Through photographs, we have relationships with people unknown. A shot of my family might mean something to you just as well as to me. It is almost a test of human solidarity. Every portrait comes before our eyes like life and when the scene involves the ties of love or blood, we can hardly help applying our own experience. Even the universal school photograph is a set of relationships, between photographer, pupils and circumstance. The picture of George and Veda in the garden is mine, and intimate, but public too, as open to your response as mine. I have shown it to others without identifying the couple; some think George is semi-detached but protective, as if shielding his wife from a draught. Most think that he is reluctant and evasive.
In her classic work On Photography, Susan Sontag insists that photography alienates us from direct experience, that it denies continuity, atomises reality. She believes photographs are merely an illusion of knowledge, that they cannot offer the truths that come only from narration and words. But this cannot be entirely right. Truth is apparent in the way people choose to present themselves to the lens, their recoil and shyness, their directness and elan; in the accidental image and the propaganda shot where people hold fast to staged poses; above all in the billions of self-portraits in which each photographer shows time and again how she or he wishes to be seen and known to the world.
Truth is there in the very act of appearing before the camera. Veda, we intuit, addresses herself to Betty quite naturally in the garden, open to the family occasion. George strikes his semi-detached pose, choosing to behave this way. This is the 1940s, after all, and shutter speeds are still anxiously slow; you had to lock yourself into position. The American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson called it a kind of rigor mortis, every muscle more rigid by the moment as he stood still for the camera. The result, he thought, could never be more than a mask. Certainly, photographs only offer as much as the subject is willing to give. And yet there is something true about this scene in Chapel, which is the way that George chooses to turn aside from it, or from the person who holds the camera.
They have gone out to the garden before or after lunch because the light is better for photography. Perhaps it is autumn, looking at George’s suit; or perhaps it is spring and the cold frame by Veda’s feet is bringing on the season’s new vegetables, cucumbers or cabbages for her table. Veda inclines towards her daughter – and her husband – apparently touched to be photographed. George complies, but only on sufferance, almost sidestepping the idea of a family portrait. Here he stands with Veda, before Betty. He does not look his daughter in the eye. This will be the last photograph. We look back at the past and discover the shape of the future.
My mother says it is all as far away to her now as the toy theatre of her childhood, miniature and remote. Except for the country bus, which remains large in memory. But here in this little picture is the proof of how enduring their life’s crisis really was in the click of a shutter. That afternoon with her parents, back home, Betty is trying and failing to bring the family tight together again, to round it out in a portrait so small you could hold it in the palm of your hand.
13
Birthday Presents
This is the scene in another garden, fixed by a flash of shock. It is the morning of my mother’s sixtieth birthday. We are sitting outside the cottage in the Scottish Borders to which my parents have now moved, and although it is August, wind is already troubling the Albertine roses she manages to coax out of the chill black soil. We are having peaches for breakfast, still rare to us in the North, and on the table is a great gathering of envelopes, the handwriting of her many friends all over the country familiar to us from years of close correspondence. But among them is one in an unknown hand, with odd loops and dots and an unusual slant, perhaps foreign. Inside it is a letter that rewrites her story once more.
It came from somebody signing herself Susan and was couched in almost breezily familiar terms, announcing that she and her sister were now in London, but due to come to Edinburgh where they very much hoped to meet her. She did not identify herself and gave not a hint of the relationship she clearly felt they had with my mother. We pored over the page for clues – in the colour of the ink, the size of the sheet, the character of the handwriting. Was the writer young or old? Were these women from overseas? Probably remote second cousins, I insisted, longing to protect my mother from disappointment. We felt exhilaration edged with fear.
For of course it had always seemed possible that there were relatives somewhere, perhaps even close relatives, someone left to tell the story. And the fact that these people announced themselves as now being in London implied arrival from somewhere far away.
My mother endured a month of nearly intolerable suspense, constantly thinking of the impending meeting, trying to hold fast to the idea that these two women would turn out to be distant relatives at best. Their surnames were Baker and Beale. Whoever they were, they presumably knew more about the family history – and perhaps her origins – than she did. Members of our Scottish family who had hitherto known nothing at all about my mother’s early life and adoption, including her sisters-in-law, rather astonishingly, were told that some news was imminent. We were all drawn into the puzzle of the letter – the return address was a Bloomsbury hotel where the staff could offer us no information about the two guests, who had already checked out by the time we rang – and into a cycle of endless speculation.
At last the day came. The arrangements had been made by letter, an impossibly antique situation as it seems now. The three women were to converge at a hotel near Edinburgh Zoo, which already had a resonance for our family as it was where Rebe Green had once taken us for that elaborate high tea. My mother drove from the Borders into the city. She was early. While she waited, an oceanic turbulence began to rise within her. She could not come face to face with these people, whoever they were, because the dam might break and everything held back for decades would overwhelm her.
Just as she was growing breathless and choked, with thoughts of running away, two women walked into the foyer. Both recognised her immediately. ‘You look just like Hilda.’ The surrounding world fell silent, as it seemed for an age, before the younger woman spoke again, to clarify. ‘You look just like our mother.’
Susan had an Australian accent; she was Hilda’s third daughter. The effect was as devastating, in another way, as the childhood encounter on the bus. If we hadn’t allowed ourselves to imagine that these correspondents could be as close as cousins, we had certainly suppressed all hope that they might be half-sisters, able to bring tidings of their mutual mother. But one wave arriving on the tide met another departing. Just as my mother met her sisters for the first time, so she discovered that Hilda Blanchard was dead.
She wrote to me.
A new family calendar is to be entered up, one which records this: yesterday, 11th September, is the anniversary of the death of my mother Hilda, in 1974, aged 69. Her birthday: 27 November 1904.
Her three daughters’ birthdays:
Grace: 8 August 1926, when she was 21
Judith: 16 December 1933, when she was 29
Susan: 14 June 1942, when she was 37
This is only known to me since 3 days ago, September 1986, when I went to meet two unknown sisters, their existence undreamt of all these years.
These were the rudimentary facts. Soon after the adoption, Hilda left Hogsthorpe on an assisted passage to Australia. On a sheep station in the outback, she met and married a man named Lance Lakey. They had two daughters and four grandchildren and she had eventually become an English teacher in a secondary school in Melbourne many years after she took her first journey to study teaching in Louth. Hilda Blanchard had sailed away from that fraction of Lincolnshire out across the world, making the vast transition from one continent to another during which a person may seem to change form or be lost altogether, starting a new life, shucking off the old one.
The existence of my mother was equally unknown to Judy and Susan, at least until the early 1970s. Hilda did not
tell them that she had another child until late in her life. History says she may have been unusual in telling them at all; so many infants have been omitted from their mothers’ narratives. But of course Grace was not an infant; she had lived with Hilda for three years. And although she never spoke of her, Hilda saw Grace’s face every day. On the table by her bed stood a black-and-white photograph of a fair-haired girl smiling among tulips in a garden. For some reason Judy never asked about her, but Susan did. She was apparently a child from long ago.
My tactful mother did not like to barrage her new sisters with questions in those first days, since memories of Hilda understandably upset them; and they were more interested in the present, in what my mother was like, how she had lived, who we were. But I was in my early twenties and avid for knowledge. I wanted to know how my mother had come into the world, what Hilda felt about this first daughter, why nobody had tried to find her all these years. Even though they were about to set sail for Australia again, my new aunts said very little, being tactful too. Everyone was so polite that George wasn’t even mentioned.
But we did learn that Hilda had sailed back to England three times, in 1933 when my mother was seven, in 1938 when Judy was four, and in 1947 when Susan was five. She returned to the mill with Lance for nine months the first time, and then without him for almost a year in 1938. Hilda was once again so close to her lost daughter. Surely she must have seen her somewhere in those wide open flatlands, on the beach, in a lane, perhaps on a bus. At one point, Hilda was working at Butlin’s to make money for her family; the bus to Skegness Grammar stopped there en route. The adoption agreement could hardly control fate. The possibility of sightings obsessed me and I still take comfort from the fragile hope that Hilda and Grace, now Betty, must have been reconnected by sight, held in each other’s eyes however briefly.
For my mother to meet her half-sisters in 1986 was also a matter of agonising chance.
It was twenty years since she had made that first and last attempt to discover her origins, returning to Lincolnshire to find her birth certificate in Spilsby. This of course gave her mother’s name, and the solicitor had given a vague intimation that there were Blanchards still living in those parts. But my mother went no further than her courage took her; friends suggested that it would be idealistic to imagine that she would be welcomed into Hilda’s life at this stage, and in any case she had long since left the area. Loyalty to Veda precluded more protracted enquiries, and it seemed on both sides a closed account. The finality of the adoption agreement signed in 1929 certainly seemed to seal the Blanchards’ lips.
But in the autumn of 1985, my mother and brother had gone on another discreet foray to Lincolnshire to see what they could discover. In Hogsthorpe, the windmill had shrunk to a stump, the mill house was harled, the bakery now a display room for the pottery. They lingered here a long time, noticing the structure of the old walls, wondering how it must have been and in her case straining for any lost memory. These were the doorways she must have walked through, but there was no sense of past atmosphere.
My brother drew out the potter in casual ways to reveal the only thing he knew about the long-ago owners, which was that a grandson still lived over the road at a nearby farm. But they passed on through Hogsthorpe, my mother resisting my brother’s eagerness to call directly on this man. She felt it a total impossibility to arrive out of the blue, the family skeleton. What if he did not know the story? The ensuing shock and burden of explanation and embarrassment would have been an ordeal all round.
She bought a pot and planted it, later, with an evergreen.
I joined them at Chapel, where we went round the village visiting all those surviving acquaintances. Even when we mentioned Hilda, and asked for any kind of explanation of her relationship with George, or George’s with Veda, they all remained resolutely silent. Among them were Eve Paul, daughter of the old coastguard, now in her nineties; and the Elstons’ former neighbour Mrs Simpson, also in her nineties. Eve would only say that George was a very difficult man and that Veda was a saint. Jessie Simpson at least allowed herself to remember that Betty was a tug-of-war child, back and forth, and that there was a terrible hullabaloo in Chapel St Leonards when she was suddenly stolen from the Elstons. This was the first time we ever heard of the kidnap. But she would add nothing more and visibly recoiled from the word adoption.
But Mrs Simpson did tell her daughter about the visit and it was this woman, almost a stranger to this tale, and to whom we will always be indebted, who took the plunge and told a friend in the Blanchard family. Which is how the news of my mother’s existence, and of her visit to Hogsthorpe, came to reach her half-sisters on the other side of the world. One person thought that sixty years of silence was enough, that this unspoken civility, or shame, or mutual tact, or whatever it was, maintained by centrifugal force across the globe, must now cease. The statute of limitations had run.
It was too late, of course. Too late for Hilda Blanchard; for Fred and for Mary Jane, who had died in 1969 at the age of ninety. And it was too late for my mother in respect of them all. She would never meet any of them now; an agony compounded by the sudden realisation that she so easily might have. She would never know what Hilda was like, what she felt and said and knew, the cast of her thought, the tone of her voice. But at least there was a face, arriving in the form of a photograph.
Hilda’s identity had been an enigma all these years, curiosity on my mother’s part having gradually lessened with time, and especially in the great life-change of having her own children. But now here she was, in a picture sent from Australia by our loving new aunts. Hilda is coming home, arriving at Port Melbourne in February 1948. She is forty-four, smiling beautifully, in one of those boxy wartime jackets, artificial silk and heavy tailoring against the ocean weather en route. I look at her and see my mother.
The advent of Judy and Susan brought other new relatives too, good kind people dotted around Lincolnshire, all warmly welcoming to my mother. Among them was the oldest surviving member of the family. Her name was Fanny Willson, known as Great-Aunt Fanny. She was the sister of Grandma Blanchard.
Fanny was a hundred and one years old, a woman of extraordinary clarity and fortitude. My mother went to visit her, taking a friend to act as a scribe, for this first encounter was too momentous to be undermined by the practicalities of a tape machine. But it was not the first time that they had met. ‘My Betty!’ was Fanny’s astonishing greeting to the long-lost child she had last seen more than half a century before – in her own home. For it was to Fanny’s house that she was taken during the kidnap.
Fanny was astonished herself, and not just at the sudden reappearance of a beloved child she never imagined seeing again. There was another reason. Like Judy, like Susan, she did not know that Betty had lived all the time in complete ignorance of the Blanchards; or that her early life had vanished, entirely erased. Her amazement formed itself in Lincolnshire dialect. ‘After you not having a birth certificate! After you never knowing any of it! After everything being total mystery and a blank, the first years all unaccounted. Never a photograph when other children had! No talk of when you were little. No mother ever secretly telling about your birth pangs, though yours had plenty of a different kind. Well, you know now that you have a family, otherwise you’d think you had no one.’
She began with the annals of that family. The names of her thirteen siblings were recited in careful order, Fanny laughing at her self-imposed memory test. She spoke of her years in service at a stately home through the First World War, of walking to the village church on her wedding day and coming home to an afternoon off, before returning to silver-service duties. Fanny needed almost no encouragement to unloose many family memories, speaking with plain unemotional sentences that seemed to testify all the more to the starkness of our common mortality. With the long look-back of a century’s living, the more poignant losses were naturally uppermost in her mind. The sudden death of her husband, the terrible discovery of her only son Billy, by th
en in his fifties, drowned by accident in a hospital bath. She spoke with much sympathy of the many griefs of Grandma Blanchard and the minute-by-minute last hours of Grandpa Blanchard, as well as the days preceding their son Arthur’s death. We can hardly realise the way illness crept up in a time when the doctor’s visit was a luxury only to be indulged in as a last resort, often too late.
Eventually, she came to my mother, remembering her as a fair-haired infant in the bakery, loved by all. A little child whose father wanted her, shuttled between the houses of her mother and father until she was smuggled into Fanny’s own. This had happened in the autumn of 1929. Betty – she was apparently by now Betty – had been ‘claimed back’ from George, taken off the sands at Chapel. She was brought to Fanny’s house near the town of Alford, where they bought her ‘new clothes all through’. Red clothes, too, not the blue she wore with the Elstons. And who knows how long they might have managed to live there together, with nobody in Alford recognising the child. ‘But then the police came knocking, and you was gone.’
Fanny, on this first visit, remembered Hilda Blanchard as very intelligent and with nearly auburn hair (a point on which the monochrome photographs were of course mute), just like my mother as an adult. As well as family affairs, she talked about her working life, still referring to her employers as ‘the masters and mistresses’. My mother wrote a letter about the encounter.
Those days of English pastoral life, beginning in the reign of Queen Victoria, were hard by our standards, but Fanny, like so many very aged people, says that work is the secret of long life. She repeatedly said that she couldn’t believe in her own longevity, or that she would live to see Hilda’s lost daughter. I was equally incredulous, and suspended in a realm of feeling that you can perhaps imagine – a compound of past and present brought together in this amazing personage connecting the centuries.
On Chapel Sands Page 15