Melody Ryle 1917-2007

Victoria Melody Wrench Ryle
Born 12 March 1917, died 20 October 2007

Address by John R. Ryle • 30 October 2007 • Shrewsbury • Readings by Anne Robertson and Caroline Walmsley • Posted 2016 • 1,698 words

My sisters, Anne and Caroline, and myself would like to thank you for being with us today. We would also like to thank those who have written to us or spoken with us in recent weeks, and others who can’t be here, including some of Melody’s oldest friends.

Our dearly loved mother, Victoria Melody Wrench Jackson, was born in London on 12 March, 1917, the daughter of Winifred and Rowland Jackson. Her own mother, Winifred, was the daughter of an engineer, Walter Claude Johnson, a pioneer in the field of transatlantic telecommunications. Her father, Rowland Bower Jackson, was a stockbroker in the City of London. Melody was the second of their two children, both daughters. She was born in Chelsea and christened at St Michael’s, Cornhill, where her grandfather and namesake, the Reverend T.W.Wrench, had been Rector.

Her first name, Victoria, was a tribute to her godmother, Princess Victoria Alexandra. But she was always known by her second given name, Melody, the name that suited her so well.

The year that she was born was the darkest period of the First World War. In the trenches at Passchendaele the young men of Europe were dying in tens of thousands. In England, there was growing privation: first eggs and butter were rationed, then bread and potatoes.

Melody’s father was a Royal Navy reservist, but above the age to be sent to sea. He manned a defence unit at Sandringham: a Rolls-Royce sedan with an anti-aircraft gun mounted on the back. A year later, the war over, he returned to the City. He and Winifred raised their two daughters in London and in West Wittering, a seaside village on Chichester Harbour. This was a place that Melody enjoyed revisiting all her life.

She and her elder sister Pauline attended Francis Holland School, near Sloane Square. As adults it amused them to recall the elevated tone of their school motto, taken from Psalm 144. “That our sons may grow up as the young plants,” the verse begins. Then comes the motto: “And that Our Daughters May Be As The Polished Corners of the Temple.”

Left: Melody Jackson c. 1942. Right: John and Melody on their wedding day, 1943

A wild pear tree on the Downs

In 1934, when Melody was seventeen, on the threshold of adulthood, her mother died suddenly. She and Pauline took a flat on the Embankment in London, in the then newly-built residential development in Dolphin Square. Over the next two years Melody studied domestic science at King’s College and painting and drawing at the Central School of Art—skills that she continued to practice all her life. And she qualified as a nurse and physiotherapist.

On a ward round at St Bartholomew’s Hospital she met the man she was to marry. If it was not love at first sight, then love followed soon thereafter. But the war came between them. John Ryle joined the navy at the outbreak of war, in 1939, and was posted as medical officer on a minesweeper in the Eastern Mediterranean. It was a posting from which only the lucky came back alive. He told her not to wait for him. But she did wait. When he returned to England on leave in 1943, they got engaged beneath a wild pear tree on the Sussex Downs. They were married a week later at Chelsea registry office.

It was a time when sugar, like everything else, was rationed; their wedding cake was made with honey from beehives that John’s mother kept on the Downs. The wedding photographs show our mother and father in the height of their youth, a wonderfully good-looking couple.

But 1943 was a perilous year in Europe, as perilous as 1917, the year of Melody’s birth. John returned to naval duty in the Mediterranean; and Melody went back to Bart’s. She worked there through the Blitz, making her way to the hospital each day along the Thames by water taxi, with warehouses in flames on either side. Among her most vivid recollections from that time was the appearance of the victims of air raids as they arrived in the Casualty Department at Bart’s, pale and ghostlike, caked in blood and dust.

After the arrival of their first child, Anne, Melody moved with her new-born to live near friends in Amersham. There, one night, a buzz-bomb fell on the house next door to theirs, obliterating it, and hurling shards of glass into the living room where she stood holding Anne in her arms. But mother and child remained miraculously untouched.

So she and Anne survived. And our father survived the war in the Mediterranean. And peace returned to Europe.

Reading by Anne Robertson

From “The Glory of the Garden” by Rudyard Kipling

Our England is a garden that is full of stately views,
Of borders, beds and shrubberies and lawns and avenues,
With statues on the terraces and peacocks strutting by;
But the Glory of the Garden lies in more than meets the eye.

And some can pot begonias and some can bud a rose,
And some are hardly fit to trust with anything that grows;
But they can roll and trim the lawns and sift the sand and loam,
For the Glory of the Garden occupieth all who come.

Our England is a garden, and such gardens are not made
By singing:—“Oh, how beautiful!” and sitting in the shade,
While better men than we go out and start their working lives
At grubbing weeds from gravel-paths with broken dinner knives.

Then seek your job with thankfulness and work till further orders,
If it’s only netting strawberries or killing slugs on borders;
And when your back stops aching and your hands begin to harden,
You will find yourself a partner in the Glory of the Garden.

Oh, Adam was a gardener, and God who made him sees
That half a proper gardener’s work is done upon his knees,
So when your work is finished, you can wash your hands and pray
For the Glory of the Garden that it may not pass away!

And the Glory of the Garden it shall never pass away

After World War II

From the experience of war, like others of her generation, Melody derived the spirit of thrift, of valuing what you have. Nothing was to be wasted. No scrap of fabric, no receptacle, no worn-out implement. All such things had further uses. Though abstemious herself, she was generous to others—both with her time and with her financial resources. Her thrift converged with our father’s views on the conservation of nature. Together they maintained—and inculcated in us—a sense of environmental responsibility that endured through the era of glut that followed the lean years of the war.

Melody gave birth to their second daughter, Caroline, just after the war ended. Our father, demobilized now, became a general practitioner. The family lived in Pembroke, in Edinburgh, and in Farnham. Finally they settled in Shrewsbury, where I was born, the third and last of their children, and where the three of us grew up.

We lived first at Draper’s Hall, a venerable half-timbered building that looks on to St Mary’s Church in the town centre. Then, in the mid-1950s, our parents bought a plot of land in the Rad Valley, the green belt that girdles Kingsland, a suburb across the river from the old town. Here they built the house we were raised in, and where they lived the rest of their lives.

Anne Ryle (later Anne Robertson), John Rowland Ryle. Melody Ryle, John C. Ryle, and Caroline Ryle (later Caroline Walmsley), c 1960

Anne Ryle (later Anne Robertson), John Rowland Ryle. Melody Ryle, John C. Ryle, and Caroline Ryle (later Caroline Walmsley), Field Rise, Shrewsbury, c 1960

A garden in Shropshire

Most of you here today have seen and enjoyed the garden that John and Melody created at Field Rise. It is a living memorial to their lives together, drawing together the threads of kinship and friendship they wove into their marriage and the family they raised. Every flower and shrub in the garden tells a story. Here are plants grown from cuttings taken from a cousin’s wedding bouquet. Or perhaps they were a gift from a visitor, or a guest who came to stay. Or they were found on a forest walk in Wales. Or in the garden wall of an abandoned Scottish croft.

Melody embraced John’s passion for the wilderness, for sailing and walking. And along the way she developed her own profound knowledge of wild plants, studying them and sketching them in Scotland, Wales and the Swiss Alps. In the 1970s she joined a small army of professional and amateur botanists for a long-term research project that made a survey of the entire county of Shropshire, square kilometre by square kilometre. A decade later it resulted in The Ecological Flora of Shropshire, a book in the high collaborative tradition of British natural history.

She played her part, too, in the 1960s liberation of women—as a prime mover in the local Family Planning Association, the pioneering voluntary organization that provided free oral contraception to women, married or unmarried, a service that had previously been available only to the well-to-do.

Readings by Caroline Walmsley

From “Let Me Grow Lovely’’ by Karle Wilson Baker

Let me grow lovely, growing old–
So many fine things do:
Laces, and ivory, and gold,
And silks need not be new;
And there is healing in old trees,
Old streets a glamour hold;
Why may not I, as well as these,
Grow lovely, growing old?

From “Spring Morning” by A.A.Milne

Where are you going? I don’t quite know.
Down to the stream where the king-cups grow—
Up on the hill where the pine-trees blow—
Anywhere, anywhere. I don’t know.

Where are you going? The clouds sail by,
Little ones, baby ones, over the sky.
Where are you going? The shadows pass,
Little ones, baby ones, over the grass.

If you were a cloud, and sailed up there,
You’d sail on water as blue as air,
And you’d see us here in the fields and say:
“Doesn’t the sky look green today?”

If you were a bird, and lived on high,
You’d lean on the wind when the wind came by,
You’d say to the wind when it took you away:
”That’s where I wanted to go today!”

Where are you going? I don’t quite know.
What does it matter where people go?
Down to the wood where the blue-bells grow–
Anywhere, anywhere. I don’t know.

A number of you here today played tennis with Melody. She was a dab hand at the game—playing every week well into her eighties. She played the violin too, accompanied on the piano by her friend, Frances Shebbeare. And she sang to us: children’s songs, hymns and sea shanties.

She did these things despite her one great affliction: the profound deafness that struck her when she was still in her thirties. It was something she never complained about. Just as she did not complain about anything else. She was a person without self-pity, and free of self-regard.

Our parents loved each other till the end. When our father fell ill in his eighties, Melody looked after him for two demanding years, up to the day of his death in December 2000. For the seven years of her widowhood, into her last, ninetieth year, she continued to live independently, taking delight in her children, and grandchildren—and great-grandchildren—and in her garden, the plants she grew, the books she read, and her wide circle of friends.

Melody and her friends

Throughout her life Melody made friends and nurtured friendship. There were friends from her student days such as Joan Ellis, who had become a nurse at the same time as her at Bart’s. And contemporaries in Shrewsbury, such as Margaret Hagger and Virginia Longmore. There were our Cranfield cousins. And our cousin on our father’s side, Sally Amos, who shared her passion for wild plants and gardens.

And those from a younger generation, notably Jane Morris, a near neighbour in Kingsland, whose friendship was such a pleasure to her and reassurance to us, her children, in her later years. There were many others, some of you here today–too many to name. We know that all of you, too, are feeling a great loss.

Those who knew Melody know that she was above all a good person, a person with true beauty of character. There was no malice or meanness in her. She loved others and conspired to help them—both those who were close to her and those who she saw as less fortunate than herself.

How blessed we were, my sisters and myself, to have her as our mother. And to have her with us for as long as we did. May something of her goodness and beauty of character be planted in our hearts—and those of her grandchildren and great-grandchildren—many of them here today—so that it does not pass away. ★

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