That We Shall Die

by Peter Hey

  What Jane hadn’t appreciated was that there were different factions in the women’s movement. The WSPU, founded by Emmeline Pankhurst, had favoured direct action, ‘Deeds not words’, ultimately including arson and violence, much to the dismay of the larger NUWSS, whose president was Millicent Garrett Fawcett. There were historians who still argued that the militants had set the cause back some years by souring public opinion and alienating MPs. It was probably impossible to tell, and as always, an individual’s views might be coloured by their political leanings in the modern world. Either way, both suffragette leaders now had statues in Westminster.

  Alan’s great-grandmother had been a member of the law-abiding NUWSS and was vocal enough to add her name to a letter sent to a national newspaper. Presumably, even that could have caused her husband a great deal of embarrassment at the time. But there was also a photograph of him in the album. Jane stared into the eyes of the middle-aged doctor and saw a kindly man, one who would have been supportive of his wife and her strongly held convictions.

  Jane had exhausted her sources but thought she had built a good picture of the family into which Alan’s grandfather was born and raised. Jane dug out the letters Alan’s mother, Pat, had written home from Cuba around the time of the revolution. In one she had written, ‘Daddy, your mother would have understood.’ But Pat had supported the violence of armed revolt, in principle at least. Jane was not sure Pat’s grandmother would really have sympathised. Or perhaps she would. Perhaps she would have seen the futility of reason and words against a regime such as Batista’s. Perhaps she too would have taken the next step.

  The erstwhile suffragette clearly had some influence on her granddaughter as a child. Pat’s own mother must, however, have had a much greater sway. Her family story proved to be somewhat different from that of the Shaws.

  The Oakleys and the Ostels

  Elizabeth Ruth Oakley, also known as Birdie, married Alan’s estate agent grandfather, John Shaw, towards the end of 1930. The ceremony was in Southsea but the newlyweds set up home in Solihull. Elizabeth gave birth to Alan’s mother, Pat, some five years later. By the standards of the time – when middle-class women were expected to raise families and never go out to work – that seemed to Jane something of a delay. Perhaps Elizabeth had had problems. She certainly had no more children until she adopted Alan’s aunt, Barbara, in 1946, though her husband’s wartime service in the RAF had intervened. Barbara had described Elizabeth as cold, incapable of affection. But Jane knew all about emotional skeletons and wondered if that was as much a reflection of the daughter as the mother, stemming from the insecurity of not being a biological child.

  If so, Elizabeth might have shared similar scars. She had herself been adopted, albeit by close relatives, after her mother died at the age of 29, leaving an architect husband with six children. Five-year-old Elizabeth went to live with her father’s brother, an affluent wine merchant who occupied a fine villa on one of the grander streets in Southsea. He and his wife had been married nearly 20 years, and the 1911 census confirmed they had never had any children of their own. There were three photographs of Elizabeth in the album, the earliest taken when she was a girl of around ten and holding an expensive-looking doll. The images all had one thing in common: a straight-lipped mouth that seemed to be struggling with a smile.

  So who were the Oakleys? Elizabeth’s father and uncle were from a family of 12 siblings, all of whom survived to adulthood, a rare distinction given the death rate among children in that period. In 1851, their mother had been a 14-year-old general servant living in the household of a London goldbeater. That was to be the profession of the man she married, though his background was a little more complicated. John William Oakley was a printer’s son from the Yorkshire city of Leeds. For some reason, he did not enter into his father’s trade but was sent south to prepare for a maritime career. In 1851, he was a ‘marine boy’ living on the Venus, an old, wooden-hulled Royal Navy frigate moored at Woolwich Dockyard. A life under sail must not have suited, and somehow or other he managed to switch to an apprenticeship working precious metal. The 1861 census listed him and his new bride in a shared house on a densely populated street just off the Euston Road in London. They already had two sons, whose ages confirmed they were born before their parents’ recent wedding. Two more boys followed prior to the Oakleys relocating to Portsmouth around 1865.

  Jane’s research told her the production of gold leaf was a craft that could be traced back to the Ancient Egyptians. In Victorian England, every town would have at least one goldbeater, and his output would be used for gilding anything from statues, churches, public buildings, tombstones, weather vanes, clocks, heraldic shields, through to hand-tooled leather and picture frames. Perhaps because of his exposure to seafaring, John William Oakley chose to build his business near Portsmouth. The Royal Navy dominated the world’s oceans and was no doubt fond of some bling to emphasise its status as the senior service. The move to the south coast proved a wise decision. The 1889 Kelly’s Directory listed John W Oakley amongst the glue makers, glovers, gaugers and glass dealers as the only gold leaf manufacturer in the county of Hampshire. His monopoly led to prosperity, and he died at the age of 65 in his own country retreat, a Cherry Tree Cottage in the rural tranquillity of a South Downs village. He left the equivalent of three million pounds and children firmly established in middle-class occupations and lifestyles.

  His eighth son, Alan’s great-grandfather, was born sufficiently late to have only known a life of comfort. The same could not be said for the woman he married. Her family, the Ostels, were from a line of sailmakers and watermen who lived in the cramped alleyways of Old Portsmouth. The censuses showed them at a variety of addresses, but they never moved more than a few hundred yards, and always within the boundaries of the original town. That had been laid out as early as the 1180s on a dominant position at the entrance to a large natural harbour. Eventually, a vast naval dockyard was developed just to its north, stimulating urban expansion across most of the surrounding area. The old town itself retained a reputation for lewdness, a place of ramshackle inns and brothels where seamen sought the entertainment and company they were deprived of on ship. Modern online street views revealed a surprising amount of newer building nestling behind the Tudor and Stuart fortifications that still faced the sea. Intense German bombing during the Second World War had flattened nearly everywhere the Ostels would have called home. A map from the immediate postwar period showed vast swathes of blank space all across Portsmouth and Southsea, evidence of the emptiness of destruction.

  Alan’s great-grandmother, Jessie Ostel, was from a large family like her husband. But the difference in their backgrounds was perhaps best illustrated by one statistic. Jessie’s mother had buried eight of her 13 children by the time of the 1911 census. Sadly, Jessie was amongst them, though she at least had survived beyond childhood. Jane wondered how a sailmaker’s daughter from a rough part of town might have landed a young architect. By contrast, her sister had married a sailor who abandoned her for another woman, leaving his wife to end her days as a cleaner living above a pub. Jane found a photograph of Jessie and the answer became obvious. She was beautiful, with some of her features traceable through the generations to Alan’s mother, Pat, and perhaps even Alan himself. Jessie’s good fortune ran out quite early. After six children in ten years, she died giving birth to her seventh. The middle daughter, Elizabeth, was somehow chosen by her aunt and uncle to be brought up separately from her brothers and sisters. Jane felt that early grief, and perhaps loneliness, could easily have damaged the young girl. That might explain why she had difficulty showing affection, as described by her own adopted daughter. Elizabeth had also raised Alan’s mother and, to an extent, Alan himself. Pat had left home almost as soon as she could and run off to see the world. How might Alan have been affected?

  Reconciliation

  Jane had worked late trying to write up Alan’s family tree and not given herself time to unwind. As a result, she slept
badly, her head still full of generations of Shaws and Oakleys and the families with whom they intertwined. In particular, Jessie Ostel and her sister kept vying for nocturnal attention, as if they were close, recent relatives of Jane herself, people whose lives and losses she somehow shared. No matter how hard she tried to push them away, tell herself they were long-dead strangers she could never really know, they insisted on reappearing in her thoughts, sad eyes telling stories that darkened at every iteration. Jane’s mind had taken Jessie’s picture and constructed an image of the sister: plainer, harder, colder, a face always destined to remain in poverty and ultimately ravaged by the drink Jane saw her driven to by the bitterness of desertion.

  Jane had set her alarm, and when it screeched her awake, cursed herself for not cancelling it in the night. After all, her time was her own and who cared if she got up or not? In that moment, her tiredness conspired with the bleakness of her mood. She made a decision. Life was short and too often cruel. You had to grab at things while you had the chance – whether they were perfect or not.

  She forced down some breakfast and tried to watch the morning programmes on TV. She flicked back and forth between the channels, either irritated by the presenters’ opinions or depressed by the news of strife and suffering around the world and close to home. All the time, she was looking at the clock.

  At 9:01, she picked up her phone and dialled. It rang twice.

  ‘Hi, Janey. To what do I owe the pleasure?’

  ‘Hi, Dave. Are you okay? I mean are you okay to talk? I’m not sure if you’re at work?’

  ‘No, I’m on lates today. Still at home.’

  ‘You weren’t having a lie-in, were you? Did I wake you up?’

  ‘No, no. I was… Well, I was up anyway. Pottering around. So, what can I do for you? No more favours, I hope? Misusing police resources tracing relatives for your family history stuff?’

  Unseen, Jane shook her head. ‘No, don’t worry. I just… We haven’t spoken for a while, and I just thought I should catch up. I didn’t want my ex-husband to think I only called him when I wanted something. We did part as friends, after all.’

  ‘Did we?’

  ‘Well, maybe I was a bit unfriendly for a while. I had reason to be, you two-timing bastard, but you know I’ve forgiven you.’

  ‘I’ve never been 100% sure of that, Janey, though I don’t blame you for—'

  ‘Let’s not get bogged down in all that. Water under the bridge. I was a nightmare. Blah, blah, blah. Anyway, how are you?’

  Dave audibly puffed air through his lips as if pondering a tricky question. ‘I’m good. I, erm—'

  Jane interrupted again. ‘Look, I didn’t sleep well last night and I got to thinking…’

  There was no elaboration and Dave responded to the silence. ‘You okay? You sound a bit hyper. You haven’t done anything silly have you?’

  ‘No! Why would you say that?’ Jane felt immediately hurt and couldn’t hide it in her voice.

  ‘I’m sorry, Janey. That obsession with your father. You wanting to scratch people’s bloody eyes out. You know you’ve got form, sweetheart. Look, I didn’t mean to… I worry about you, that’s all.’

  ‘I’m doing really well, honest I am,’ pleaded Jane, unconvincingly. ‘I mean, he’s threatening to come back into my life, and I’m not stressing about it. It’s making me stronger if anything.’

  ‘Hang on. What do you mean he’s threatening to come back into your life? He’s been in touch? After all these years?’

  ‘No, not exactly. I didn’t tell you because you’d go bananas. Let’s just say he had one of his old lowlife chums check me out to see if I was hell-bent on revenge—'

  ‘What!?’ Dave’s response was more an exclamation of anger than a question.

  ‘You see, you’re going bananas. It was something and nothing. I think it was you, my detective inspector ex-husband, he was most worried about. You looking into his dodgy past and finding something you could pin on him.’

  ‘If it would get that particular monkey off your back, maybe I would,’ said Dave, still sounding indignant. ‘So, is he in the country? What’s going on?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know, do I? Maybe he just won’t bother. He’s an idiot if he expects a warm welcome. I mean, I thought I saw him in a parked car a few nights ago. But it couldn’t have been him.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Yes. My headlights lit up his face for an instant. And… two eyes, no eye patch. Not Steve Jones, my long-lost dad. Just Jane being a bit jumpy. But only a bit. Oh, Dave...’ Jane’s voice began to tremble with tears. ‘This conversation wasn’t supposed to go here. I was feeling a bit lonely. Just wondering what the hell I was going to do with the rest of my life. I’ve swallowed my pride and phoned you up. I just thought we could maybe get together. Just see if there’s anything between us anymore. I got the impression you…’

  Jane didn’t finish the sentence and waited for a reply. It came in the form of a different voice, talking in the background. It belonged to a woman.

  ‘Dave, that sounds like Bridget. Are you two back together?’

  ‘Erm, yeh. I was going to say, but—

  ‘Oh God! I feel so stupid.’

  ‘Janey—’

  ‘Look, I’m really happy for you. Honest.’ Jane began to speed up, desperate to get off the phone. ‘Bridget’s a nice girl. Much nicer than me and far too good for you. I hope it works out. I’ll leave you to it. Bye.’

  ‘Janey?’

  The line went dead.

  Solihull

  Jane arrived in Willowbrook Lane a little early and sat in her car for a few minutes gathering her thoughts. It was a cold, crisp day and the trees had surrendered nearly all of their leaves since her previous visit. The small square of lawn in front of Alan Shaw’s house had been raked clean of autumnal debris, and as before, everything looked neat and tidy, if rather characterless. Jane assumed a gardener had passed by occasionally while Alan had been on his extended holiday in Thailand.

  She had compiled her report and was pleased with the work she and Tommy had produced. Alan had not wanted to delve deep into the past, being more interested in the lives of his mother’s more recent antecedents and how their circumstances might have shaped their characters and made his mother who she was. And, of course, it was his mother and her family who were the influences on Alan himself. His father was completely absent from his upbringing, and his identity continued to remain an unknown. The DNA test results had not yet come through, and that part of the commission was still outstanding.

  Jane was therefore presenting an interim document, albeit complete in itself. And she felt it was complete, or at least as much as these things could ever be. There were the odd gaps, distant cousins with unknown fates, periods of time where more direct ancestors vanished from the records, but there was a clear and interesting narrative. On the Shaw side, it was a tale of military imperialism spanning the Raj, the Mediterranean, the West Indies and North America. The troubled history of Ireland also raised its hand for attention. Whilst generations of the Shaws were used to money and status, those comforts came relatively late to the Oakleys. They had seen a different side to Victorian expansion, firmly rooted in Britain, but where industrial and financial growth gave opportunities to entrepreneurs brave enough and lucky enough to seize them. All the while, other families were stuck in poverty, enduring shocking infant mortality in the then richest country in the world.

  Jane climbed out of her car, walked up to the porch and pressed the bell. Once more, she didn’t hear it ring but Alan’s tall outline appeared almost immediately in the frosted glass surround.

  He opened the door with his customary broad smile. He looked younger than she remembered, younger than she now knew him to be. He still suited his baldness, and his tan had deepened on his travels. Two simultaneous thoughts slipped into Jane’s head. First, he had not inherited his complexion from his Irish roots. Was that Cuban skin? Argentinian perhaps? The second notion was the question o
f whether he really was too old for her. She quickly pushed that aside. He was. Full stop. And she didn’t want to act unprofessionally just because she was feeling a little unloved. She certainly didn’t want to come across as desperate.

  ‘Alan, you’re looking well,’ she said, returning the smile. ‘How was the holiday?’

  ‘It was good, thank you. I feel… refocused, rejuvenated.’

  ‘Did you move around? I’m afraid I don’t know the country at all. I’ve never been that far east. I’ve never been to the Far East at all.’

  Alan shrugged noncommittally. ‘I stayed in Bangkok mostly. I’ve been there a few times. Met my wife there, of course. But the less said about her, the better.’

  He showed Jane into the large front room and then went into the kitchen to make coffees for them both. She sat down and glanced around, seeing the same expensive but slightly faded furnishings, the same immaculate tidiness. On the bookshelf were the two photographs she had come to know well: Alan’s mother, Pat, looking star-struck with Che Guevara in Havana and then, maybe a decade later, happy and smiling in London with her beautiful and elusive friend, Cyn. Alongside the photo frames were the two other artefacts with a connection to Pat’s time in Cuba: the automatic pistol given her by Che and the racing goggles which had belonged to the great driver Fangio. Jane was able to cast new light on Pat’s relationship with both men, but there remained deep shadows where speculation had to fill in for substantiated fact.

  Jane was staring at the gun wondering whether it was wise to have a firearm on display, deactivated or not, when Alan appeared at the door carrying a tray.

  ‘So,’ he said cheerfully, ‘your job is done. You’ve timed it perfectly. I come home and you have a report to give me. It couldn’t have worked out better.’

  ‘Well, we’re still waiting for your DNA results,’ said Jane.

  ‘Oh, of course, I keep forgetting about those. Was my father a Cuban goatherd or Che Guevara himself? I think we both know which is more likely.’