My Mum: early years

I recently came across some pages which I had missed in the journal of Freespiral. Inspired by ceridwen, she started to write about her parents. I find this moving and thought I would have a go too.


My mum, Karin Judith was born in 1919. She was always known as Judith in later years. She was the younger of two daughters, her sister Ann having been born three years earlier. 
Their parents, Adrian and Karin Stephen lived in Gordon Square in London. They were early students of Sigmund Freud and the psychoanalyst Ernest Jones and later trained as medical doctors, practising in Harley Street.
Ann and my mum were mostly brought up by a governess and only saw their father for a brief spell at the end of each day. It must have been a rather typical post Victorian upper middle class childhood. Fortunately the girls had each other for company which must have been a lifesaver.
I don't think they viewed it as an unhappy childhood though. Mum was sent to a prep school, I think it was called Mayertorn, which had a small farm attached. She was very fond indeed of animals. That is where this photograph was originally taken.
Mum's love of animals continued throughout her life and she passed this on to us. When we were young we had a wide variety of pets and rescue animals living with us at different times - from the more conventional hamsters, guinea pigs and ferrets, not to mention a goat and a sheep dog, to somewhat more unusual creatures - a flightless heron ("Hank") found at the foot of a tree and rejected by its mother and a young seal we fed with a fountain pen filler who sadly didn't live all that long.
Mum's parents bought a rambling old house on the Essex coast where they often spent their weekends and loved to sail. She later inherited it from them. Mum later taught me to sail there when I was old enough. She and Ann were playful and adventurous young women.
Later on Mum was sent to Bedales public school and later on to Newnham College Cambridge where she got a double first in social anthropology. That was pretty unusual for a young woman in the early 1940s.