During my childhood in the 1960’s, my father, Peter, often promised to take me to England where his parents were born and where he spent all of his school years. On one occasion the ticket and passport were in my hungry little hands. But, somehow the trips always fell through. “Business,” he said, but I knew it had to be more than that.

My father’s ties to England were strained. He actually was born in Malaya to British expats, Robert Nixon and Dorothy Forster from the north of England. As was the tradition, he and his younger sister, Denise, were sent back to England at a very tender age to attend school – and to live with random relations during the summer months.

Being a child of Empire, he had no ‘clannish’ ties to England, and, yes, many sad associations with the country, abandonment for one. This likely accounted for his ambivalence about going back ‘home.’

I read somewhere that upper class British parents were cruel to their children just for this reason, to discourage attachments that would keep their children close to home when the Empire needed them. My father’s people definitely were not upper class, not nearly, but it amounted to the same thing.

It wasn’t until the mid 1990’s that my father finally decided to cross the pond – on his own this time. He stayed with his sister Denise in Hampshire and took drives north, one time to see ‘an old auntie’ – or so he said.

My father had passed away before I ever got to England. That was in 2006. I, too, stayed with my Aunt Denise in Hampshire. I had a lovely time. My aunt was a most loving and gracious host.

Only twice before had met my Aunt Denise, the first time when she surprised us in Montreal in 1978 (I had just graduated from university) and then in 2005, when she travelled to Canada to see my father in his final days.

Arriving at her Hampshire home, I noticed something rather touching on the side-board in her living room: a framed photograph taken of us at the summit of Mount Royal back in 1978.

After visiting Denise, I stayed in quaint Harrow-on-the-Hill because my cousin Peter, a former England rugby star, was a teacher at Harrow School. He took me to eat in the prof’s dining hall in that storied institution.

Just recently, in September of 2024, inspired by some YouTube videos, I took my second trip to England, a ‘genealogy’ trip to Helmsley, North Yorkshire where my grandfather, Robert, a lowly footman at Dunscombe Park in 1911, was born.

I had long wanted to visit Helmsley but my husband isn’t keen on driving in England. My son has no such qualms however so we went took the trip together.

After settling in our comfy air bnb in the center of town, we took the nearby path, part of the famous coast-to-coast Cleveland Way, six miles back and forth to Rievaulx village where my father’s great grandmother Ann Nesfield was born.

As I staggered up-and-down the daunting Fairy Stairway between Helmsley and the small village of Rievaulx, I mused to myself about all the ancestors who likely trod on the same steep, uneven steps. No doubt trysts and assignations happened on these stairs, tucked away as they are in the woods between the two places.

That long six mile walk did me in, though, so the next day I did not feel like visiting York, our planned destination. Instead, we drove to a nearby village Thornton Le Dale. The YouTube video claimed it was the prettiest village in North Yorkshire, so why not?

We walked around the picturesque place, bought some gifts at a crafts fair in the Town Hall, visited the duck pond as well as a thatched cottage that is famous in the UK, and then ate chili at a place called Baldersons Cafe in the center of town. There was a very classy gift shop attached – so we browsed.

Then we embarked on a shorter one mile hike, on a very narrow path past gurgling streams and through fields of of grazing sheep to an odd little place, Ellerburn, that consists of two or three delightful thatched cottages and one (rather smelly) church, St. Hilda’s, founded in the early Saxon era. Then we drove back to Helmsley, things getting a little tense in the town of Pickering because of a U-turn that got us trapped on a very narrow, very steep street.

Helmsley has long been the ‘market town’ in the area. Today, Helmsley is a pretty touristy kind of place with fancy hotels and even a Micheline starred resto. My father’s ancestors, I have learned, were farmers, labourers and preachers. I imagine boiled mutton and oatcakes were their mainstays, not “herb fed chicken with liver parfait” and the likes served up today in the local eateries.

My son and I had a great trip, despite the many rainfalls, first to Edinburgh, then to Helmsley and then on to Whitby on the coast whence came the Nesfields who, of course, were mostly fisherman and sailors.

But, the oddest of coincidences: Two weeks after I had returned home to Canada, my Ancestry app sent me a ‘photo hint’ for someone in my tree and I recognized the restaurant my son and I had just visited in Thornton-le-dale, Baldersons Cafe! (Had it shown up before our trip, it would have meant nothing to me.)

It seems Ethel Nixon, my great aunt, who I had hidden away in my Ancestry family tree, married a local man, PB Balderson in 1925, a fact I had forgotten. It took me only a few minutes of Internet research to discover that the restaurant I had visited by chance was a 100 year old family business!

I contacted the resto on Facebook and Ethel’s great granddaughter replied. She told there’s a picture of the family on a wall inside the restaurant. Too bad! We had dined in the outside garden area.

What a missed opportunity!

So, my great aunt Ethel Nixon, unlike her older brother Robert, the footman turned Malayan planter, stayed close to home marrying a local man in the bakery business. They moved around a bit, but eventually started up Baldersons Cafe in oh-so-pretty Thornton-le-Dale. Perhaps Ethel was the ‘old auntie’ whom my father saw during his England trip. She died in 1996.

The cafe (now also a bakery and gift shop) stayed in the family and has been managed down the decades by Ethel’s children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren. All this is a town considered, then and now, to be one of the prettiest places in the North of England.

Lucky Edith. Lucky descendants.

The ‘old auntie’ apparently explained that his father, Robert Nixon, humble servant, of Hemsley, North Yorkshire went to Malaya in 1912 because he got ‘the daughter of the local Earl’ pregnant. A close relation who contacted me on this blog claimed he was always told that Robert got a servant pregnant. No biggie there.

So either Robert was sent away by an angry and rich father or he REALLY didn’t want to marry a poor girl like himself and decided to get as far away as possible. How awful!

(I haven’t yet found an unknown relation on Ancestry.) It cost money to travel to Malaya, though – and the opportunity to go out there and possibly get rich was usually given to the sons of wealthy men.