The Scarlet Sisters

by Helen Batten

  ‘Sometimes I see people and it’s very clear, but I don’t understand why you two don’t work,’ the counsellor said.

  Yes. That’s because he neglected to mention he was having an affair. I was the child of divorced parents, so I knew exactly how devastating the break-up of a family was. Without having a very good reason, how could I press the nuclear button and then look my children in the eye? And he wouldn’t give me that reason. So I was stuck. And I felt not just stuck, but trapped.

  But, finally, I did find that reason and with that revelation everything I had believed about my past, my present and my future was blown apart. Who do you think you are? I knew who I thought I’d been, but suddenly I had no idea.

  I no longer had a narrative for myself.

  I came across an article that suggested that suffering could be inherited. The research had concentrated on traumatic life events such as bereavement and abuse, and had shown them repeated down generations of mothers and daughters and shared among sisters. There’s a name for it: trans-generational trauma. I read the article slowly and carefully. It might be that this is a physical inheritance – research has shown that trauma affects and changes DNA; it equally may be a psychological phenomenon where trauma affects the relationship you develop with your children and in turn the relationships they go on to make.

  It may not matter how it happens, just that it does.

  I knew so little about Nanna, practically nothing about her sisters and as for my great-grandma, just a name and a location: Clara Crisp from the Old Kent Road. I decided that while I would probably never know why my husband did what he did, I might be able to make some sense of why I chose him and why I stayed with him. It felt important for me to understand where I found myself, and to find a new narrative. Not to repeat, but to fall in love with someone better next time.

  And, most crucially, so that if there is a traumatic inheritance, I might be able to stop it at me.

  I started to talk to the family. Nanna and her sisters are long gone but their children – my mum, her brothers and her seven cousins, are still very much with us. I wrote to them, telephoned and then eventually went to see them. They fed me food and stories, got out old photo albums, and scoured their attics specially, finding new information, things they didn’t even know themselves. And a story started to unfold.

  Late one night I felt compelled to draw a family tree with a difference. I took the normal diagram with its births, marriages, deaths and descendants, and I plotted the trauma. It didn’t feel a healthy thing to do and not something I’d necessarily recommend, but once I’d had the idea, I had to follow it through. With a glass of wine in one hand and a pen in the other, I overlaid all the things that we don’t talk about.

  It was pretty sobering. I saw a pattern, as if one of my ancestors had forgotten to invite the Wicked Fairy to the christening, and we had all been condemned to live difficult lives ever since.

  I made a resolution there and then – to do everything I could to stop the cycle being repeated with my three precious daughters. I wanted to break the spell. But how? It seemed important to locate the original problem – the source of the curse, if you like.

  Some things we know for certain about our families – the big, official stuff: births, deaths and marriages. And then the internet is an amazing thing. I was just a few clicks away from all sorts of information – war records, criminal records, workhouse records and the census results – information that even ten years ago would have been quite an effort to find. Now secrets that have lain buried for generations – our ancestors probably thought for ever – are being dug up. Family myths are being shown to be just that: myths. Often the truth is more interesting, and in my case, a bit darker.

  But what lies behind these official happenings: the feelings, conversations and actions? This is harder to pin down. For a start, all the main protagonists were no longer with us, but I was blessed with a family that helped me piece together the history.

  Some anecdotes were just part of the universal family folklore. I’d grown up with them, woven into my memory along with my DNA. The fact that these stories were so embedded in the extended family consciousness, despite often seeming insignificant, seems important. For example, Nanna was brought up on Carnation’s condensed milk, while her twin sister, Katie, was breastfed. Everyone told me this, but I knew it already. Why did I know? Scratch the surface, though, and it’s obvious. Because these much-repeated stories are small keys that unlock much bigger truths.

  Then there were the gaps. With the paper and electronic trail ominously quiet, they had all us descendants scratching our heads. But I’ve researched enough now to know the general historical terrain, and I know the personalities involved. I’d also discussed the options with the wider family and had the benefit of hindsight. So I’ve made a stab at what might, if not probably did, happen in those missing years. And I hope my ancestors are not spitting at me from the heavens …

  On other occasions I heard the same anecdotes, but with different beginnings, middles or ends and, indeed, protagonists: ‘No, that was Katie’ ‘No, I’m sure it was Bertha …’ etc. Then sometimes I heard something that no one else had told me, or which was in complete opposition to what I’d heard from someone else. So I had to make my own judgement.

  I guess that goes for the whole story. It’s my interpretation of our family history. It’s subjective, as is all history, and I was looking to break a spell. Put it this way, if another member of my family wrote this book, it wouldn’t be the same. We all have our own version of the truth, and our own reality.

  So this is what I found.

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Hero

  My great-grandfather, Charlie Swain, was blown into my great-grandmother Clara Crisp’s life with a strong westerly wind on an autumn afternoon in 1897.

  He was standing on the doorstep of the small terraced house in Lant Street SE1, a flutter of copper leaves dancing around his ginger head, with only a wicked grin on his face and his worldly goods in a rucksack slung over his shoulder.

  It was my great-great-grandmother, Sarah Crisp, who greeted him on the doorstep. ‘Here’s trouble,’ she thought, and with her seven daughters in mind, felt a twinge of apprehension.

  ‘Mrs Crisp? I’m your new lodger.’

  ‘Oh. Not too tall, are you?’

  Charlie was indeed pushing to reach five foot four, but he was strong, and he had a sense of humour. ‘Charlie Swain, pleased to meet you. Hasn’t anyone ever told you, Mrs Crisp, that nice things come in small packages?’

  ‘Yes, well, so does poison, young man. Guess you’d better come in, then,’ she said, struggling to stop a smile, and ushered him into the kitchen where the baby of the family, my great-grandmother, Clara, was busy making biscuits.

  They looked at each other over the kitchen table.

  It wasn’t love at first sight, at least Clara didn’t think so at the time. But Charlie did make an immediate impression. Years later, when pressed by her daughters, all Clara could say was, ‘He seemed to fill the room, like the westerly wind had blown in something exotic,’ which would send them into a chorus of giggles because, by that time, the last thing Charlie seemed was exotic.

  But, back then, when he was only nineteen, what Charlie did brim over with was confidence, his wide, freckly face open to the world, just daring stuff to happen.

  Which piqued Sarah’s curiosity. ‘So, take a seat then, Charlie Swain. Tell me, how come you’ve landed in the lovely borough of Southwark? You’re not a Londoner, are you? I can sniff it.’

  ‘No, Mrs Crisp, your nose is right. I’m not a Londoner. I’m a black sheep that has been cast from the flock as a result of a large misunderstanding and a small amount of high spirits.’

  ‘Oh, dear, I sense a tale,’ Sarah said, sitting herself down and getting comfortable – gossip was oxygen in this house of eight women.

  ‘A tale that is not to be told. Sorry to disappoint, but I’m turning over a new leaf and drawing a l
ine under. I’m sure you understand. I’ve travelled away from the scene of my alleged crime, and left it behind. I’m starting tomorrow at the brewery, next door. I’m an engineer. I’m good at fixing things.’

  ‘Well, that’ll be handy, won’t it, Clara?’ Sarah said, glancing in the direction of her daughter.

  Clara had kept her head down, busy with her biscuits, but not a crumb of this conversation had passed her by. She was determined to carry on with her work – she was kneading the dough and cutting out shapes – but Charlie Swain’s gaze seemed to be having a wobbly effect on her fingers.

  ‘Come on, Clara. Cat got your tongue?’ Sarah said.

  Clara looked up. ‘Yes. Handy, indeed.’ She had her sleeves rolled up, showing her dainty wrists, while a tightly tied apron showed off her waist. The look was completed with a light dusting of flour on her cheek.

  ‘I hope I can be of service,’ Charlie said, and once again Sarah felt uneasy.

  ‘Well, we’ll see about that, young man. Anyway, Clara’s handy at making pastries and cakes and all sorts of treats for the bakers around here, aren’t you, my dove?’

  Charlie could see she was blushing as she started cutting out shapes in the dough once again.

  ‘Save some for our Rosie Lee. I’ll make you a cup. You must be parched,’ Sarah said.

  Charlie was only too happy to settle himself down, but the cockney rhyming slang confused him a bit. Also, he was finding it difficult to concentrate on Sarah Crisp when her youngest daughter was doing such pretty things with her hands. Her fingers gently but firmly pressed the dough into dainty shapes: butterflies, shells, crowns and flowers. Intricate yet effortless. Charlie was slightly mesmerised, and he got a familiar impulse to make a shy girl smile. While Sarah had her back to them, he found himself grabbing a small corner of the dough and fashioning it into a heart, then sliding it without a word back to Clara, who looked up, astonished.

  Charlie and Clara were exact opposites. But when this couple of nineteen-year-olds looked at each other – Charlie’s dazzling sharp periwinkle eyes looking into Clara’s brown, gentle eyes – they felt like they had met before. Without thinking, just as her mother turned around, Clara hurriedly put the heart into her apron pocket and looked back at Charlie. They held each other’s gaze.

  Why do opposites attract? Hearing my mum and her cousins talk about Charlie and Clara makes me think of magnets pulling towards their polar opposites, as if we can be repelled by partners whose personality is too similar and hopelessly drawn to those who are different. Perhaps we choose people who appear to give us the very qualities we lack, as part of a natural quest for completion. Or perhaps it’s just a recipe for marital disaster …

  In any case, the instant attraction of opposites that were Charlie and Clara is a key piece of the jigsaw puzzle that made the Scarlet Sisters; or, putting it another way, that’s how the Scarlet Sisters became a twinkle in Charlie Swain’s eye.

  Later on, while Charlie was settling himself into his room, Clara was bursting with questions for her mother. ‘Do you think Dad’ll approve?’

  ‘I think he’ll rather admire that young man’s nerve. Your father always appreciates a bit of confidence. And if high spirits are his problem, I think they’ll hit it off.’

  After a pause, Clara asked the biggest question on both their minds: ‘What do you think he did?’

  ‘Hmm … if I had to put money on it, I’d say it involved a lady. It’s that look in his eyes. Anyway, I’ll find out, love, don’t you worry.’

  But Sarah never did find out, and neither did anyone else.

  Where does the story of one’s own existence start? Sometimes it feels like a chain of random collisions between people – lots of events happening simultaneously in different parts of the world that are working towards the appearance of a new life on the planet. They seem to come out of thin air, haphazardly, by chance. But sometimes the opposite happens – it feels as if there are too many coincidences, and if they start to pile up, then events start to feel like fate – or perhaps ‘destiny’ is a better word …

  It was only recently that I found out my connection to Lant Street SE1. Searching the 1891 census for a record of my great-great-grandfather, I saw Alexander Crisp’s name and his eight children – seven daughters and one son (large families of girls are a bit of a theme here) – and the address of 68 Lant Street SE1. The name rang a bell.

  I googled the area, and there it was: the Gladstone pub, nestled in the corner of Lant Street, right next door to the Crisp family home. I’d been to Lant Street before. Only once, as it’s a long way from where I live in West London, but my one night in the Gladstone was one of those turning points where the gods are rolling the dice, the plates collide, and life spins off in a whole new direction – because the Gladstone pub in Lant Street was the location for my first date with Mr D, a date and a person which were to have a huge significance for me.

  As soon as I saw the address in the census, I picked up the phone and asked him why, out of all of the pubs in London, he’d chosen that one as our first proper date.

  ‘I just thought you’d like it,’ he said.

  And yes, he was right – I did like it. And I liked him too.

  The day of that date, I’d had a busy day trying to work and be a mum, dashing around in the chilly March rain, getting wet over and over again, ruining my hair and dampening my clothes. I’d had to feed the girls, and leave instructions with the babysitter, and of course the most difficult thing, wrench myself away from them. By the time I’d done all that I was not in the right zone at all – I was an exhausted, harassed mother, yet somehow I needed to turn myself into someone more chilled, more playful and definitely more foxy.

  I was close to giving up, but some words of the immortal Nora Ephron came to mind: ‘Be the heroine of your life, not the victim.’ What would the heroine do? She would go on this date … I put on Beyoncé’s ‘Crazy in Love’ loud and started to get in the mood.

  What to wear? I picked the first thing in my wardrobe that caught my eye. That night it happened to be my short denim skirt and tight black shirt; the same one, in fact, that I was wearing the last time I saw my nanna. And remembering this, I listened to Nanna’s voice in my head, and decided to counterbalance any potential tartiness with thick black tights and my patent Doc Marten shoes. After countless drenchings that day my hair was irredeemable so I put it in plaits (my hair now having grown very long, and here an apology to Nanna). Crazy for a forty-two-year-old, but I questioned the mirror and it didn’t seem to object.

  Despite the protestations of my children, I launched myself into the cold, wet London night, and as I strode off towards the tube with each step I felt myself metamorphosing, getting lighter; by the time I got off the tube at Borough I no longer felt nervous – just the right amount of fizzing anticipation. I felt good, my instincts telling me I had set off on an adventure that was about to have a happy ending and, anyway, I really had nothing to lose.

  I wandered around the streets getting slightly lost, but not alarmingly so, and I soon came across Lant Street. ‘It’s like something out of Dickens,’ I thought, which was bang on because Dickens had lived there: it was where he wrote Little Dorrit. In fact, St George the Martyr church around the corner was where Little Dorrit got married, and was also the church my great-great-grandparents had married in. The Gladstone pub is in his novels.

  Lant Street was dark and cobbled, the terraced houses different to the ones I was used to in West London – early Victorian as opposed to late Victorian – darker brick, smaller windows and doors. And there, nestled in the corner, was the Gladstone, lights beaming onto the street, a friendly hum getting louder as I approached. And it was then that I must have unknowingly walked right past the house where my great-grandfather Charlie Swain had first been introduced to my great-grandmother, Clara Crisp. As I walked, in fact, I must have been walking in the footsteps of my great-grandfather as he walked towards his future wife.

  How often doe
s this happen – that we walk in the footsteps of our ancestors without knowing it, their ghosts tailing us, egging us on? As Charlie walked, over a hundred years earlier, were his (literal) whiskers telling him something was about to happen that was going to change his life?

  The street must have looked the same, except murkier, with gaslights instead of the few street lamps. There still is a slightly deserted, desolate air hanging in the ether around the back of Borough station, which used to characterise the streets south of the river. As London grew, the Thames marked a natural barrier between the city proper on the north side, and the badlands of the south where the outlaws, gangsters and prostitutes sought refuge. It was wilder, poorer and edgier. The area was famous for its odours – the smells of jam, beer and butchery were ever-present in the gloomy smog. It was also where London’s debtors traditionally fled – Lant Street is on the edge of the Mint slum, where debtors were given compensations. And it was handy for the Marshalsea prison, too.

  So, how did my first evening in Lant Street go? As I opened the door of the Gladstone, the warmth and noise of the friendly pub hit me. As it happened, I didn’t need to look around to find him: Mr D was sitting right opposite the entrance, a pint in front of him already half-empty (I was late, but not catastrophically).

  He spotted me straight away and I had no time to collect myself. He had a quizzical, shy grin on his face, which I couldn’t quite read. And when it came to the point of the evening, around 1 a.m., where we’d drunk all we could drink and filled ourselves up with pies and talked and talked, and a decision had to be made one way or the other, he said: ‘Well, we could stay here, or we could go to a pub near me, or we could just go back to my place. What do you think we should do?’