Silvi Marie Newham
by Mary Bevan
Silvi was born in Malmö, Sweden, the youngest of five siblings. Like most families in 1950s Sweden, the family lived in a rented flat during the winter and owned a little chalet-style wooden house by the sea with a garden and a vegetable plot where they spent the summer months.
She loved going to school – so much so that her best and oldest friend who was three years older than her was co-opted to play schools with Silvi who also borrowed her school books to learn Maths and English. The result was that Silvi’s English was excellent from a very early age, which stood her in very good stead as we shall see.
By the time she was 18 she had passed her A-levels and was presented with a hat when she graduated, the hat has her all her tutors’ signatures inside it. This stage of education is celebrated in Sweden more than degrees are and when they celebrate they go for rides through the streets on tractors and trailers and the backs of lorries.
At 18 Silvi also worked as an au pair for a family on a farm in Somerset in the UK. Members of this family were to become her life-long friends till they died, calling themselves her ‘English parents’. She then spent a year working as a train stewardess in southern and western Sweden, travelling widely of course and meeting many interesting people such as Miriam Makeba the well-known African singer. At this time Silvi’s parents divorced and Silvi went off to University in Lund in Sweden.
Silvi describes her University days as ‘heady’. She majored in English and American literature and dabbled in French and Geography, finding time to teach English to adults three nights a week, entertaining them with stories of her au pair days. She also enjoyed plenty of extra-curricular activities such as jazz dance, ending up in hospital with a torn tendon! One summer she spent time in France in the city of Tours and one evening while out for drinks there, she met the then Swedish Crown Prince Karl-Gustaf, now King of Sweden. She then moved to Amiens for a while, living with an American family and going to classes at the University there to improve her French as well as making many trips to Paris.
Another summer she decided to join a summer camp in the Appalachian Mountains of West Virginia as a leader in charge of entertainment and swimming for a group of teenagers. It was irritating as the children were so spoilt, but it was also an important experience as she learned to play the guitar there and began to perform as a singer. And in and out of all this she returned from time to time to stay with her ‘English parents’ in Somerset, helping out on the farm.
About this time the members of Silvi’s Swedish family began to go their own ways, and Silvi settled in England, first doing hotel work, then ‘nannying’ for a Colonel and his family (seeing how the other half lives!) and finally working in the catering department of Boscombe Hospital. There she met Mike.
At first Silvi thought Mike was an ambulance driver because he wore a navy blazer with shiny buttons, but soon found out that he was in fact an orthodontic technician. It didn’t stop them getting together though, and soon they were married, going back to Sweden for the ceremony at her mother’s insistence. Back in England once again Silvi took a new job, using her language skills to train and work as a TEFL teacher (Teacher of English as a Foreign Language) in Bournemouth until baby Christopher was born.
Now a full-time Mum, Silvi joined the choir in Verwood where she and Mike now lived and then joined the West Moors Singers who gave her a real taste for performing. From this her amateur singing career took off, and she partnered with another trained singer to form a duo singing largely folk songs and some country and western. When the other half of the duo eventually moved away Silvi went on to sing in various Operatic and Light Opera societies and later with the semi-professional Heritage Theatre Company which performed at various venues in Dorset and further afield. In all this Mike supported her up to the hilt, enjoying the travelling her various projects entailed and helping out wherever and however he could.
During this time, to make Mike’s earnings go round Silvi had begun to make clothes for herself and Christopher, including some handsome slipper boots in crochet with sheepskin and suede soles. These really caught on among her friends and blossomed into a cottage industry which was soon exporting boots all over the world. Then came the offer of a Teaching Assistant post at the Waldorf School in Ringwood where she was to spend a wonderfully happy eleven years until her retirement.
Luckily by this time Silvi and Mike had managed to get together enough money to buy Silvi’s Grandpa’s house in Sweden. They have spent countless happy times there over the years and have only recently sold the property. They have never stopped travelling, having adventured across the globe together (but don’t go to Hollywood, they say!) and Silvi has continued and expanded her craft activities and still does a bit of singing from time to time.
Altogether, then, a very rich and fulfilling life. Silvi and Mike obviously make a splendid team! We wish them many, many more years of happiness together.