Lemon Sherbet and Dolly Blue

by Knight, Lynn

  The baby was due in the autumn. She was born in November, a beautiful little girl, but the pregnancy was disturbing and the birth itself a terrible shock. Betsy had told my grandma nothing, just as, years before, Annie had been left to discover menstruation by herself, retreating to the privy feeling frightened and ashamed, wondering if she’d bleed to death. The pain, the indignity, the whole bloody mess of childbirth offended Annie’s fastidious nature. Worst of all was her fear, not knowing what would happen next, or if she would survive the delivery. Just two years earlier, Willie’s sister Nellie had died giving birth to a boy. Poor Nellie, Willie’s childhood playmate (and every bit as mischievous), was dead, aged twenty-five, and Annie only one year younger.

  Like most women then, my grandma gave birth at home, which in her case meant the attic room, two flights upstairs, the shop bell marking time between contractions. But, in the end, it would all be worthwhile. Except that it was not: Annie’s baby was stillborn.

  If you look for my grandma’s baby in the General Register, you will not find her. Stillbirths were not required to be registered nationally until 1927, although from 1915 all had to be notified locally. In 1916, the year my grandma gave birth to a stillborn child, Chesterfield’s Medical Officer of Health (MOH) reported forty-one stillbirths in the borough, though it is likely that, even then, some slipped through the net. All those notified were investigated to ensure there was no foul play, a stillbirth not always being what it seemed in the years when many women were overburdened with children.

  In the early twentieth century, stillborn babies were cheaper to bury than other infants, a crude but telling fact for poor families. The poorest might avoid cemetery fees altogether by asking a grave digger to tuck the child into a newly prepared grave. (This was perfectly legal, providing the burial was reported.)

  One young woman recalled taking her mother’s stillborn baby to be buried when she was but a small child herself. She collected a soap box from the grocer and prepared the baby for burial by wrapping the body in the lining of her father’s coat – it was like dressing ‘a little doll’, she said. She padded the soap box with cotton wadding and laid the baby down, as if tucking up her doll for sleep, then carried the lidded box to the churchyard, where she gave it to the grave digger with a letter from her father.

  ‘That’s all right, my lass,’ the grave digger said. ‘You see the church there?… Well, in the far corner, you’ll see a heap of boxes and packets.’ Other stillborns awaiting burial.

  – Based on the recollections of Rose Ashton, in Angela Holdsworth, Out of the Doll’s House: The Story of Women in the Twentieth Century, 1988

  That year, Chesterfield’s MOH also recorded an increase in infant mortality and condemned the unhealthy environments in which some expectant mothers and their infants were required to live, especially those in working-class neighbourhoods with ‘insanitary privy-middens’ – night-soil lavatories like the ones at Wheeldon Mill. This may have had a bearing on my grandma’s situation, though I doubt it: the family was scrupulously clean. (It is almost impossible to contemplate how all their white lace petticoats and blouses, starched aprons and shirts, linen sheets and pillowcases, lace runners, damask tablecloths, handkerchiefs, napkins and doilies issued from a house whose plumbing ran to one cold tap and a privy-midden.) Infant mortality was generally high in Chesterfield: only three years earlier, its MOH had reported that the district’s figures were higher than any elsewhere in England: one child in five, between the age of one and five, was born to die.

  All over Britain, women like my grandma lost babies they’d longed for. All over Britain, women gave birth to babies they could ill afford to keep or did not want to begin with. When the first soldiers marched out of Chesterfield in 1914, they were trailed by weeping women clutching babies. Wartime births caused distress and consternation in equal measure. Illegitimacy was on the increase. ‘War Babies’, newspapers screeched, with some headlines preceding the actual rise in the illegitimate birth rate. Figures rose from 1916 and, by the end of the war, were up by 30 per cent. Chesterfield’s own illegitimate birth rate rose to a record high of seventy-two in 1916, although the actual number of women conceiving children out of wedlock was probably disguised by the number who managed to convert their panic into confetti. Other pregnant women found desperate solutions. A VAD nurse working in a poor area of London spent her wartime service on a babies’ ward at a hospital near Waterloo, presumably St Thomas’s: ‘All I did was lay out dead babies like little birds… babies… left on doorsteps to die.’

  My grandma knew that babies died, of course she did, but not her baby, and not with Willie so far away. Though my great-grandparents knew what it was to lose a child and could support her, it was not the same as having Willie there, and Annie’s grief recalled their loss from all those years ago – and what desperate memories did it revive for Eva? Theirs was a household fastened tight in mourning. A year of beginnings and promises became a year of endings and loss.

  There would be no cotton daisies for Annie to stitch on small silk bodices, no ribbons to thread through impossibly fine woollen shawls, no baby to bathe and pat with the large powder puff, like a giant pale dahlia my grandma had bought for her first child. The swansdown puff was pushed into a drawer, where I came upon it many years later: ‘That was for my baby, who died.’

  I did not know my grandma’s baby was stillborn, nor did my mother. Annie never said. We thought she lived for a few days and was called Mary, like Dick and Betsy’s first child. During the nineteenth century, even a baby who breathed for a few hours might casually be termed a stillborn. With the local notification of stillbirths and improved training for midwives, the likelihood of this misrepresentation was greatly reduced (and finally ceased altogether), but I wonder if Annie’s baby lived for a few hours? This may be a mere fancy of mine; there is no way of knowing, but, if so, it would account for her words. Either my grandma gave birth to a child she yearned for, who was as real to her as any who drew breath, or else she held her first child and lost her, all in one day. Neither version bears contemplation, though each has been the fate of many women and continues to be today.

  ‘It is more dangerous to be a baby in Britain than it is to be a soldier.’

  – Slogan for the UK’s first National Baby Week, 1917

  The Brimington Cemetry records give neither name nor gender for Mrs Thompson’s ‘stillborn’, who is listed among the others buried there, tucked into a corner of the churchyard. No christening, no gravestone, though never forgotten by Annie. My grandma’s child, not child, her lovely daughter, Mary, lies buried beneath the trees.

  There was snow on the ground that December. The trees became frosted sketches, the flowering currant bush bloomed falsely white; the streets round about were iced over, but few enjoyed a picture-book Christmas in the winter of 1916.

  8

  Oh Dear! What a Dreadful War

  FOR ALL THE TALK IN THE TAPROOM OF THE GREAT CENTRAL Hotel, of what they’d do to Fritz if they caught him, no civilian expected to come face to face with a German soldier. Yet that’s precisely what happened in Brimington in 1917. In no time at all, the story was the talk of the neighbourhood and the Derbyshire press. The local bobby liked to call at the corner shop for a cup of tea; I expect Betsy and Eva heard the tale first-hand.

  One Sunday lunchtime in late September, William Darkin and George Fretwell were walking in Bluebank Wood when they spotted four men up ahead. Darkin and Fretwell had permission to walk the wood and, these being the days before public right of way, had not expected to encounter anyone else. As the two men approached, they saw that the group had obviously made some efforts to conceal their presence: they were lying half shrouded in the undergrowth, their bags jutting out of the bracken.

  Suspicions were further aroused when, in reply to a cheery greeting, ‘there was not the Derbyshire ring in the voice, a foreign accent striking the ear’. What happened next seems ludicrous. The strangers commented on the volume of traff
ic on the nearby railway and, as if reading from an espionage handbook, displayed a keen interest in the large industrial works in the distance – Sheepbridge. This was too much for Darkin and Fretwell who quickly retraced their steps and alerted Mr Stott, the man who had given them permission to walk the woodland path. Stott hastened to the spot, greeted the suspects, and then – as in the best detective fiction – made as if to leave, but doubled back, while keeping the group under observation. Meanwhile, Darkin went in search of a policeman. It was the kind of moment village bobbies dream of.

  The strangers offered no resistance when confronted by Sergeant Parnham, and admitted they were prisoners of war who’d escaped from a Nottinghamshire camp some days earlier. ‘The game is up,’ their spokesman conceded, as if quoting again from his espionage handbook.

  ‘News of the capture spread like wildfire.’ By the time a car had been located and commandeered (no instant matter in Brimington in 1917), ‘the prisoners were the centre of a large and excited crowd’. Here was a chance for women with sons and husbands at the Front to harangue and abuse reallive Germans. Amid much jostling and shouting, the prisoners were bundled into the car and conveyed to Chesterfield Police Station.

  The Derbyshire Times was tickled pink and delighted in unfolding all aspects of the story. Particularly fascinating were the contents of the fugitives’ kitbags. The prisoners had amassed sufficient tinned food to last a fortnight – which was more than could be said for Betsy’s customers – plus cigarettes, tobacco, mackintoshes, bottles of tea, a pair of tiny handmade compasses and several maps said to have been drawn with such precision that even the smallest hamlets were included. A portmanteau they were carrying weighed ‘fully a hundredweight’; it was extraordinary the men had managed to travel as far as they did. Their fellow escapees had been picked off fairly easily; the last of them to be recaptured, an ace pilot, was spotted by a group of schoolchildren, crouching in a ditch.

  The final intrepid four had spent their last day of freedom in the Derbyshire village of Ashover, crossing further into the county as darkness fell and making their way towards the mail train. Missing the train by just three minutes, they had decamped to Bluebank Wood where they spent several hours before their discovery. Their chances of getting further in broad daylight were slim, to say the least, but, with luck, and without drawing attention to themselves by lighting a fire, they could have remained hidden until the next mail train the following day.

  A grateful Sheepbridge Company issued specially minted gold medals to Darkin and Fretwell; my grandma kept a report of the private ceremony. The pair were fêted as heroes – drinks on the house – though when they first reported their suspicions to their fellow drinkers on that fateful Sunday in the bar of the Red Lion, they’d been greeted with typical Derbyshire candour and dis belief.

  For a few short weeks, the Bluebank Wood incident bolstered morale. People felt their own small contributions to the war were of value, albeit that night-time fears – and taproom jokes – acquired a new edge: the bogeyman behind the coal house really might be the Hun.

  This morale boost was timely. By now, everyone knew a handful of people who’d been killed or injured. Annie’s friend, Ethel, was widowed. Earlier in the war, she had married a local lad, Henry Marsden. One of seven children, he was keen to see the recruiting officer, pleased to get fixed rations, and proud to put ‘soldier’ on his wedding certificate. They were married barely two years before Henry died of wounds. ‘I never really knew him, Mrs Nash,’ Ethel said. ‘Not really.’ In her heart, she knew the marriage had been expedient. They’d both had reasons to escape. She bought a black hat and wore it for a month or so, but she was only twenty-four. Ethel Marsden, widow, did not suit her.

  Dec 25th 1917

  Xmas Day and such a sad one. My dear lad Tony was missing from the family circle first time in 20 years. Oh Dear! What a dreadful war and what awfully sad homes there are this Xmas. The worst I have ever known. No joy. No singing Xmas hymns. No decorations. The singing will be in Church… Anthony and I have no heart for anything, only grief for our dear lost lad; and poor John and Louisa, how sad they must feel, as [their] poor Anthony was with them as our dear boy was with us this time last year…

  Dec 26th

  Cold and dull at times. Young Billy Twelves went back tonight on his way to France again where he has spent nearly 3 years. We do not seem to be getting any nearer the end of this terrible war. The Russians are nothing to be depended on and the Italians are having a severe struggle to hold back the Huns. I am afraid there will be a famine before long as there seems to be no getting things for money and people are standing by thousands outside the shops in the large towns… We have nothing to sell, only minerals and very few of them are left.

  – Maria Gyte, farmer’s wife and publican, lived in the Derbyshire village of Sheldon, and kept a diary 1913–20. Her son Tony was killed at Passchendaele.

  The Derbyshire Times offered ‘In Memoriam’ cards, two shillings and sixpence a dozen, two bob for three dozen or more: everyone wanted a card and a last photograph, including those the dead had fought alongside. What with the grief and the weather and the shortages, one day seeped into the next, shaming those who, in 1914, had regretted being out of the fun.

  Neighbours who lost husbands and sons hadn’t the heart (or the shoe leather) to scour the shops for the tea, butter, sugar, currants and jam that were rapidly disappearing, and cared nothing that eggs were twice the price of two years earlier, or that flour – if you could get it – was nowadays measly stuff that needed bulking out with potatoes. Who needed eggs and flour to make a batter pudding when the lovely boy who liked to eat it would never taste a pudding again?

  From late February 1918, rationing evened things out and reduced the interminable queues. There were coupons for Betsy and Eva to check and collect and customers were obliged to register with the corner shop as their chosen supplier for grocery staples. But there were still mouths to feed from shelves still half empty and with everything increasingly dear. The fourth year dragged on, rubbing out hope and picking at everyone’s wounds. When, at last, there was talk of peace and neighbours dared to contemplate the future, news came of a grand lad Annie knew, killed the day before the Armistice.

  WHITTINGTON OFFICER KILLED

  Killed in action only a few hours before the signing of the Armistice is the untimely end of sub. Lieut. Harry Young, of the R.N.V.R, youngest son of Mr and Mrs Chas. Young… The sad news reached his parents on Monday evening to the effect that he was killed on the 10th Inst. Deceased was 24 years of age, and joined up in the early stages of the war. At the time he was an assistant schoolmaster at the Brimington Schools, and after a period of training with A.S.C. he was sent to Salonica, where he stayed a little over two years. Later he was given a commission in the R.N.V.R. and went out to France in August last… On Tuesday morning of this week his parents received the usual letter saying he was quite well.

  – 1918 obituary [unattributed] pasted into Annie’s commonplace book

  1918 had not quite finished with indiscriminate deaths. Next came the influenza, killing those the war could not reach. In no time at all, the Spanish ’flu claimed local man Charles Inns and, five days later, his son. Young Charles, a fit man of twenty-six, with a wife and a son of his own, contracted pneumonia following the ’flu and was buried with the flowers still fresh on his father’s grave. Poor Charles, poor Constance, and their poor young son, who was barely more than a baby. Constance often used the shop; Eva and Annie always chatted with her. She and the baby were so ill themselves that the funeral service was conducted at their home.

  But the greatest shock for my grandma was the death of Elsie Phipps, headmistress of the Princess Street Girls’ School, the companion school to the Infants’ where Annie taught as a pupil teacher and to which she returned following her baby’s death. With all her hopes unravelling, Annie needed something to occupy her thoughts and distract her. Though a married woman now and, by rights, no longer
needed – like most local authorities, Derbyshire expected married women to give up teaching – regulations were relaxed during the war. Annie took herself back to her old classroom and her old adversary Miss Doughty, and also got to know Elsie Phipps.

  Less formidable than Mabel Doughty, Miss Phipps was popular with both colleagues and pupils. Barely a month earlier she and Annie had sat in the church hall, pricing goods for a Red Cross Fancy Fair. ‘And what would you give for this?’ Miss Phipps had asked, lifting a misshapen muffler, ‘or these?’ – a pair of gloves – before writing exorbitant sums on the price tags.

  But the date intended for the Fair turned into the day of Elsie’s funeral. The Phipps were well respected in the neighbourhood – Elsie’s father was a committee-man and High Street grocer – and many neighbours as well as colleagues turned out for the church. My grandma joined the procession but, even as she walked in that cold black line, the occasion made no sense. It was incom prehensible how someone she had laughed with, had liked and admired, and expected to go on seeing over the years, could be alive and well one week, and dead the next. She knew Miss Phipps was ill, but she was strong and would recover. Expecting to hear that Elsie was sitting up in bed, making light of her scare and wanting visitors, Annie was told she was dead.

  My grandma kept one of the price tags from the Fancy Fair. ‘6/6’, it said, in thick red ink. ‘Written by E. Phipps Oct 9 1918, died Nov 5,’ she wrote underneath those vivid strokes, the insignificant memento underscoring the preposterousness of the death. Some weeks later, the delayed Fair went ahead. Everyone agreed that was what Miss Phipps would have wanted (and what else would they have done with the contributions?). The church hall was filled with stalls and there was the usual raffle and prizes, but though the Armistice had been signed some weeks earlier, few could muster much enthusiasm for the event.