A Habit of Dying (20 page)

Lydia checked the notes from her visit to Worthing. What was the date of birth she had for Dorothy’s mother Fanny? 19
^th
April 1915. So, baby Fanny had a father for just twenty one days, and most likely father and daughter never laid eyes on each other. Did her mother even know that Joseph was dead by the time she registered the birth, or was he still ‘missing in action’? Maybe he was still missing to this day, a name on a stone that marked no grave. Lydia tried hard to feel that loss, to try to understand how hard it would have been, how crushing to the spirit. Was it any easier for knowing that so many other wives and mothers shared the loss? Some sense of it came to her, sitting alone in her little house in Osney, but the distance in time and space spared her true knowledge.

With Joseph lost at Ypres, Fanny’s fate remained to be discovered. When had Dorothy’s mother become an orphan, farmed out to aunts and cousins? As methodical as ever, she started her search through the lists for 1915 in the same quarter as Fanny had registered her daughter’s birth. Most likely it would be found sooner rather than later, probably no later than 1925. The index images flickered in front of her well practiced eyes. On each page she ran down the whole list and then to be sure that nothing had been missed she checked the bottom of the page to see if a stray entry had been added. And for every search for Joslin, there was
one for Jocelyn and Josslin too. Fifty-eight pages into her search came her reward. December quarter 1922, Joslin, Fanny, death registered in the Colchester district of Essex. Another set of references was added to Lydia’s list of certificates. When they all arrived she would have much to write to Dorothy about.

Such was the volume of notes and information of one kind or another, Lydia set about reviewing it all in the week that followed. She resorted all her data, removing to a separate list all those individuals she had collected as being possibly connected to the family, and prioritising those she was sure of. Then she turned to the budding family tree she’d begun and entered all the additional information. This prompted a list of data yet to be gathered and questions yet to be to be answered. Finally, she arranged those questions into an order of importance. Laid out before her she had Papa and Mama’s family, the five children that she knew of, Albert, Isabella, twins Alethia and Alice, and Joseph the youngest. She had a tentative line back from Papa through Nathaniel and Joshua to John Jolly, Joshua’s father-in-law. And from John Jolly there was a second line through his daughter Prudence to his granddaughter Isabella Dix to Papa Albert. Coming forward from Papa there were his grand children Phoebe and Albert Marshall, and the orphaned Fanny. Most of these characters were no more than names on a page, but for some she had uncovered something of their lives and their loves. And everything she’d found had been touched by sadness, as if the Great War had cast its shadow down the generations. It was all good, all believable, all corroborated by the records. But still it only satisfied her original objective of finding a descendant who would be interested to have the album. The mystery of the journal remained, as did the possibility of connecting the faces from the sandcastles and the RAF albums to the whole picture. Their places in the puzzle remained to be found. In finding them Lydia was convinced she would also find the key to unlock the journal.

To her surprise she realised that although the family had been established, she had completely failed to follow up on Albert junior and more surprisingly she had made nothing of discovering the
‘self’ of Longlands was Alethia Joslin. Neither had she properly studied Beatrice, James or Henry, teenagers in the Longlands album, nor the youngsters Albert and Harriet. Who first? It was no choice really, the male name does not change on marriage and her theme was clearly Josilin, so Albert, the eldest son, it had to be.

West Street

Osney

Oxford

4
^th
April

Dear Dorothy

How have you been getting along? I was sorry to hear of your head cold and hope it is all cleared up now and that you will be able to get out a little more now that the weather has cheered up. I would be very happy to take you to the gardens that you mentioned the next time that I come down to see you. I can imagine the view is as lovely as you describe.

You will want to know how I have been getting along with the Joslins. Of Alice (your great aunt) I can find nothing, no marriage and no death and no other record. Albert junior (your great uncle) married Beatrice Pelham on 3
^rd
February 1902 and they had at least three children - Beatrice, who died aged 6 weeks in January 1903, Albert born 6th August 1903, and Harriet, born 7th July 1905. You will see that I have copied the main photograph that we spent so much time over and written this information on it, so that you will be able to put faces to the names and dates. I’m guessing a little about Beatrice in the photograph being Albert’s wife but I think it is a reasonable assumption. Likewise with their two surviving children Albert and Harriet being present.

Since I wrote to you last I have received the certificates that I applied for, that is for your grandparent’s marriage and your grandmother’s death in 1922, together with your mother’s full birth certificate. All confirm our expectations. I am making up a new ‘album’ with all these documents in it so that when you have the photograph albums you will have all the certificates too.

I am still no further forward with the other albums and have yet to look
into what may have become of Alethia, another of your great aunts. By the way it is Alethia and not Aletha as I had originally thought. I will probably find that she becomes Althea somewhere along the way. I hope she is not as elusive as Alice!

I do hope that this finds you well, I will be pleased to hear from you. Or give me a call anytime.

Your friend

Lydia

As good as her word, Lydia began searching for Alethia before the letter was even posted. By the time she reached 1920 in the index she was beginning to think that, like Alice her twin, Alethia would disappear from the record. She would have been twenty-eight in that year and becoming less marriageable by the month. Lydia rechecked and then, sensing the Joslin malaise of sadness, looked right through the death lists to 1930. Nothing. Not even an Althia or an Aletha, not a Jocelyn or a Josslin. Pausing in her enquiry, Lydia pulled out the Longlands album once again looking for an answer to the disappearance of the twins. They were pretty enough, surely? Well nourished and clearly from a comfortably placed family, they would have been a catch for anyone. Her eye rested for a moment on the other two faces as yet unaccounted for, Henry and James. Seemingly they were not Alethia’s brothers, but most likely family since they were not ‘Mister’ anything, in the way that Mr Melville was described. If not brothers, then cousins? Tracking that possibility would be a mammoth task without some further clue. And even if she should find them, they might easily have been devoured by the coming cataclysm. Which reminded Lydia quite forcibly that twenty-eight was probably no age at all for marriage, if war had snatched four years of your prime. Might even have snatched your husband-to-be.

She returned to the lists, determined to take her enquiry to 1950 if need be. Her endeavour was almost immediately rewarded. In the three months ending in March 1922 there was her prize.
‘Joslin, Alethia, married Dix-Myers, Chelmsford.’
Now that, thought Lydia, was really worth waiting for, here was the door to a new
path. And then she stopped still and closed her eyes for a moment to assemble the jumble of thoughts into a meaningful pattern. ‘Dix-Myers?’ Wasn’t the RAF album about a Myers? But there was more to it than that, something else above and beyond. Quickly she opened her list of family names. A couple of clicks and there she was, Isabella Dix, Papa Joslin’s ill-fated first wife; Isabella Dix, Papa Joslin’s first cousin, removed by one generation. And J D Myers was the name on the postcard in the RAF album. Now here was Alethia marrying a Dix-Myers. Lydia’s fingers flew across her keyboard to see the other side of the entry. March quarter 1922, ‘
Dix-Myers, James married Joslin, Chelmsford.’
The circle was complete.

All those frustrating early searches to try and find something, anything, for Myers, would need to be done again, this time for Dix-Myers. If what Lydia just knew must be true really was, then she would be able to prove it from two directions, taking Alethia forward through her marriage and her children and working the names and places of the RAF album back to join them. Not only that, but there was Papa’s marriage to Isabella to reconsider. The Jolly’s and Joslin’s might have entwined their families more often than appeared at first sight. With so many avenues opening, Lydia was at a loss to decide the most fruitful one to choose first. As she considered this happy dilemma, her eye fell on the brightness of the new growth in her garden and that of her neighbours. A new season was beginning, new life breathing spring air, a whole new world emerging from the drab cocoon of an Oxford winter. And in that instant too, she saw herself closeted away in her room, immersed in past lives, insulated from the turn of the world. So instead of choosing a Dix or a Joslin, a James or a Martha, she packed up her papers, tidied her desk and elected to take a walk before the promise of the sunshine beyond her window was spent.

Out of her house and into the air, the day felt a good deal cooler than it had appeared from the warmth of her back room. She took the few steps along to Swan Street and across the narrow little bridge over Osney Stream. Then she followed the path as it ducked past the school and out to Ferry Hinksey Road. It was a well used route, but only by those who lived on the island; for the rest of
Oxford it served no purpose and was unknown territory. Straight away she was out of the city, skirting the playing fields and heading for Hinksey. Tongues of open countryside still run almost to the city walls, largely ignored and hidden behind the sprawl of development along its main roads. For those who know these places they provide an instant relief from the relentless noise and the commercial grind. Lydia’s pace slowed as she walked, seeing children swinging, running, squealing at the age-old pleasures of a playground. Fathers kicked balls, mothers chatted with half an eye on yellow-booted infants toddling in puddles. Common enough sights, but Lydia saw them with the eye of the visitor in a strange land. She saw the buggies and the bikes with their stabilisers, the scarves and mittens, the glances she attracted from protective parents. She saw the steadier gaze and the pause in the chatter as a ruddy faced man, thin white hair and a beard that went to his waist, shirt-sleeved when he should not have been, came too close as he collected litter in a plastic bag. A man with history, a man with stories and unknown lives, with ideas and knowledge to be shared. But now a threat, an eccentric, a danger, the danger of difference. Lydia immediately had him down as a river dweller, somewhere down below the lock, smoke curling from a tin chimney on a narrow-boat festooned with flower pots and a washing line dangling across the stern. There was no menace in that gruff waterman, only the fear of a tabloid bogeyman.

She passed on to the soggy meadows, the path taking her under crackling power lines and up to the avenue of trees flanking the causeway to Hinksey. A veil of fresh green covered the hedgerow and in a break, framed by the pylons and the cables, she glimpsed the offices of Seacourt Tower to the north. No matter how many makeovers it had, it remained as unlovely as the day it was built. Had her tormented journal writer seen it that way, ever walked here and seen it brooding glumly over Botley? Or had it been no more than the building he worked in, the home of Pink2 and the office of conspiring colleagues intent on his destruction? Lydia allowed herself a smile at her own obsession. A walk in spring air, along an ancient track had brought her, for a few minutes at least,
into the physical world, but how easily she slipped back to that other creation. As she walked on, she let the characters drift through her mind, seeing if they would settle to a pattern, find their places of their own accord. As they did so she saw clearly that no matter how special they had become to her, they were no different in their way than any other family over the generations. Each was unique yet shared so many common threads. When she’d discovered their lives, found S and her troubled husband and their untold story, when she had passed it all on to Dorothy, when both she and Dorothy were long gone, when all that had happened, the Joslins would sink back to being mere names and dates. There was no sense of depression in these thoughts, simply that she saw the saga for what it was, brief moments in the great sweep of time. She had her role to play, her own part in the Joslin story, and play it she would.