~ Chapter Twenty-Nine ~
A New Life in Oxford

Shortly after Sybille’s death, Inez contracted tuberculosis.  Tara takes up her mother’s story from there:
She recalls then having to go live in a convalescent home.  She has the scars on her neck from several surgeries where they removed the tumours.  She says she recalls being there for 18 months before her Dad and Gloria came to get her ... they had come to visit her several times in the months she was there.  She went to live with them.  She said they lived outside of London in a smaller town ... can't recall the name of it.
            In fact, Sydney and Gloria were staying in a village near Oxford.  It was there that their daughter, Sandra Julia Hilary Quelch, known as Julie, was born in 1947.
            Inez went on to marry Charles Beach, an American serviceman, in Margate in 1953.  She and her growing family moved back and forth between various locations in the UK and USA.  The marriage didn’t last, however, and she remarried another American, Richard Murray, finally settling in the mid-1960’s in Amarillo, Texas, where she lives with a large family of children and grandchildren.

            Meantime, probably under considerable pressure from Inez, Sydney finally married Gloria in 1954.  This photograph of the couple is likely to have been taken a few years after that.

            These are Inez’s final memories of her father and stepmother, as related to Tara:
She recalls Gloria and her Dad both worked for the buses...she distributed tickets and took money...he was a driver.  She did get a few letters from Gloria (late 60's or early 70's), stating that she was no longer with her father.  She claimed that he liked younger women and had several girlfriends.  Mom never heard her Dad's side of the story.
            So the serial deserter abandoned his family once more.  It is believed that the woman he left Gloria for had the surname of Dean, which he is thought to have adopted.  Other than that, we know nothing of Sydney’s later whereabouts or life.

            The last words of his story here come from Ken Holmes, who has this memory of his Uncle Syd from around 1969; the memory serves, perhaps, to sum up Charlie Gisby’s fifth and not so fine son:
I saw him when my grandmother Elizabeth died, and he searched the house for her will, presumably because he was her favourite child.