Lemon Sherbet and Dolly Blue

by Knight, Lynn

  *

  In the tree-lined suburbs of North London between the wars, many detached houses had a live-in servant who served corn-beefed hash and chocolate ‘shape’ at luncheon before retreating from view. Jessie Mee was among their number. For all the anxiety surrounding ‘the servant question’ at this time, women like Jessie were employed in middle-class homes until the Second World War.

  In 1929, the year she enters my family story, Jessie Mee was working as a cook, and so already had some years of service under her belt (a belt pulled tight across a neat, plain dress) by the time she came to Hazelmere Avenue. Her employer was a widow, a Mrs Sedgwick, whose husband had died two years earlier. The Sedgwicks purchased their Finchley plot in 1925, after having lived in America for some years. With its mix of professionals with young children and older couples like themselves, the Avenue made a nice spot for their retirement. Each house asserted a touch of individuality, be it stained-glass windows, mock-Tudor beams or rustic porch. This was a comfortable middle-class area.

  Mrs Sedgwick’s needs were unlikely to have stretched beyond a cook and a daily help, and unless she did a great deal of entertaining, Jessie’s responsibilities were far less onerous than those facing many cooks. She had her own kitchen – and a modern one at that, the kind with a serving hatch, a window on to the garden and white walls, not a damp treacle-brown coloured basement – but standing in a kitchen all day was a lonely occupation all the same. The Avenue was all houses and there were just houses in the streets nearby. There was no call to run to the shops. When provisions ran low, Jessie telephoned the grocer or the butcher with Mrs Sedgwick’s orders and awaited their delivery boys.

  Unless you could afford to train as a cook, the usual way to learn was by starting on the bottom rung as a kitchen or scullery maid, like those poor girls in Industrial Schools, although, unlike them, young women from stable working-class backgrounds grasped some of the ropes at home. By caring for younger siblings, they learned discipline and a sense of responsibility at an early age, along with domestic chores. Even before they started paid work, many working-class girls were well on their way to becoming biddable servants.

  That did not make the role any more palatable, nor the route to advancement any simpler: up to your elbows in greasy water, hands stung by washing soda and the paste of sand, salt, vinegar and flour mixed for cleaning copper-bottomed saucepans. There were mountains of vegetables to peel and, over the years and in different households, tips to pick up from different cooks – how to make an entrée, chicken in aspic, jugged hare – though with little time or opportunity to practise the recipes yourself.

  At some point during her years of service, heartily sick of skivvying and desperate for better pay (a London cook could earn in the region £54 to £63 a year in 1930, more than twice as much as a kitchen maid), a young woman might be emboldened to answer an advertisement for a cook, or put her name down at a domestic agency. ‘Good plain cooks’ were always in demand, even those whose actual experience was shaky. Hazelmere Avenue may even have been Jessie’s first post in this role; landing on the doorstep with a nervous smile, a newly thumbed copy of Mrs Beeton and the tin box containing her belongings.

  If she looked through the kitchen window while doing the washing up, Jessie could see next-door’s servant pegging out clothes and, if their time off coincided, and provided they were home by ten (buses became pumpkins after ten), they could link up and catch the latest picture at the Finchley Bohemia. A cook might have every other Sunday afternoon off, plus an afternoon and evening a week. It was hard to meet new people, with your freedom so tightly prescribed, and hard to maintain friendships too, with each job taking you to a different part of London; servants palled up when they could.

  The best domestic servants were supposed to be a hidden current running through the house, making its smooth running possible in all manner of unseen ways. At worst, you were ‘a menial, a nobody’. Even a cook, at the top end of the female scale, was part of that separate species, not reckoned to have thoughts or desires of her own. Unwritten rules governing boundaries and behaviour were understood by both sides; published guidance was also available. Domestic manuals included chapters on servants, mainly directed at employers, but, in Waiting at Table: A Practical Guide, Mrs C. S. Peel produced a whole volume of advice for the young women themselves: ‘Do not speak unless necessary… Do not breathe heavily. Move quietly but quickly… Do not rattle knives and forks.’ In other words: make yourself invisible. Jessie Mee could not to do that. She brought her own life and feelings into the house. In 1929, she was pregnant.

  A pregnant young servant was hardly a rarity; this was the fate of many naïve young women, and domestic service, with its circumscribed hours and strict routine, is thought to have ensured that servants remained naïve longer than most. They were also desperate to get away and live their own lives instead of underpinning someone else’s. There was nothing unique about Jessie’s plight, but that did not make it any less real.

  In 1929, a time when ‘immoral conduct’ usually secured instant dismissal, a woman of Jessie’s age and circumstances had few options. The NCAA wrote of finding live-in work for some of the young women who came to them, in households willing to take a mother and child, but there were very few of these jobs available. Few employers wanted a woman with a child, let alone a single woman with a baby. And think of the practicalities and the questions, the constant suspicion and pursed lips. The NCAA also suggested that, ‘when possible’, a young woman could stay in its hostel with her child, while engaged in domestic work elsewhere, but this would obviously provide only a temporary solution and ‘when possible’ manages to convey how infrequent a solution this was. Some welfare hostels took on unmarried mothers, but these placements usually came with a large dose of moral medicine.

  You must remember that your moods do affect your child through you, and therefore, for its sake you must shun the ugly and depressing things of life and keep as cheery, as happy, and as light-hearted as you possibly can.

  – Advice to Mothers, Home Management, 1934

  A bold option would be for Jessie to buy a cheap ring and pretend to be recently widowed – but she could find no new domestic work without a good ‘character’ and could hardly expect Mrs Sedgwick to lie on her behalf. If she took a different kind of job altogether, she’d need someone to mind her baby, which had its own risks (the bogey of baby farming still stalking recent memory and, occasionally, the press). Hers was the age-old dilemma. With a child, she could go neither forward, nor back.

  I know almost nothing of Mrs Sedgwick, but she seems to have been compassionate and broad-minded, and far more broad-minded than most. I assume her wider experience of the world accounted for that. And it’s possible that, given this small household, theirs was a more companionate relationship than many. Jessie remained with Mrs Sedgwick for some months after the birth. They must have made an odd pair during the Christmas of 1929, an exceptionally cold winter, when even the River Thames froze. Outside, freezing temperatures; inside, the widow, the cook and her baby, awaiting the next year and all it would bring.

  Hazelmere Avenue was the address Jessie gave when she registered her baby’s birth, and she waited a very long time to do that, either because of a reluctance to commit reality to paper, or perhaps because she hoped – and, if so, how fiercely she must have hoped – that the baby’s father would acknowledge their child.

  I’ve been to the house on Hazelmere Avenue. I went there with my mum one November afternoon. It was a drear, cold day and the road itself inaccessible, a bus journey across unknown territory, following a tube ride towards the edge of the map. Jessie was long gone, of course – we weren’t expecting to see her. No one answered our knock at the door. We left the Avenue with nothing.

  We could have gone back another day. Why didn’t we? My mum put a note through the door and the owner replied, inviting us to visit. We never did. Why ever not? What madness, we say now. And I gather that, at the time, the inter
ior of the house was more or less the same as when Jessie lived there. It seems ludicrous, when there are so few clues, but our failure to return was not just the fact of my mum not living in London, and it being the other side of the capital from me. It is hard to convey how intensely distressing that grey day was. Years passed; the owner died and his invitation with him. I’ve been back there since: sunny afternoons on both occasions; light dancing on the Avenue’s trees, and found the journey, now freed of those initial weighty expectations, straightforward and easy.

  I’ve stood outside that house and willed it to give up its secrets, but bricks and mortar won’t do that. I’ve pictured Jessie looking through the landing window while considering what to do for the best. Through its stained-glass panes she could watch the garden flush green, yellow, blue or scarlet, but whichever coloured landscape she observed, nothing altered her situation. In 1930, Jessie went to the NCAA and was interviewed by its gentle, pearl-throated inquisitors.

  She would not have found the Association by herself. Mrs Sedgwick and her youngest son, a married doctor, probably made enquiries on her behalf and vouched for Jessie’s good name. Mrs Sedgwick would have been at ease in this milieu (or was, at least, a woman who knew which questions to ask); her son’s profession gave him some knowledge of adoption. However it came about, the result was the same. In June of that year, Jessie Mee gave up her baby.

  *

  I’ve never seen the NCAA hostel, Tower Cressy. I’ve seen photographs and a line drawing, but not the real thing. The building no longer exists, but, in the summer of 1930, when Annie and Willie went there, one unrepeatable afternoon, it dominated Aubrey Road. I can only imagine their feelings as they walked towards its imposing Italianate structure. Built in the 1850s for Thomas Page, creator of Westminster Bridge, this turreted Gothic building was later home to the designer Christopher Dresser and his thirteen children (thirteen born into the right social class), and was owned, for a while, by the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) during Emmeline Pankhurst’s foray into adoption, before being gifted to the NCAA. It was a landmark in the area as well as in my grandparents’ lives.

  There was always an other-worldliness about Campden Hill; those magnificent houses and mysterious squares from which Turner painted sunsets. Novelist Naomi Mitchison wrote of a house she often visited (her motherin-law’s) and yet could not find when she returned to the area years later. To me, that seems at one with the landscape and the fairytale quality of Annie and Willie’s experience. I know Tower Cressy was real, but it feels like something invented.

  Despite its ornate and intimidating façade, everything within the ‘babies hostel’ was built with comfort in mind, and with institutional elements kept to a minimum. A visiting journalist writing for Woman’s Own compared Tower Cressy to a ‘huge private house, beautifully arranged and furnished, in which you see happy toddlers playing together with their toys and smaller babies chuckling at each other’. The photographs accompanying her feature show children straight out of Mabel Lucie Attwell: 1930s cherubs and toddlers with pudding-basin haircuts and big eyes. These days, they were no longer ‘war orphans’ but ‘motherless mites’.

  In sentiments equally reminiscent of that popular children’s author, the journalist concluded: ‘There are all sorts of babies – fair and dark, large and small – a constantly moving stream of them, for often their stay in the hostel is for only a few days, and then their adopted mother comes and takes them away, and a cot in the peaceful nursery…is filled by another motherless mite, and so the story goes on…For there are always babies who need a mummy and a home, and always women who yearn for the baby who never came.’

  Annie and Willie could not believe what stood before them when they arrived at Aubrey Road. The journey itself was remarkable enough, but after street upon street of royal icing stucco, they thought they must have stumbled upon Béla Lugosi’s house. Willie took out his camera and, as if made dizzy by what he saw there, took a leaning photograph of Tower Cressy. Inside, all was courtesy, smiles and politeness, with nursery nurses in starched uniforms moving stealthily through sunny rooms.

  Annie was gripping a letter the postman had brought to the cake shop; a postman turned stork, though he’d no idea what he was delivering. HRH Princess Alice, head of the NCAA Case Committee, had studied my grandparents’ photographs and selected the child best suited to them. There was a baby waiting for Annie and Willie, a baby chosen specially by her royal self. Imagine.

  My grandparents wanted to remember every single detail of that extraordinary day and so, when Willie stepped into the garden, he photographed some babies asleep in wicker cots. Clara Andrew is in the picture too – throwing up her hands at his impertinence. Thank you, Willie, for your impertinence, if that’s what it was. That forbidden snapshot is a tiny piece in the jigsaw of my mum’s story.

  When they left Tower Cressy that afternoon, Annie was clutching an eight-month-old baby wrapped in a shawl, and Willie, a set of instructions, details of the baby’s feed. Until I saw that simple handwritten sheet, I had no idea a list could make your heart ache.

  Part Three

  12

  Cora

  MY MOTHER WAS BATHED IN A BLUE ENAMEL BATH THE chemist’s son had outgrown, but her rattle was brand-new and at last Annie could stitch daisies on to the bodice of a dress: eight ivory-coloured threads radiating from each silk knot.

  On fine days, Cora’s pram stood in the old bakehouse yard, its front wheels and hood visible beyond the door leading into the cake shop. ‘If you’ll excuse me a moment,’ Annie tells her customers, the minute Cora cries, ‘I must just attend to my baby.’ She has waited thirteen and a half years to say those words.

  One day she was Mrs Thompson, with no children; the next she was a mother pushing a pram. There was little chance of Annie pretending to be Cora’s birth mother to her near neighbours, though stranger things happened all the time. My family all knew women who introduced new babies, although their daughters had been the ones gaining weight. Mystery babies were not unusual. People shrugged their shoulders and got on with their own lives.

  Everyone at the Mill was delighted and when they’d finished holding Cora aloft for the camera and posterity, and toasting her future in glasses of warm beer, Dick chucked the little duckie under her chin and Eva blew her enormous bubbles that quivered before they burst and disappeared.

  On Sunday mornings, Annie pushed the pram up to Wheeldon Mill as proudly as Boadicea driving her chariot. Long after Cora was too old for her pram, the pram accompanied them, enabling Annie to wheel her back at night. It was a considerable walk for a woman with a baby, and parts of it quite deserted after ten, but that didn’t trouble Annie. She passed the time by describing the stars to her daughter: Orion’s Belt, the Plough, Cassiopeia.

  Eva jiggled Cora on her knee and did not mind when she bit into her raspberry-coloured beads when teething. She even forgave Cora the loss of her front teeth. It was an accident, of course, the act of a baby flinging out an arm while holding a glass feeding bottle, but the bottle caught Eva squarely on the mouth and broke her teeth. ‘Those two have got to come out,’ the dentist said (no string and door slamming for Eva), ‘so why not remove the lot of them, and save yourself trouble and expense later?’

  People did that all the time; some poor devils had the cost of the extraction presented as a birthday gift. In the days before complex dentistry, replacing your own teeth with dentures was thought to be doing yourself a favour. So Eva did the sensible thing. She spent a hideous morning at the dentist and returned home with a vastly swollen face and a jaw that felt it had gone ten rounds in a boxing ring. Her own teeth were exchanged for a set of gleaming ceramic ‘pots’ which loomed in her mouth, overcrowding it. She persevered for a while and each set of dentures was an improvement on the last, but Eva hated the wretched things and hardly wore them.

  She managed the adjustment remarkably quickly and her mouth did not turn down in a permanent sag. The oddities became the occasion
s Eva wore her teeth, not the days she ignored them. Though she grieved for their loss, there was nothing she could do. Teeth were one of the things Eva learned to go without.

  My mum’s adoption was formalised in 1931. The court officials told Annie and Willie she was the first child to be legally adopted in Chesterfield since the Adoption Act had come into force in 1927. The officials offered their warm congratulations and my grandma’s answering smile burnished that January day. Annie and Willie were thrilled and proud, and all those others words used to describe new parents that don’t come close to conveying the immensity of their feelings, but pride notwithstanding, the adoption itself was not something they intended to dwell on. They were a family now and that was all that mattered. It was nobody’s business but theirs.

  Annie was now the mother she had always hoped to be, but mothering at thirty-seven (which was older then, than now) came as a considerable shock. In the interwar years, childcare guru Truby King reigned supreme in instructing middle-class mothers how to care for their babies. Tower Cressy prescribed the four-hourly feeds that were fashionable then but, unlike other Truby King novitiates, Annie had no nursemaid or nanny. She also had a cake shop to run. Childcare gurus and middle-class adoption associations did not consider the practicalities of life for a working mother. In the one photograph that exists of my grandma with her young baby, she looks completely done in.