Lemon Sherbet and Dolly Blue (39 page)

A difficult situation neatly resolved and without accusations, or with anyone losing face: it was the kind of negotiation Annie and Eva had learned from Betsy. How sad that they now had to practise it on her behalf. I'm shocked to think of a close neigh-bour stealing from my great-grandma, and especially in these circumstances. But I suspect my shock was greater than Annie's and Eva's. They knew what their neighbour's life was. Life had taught her harsh practicalities: the living need money, the dead do not. What seems a dreadful disrespect was as much a mark of desperation. Either way, it provides a coarser tale, as well as a finale to my great-grandma's story and life at the corner shop.

My mum was married by the time my great-grandparents died. She met my dad at a New Year's dance in the late 1940s. Didn't
most couples meet at dances then? The 1950s were no kinder to married women than previous decades. No sooner was Mum married than she had to circumvent the constant banter of the (married) male office wags, asking when the little ones would be coming. ‘Oh, don't you worry,' Cora said. ‘I'll catch up with you soon enough.' Like many women of her generation, she gave up paid work to start a family. My brother came first, and then me. My brother is named for our great-grandfather; me, after noirish film star, Lynn Bari: Hollywood habits die hard. Until I started school, Cora's dancing fell by the wayside. By the time she took up classes again – Latin American, for her own fun and fitness – she was also tying my ballet shoes, just as Annie had helped tie hers.

After Dick and Betsy died, the lease on the shop was surrendered and Eva went to live with Annie. That's where I came to know them, in the house at Racecourse Road. The cupboard that once housed my mum's books and toys – and which Annie had opened to show the mystery lady – was mine now, as were the books and toys. At bathtime, Eva blew my brother the same pendulous soapy rainbows she'd blown for my mum, and (some years later), thanks to Annie, he was the only boy we knew with his own Dennis the Menace jumper. I can see him now, lying on their rag rug before a blazing fire, drawing cartoon John, Paul, George and Ringos, sporting his own Beatle cut.

My grandma and great-aunt were invariably together, though Annie was still Providenting, and, for several years, Eva worked at a grocer's shop, swapping the family counter for another, less pleasing one where she was, at least, visited by women she'd known at the Mill, who kept her up to date with its goings on. Annie
and Eva (Mama and Auntie to me) were nearly always mentioned as a pair, a kind of double act, although their personalities were very different. They eventually performed a final, heartbreaking double act of sorts, by dying within ten days of each other. In the absence of a maternal grandfather (Willie being long dead), they were my maternal grandparents: my relationship with Eva was much closer than the title ‘great-aunt' usually suggests.

When I was small, Annie had more time than she'd had during Cora's childhood. As well as dressing me and my dolls, my grandma had other impressive talents. By some means, whose method
baffles me still, she crocheted a doll's cradle, some six inches high, which, when stiffened with sugar water, stood proud on its silk rockers. Annie reupholstered the three-piece suite from my mum's doll's house, complete with antimacassars: individual lace florets. Such loving care and artistry on my behalf; the hours she must have spent cutting out and gluing velvet on to that miniature furniture. Now, I notice that a patch of glue escaped from one of the seams; then, all I saw were plump red seats fashioned with love.

Mealtimes at Racecourse Road were always a treat, whether eating Annie's meat pies, served in jam-tart-sized pastry cases; Eva's fat chips (as good any gastro-pub offering and dashed into hot fat with characteristic abandon), or a kind of children's meze they invented, offering several diminutive dishes tempting to a child. Sometimes, during Eva's stint at that other grocery store, we ate mystery teas. With the tin opener at the ready and the bread and butter waiting, we discovered whether tea would be tinned salmon or peaches. Tins that had slipped their labels were no good to sell, but made for some entertaining mealtimes. Annie and Eva were always willing to enter into a child-eye's view of the world. If dinner was too hot, my brother and I were instructed to take our plates for a walk down the garden. Willie's aviary had long since disappeared, but Ginny the cat would be toasting her back against the boundary wall, conjuring phantom birds.

My mum used to hear Annie and Eva telling their stories and wonder how she could match their vivid tales. Yet this book could not exist without her memories of the childhood places and people she knew. There were many other people too; still are. They are not omitted accidentally. My mother's later story is her own.

The possibility that my great-grandfather was Romany was one of the tales my mum wove for my brother and me during
childhood, and was part of his enchantment for us. Stories about Dick invariably involved ‘Grandad's wood'. He was an almost mythical figure and the wood itself a magical spot. Long after my great-grandfather died, Eva walked me along Pottery Lane and up to Wheeldon Mill to see the wood and the bullock grazing there. En route, there were more stories: of Eva dodging in and out of the trees with Teddy the dog, and of my mum burying treasure. The wood's there still, but the steps Dick created from living tree roots are gone.

There were other walks with Eva, walks going nowhere in particular, but always with an element of surprise or adventure, whether through ‘the jungle', an area of overgrown shrubs and trees, or along unknown meandering lanes where Eva introduced me to ‘bread and cheese', the hawthorn she'd nibbled during similar walks in her own childhood.

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.

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.

*

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.

F
OR 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.