~ 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:
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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: |
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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:
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:
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