting into work and back home with such ease and safety that they were keen and effective workers. This meant that Nicholls' firm earned a great reputation, were able to charge a slightly higher premium rate and therefore pay the staff more for their loyalty and reliability. Very quickly the business grew, so he employed more cleaners and more drivers, enough to start a mini-cab service controlled by radio.

Colin and Mary were clearly both head over heels in love, and Colin brought fresh energy into the family and Gertie soon grew to love him as a son. Jonathan got on well with Colin as all four adults shared the love of hiking and camping outdoors. Colin was so down to earth, relaxed in any kind of company, with a wicked sense of humour. The whole family were all in love with Colin, and he was so full of love for his wife Mary, their son Jake and life in general. He was the perfect husband for Mary. Their son Jake was named Jacob as a second name, because almost every male in the Winter family (even some of the girls) was given Jacob somewhere in their forenames in homage to their heritage. Jake's first name John was not named after his mother's twin, Jonathan or her mother's third husband, but after Colin's late father, John Nicholls.

Gertie found it hard calling her grandson by his first name, John, after the tragic loss of her first husband and, more recently, her own son Jonty's estrangement to her. So she started calling her only grandson "Jake", even while holding him only a couple of hours old. Colin was happy to go along with the nickname, so John Jacob Nicholls became known in the family as Jake.

So what happened four years later in 1989 was a blow to the family and to Gertie in particular.

There was a children's party at Standhope Manor, mostly for the children and grandchildren of the staff as well as family. It was a fine day and everyone was outside on the extensive well-manicured lawns and around the garden walkways. Somehow four-year-old Jake fell into one of the many ornamental ponds. He was upset at falling in the pond and was inconsolable.

Jake was bathed and dried off by his mother, but Mary had brought no change of clothes for him other than a spare change of underpants. At this time they lived in a lovely apartment in New Timber Lane close to the bank where Mary was a board member alongside Gertie while also working as bookkeeper to her husband's office cleaning business. Some of the Manor staff managed to rustle up whatever sleepwear that vaguely fitted him to make him comfortable and, with the party over by late afternoon, Colin loaded up the car and set out for London, knowing he had a 4am start in the morning.

They didn't get very far down the minor roads leading to the motorway before they were involved in an accident that forced their vehicle off the road and down a steep embankment. The inquest into the accident found that a box van had jumped a red light and clipped Colin's car, flipped it over the safety barrier and off the carriageway. Mary and Colin in the front of the car were crushed against a concrete fence, the fuel tank was ruptured and the spilled fuel dripped onto the hot engine and exploded into flames.

Although Jake was hanging from the child seat he was strapped into at the back of the upside down vehicle, he was asleep throughout the initial impact and knocked unconscious, so he has little if any memory of the accident.

The flames ran from the lowest point at the front of the car, along the outside of the vehicle to the open fuel tank and, although the actual flames never reached the boy, the heat was tremendous inside the car and the synthetic fibres he wore began to smoulder, soften and melt against his skin where it wasn't protected by the natural fibres of his cotton underpants, but his upper torso and thighs were particularly badly affected where the material was at its tightest around his young body.

With no fire hydrant nearby, the fire brigade used what water they had in the bowser and a number of brave firemen were able to open the rear doors with the 'jaws of life' to rescue Jake under the streams of the hoses, but there was nothing they could do for the parents in the front seat, except recover the bodies after the flames had been fully damped down. Meanwhile Jake was taken to the nearest accident and emergency department at a local hospital.

The hospital kept Jake sedated for many hours while they cut away all the melted fibres and started the repair work. He was a mess, the poor little soul, but they had the best plastic surgeon that could possibly be found for him, Doctor Michael Rahn, later knighted for his valuable reconstructive surgery work over many years, Sir Michael Rahn, who Gertie soon learned to count as a dear family friend.

While Gertie fretted anxiously at the hospital, Jonathan offered to drive down to London and try to pick up Colin's morning duties. Jonathan and Colin had often conversed about Colin's growing businesses and his plans for the future and he knew where Colin's office was located as he has been there once before for a look around, but he didn't know if anyone other than Colin was scheduled to even be there at 4 in the morning or who still actually dealt with the cleaners' early morning logistics.

"Gert, old love," Jonathan said, "I feel pretty damn useless just sitting in the hospital, you have Evie here to support you and Colin's business is now poor Jake's business. Let me get down there and break the news to the staff and see what I can do to help keep the show on the road. I'll ring the Manor when I get there and they can get a message to you."

Gertie agreed to let him go.

"But drive carefully, Hon," she insisted.

***

Jonathan had always preferred to drive himself and Gertie to the Manor in his own two-seater sports car, so in the middle of the night using the motorways he managed the 150 mile journey in just over 150 minutes, arriving at Colin's East End of London offices just after 4 am and was relieved to see that the lights were on in the building and several cabs outside the office were coming and going ferrying staff out to their various work-places.

It wasn't easy breaking the news of the untimely deaths of the company proprietors, especially as many of the staff were Nicholls family members or ex-Army colleagues of Colin. The general consensus was that as everyone's livelihood depended on the company and that poor Jake, if he survived his injuries was now the owner, they wanted to keep the company going. Colin had been a hand-on manger, who turned up for work every day; Mary as his bookkeeper worked at least two or three days a week and she usually brought Jake with her, so of course everyone knew the little boy and sympathised over his loss.

Now Gertie was a board member of the Standhope Winter Bank and when she married Jonathan Albury some six or seven years earlier, she asked him if he wanted a seat on the bank's board but he declined. However, as soon as the news came through of the death of Colin and Mary and the plight of poor Jake, while Gertie concentrated on purely caring for Jake, Jonathan had wanted to check out Colin's business to ensure it could function without its leader.

Being a well-organised Army sergeant, Colin had installed confident supervisors who were able to cover the cleaning jobs but in truth the remaining management lacked direction. With Gertie's agreement, Jonathan stepped up to manage the company to keep it going and keep everyone employed and moving forward, while implementing some of the expansion plans that Colin had envisaged and had already arranged finance for.

Jonathan managed the Nicholls business until Jake joined the company full-time in 2003 wanting to learn the business from the bottom up before he took over his late father's businesses in 2008 and Jonathan could finally retire.

***

In 1990, Gertie's uncle-in-law who had run the Standhope Winter Bank for several years, died and his son Gerald Standhope took over over the business, for over twenty years before Gillian Moorhouse took over as CEO.

In 1993 Jonty died in Thailand, age just 42, of AIDS having wasted away and was a pitiful sight when he was brought back to be buried in England within the family vault at Standhope. By this time Jonty had become a sad and lonely drug addict.

John Jacob Nicholls therefore inherited the title of Lord Standhope at the age of 8. For many years Jonty had drunk to excess, took drugs and had lost his way. However estranged he was from his mother and the rest of the family, he had maintained some contact with his twin sister. Losing his twin Mary, who was the only person who apparently understood him and was his only family contact, finished him off and he died only four years after his twin died in that awful motor accident.

Jake's childhood revolved very much around his grandmother Gertie. They moved to the London house so they could be near to the hospital where Dr Michael Rahn treated the damage to his skin and undertook regular operations moving skin from undamaged parts to where it could cover the worst parts. As Jonathan worked for the Nicholls family and Jake was home schooled in the main, Jake had many opportunities to get to know many of the staff and Jonathan encouraged him to learn of the services areas that the company had moved into.

The Nicholls company had started with office cleaning, specialising in companies where security was important, such as banks and government institutions. Then set up their own radio-controlled mini-cab company, which included some black cabs also on the radio network, so the black cabs were able to be kept constantly working though both casual hailing as well as summoned by radio. Added to this were radio controlled motorbikes who couriered documents around the City of London. Then they added Security services and Reception staff to the mix of services offered, again concentrating on security-conscious companies. By the time Jake joined the company they also had established printing and communications departments in many banks, particularly international banks, looking after telexes, facsimile machines, producing reports and archiving data securely on Winchester discs and on microfiche.

Nicholls' company, rebranded as SWN Services, also went into computing, writing routines originally to translate data between various operating systems, providing international computer connections in the days before the internet was established and then set up their own servers providing secure backup systems with solid firewalls. Some of the earlier back-up systems that banks were using were highly inefficient, which often let the banks down when needing to recall files, but Nicholls' had servers which stored everything without suspect encryption, ensuring the integrity of the archives.

Eventually, when Jake was 18, he decided he didn't need a college degree for a career, he already had a successful business that he had a 100% stake in, that he was also interested in and enjoyed being involved on a day-by-day basis.

He told Gertie that he had had enough of all the operations, accepting that he would never be "normal", his head and face was fine, except for a slightly wonky ear, his wrists, hands, feet, calves and face were largely unaffected and, so long as he wore long-sleeved shirts and trousers, he looked normal enough for everyday life. So he moved back to his parent's moth-balled apartment, which he completely refurbished. As tenants in his building moved on, he didn't bother to replace them with new tenants, so within a few years there was only one other tenant, an old lady who had lived there since the late 1940s, who was still able to tell stories of his parents, of which he had very few memories of his own.

Gertie missed the regular daily contact she had with Jake, although she insisted that they stay at the Manor every weekend as a family.

As all the family and friends around her grew older, Gertie started to lose some of the people she had once relied on for support and advice for so long. Her father Dan was a lifelong-smoker who cleaned steam trains all his life, so it wasn't too surprising that he died at the age of 75 in 1978. Her mother Dotty lived in a small cottage on the Manor estate in her last eighteen years and passed away in 1995. What was surprising was that the younger of her two brothers died first, Eric Thornton died in 1997 age 72. Gertie's oldest brother Dan junior was 80 when he died in 2003.

Gertie sadly lost her best friend "Evie", Eveline Winter-Gervaise, Lady Dorset, in 2010. Mildred Marina Winter, who was born at Standhope, died there at the grand old age of 104, that was quite an adventure for one of the planet's great explorers.

Jonathan Albury died peacefully in 2014 at the Manor after a short illness. The left a gap in Gertie's life which only her grandson Jake could fill. She hoped that Jake would find someone who would care for him as he deserved but all her efforts to get him to engage with likely young ladies came to naught. Some of these potential matches she pushed his way at social gatherings or on the public hikes she organised and ensured that Jake accompanied her on. However, the boy seemed impervious to the charms of all the eligible young ladies of Gertie's acquaintance.

And Jake had little interest in accompanying his grandmother to the theatre and had even less enthusiasm in re-visiting the hospital that held such bad memories for him.

Gertie sadly came to accept that the long line of Standhopes, Weinsteins, Winters and Nicholls would end with Jake and the title would eventually pass onto a cousin or die out completely.

to be continued