This site is a tribute to June Murrin. She is much loved and will always be remembered.
Like all of our lives, Mum’s went through distinct stages, five in all.
In her case, each mostly was entwined with the geopolitical events of their time.
For the Martins and ultimately Mum, WW1 was tumultuous with grandma losing her father and two brothers, and seeing her husband go off to fight in Mesopotamia.
The jewel in the crown of the Empire was India which became home to the Martins for many decades and Mum’s birth place.
Lastly, there was WW2 with Mum’s oldest brother Barry leaving home to fight with the RAF bomber command, and the event that perhaps triggered the most traumatic event of all for Mum was the death of her father.
Mum’s story begun in 1930 during the last gasp of the British Empire. Indeed, Mum was of the last generation to be born into a past world in a British Hill Station called Poona, in what is now Pakistan. One of the last of the generations belonging to the greatest empire the world had ever seen, known at the time as the British Raj.
Then in 1934-35, when the brothers were at boarding school, my Grandmother who was a remarkable lady sailed to England with her girls. However, for reasons that will become apparent later, she had to quickly turn around and sail back to India to support my Grandfather. Very reluctantly and feeling terribly torn, she left the girls with her step-mother, Louise Kingswell in Portsmouth.
This was a challenging time for the two young girls who were left alone with a lady they disliked. They became ever closer, with June in the role of older sister. This must have been a testing, painful time and yet one that made them stronger, a strength that would be sorely tested in times ahead.
Soon after, Major Martin left the Indian Army. After losing his temper with an errant cow that repeatedly returned to consume his vegetable patch and in an ever worsening mental condition of deep cycles of depression, he went inside, grabbed his gun and shot the cow dead, committing an unforgiving taboo in the Indian society.
Consequently, my Grandfather had to leave the Indian army and my grandparents returned to England permanently, reuniting the family and settled in Boundstone not far from this church. The children went to Frensham Heights close by, which Mum always had fond memories of and her whole life she has been going to as many reunions as she could. Those fond memories included what would today be unthinkable, naked swimming for the under sevens!
However, not all was well in the Martins’ house as my Grandfather was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after WW1. This condition was not understood until recently, so he was undiagnosed and beyond understanding. Given the medical treatments of the time, this resulted in numerous breakdowns and a constant battle for sanity.
The cause was my Grandfather’s service in WW1 in Mesopotamia where he was fighting the Turks in a horrible war, the details of which are not for today’s story, but we am sure that the Siege of Kut (7 December 1915 – 29 April 1916) and the ultimate surrender of the The 6th (Poona) Division<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/6th_(Poona)_Division> of the Indian Army<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Indian_Army> to the Turks played a major role.
Alarmingly, his condition only worsened with time in England and then further worsened as Barry, his older brother (my uncle) joined the RAF to fight in the skies above Germany. Suffering from the PTSD and anxiety about his brother’s short life expectancy, in 1943 after saying goodbye to the children one morning as they left for school, he placed his head in the gas oven and committed suicide; a casualty of WW1.
Naturally, this hit the family like a freight train, especially Mum aged 13 and Heather aged 11 and 6 months. The shock of a seemly normal morning marking the death of their father embedded a sense of anxiety deep in Mum and Heather that would only resurface much later in life when they became parents.
In 1943, suicide broke the law and society shunned the Martins. Worst of all, they were unable to grieve for their horrendous loss, to which was added a sense of shame. The rejection by society forced their feelings of sorrow to be buried deep in Mum and her family as they carried on with a stiff upper lip. However, those feelings would inevitably resurface in later life. Thus, the consequences of what was essentially a WW1 related death 27 years later, echoed through time.
Indeed, this is an example of how the wounds of war cascaded down through three generations, from my Grandfather, to my mother and then to us, her sons,
For Years afterwards, for my mother, the feeling of loss of her father was unbearable and for years afterwards Mum suffered from depression and lack of self-confidence that are only natural when a child feels rejected by their parent. Understandably, after all, deep in her heart she felt abandoned by her father who did not love her enough to stay alive which only enhanced the earlier feelings of being abandoned in England by grandma when she was very young.
These feelings continued as she joined Westminster Hospital to be trained as a nurse. There, she found herself the subject of bulling and intimidation that took her to the limits of her endurance. But with the support of her family, her steely determination and courage shone through and she not only qualified but in time became a Senior Registered Nurse. This was the time of her life when having overcome her negative feelings around the death of her father Mum build and lived a remarkable life for the next three decades. Travelling the world and building a close not loving family, whilst always supporting her extended Martin family where possible.
But soon after, when Mum was 46, something changed dramatically and Mum changed almost overnight in the space of a few weeks.
Looking back, we her sons now feel that it was all the emotions that had been suppressed around her father’s death erupting to the surface just at a time when David was the same age as she was back then. Depression struck as did anxiety, both now much better understood. It is ironic that Mum ended up fighting a very similar condition as her father, not, I believe, because of a genetic trait but rather because of the effect of events that flowed down from father to daughter.
Depression and suicidal urges dogged mums mind which she battled with for the rest f her life. These were not qualities of her innate character, but rather the product of events superimposed upon her by being passed down from her father. Effect that her sons have also felt and had to released to allow the 4th generation freedom from the past.
Speaking to one of the guys manning the Combat Stress helpline, he said that in his experience 95% of all PTSD veterans had at one stage or another suffered from suicidal urges which explains what happened to June's father.
So in today’s world, we believe that supporting suffers from PSTD not only help those our society owes a debt to after they protected us, but also to protect their children and grandchildren from the cascade of unconscious emotions being passed through the generations.
So please give a small amount to Combat Stress.
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