The Slaidburn Angel

by M. Sheelagh Whittaker

  Matthew and Margaret, two fine names for two healthy children who could be a comfort to them in their old age. Jane wasn’t much for imagining, but it really felt as if this bright little girl was going to find her life a great adventure.

  Jane had the notion, wistful and yet hopeful, that she would be able to teach her daughter the things that she so wished her mother could have had the chance to teach her. She wanted to show her daughter how to cook and sew and wean baby kittens from their mother. Most of all, Jane wanted to watch her daughter grow into young womanhood, to help and encourage her to fulfill her dreams.

  Being Jane’s first girl, Margaret’s name was full of family connection. Jane’s own mother’s name was Margaret, and Jane’s beloved older sister was a Margaret, too. And though she may not even have known, both Jane’s grandmother and her great-grandmother on her mother’s side had also been named Margaret.

  One reason that she might not have known about all of the other Margarets was that Jane’s own mother, Margaret, had died so soon. She really never had the chance to tell Jane many stories about her life and the lives of her parents, stories about the choices life had presented to them and how those choices rippled down through the years to shape the lives of those who came after.

  Jane’s sister Margaret was sweetly flattered by the baby’s name. She had held Jane’s hand through her long labour, gently wiping her forehead. At one point she had even sung Jane a lullaby to distract her from the relentless pressure of her contractions. Though it was a longish trip from Slaidburn, through the Forest of Bowland, to the Isherwood dwelling at Mill Brook Farm, Margaret had already been around again to drop off clothes suitable for a little girl baby, including a lovely new knitted jacket with fancy work down the front.

  “We’ll have to call her Maggie,” she happily admonished Jane. “Otherwise people will start calling me Old Margaret, and I’ve no need of that.”

  John’s sister Mary and her husband, Tom Rushton, had also come around in their trap to see the new baby and to leave behind some freshly baked bread, but it was Tom’s news of the neighbourhood that really had John and Jane most excited.

  “I hear the tenancy on Meanley Farm may be coming up,” Tom had told them. “What with Henry Harrison gone and John not well, they need a strong new tenant over there. Mary and I would dearly love to have you and Jane as neighbours.”

  “Do you think the estate manager would consider us for it?” asked Jane eagerly.

  “Why not,” said Tom. “That husband of yours has a fine reputation as a hard worker and an honest man. Everyone in Slaidburn knows that if you want a job well done, just go looking for John Isherwood.”

  Jane and John exchanged hopeful looks: The tenancy of Meanley was one of their dearest wishes. Growing up at Chapel Croft where Mary and Tom now lived, John had long admired Meanley’s fine aspect and rolling fields. And there was family to consider. With Mary just next door, Margaret nearby in Slaidburn, Jane’s brother Tom at Ash Knott, and her brother John in Newton, Jane would not lack for company and John would not lack for help when he needed it with the heavy work around the farm.

  Once their visitors had gone home, the new parents shared their excitement quietly so as not to wake up the sleeping newborn, and just as she was slipping off to join the baby in sleep, Jane reached out and held John’s calloused hand.

  “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we can go to live at Meanley. With the school just over in Newton, the children can get a fine start in life. A farm like that is what I always hoped for us.”

  “Yes,” replied John softly. “It would be a dream come true.”

  The Importance of Being Margaret

  As long as I can remember, I have known that Margaret Isherwood, my Whittaker grandmother, was born on April 9 because that is my birthday too. In recognition of our shared birthday, my father, Dean, Margaret’s second son, with what was probably the resigned acquiescence of my mother, added Margaret to the front of the list of names they already had planned for me.

  Margaret Sheelagh Dillon Whittaker is a mouthful, though it does at least have substance. But I was never Margaret. Instead I was Binkie until I could spell Sheelagh, which was quite late, and I have been Sheelagh ever since.

  It was not until I delved into grandma’s history that I came to realize the importance, the sheer immanence, of the name Margaret in my family. As a result of that ignorance, and because the computer age has made it increasingly difficult for people to list three first names, the Margaret part of my name had almost withered away.

  However, I had not forgotten our shared birth date. That piece of information proved vital when, following that first excitingly successful genealogical venture in Haslingden, I went looking in London for my grandmother’s birth certificate. I did not know the exact year, but I certainly knew the month and the day.

  I went looking for my grandmother Margaret Isherwood’s birth registration at St. Catherine’s House in London, and from the records I learned that she was born in 1876 and her birth was registered in Clitheroe. I was surprised at the place name, Clitheroe, as I had been expecting her to be born in Haslingden. I was further surprised when I got the actual certificate and learned that Clitheroe was just the registration district for a birth that had actually taken place at Mill Brook Farm in the Forest of Bowland.

  To a genealogical novice such as me, the various place names were both confusing and intriguing. Without much knowledge of or insight into Lancashire rural and urban life, especially in Victorian times, I really didn’t know if the moves Margaret seemed to have made in her life were unusual or not.

  Among the bits and pieces of information safeguarded by Penny, there had been some vague family story about grandma’s father having “lost everything” in a big court case defending her stepmother from an unjust accusation over an accidental baby death. It was hard for either of us to make any sense out of it, and now both grandma and anyone else who might have known the facts were dead.

  A more experienced researcher would have realized immediately that being born on a farm near Clitheroe but married as a mill girl in Haslingden implied a serious reversal of fortune. I simply did not understand that in the mid 1880s leaving a farm tenancy to find work in a mill town was wrenching, not a move one would make if there was a better choice. It was most likely an act of desperation or desire to escape the past and find a new place in a new community.

  The Absence of Jane

  My searches were beginning to be peopled with gentle ghosts. People whom no one had thought about for many years were being resurrected by my queries. Their stories, their births and marriages and deaths, began to interweave with and be embellished by my discoveries. I had gone looking for antecedents and now they seemed to be whispering to me from the past, eager for their lives to be remembered.

  I had learned our great-grandmother’s name, Jane Isherwood, née Bleazard, from grandma’s birth certificate, and I thought if I could learn more about Jane I could really begin to better understand Margaret’s life. Penny’s impression was that Margaret had lost her mother when she was still quite young, around six or seven years of age, so I went looking in the early 1870s for a death record for Jane Isherwood.

  I looked and looked and looked, standing shoulder to shoulder with like-minded people engaging in a little genealogy research on their holidays or during their lunch breaks. The room at St. Catherine’s House was full of so many shelves of large old books, usually four of them for each year, listing the names of the dead in copperplate handwriting. Like all of those around me, I heaved each book onto the high, long, chairless desk provided, hunted through the alphabetical listing, and then returned the book to its ordered place on the shelf. At times someone was standing there waiting for it.

  I was somewhat confused in my geography and a little unsystematic in my searching, and I did not have much luck. After succeeding in my initial searches so quickly, this one was proving much more difficult.

  I set Jane aside for a while in
favour of hunting for a birth certificate for my great-grandfather Robert Whittaker. I was in a better position looking for him. Confronted with a neglected churchyard in Haslingden full of centuries of burials, William had mysteriously felt prompted to walk to a far corner of the graveyard, there discovering the gravestone of Robert Whittaker, his wife Ellen, my great-aunt Fanny, and her husband. Thus equipped with Robert’s age and date of death, I thought that finding his birth certificate in the official records would be comparatively easy. Who would have thought that there would be so many men called Robert Whittaker living in Lancashire in the middle of the nineteenth century?

  Finally, I had to give up and return to Canada. Despite the tedium of the search, and the physical discomfort of the surroundings, I was determined to go back and continue. I knew that the records just had to be somewhere in that building.

  A Sad Goodbye

  Meanley Farm 1883

  Jane wished so fervently for things to be different, better, for her and her dear Maggie than they had been for her own mother and herself. But in the end, they too had to face almost the same sad rituals of premature loss and death. It would take the resilience of young Maggie, raising children in a far-off dominion, to break the cycle at last. All Jane would ever know was that she was losing her life too soon and leaving her beloved daughter behind.

  Matt and Maggie held hands as they filed solemnly into the room, nudging brother John in front of them as they went. Aunt Mary had told them to go and kiss their mother goodbye as she was going up to heaven to be with the angels, but Jane’s laboured breathing and stifled moans only left the children convinced that nothing good or happy was going to come of all this.

  Ma had been sick for quite a while, her legs swollen and her breath short. Da was drawn and tired, and he sometimes shouted at them now, something he had never done before. Aunt Mary was helping to look after the littlest boys, but she was tired too. The farmhouse had a neglected air, which was particularly hard on da because he always liked to have things clean and orderly.

  Maggie missed two things a lot: her mother’s laugh and her nightly stories. Jane had told them stories about a blue fairy that she said her own mother had told her, and Maggie just loved those stories.

  In her heart, Maggie knew just what the blue fairy looked like — not too big with a long blue dress like a princess and lots of beautiful blue hair. Her mother laughed at her about the blue hair but then she helped Maggie make a dolly that looked exactly like the blue fairy … almost. She had blue-dyed yarn for hair, a soft, long blue dress, and little wings made of real feathers sewn so neatly onto her back that they seemed to sprout through holes that had been cut carefully in the blue dress. Margaret adored that fairy doll and called her “Blue.” When ma was feeling really sickly Maggie had tucked Blue into the bed beside her so the doll could keep her company.

  Aunt Margaret came to visit as often as she could, trailing her mob of children and stepchildren behind her. Jane was particularly interested in how the children of sister Isabella were getting along, being raised by Margaret.

  “Some other woman will be raising my littl’uns,” Jane whispered to her sister, but Margaret would hear none of that kind of talk.

  “You are going to get better,” she ordered Jane. “There is nothing else for it. I have too many to care for already, and John and the children would be lost without you. Think about me for once, I’ve only two sisters left in the world and I need both of you.”

  Jane laughed at Margaret’s posturing until she had a coughing fit. Margaret hugged her as tightly as she dared and then settled her gently back down into the covers.

  “What this?” she said, finding the doll with blue hair in amongst the covers.

  “That’s Maggie’s blue fairy. Her magic is supposed to keep me well.”

  “Let’s hope it works.” Margaret smiled, putting the doll back where she found her. “I always have been partial to the colour blue.”

  John went quietly into the front room for one last look at his beloved Jane. It was quiet now, the children asleep at last. His sister-in-law Margaret had washed and dressed Jane lovingly, talking quietly to her the whole time. Looking down into the wooden coffin, he saw a scrap of blue caught in the folds of Jane’s soft white nightdress.

  He gently lifted the little fairy doll out of the coffin.

  “I think the living will be needing you, Blue,” he whispered. “Especially my girl Maggie. Do you think you can look after her for now?”

  The tiny doll stared up at him fixedly with her criss-cross-stitched blue eyes.

  “I believe that is a ‘yes,’” said John.

  The Gardners of Dalton-in-Furness

  Grace Gardner was born into a life with few advantages. While New Year’s Eve 1859 might have been an interesting date to be born, the prospects for a young working-class female in Dalton-in-Furness were pretty limited.

  Her pa was an iron miner and her ma the vivacious local girl who had caught his eye. Grace was her parent’s first child and she inherited her mother’s slight beauty and magnified it with a gentle warmth.

  Grace was a great favourite of her father’s — her desire to please beguiled him just as it later would other men in her life. The sweetly toddling Gracie in her pinnie, growing into a surprisingly serious little scholar who was determined to learn to read and write, made him dream, at least for a moment, that she might marry well and even be the one to look after her ma and pa when they were old.

  Then, as the years passed and he had to listen to more and more admiring comments about Grace from his mates, Ed Gardner began to worry instead. His advice to be careful of boys was gruffly delivered, and barely acknowledged by Grace … or heeded.

  Ed liked a pint and didn’t mind spending a bit of time at the pub on a Sunday. His family was growing steadily and their house was noisy and crowded. Unlike those of his chums, the Gardner family were a healthy lot and most of his children survived.

  After Grace, Edward and Isabella Gardner went on to have two more daughters at four-year intervals. Grace was eight and Jane four when Isabella was born. They were an interesting trio: Grace, the eldest, quiet spoken and acquiescent; younger sister Jane shared some of Grace’s gentle loveliness, but with a bit of an artistic flair; and Isabella, the youngest, who was born solemn and matured somehow shrewd.

  They all came to think of Isabella as the “smart one” and were probably right. She certainly was a fast talker and she had a quick mind. Yet there was also a kind of still intelligence in Grace’s big eyes.

  It was Grace’s warm brown hair and soulful eyes, not the intellect, that attracted most men. Her gentleness and pliancy suggested that she might not put up too much resistance to a kiss and a cuddle.

  In fact, Jane was the first Gardner girl to get pregnant. By the time Jane was eighteen her illegitimate son, Edward John Sykes Gardner, had been added to the rather full Gardner house at 9 Stafford Street in Dalton-in-Furness. She named him after her father, and maybe after the baby’s father too, although no father was listed on little Edward’s birth certificate. The name Sykes amongst his given names is the only clue to his possible paternity.

  Perhaps to reduce the crowding at Stafford Street, but more likely just to help the family keep going, fourteen-year-old Isabella was not around to help care for baby Edward. She was already in service. Through some family connection, she and older cousin George Cartmell were working as general servants for a family over in Wesham.

  But there were still three sons, two daughters, their parents, and the new grandson living in the little house on Stafford Street, all trying to survive on Edward’s earnings from the mine and what little Jane could make as a dressmaker. Of course, Isabella was also expected to send some money home.

  Then, within a year, there was yet another mouth to feed at Stafford Street. This time it was Grace’s turn to bear an illegitimate child. She named him Thomas and described herself on his birth certificate as a domestic servant, making no mention of a father f
or the boy.

  It must have been obvious to everyone in the Gardner house that there was no room for yet another child, fatherless or otherwise. Even before little Thomas was born, Grace knew that she would have to find a place to live and a job to support them both. Isabella seemed well set up and might be able to help her find work near Wesham. With a job in a new place, maybe Grace could start afresh.

  December 15, 1882, was the beginning of Thomas Gardner’s blighted little life. His mother looked down at his sleeping form and whispered, “Oh Thomas, what is to become of us?”

  A Dreadful Plight

  Seizing the chance to leave the stigma of unwed motherhood behind, at least for a while, Grace gladly went to a situation that Isabella had found for the two of them over at Crosshills, putting the baby out to nurse with a kindly Dalton woman named Agnes Creary and promising faithfully to send money for his care.

  Even before she had any money to send, Grace wrote to Mrs. Creary, pestering her with questions about the baby. Sadly, Grace’s letters had to be read out to Mrs. Creary by her neighbour’s daughter, who was often too busy to write back, so Grace received little information on her son’s progress. As she went about her new work, Grace often whispered a prayer for the health of little Thomas.

  Despite starting out hopeful that she would find her feet and perhaps even be able to send for her child, Grace found that life away from her parent’s home was lonely and much more difficult than she had imagined. Though Isabella had warned her, the heavy, demanding work of a farm servant still came as a shock, and Grace fell into bed each night exhausted. And the money that she earned was only pennies more a week than she owed Mrs. Creary. She spent very little, but her letters, while frequent, were increasingly filled with descriptions of her difficulties and empty of money for the care of the baby. Back in Dalton, Agnes Creary, while sympathetic, was becoming increasing impatient with Grace’s excuses.