The Scarlet Sisters

by Helen Batten

  Grace waded in: ‘They’re ever so common, Mum!’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The aunts.’

  ‘Grace Swain! How dare you? You show some respect. They’re my sisters and your aunts and if they’re common, then we’re common too.’

  ‘No! We’re not like them!’

  ‘How do you work that one out then?’

  ‘Well, we wear knickers for a start.’

  ‘Grace!’

  Alice nudged her sister – they were for it now. But Grace wouldn’t be deterred. An indelible image had been placed in the girls’ minds during a visit to their Crisp aunts, Katie and Louisa, in London. In keeping with the Victorian tradition they had been born into, the older Crisp sisters were still wearing bloomers. These consisted of two separate leggings reaching from the knee and tied at the waist, but open from the thigh up. In the old days ventilation was considered hygienic and also necessary because of voluminous skirts – impossible to use a chamber pot otherwise. But Grace was more interested in propriety than history. In her world, she had only known ladies wear the closed briefs which had become popular since the turn of the century, when skirts became shorter and less full, and the closet had taken over from the ‘po’.

  ‘Mum, they took us to the park and they just crouched down and peed right there in public. It was so embarrassing!’

  ‘Grace, if you’re not careful I’m going to get the soap and wash those words right out of your mouth.’

  Now Grace looked scared. It wouldn’t be the first time she’d tasted her mother’s carbolic.

  Alice felt it was time to rescue her. She jumped in quickly: ‘Yes, Mum. Sorry, Mum. Grace doesn’t mean it, not like that. We just don’t want to leave you.’

  Clara looked at Alice’s distraught face and felt a sudden wave of affection for her eldest daughter.

  ‘Yes, well, I don’t want you to leave either. Don’t worry, I’m not going to send you away … ever. If you’d just give me a chance to tell you – I don’t need to send you away, but I do need your help. Both of you.’

  Darn It! had taught Clara that paying suppliers made her vulnerable. She would do better if she could sell things that she made herself, and if she didn’t have to pay rent on a shop, either. So she explained her plan. ‘Girls, I’m going to declare a war on poverty. I’m the Commander-in-Chief. Alice, you’re my general, and Grace, you’re the brigadier. We might promote Dora to colonel but she’ll have to shape up a bit. The twins are going to be privates for a while, but in time, who knows? We’re going to draw up a plan of action.’

  Clara picked up her pencil and tapped the paper in front of her.

  ‘From now on, we are going to start selling things – anything we can think of. Things we can grow, things we can make. Now, any ideas what we might sell?’

  The girls looked at each other, and then Grace turned to her mother and said, ‘One of the twins?’

  At which point Alice dissolved into giggles and Grace joined in and then in a flash they were clutching their stomachs, howling.

  Clara tapped her pencil and then banged the table and shouted, ‘For goodness’ sake, girls, this is serious! Shut up!’

  But it was no good – she’d lost them.

  Alice gasped: ‘Which one?’

  And then both hiccupped simultaneously: ‘Bertha.’

  Which set them laughing even harder.

  Clara was caught between the desire to clobber them over the head and the rising hysteria in her stomach. They’d inherited their giggling from Clara and her Crisp sisters. The more their father, Alexander, had shouted at them, the more hysterical they’d got until he’d either literally knock their heads together or, if it was really bad, go and fetch his horse whip and start flinging it around threateningly. That always worked.

  Giggling fits en masse – an occupational hazard of being in a family packed with female Swains and their descendants – I know this only too well.

  A certain performance of Stainer’s The Crucifixion in the Chapel of St John’s College, Cambridge, where I was a student and singing in the choir, took place, and I had invited my family. As I walked out and took my place in the front and found myself directly opposite my nanna, Bertha, and my mum, in the front row of the audience, my heart sank. I knew exactly what was going to happen.

  Sure enough, they caught my eye and they started to giggle. I saw my mum’s face crinkle in contortions; Nanna just grabbed Mum’s hand and used the other one to cover her face in her handkerchief. I put my face down and dared not lift it for the whole production, my music shaking in my hands as I tried desperately not to catch their hysteria. It was totally inappropriate in this august setting, for this sombre work, and of course that was the whole point. I also knew part of the problem was that Nanna never expected to find herself in such an exalted place, nor my mum. Nor me, actually.

  In the end, desperation caused Clara to stand up, pick her iron ladle out of the stew pot, and fling it at the wall, leaving a dent just as she had done two weeks previously when Charlie had announced his intention to go to war. Not a subtle tactic, but an effective one.

  ‘This is serious. Do you want to starve?’

  ‘No, Mum. Sorry, Mum,’ they said, wiping the tears from their faces.

  ‘Good.’ Clara sat back down, picked up her pencil and started again. ‘So, what can we sell?’

  Grace made a second attempt: ‘How about vegetables from the allotment?’

  ‘That’s more like it.’

  One of the advantages of their move was that they found themselves next to some allotments. Clara had wasted no time in renting a little plot and had been growing peas, potatoes, cabbages, carrots and onions. They also had a couple of plum trees and a small apple tree that gave them very tasty fruit in the autumn. Clara had been using the extra produce to barter for things with her neighbours, but if she put her mind to it she could add some more produce and make some money. Selling things made in the kitchen was a common way to make an extra bit of pocket money for the working-class woman; indeed, if Charlie Junior had not been in his box, Clara could have opened up her front room as a shop. But the kitchen would have to do for now.

  ‘Alice? Any ideas?’

  ‘Well, Mum, I could go and get eggs and milk from Handy Cross.’

  ‘Good girl,’ Clara said, scribbling on her paper. Handy Cross Farm was a five-mile round trip, but the farmer was friendly and Alice was a fast walker. ‘I can make pies, bread and cakes,’ she added.

  ‘We could all make jam and pickles.’ Alice wriggled with enthusiasm.

  ‘We’ll have a real shop again,’ Clara said, clapping her hands. ‘We’ll have a shop again, but we’re going to have to work hard. You’re all going to have to help me around the house. You especially, Alice. It’s going to mean missing some school this year. Of course, next year you can help me all the time and perhaps we can do more, maybe even rent a place properly.’

  With the girls’ help, Clara drew up a list of responsibilities, and then she drew up their plan of action.

  Just a week later, Alice was putting notes through the doors of the neighbourhood alerting them to the fact that Swain’s Kitchen was now open for business.

  Clara’s war on poverty was successful from the start. Most women shopped every morning for the food that they would be needing that day. Clara’s little kitchen enterprise was very convenient, as many of the local women had taken the jobs that had become available as the men went off to the war, and now they didn’t have time to go to the shops or cook themselves. Clara’s pies, bread and cakes were a special hit.

  Meanwhile, thirteen-year-old Alice was happy to be skipping some of her lessons. By 1916, education was compulsory up until the age of fourteen, but many children still missed school to help out at home or earn some extra pennies. Alice was bright, but not a fan of school. The headmistress of the secondary school was a rather formidable Miss Packer, who made the children line up in the playground at the start of the day to be inspected. They all
had to stretch out their hands to check they were clean, and nails scrubbed, shoes shiny, hair neat, with a fresh handkerchief in their pockets. Many of the children rarely had a bath, but as long as they looked clean, that was all that mattered.

  Alice had usually been up for several hours helping her mum before she even got to school, and her hands would often be dirty. Miss Packer would immediately call her out and rap her palms with a ruler. Grace had an even more difficult time, due to the particularly unruly nature of her chestnut curls: by the time she had run to school, her head could resemble a medium-sized furry animal. Miss Packer would beckon her out of the line, grab her hair and swing her around by it. Alice couldn’t bear to watch.

  Added to this, much of what Alice was being taught she knew already. She could read and write and she was good at sums. There were extra lessons in sewing, cooking and general housekeeping: how to do the laundry, how to polish the brass and bath a baby. But Alice had been doing all of these under her mother’s firm eye since before she could remember. Which meant she was only too happy to miss school and set up shop instead.

  Of course there were some teething troubles. Five-year-old Dora had been given the responsibility for collecting the fruit and vegetables from the allotment. Dora was a whimsical, creative child. She loved stories, she also loved making up stories; so vivid was Dora’s imagination that sometimes the line between fact and fiction could become blurred. This posed a serious threat to Swain’s Kitchen early on, when Dora was sent to collect some peas from the allotment but came home empty-handed. She flew in through the back door screaming: ‘Mum, Mum, there’s planes!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I was bending down and I heard this growling sound … grrrrrrr … and I was looking up and there was this big German babykiller, right above my head!’

  ‘Well, I didn’t hear anything,’ Clara said, wiping her floury hands on her apron and striding outside. She searched the sky but, as she suspected, there was nothing except some starlings and a few puffy clouds. She walked back into the kitchen but Dora had disappeared.

  A little voice came out from under the table. ‘It was going to land on my head. There was a soldier grinning right at me, holding a gun.’

  Clara bent down and looked underneath the table at her daughter. Her little shoulders were shaking.

  ‘Don’t be daft, Dora. There’s nothing there. You was just imagining it, you little juggins.’

  ‘No, Mum. I ain’t coming out and I ain’t going down the allotment again.’

  Clara realised she had to nip this in the bud. ‘The growling was next door’s dog, lovey. Those airships only get as far as the coast. Come on, let’s go back there and I’ll show you.’

  ‘Nope, I’m not getting out, no way. I tells you there was a plane.’

  Dora started to howl, and Clara inwardly cursed Alice for bringing back an old newspaper telling horror stories of the ‘babykiller’ German Zeppelins that were raiding the east coast of Britain.

  From then on, trying to get Dora to go to the allotment was a daily torment. It was a combination of cajoling, bribing and sometimes, when Clara ran out of patience, sheer brute force.

  As Clara watched her tiny legs tripping down the garden path, she couldn’t help but feel guilty about Dora’s emotional fragility – the pregnancy full of grief as the extent and permanency of Charlie Junior’s disability had sunk in. Clara had an image of a toxic weight of sorrow sinking through her body and down the umbilical chord to infect the fledgling Dora that nestled in her stomach. Alice and Grace whispered about their mother’s tolerance of her highly strung third daughter, but Clara felt that Dora hadn’t really had a chance.

  Of course she could have just let Dora off the vegetable patch, but really there was no one else to do it – Alice was the only one who could manage the long walk to Handy Cross, while Grace was in charge of supervising the twins.

  It wasn’t that the three-year-old twins were particularly difficult: Bertha was very biddable and Katie keen to be one of the big girls and help her mother with household chores – like cleaning the front step. Small, round and rosy-faced Katie would insist on commanding the brush and scrubbed away with the most tremendous vigour. Meanwhile the pale, delicate Bertha was more than happy to sit beside her, looking beatific with her bright red hair shining like the Virgin Queen. It was a happy, functioning dynamic. Katie and Bertha were the most unlikely twins – they were opposites, but somehow together they made a whole – the yin and yang of Marlow.

  But Katie was a bit of a busybody. Sometimes she would take matters into her own hands. And where Katie went, Bertha, the willing foot soldier, followed. It meant that they could find themselves in rather compromising situations. Like the time Katie decided that they should help their mum by sneaking through the hedge into old Mr Smith’s garden and picking up his fallen apples. They were brought back by an irate Mr Smith, and received a sound hiding – Clara had had a difficult time persuading Mr Smith that she hadn’t put them up to it for her new kitchen enterprise. Most embarrassing. Another time, Katie took Bertha to pick up spare coals from the railway line. Luckily they were spotted by a man walking his dog before the 5.15 express from London came steaming through. And then there was the time Katie invited their neighbour, Mrs Talbot, to tea. She called at the door and said, ‘Mum would like to have you over.’ Mrs Talbot duly turned up later that day on the doorstep in her best dress, much to Clara’s mystification and then complete mortification. There was another spectacular hiding after that one.

  So while Clara was stuck with the daily ordeal of trying to get Dora to the vegetable patch, the actual selling itself gave her little frissons of joy, particularly those things that she had made herself.

  Clara had seen a picture of an alchemist in a book that one of Alexander’s customers had left behind in his hansom cab. It had been an old man with a long white beard and wizard’s robes gazing, puzzled, at a big glass vial. Intrigued, she had asked her father what he was doing.

  ‘He’s turning lead into gold, my pippin.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Oh, you can’t do it really, although there’s many that’s tried. There’s a legend that there’s a secret recipe. Imagine if you found the recipe, you’d be rich for ever. You could buy anything you wanted – the whole world!’

  Sometimes, when Clara was at her kitchen table mixing all her different ingredients and transforming them into something that was much more than the sum of its parts – something that would indeed bring them gold – she felt like that alchemist (minus robes and beard). Yes, cake into gold. It was something she’d been doing since she was a toddler in Lant Street, hanging round her mother’s skirts.

  But that was in the broad light of day. In the witching hours of the night, Clara had a recurring dream that she was with Charlie Junior and he was turning into a skeleton, crying for food, and she couldn’t feed him and was helpless. They could be in different places: in a boat on the river, in a railway carriage, often in the back of her father’s hansom cab; but no matter what the setting, the dream always ended the same – she was left holding a skeleton. Clara would wake up suddenly, her heart thumping, and sit up in bed feeling alone. She would tiptoe downstairs and steal into the front room to gaze at her son lying in his box – not a skeleton, not dead, only sleeping. And in the morning, the witching hour broken by the rising of the sun, she would wake and shake off the dream and come downstairs to her kitchen enterprise, her optimism restored.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Playing the Hand

  I picked up the telephone to speak to Great-Auntie Dora’s daughter, Angela. I was slightly nervous – we’d never met or even spoken before. But I was only slightly nervous because by this time I’d encountered enough of my Swain cousins to guess the sort of reception I was going to get. And I wasn’t wrong.

  ‘Oh, hello, dear. It’s so nice to speak to you. You’re Dianne’s daughter?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Oh, lovely! How is she? How are you? Wh
en are you going to come and see me? It’s SO lovely to speak to you.’

  Angela was excited, and I could feel the hug down the telephone. Once again I was struck by how my mum and her cousins were so fond of each other. They had spent a lot of time together as children but as adults distance had kept them apart. We started to natter and we couldn’t stop. I was telling her things she didn’t know, and she was telling me things I didn’t know, and there were lots of exclamation marks flying around:

  ‘Ooooooooh, you don’t say!’

  ‘Noooooooo! Never!’

  ‘Oooooooooh, he was bad!’ (I’ll let you guess who we were talking about.)

  I recognised the love of melodrama in Angela, but I also felt a bond of sadness: ‘That poor, poor little boy – and the only son too,’ she said.

  It wasn’t the first time I’d heard it; in fact, every Swain relation had said it and I was beginning to think that it probably wasn’t a coincidence, but a phrase that the cousins had inherited from their mothers, who had probably inherited it from Clara or Charlie, or both, or indeed any of the adults around them as they were growing up. There was also a shared sense of humour. We chuckled over watches from ‘dead German soldiers’ that were made in London. ‘What was he like?’ she said.

  Indeed.

  Light and shade, sunshine and showers. Our conversation felt a bit like a spring day in April.

  The time whizzed by. I glanced at the clock and realised I was already late picking up my girls from school. Angela let me hang up on condition that I promised to come and visit her soon, but not before she told me two things that would linger in my mind: ‘Well, of course Charlie kept cutting the line.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Yes. He can’t have been a very nice man, can he?’

  ‘But what do you mean, “cutting the line”?’

  ‘Well, the washing line, of course.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Dreadful thing to do. After she’d worked so hard hand-washing all those clothes for all those girls – five girls, imagine! – and there they are, hanging out all clean on the line, and him coming home from the pub and cutting it, so they landed in the dirt.’