My Secret Sister: Jenny Lucas and Helen Edwards' Family Story (4 page)

One day, when I was about four, I remember falling over in the street and scraping my knee. I sat up and cradled it as I watched the blood rise to the surface of my skin and drip down onto my white sock. I tried to push my sock down because I knew my mother would be angry, but it was no use. The stain spread.

I cried out loud and tears ran down my cheeks. I think I was more upset and worried about my sock than about my knee, but my cousin Jean came and picked me up. ‘Shush, don’t cry,’ she whispered to soothe me. ‘Dry your tears.’

Several other cousins gathered round to see what all the fuss was about.

‘That looks sore,’ said nine-year-old Malcolm. ‘I’ll take you to Grandma’s house. She’ll put a plaster on it for you.’ He held my hand and walked me across the road.

As we passed Auntie Dorrie’s, she opened the window. ‘What’s the matter with the bairn?’

‘She scraped her knee,’ answered John.

Uncle James rode up the lane on his pushbike and stopped near me. ‘What’s the matter, pet?’

‘She fell down,’ Malcolm explained.

‘We’re taking her to Grandma’s,’ added little Melanie, tagging along behind.

‘She’ll put a plaster on Helen’s knee,’ agreed Gillian.

There were now several cousins following and we led the procession to Grandma’s front door. Malcolm knocked and we all waited expectantly. Everyone loved going to Grandma’s.

The door opened and there she stood, in a dark dress as always, with one of her full-length flowery aprons stretched over the top, a grey bun at the back of her neck, her thick stockings wrinkling at her ankles, and a twinkle in her eyes. She took one look at my knee and guided me indoors. ‘Aahh, haaway hinny. Let’s put a plaster on that knee.’

She gave me a big hug as she set me down and carefully cleaned the wound. I always loved Grandma’s hugs. She radiated warmth. Hers were the only hugs I ever had from an adult. Grandma took off my shoe, unrolled my blood-stained sock and removed it. ‘Don’t you fret about that. I’ll give it a soak, shall I? It’ll be right as rain in a jiffy.’

‘Yes, please,’ I said, wiping my eyes. I knew she understood. Grandma always understood.

‘I made some shortbread today. Do you want to stay and have a piece?’ She always baked the best biscuits and cakes. The shortbread was soft and still warm. It melted in my mouth and cheered me up as she showed me the new pink bed-jacket she had made herself. ‘I’ll teach you to knit if you want, pet,’ she smiled. ‘But you’ll have to grow your hands a bit first.’

I reached for another shortbread, but Grandma pulled the plate away. ‘Oh no you don’t!’ she said with a mock-stern expression. ‘You don’t want to spoil your tea.’

When it was time to go home, Grandma put the damp sock back on my foot and did up my shoe. ‘Look. White as snow,’ she said. ‘No one will know.’

She waved me off out of the door with some shortbread pieces wrapped in greaseproof. ‘Give those to your Mam.’

I walked the short distance back to our house, my feet heavier with each step.

As soon as I opened the kitchen door, I could feel a chill in the atmosphere.

‘You’re late,’ said my mother. ‘Where have you been? I’ve been worried sick.’ She had her back to me. ‘Just you wait till your father comes home.’ She clanged a frying pan onto the stove. Not a glance at me.

‘I was at Grandma’s house. She gave me this for you.’ I put the greaseproof parcel on the table. ‘I fell over and hurt my knee.’

‘Well, you should have been more careful.’ She still had her back to me.

The door opened and my father came in.

She turned towards him. ‘Helen’s been out all afternoon. She’s only just come in. I told her she’d be in trouble.’

‘Why are you late?’ my father barked at me. ‘Your mother’s slaving away to make you some tea. If you can’t be bothered to be on time, you can do without.’ He pulled me by the arm through the door to the stairs, slapped the side of my head and pushed me up the first couple of steps, so that I landed on my bad knee. ‘I am master of this house. You do as I say.’

I sat still on the step, not daring to move. He went back to get Grandma’s shortbread and threw it at me. ‘We don’t take charity.’ The paper fell apart and the treasured biscuits crumbled everywhere. ‘Go up to your room. I won’t have you treating this house like a hotel.’

I didn’t know what he meant, but I scrambled up the stairs as fast as I could. Would he follow me? I ran into my room, the room I shared with George, but he wasn’t there to protect me that evening. I sat behind the closed door and listened, breathing a sigh of relief as I heard Tommy go back to the kitchen. Now he and my mother were having a shouting match. I couldn’t hear what it was about, but even at that age I was sure it was my fault. It was always my fault, whether I knew what I’d done or not.

I put myself to bed, but still they were raging at each other downstairs. I hid my face in the pillow, to block out the noise, but it didn’t stop me hearing a scream, followed by silence. I wanted to go down and see if my mother was all right, but I feared he was still there, so I didn’t dare. What would happen to me if . . .

Then I heard her voice again. ‘You brute!’ she yelled, and the row continued.

I was hungry and couldn’t get to sleep. I curled up with my fingers in my ears and thought back to my happy afternoon with the cousins, playing games down the street. I think the only time I felt safe was when I was playing with them. I was a part of something out there. Something special. It wasn’t something I felt in our house, but down the street I belonged. Especially with Grandma.

A real matriarch, Grandma was, despite her diminutive size. When she was married, very young, she had an eighteen-inch waist, but that was before she had ten babies. My grandfather was Deputy Overman at the pit and worked shifts. He was a tall man, over six foot, and stern but fair.

Whenever the children squabbled, Grandma would say to him, ‘James, will you please speak to these bairns?’

‘You’re managing very well!’ he would say to her. Then he’d turn to the children and raise his index finger. Apparently there was never another sound after that.

Grandma used to get up at three every morning and put an oil-lamp in the window to light his way home. He arrived to a cooked breakfast every day, while she boiled some hot water on the range to fill the tin bath in front of the fire. She washed the coal dust out of his hair and scrubbed his back as he rested his aching muscles. All this before the children woke.

One morning my grandfather came home with blood running down his face. ‘I cracked my head on a beam,’ he said. He was suffering from concussion, so a couple of his workmates had brought him home. Apart from a headache, he soon felt better and went back to work as usual.

Six weeks later, Grandma was woken early by a loud banging on the door. Her husband, who was only in his forties, had collapsed down the mine and died. He’d had a brain haemorrhage, caused by his head injury. Grandma screamed when they told her, a great piercing shriek. Devoted to her man, she never got over his death and wore mourning clothes for the rest of her days. The whole village turned out for his funeral and walked behind the hearse along the two-mile route to the church where he was buried.

It was 1932. There was no social security then, but the colliery provided a small pension to Grandma, and free coal for life. Somehow she managed to bring up her ten children, and her orphaned little brother too, keeping them all warm and fed. She was a great one for making do. Nothing was ever wasted. Clothes were hand-me-downs, with a lot of mending and alteration.

Once, when George needed some special shorts for a school boxing match the next day, Grandma sat up all night and hand-stitched him a brand new pair from one of her satin petticoats, bless her. She was always sewing. Old jumpers would be unpicked and the wool rewound to be used again. When the bed-sheets were threadbare from wear, she would cut them down the middle and stitch together the outside edges to make them last longer. Every old button and fastener went into the button jar for reuse. Leftover meals were fried up as pies. Old rags were made into clippy mats. Grandma threw nothing away.

When you think about it, she had a hard life, my Grandma. They all had a hard life in those days, didn’t they? They had a lot of babies. I remember her telling me that she used to buy two stone of flour every week. Two stone! That would have taken some carrying. All that baking and cooking and doing all the laundry by hand. Every day she scrubbed the kitchen table white and blacked the grate.

Grandma carried on her thrifty ways all her life, but she adored her family and found a way to give us treats now and then.

Whenever I called round, if I hadn’t seen her for a few days, she’d sweep me up in her arms and hug me tight. ‘Ee, haaway hinny, it’s been a long time since I’ve seen you.’ Each of us cousins thought we were her favourite, but she was the same with everyone. She loved us dearly and spoiled us all in turn. She was the only adult who really loved me.

I stayed with her a few times when I was little, and enjoyed those sleepovers, except that she wouldn’t let me eat the top of my boiled egg. She always took it.

‘Let me have that.’ She loved the top of a boiled egg.

‘Grandma! I wanted to eat that.’

‘There’s one at the other end for you,’ she’d say.

Grandma was a legend in our family. She would take to her bed and have a death scene whenever she had a cold or the flu. Of course she had witnessed the deaths of many in the 1918 flu epidemic. She had lost her husband young, and her first-born too. She had seen illness and death as a commonplace all around her throughout her life, since this was before penicillin and antibiotics. Serious chest conditions were the norm in Seghill, especially ‘miner’s lung’, caused by the coal-dust that polluted the air we breathed. Superstitions surrounding illness were rife. I was always warned not to sit on the ground because ‘The cold will strike through!’ I didn’t really understand that. ‘It will strike your kidneys.’ I was bundled into a vest and liberty bodice, even in warm weather. The spectre of illness lurked everywhere.

So whenever Grandma felt ill, she would call the whole family to the ‘wake’ before she died. One of the cousins would go round announcing, ‘Grandma is very poorly’, and all the family would dutifully appear at her house. We crammed in somehow, taking turns to sit with her in her bedroom, while the others would have a raucous time with tea and biscuits in her front room or on the stairs. My uncles Sam, Jack, Marcus and James were full of fun and quick-witted jokes. It was fast and furious when they got together, so they always brightened the mood, and Grandma would sit up in bed with tears of laughter rolling down her cheeks when it was their turn to sit with her. Even my father, if he was at home, didn’t complain about going round to see Grandma. He was fond of her and teased her, which she loved. I was always surprised about this when I was little, but I suppose he recognized her seniority as the matriarch of this extended family.

I used to go too and see her lying in state, muffled up in a vest under her warm winceyette nightie with its elasticated cuffs and a high neck tied with satin ribbon. Over the top she would wear one of her hand-knitted bed-jackets in a pastel colour. She had a vast range of them in lemon, pink and powder blue. She kept her best bed-jacket for when the doctor came.

Her bed always had crisp white sheets and pillowslips, and was piled high with blankets, a bedspread and a matching quilt, which she straightened every now and then after one of us had sat on it and sent it askew. Her little wrinkled hand with its blue veins and the thin gold band of her wedding ring lying on the white turnover of the sheet fascinated me. I could almost see the blood pumping through those veins.

I was intrigued by the array of tablets and cough medicines on her bedside table. ‘Don’t touch those, hinny,’ she would say. All those of us who could squeeze in would sit around her bed and take turns to hold her hand. I can feel now the stifling heat in that room with the roaring fire in the grate and the thick curtains closed ‘to keep out the draughts’. The lamp, lit dimly on her bedside table, cast a warm glow over the proceedings.

Grandma brightened as each group dutifully trooped into her bedroom.

‘How are you getting on, Mother?’ Uncle Marcus would ask. ‘Do you want a glass of water?’

‘No thank you, pet. Nancy just brought this one. It’s as fresh as can be.’

‘Let’s plump up your pillows,’ Auntie Dorrie would say, leaning Grandma gently forward.

‘That’s champion,’ she would say in a weak-but-trying-to-be-cheerful voice as she settled back again. ‘Now, sit down and talk to me. How are the bairns?’

Even my mother would join in. She was always bright and witty in company, like a different person. She smiled at everyone . . . except me.

Grandma’s wakes seemed like joyous occasions in some ways, but there was always an underlying fear – an anxiety amongst the aunts and uncles that this might be Grandma’s last. But I don’t think we children realized that at the time.

I always tried to sit near Grandma’s dressing table, with its bowl of sparkly trinkets and her beloved dressing-table set. Overcome with curiosity, I would edge open her drawers and have a quiet rummage through her satin underwear or her pleated blouses, sniffing the mothballs. Going through Grandma’s drawers was a treat. A ritual.

Eagle-eyed, she noticed everything. When she saw me open her drawers she would make a sudden recovery, sitting forward in bed, and waving her walking stick. ‘Hey, out of there, you little monkey! Out of my drawers!’ she would say, but with a grin. It was a great game between us.

There were many fun times at Grandma’s. Her living room was dominated by a church organ. When we all went for tea on Sunday afternoons, my cousins and I were indignant that the adults ate first at the table while we were consigned to wait for the second sitting. We would peep over the edge of the table to see the sandwiches and cakes disappear, so that by the time it was our turn, most of the cake plates were empty and there were nothing but crumbs to share between us. We all thought that was grossly unfair! Sometimes we tried to sneak in and steal something before anybody got there and got a smack on the hand, but not too hard. It was because the family was so big that the best stuff was always gone. That was the way it was. We were just kids and we had to stand at the back of the line. We didn’t know any different.