Lilla and Arthur, Bedford, 1902
It’s unclear whether it was a surprising corner or another vehicle that caused the crash. But shortly after leaving the house, the horse bolted and the pony cart ended up in the ditch. Lilla, shaken by the fall, felt her stomach begin to contract. Alice’s plan, in a roundabout way, had worked.
The baby, my grandfather, was a boy. Given the less-than-perfect state of Ernie and Lilla’s relationship, this was probably a good thing. Ernie regarded baby girls as “petticoats.” In any case, Lilla’s in-laws were delighted. The baby was the first boy with the surname Howell to be born in his generation, and, even better, the few wisps of hair on the top of his head were clearly the same reddish color that Ernie and Papa Howell were so proud to bear. For once, Lilla appeared to have done something right, and glowing with pride and keen to preserve this new state of affairs, she readily agreed to christen her son Arthur after Ernie’s father.
Lilla’s state of grace in having produced a son and heir was short-lived. Alice had seized the opportunity of being with Lilla for the birth and had whisked her straight back to Bedford. But the Howells must have wanted Ernie’s son back. Just one week after the birth, when Lilla should still have been confined to bed, she made the day-long journey back from Bedford to Ernie’s cousins in Norfolk. There, when she was worn out from the trip and separated from her own family, things rapidly went downhill.
A couple of afternoons later, Lilla was alone with baby Arthur when she began the usual struggle to persuade him to feed from her breast. Muddled by the soul-emptying exhaustion of childbirth and moving around the country, she was turning the tiny child around every way she could think of to find an angle at which he could latch on when the Howells’ baby nurse came into the room. The nurse was horrified, as Lilla later said, to see her “trying to feed the baby upside down.” She snatched Arthur from her and advised the family that Lilla was unfit to look after the child. From then on, the times at which Lilla could see her baby—under strict supervision—were limited.
Lilla was devastated. To take a newborn child from its mother is to tear that mother apart. Having given birth so recently, Lilla ached in every cell of her body to hold her son in her arms and pull him close to her, dulling the physical pain and emotional turmoil that can make a new mother feel like she has been run over by a juggernaut. And she would have still felt so physically joined to her baby that whenever the nurse took Arthur from her and swept him out of her room, it would have felt as though, like a medieval torturer, she had reached in and taken hold of Lilla’s innards, dragging them behind her as she and the baby left the room. Each time Lilla watched Arthur’s tiny pudgy hands and face disappear out of view, I’m sure she felt that part of her died.
A few days later, bad news came from India. Ernie’s sister Barbie had also given birth to a healthy boy—Alan Fitzroy, known as Roy— just two days after Lilla. But she had since fallen dangerously ill with a postpartum infection. Such infections are a common complication of childbirth today—though they can usually be cured by a swift course of antibiotics. Back in 1902, the only way to recover was to ride the infection out. Or, in the worst cases, be operated on—putting the mother at risk of yet more infection. The wire that the Howells received in England told them that Barbie’s temperature had already been climbing steadily above 104 degrees Fahrenheit for four days. The absolute maximum amount of time that a person could survive with a fever at this level was eight or nine days.
Ernie left to join his parents in London the moment their wire reached him with the news.
For hours on end, Lilla was left alone in her room. Still exhausted from pregnancy and childbirth, still facing being abandoned by her husband and having been told by his family that she wasn’t capable of looking after her own child, Lilla must have felt that she wasn’t worth anything at all. And with her self-esteem shot to pieces and a tumultuous hormonal tide turning her mind and body inside out, it was almost inevitable that she began to sink into what Ernie was to call “malingering” but what any doctor today would instantly recognize as postpartum depression.
However long she spent in bed, Lilla still felt exhausted, drained of every ounce of her former energy. Too tired to concentrate on reading or any other distraction. Tracing and retracing the loneliness of the past year. Where had she gone wrong? Why couldn’t she have her baby? And why wasn’t Ernie with her? Why did she have to be so very far from Ada?
It took almost seven weeks for a letter from England to reach Ada in Chefoo. And seven weeks for the reply to come back. That made a long three months for Lilla to tell her twin something and receive an answer. It was too long a time to have a conversation about anything that really mattered. In any case, at this point, Lilla would probably not have been able to write. Ada, who must have been desperately worried by her family’s hasty departure from Chefoo, had to rely on the occasional wire and her mother’s more detailed but seven-week-delayed reassurance, or not, that Lilla was all right.
And as Lilla lay there, the questions, the self-doubts, kept on popping into her mind. Why couldn’t she do anything right? Not even now that she had given her husband the son he’d wanted? The more that she tried to think things through, the more confused she became, her mind thickening and slowing down. Her body, overcome by the effort of it all, lying there listless, as though her limbs were lead weights pinning her down on the lumpy mattress, and the news of the continuing ups and downs of Barbie’s illness in India flinging her from tears to elation to tears again.
It would be another three months or so before Ernie’s siblings made an overt decision to collect their letters. But they had for some time already resisted the urge to throw all their letters away. Especially the ones detailing the family drama that follows.
For five long days after Ernie left her to go to London, Lilla waited to hear, secondhand, of Barbie’s fate. And then good news came through. Barbie had been operated on, and her temperature had fallen from 104.8 degrees to a far safer 100. Ernie came back to Norfolk and saw a Lilla who hadn’t had to have any operations, who hadn’t been battling at death’s door in a faraway country, being what he must have thought was self-indulgently tearful. So when, less than a week later, another message arrived from Shillong to say that Barbie was ill again and this time the situation was even worse than it had been before, Ernie packed his bags and headed off once more.
Lilla cried as he left. Not just for Barbie, but because, even though Ernie wasn’t supposed to be leaving her until he returned to India in January, still almost three months away, he seemed only too ready to go now. And because the more elusive he became, the more she loved him. And she didn’t seem able to make him love her back.
Up in London, Ernie became totally absorbed in his sister’s illness. So far, the news from India had been brief and confined to wires revealing only the extent of Barbie’s fever, the fact that she had been successfully operated on, followed by “Serious relapse, slightly better.” Any more details were still caught up in the relentlessly slow post. It took a good three weeks for a letter to reach London from Calcutta, and Shillong was two or three days farther away than that. For the next two weeks, the wires continued in the same vein. Barbie was still extremely unwell and showing no sign of improvement. Ernie stayed in London, waiting on every piece of news, with the added excuse that he needed to study for his promotional exams.
As Ernie’s concern for Barbie grew, his notes to Lilla must have grown briefer and rarer. He hadn’t yet left her for India—gone only as far as London. But back in Cromer, Lilla would have felt that she had as good as lost him already. Her own mother’s visits can hardly have helped. The more Alice—who would have meant well, would have only been trying to make her daughter better—told Lilla to pull herself together and stop her silly worrying, the more Lilla would have done precisely the contrary.
And then, in the middle of the second week of November, the news from India changed. Barbie’s sister and husband had decided to move her to
a hospital in Calcutta. As Barbie was seriously ill, they would have to travel slowly and the journey would take several days. But reaching proper medical care was her only hope of survival. The Howells, relieved that a clear decision had been made, drew in their breath to see what would happen next. Mama booked herself on the next boat out to Calcutta. Ernie was almost beside himself with worry. But his exams had finished. There would be no more news from India for a week or so. It was hard to justify staying in London. On November 13, Papa wrote: “[Ernie has] gone back to Cromer to look after his sick wife. Poor old chap—he is by no means the light-hearted chap that he used to be.”
By now, Lilla’s six-week confinement was more than up. But, far from having recovered, she was still languishing in bed, unable to rise, dress, and appear downstairs. Alice decided that, again, it was time to step in. What her daughter needed was a change of scene. She whisked Lilla back to Bedford.
Even surrounded by her own family and allowed at last to look after her baby, Lilla remained a shadow of her former self. Before the birth, even when she had been upset by Ernie’s behavior, she had continued to try to please him. Now she had lost the will to do even that—although Ernie’s approval was precisely the tonic she needed.
Ernie was not a patient man at the best of times. He can have made no effort to conceal his irritation with what he saw as Lilla’s unwillingness to pull herself together. He had decided that Lilla was a burden even before she was ill, and now he must have felt that, compared to Barbie, Lilla’s tears and exhaustion were a fuss over nothing, addressing her as if she were a foot soldier in his regiment—come along now, time to buck up—the bullying officer streak creeping in.
Ernie’s words passed over Lilla in a blur. In a world of her own, all she would have heard was the tone of his voice: thud, thud, thud, like a deep bass marching drum. All she would have seen were his stiff shoulders, his jaw clenched, as if his teeth were perpetually on the verge of grinding against each other, his eyes darting around the room and back again to the door. I can see her lying there, her face pallid, her eyes vacant, and her cheeks tear-stained, sinking farther and farther into her mattress.
Alice called in the grandest doctor she could find in the hope that he could explain why Lilla was wasting away. But postpartum depression wasn’t a diagnosis a doctor was likely to make back then. After examining her, he suggested that Lilla had “possible tuberculosis,” the early-twentieth-century catchall for doctors who didn’t know what was wrong. “Doctors,” wrote Lilla’s sister-in-law Ada, “seem to me to have tuberculosis on the brain.”
But at the mention of tuberculosis—which would make Lilla a long-term invalid and yet more expensive to live with—Ernie became even more determined to leave her behind.
Shortly after, a wire came from India saying that Barbie had reached Calcutta safely—“Barbie better.” And then, hot on its heels, the letters detailing what exactly had happened to her started to arrive from Shillong. They had been written by Ernie’s sister Ada to Mama. But Mama had already left for India. Papa opened them, forwarding them on to Bedford, and Ernie appointed himself the family scribe, copying each one out several times, making a diary of the events described in them, and forwarding both to the rest of the family.
Lilla must have felt that when she looked at her husband, she only ever saw the back of his head. And the sheer horror of the letters he was copying would have made her feel guilty for wanting even a scrap of his attention. As Ernie’s obsession with Barbie’s condition grew, Lilla may have begun also to fear that the same might happen to her. Perhaps she even hoped it, thinking that if she fell as ill as Barbie, then Ernie would pay her the attention he was now paying to his sister.
Until the first letter arrived, Ernie and his family knew only that Barbie had been desperately ill. They had some idea that Barbie had had a postpartum infection, but it was only now that they learned the gruesome details. And, even today, the following is not for the squeamish. Having a baby in an Indian outpost one hundred years ago, let alone falling ill afterward, was a risky business. Yet another reason for wanting to have as few children as possible.
Barbie’s Illness
Barbie’s doctors in Shillong did not decide to make a “thorough examination of her” until she was unlikely to survive another twenty-four hours. The extracts that follow are from copies, in Ernie’s handwriting, of letters from Ada Henniker to her mother.
Shillong, October 20
[The doctors] found two large cavities full of pus one on either side of the vaginal passage. They washed these out and inserted a tube to carry off the pus in 2 hours her temp had fallen from 104.8 to 100. . . . Had they not found the seat of the fever she could not have lived another 24 hours as with 8 days of temp at 104 and over she was nearly worn out of course. Every day the cavities were left more accumulation was going on and the temp would have gone on rising. It was an awful time. I shall never forget it and even after the cavities were found the pain she su fered having them cleaned out was too awful and yet as her only chance of recovery depended on it it was obliged to be done in spite of her heart-rending cries. What she has su fered I should think very few human beings have ever been through as any one with a less strong constitution would have died long before. Of course her recovery after this long period of perpetual fever is fearfully slow and has been somewhat delayed (even now the cavities are healed) by the most fearful irritation of the bladder, which is now being cured and then when she is sewn up she really will be over her troubles, but she has had the most awful time anyone ever had, I think. However she is so much better now that I feel quite a different being.
Ernie had to wait nearly two weeks for the next installment. And, compared to what was to come, Barbie’s first operation would look like a quick trip to the dentist.
Shillong, October 31
My darling Mama,
I must try and tell you of some of the awful things that have happened since my last letter.
Barbie had fever every day—but what the cause was no one could tell— they thought it was from the bladder trouble. On Wednesday morning about 7 am Wyndham [Barbie’s husband] rushed round to me on his way to the doctors to ask me to go at once as Barbie had fainted. I went at once and found her with Major Hehir and the two nurses putting mustard plasters to her legs and heart, while she was in a complete state of collapse, icy cold, and covered with cold perspiration. We never thought she could pull through it was too awful. However she did—by the evening was wonderful. We had in the meantime wired to Capt Dykes, the Gauhati man, who came up at once and was there that evening so they had a great consultation with result that they said they must perform an operation as she must have an abscess inside her. It was an awful thought of course she was so weak and I had a horrible haunting feeling it was a mistake. But against 3 doctors, what could I do? I argued against the operation but they said it is certain to be an abscess and if we wait longer it will have bored deeper and perforate the bowels. Wyndham and I were nearly mad with fears, but in the face of 3 doctors we gave in and today they performed the operation. Oh! Mama, the horror of it. Poor little Bar lying there & not knowing what was in store for her and asking me why I looked so sad. It nearly broke my heart—but of course I could not tell her— oh but the agony and suspense mingled with doubts and fears were so awful, I should have gone mad if I had not been set to work to carbolize towels and mix antiseptic lotions and then when they began to work how Wyndham and I sat holding our breath for nearly 2 hours. Every time she stopped groaning my heart stood still as I said to myself “they’ve killed her”—I can’t describe the agony of it all, as her groans tore one’s heart nearly out. At last the doctors came out and said they had found no abscess at all but had found she had got local peritonitis. I felt absolutely crushed to think of all she had gone through to find only that—I have done nothing but blame myself all day for not having followed my own instinct and persuaded Wyndham not to allow it. But as I said before—in the face of three doctors, how co
uld anyone? Now she is lying all bandaged up and when not under Morphia, in the most heart-rending pain—all for nothing, all for nothing.
Nov 2:
Since writing this we have had one awful day and 2 more than awful nights. Last night was the worst as she began being sick about 10 pm and the pain this caused her was almost unendurable and [when] she thought she was going to be sick she got into a cold perspiration or terror and clutched me on one side and the nurse on the other, while her eyes started from her head. I’ve never seen anything so ghastly. This feeling came over her about every hour and a half and lasted perhaps 10–20 minutes at a time. We gave her ice and brandy, but all no good and by the morning she was worn out and had more Morphia which she is now sleeping o f.
Shillong, November 10
My darling Mama,
My brain is in a whirl. On Saturday the doctors had a consultation about Barbie and said that she would never get well here and that taking her to Calcutta was the only chance and that of course was a tremendous risk. However Wyndham and I decided to risk it as it is very evident they have not the slightest idea what is the matter with her and they will probably only muddle her worse than they have done. Oh it is too dreadful to see the poor little wreck they have made of it. It is cruel cruel. Think how splendidly strong she was and now she is nothing but a little skeleton and aching all over. She cannot lie on either side and her back has two sores on it and causes her agony and she can’t sleep because she is so uncomfortable. It is simply piteous to see the poor little soul’s su fering. Oh! Mama I believe they have killed her. I can’t believe she can survive the journey to Calcutta but it is her only chance.
By now, Major Hehir was suggesting that Barbie might have “tuberculosis of the bowels” and was persisting in “pouring some awful solution of mercury down her throat.” A move to Calcutta was indeed her only chance.
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