Lemon Sherbet and Dolly Blue (10 page)

Committee reports of girls (they were barely young women) returned to the School due to insolence or because they were ‘unsuitable' – a word covering many unspecified misdemeanours, including wetting the bed – conceal a host of private miseries. Sometimes girls were deemed ‘unsatisfactory', a word which, like its opposite, runs like a dark seam through institutional life. Some poor girls were sampled and rejected, like shoddy goods returned to a shop.

Thankfully, rejection was not all one-way: some requests for servants were refused, though the enquirer was generally soft-soaped and told there were no girls old enough at present. One employer was threatened with legal proceedings for failing to pay a weekly wage of 1s 3d (though the poor girl had worked for more
than twelve months in receipt of only twelve weeks' wages before this abuse came to light).

Committee minutes provide bald statements and resolutions but, occasionally, stories like these seep through, offering glimpses of the realities behind formal words: not just the young girl who worked without wages (and in who knows what atrocious conditions), but the father sentenced to six months' hard labour for cruelty (consider how cruelty was defined in an era when
corporal punishment was widely accepted); the letters withheld from children because of their mother's intemperate behaviour; or the girl whose mother, should she ever succeed in freeing herself from the workhouse, was judged totally unfit to care for her child. One poor boy who absconded from the School twice in one day was immediately dispatched to the workhouse. (That'll learn 'im.) But there were success stories too, although, admittedly, fewer of these: women whose children were returned to them when, on re-inspection, their homes were judged ‘satisfactory', plus reports of grandparents and other relatives taking children out of the Homes.

No relative came to rescue Emily Ball's daughters. In years to come, my great-aunt would have no recollection of her parents. She remembered, however, a tall man who visited one day and gave her an apple, a rare treat. She thought he may have been her father. If so, what love and regret in one apple.

My great-aunt had been at the Orphanage for some six years when all the girls were instructed to join a line-up in the yard. Back straight, eyes forward, as she had been drilled, she watched a short stocky ‘gentleman' with a moustache and kindly eyes and a tall ‘posh lady' walk towards them. The lady would select a child and take her home, the Matron informed the waiting girls.

‘Pick me,' Annie Ball pleaded silently. ‘Pick me.' This is how, years later, she described the experience, not an invention of mine. How terrible to know, at the age of eight, and with her sisters at the school – her only remaining family as far as Annie was concerned – that this was the place to escape from. She was in luck. The ‘posh lady and gentleman' were my great-grandparents, Betsy and Dick.

I've known this story for years, but had no expectation of finding any reference to it when I consulted the Industrial School archives. I simply wanted to know what daily life was like for Annie Ball. My great-grandparents had walked past the School when they lived at Linacre and pitied its poor wretches. Dick knew better than most how chancy life could be; were he of a different generation, he could easily have ended up in an Industrial School himself. Instead, my great-grandparents took a child away from one and gave her a fresh start, just as Dick had been given a new beginning.

It is written in beautiful copperplate. On 13 April 1909, it was minuted that Mrs Nash desired to adopt a little girl, between five and six years old. The Relieving Officer for the district was required to inspect my great-grandparents' home and on pronouncing it satisfactory – that word again – the Committee granted the request. How quickly and how easily this was accomplished; how appalling that the inspection procedure seems to have been the same whether you applied to adopt a child or employ a servant.

Individual Poor Law authorities took their own view on the ‘re-adoption' of children in their care, which does not seem to have been that common. Some authorities preferred fostering arrangements with the children remaining their overall responsibility; others gave up on the idea altogether because youngsters were returned too many times. Although Chesterfield's Guardians were clearly in favour of ‘adoption', there were far more requests for servants than for children to adopt during this period (and, as with requests for servants, not all were granted). My great-grandma's enquiry was one of the very few. Imagine my delight when I found it. The decision is recorded in crisp black ink and, like all resolutions in that Committee minute book, partially
underlined in red. And so it should be. 10 May 1909: ‘Resolved that the application in question be granted.'

Both my great-grandparents walked along the rows, inspecting those desperate young girls who were all busily arranging their faces into the kind of look they hoped would free them. She conferred with Dick, but Betsy did the actual choosing. And she did not choose a child aged five or six as she'd intended, but a girl of eight, who was small for her age and might have seemed in distinguishable from all the other girls lined up in coarse pinafores that day were it not for the appeal in her smile. Something about it won them over. I know that smile. It's recorded on the photograph taken shortly after Dick and Betsy took her home to the corner shop. I know a stronger, brighter version too. It belonged to my much-loved great-aunt.

A
NNIE
B
ALL WOKE THAT MORNING IN A DRAUGHTY
dormitory but went to sleep that night beneath one of Betsy's warm plump weighties, in her new sister's bed. Far better, everyone agreed, that the little girl should not be by herself at first.

My great-grandparents could not have two daughters sharing a first name and so Annie Ball became Eva and began a new life with her brand new parents and new sister (though, aged sixteen, my grandma was twice Eva's age, and so was almost as much of a grown-up as a sister). It was impressed upon Eva that she now had a home and a family, with parents who would always care for her.

The Industrial School's lack of ornamentation and excess of fresh air were now exchanged for the warm clutter of the back room, with its vases wafting peacock feathers, decorative cranberry glass, and lace runners covering every surface. And the bustle of the grocer's shop out front. There were new dresses for Eva – dresses whose patterns she could choose – and cotton pinafores, and hair ribbons instead of rough braid, and lots of underclothes, and all of them just for Eva, who had never had any things to call
her own. And there were toys for Eva too, who would never again have to hope for a charitable doll.

Shortly after her arrival, the new sisters posed for their first photograph. Annie towers above young Eva, who looks especially small and both pleased and overwhelmed by her new circumstances. An enlargement was made of Eva and hung on the wall, where it joined the other family portraits in gilt frames. At Christmas, Dick and Betsy sent their friends a festive card displaying a further photograph of Annie and Eva: winter princesses in corresponding outfits of dark velvet. That year, Eva was given her own money box in blue enamelled stoneware stamped with strong black flowers. Strongest of all was the lettering: Eva Nash, 1909.

*

The more my great-aunt heard the name, the easier it became to absorb, but it was strange, all the same, becoming a new person overnight, even if her old identity had little to recommend it. It was not just that Eva had a new name, but that her new sister had her old one. Sometimes, when they were walking together up Station Road, a neighbour called out, ‘Annie', and both sisters turned round. My great-aunt practised saying ‘Eva' aloud and writing her new name in the new books her new parents bought her. In her large, round hand, in the corner of each first page, she declaimed, in descending steps: Eva Nash, 150 Station Road, Brimington, Chesterfield, each short line a building block towards her new identity.

Had she known any bedtime stories, my great-aunt might have wondered if she'd stepped into one. It was a sign of the life Eva had been used to that, at first sight, she'd thought Dick and Betsy posh. She had gone from nothing to plenty, not the fantastical plenty of unattainable make-believe, but the more realistic daydream of a home and family, and no more cold and hunger. Eva found herself in the kind of home she'd wished for when the dormitory floorboards made ridges in her knees from kneeling to thank God for her lot.

For a while, at least, God remained in the picture. The Spencer Street priest called at the shop on several occasions – Betsy could see him coming along the road well before he saw her – but was quietly but firmly told that Eva was no longer a Catholic. All God's creatures were equal in His eyes and you had no need to attend church to learn that. Eventually, worn out by my great-grandma's obduracy, the priest retreated.

Not every aspect of my great-aunt's former life was discarded.
She was to stay in touch with her sisters, Kitty and Margaret. Eva was delighted to know that, though they remained in the orphanage on the other side of town, her new family did not want them forgotten. Kitty and Margaret were now eleven and ten, still very young themselves. There was barely any difference in the three girls' ages, but the contrast in their lives was now immense.

One thing Eva had not pictured in her daydreams was a shop – with everlasting strips of toffee, gobstoppers and licorice bootlaces, humbugs and bullseyes. There were huge jars of currants, raisins and sultanas that required both hands to lift them from the shelf. She could take a handful of dried fruit whenever she wanted, as long as she asked first. And there was jam in enormous quantity, doled out from great big pots; large boxes of biscuits (Eva was allowed to eat the broken Rich Teas) and bottles describing things she did not know existed, such as tomato ketchup and Daddies Sauce. There were squat drawers for money and metal scoops in graduated sizes which slid silently into the bran tub but crunched into the sacks of lentils and dried peas. Sugar came wrapped in solid rolls of dark-blue tissue paper that Betsy sliced through with a knife, or in thick bags marked ‘Granulated' or ‘Demerara'. Every bit as good as sweets, biscuits and raisins was the slice of bread and butter liberally sprinkled with sugar Betsy gave Eva to eat while she tackled the lugs in her hair.

Dick took to calling her ‘My Ava'. (‘My Nancy' was his pet name for Annie.) He showed her where red chandeliers bloomed on the scraggy currant bush in the strip of earth that passed for their garden, and took her for long walks where they nibbled ‘bread and cheese' (hawthorn) from the hedgerows and plucked handfuls of watercress from a stream. Dick taught her the names
of birds and wild flowers, and how to make sharp blades of grass whistle between her thumbs. Betsy showed Eva how to create pastry leaves to decorate pie crusts, and how to turn a dish on raised fingers while slicing excess pastry from the rim. Together, she and Eva gathered the rose hips, blackberries and damsons my great-grandma used for making jam. Betsy taught Eva to pick only the berries that left the stem willingly, not the ones that resisted, and always to leave some behind for the birds and the next gatherer. Moments like these had a gentling quality, a belated release into childhood.