Joy Irving 1951 – 2019
Joy was born in December 1951 in Holbeach in Lincs to Joyce
and Fred, suspiciously close to her parent’s wedding earlier that year!
She narrowly escaped being named Noel because of the
closeness of her birth to Christmas and was stuck with Eileen because her dad
had an early girlfriend with that name. Her childhood was notable for various
assaults on her annoying little brother David, including one with the point of
a pair of scissors. By dint of her mum’s nagging, Joy was elevated to Spalding
High School, avoiding the rather dismal Secondary Modern. At grammar school,
she acquired a love of science – mostly chemistry, a dislike of PE teachers and
team games and sports of all kinds, rebelling to the extent that she went to
the headmistress and told her that all this sport stuff was getting in the way
of her A-level studies. Her interest in science was probably helped by watching
the explosion when her friend tossed a lump of potassium into water and by
chasing blobs of real mercury around the work bench….
Joy
emerged from school with quite a lot of A-levels, but also with some mental problems, which caused her to spend a time
in the ‘nuthouse’, a jolly place in the country where she and other misfit
girls tried to regain mental equilibrium, while having fun and plaguing the
staff…. She frequently marvelled at the unlimited access she was given to a
psychiatrist at the time compared with the miserly limits doled out through the
NHS now. She always considered it was her duty to be upfront about her mental
problems to reduce the stigma around such illness.
Her A-levels were enough to take her to Aberystwyth University to study agricultural botany. However, being that far away from home freaked her out more than somewhat and she managed less than a year before she dropped out, again with mental problems.
Her A-levels were enough to take her to Aberystwyth University to study agricultural botany. However, being that far away from home freaked her out more than somewhat and she managed less than a year before she dropped out, again with mental problems.
Back home, she spent a while in the lab at Geest’s fruit
processing plant, of which her best memory was of tasting her first mango…. It
also put her off big business, too, to the extent that she decided to join the
tax men in the Inland Revenue!
Somewhere around this time, she saw Colin who had long hair
and brightly-coloured trousers, and became her first husband, and they set up
house together in a housing association flat. Colin is a musician who played in
folk bands and organised a folk club so their flat frequently had musicians
sleeping on the floor. He introduced her
to strange music from such as the Incredible String Band, Pink Floyd and more
normal stuff like Gerry Rafferty, Kate Bush…
They scrimped and saved to put down a deposit on a house,
bought some very posh sofas which are still with us!
Joy, being a very clever person, got promoted in the Inland
Revenue, first to Peterborough and was moved to London so spent some months
travelling to and fro – this meant getting up very early and was never going to
last for her! She moved back to Peterborough and spent some years getting lost
in eastern England prodding farmers and others into paying their employees’ tax
and National Insurance. She also separated from Colin at this time, in a
curious divorce which left them apart but still friends.
This was when I met her, in a pub at a sort of singles’ club
gathering, so attractive with lots of curly hair and very chatty, very stylish.
A weird sort of lightning courtship ensued, during which I, Bob, had a chest
infection and Joy came to talk to me while I suffered… I said she was chatty,
didn’t I? At the time, I was restless in my job, got the urge to work abroad
and found a contract in Papua New Guinea. There was, however, a catch, that I
didn’t want to leave my new love behind and PNG wasn’t willing to let me take a
mere girlfriend with me, so we got married!
Joy didn’t enjoy New Guinea. It was hot, sticky and
mosquito-ridden and becoming pregnant did not help. So she returned home and I
followed home soon afterwards.
Back in the UK, she managed to coax a slightly reluctant
Rupert out into the world and drag us across country to live in Faringdon, and
then, feeling that we had missed out, I took up an offer of work in Namibia.
We spent 4 and a half years there.
We travelled all over with Joy happy to thrust our tiny
family – first just Rupert, then with extra added Tamsin - out into the desert
roads to see enormous dunes, rock cavings and paintings, variously in battered
Landrovers and then a rusty VW van. Joy loved lying on the gravelly desert floor
searching for tiny semi-precious stones. She loved the peace of the desert at
night. She was also very fond of drinking iced coffee in the town café where
she would give the waitresses big tips to make sure she still got served
quickly in the tourist season!
In Namibia, she finally completed her Magnum Opus, The Open University Degree! She had started
this 8? years before, when she was still with Colin, completed her studies with
a tiny Tamsin sleeping on her knee and sat her last exam in my company’s
training officer’s kitchen beside a washing machine while it worked… A real
marathon, not a sprint!
When we returned to the UK and after we settled the sprogs
into nursery and school, Joy had the urge to study again, perhaps with the aim
of working abroad again. After taking a bit of a run at it with a maths course
and a geology module at Oxford Brookes, she launched into an MSc on mining
geology. This was a bit of a struggle for us all, especially as Tams was 4 and
Rupe was 8, but they put up with Mum coming home every other weekend and Dad’s
rough and ready care!! While Joy dealt very well with the Master’s, it did
reveal or confirm what we already probably knew – that starting out in mining
geology in foreign parts was a ‘man thing’ and a challenge for a ‘lady’. Also
our small persons needed some stability at sensible schools. So Joy went
looking for other jobs and found what seems to have been her spiritual home,
the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, where she spent 18 years and
even returned 1 day a week as a volunteer. Perhaps her colleagues can tell us
more about Joy’s sojourn there.
After she was inducted into the Museum, it was Joy who
stayed still and the rest of the family who moved around…. It was Joy’s idea
that we should despatch our treasures, large and small, to board at Millfield
Prep School to avoid the boredom of a second year with the same teacher at
their primary school. Rupe went reluctantly but enjoyed it immensely, while
Tams was eager to go, but loathed it due to the competitive consumerism of the
other (richer) girls! Both however enjoyed the music teaching and even the sport, and emerged more
confident from the experience.
The cost of school fees meant life was quite quiet for 6
years between 1991 and 1997, enlivened by our move to Cirencester in 1994, so
that Rupe could go to a really good state school after Millfield. The move was
chaotic and the new house was fairly dreadful so some years were spent on
revamping the ground floor to meet Joy’s Grand Design. In the process, Joy
built quite a relationship with our master carpenter, Ed Boote, persuading him
into building progressively more efficient windows. More years were spent
decorating afterwards, with Joy putting great thought and care into it all,
especially the Art Deco shower room attached to our bedroom. Much cursing and
masking tape was employed in outlining doors and windows….
After the children finished their stints at Millfield, Joy
was able to indulge us in family holidays, starting with a comparatively modest
narrow boat trip – in an electric narrowboat, which gave us a week of peaceful
quarter hours punctuated by panics going through bridges and locks because of
its low power. This trip was followed by various epic journeys to France, Spain
and Italy, epic because our principles did not allow us to fly, which meant
quite long drives inevitably leading to our searching in the dark for obscure
addresses. On a couple of occasions, we put our car on a motor rail service,
which meant we got there more quickly, but just as knackered because of the
noisy sleeper train. Joy persuaded us into long walks up mountains, long walks
around Pompeii and Herculaneum, long walks to obscure but quaint villages… She
enjoyed the company of our now grown-up children on these holidays with time to
talk.
Over the period of the 1990’s and early noughties, I think
Joy managed to simultaneously struggle with the boring bits of her job, with
her level of OCD preventing her performing the way her management wanted and
also to develop those parts which she saw as important for the long term
conservation of the more vulnerable specimens in ‘her’ part of the OUMNH
collections. She and I developed a database to assist with the control of her
work and this proved so useful that she was still using it until she was forced
to cease volunteering. She also slogged through the process of getting promoted
or “regraded” which gave her some pleasure and a tiny increase in salary!
When I was made redundant in 2004 and started to study
‘green building’ with the Centre for Alternative Technology, this sparked an
interest in Joy, who took on board a lot of the stuff that I was studying and
changed tack in her decorating to use lower impact paints and materials and
start contemplating ways in we could improve the performance of our house.
In 2006, Joy was diagnosed with breast cancer, which seem to
be fairly swiftly dealt with, but needed two operations and both chemotherapy
and radiotherapy treatment. Despite this, she was able to carry on working at the
Museum between treatments. As result of
her diagnosis, she became involved in the Breakthrough Breast Cancer charity
and the two of us attended their showing of a horrifying film about the effects
of pollution on the Inuit and the seals that form their diet. After the film,
Caroline Lucas, then the leader of the Green Party, made an impassioned speech
because of which we jointly had an epiphany and decided to join the Greens.
In one of the early mailings that we got from that Party,
there was a plea for someone to take over the Treasurership of the party’s
South West Region and Joy decided that she could and would do this job…. So for
5 years, she tended their rather limited finances, storing up cash to fund the
European Election campaign in 2014. Having finished her term of office as the
official Treasurer, she was then asked to take over as treasurer for the
European Election Campaign, spending lots of the money that she’d been saving
up! It must have worked, because we got our first South West MEP from that
campaign!
In the 2000’s, we got an urge to make our lives more
communal, to find and join an ‘intentional communities’, in our case, one which
jointly owns property and runs it for the benefit of its members, perhaps
eating together, growing veg and fruit and keeping animals, maintaining
communal assets, depending on their attitudes. Joy and I spent quite a few
weekends visiting and working at some of these and a long time agonising over
which would suit. This all came to nothing
as it seemed that we didn’t like the communities that liked us and,
worse still, the communities that we liked, didn’t like us. It was still a
source of regret to us for years after.
In 2010, Joy decided to take early retirement from the
Museum, partly due to her finding the drive to Oxford tiring as she was now
mostly doing that on her own, but also because Oxford University was running an
incentive for this. However, being a sucker for punishment, she continued
working one day a week there as a volunteer, feeling that she still had
unfinished work to do and also to keep up the friendships that she had made.
The unfinished work kept her busy for years afterwards analysing all the data she
had collected in her ‘normal’ working time and even as she went into hospital
for the last time, she was worrying about completing a paper written with a
colleague.
In 2014, we went a bit mad and bought a very small cottage,
called Y Ddôl, in mid-Wales, complete
with small woodland, right at the end of a rocky road in the Vale of Rheidol,
just below Devil’s Bridge. Y Ddôl is
off-grid, getting power from photo-voltaic panels, (some) hot water from a
different sort of solar panel and water from a spring in our wood below. It has
wood-burning stoves for cooking, hot
water and heating. Joy loved managing all this – keeping the batteries up, the
water supply full and the wood stores replenished, required organising. The
wood business concerned us as the house required a lot of heating and was
desperately draughty. Also parts of the roof were distinctly restless. When we tried to get builders to fix it, we were told “your house is falling down” and
they recommended vast amounts of work. So Joy and I set about writing
specifications for all the changes, in her trademark vast levels of detail, and
set the builders to work. This meant that Y Ddôl was uninhabitable for a long
time, about 15 months in all, and took a lot of cleaning to become habitable.
We then managed to visit for some weeks over last summer, which gave us a
chance to excel at hacking down the vast briars that had sprung up during our
long absence. Joy took great pleasure in discovering woodpiles and compost bins
that had been lost beneath them since the Great Rebuild!
In 2015, Joy went back to the doctors with back pains, which
were first diagnosed as a crushed vertebra, then as osteoporosis, then as the
spread of the cancer to her bones, and then it was further discovered to have
spread to her liver. Two further chemotherapy sessions kept the disease at bay
through 2016, 17 and 18, but after that it was no longer effective.
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