by Knight, Lynn
My mum knew nothing of Dick’s and Eva’s beginnings until after Dick and Betsy died, when she was told by Annie and Eva. I knew of my great-grandfather’s history from a very early age, but was about fifteen before I learned of Eva’s orphanage years, and eighteen when knowledge of my mum’s adoption added another layer and further dimension to the mix. Having unrelated relatives has always intrigued me, but it’s taken me much longer to explore almost (but not quite) the full story.
Questions of naming and identity are central to any adoption. Naming has a complex place in this family’s story too, and I’ve added to it by changing some of the names in this book. All three adopted children acquired new names, Eva and Cora gained forenames as well as fresh surnames. My great-aunt spent a considerable part of her childhood as ‘Annie’ before becoming ‘Eva’, an extreme change to contemplate, although probably less disturbing than those she’d already encountered before she came to Wheeldon Mill.
My great-grandfather’s ‘adoption’ document gave him a second name, which looks like ‘Darnce’ or ‘Durnce’ but which Dick understood to be Dorance: he was Richard Dorance Walker and became Richard Dorance Nash. Despite the evidence of the actual document, however, Dick understood Dorance to be his original surname, and attempted to pass this on to his daughters, and so maintain a link with his original family line. Unfortunately, his attempts were fogged by poor learning and spelling ‘by ear’: the name appears differently in almost every instance – ‘Doran’, for example, and even, on one occasion, ‘Durham’ – each recording clerk interpreting it in their own way. Poor learning led to another complication too – ironically, for Annie, the one child who was always sure where she came from – my grandma’s birth is not registered under her full name.
Official documents have a way of revealing only part of the narrative and of foxing those of us who look into the past. Despite never marrying, Eva had three surnames during her life: her birth was registered under her father’s name, she became Ball and, finally, Nash, with a wealth of stories between each alteration. And, although the name was not used within the home, my great-aunt was also called Doris to create an echo with ‘Dorance’ and so bring her more into the family.
There is a further aspect to my great-aunt’s history, though Eva knew nothing of this, and it belongs to her father, that ordinary man doing what he had to do to get by. By 1908, he had a new life, a new ‘wife’ (I’ve found no evidence of their marriage) and, soon afterwards, a new family.
And he who gives a child a treat
Makes joy-bells in Heaven’s Street
And he who gives a child a home
Builds palaces in Kingdom Come
– From ‘The Everlasting Mercy’ by John Masefield. Published in 1911, the poem became widely known and was copied into an old Provident register by Annie, together with other quotations. Masefield’s mother died in childbirth when he was six.
By making representation to the Poor Law Guardians, he had the power to release his three girls from the orphanage once his circumstances changed, and provided they were judged ‘satisfactory’. Yet again, he had to make a choice between his old life and his new one; it is unlikely he could afford to combine the two. His new ‘wife’ may have known nothing about this aspect of his past, or else had been told about the girls and refused to take on any children other than her own – old and new family combined would have brought them all closer to calamity. The decision may not have been calculating irresponsibility, but yet more harsh reality.
Eva remained in touch with Kitty and Margaret throughout her life. Despite the best efforts of the Industrial School, all three seem to have avoided domestic service. Ironically, their oldest sister did not. By 1911, Nellie, who disappeared from this story at their mother’s death, was a junior maid. Until I looked into the family history, I had no idea she existed.
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The abandoned or orphaned children of Victorian and Edwardian literature frequently had well-to-do guardians or benefactors (cruel as well as kind), but working-class families also took in children, as Dick’s and Eva’s beginnings show, and these children were expected to work. The view that children should be useful was by no means confined to the workhouse or Industrial School, but was fundamental to an ethos of service and duty that extended beyond the First World War – hence Dick holding the candle for Joe Nash, and Eva being kept at home – and the idea of a child being schooled in the family trade or business ran well into the twentieth century, irrespective of social class.
One of the anxieties surrounding adoption in its early years was the fear of children being taken into families to act as unpaid servants. I think, with immense dismay, of one parallel between the life the Industrial School envisaged for my great-aunt, and the life she actually led, and that’s the common view that servants should have ‘no followers’ (no suitors). But, for all my discomfort at that similarity, Eva’s life was not that of a servant. My mum, who knew nothing of Eva’s beginnings during her own childhood, had no sense of her aunt being anything less than a vital – and vibrant – part of the family, on the same terms as everyone one else. The idea of Eva being the-daughter-at-home brings into sharper focus that complex equation between family and service, whereby wives (and, in some instances, daughters), perform for free the duties servants are paid for.
Clara Andrew of the NCAA spoke of adopters wishing to take girls because, in later years, they would be companions for their adoptive parents. Contemplating this subject in 1920, the Home Secretary of the day remarked that ‘a good many people looked upon children as a legitimate investment for their old age’. Daughters have long been expected to fulfil the role of comforter.
Though her role as daughter-at-home took away freedoms most of us take for granted, Eva knew she was loved. Had she married, her life would have been very different, though it may have been even less free: in those days, marriage to a blue-collar worker, plus two or three children (possibly more), would not have allowed Eva much time for herself. It would nonetheless have given her experiences she never had the chance to have – most obviously, sexual love and, probably, her own children. Instead, she had my mum and, later, my brother and me.
Dick’s life and Eva’s were as thoroughly constrained by attitudes to childhood (and young women) during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as by adoption. My mum grew up in a different era, albeit one with bogeys of its own: she was the one child who had no idea where she came from, and whose origins were actively hidden, the greater focus on the family unit at that time paradoxically encouraging concealment. I can stand back a little (though admittedly not that far) when considering Dick and Eva, but that is hardly possible when it comes to Cora. Hers is obviously the story closest to me.
24
Beginnings and Endings
FOR A LONG TIME, I WAS NOT PARTICULARLY CURIOUS ABOUT Jessie Mee. This was partly life going on, but it also seemed that knowing more about her would be disloyal to Annie. My mum and I still speak of what Annie would have wanted; neither of us wished to hurt her. But an even greater imperative existed, and that was my desire to see if I could help Cora find out what she could about her birth mother.
When I started researching this book, there was still much to uncover and much I wanted to find irrespective of this memoir. I wept on reading Emily Ball’s death certificate – dead aged twenty-seven and reduced to a housekeeper by the man whose children she bore, and died for – though it took me a moment or two to register the document’s full implications. And thinking of how Emily’s young life was swept away on paper and in fact, and of how impossibly hard it must have been, she seemed to stand for all the other young women before and after her who never stood a chance. I was also crying, I suppose, for another young woman; someone of whom, at that point, I knew little, beyond her name. But then (on paper, at least) I found her.
My mum started trying to trace her birth mother after the change of law in 1975 that enabled adopted children (following counselling) to have a
ccess to their original birth certificates and thus the possibility of tracing their birth mothers. Knowledge of a name, an address and, in this instance, an occupation is an extraordinary thing to acquire when you have waited nearly forty years to discover it, but unless that name is unusual, it does not get you very far in identifying a person; you also need some idea of their age and place of birth. A name alone produced multiple candidates of childbearing age in different parts of the country. The helpful (and logical) advice that you pursue marriage certificates next shows how many people assume a geographical stability domestic servants and many working-class families did not have. The documents that would also have helped – the censuses of 1921 and, especially, 1931 – were, of course, inaccessible (1931 will remain so, having been destroyed by fire).
The most obvious route is via the actual adoption, but the court records pertaining to my mum’s adoption were apparently nonexistent and the NCAA is now a defunct organisation, its records taken over by Westminster City Council. It is extremely difficult to trace adoption records that pre-date the Second World War: No. Nothing. No. I’m Very Sorry. Lost. Gone. Each letter or call, however sympathetically expressed, a rebuff so strong its kickback dammed up further enquiries. Months passed; months and years.
A chance repeat enquiry turned up some archival tidying in an office initially contacted years before, and, this time, produced court records. I’m sure my mum was not the only adoptee of her generation to discover how scant these details are in files dating back to the twenties and thirties. Those with some knowledge of adoption today would be aghast at the flimsy documentation. All those ‘satisfactory’ arrangements barely recorded; birth mothers’ stories forgotten and not passed on. Even into the 1960s, it was customary to advise adoptive parents to conceal the child’s origins and tell children their biological parents had died – and sometimes violently at that: in a car crash. A sure way to end probing questions, but what a brutal legacy to hang round a child’s neck.
In my mum’s case, however, there was one lead. Together with the details on her birth certificate, an index card existed in the files of the NCAA (which was almost but not totally defunct when my mum began her search: the Association existed until 1978, when local authorities took over the responsibility for adoptions). This index card included a further name, F. M. Wood: Jessie was not alone when she took my mum to Tower Cressy. My brother discovered this when he made some preliminary enquiries. Thank goodness the index card was found when it was. Some time later, that stray documentation also vanished, and, with it, all evidence of Cora’s connection with the NCAA. For many years, there were three mysteries in my mum’s adoption story: the ‘mystery lady’ who visited Racecourse Road; F. M. Wood, and the most significant mystery of all, the woman I’ve called Jessie Mee.
The ‘mystery lady’ has haunted my mum’s story for years. For a long time, we imagined she was Mrs Sedgwick, Jessie Mee’s employer and, possibly, the wife (or mother) of the man who made her pregnant, who wanted to ensure the child was safe (chauffeur-driven cars being more likely to belong to leafy north London and to a past I cannot fully recreate). But the ‘mystery’ visit to my grandma came several years and accumulated paperwork after an adoption bound and stitched together in secrecy, though, back in the 1930s it may just have been possible for Mrs Sedgwick to unlock those doors. Annie would certainly have wanted to impress upon someone of her standing how well she was looking after my mum. After all, my grandma told Cora that their visitor was ‘a very nice lady,’ and ‘very well off’. Yet why did Mrs Sedgwick wait so long before making an appearance? This is where the theory stumbled.
More recently, my greater knowledge of the National Children Adoption Association suggested an alternative, if imperfect, scenario. Ladies with chauffeur-driven cars were exactly those the Association cultivated and attracted: women with means who could attend their fund-raising dinners and had a use for those evening gowns and mah-jong sets. However, Clara Andrew wanted adopted children to make fresh starts, so it seems strange that the NCAA would risk the awkward questions that could so easily have stemmed from the mystery lady’s visit. Its literature makes no reference to occasional inspections or follow-ups of any kind (though some of those involved with children – the NSPCC, for example – would have been happier if these had taken place), so there seems to have been no apparatus for a visit like this one. Unless news of Willie’s ill health and receipt of the dreaded Means Test had percolated down from Relieving Officer to Health Visitor, though, in that case, the visitor would have been a gabardine-clad woman arriving on foot, not in a chauffeur-driven car; and that version of events would also suggest a far more rigorous approach to adoption than I believe existed then. (Clara Andrew is on record as saying she thought that adopted children, like all others, should, to some extent, take their chances.) So, the ‘lady’ continued to be a mystery.
And a further aspect of her visit puzzled me: if she was acting on the NCAA’s behalf, why did she allow my grandma to head off to my mum’s school in that fizz of anxiety? Perhaps her polite protestations went unheeded and Annie set off before she could be stopped; or else, while Annie was away, the mystery lady realised the complications that would ensue from meeting Cora, and that she’d overstepped the mark. Both would account for her hasty withdrawal. Yet, my grandma’s behaviour on that afternoon does not sound a bit like Annie, who was always composed, no matter how anxious she was feeling. Unless she felt wrong-footed by this apparition in marocain silk, thought she was being questioned about her ability to care for my mum. She had the same rights in law as a birth parent, but, like any parent, if questioned, would have felt intensely distressed. If she felt the need to prove that care, and thought her love in jeopardy, Annie would have done anything.
For a while, F. M. Wood, the person named on the index card, seemed much less significant, though, in fact, she was the key to unlocking my mum’s story. I’d assumed her to be a middle-class woman, someone else well-connected who assisted Jessie (at one with the mystery lady and Mrs Sedgwick). And Annie always hinted that my mother’s father was ‘posh’. Of course she did. Why wouldn’t she? And perhaps he was. The different threads appeared to fit.
F. M. Wood lived in London, N1. Fastening on the postcode, I pictured Georgian houses and nicely turned pavements and squares. I forgot how easily, in London, smart bleeds into down-at-heel. So I was surprised when her address turned out to be Hoxton, unlovely in those days. The house is not there anymore, slum clearance managing what Hitler did not get round to.
She revealed her identity quite quickly, although I’ve given her another one here. Frances Wood was the married name of Jessie’s elder sister. At last I was on the right track, except it was not quite as straightforward as that. Try as I might, I could not make the pieces fit. Large contingents of people with the same surname in far-flung parts of the country provided the usual baskets of red herrings. Though it looked as if Frances would be easy to trace, and, through her, Jessie, the trail very quickly went cold. My researches continued: court records, hospital archives, electoral registers, census details; birth, death and marriage certificates, trade directories, on and on… trying to piece together a narrative from the poor threads available. Though England had seemed full of possibilities, these led nowhere; Ireland was where I needed to look.
I still know the strange calm I felt when, sat at my computer, I knew, without doubt, I’d found Jessie. I know the date and the hour she came to light. She was waiting to be discovered all along. I can see myself picking up the phone to give my mum the news she’d thought she would never hear. I’d always imagined catching a train to reveal that news in person, but some information will not wait.
Jessie Mee was in her early twenties when she gave birth to Cora. In some ways, she was barely more than the ‘girl’ Annie described. She was one of eleven surviving children, the eldest already married before Jessie started school. Her beginnings do not surprise me. Her mother’s was the same old story: in and out of pregnanc
y from a very young age, the latest baby barely weaned before the next one stirred inside her.
Jessie’s father was a builder; her eldest brother followed him into the trade, but things were more difficult for girls. As in England, domestic service was their best option. Once they reached their mid-teens, it was time they put their feet under someone else’s table. At least two of Jessie’s siblings were in service at some point, including Frances, before, and possibly after, she came to London.
Women left Ireland in greater numbers than men in the early years of the twentieth century and provided a significant proportion of London’s domestic staff. London-born girls were said to look down their noses at the work and were disliked by prospective employers for that reason, being thought too independent and too knowing. Expanding opportunities in factories, offices and shops beckoned them. Provincial young women and migrants, like Jessie, took their places. The high proportion of Irish-born women living in Kensington, Hampstead, Westminster and St Marylebone at the start of the 1930s was almost entirely due to the demand for domestic servants, despite anti-Irish feeling among some employers.
How Jessie’s life must have changed from the days when she raced her brothers and sisters along Main Street, past the draper’s, the boot shop and the Temperance Hall, to when she became Mrs Sedgwick’s cook. Days serving breakfast, luncheon and high tea; evenings off at the cinema. But, of course, there was more than this to Jessie’s story: in 1929, she was pregnant with my mum.
Interwar London could be every bit as overwhelming as the city can seem today, albeit on a smaller scale. And just as capable of swallowing up the desperate, the poor and the lonely – young and vulnerable servants among them. But Jessie Mee was not alone: she had her sister Frances, and another sibling was also in London around this time.
Frances was a married woman with small children when her younger sister became pregnant. Like many working-class families in London between the wars, she and her husband rented rooms in shared houses, and then upped sticks to another shared house nearby. Life seemed to catch at their coat tails. Addresses previously occupied by two couples housed three when the Woods pitched up, making for even more of a squeeze.