Relative value

Every family has a few skeletons in the closet and mine is no exception, madness for example runs rife on my fathers side of the family though we don't talk about that. On my mothers side it's tragedy. This is polite speak for all manner of unfortunate ends; suicide, electrocution, deportation and imprisonment to name but a few, and we talk even less about those.

Many of the past generations of Robinson's had a look of madness about them, this one's tie pin hints at a musical bent. 

I am the result of a mixing of two of the great north Antrim Protestant families, the Robinson's and the Carlisle's. Like many Irish families we've been spread to the far flung corners of the earth. My mother used to say that the Robinson's spread faster than fleas and my father would whimsically retort that if the Robinson's were like fleas then the Carlisle's where like the black death.

The Carlisle's were an altogether better looking bunch but no less eccentric. This is my great uncle and namesake Robert Carlisle in about 1902 aged 10.    

My mothers side of the family tree were certainly the more glamorous of the two. Old Irish and before that Scottish with a thousand year old history. The Carlisle's were in Ireland eight hundred years before the Robinson's though my mothers generation saw the last of them in Ireland.

My Mother (middle) and her two sisters Nancy (right) and Jane (left) who died of cancer some years ago.

What remains of them now is down to my grandfathers brothers, John, Tom, William, Jim and Robert Carlisle (whom I'm named after) all of whom left Ireland before world war one. My great uncle William moved to America, married and had at least one daughter, Mary, who at 99, is still alive.

between 1930 and 1943 Mary Carlisle acted in at least 67 movies

Mary, my first cousin once removed, and a glamorous Carlisle if ever there was one, is one of only two surviving members of WAMPAS Baby Stars of 1932 she made a string of movies in the 30's and 40's and enjoyed a decade of stardom before retiring from the screen to work for Elizabeth Arden, managing the famous Beverly Hills salon for years. She was given a star on the Hollywood Walk Of Fame in Feb 1960.

Mary Carlisle top billed in the 1933 smash hit "girl of my dreams" titled here for the American market. Her co-star Buster Crabbe would go on to find fame in the role of Tarzan and later as Flash Gordon.

A couple of dozen bit parts (she played a honeymooner alongside Garbo and  Joan Crawford in Grand Hotel)  lead to a handful of staring roles and although cast alongside some of the leading actors of the day Mary would remain a star of the B movie. She worked with the legendary Cecil B. DeMille and made three movies with Bing Crosby, often cast as the pretty blonde she would become the original Hollywood dumb blonde.

In the heydays of Hollywood, collecting postcards of the stars was a popular pastime, here is my favourite of the hundred or so produced of Mary. Its a copy of the picture used by studios to promote her. 

These days Mary lives in almost total seclusion in Santa Monica and hasn't been seen in public in twenty years; something which is much more a Robinson trait than that of a Carlisle.

Sleeping on the edge of history

My sister has a small piece of history in her house. Mounted on a wooden plinth, the size of a matchbox (remember matches?) sits a concrete example of the power of freedom. A prized possession; she and I were recently discussing how she came to have it. It was 22 years ago on November 9th 1989 that the Berlin wall came down. At the time I was 23 years old, in love and in Berlin.

Earlier that summer I had been living in a student house in Portrush on the north coast of Northern Ireland. I was the only boy in a house with eight girls. As a bit of a science geek I didn't really notice the girls much beyond the mess and general lack of bathroom facilities.

Having completed my first degree I was contemplating taking time out before embarking on a masters. I recall the landlord, James, an archetypal Northern Irish protestant Christian; all hard work and money but a decent sort, popping in to ask me if I'd show a German girl around who was thinking about taking a room over the summer. Ever the obliger I agreed though I was thinking that another girl was hardly what the house needed.

Jenny the German as she became known was old beyond her years and had a melancholic air about her that I instantly liked. I'd frequently find her brooding in the living room, she often found the other girls to be foolish and generally avoided them. She was amazed at how little they knew about life and I was amazed at how much she knew.

The daughter of a high ranking German army officer, her mother a Russian dancer Jenny had come to Ireland because she wanted to be somewhere as cold and as grey as she felt inside. She'd picked well. Her parents had separated, unusual at that time, at least where I came from, and her mother had recently introduced Jenny to her new boyfriend Peter. It was too much for Jenny and she fled to Ireland, to Portrush, to my house.

I think the immaturity of the girls in the house drove her to strike up an awkward friendship with me and free from lectures and lab classes I found myself spending more and more time with the enigmatic German. I'd love to tell you that I swept her off her feet all debonaire, suave and charming but nothing could be further from the truth. Ours was a slow cooker love affair driven by circumstance, longing, boredom, loneliness and need. I was lost between the anticlimax of finishing my degree and not knowing what to do next and Jenny, well she was just lost. Even when she was laughing she retained an air of sadness. I loved her for it, I longed to understand and ease her pain and she loved me for trying.

By the end of that summer we'd found an uneasy comfort in each other. There were lots of long silences, walks on the beach, staring at the cold north sea. Nights spent in Jenny's room, Simple Minds; Belfast Child seemed to be on constant loop and Jenny smelling like orange blossom.

September came and summer ended and along with it Jenny ended her time in Ireland. We could feel it coming, in those last days, like the poison of a snake bite, ending us. We spoke in solemn hushed tones. "I'll come to you in Berlin" "yes do, you should"



And that is how I came to be in a flat on Summerstrasse two months later in November 89. Sadly those two months might as well have been two decades, we had changed, everything had changed and the world around us was changing. The claustrophobic isolation of the north coast that Jenny had felt so strongly was gone and so was her need to run away. Her mothers relationship with boyfriend Peter had become the norm, Jenny liked him, so did I.  I learnt also that there had been another relationship that Jenny had ran away from.







Frank, she told me, was the opposite of everything I was. He was no good for her, but she loved him, what could she do. I was oddly relieved; to be released from the weight of Jenny's sadness was some small consolation. She went to work, I walked in the parks, we dined with her mother, with Peter, alone. Alone in the flat we talked about the girls from the student house, the beach, James the landlord, the relentless cold but we would never listen to Belfast Child again. We wandered the city and I fell in love, this time with Berlin. Jenny seemed happy.

In the days that followed we created something new, in her flat at night when it was her and I. We tore down our sad old world and built a new one, full of laughter, full of trust, full of love. "Will you hold me?" "Always" I said and I meant it. Jenny and I had found our rightful place in the world; friendship.

Outside the city was erupting, our normally quiet street was a constant blare of car horns. People were shouting, yelling, dancing. Jenny's mother was on the phone, "The wall is broken, the wall is broken" Jenny cried. I asked her "Do you want to go; to the wall, to see what's happening?" "Tomorrow, we can see it all tomorrow. Tonight is your last night here and I don't want to spoil it, let's go to bed." I have no regrets, sleeping as I did on the edge of history. Jenny and I were rarely together again after that but even after all these years every time I hear Belfast Child or smell the soft orange scent of calendula oil I think of Jenny the German and the broken wall.

Give a kid a book

Having long ago run out of book shelf space I now have several stacks of books piled about my Kemp Town flat and I am fast running out of floor space. What started as pondering on where the latest additions to my burgeoning collection could possibly go, ended upon recollection of my first ever book.

My mother assures me that the book in question was a red, leather bound, revised standard version of the bible given to me as a gift from a great aunt who was known more for her spirit than her spirituality. A quick check and wouldn't you know it I still have that bible in my possession and I have to say for something that I've had for forty years it looks remarkably unread. 

My mothers memory alas is filled with unrealised hope and promise for the first book I can recall as being mine was not the bible but a large, green, canvas backed, hardback, encyclopaedia of animals given to me by my father. It was to be the beginning of a life long love affair with science. 


I devoured the book, memorised it, quoted from it with annoying frequency and to this day know more about the habitat, distribution and breeding habits of everything from the Kakapo to the Ocelot than I do about almost anything else including the bible. 

So how come that great green font of knowledge is gone and the red leather bible remains? Well I guess I like the smell of leather and that particular story is told and unchanged whereas the encyclopaedias keep having to be replaced as our understanding evolves