The Lives and Loves of Daisy and Violet Hilton: A True Story of Conjoined Twins (3 page)

             
Twenty
Scared, Shaking, Hungry Little Puppies

      
Twenty-one
Those Days Are Now Over, Over Forever

Violet and Daisy, early 1920s
. (
Author’s collection
)

K
ate was having a hard labor. The contractions were coming so close together that the pain from one never completely subsided before the next one started. It had been going on since before dawn on the morning of February 5, 1908. Fourteen hours later, the sun had set and the small second-floor room overlooking Riley Street was dimly illumined by lanterns.

Kate was twenty-one and unmarried. She was striking in appearance with softly waving cinnamon-colored hair, sad green eyes, and a complexion so pale her face almost appeared to be emitting light. She was tall and of slender frame, but she had become huge in pregnancy.

She clenched her teeth and fixed her eyes with each contraction, fearing her middle was going to tear open. Sometimes she screamed so loudly from the pain that the tenants in the adjoining row houses banged on the walls.

It was dank and cold, but because Katie complained of breathing trouble, the room’s single window had been thrown open, letting in salty sea air and the stench of horse droppings and garbage from the street below.

Sitting on Kate’s bed, holding her hand and talking soothingly, was her mother, Mary Ann Skinner, and although the chamber was scarcely large enough for the bed, it was occupied not just by Kate and her mother, but also, Mary Hilton, a midwife, and her daughter,
Edith Emily Hilton. Two of Kate’s sisters, Maggie, fifteen, and Winnifred, nine, came and went as the evening wore on.

Maggie had known before anyone that this was going to be the day that Kate was going to deliver. It was 5
A.M.
and still dark when she woke up in the bed she shared with Kate and discovered that the bed clothes were sopping. Soon after, Kate’s contractions started. They were mild at first and widely spaced, but by midmorning they had become violent and kept coming without interruption.

Kate resided with her family in Brighton, England’s most popular seaside resort. But the Skinners lived nowhere near the grand hotels, posh music halls, glittery arcades, and shooting galleries that were clustered along the famous boardwalk. Their row house was in the Bear Hill section of the city, which was not a part of town that tourists visited. Even the ocean breezes seemed to avoid Bear Hill. It was a slum, an almost impenetrable fortress of tightly clustered, badly drained, and appallingly over-crowded brick and mortar dwellings.

Mary Hilton was the best known midwife in Bear Hill. Over more than thirty years, she had presided at the births of hundreds of babies. She was in her fifty-fifth year. Some of the babies she was now delivering were the children or grandchildren of girls who, decades earlier, she had also brought into the world. But for all her experience at midwifery, as the hours passed in Kate’s bedroom, Mary was becoming increasingly concerned.

In appearance, Mary Hilton was a woman without any sharp corners. She was plump with waist-length chestnut-colored hair that she wound, piled, and pinned into thick coils on top of her head. Kate knew her not just as a midwife, but also as an employer. Mary and her husband Henry, along with their daughter Edith Emily, operated a pub in Brighton, the Queen’s Arms. It was a place known by the locals not so much for the quality of its food, but for the continual coming and going of barmaids with pregnant bellies, none of whom was paid.
They worked at the Queen’s Arms in exchange for Mary’s promise that she would deliver their babies.

The twins’ mother, Kate Skinner
. (
Author’s collection
)

When unmarried young women in Kate’s circumstances became pregnant, they rarely sought the services of doctors. Usually they gave birth in their own beds, often with a midwife in attendance. Kate’s pregnancy had been complicated. She had complained of bleeding and unusual pain six months into her term. It’s impossible to know what the nature of her problems were, but her concerns were serious enough that she was also placed under the care of a doctor. The medical attention Kate required took most of her skimpy earnings as a grocery store clerk. Because her pregnancy forced her to give up her job, she was unable to pay room and board and could do nothing to ease the family’s financial strains.

Her father, Charles Laker Skinner, worked as a butcher’s assistant. Besides Kate and Maggie, there was another child in the family, a younger brother, Charles Jr., and all were living in the narrow row house at 15 Riley Street.

Fourteen or fifteen hours had passed since Kate’s labor had begun. Although Kate was widely dilated and her contractions were strong, Mary Hilton still didn’t see any signs of movement by a baby. She told Mary Ann, Kate’s mother, it was likely the infant would be stillborn. It was time to summon a doctor. She left the Skinner residence to find a public telephone.

The physician whom Kate had been seeing was James Augustus Rooth, a member of London’s Royal College of Surgeons and a highly regarded doctor not just in Brighton, but the entire county of Sussex. Rooth lived in Hove, a community bordering Brighton to the west. He was home when Mary Hilton’s call came in. The nurse reported that something was wrong, that although Kate had been in labor since the predawn hours, she still had not delivered. Soon he was seated in the rear of a horse-drawn hansom, rolling toward the Skinner residence.

Rooth wore a mustache that was so fastidiously maintained it appeared to have exactly as many hairs on the left side as on the right. He was tall and lean and seemed to be implanted with some leveling device that kept him absolutely perpendicular to the ground. When he entered a room, most people felt inclined to stand at attention. Rooth had been a medical officer during the Boer War in Africa, and had never lost his military bearing.
¹

It was Kate’s father who received Rooth at the door. He told the physician that only minutes earlier, his daughter had finally delivered, and that although he himself hadn’t been in the birthing chamber, he thought Kate may have delivered twins. Rooth could hear the squalling of two babies the moment he entered the house. What was
immediately more disconcerting to Rooth was Kate’s hysterical shrieking. He bounded up the stairs to her bedroom.

Even the doctor was startled by the scene: Kate, lying atop bed-clothes that were soaked in blood, her legs drawn up to her chest, was maniacally throwing her body from side to side and still screaming. Mary Hilton and her daughter Edith Emily were struggling with Kate, trying to restrain her. Maggie Skinner had her hands tightly pressed to her ears, trying to muffle her sister’s chilling cries.

Lying beside Kate, still sticky with blood and vernix, were two bawling girls. Rooth reached down for the infants and then drew them to eye level to make his appraisal. They were large for twins, probably weighing about six pounds each. The lower leg of one of the babies was slightly twisted, but each girl had all her fingers and toes and appeared to be well-formed, at least on first examination. And because of the twins’ lusty crying, it was also apparent they had strong lungs. But the midwife had been right. There
was
something wrong with the infants, something terrible. Of the hundreds of births at which Rooth had been present, he had never seen babies like these. They were fused together. In the language of medical science, they were pygopagus babies, twins whose bodies were joined back-to-back by a bond of flesh and bone at their lower spines

The doctor tried to calm Kate. He attempted to place the babies in her arms but she only screamed more. Her face was turned away from her children. She was too terrified to take another look at them. Kate now believed she knew why her pregnancy had been such a difficult one: The hideously fused babies were a sure sign that God had found her adultery to be deserving of the severest punishment. She wouldn’t—she couldn’t—bear to touch them. Even the medical world of the day used the term “monsters” to refer to human beings of such anomalous forms.

It was Mary Hilton who cleaned the twins of their afterbirth, wrapped them in swaddling clothes, and gently rubbed their backs and cooed to them softly.

Before leaving her, Dr. Rooth told Kate that while he knew of a few cases of conjoined twins, the odds were never good for their survival. He said that God had a way of sparing such creatures lives of wretchedness. While Kate’s babies looked to be strong and robust, something was likely to change in their condition soon, the physician predicted. First one would die followed quickly by the other.

But what if the infants did survive? That is what Charles Laker Skinner wanted to know. He was barely able to put enough food on the table as it was. Now, in an instant, the number of mouths in the household jumped from seven to nine. He shouldn’t have been surprised that Kate delivered twins, because they ran on the Skinner side of his family. His own mother had borne four sets of twins. He himself was a twin, as was Kate herself, although her sister Maggie had died at one year.
²

After two or three days there was still no change in Kate’s feelings toward her babies. She refused to hold them and screamed when her mother or Maggie brought them to her. Because Kate refused to suckle the twins, Dr. Rooth put them on a diet of diluted cow’s milk.
³
Kate’s mother and sister mostly carried out the bottle feedings with Mary Hilton and her daughter Edith Emily helping during their periodic visits to the Skinner house.

It angered Kate that day after day, the twins did not seem to be getting weaker, as Dr. Rooth had predicted, but stronger. When were they going to die? She had no desire to bond with them, but her mother insisted that Kate give the girls names. There was something almost poignant about the choices she made. She named one child Daisy, the other, Violet. Daisies and violets were among the first flowers to bloom in the window boxes of Brighton after the gray and
gloomy winters. They were also the flowers that Kate regularly sold at the green grocery. By conferring the names of these common but cheerful flowers on the babies, was she hoping that if they did survive, they might triumph over their illegitimacy, poverty, and deformity, and bloom into creatures of hardiness and gaiety? She may have been prescient in choosing the names, or so the passage of time would seem to have shown. As the twins grew older and their personalities began to develop, Daisy would show herself to be the sister with the warmer, sunnier disposition. Violet’s temperament, on the other hand, tended to be cooler, darker, and more mysterious.