Ollie Treadaway

Ollie Treadaway is Edwina’s first husband, a young artist whose marriage to her begins a family life that is cut short by his sudden death. In Edwina’s recollections, his youthful charm and their shared beginnings as impoverished artists stand in sharp contrast to the abruptness of his death, after which she must learn to manage alone with their twins, Rowena and Charlie.

Identity and First Meeting

Ollie is introduced as the golden boy of Goldsmiths’ art college: a wiry nineteen-year-old with a fashionably curly forelock, remembered as seeming perpetually poised between boyhood and manhood. Edwina first sees him in the college canteen in 1957. She remembers her grey polo-neck and black-and-white houndstooth pedal pushers, and Ollie bundled into a navy Guernsey knitted by his mother. While waiting for egg and chips, he pulls off the overheated jumper; the glimpse of his pale skin makes Edwina fall in love with him.

The memory gives their courtship a vivid, physical beginning. Ollie’s Kerry brogue, the crowded canteen, and his ungainly struggle with the hot sweater make him both distinctive and unguarded in Edwina’s account. The image of the young artist is not that of a settled adult but of someone whose appeal lies partly in his unfinished, boyish quality.

Marriage and the First Home

Fifty-five years before the later visit Edwina remembers, Ollie carries her through the front door of their house. She is twenty-two and five months pregnant; they are married, but the prospect of owning a home is still unfamiliar to her after a life of renting rooms. Their poverty has not ended with marriage: they have been impoverished artists, used to Soho cafés and dancing to records on jukeboxes. The house is theirs, but its roof has holes, fungus grows through cracks in the walls, and the cornicing is broken.

Ollie leads Edwina from room to room, pointing out the repairs he plans to make and touching the curve of the banister as if the damaged house can already be imagined as a home. His laughter about the mushrooms growing inside does not remove the damp, dust, and rot that Edwina notices, but the scene holds both their vulnerability and their hope: the couple enter a precarious new life together, while the unborn child makes that future immediate.

Family Life

Ollie and Edwina become parents to twins, Rowena and Charlie. At Easter, when the children are toddlers, the family spends time by the water with friends from art school. The babies’ toes are dangled in the cold sea, and Charlie screams until his face turns cherry-red. On a red tartan rug, the young parents share a picnic of fruit cake and cheese-and-pickle sandwiches with their friends. Edwina remembers that she and Ollie were the first in their circle to have children, and that the twins, already becoming small people, drew attention as a novelty.

The family scene is full of ordinary movement: the twins laugh and cry, sit heavily in the sand, and Charlie tries to eat it. Its warmth makes the reversal that follows especially stark. The picnic, the children, and their friends place Ollie within a life still being formed, rather than presenting his death as an isolated fact detached from the family it changes.

Death and Aftermath

The change comes while a cricket ball arcs through the sky. Edwina hears the bat strike, then registers the pause that follows amid small sounds on the beach: a bee, a barking dog, and a boy further along the sand calling as his yellow kite dips into the dunes. Ollie lies face down and does not move. The ambulance crosses the sand while the boy continues to fly his kite; its crew work on Ollie’s heart, then stop and carry him away beneath a red blanket.

Edwina cannot remember how she got home from the holiday. She realizes she could not have driven their rusty green Humber Hawk herself: she had not yet passed her test. After Ollie’s death, she has to learn. Her reflection that widows must learn to do everything gives the loss its practical as well as emotional consequence. Ollie’s death ends the marriage and turns Edwina’s responsibility for their children into a life she must conduct without him; it also anchors her later understanding that a mother’s duty to keep her family safe cannot protect them from fate.