A new woman

Diana Thomas’s transgender diary

My paternal grandmother was born Violet Quicke. I was always told that her family, whose chief claim to fame these days is as makers of excellent cheddar cheese, had lived on the same estate at Newton St Cyres, near Exeter, since before the Norman Conquest.

Whether or not that is actually the case, i couldn’ t say. but they certainly had been stalwarts of Devon society for a very long time, and Grandma had a strong sense of her own genealogy.

Dad was christened David Churchill because Grandma was distantly related to the Churchill family, Winston included. And I still have Penrose as my third name after another of Grandma’s relatives, the Rev Charles Penrose Quicke, who married an American called Anna Mary Minturn.

Anna’s father, Robert Bowne Minturn, was so wealthy that he donated some land he owned in Manhattan to the city of New York… to create Central Park. One of Anna’s nieces married into a smart Massachusetts family called the Sedgwicks. That is why Dad always referred to Edie Sedgwick, the tragic 1960s beauty who was certainly one of Andy Warhol’s muses and possibly one of Bob Dylan’s, as Cousin Edie.

But I digress… Among Grandma’s less exotic Devonian relatives were a couple called the Acland-troytes, who owned an estate near Tiverton called Huntsham Court. In the late 1940s, when my grandparents were still in Argentina, but he was already at boarding school in England, Dad used to stay at Huntsham during his school holidays. He rememit bered as a magical time. The rationing that was, if anything, even tougher immediately after the Second World War than durlittle ing it, meant on a country estate that could supply all its own meat, eggs, milk and vegetables.

The house, of course, had stables. Having grown up around horses in Argentina, where my grandfather, though just a junior manager in a Buenos Aires bank, could run a string of polo ponies, Dad plunged into a world of hunting and Pony

Clubbing, with all the balls, parties and teenage romances that went with that.

These days, Huntsham Court is run as a venue for hire: weddings, corporate jollies, you name it. So one day, when this corona hell has run its course, and if there is any money at all left in the family kitty, we Thomas kids may just hire it for the weekend and invite a horde of friends and relations. There’ll be a memorial service for Dad at the little church near the entrance to the grounds. We’ll have a dinner and a party, and remember our father in style.

But for now, all we are allowed is a pitiful, Eleanor Rigby cremation, with just my sister Harriet and I to bid Dad farewell, and a few other people watching online. How do you prepare for such a grim event?

Dad had left instructions for his funeral. His music choices included Guide Me O Thou Great Redeemer and When the Saints Go Marching In .But it’s not much of a parade with only two marchers. And the rousing chorus of ‘Bread of heaven…’ sounds nothing like Dad’s beloved Welsh rugby crowds when it’s only a duet.

He wanted all the women in his life to come dressed in black, with veils, like Mafia wives at the passing of a don. Who was to know that his wife would be locked in a care home, her brilliant mind destroyed by dementia, and his son would be one of those women?

I confess, I don’t possess a black veil, nor a little black pillbox hat to hang it from. But being a compulsive shopper, I do have three suitably chic, yet restrained black dresses to choose from. And my great big Tom Ford sunglasses just scream, ‘Jackie O in mourning.’

But part of me wonders whether I shouldn’t go as David, just this one last time. It’s not that I am ashamed of who I now am, nor that Dad in any way disapproved. Neither of those things is true.

But I was born his son. I listed myself in the newspaper announcements of his death as David, because that is how my parents christened me, and how I was still named when Dad went into hospital.

It’s only a little thing, a trifling insignificance in the great scheme. But I just want to do my old man justice.

Dad wanted all the women in his life to come to his funeral dressed in black, with veils, like Mafia wives at the passing of a don