My Ancestors

I do love a good mondegreen. What’s a mondegreen? The term was coined in the 1950s by American writer Sylvia Wright, who recalled that as a child, her mother had read her a Scottish ballad. The original lyric read, ‘They hae slain the Earl o’ Moray / And laid him on the green.’ But Wright misheard it as, ‘They hae slain the Earl o’ Moray / And Lady Mondegreen.’ 

Chances are, you’ve grown up singing – or shouting out – a fair few mondegreens yourself. Perhaps: ‘See that girl, watch her scream, kicking the dancing queen.’ Or: ‘Money for nothin’ and your chips for free.’ And then there are the truly dangerous ones – the lyrics you’re certain you know, until one day, in a moment of awkward silence or all-too-public performance, you discover just how wrong you’ve been all along.

‘Send three and fourpence, we’re going to a dance’ seems to have evolved organically in popular culture. The first half – a mishearing of ‘send reinforcements’ – dates from late Edwardian times and seems to be credited to a group of boy scouts. The ‘going to a dance’ ending – for ‘we’re going to advance’ – appears to have been added a few years later, during the First World War.

Embarrassingly misheard or misremembered stories have a habit of embedding themselves in family history. For decades I was convinced that my Aunt Hepsey had traced the Jarvis line all the way back to Admiral Jervis, the man who sailed with Nelson and gave his name to Jervis Bay in Australia.

However, among Mum’s papers found a letter from my Grandad Jarvis, dated October 1975, which closes with the wonderfully frank observation: ‘I don’t think any of this will help Gordon I’m sorry to say.’ A useful timestamp, at least, for when my obsession with family history began.

The letter itself is even more revealing. Trying to breathe life into my early curiosity, Grandad wrote that he had been ‘looking through Hepsey’s books’ yet, ‘could find no reference to any of the ancestors.’ How I wish I knew more about these books – though it’s quite possible they would have offered little beyond what we already know.

And then comes the twist. Some years earlier, a Miss Jarvis had lived up the road from him. She had a relative who she believed had traced their line back to a brother of Admiral Jervis. As Grandad dryly concluded, ‘That leaves a big gap between [Admiral Jervis] and Richard [my own grandfather].’ Indeed.