Lemon Sherbet and Dolly Blue (8 page)

Protecting herself in childhood scuffles was not something my grandma was good at. If someone pulled Annie's hair, she stood still. Thankfully, whenever swift blows or sharp elbows were needed, Ethel was there to defend her. ‘I'd gi' em a crack,' she explained years later, ‘Well, Annie always was a lady.'

Whenever my grandma told me about her childhood, she always mentioned poverty and hunger – though not hers. She had jam spread on her bread (and butter, if she wanted it, though some considered butter
and
jam an extravagance), and as many slices as she could eat. She had stout boots that Dick mended when their soles became too thin, and, after she had washed her hair, it was spread across her shoulders to help it dry while Betsy brushed it, if not quite one hundred times, then sufficient times for Annie to lose count.

The poverty and hunger were Ethel's, though hers was not the only family going without. If she called for Annie on the way to school, Betsy would ask if she'd had breakfast, and it was often evident from Ethel's face that she had not. Time and again, my great-grandma placed a hunk of bread and jam in her hands. One morning, Ethel appeared with bare feet. The soles of her shoes had worn right through and even the cardboard stuffed inside them had disintegrated. A new pair of boots cost around six shillings. There was no point in Betsy asking when Ethel's would be replaced, when Florrie did not have sufficient money to feed
her family, let alone the penny for the boot club. That afternoon, when Dick came off shift, my great-grandma walked down to Whittington Moor and returned with a brown-paper parcel. When Ethel appeared the following day, a pair of shoes was passed across the counter with a smile and a shushing finger.

Annie's other childhood friend, Zoe Graham, was the publican's daughter, whose circumstances could not have been more different. She wore nice clothes, like Annie, and shared Annie's disinclination for rough games. With most games played on the spare ground between their houses, they sometimes gauged the general mood before venturing out to play. Quieter, rhyming games were more to their liking: ‘The farmer wants a wife, the wife wants a child…' Each time their respective doors opened, sweet young voices drifted into the shop and the pub.

My grandma was not stuck up, but she was indulged. Even those who loved her dearly (including Ethel) said she was not allowed to soil her hands in any way. Annie was not to wash a single pot, peel a potato or lift a sweeping brush, but to sit with her school books or her sewing. At a time when girls like Ethel had one sibling on their hip, others at their heels and a long list of chores to complete, my grandma was having crochet lessons, learning the piano and perfecting her embroidery. Dick and Betsy greatly regretted their own poor schooling and wanted her to have an education in all the things they lacked, and as many extras as they could afford. Dick's income was reasonably stable, with a foreman's wage, and the shop was beginning to pay its way. Their own needs were relatively minimal. And unlike the majority of their neighbours, my great-grandparents had only one child to pro vide for. They could not afford to raise a lady of leisure – Annie would have to
work until she married – but the better her education, the more chances she would have. Her hands would be smooth, unlike theirs.

It was probably Dick and Betsy's friendship with the publican that helped determine my great-grandma's schooling. Zoe Graham was a paying pupil at the Netherthorpe Grammar School, Staveley (tradesmen's daughters were often fee-paying pupils). In 1907, Annie joined her. She had to pass an entrance exam in Reading, Writing and the First Four Rules of Arithmetic, but with that achieved, was accepted. School fees were £1 13s 4d a term; dinner in the School House a further 9d a day – most pupils came from too far away to return home at lunchtime (though, this being the north of England, no one ate ‘lunch'). Students were required to provide their own books and stationery; there was also a sports fee of 2s 6d a term, although my great-grandparents could have spared themselves that cost: it paid for the hockey lessons Annie hated. My grandma could think of nothing worse than pounding up and down a muddy field.

Staveley Netherthorpe Grammar School had a long pedigree stretching back to the sixteenth century and had recently resisted attempts to deprive it of its grammar-school status. Shortly before my grandma became a pupil, the school had sixty-six day boys, one boarder, and forty-one girls. Over the next few years, an influx of those wishing to train as elementary school teachers at its newly established Pupil-Teacher Centre further increased student numbers. As befitted a co-educational establishment, the staff was mixed, its female members inspirational New Women in college gowns, teaching their young charges to think for themselves, a lesson my grandma absorbed.

The school syllabus included Latin, Euclid, Trigonometry and Science. Pupils were encouraged to perform their own experiments in the chemistry and physics' labs and to ‘attack problems with confidence'. Additionally, girls were taught housewifery, dressmaking and cookery; and boys woodwork, to introduce ‘ideas of economy, thrift and careful attention to detail'. Annie's favourite subjects were English and History – she relished Dickens and Longfellow and devoured Walter Scott; the Kings and Queens of England; the little Princes in the Tower; Alfred burning the Cakes. Aside from the dreaded hockey, my grandma loved her Nether-thorpe years.

There were more new friends to make at the grammar school, boys as well as girls, who were just as interested in reading Shakespeare as she was: Maurice Unwin, who had views on most subjects; and a quietly spoken boy, George Walter Hardcastle, who kept his opinions to himself, but generally had something interesting to say. There was slim, fair-haired Gwennie Peat, and, of course, Zoe was a classmate too. Just as Ethel had defended my grandma, now Annie stuck up for Zoe. Whereas Annie had needed a champion to fight with slaps and fists, Zoe was a diffident pupil. Words did not frighten Annie; she knew and enjoyed their power, and spoke up for Zoe whenever she could. Though no fists flew at the grammar school, there were other ways of wounding with intent.

It was quite a performance to walk the five miles to school and back again at the end of the day, and so, for her fifteenth birthday, Dick and Betsy bought Annie a dark green bicycle from Flint's on Whittington Moor, with dress guards to protect her coat and skirt from splashes. The bike had to be pushed uphill for the first leg of the journey, but Annie could cycle on through Brimington, into Staveley and on again to Netherthorpe.

My great-grandparents were so proud of their grammar-school girl, they had a new studio portrait taken and mounted on the wall, where it joined the panorama of family photographs. The new picture showed Annie in her grammar-school cap and uniform, hair flowing free, trusty bike in the foreground – the independent young scholar cycling into the future. Framed in gilt, with a slim green velvet border, the picture had pride of place on the wall. The first thing you saw when you opened the house door was young Annie.

She and Ethel saw less of one another when my grandma became a grammar-school pupil. Ethel left school the minute she could – she couldn't have stayed even if she'd wanted – and
was soon stacking newly pressed glass at the bottle factory on Coronation Road. Faced with a choice of the sticky, scalding sweetness of the jam factory, fettling crocks at Pearson's Pottery, the yes/no servility of domestic service, or lugging bottles and crates, Ethel plumped for the latter. Cut fingers and an aching back were preferable to scalded hands and forearms, lungfuls of dust or mountains of some old biddy's pots. While Annie was walking out in a dress so new its velvet shimmered, Ethel was collecting her first wage and tipping all but thru'pence up to her mam.

Now that she was working, Ethel had more of a voice in her household. Having her say did not make family life any easier, however. If Ethel had a view, she expressed it. She was sick to death of her father's aggravating ways, his leathering the younger ones, bullying her mam and pouring half his wages down his throat. She put food on the table just as he did. One night, during yet another furious altercation, he lunged at Ethel who lunged straight back at him. Immediately, she was thrown out of the house.

Ethel was tearful and trembling, though defiant still, when she landed on my great-grandparents' doorstep. Of course she could stay, Betsy reassured her, and made up a bed in the attic, which, until now, had housed assorted sacks of grain, but there was a small table in one corner, an upright chair and a hook on the back of the door which would do for her things. It had a sunny aspect too, with stairs that came right into the room.

Ethel stayed with my great-grandparents for several months, returning home when she knew her father would be out, and washing pots and generally helping Betsy while Annie did her homework. She had always been grateful for the kindness they showed her, now she could not thank them enough. But Ethel
could not stay at the corner shop for ever. Eventually, she and her father called a truce. They'd been passing in the street without acknowledging one another, but Ethel had enough of that game, and wanted to be at home for her mam. Which was just as well, because life at the corner shop was set to change. Annie was about to get a sister.

O
N
2 F
EBRUARY
1901, Q
UEEN
V
ICTORIA WAS BURIED WITH
state ceremony and full military honours. On the same day, a baby came into the world with no fanfare whatsoever, a daughter born to Emily and Thomas Martin. At least, that's what the birth certificate says. In fact, although they lived together for some seven years and he gave his name to their four daughters, Emily Ball and Thomas Martin never married, though that's less unusual for the time than some might think.

Thomas was a colliery hand, a hewer. By 1901, he and Emily were living in the Derbyshire town of Eckington, having had as many houses as they had children, and in as many years, just about. Life looked set to be the same for Emily as for her own mother, who gave birth to eleven children, her youngest born when Emily was already a mother herself; at one point, mother and daughter were pregnant at the same time. Thomas was also one of eleven children, born to Irish parents living on the outskirts of Chesterfield.

In 1903, Emily was pregnant again, a pregnancy she did not survive. A fifth pregnancy in seven years was not that unusual for
a working-class woman of her day, nor was death in childbirth: maternal mortality was a major cause of death among married women. In October of that year, at the age of twenty-seven, Emily haemorrhaged following her confinement. There is no record of what happened to the baby she was carrying.

The tragedy of Emily's short life was not quite over. The following day, Thomas went to register the death and, as is the custom, was required to state his own name along with hers and define his relationship to the deceased. There are two ways of interpreting what happened next. A sense of propriety, a need for truthfulness at the end; shock or exhaustion, or perhaps a combination of all these, made Thomas give her correct name: Emily Ball, and not the surname, ‘Martin', which she had given on recent documents and for the purpose of the census two years earlier. A less generous
interpretation is that by giving her correct name, Thomas not only told the truth but also distanced himself from further responsibility for their young children. This naming left him with a problem: how was he to account for his relationship with Emily? Faced with the recording authority, Thomas chose the term sometimes used to acknowledge a settled but unsanctioned relationship. And so the mother of his children, with whom he had lived for at least seven years and who, twenty-four hours earlier, had bled to death in childbirth, is defined on her death certificate as: ‘Housekeeper'.

It was almost impossible (though not unheard of) for a man to bring up four daughters by himself. These were the days before welfare provision and Thomas had to work to survive. He had sisters who could have helped him, however, and I suspect that one of them did, because his eldest daughter was separated from the other three and disappears from this story. Not so Kitty (aged four), Margaret (three) and Annie (three months off her third birthday). For whatever reason, Thomas Martin could not or did not provide for his youngest girls.