My sister Judith was born September 4, 1943 at the Oakwood Nursing Home in Northampton. We grew up together with Mum and Dad in the house at 62 Friars Avenue until we both left home in the early 1960s.
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Judith, after some experimenting with office work in Northampton and London, went to a teacher-training college in Saffron Walden, Essex, graduating in 1966. She then went abroad for a year of "Voluntary Service Overseas" — the British equivalent of the Peace Corps. Her posting was to Sarawak, on the northern shore of the island of Borneo in the East Indies. There she met an American, Allan Dailey, who actually was in the Peace Corps. Their daughter Tessa was born in September 1967 — Judith back home in England by now — and they married some time soon afterwards.
Allan and Judith first went to live in the U.S.A. — in Morristown, New Jersey for some time, and also other places. Then — I have no idea of the exact dates here — they went back to England and lived in a pleasant terraced house in Ivy Road, Northampton. They were there in 1973, when I returned to England from my first spell in the Far East.
They then decided that Hawaii was the place, and in summer 1974 came back to the States on their way there. By that time I was living in Elmsford, New York, and I chauffered them round to visit friends in Morristown and New York City. They then passed on to Hawaii.
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Hawaii was not a success, however, and in fact broke up the marriage. Judith returned to England with Tessa in early January 1975, Tessa 7½ years old. I don't know the subsequent trajectory of Allan to any precision. He died November 2023 in New Mexico after a spell of poor health.
Judith lived with Mum and Dad for a time, then in a rented apartment in Northampton, working as a schoolteacher the whole time. In August 1976 she married Philip Moore, an auto and truck mechanic, and went to live in a council house at Bellinge, one of the new estates on the east side of the town. Their son Marcus was born January 31, 1977. The photograph above, of Judith with our mother, was taken at Marcus's christening party in 1978.
Judith continued to work as a schoolteacher until taking early retirement in 1998. The family — Philip, Judith, Tessa and Marcus — moved from the council house in Bellinge to a larger house nearby in February 1977. Around 1980 — I am not very clear on dates here — they bought a house of their own in Acre Lane, in the Spring Park estate, north Northampton. Later still — mid-1980s? — they bought a big old terraced house in Birchfield Road, Northampton; then, in the early 1990s, when Tessa had left home, they moved to a smaller house in nearby Broadway. Philip and Judith lived at the Broadway house until March 2016, when they moved to a bungalow in Westone, which an eastern (of course!) suburb of Northampton.
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Judith's daughter Tessa Dailey married a fellow named Mark Logan round about 1987. They went to live in a house in the village of Geddington, near Northampton. The marriage failed, however, and Tessa got a divorce.
She went to work for the National Theatre in London as a dresser. There she met Paul McLeish, a lighting engineer employed by the National, and they married in the mid-1990s. They have four children: a girl Kesta (born January 1996) and three boys, Tully (born August 1997), Caden (born June 24, 2000) and Wolfgang Edward Allan (born November 16, 2003). Somewhere among all that child-raising Tessa found time to train and qualify as a midwife.
The news of the McLeish family at Christmas 2021 is:
- Tessa: Midwifery: "Whizzing round south London catching babies."
- Paul: Lighting technician for the Westminster School Drama Department.
- Kesta: Teaching at a south London primary school.
- Tully: Joined the Metropolitan Police at the beginning of 2021, graduated from training in June, now a cop in the West
End.
- Caden: A university student in central London.
- Wolfgang: In his final year at secondary school preparing for A-level exams.
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Judith's son Marcus Moore took a degree in Civil Engineering at the University of Plymouth in England. He now makes a living in that line of work. He has acknowledged paternity of a son, Jack Philip Kelly, born June 15, 2003.
On March 29, 2008, at Sedgebrook Hall outside Northampton, Marcus married a young lady named Nicola Clarke. There are some photographs of the event here. I wrote it up for a National Review column here. The couple's first child, James Michael, was born around 10:40pm local time on Saturday, January 9, 2010. James Michael was my father's eleventh great-grandchild, my mother's sixth.