One morning, on her way to school, Joan was wondering what to do for tea that evening, when she thought how lovely it would be if they could have bread pudding – one of their favourites – just like their mum made it. The problem was, she had no idea what Annie’s recipe was. So when she returned home she went straight downstairs to her grandmother to ask her how to make it. Kate told her what she would need and how to mix it, and to put it into a roasting tin before baking it in the oven for fifty minutes or so, until golden brown. Joan followed the instructions to the letter, and it proved to be such a success that Gran’s recipe became part of Joan’s cooking repertoire for the rest of her life.
That summer, during another of Annie’s stints at St Olave’s, Pierce went to visit her while the girls’ grandparents took them to play in nearby Southwark Park. In the midst of a game, Sheila noticed something. She suddenly stopped and pointed towards the hospital. ‘Look! It’s Mum!’
Weak and frail, Annie had walked out onto the veranda and was waving down at them, smiling. The girls smiled and waved back energetically but each of them felt sadness at the sight of the forlorn and slight figure in the distance. She seemed very far removed from the cheerful, robust woman whose singing would resound throughout the house.
The seriousness of Annie’s condition was brought home unexpectedly to Mary at school one day. Mary, then thirteen, had moved into the top class for her final year. All the teachers were nuns and she loved her form tutor, Sister Theresa, who had a nice way of treating her pupils – more like grown-ups, Mary thought, than children. Sister Theresa would tell them funny little stories but Mary was sometimes a bit slow in getting the joke and so there was often a delay before she started laughing. Once she got it, though, she couldn’t stop giggling, so sometimes Sister Theresa would have to send her out of the classroom for a while to compose herself. On one such occasion, Mary was spotted in the hallway by the formidable headmistress, Sister Fidelis.
Mary was given advance warning that the sister was making her way along the corridor by the rattling of the large wooden rosary the nun wore around her waist. This always gave pupils time either to stop misbehaving or to make a prompt getaway. Mary had to think fast. Should she go back into the classroom after only a minute outside? No. Without further ado she scurried quietly to the nearby cloakroom and hid behind a rack of coats. However, Sister Fidelis’ finely tuned ears must have detected a sound and, to Mary’s horror, she entered the cloakroom. With a thumping heart, Mary ducked lower.
‘Who’s there?’ called the voice sternly. Trapped, Mary took a deep breath and revealed herself slowly.
‘Mary Jarman! What on earth do you think you are doing?’
A sheepish Mary did her best to explain about having to compose herself after giggling too much in class. Sister Fidelis looked down at her without comment for a few moments and Mary was terrified that she was going to have to endure one of the nun’s favourite forms of punishment – making her pupils kneel on coconut matting whilst praying the rosary. It was an excruciatingly painful ordeal which left children with red and sore knees. This time, Sister Fidelis took a different tack and Mary was taken aback by her words.
‘Your mother is seriously ill with tuberculosis,’ Sister Fidelis said. ‘You should be praying for her, not misbehaving. Now get yourself back to class and stop acting the fool!’
Mary felt sick to the stomach. She knew her mother had been in hospital but didn’t know that tuberculosis was anything that required prayer. It took all of her willpower not to burst into tears as she slowly made her way back to class. Giggling was now the last thing on her mind.
Annie’s willpower was even stronger, though, and saw her recover enough to leave hospital and return home to carry on with her life, much as she had always done. For the girls, thoughts of their mother’s frailty receded for the time being.
Forever striving for better things for her family, and keen to rent a bigger home to accommodate her growing children, Annie was a frequent visitor to the local council. She wanted to move out of Bermondsey, which she didn’t think was good enough for her. She wasn’t going to accept just any alternative, though. She wanted a prettier, more spacious environment.
‘There’s a place going in Downtown,’ the housing officer suggested, referring to an eastern region of Rotherhithe.
‘I’m not going there!’ Annie replied forcefully. ‘That’s worse than Bermondsey.’
‘But you’ll have more room,’ the housing officer persisted.
‘What about Grove Park?’ said Annie, cutting him short. The southeast London suburb of Grove Park, near Lewisham, where Annie occasionally shopped, struck a chord with her aspirational nature. There, much of the farmland had been sold in the early 1930s and airy new villas had been built.
The housing officer shook his head. The exchange was a familiar showdown between him and Annie over the years – only brought to an end by wartime evacuation.
‘I’ll be back next week to see what you’ve got,’ she said as she got up to leave.
In a sad twist of fate, Annie did get to reside in Grove Park. But it certainly wasn’t the type of home she wanted.
With its imposing red-brick facade, grey slate roof, abundant chimney stacks and domed gatehouses on either side of its entrance, the magnificent Victorian building in the leafy London suburb might have been a grand stately home. However, the history of Grove Park Hospital always sent a shudder through those who had reason to stay there.
The ten-acre site had originally been built in 1902 as a workhouse for the poor, elderly and ill of Greenwich borough. The more able-bodied paid for their residence with the monotonous daily chore of breaking up granite, which was later sold to councils for road construction. Following the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 it was requisitioned by the Mechanical Transport Depot Service Corps. The residents were relocated to other workhouses while the grounds and buildings were used as a training and mobilization camp.
Then, in 1919, the workhouse was sold to the Metropolitan Asylums Board, who turned it into a hospital for the sick of South London. Grove Park Hospital specialized in the treatment of tuberculosis and so the building’s grim reputation continued for successive generations. It had 299 beds – 117 for men along the north side of the main, three-storey building and 182 for women along the south.
After a particularly bad coughing attack, Annie was referred to Grove Park in the autumn of 1937 – her second hospital stay that year. As a specialist hospital, there was more attention to diet, rest and exercise for the patients than at St Olave’s but, with no cure for tuberculosis, there was little more to be offered. A surgical option was sometimes carried out, called the pneumothorax (or plombage) technique, in which an infected lung was collapsed to reduce its volume and thus rest it, but this procedure had little proven benefit and its practice was mostly discontinued after 1946. It would not be until after the Second World War that a drug called streptomycin was developed, which proved to be extremely effective against TB. It paved the way for a rapid succession of anti-TB drugs in the following years. However, unfortunately for Annie, that was all in the future.
Annie acutely felt the irony of finally living in the area to which she aspired. It seemed like God was playing a joke on her – a joke in rather poor taste. In Grove Park, she felt increasingly miserable amongst the sick and dying, and yearned to be back home with her family, neighbours and friends, sharing a laugh, gossip or simply being fit and well enough to do household chores – whilst singing, of course. There was no singing here. Only the sounds of coughing, wheezing and moaning.
One day she had had a visit from a solemn doctor, who told her that her sickness wasn’t going to go away and that, whilst they could make her comfortable, her long-term prognosis was not good.
‘Well, I don’t want to be here long term,’ she told him.
‘What I mean, Mrs Jarman, is that you will need to come to terms with the fact that the illness will reduce your life expectancy significantl
y.’
Annie stared at him, as it slowly dawned on her what he was really saying.
‘How long?’ she asked.
He told her that she probably had around ten months left to live.
Annie was too stunned to cry. That would come later, in private. Instead, once she had gathered her thoughts, her next reaction was a typically practical one.
‘That’s all the more reason to be with my family, then,’ she said firmly. ‘There’s no point in spending the rest of my life here. I want to spend what’s left of it back home.’ She paused. ‘Anyhow, I’m feeling a lot better. And they need me.’
Annie wasted no time in getting out of bed and into her clothes. She packed her belongings and a young porter, who she thought could only have been fourteen or fifteen, carried her suitcase down the stairs and outside. Annie thanked him before picking up the case to make the short walk to the bus stop. He smiled at her and, with the clumsy tactlessness of youth, remarked, ‘I didn’t think anyone ever walked out of this hospital.’
Annie had been so eager to flee the oppressive surrounds of the hospital, there had been no time to tell anyone that she was coming home. None of her family knew that she had discharged herself. The girls were playing in the local park in Tooley Street when one of their friends arrived and told them that their mother was home. They ran back to Abbey Street, with spirits soaring, and charged into the house, where they found her standing in the kitchen. Annie cuddled them warmly. She had missed them all so much. The house might be crowded, the girls a little noisy, but it was home. It was life.
Pierce was startled when he returned home from work.
‘My place is here, with you and the children,’ she said before Pierce kissed her.
Annie explained that she had discharged herself and told her husband what the doctor had said. Pierce hugged her tightly and she felt a tear roll down her face.
After a few moments she released herself, wiped her face swiftly with her sleeve and said, ‘Anyway. What do they know? They don’t know me. I’ll prove them wrong. And we’ll keep it from the girls.’
She gave Pierce a quick peck on the cheek and walked off, leaving him to marvel at her bravery and resilience. And to hope to God that she was right.
In September 1940, Sheila left Hailsham Junior School in Grovelands Road to attend senior school in Battle Road. Although she was delighted to be away from Miss Mobbs, she was apprehensive about joining ‘big school’ and soon made up her mind that she hated this new one as much as she had hated her junior school.
Sheila hadn’t really made any close friends amongst the local children, preferring to stick with the evacuees she knew from back in Bermondsey. At Hailsham Senior Mixed School, though, the only other evacuee in her year was her good friend Mary Eddicott – who shared the name with her mother – and she was convinced that the teachers didn’t like either of them. Sheila particularly disliked the head teacher, Mr Russell, who was stern and made her quake with fear. Sometimes, when she saw him approaching in the corridor, she felt as though she was going to faint.
Despite all this, she did well in class, and each time it came to grading, she would find herself in the A section, even though she was convinced that she would be marked down each year.
Like Joan, Sheila was a voracious reader and was particularly good at English. However, it was PE that gave her the greatest pleasure. She was a good runner and won most of the races at the school’s annual sports day, held at the rec. With the help of these small mercies, Sheila found herself settling in, and began to find school in Hailsham tolerable, if not enjoyable.
When not at school, Joan was becoming more of a homemaker. As Annie’s illness became worse, she spent more and more time in bed recovering, or sitting in the armchair, too weak to do the chores. Despite her advanced years, Annie’s mother also helped out and the younger girls did their bit with cooking, darning, cleaning and shopping. Everyone pitched in looking after baby Anne.
Occasionally, when need be, Annie recovered enough to show her fiery spirit, such as the afternoon she sent Joan into town to buy some potatoes. When Joan brought them home, Annie inspected them and turned up her nose at the fact that some of them were sprouting.
‘You can’t let them get away with that, Joan,’ she said. ‘These are much too old. We haven’t got money to burn and it’s not to be wasted on rubbish like this.’ She leapt out of her armchair and put her coat on. ‘Come on.’
‘Where are we going?’ Joan asked.
‘Back to the shop. I’m going to give them a piece of my mind.’
Joan was not looking forward to the embarrassing episode this was likely to be, but she knew by now that it was pointless trying to stop her mother when she had set her mind to something. In the event, it was even more mortifying than Joan had anticipated. Annie stormed into the shop and emptied the contents of the bag over the counter, sending the potatoes rolling all over the floor.
The greengrocer looked petrified as Annie shouted, ‘We might have come from London but we don’t eat shit!’
He mumbled an apology and promptly gave Annie fresh potatoes. From then on, he made sure that the Jarmans were never given inferior produce.
Money was tight, as always, and Annie was adept at making a little go a long way. However, she also suffered the occasional lapse when her desire for something non-essential but nice took precedence, like the ill-fated piano she had bought in Bermondsey.
A warm, late summer’s day inspired Annie and Mary Eddicott to catch the bus into Eastbourne for what was intended to be window shopping. They particularly liked looking at the nice things in the department stores and, in one of them, Annie saw a mantle clock in an oak case on one of the shelves. She was thinking how elegant it looked, with its silver face perched above twin decorative wooden mouldings, when a shop assistant approached and asked if she might be of help.
‘I’m just looking, thank you,’ said Annie. ‘It’s got a lovely deep tick-tock,’ she added.
‘That’s not all,’ said the lady, who then opened the glass case and moved the hand forward to three o’clock. There was a brief mechanical sound and then a beautiful chime as it struck the hour three times.
‘Oh, that’s lovely,’ said a delighted Annie. ‘Isn’t that nice, Mary?’
The assistant smiled. ‘I think it has the best chime of all the clocks here,’ she said. ‘Simple but quite loud and melodic for its size.’
Annie agreed.
‘It’s what they call Napoleon style – in the shape of his hat, see?’ said the assistant, sensing a sale.
‘Lovely,’ said Annie again, and looked at Mary, who raised her eyebrows. ‘We could do with one of these at home. It’s good quality. And a lovely chimer.’ She smiled at the assistant. ‘I’ll need to think about it,’ she said, and they left the store.
Back home, Annie kept staring at the mantelpiece in the living room, thinking how nice the clock would look there. The more she looked, the more she thought how perfectly it would fit. Two days later, she went back to the store on her own and brought the clock home with her.
Pierce disapproved but tried not to show it, knowing how ill Annie was and how happy the purchase had made her.
‘Just listen to that chime, Pierce.’ She smiled, like a little girl with a birthday present. ‘Sounds very regal, doesn’t it? And it’s good quality. I’m sure it will last for years and years.’
As Annie was making the house in Battle Road more and more like a home, a couple of aerial incidents in quick succession made her wonder whether their new abode was doomed to suffer the same fate as 103 Abbey Street and whether, once again, they would lose all they possessed.
On the morning of 27 September, many Hailsham residents were witness to a spectacular aerial dog fight at low level in the skies. In recent days, the Luftwaffe had had several successes when German bombers, escorted by twin-engine Messerschmitt fighter planes, successfully hit the Bristol Aeroplane Company at Filton, causing extensive damage and killing ov
er one hundred people. Around the same time, two raids in Woolston, Southampton, flattened the Supermarine factory, which manufactured Spitfires, with another hundred casualties.
The RAF was better prepared for the next attack, though, and as a formation of Junker 88s flew over the south coast, accompanied by protective Messerschmitt 100s, a stream of Hurricanes met them. As bullets flew and evasive action was taken, the German aircraft beat a hasty retreat back towards the Channel. However, a young RAF pilot named Percy Burton chased a Messerschmitt 110 towards Hailsham air space.
Just north of the town, Burton stopped firing, most likely because he was out of ammunition, and the two aircraft flew low over houses and treetops. Locals watched in amazement as the Hurricane then appeared to shunt the Messerschmitt from the rear and the tail unit of the 110 detached and dropped into a field, followed shortly by the rest of the aircraft. Unfortunately, the wingtip of Burton’s plane had also been ripped off and he crashed into a large oak tree on New Barn Farm. Both pilots died.
The following month saw an RAF pilot run out of fuel in his Spitfire after engaging in combat with some Messerschmitt 109s, and crash land at Pattenden’s Farm in Battle Road. Pierce was having a drink at The Terminus pub in Station Road at the time of the crash, participating in a leisurely game of shove ha’penny. He was just lining up a coin at the edge of the board when one of the regular customers rushed in and said excitedly, ‘A plane’s come down in town! Right on Battle Road!’
A feeling of panic washed over Pierce as he feared for his family’s safety. Without a second thought, he rushed outside, grabbed a bicycle leaning against the pub wall, and rode it home as fast as he could pedal. Bursting through the door, he shouted, ‘Is everyone all right? Where’s the plane?’
His daughters joined him in the kitchen. ‘It came down on Pattenden’s Farm, Dad,’ said a wide-eyed Joan. ‘We’re all safe, don’t worry,’ she added.
The Sisters of Battle Road Page 9
