Lemon Sherbet and Dolly Blue (14 page)

George wrote from France, sending Eva the lace-fronted postcards she requested. Commonwealth flags flit across most greetings, their cheery colouring and delicate lace as much at odds with the place they have come from as his anodyne words. Some are sentimental tokens, like the sweet briar rose in palest pink, with ‘forget me not' stitched beside it, a postcard written to Eva,
with a larger message intended for Annie. Eva returned the favour with parcels of socks and cigarettes and news of Wheeldon Mill. But she did not tell George everything. One of his pencil-written cards makes poignant reading: ‘Is it correct that Annie has married? Why did you not write and tell me?'

When Annie and Willie married on 1 January 1916, they hoped the New Year would hold all the right promises, despite atrocious weather and the continuing war. Eva and Willie's younger brother Nelson stood witness at the ceremony and accompanied the couple to church, arm in arm, so as not to slip on the ice. Annie wore a
new hat, though not one she had trimmed herself. This one was made especially by a local milliner and had an under-brim of pleated silk. Despite snow carpeting the ground that day, she looked a picture of spring elegance. Annie was handsome before Willie Thompson came along, but on the day my grandma signed a photograph, ‘your ever loving wife', she was beautiful.

The attic room was rearranged to make it ‘new' for the young couple with the addition of a little bamboo table and a cushioned wicker chair. It was a sunny room for Willie to come back to after a day at the bakehouse, though not his to enjoy for very long. In no time at all – or so it seemed to Annie – he was conscripted.

The talk in the corner shop was nearly always of goodbyes. The number of lads departing for the Front was soon joined by that of lasses engaged in war work. Sheepbridge Works converted to munitions, enticing young women from their pre-war jobs. Fast and alert workers were needed; wages and camaraderie were good. They disappeared into vast hangars each morning and spilled out again at night, linked arms and singing, nobody seeming to mind the twelve-hour shifts.

Ethel Stokes was one of them, a ‘canary' (so-called because of the cordite staining their faces), working in an overall and cap; no hairpins, no corsets – ‘Oh, Annie, the blessed relief,' – no metal of any kind allowed on site. Ethel spent her days twisting something that looked remarkably like macaroni into a lethal dish. Though wages were high, so were the risks. An explosion at a nearby gunpowder factory permanently scarred a number of women. Patriotism was all very well, but they had not reckoned on displaying theirs for life.

Patriotism had other ugly moments. Bricks were hurled through
the windows of German butcher, F. Stünder, on Sheffield Road, in retaliation for the sinking of the
Lusitania
, and windows smashed in Haag's butcher on the High Street. ‘Whoever would do a senseless thing like that?' asked Betsy. ‘German or not, they're all some mother's sons.'

Quietly at first, but gathering momentum, news starts coming in. Soon, it's a weekly dispatch. The vantage point of the sweet window is shunned nowadays, when the clear view it affords could be that of the telegraph boy crossing the canal bridge on his bike. It takes such an age for him to pass the shop it is like waiting in slow motion. All conversation stops until he rides by.

Carefree youths, who liked to hang around outside the shop are picked off, one by one. Eva's friend Carrie loses the big brother who used to grab her hands and swing her off her feet on payday. She has four brothers in all, and a stepbrother too, but that does not mean she has a brother to spare. Lads Annie knows from grammar school, some of whom she vied with over their position in class, join the list of dead and wounded. One former assistant master, presumed killed, is discovered to be a prisoner of war. By the time the war is through with them, nineteen ‘old boys' will be dead. Betsy learns to read her customers' faces. How do you greet a woman who has lost both sons?

It is not just neighbours and school friends who suffer. Annie's cousin Jack survives only one month at the Front. Nineteen years old – and what's the good of that, his mam asks Betsy. There is nothing ladylike about Aunt Annie's grief. Her young Jack had a fund of stories always, and liked pulling everyone's leg; now his jokes rot with him in France. Jack's brother Charlie is wounded three times before finally being invalided out. The photograph he sends from his convalescent home is supposed to reassure them,
but he's lost so much weight his clothes hang off him. Betsy wonders how much else of Charlie has gone.

But there is good news too, or what passes for good news in wartime: Willie is posted to the Middle East as a dispatch rider, and will surely be safer there than in France; and George has a commission, which is exactly what everyone expected. On the Home Front, there is the very best news of all: Annie is expecting a baby.

The baby was due in the autumn. She was born in November, a beautiful little girl, but the pregnancy was disturbing and the birth itself a terrible shock. Betsy had told my grandma nothing, just as, years before, Annie had been left to discover menstruation by herself, retreating to the privy feeling frightened and ashamed, wondering if she'd bleed to death. The pain, the indignity, the whole bloody mess of childbirth offended Annie's fastidious nature. Worst of all was her fear, not knowing what would happen next, or if she would survive the delivery. Just two years earlier, Willie's sister Nellie had died giving birth to a boy. Poor Nellie, Willie's childhood playmate (and every bit as mischievous), was dead, aged twenty-five, and Annie only one year younger.

Like most women then, my grandma gave birth at home, which in her case meant the attic room, two flights upstairs, the shop bell marking time between contractions. But, in the end, it would all be worthwhile. Except that it was not: Annie's baby was stillborn.

If you look for my grandma's baby in the General Register, you will not find her. Stillbirths were not required to be registered nationally until 1927, although from 1915 all had to be notified locally. In 1916, the year my grandma gave birth to a stillborn child, Chesterfield's Medical Officer of Health (MOH) reported
forty-one stillbirths in the borough, though it is likely that, even then, some slipped through the net. All those notified were investigated to ensure there was no foul play, a stillbirth not always being what it seemed in the years when many women were overburdened with children.

That year, Chesterfield's MOH also recorded an increase in
infant mortality and condemned the unhealthy environments in which some expectant mothers and their infants were required to live, especially those in working-class neighbourhoods with ‘insanitary privy-middens' – night-soil lavatories like the ones at Wheeldon Mill. This may have had a bearing on my grandma's situation, though I doubt it: the family was scrupulously clean. (It is almost impossible to contemplate how all their white lace petticoats and blouses, starched aprons and shirts, linen sheets and pillowcases, lace runners, damask tablecloths, handkerchiefs, napkins and doilies issued from a house whose plumbing ran to one cold tap and a privy-midden.) Infant mortality was generally high in Chesterfield: only three years earlier, its MOH had reported that the district's figures were higher than any elsewhere in England: one child in five, between the age of one and five, was born to die.

All over Britain, women like my grandma lost babies they'd longed for. All over Britain, women gave birth to babies they could ill afford to keep or did not want to begin with. When the first soldiers marched out of Chesterfield in 1914, they were trailed by weeping women clutching babies. Wartime births caused distress and consternation in equal measure. Illegitimacy was on the increase. ‘War Babies', newspapers screeched, with some headlines preceding the actual rise in the illegitimate birth rate. Figures rose from 1916 and, by the end of the war, were up by 30 per cent. Chesterfield's own illegitimate birth rate rose to a record high of seventy-two in 1916, although the actual number of women conceiving children out of wedlock was probably disguised by the number who managed to convert their panic into confetti. Other pregnant women found desperate solutions. A VAD nurse working in a poor area of London spent her wartime service on a
babies' ward at a hospital near Waterloo, presumably St Thomas's: ‘All I did was lay out dead babies like little birds… babies… left on doorsteps to die.'

My grandma knew that babies died, of course she did, but not her baby, and not with Willie so far away. Though my great- grandparents knew what it was to lose a child and could support her, it was not the same as having Willie there, and Annie's grief recalled their loss from all those years ago – and what desperate memories did it revive for Eva? Theirs was a household fastened tight in mourning. A year of beginnings and promises became a year of endings and loss.

There would be no cotton daisies for Annie to stitch on small silk bodices, no ribbons to thread through impossibly fine woollen shawls, no baby to bathe and pat with the large powder puff, like a giant pale dahlia my grandma had bought for her first child. The swansdown puff was pushed into a drawer, where I came upon it many years later: ‘That was for my baby, who died.'

I did not know my grandma's baby was stillborn, nor did my mother. Annie never said. We thought she lived for a few days and was called Mary, like Dick and Betsy's first child. During the nineteenth century, even a baby who breathed for a few hours
might casually be termed a stillborn. With the local notification of stillbirths and improved training for midwives, the likelihood of this misrepresentation was greatly reduced (and finally ceased altogether), but I wonder if Annie's baby lived for a few hours? This may be a mere fancy of mine; there is no way of knowing, but, if so, it would account for her words. Either my grandma gave birth to a child she yearned for, who was as real to her as any who drew breath, or else she held her first child and lost her, all in one day. Neither version bears contemplation, though each has been the fate of many women and continues to be today.

The Brimington Cemetry records give neither name nor gender for Mrs Thompson's ‘stillborn', who is listed among the others buried there, tucked into a corner of the churchyard. No christening, no gravestone, though never forgotten by Annie. My grandma's child, not child, her lovely daughter, Mary, lies buried beneath the trees.

There was snow on the ground that December. The trees became frosted sketches, the flowering currant bush bloomed falsely white; the streets round about were iced over, but few enjoyed a picture-book Christmas in the winter of 1916.