Bunty’s Knife

What's in a name?

Amongst our kitchen cutlery is a small fruit knife with a wooden handle. The name Bunty is carved into it. It rarely comes into use, but as I washed it up one day last week and carefully put it back in the drawer, I wondered about Bunty, who would have been my mother-in-law if Bob and I had met earlier in life.

Bob has said that she would have liked me, and that we were alike in some ways. She died long before Bob and I met, and I only knew Bob's father in the last year of his life when he had dementia. The two had divorced many years before, when Bob was in his late teens, after a seemingly unhappy marriage. From what I can piece together, the family moved house frequently in an effort to make the marriage work in different towns and in different countries. Sometimes they lived apart, separated by continents. In the end it just didn't work and they separated for good.

Bunty was born Margaret Ada. I don't know if Bunty is one of those strange derivations of Margaret, like Peggy, or a nickname that stuck. I've been thinking about names, how they're given, how they're spelled, how spelling can change over time, how migrants can lose their name in different countries, recorded wrongly at immigration, or names that others find difficult to spell or pronounce.

Our neighbours are Romanian, and when I first spoke to them over the garden wall, I was introduced to Silviu. He said that I could call him Silvio, as he is known at work. I didn't think Silviu was too difficult to pronounce, so that's what I call him. It is his proper name after all. Last summer, Silviu's brother came over, and has now joined the household permanently. I only know him as John, which is not his true name. He speaks very little English, so we tend to wave in passing, and that's it. We had a comical exchange at Christmas, as I stepped outside to check how our window decorations looked, to find John enjoying a smoke in his front garden. I pointed at the window, he grinned and nodded his approval. Thumbs-ups all round.

Checking the proofs of my new book, Learning to be Irish, I noticed different spellings of the same names, and rather than standardise them throughout, I added a note to the book, saying that I knew some of my Irish relatives by different spellings of their names. Even official documents differ. I had always known my mother as Mary Catherine but her birth certificate has her as Mary Kate. On her marriage certificate, she is recorded as Mary Catherine. I guess the checking of documents was not as stringent in 1955 as it is today. I don't think my mum even had a copy of her birth certificate until she began to travel home to Ireland by air in the 1980s. You could travel freely between the Republic of Ireland and England by ferry without documentation.

As for myself, I discovered belatedly that my middle name is recorded as Christine on my birth certificate, having believed it was Christina. I now have Christine on all official documents. I used to go by Cookie as a child, but this nickname is lost now, along with the few people who called me by that name. It exists only on old birthday and Christmas cards, kept as mementoes.

As for Bunty, I have seen the photo albums she compiled and annotated. I remember one comment particularly: ‘Ken was in a bad mood that day.’ I, too, have been assembling albums using photo corners, on pages that allow me to write who the people are, how I knew them, when and where the photos were taken. I believe that Bunty kept a diary, much like the journals and notebooks I have filled over the years. Bunty and I are alike in those respects. I wonder if we would have got on, if she would have approved of me as her son’s second wife, if I would have had an ally in Bunty.

This post is scheduled to go out while I am on holiday. On my return, I shall be telling you more about my new book, Learning to be Irish, and shall have copies to send out for UK orders. You can order the book from me, and find out how to order it from other outlets, including outside the UK, here.

Details of the launch, at Sun Pier House, Chatham on 19 July, are here.