My mother went no further than this after her visit to Spilsby. Friends advised her not to pursue this girl who had given her up; who would not or could not keep her; to whom she once belonged, in her words, but who then disowned her. Hilda might not want to see her again; only consider the distress of a second rejection. For the next two decades all my mother had of Hilda Blanchard were her name and signature. And one more thing: a pair of dates, telling her that Hilda was twenty-one when Grace was born, and twenty-four when she agreed to the adoption, which left three unaccountable years.
We have since learned that Hilda Blanchard was born in 1904 to Fred and Mary Jane, who ran the High Mill and bakery at Hogsthorpe. She was one of five children. Her brothers were Frank, Arthur, Harold and Hugh, such classic Edwardian names. Frank was three years older; Arthur was younger by five years. There are traces of him in public documents. At the age of fifteen Arthur was apprenticed to Gamages department store at London’s Holborn Circus, famous for its toys and model railways. At the age of sixteen, he was carried off by appendicitis. This desperate death occurred only weeks after Grace’s birth. In the space of two months, the Blanchards gained a grandchild and lost a son.
Hilda could not have been more than twenty, and was perhaps even younger, when she first met George Elston, then in his forties. A May–December romance is common enough, but how could she possibly have been drawn to the George I had heard about, bad-tempered, suspicious, morose and dictatorial? All the tales of him ran against any kind of romantic affair, and the tenor of the adoption agreement implied aggression. Hilda was surely the victim of George’s force. An encounter, a grappling, perhaps not even preceded by a flirtation: it can only be imagined, and yet it must not be imagined. To cry rape is to offend Veda’s memory, to horrify my mother, to subject an unknown grandfather to summary justice when he cannot speak for himself. Just to think of the moment of your own mother’s conception is unnatural in any case. We should recoil at this taboo.
The only time we ever talked of it, my mother thought it might have been a more Hardyesque seduction. A courtship, a young woman overwhelmed, a pregnancy that could barely be acknowledged. Only twenty when this fate befell her, Hilda’s heroism lay in her endurance. She could so easily have been one of those fallen women from nineteenth-century French art, throwing herself into the Seine by night with stones in her pockets, dredged from the foggy waters at dawn, face still lovely in death. Instead Hilda Blanchard carried the child, gave her life. And then could not bear to part with her; is pressured over and again into handing Grace over to George, with his threats and his legal documents. Four years after they first met, he is somehow still in her life. For the encounter must have taken place in 1925, given the August birth. A toss-of-a-dice moment that produces the accidental child: how on earth could they have met? At the Vine, a village dance, on Chapel Sands? Or is it something to do with the windmill, Fred Blanchard’s bakery dispensing bread round the neighbourhood? From Chapel to Hogsthorpe is a mile or two along a lane scented with limes, its flatness sporadically interrupted by windmills scalloping the sky. You could walk in thirty minutes from the beach directly past George’s house and on up the road until Chapel melts into Hogsthorpe with its medieval church. The crow’s flight takes you rapidly from the sands to the mill, from George to Hilda.
Hogsthorpe in the 1920s numbered not quite five hundred people, including half a dozen smallholders and twenty-three farmers. What marked it out was a surprising range of shops – a butcher, a baker, not one but two shoemakers, a pair of blacksmiths – including Mr Janney, witness to the adoption – a confectioner, three separate grocers, a bricklayer, plumber and wheelwright. You could have your hair cut in Hogsthorpe, have bicycles and baskets custom-made, and later repaired, order your coal and employ the services of a doctor. The elementary school had room for more than a hundred pupils, including a succession of Blanchards – Frank then Hilda then Harold, Hugh and Arthur. Three of these souls lie in the graveyard now, outside the church they attended as children; where they were christened and confirmed, and where my mother was christened as well. When she is born, this new girl child must be carried up the long main street to the church for the ceremony, perhaps to the various shops, to Sunday services where Fred sings in the choir, in and out of the post office which is connected to the one in Stow’s Stores; my mother and Betty Janney, the blacksmith’s daughter, will one day be in constant touch over telegrams. Betty Janney knows all about Betty Elston.
So does Reverend Drake, who has held the Hogsthorpe living for twenty years and christens the unexpected infant in his church. She appears in the register as Grace Ellston [sic] Blanchard, the initial fulfilled as a name. So does the doctor, Mr Paterson, for it is he who delivers my mother. (As he will one day sign George’s death certificate.) So do the butcher, the baker and all. And good Fred Blanchard, who buys his grain from the farmers, sells flour to the grocer and the confectioner, delivers the daily bread to all the surrounding villages: he is on speaking terms with all these people. He must realise that they know.
A postcard of the Blanchard windmill exists from around 1911. It soars high and black, a tapering brick tower, tarred to keep out the slightest breath of damp that might steal in through the air and ruin the dry grain. Capped with an onion-shaped ogee, it has four great fantail sails that catch the wind and turn the flywheel several storeys below, connected top to bottom by pulley. Fred Blanchard had no engine until the late 1920s, and could not mill the wheat and corn without that wind. But on a day of high breezes, he and his employees could turn out four tonnes of flour a day.
Hauling on the brakes, lugging the sacks to the perpetual sound of grindstones loud enough to drown out a voice, the men are always encouraging the mill to go a little faster, to make a little more flour. One of the sons, Frank Blanchard, was said to have climbed up and hung on the sails, wheeling round in the air for fun; while inside the mill, these same sails drove the centrifugal drills, the revolving stones and shifting sieves. And all these millers, in their Edwardian shirtsleeves, appear in the photograph taken that day a century and more ago. Here is Mary Jane Blanchard in the doorway in leg-of-mutton sleeves, two of her children perched on the wall. The boy is this very Frank; the little girl in the hat is Hilda, my grandmother. Except that this pronoun is like a stile I cannot get over. The connection between us was diverted, as if a dyke had been thrown in the way. She is my grandmother, and I am her granddaughter, but I can only reunite us with words, the joining of people through writing.
Here they stand like chess pieces stationed upon a board; a family and the staff that have become a second family. The postcard shows a hard-working group, clearly united, all day together at the mill. The house is so close, separated only by a drystone wall, that everyone must have been in and out all day, with Mary Jane a kind of mother to them all. The corn arrives by cart and leaves in the form of finely sifted flour, silky as hair, or in batches of cottage loaves, round Lincolnshire rolls and trays of fresh jam tarts.
And immediately I picture my mother there, through the front door that opens straight into the big kitchen. She is being held up to the table, on a stool, or, God willing, on somebody’s knee, excitedly holding the spoon she has been allowed to dip in the strawberry jam. Slowly, carefully, she fills the tarts. Grace is the smallest child, an infant niece to the boy uncles, one of whom is only eight years older. She is the daughter of the baker’s daughter.
And this is what she had – all she had – from those first three years: this strange free-floating memory of jam. No photographs, no letters or other recollections. I remember that she was once envious of Fred Astaire, who also had no memory of his first three years of poverty in Nebraska, except for the ceaseless shunting back and forth of the freight trains near his house. He had the sliding thrum of those engines as a sound and rhythm running all through his tap-dancing life, whereas she had not a single memory of that mother, those grandparents or uncles, not the vaguest ghost of a person or place, only the spo
oning of jam.
Public records give me a little more of Hilda, who attends Hogsthorpe school until she is eleven and is then admitted to Louth Grammar as a weekly boarder. Another clever child, she too excels in English. Every Monday she travels to the grammar school, returning home on Saturdays, back to the windmill and the chores. Like my mother, Hilda leaves school with no obvious route to the university she would certainly now have attended and is apparently taking up nursing work at the time of Grace’s birth. The certificate describes her as a mental health nurse. Does disappointment set in already, at twenty: a life limited to Hogsthorpe and Louth? George Elston, older, wiser, travelling around Britain, playing in a dance band, known for his sharpness, whichever way it cut – might he have seemed alluringly worldly?
Hilda’s mother Mary Jane was one of fourteen children from a family of lime burners, her father Joseph illiterate. Her headstone in the graveyard, now gone, testified that she was much loved. A photograph in an amateur history of Hogsthorpe shows a neat and tiny woman, shining hair and round spectacles, standing by her moustachioed husband in a perfect scene of solidarity outside the bakery, the family name written above one window, a loyal terrier at their feet. Five children: Arthur dead at sixteen, in horrifying pain; Frank also lost during her lifetime. Fred Blanchard died in 1948, leaving Mary Jane a widow for almost twenty years. This is the grandmother who longed to see Betty.
Yet what can I make of her without more words and images? And what do I know of Fred Blanchard, who grew up at another windmill nearby, then managed to buy High Mill himself? That he gave his wife flowers, as another photograph of him tenderly offering her white lilies shows; that he had a famously beautiful voice, singing not only at St Mary’s in the village but at Latin Mass in the only Catholic church for miles around. Perhaps he also sang as he worked, the rhythm of the mill the background to their days: a strong whirring within, sails moving silently without.
I know that their son Frank went to Australia, for his passage is written in the manifests of vessels sailing in and out of Melbourne in the late 1920s. This was not unknown in these parts. Another postcard shows that guest house on the shore, only inches from the tide; a house that would inevitably be washed away. That family, dispossessed, their livelihood gone, set sail for Australia in 1919 and so did the daughter of the Hogsthorpe bicycle-maker; far away to a new life elsewhere, out of the flatlands where the bicycle was their only carriage to the vast plains on the other side of the world.
Harold and Hugh stayed in Hogsthorpe after their older siblings had gone, and after the death of their father, who tried mechanising his mill in the 1940s, like so many other Lincolnshire millers, only to be overtaken by the advanced technology of factories. The brothers lived on, and so did Mary Jane, well into her nineties. For a long time, it seemed to me that we knew more about them from a few words in official documents, or carved in gold on headstones, than we did about Hilda Blanchard.
And then one day in 1985, my mother, brother and I decided to go back to Chapel St Leonards to find out more. We were everywhere thwarted. The Hogsthorpe windmill was now a pottery and the only thing we could discover about how Hilda met George – the only thing anybody would tell us – was that when Hilda Blanchard left school she wanted to study to become a teacher. This involved catching a train from the local station at Mumby to Lincoln; and Mumby station was where George departed for various Midlands destinations. Fred Blanchard, kind Fred Blanchard, is concerned about his daughter’s welfare, thinks of George Elston, possibly the only regular railway passenger in these parts. Mr Blanchard asks Mr Elston – to whom he is presumably still delivering bread – to keep an eye on Hilda through her first journeys. And George does.
A bus connects Chapel to Hogsthorpe to Mumby, though George is a brisk, wiry sort of man who likes the roving life and sea air, striding for miles with his suitcase, so perhaps he reaches the station on foot. Or he walks from Chapel to Hogsthorpe and waits for Hilda at the bus stop close to the windmill. They travel via a magnificent stretch of Roman road that runs straight for a mile, unique among Lincolnshire’s winding lanes and hairpin bends. This road was particularly beloved of my mother, and entered my childhood mythology of great world wonders, not just for its straightness but because it was not flat. It inclined very gradually from Mumby village to the station, so that she could swoop down it at speed on her bicycle. At the bottom there was even the magic of a level crossing, and the smallest of all stations, Mumby Road, the nearest departure point for faraway towns. Look south and you were on the line to London; look north and the tracks stretched towards Louth and eventually Hull. Louth was where passengers changed for Lincoln, where Hilda would study and George caught trains for parts as foreign as Birmingham, Liverpool and Leicester.
The crossing is still there, and traces of those tracks. Stand there and you see a perfect diagram of receding perspective, the parallel lines converging at a vanishing point on the green horizon. Down to the south went my mother’s friend Pat to a new life in London. And one day she herself would take the line north towards Edinburgh, disappearing forever from this landscape.
The London and North Eastern Railway still has the intertwined initials LNER scrolling in brass script across old stations on that line. Modest trains, sometimes only a couple of coaches, would trundle through ever smaller stations all through the county: Tumby Woodside, Thimblehall, Bag Enderby, Mareham le Fen. Mumby Road was on the Mablethorpe Loop to Louth, which ran between several little stations – Willoughby, Saltfleetby, more Viking names – some of them scarcely half a mile apart. The train moved slowly off towards Mablethorpe, where passengers often had to wait for a connection. Even the fastest journey through these twenty or so miles of level fields, where the train felt like a ship sailing upon open water, took nearly an hour. And then there was a change to Lincoln, so that George and Hilda’s journey may have taken twice that time. Two hours in a closed carriage, with no side corridor; once these trains moved off, you were confined in that knee-to-knee compartment.
The station has flower beds and hanging baskets and a small office where the tickets emerge from a round dip between the glass window and the counter. Hilda and George wait on iron benches by the line, the scent of new-mown hay in the air, for it is harvest time and the beginning of the new student year. George takes an interest in Hilda’s studies; Hilda is amused by his rapid wit and his driving energy, always off to the larger world somewhere else, not tethered to the spot. And he has been abroad as a soldier. There is only one train back on a Friday evening, after the week’s selling of soap and attending of lectures. They take it home together.
Or is it a hedgerow romance, two people out in country lanes. They meet secretly in the fields, or walking on the sands after their first encounter on the train. Veda is at home with her elderly mother; Fred Blanchard must also be avoided. Or perhaps they run into each other by chance at the Vine. It is a mishap, a disaster, a crime. It is something, or it is nothing. There were just those two documents upon which to hang a private life: the birth certificate and the adoption agreement. They only say that life went wrong.
The birth of children ‘out of wedlock’ was so common in Lincolnshire at that time that the local newspaper never scrupled to name names in reporting the maintenance claims at Louth Magistrates’ Court. Thus Maud Branderby, unwed mother at Aby, sues Jack Price, labourer of Spilsby, for unpaid dues owing in the case of their son William, born June 1925; and so on. There was no question of confidentiality; the pleas were held in open court, attended by reporters, and referred to as bastardy cases. They sometimes involved a broken promise of marriage, or the breach of a pledge given to the woman’s father, who appears as an irate witness. Occasionally the father has vanished and the case is uncontested; the mother receives justice but no money.
Hilda was by no means the only unmarried mother in her neighbourhood. Children born on the wrong side of the sheets, in the period phrase, were brought up by neighbours, aunts, vicars, grandmothers, commonly beli
eving their mothers were their older sisters. Some vanished from the public record, absorbed into the family this way and often concealed during a census. Others were not so lucky. There are applications for poor relief around this time from young women whose families have thrown them out, or who are working as servants in grand Lincolnshire houses where the master has molested them. One girl from Aby is dismissed, outrageously, by her mistress on these very grounds. Another from Mablethorpe travels all the way to London to give birth to her son in a Salvation Army home so that nobody knows. A third follows suit, but immediately gives up her child, having no friends or family to rely upon.
Secrecy was abetted by silence. Whole villages, and later council estates, would keep a family’s secrets on the grounds that it was nobody’s business. And in any case familiarity bred tolerance. So many babies were born where parents could not marry, could not afford to marry, or never wished to be married in the first place, that the situation was known up and down the country.
It seems to have been no different among the English middle classes, except that they contrived more complicated fictions. The writer Rebecca West had a decade-long affair with the married novelist H. G. Wells. Like Hilda, she was twenty-one when their son Anthony was born; Wells found her lodgings in a quiet seaside town. Many years later, when they parted, she officially adopted her own son, who had been led to believe he was her nephew. As late as 1947, when Anthony West was in his thirties, his mother suppressed an article in Time magazine identifying his actual parents.
Hilda was hardly alone in giving birth to the child of a married man, but her story has strange aspects. Given the time span of the documents, she must have been in touch with George for at least four years from first to last (if the adoption agreement is in fact a full stop). Their daughter goes back and forth between them at least once. There are no records of any appeal for maintenance, although money might have been informally given, and it seems as if Grace has been fully gathered into family life at the Blanchard mill. Having survived like this for three years, Hilda might be expected to keep on living with her daughter. Equally, George, married to Veda, might be expected to keep as far away as possible, to have nothing to do with Grace (or Hilda) and certainly not to long for his daughter. Public records suggest that it is highly unusual for a father to sue for his child in bastardy cases; and perhaps just as unusual for a married couple to adopt the child born of the husband’s infidelity. It seems that both sides wanted Grace, if at different times, before she was Betty.
On Chapel Sands Page 13