What's in a Name?

“Why can’t we call her Shalimar?” Stewart Lovell sounded far more hurt and puzzled than angry. He was the kind of man who hated confrontation and most certainly didn’t want it now, when his wife Wilma had given birth to the most wonderful and beautiful and miraculous small human in the history of the whole world, ever, only a few hours previously, and he still couldn’t get his head round the fact that he was her father. Looking at his two fantastic girls, he felt his heart and soul brim over with joy. So why was he even contemplating spoiling it?

     She definitely has the look of me, thought Stewart. And of my mother, and of my Uncle Claude. Thank the Lord she has Wilma’s nose and not our family hooter, though!

     “Let’s talk it over later, okay, Stewart?” Wilma asked.

     “Of course, sweetheart!” 

     And they did discuss it later on. The next day, when their as yet unnamed daughter, after having proved that nobody needed to worry about either her lungs or her appetite, was sleeping soundly. They would go home tomorrow. Go home as the lovely little family that Stewart had always longed for.

     Wilma was all patience and reason. She pointed out that she had suffered for sharing a name with the matriarch of the Flintstones, though in fact she had been named for an old friend of her mother’s. She vehemently denied that she was scarred by the experience, but when she was having an awkward kind of day, even now, if someone mentioned Abu Dhabi it evoked those old Yabba Dabba Du taunts. True, she hadn’t suffered the horrendous bullying some kids did, and had emerged pretty much unscathed, but still with a steely determination that no child of hers should ever risk derision because of their name.   She was perfectly prepared to compromise. Perhaps their daughter could have the name of a river, even one beginning with Sha as her middle name.

     So that’s how she came to be called Estella Shannon Lovell. And everyone agreed it was a very pretty name, and original without being silly. Estella soon got shortened to Stella, and wholly appropriate it was too, because she was their little star. Two years later, her little brother whom they called Connor Robert, was born. Being human children and not cherubs, they fought sometimes and drove Wilma and Stewart up the wall quite frequently, but they were children to be proud of – bright, good-natured, and often very funny.

     Stella had just become a teenager when her godmother, Francine gave birth to twins, both girls, and called them Magenta and Vermilion. “They’re cute kids,” Stella said, “But they’re bloody silly names!”

  “Don’t swear,” Wilma corrected her automatically, though she couldn’t, in all conscience, disagree.

  “Well, they ARE, Mum! You’d think she wanted a tin of red paint instead of a baby!”

    “That’ll do!” But Wilma’s lips were twitching. “Anyway, you could have ended up with an even more bizarre name!”

     “How come?” she asked, interested at once, though realising this wasn’t going to be on a par with one of those moments beloved of fiction and the paparazzi (in other words, much the same thing) when someone discovers that they were abandoned in the bulrushes or was the legitimate heir to the throne of some country in the Balkans, or both.

     Wilma gave Stewart a rather apologetic look, but he only smiled. “It’s fine with me. You may as well get it over with!”

     “You’re really the one to tell it.”

     “Well, Stella, before I met your Mum I’d say that the most important woman in my life – apart from MY Mum, of course! – was our next door neighbour.” He paused for effect, and Stella suspected he was quite enjoying this and had been looking forward to it.

     “And you can take that I’m old enough to understand things like that expression off your face,” Wilma put in, “Though in fact you are old enough to understand things like that, so don’t have a strop. But it isn’t a thing like that”

     “No indeed,” Stewart went on. You see, Stella, I’m talking about someone who was in her 90s when I was a little boy. But she had all her wits about her and more energy than some folk half her age. She often used to babysit me, and even when I was of an age to not like the term babysit I still looked forward to it. Her name was Shalimar San Pedro. And though I know that screams out stage name, she assured me it really was her name. Her father was Spanish, so the San Pedro bit is perfectly explicable. She had 2 sisters, though both of them had passed away by the time I met her, and they were called Scheherezade and Sabrina. Sabrina seems to have slipped through the net somehow. Anyway, so far as I know, everyone called her just Shalimar, not Miss San Pedro, and I don’t know if there was anyone who could have called her Auntie, though she let me know that there wasn’t anyone who could call her Mum or Grandma. She was quite happy about that, she assured me, and I think she was telling the truth. I suppose on letters from the council or the insurance or whatever she must have been called Miss San Pedro, but that’s not the kind of thing a little boy thinks about. I guess I hero-worshipped her, Stella, and there was good reason. She’d lived more than most people could in a thousand lifetimes. Her family were with a travelling fair – they owned it, in fact. I say fair, but there were elements of a circus in it, too. And she had photographs to prove it, not that I’d have doubted her anyway. When she was not much older than you she was riding the wall of death- do you know what that is?”

     Stella nodded. She’d seen old films of these legendary motorbike riders whizzing round in their dizzying circles.

     “She was just as good at riding horses, too. She could ride them bareback and do all manner of stunts. But she was just as happy working the rides and setting up the stalls. So far as I know she and her sisters never went to school, but they were still quite well-educated and though I don’t much like the phrase university of life this is one instance where there was some truth in it. She had a glorious singing voice, too. Even in her extreme old age it was still clear and true. She once told me that she was sorry she was born just that bit too late for the music hall. Her mother had been a music hall singer – an artiste she called her, and she liked the old songs – old even when she was a girl – one of her particular favourites was Pale hands I kissed beside the Shalimar. And that’s where her name came from.  Oh, they were still around, but when one closed, a new one didn’t open. Then war broke out. I know that you’ve studied that period in history, so you’ll know that women were called up, too. But Shalimar wasn’t content with doing something ordinary. She was a spitfire pilot!”

     “But I thought – well, I thought that was only men,” Stella said.

     “A common misconception and I can’t honestly say I’d have known if it weren’t for Shalimar. Oh, they didn’t fly combat missions, that much is true. But they certainly flew them back to the front when they’d been repaired. She wasn’t a boastful woman, but she was still very proud of a letter from the squadron leader saying that she’d made him completely change his mind about women pilots . Still, despite a glowing reference from him, the commercial airlines still weren’t quite ready for a female in the cockpit. I think to the end of her days that still rankled a bit, but as she said, she certainly wasn’t going to let it ruin her life. She was well ahead of her time, and set up a charity helping what folk euphemistically called troubled youngsters by using fairground and circus activities. I don’t need to tell you that she met with a great deal of opposition and there were plenty who said that a good hiding or a bit of square bashing was what they needed, not that nonsense. Projects like that are controversial even now! But she was never a pushover. They were expected to work hard, and she insisted that if they needed to they brushed up on their reading and writing, too. I’m not going to say that it always worked. But it most certainly sometimes did. One of the “graduates” of her training scheme ended up as a chief constable, and there were plenty of teachers and engineers and people who ran successful businesses. When she was in her 70s she turned to politics and became mayor of her home town. And yes, I mean mayor, not lady mayoress. That would be about the same time she decided to renew her pilot’s license. She learnt how to fly a helicopter, too. But she didn’t make her first parachute jump until she was in her late 80s. I hoped she’d make it to her century, of course, but one morning she just didn’t wake up, and the autopsy said that she’d had a massive stroke in the night. Of course it was a huge shock to us, but I’m pretty sure that going like that, quickly, and never going downhill and losing her faculties would have been exactly what she wanted.”

     It was a lot for Stella to take in, but she was pleased to realise that her Mum plainly admired Shalimar too, even if she’d had misgivings about the name. She had no such misgivings! Weighing up the remarkable life of her father’s mentor, she couldn’t help asking, in some frustration and regret, and not just because it was one of the coolest names ever, “Why DIDN’T you call me Shalimar?”