Lorna's father's driving

Lorna wasn’t the only member of her family to keep a diary. This is an extract from that of her Aunt May (Uncle Percy L’s wife, and mother of Lorna's Cousin Diana). It covers a short period that started on this date almost 90 years ago. We have photographed it from one of the family annuals.

The main topic of this extract is the terrifying car journey from Sheffield to Gloucester that Aunt May took with Lorna’s father Albert on Saturday 22nd August 1931. Uncle Percy, Aunt May and Diana were returning home to Gloucester from a holiday in Scarborough. Lorna's father Albert was heading from the family house in Sheffield to Bristol (presumably to Lorna's paternal grandparents' house), and then on to Cornwall for summer ‘sea frolicking’ with the clan.

It would appear that volunteering to be a passenger with Albert at the wheel was known to be a very risky decision: ‘… we discussed at length who should go by car and finally decided - as it was only a small car - that Percy and Diana should go by train, and that I with all our baggage should go with Albert….. I felt that if anyone was going to die, it had better be me’.

The whole piece is very wittily written, and also gives some further insight into Lorna’s family. A couple of choice lines read:

‘It is very curious how all [Percy’s] brothers spend all their holidays messing about in small boats, getting wet and uncomfortable. They seem to think that holidays and boats are the same thing.’

‘How a nice quiet girl like Topsie can have endured twenty years being racketted about [by that madman Albert] beats comprehension.’