by Knight, Lynn
The year was not quite over, nor the difficulties experienced in the aftermath of the ’flu. There were still parcels to make up – with Glaxo, bread, butter, tea, sugar – and deliver to frail neighbours. On Christmas Eve, Clara Tissington sent Annie (‘Mrs Thompson’) small gifts for herself and Eva, with a card expressing ‘kindest regards to your Mother and yourself and thanking you for all you did to help me’. She enclosed a recent photograph of herself and hoped that ‘when your husband comes home, you will be very happy’. Mrs Tissington’s picture joined the others in my great-grandma’s tiny album: snapshots of a small community, 1914–18.
9
Tea for Two
WILLIE HAD BEEN HAVING A DIFFERENT KIND OF WAR. PACKED off to France with the rest of them in 1916, he learned that though roses might bloom in Picardy, none grew in the trenches. He considered his posting to the Middle East a stroke of immense good fortune.
His new role as a dispatch rider suited him much better. Willie was not the sort of man to stand in line and much preferred to be a lone adventurer. The job enabled him to drive through the desert on a motorcycle, delivering communiqués both urgent and mundane, kicking up sand in unknown, open spaces. He was proud of his service-issue rifle and prouder still to handle a revolver.
Willie was curious about the world in which he found himself and jotted down some ‘Hindoo’ words and phrases: common commands – yes, no, stop, come here – and a smattering of other useful nouns: porridge, paper, bucket, meat; a frugal (and Imperial) vocabulary, just enough to get by with supplementary signs and gestures. He was interested to know more about the culture he observed. ‘Caron,’ Willie wrote: ‘a book or bible composed of 104 books, split into 30 portions, and Arabs must read 1 portion each day…’ He photographed a Sheik’s sons and a young Arab boy to show Annie, and collected postcards of the far-flung places he visited and others he hoped he might see one day: general views of Aden, Basra, Cairo; majestic tombs and pyramids trapped in grainy images. But he was also a card-playing private who liked to place a bet and enjoyed the camaraderie of his fellow soldiers and their boasts about the number of pints they could sink. He was only twenty-three, after all.
Willie must have worked quite hard to remain a private during the First World War, though this was easier in the Middle East than in France, where, with mortality rates rising as fast as the mud men drowned in, and an officer’s life expectancy down to a matter of weeks, it required tenacity to remain on the bottom rung. Head down and get on with it: that was Willie’s mission; anything that enabled him to survive the thing and spend time astride his beloved motorcycle.
The Middle East was not an entirely cushy billet, what with the sun and the flies, and the way his guts churned daily. On the journey down to Basra, the heat was so thick you could have cut it with a knife. At some point, Willie developed malaria which wrapped him in rank sweats and made him long for Blighty, but a Middle East posting made home-leave nigh on impossible and letters took for ever to arrive. Until the envelope was put into his hands, he’d been picturing Annie with their new baby. The baby’s death demolished the images Willie had built of his wife and child running to greet him as he walked back up Station Road with his kitbag. Sometimes Willie had pictured a babe in arms, at other moments, a toddler stumbling towards him – but it was all so far away, it was hard to make the image stick. With time, he hoped there would be other children for him and Annie. Meanwhile, there was the war, and years of it at that, eating up his future and other people’s lives. It was at least 1921 by the time Willie was demobbed. He still had a good while to wait.
Peace and quiet was what most returning soldiers longed for, the monotony of the everyday: Clem Stokes and Jimmy Frith wanted to sit on their back steps and see a patchwork of green fields and moorland on the skyline, not cruciform trees, blasted bodies, seething mud. Even colliery wheels and smoking chimneys were preferable to the images bombarding their vision.
A trip down the aisle was an efficient way to eradicate bad memories. Some slow-burning courtships outlasted the war; others were whirlwind romances or marriages made catch-as-catch-can. Survivors grabbed happiness where they found it.
One after another, Edna, Liza, Ellen marched into the shop. I’m getting married tomorrow, Mrs Nash. I’ll be Mrs Stokes (or Frith or Taylor) they informed her, as if Betsy had not witnessed the burgeoning courtship (and heard their mother’s opinion of the match). Another generation of young couples, set to live similar lives to their parents. Some faced greater obstacles before they even started: Clem Stokes came home with a badly smashed jaw; Jimmy Frith was shell-shocked.
Rolly Cook returned wearing a taut leather glove, a second skin to conceal his disabled hand, damaged when a shell exploded near him. He had also injured his leg and, for the first few months, walked with the aid of a stick. The effect was not so much of an impediment, but of a permanently raffish air. He looked more dapper gent than wounded soldier. ‘Nice stick, Rolly,’ Ethel said, the first time she saw him coming along Station Road.
‘Yes, I’ll use it to hook the ladies.’
‘If you think you’re quick enough to catch one.’
They were married the following spring.
Meanwhile, Annie waited and made plans. All over the country, women like my grandma were busily shaping homes for returning heroes. Annie waited longer than most and so had time to make her plans more elaborate. By 1921, the war was mostly the stuff of mourning and of newly erected memorials, not a living, breathing, longing for a husband who would finally be coming home.
Home. The mark of a good home was its furnishings. Annie had some five years in which to squirrel away her wages and save towards the home she and Willie would have on his return. Betsy encouraged her to put away as much as possible while she was still teaching. Each month, Annie strained to extend the amount she saved by another sixpence or shilling; she lost count of the number of times she caught the train into Chesterfield and gazed through Eyres’ window – ‘Eyre & Son’s: the thoroughly up-to-date dependable firm… Designers and Manufacturers of Artistic Furniture’ – huddled in her winter coat, disappearing into her turned-up collar, attempting to warm herself on her own breath, while she contemplated the Denmark Suite in solid satin walnut (three bedroom pieces plus two cane chairs) for £9 5s 0d. In the end, she chose a suite whose dressing table had slim legs and a swing mirror. While Annie was breathing frosted air on to a plate-glass window and doing rapid sums, Willie was checking his hand beneath the palm trees and wondering whether to play his Jack of Hearts.
Next, she bought a dining suite in varnished wood, another Eyres’ purchase, and some second-hand silver to show off the sideboard: a Georgian teapot, a filigree bun tray and an ornamental tree that sprouted cranberry-glass cones for single blooms. The minute Annie got the tricksy thing home, she wondered when on earth she would use it, but the silver was so dainty she had not felt able to resist. In time, she bought a dressing-table set with a pattern reminiscent of a spring garden. Though her evenings were spent at Station Road with her parents and sister, all Annie’s thoughts were directed towards the future.
EYRE & SON’S LTD
Palm Stands
Music Cabinets
Smokers’ Cabinets
Luxurious Easy Chairs
Oak & Japanese Trays
Occasional Cabinets
Music Stools
Coal vases & cabinets
Tea Sets
Plant Pots
Rose Bowls
Silk lampshades with plain or beaded trimmings
Pouffe cushions
Carpets in the Newest Styles
– A selection of tempting furnishings from a Derbyshire Times advertisement, 5 January 1916
In the picture she had of Willie, he was standing in a garden, throwing a laughing child into the air. She was smiling at them both and pouring tea through a delicate Georgian spout. Sometimes the image changed and she and Willie were walking along the canal path with the corner shop behind them,
each holding a small hand in one of theirs. There was always a child in view. A married friend in whom she confided lent Annie a book which explained many facts about pregnancy (and sex) a young woman ought to know, and of which she’d had no idea until now. She would not feel so helpless next time round.
My grandma saved the pattern for the baby’s petticoat she wanted to crochet, though resisted the urge to buy the yarn or practise butterfly edging straightaway. Instead, she embroidered a large silk handkerchief with tulips and curling leaves, to put in a frame on the wall. While she stitched, Annie tried to close her mind to all the months and years that were disappearing. She was already twenty-six when the Armistice was signed. It was impossible not to realise how much time was slipping away, even though it seemed to pass so slowly.
One of my grandma’s treasured possessions was a silver pen-wipe in the shape of swan, a perfect choice for her in many ways, but this elegant creature was not bought by Annie, but by Dick, and probably came from his country-house foraging. My great-grandfather’s liking for country-house sales began during the First World War and gathered momentum thereafter, when high taxation and death duties left the gentry and upper-middle classes strapped for cash. One after another, homes were advertised for let in Country Life. Some landowners sold up entirely; auction houses acquired a new zeal.
Sales in Derbyshire were as plentiful as elsewhere. In March 1920, the Duke of Rutland auctioned part of his estate. Land stretching diagonally from Sheffield to below Matlock, and from Buxton into Chesterfield, was auctioned, together with farms, smallholdings and cottages, some of them going to sitting tenants, the rest to speculators as ‘parcels of property’, while the auction of 13,300 acres of the Duke’s Belvoir Estate realised a total of £489,780, the equivalent of some £14.5 million today. (A farm worker kept his family on 15s a week.) Later that year, Major Philip Hunloke sold the Wingerworth Estate on the edge of Chesterfield. The sale raised just £32,300 on land that had been in his family more than three centuries.
It was not only large estates that came on to the market. In 1915, the ‘valuable household furniture and effects’ of Brimington’s Sutton Lodge were auctioned over the course of two days. Motor buses delivered prospective buyers (and nosey parkers) to the house, where everything from burr walnut suites and a grand piano, to bonbon dishes and a soup ladle was up for sale, not forgetting the ‘art border carpet’ from the maids’ bedroom. Two years later, Brimington Hall was similarly denuded, the whole of its furnishings plus a ‘single brougham in perfect order’ and a dog cart coming under the hammer. Pockets of land and property elsewhere in the neighbourhood were broken into lots and sold to the highest bidder. For some families, money and influence were trickling away.
Their losses were my great-grandfather’s gain. Dick loved to visit big-house sales – beanos he called them. Whenever he could, Dick took himself off for the day to see houses stripped of their furnishings – everything from tapestries to the contents of their larders laid out on the grass; mangles set out on once exclusive parkland, meat-mincers and nests of basins arranged on trestle tables like some early twentieth-century boot sale. For the price of a thrupenny catalogue and a short walk, or a lift hitched on a farm cart, Dick could have himself a real fuddle.
Sales like these gave outsiders like my great-grandfather – and no one could be more of an outsider – a chance to glimpse the workings of a different social class: to see, if not their dirty linen, then their clean linen, at least (and piles of it, at that), and the reduction of a way of life that had persisted for centuries. But Dick was not just looking, he was buying. This fairground lad had a good eye. (He wasn’t cowed by his ‘betters’ either. Years later, Lord Andrew Cavendish, soon to become the 11th Duke of Devonshire, came to the shop as a prospective Tory candidate and was invited through to the house. ‘Sit y’sen down lad, and have some bread and jam,’ said Dick, who was eating his tea.)
My great-grandfather’s booty included two huge mirrors of the size that nowadays occupy the walls of dance studios – on the occasions she left the house, Betsy liked to check that she looked ‘right’ – hefty chests of drawers, an overmantel mirror; shell-like silver salt cellars and their minuscule spoons, and a china dressing-table set for Eva, its Art Nouveau shape splashed with poppies. Even the household bible was picked up at a country-house sale. And a sale was surely responsible for an improbable shawl that belonged to my great-aunt, its geometric patterns and metallic sheen promising a sophisticated evening and a full dance card. I doubt that the shawl was ever worn; Eva did not go dancing. For much of her life, it glittered in a drawer.
My great-grandfather’s big-house jaunts continued well into my mother’s childhood (death duties carried on climbing and, by 1934, had reached 50 per cent). At one such sale, he found a musical box, a relic of some child’s nursery, with a sentimental watercolour decorating its lid and a halting rendition of ‘Pussy Cat, Pussy Cat…’ in its windings. From then on, it played its plaintive tune for my mum and, later, me.
Country-house sales were as much a sign of the times as the advertise ments being produced for products sold by the corner shop – ‘A word to the wise coquette and cocktail drinker: drink Enos Fruit Salts’; ‘Icilma Face Cream (essential for the female pillion rider)’ – and the felt cloche hats, like tight spring buds, that were beginning to decorate Whit Walks. With the end of the war and, gradually, rationing, the new decade offered a sense of possibility even industrial unrest could not diminish. But the past refused to be erased entirely. Jimmy Frith still trembled with shell-shock and was jolted by sudden bangs; a motorcycle or car backfiring were enough to set him off, while Ethel’s brother, Clem, was left literally propping up his jaw. Each day was a reminder of the injuries you could sustain and have to live with, though God knows how some people did. Not everyone succeeded: one Staveley man killed his mother and injured his brother and wife, before turning his war-issue gun on himself. Newspaper reports like this one were grist to the 1920s, when nearly every out-of-work serviceman had a row of medals on his chest and every door-to-door salesman with a suitcase full of brushes seemed to be missing a limb.
DR WILLIAMS’ PINK PILLS
When Girls Grow Thin
When girls grow deathly pale, weak and miserable then is the time for parents to take prompt steps, for delay means danger
– Dr Williams’ Pink Pills
(there is no medicine that can compare)
Advertisement, Derbyshire Times, 1910
DR WILLIAMS’ PINK PILLS
When Your Nerves Fail – Beware of Neurasthenia
Pitiful is the cry that comes from men and women, victims of this ‘twentieth-century complaint’ which arises out of the competition, speed and striving of the age
– Dr Williams’ Pink Pills, 3s 0d a box – nothing else will do
Advertisement, Derbyshire Times, 1926
When Willie finally returned, in the early 1920s, he and Annie took themselves off to Sheffield, where Willie found himself a job in a city bakery. It was the furthest my grandma had been from Chesterfield and the longest time she had spent away from the family, but it gave her and Willie the chance to get to know one another again, and less self-consciously than if they’d remained at the shop. Perhaps this was the reason Willie did not immediately start working again for his brother Jim. Maybe he and Annie wanted some time to themselves.
Willie had gone off to war as C. W. Thompson. He had too much gumption (and too long a memory of schoolyard ribbing) to enter the army with his correct initials. While in Sheffield, he was William C. Thompson and sometimes reverted to plain W.C. He and Annie had two or three addresses during their short stay; each new street came with a small adjustment to his name. Willie was still working out who he wanted to be.
That first summer was as hot as Hades. A home from home, after the Middle East, someone said. All people wanted to hear from Willie were exotic details like those described on the bangle he’d brought back for Annie: a Mesopotamian circle of
elephants, crocodiles and palm trees.
Though he and Annie had been married six years, they’d spent so much time apart and in such different circumstances, they might as well have been married six weeks. They were still tentative with one another, circling each other, discovering themselves all over again. Willie’s corn-coloured curls were just as angelic as they’d always been and his eyes just as blue, but his face looked different somehow, though no less handsome for that. Annie liked to watch him smoke. She was fascinated by Willie’s hands and the long, fine fingers he kept spotlessly clean because of the bakery. She loved the way he smoked, seeming to inhale a sense of himself with each fresh drag of tobacco.
They were only perching in Sheffield, marking time in rented rooms. They knew they’d be back in Chesterfield before long and so did not try to put down roots. The best thing about the city was its theatres: Variety shows at the Empire, and plays and musicals at the Lyceum, where they saw The Maid of the Mountains twice in one week so that Willie could learn the best songs. Years before, he had copied his favourite lyrics into an exercise book; he was too old for that lark now, but he still wanted to sing all the tunes. They were frequent visitors to the Star Picture House on Ecclesall Road where they saw ‘the Kid’ lean against street corners in his oversize cap and trews and held their breath as Pearl White managed to free herself from the railway line as an express train hurtled towards her.
Sometimes, at a loose end on a weekday afternoon – my grandma knew no one else in Sheffield and couldn’t teach with the marriage bar resurrected – Annie took herself back to the Picture House and slipped into a seat in the semi-darkness. All around her, women like Annie were sitting in their own private worlds being charmed by Ramon Navarro or appalled when Lillian Gish was cast into the snow, a fallen woman. Annie saw The Kid a second time and marvelled at Charlie Chaplin and Jackie Coogan all over again, but her heart snagged on the mother’s note: ‘please love and care for this orphan child.’