Lemon Sherbet and Dolly Blue (5 page)

She was only twenty when she married Richard Nash, nineteen when this dark-haired moustachioed young man first caught her eye. (One of the ways in which Dick reckoned his age was by saying he was two years older than Betsy.) The fact that he had turned his back on the colliery where their fathers and many neighbours were employed told Betsy he'd a mind of his own, which was no small thing when you consider how quickly the pit became the warp and weft of a miner's life. She was relieved to meet someone who saw things differently, even if battling in the hell-fire temperatures of a foundry was not exactly dainty work.

They were near neighbours when they started courting, so Betsy already knew something of my great-grandfather's character. He was a quietly spoken, practical man, with skills beyond deft hands and physical strength. Dick was popular with his fellow workers and gained their respect without feeling the need to shout about it – or at them – and his smile could soften any day. Betsy's first young man had had a starchy look about him; there was nothing starchy about Dick.

He and Betsy moved to a cottage in Whittington and settled down to married life. Most of their neighbours had small children running about the yard (and, in many cases, more than they
could cope with), but my great-grandparents' circumstances changed far more slowly than either of them envisaged. Five years passed before the birth of their first child. Dick spent his days at the foundry. Betsy washed and baked, and swept and re-swept their stone floor, and waited. Finally, in July 1890, a daughter, Mary Elizabeth Doran Nash, was born.

The relief of her first cry, after all that waiting, and a summer baby too. Betsy felt fortunate to be delivered of a July baby. It was pleasant to sit on the doorstep on warm afternoons, rocking the cradle with her foot while darning and watching the spiders spin their webs. More importantly, a summer birth would give Mary the chance to thrive before harsh weather set in. Like most workmen's cottages in the area, my great-grandparents' house was damp. No matter how wide Betsy flung open the windows, an earthy smell clung to the interior. It was as well to establish a child before winter seeped through the walls. But with the spiders' webs still draping the backyard, Mary contracted bronchitis. She died on 1 October, aged eleven weeks.

Infant mortality was high in the late nineteenth century. In the year Mary died, children aged one and under (who represented barely more than 2 per cent of the population of England and Wales), accounted for nearly a quarter of all deaths, a third of those taking place in the first month of a child's life, and a fifth during the first week. To have raised a child to nearly three months old felt like some kind of milestone, but, in the face of statistics like these, it was a crooked and crumbling one, with poor foundations. Mary Elizabeth was a long awaited, much wanted firstborn and her death was greatly mourned. My great-grandparents were parents for no time at all before they were childless again.

Betsy kept the arrangement of wax lilies that decorated the tiny
box in which Mary was buried, and the memoriam card they had printed with verses selected from a book. Choosing the verses was especially difficult with Betsy unable to read and Dick a slow reader at best. He read each one out loud, weighing their rhymes so that Betsy could decide which one most closely represented her feelings, but they were all much the same: sentimental posies and too pretty by far. In the end, they had to settle on something.

Neither of my great-grandparents were church-goers, although Dick regularly knelt to say his prayers, a gentle murmur rising from the bedside as he did so. The Lord Giveth and the Lord Taketh Away. These were just words, as far as Betsy was concerned. Religion offered her scant consolation.

Two years later, my great-grandparents were living on the opposite side of Chesterfield. Dick was tending engines still, currently employed at a brickyard, literally helping to build the town. Two years is no time at all, but an eternity if, like Betsy, you are
twenty-eight years old, mourning a child and watching your neighbours' children grow. Dick's new job brought a new address, but, most importantly, 1892 was the year my grandma was born.

Betsy wanted the very best for her new daughter and so she was christened Annie, after her ladylike aunt. She had Richard's birth name too, or a version of it, at least, as had Mary, to keep the name Dorance in the family. A photograph taken some years later shows them: Betsy, dark hair, dark blouse; twenty pearl buttons counting down to her slim waist, standing proud and erect in the doorway of their home, though it's merely another workman's cottage (one of several they came to know), with rough shutters at the window, a dank privy down the yard and no running water, which only underlines how hard Betsy worked to maintain their snowy window nets and dress Annie in her white lawn frock fashioned with a dark ribbon sash. Dick sits beside
them. Whatever his day has been up to this point, he looks polished clean, and rests his foot on a kerbstone as easily as his daughter places her small, trusting hand on his knee. Their Jack Russell is alert in the foreground (there was always a small dog about somewhere).

Betsy's cinched waist and Annie's lace look out of place in their humble surroundings, but this was a best-dress occasion – a birthday, perhaps – posed for the camera, for keeps. And if Annie's ribbon sash was broader than was strictly necessary and her bodice comprised the most complicated lacework Betsy's fingers could achieve, then behind my grandma, always, was the ghost of the child who had not survived.

Annie had her mother's nose, ‘the Ward nose' as it was known within the family, though it was not especially prominent. She had her father's thick brown hair. She inherited her composure from them both. Even as a small child (a solemn child in photographs), Annie appeared self-contained, as sure of herself as of her two small feet planted firmly on the ground in the new button boots in which she started school. No clutching at a toy boat or rag doll, like some of her classmates, or making an appeal with her smile. My grandma always knew who she was.

By the early 1900s, Dick was appointed foreman of the men constructing Chesterfield's third and final reservoir at Linacre, with some twenty workers under him. Far better to be a foreman directing men and overseeing machinery than tackling the back-breaking work of digging out the new reservoir and excavating tons of earth. Parched and exhausted at the end of their long shift, Dick's men headed for the Crispin Inn. Beer was downed in enormous quantities, eight pints a night being not uncommon for labourers who'd worked up a thirst. Dick became such a good
customer himself that the landlord gave him a kissing cup, one of three silver tankards discovered in the cellar. He hoped it would bring Dick luck (and many more return trips to his pub).

My great-grandfather's job came with a cottage at the edge of the woodland site; their only near neighbour was the town's bailiff and his family. Annie played games of tag-and-chase with his young sons and idled with them on the way to school. On summer days, they walked down narrow lanes where overlapping branches made a dappled canopy. Come winter mornings, Annie was bundled into a thick woollen shawl which criss-crossed her chest and held her fast as she tried to balance on the spangled paving stones.

In 1933, ‘Chesterfield's D. H. Lawrence', novelist and poet, F. C. Boden, wrote lovingly of the beauty of ‘wood, water and sky' at the Linacre reservoirs. You could ‘lie at the top of the Linacre wood watching the sinking sun burn on the stretch of water… listening to the sweet chiming of the Old Brampton bells'. This undisturbed haven became a place to escape from the town's industrial clamour. Though less glorious during the construction of the reservoirs, to walk through the deserted woods in the early morning, especially during springtime, when bluebells crouched in the long grass, or at late evening, when your footfalls released the scent of wild garlic, was to enter a perfect green world. My great-grandfather loved it.

It was a beautiful spot, but an isolated one in which to bring up a child and Betsy missed the sound of children's games and women's voices ricocheting around backyards. It was hard to have just one neighbour, however reliable and well-liked, and Betsy missed her sisters being nearby. Five miles might as well have been the other side of the county, given the number of times they managed to meet.

And Betsy wanted to be doing something herself. A few years earlier, an industrial accident, a blow to the head, had put Dick in the Sheffield Infirmary. She could still picture his workmate, standing, breathless, ashen-faced, looking anywhere but at her, while he explained where they'd taken Mr Nash. Neither Dick nor Betsy spoke of that desperate time: the worry of it all and of the state he would be in, if he survived; his long, slow, painful recovery, with no money coming in except a pittance from the insurance. Amazingly, Dick recovered fully, a dent in his forehead the only legacy of those dreadful months, but its presence served as a reminder of what might have been and could still be. Industrial accidents happened daily.

Betsy was busy with the chores for which there were no short cuts then, but she still had time enough to make plans. At night, while she sat threading the ribbons that edged Annie's petticoats, nightdresses and bodices, and which had to be rethreaded with each wash, her mind considered all the possibilities before her.
She was nearly forty now and wanted an occupation, but not one at someone else's bidding. Betsy hankered after a shop. Her sister Annie, a widow now, ran a beer-off (not the most ladylike of activities) and seemed to manage by herself pretty well. If Betsy ran a shop while Dick was working, they'd have two incomes coming in and she'd have a role that would suit her. She asked sister Annie to keep an eye open for somewhere close by, though not on Annie's doorstep, which Betsy could inspect for herself. And, around 1905, she found it: the corner shop at Wheeldon Mill.

Only one photograph of Wheeldon Mill appears to have been taken during all the years my great-grandparents lived there, its singular status confirmation of the area's insignificance. The picture shows an overcast day, circa 1908, and does the place few favours, the photographer keener to foreground the man crossing the canal bridge with his decrepit donkey and handcart than the surrounding houses. Its most prominent feature is the poorly surfaced road the hawker stands on. Unless you know that the tiny white slab, barely visible through the trees, is a doorstep, you may not even realise the corner shop is there. The picture was sold as a postcard but would hardly encourage visitors. It looks a pretty dismal spot. Wheeldon Mill: the last place God created.