The Scarlet Sisters

by Helen Batten

  ‘We’ve come all the way from Birmingham.’

  ‘It’s Gran’s eightieth birthday today. She’s always wanted to go up in a balloon.’

  The pilot was under pressure. I didn’t like it one bit, especially as he didn’t look too convincing. How would you not like your balloon pilot to look – baseball cap turned backwards, grubby sweatshirt, mad look in his eyes …?

  He licked his finger and held it up to the wind. ‘I think we’ll be OK. There’s a patch of blue over there – we’ll head for that.’

  I did what I was told even though all my instincts were screaming ‘No!’ I climbed into the basket and before we knew it we were shooting up in the air, basket swinging wildly as the wind blew around us.

  ‘Ha ha! Hold tight,’ he cackled, as we travelled at high speed into the eye of the storm. ‘I’ll bring her down a bit. She should start going the other way.’

  So we started to go down, and then down some more. Now I could see the pretty gardens of the houses below – there was an old couple standing pointing at us, and we were so low I could even make out the green embroidery on the lady’s top.

  We were plummeting. The pilot desperately yanked the rope to power up the heat, but with one gust of wind the fire went out completely. We came down like a stone, just missing the roof of the house. The old couple ducked as the basket clipped the top of their hedge.

  ‘Brace yourselves,’ yelled the pilot.

  We hit the ground with a thump, and everyone screamed. I was thrown half out of the basket but my husband caught me and hauled me back in. We bounced along the field one, two, three times, then a gust of wind, the burner reignited and we took off again – straight into the path of a massive electricity pylon.

  ‘No! No! No! I don’t want to die! How dare you kill me after everything I’ve been through, you tosser!’ I screamed.

  The others looked at me with a mixture of fear and bewilderment, except my husband, who knew exactly what I meant.

  My mind was racing, a million thoughts at once. I felt so angry. This whole summer, all the pain I’d been through, the hard work I’d put in just to carry on: working, my marriage, my friends, trying to get my life back together; all those lessons I’d learnt, and for what? I may as well have died on the table of the operating theatre.

  At that moment I could have wrung that pilot’s neck. Just three weeks before I’d been on the brink of drowning myself, but now something fundamental had changed: I’d gone from not caring, even wanting to die, to feeling there was stuff on this earth I still needed to do.

  And a tiny thought said maybe I didn’t want to die because I was pregnant.

  Two weeks later I found out I was indeed pregnant. This was Amber’s beginning.

  In those few weeks between the wedding and the balloon ride something fundamental had changed. And the difference was that I was a mother again.

  Now, I feel an unbelievable imperative to remain on this earth, because however much I might have moments of despair, I know I am loved and needed by three precious people, and I cannot bear the thought of leaving them to face the world without me. They literally keep the balloon of my existence tied very firmly to this life.

  In theory, Charlie should have felt the same. He had five beautiful daughters and by this stage six grandchildren, with more on the way. But others in the family are not as surprised as Dennis with the suicide theory.

  For many years Charlie had felt a bit of a spare part. As his daughters grew up, and his wife’s business flourished, there seemed to be no role for him. Even the money he brought into the house was increasingly overshadowed by the success of Clara’s grocery. The girls seemed to follow their mother’s lead and have little love or respect for him, or that’s how he felt, anyway. When he walked in from work, they ignored him.

  Charlie still regaled everyone with the fact that he was surrounded by so many daughters: ‘They drive me mad,’ he would say. ‘All these women.’

  The birth of his grandsons was bittersweet. While filling him with joy, Dennis, Brian and John also reminded him of his own lost son. Charlie drank, but there were times when it just made him feel worse. And when he had one of those fits of melancholy, he would remember the night he fell in Marlow lock: the peace and the sense of relief he felt as the water washed over him and the oxygen left his body.

  Bertha, Katie, and Dora used to tell how, on occasion, they came into the house to find Charlie with his head in the gas oven.

  ‘For goodness’ sake, Charlie. Stop being so stupid and get yer head out,’ Clara would say and march over and turn the gas off. Nanna used to tell this story laughing. But now it doesn’t seem like a laughing matter.

  Perhaps the outbreak of the Second World War was the last straw – watching all his sons-in-law go off to fight. Perhaps he had that feeling of being a failure too. But, more than anything, perhaps the outbreak of war pushed Charlie over the edge because it gave Clara the excuse to leave him.

  When war was declared in September 1939, there was a hasty Swain exodus west into London, and then out the other side. Everyone knew that the German bomber planes would approach the capital from the east, down the Thames Estuary, following the river into the heart of the city. There was a good chance therefore that even if they weren’t dropping their bombs on the docks or airfields around Grays on purpose, sometimes they would drop them by accident, or if they had any bombs left after raids in central London, they would off-load them on their way back. The sisters couldn’t be living anywhere more unsafe.

  But there was one sister who was not living anywhere near the firing line, and that was Alice.

  By 1939 Alice had moved from the Welsh valleys to High Wycombe, where Tom had found a job as a delivery man and Alice was working as a typist in an office. Alice now had two children: Jean, who was six, and Brian, who was four. They lived in a tiny cottage, with just two bedrooms, a kitchen and a front parlour. There was no running water. Instead, they had to draw their water from a well in the back garden. It was a source of endless fascination for the local children.

  ‘How no one ever fell in and died, I’ll never know,’ Jean said. She reckoned it was so deep you could throw a stone down and never hear it hit the water. A lot of time was spent hauling that bucket up and down. And there was still no running water when Jean got married in the late fifties – as a present, she was invited over to the neighbours on the morning of her wedding so she could have a bath. No wonder the gold taps in Bertha’s bungalow caused a bit of a stir.

  When war was declared the Swains downed tools, walked out of their jobs and left their homes. It wasn’t very well thought through, but I suppose it’s a measure of just how frightened people were.

  Alice was so delighted to find herself back in favour that she welcomed them all with open arms, despite the fact that she had no room for them. But, ever resourceful, she managed to organise for them to stay with various neighbours, for a small fee. Dianne remembers the cousins having a riot running around the woody hills behind Alice’s house, and the adults hanging around smoking and gossiping. The sisters sat around Alice’s kitchen table swapping stories about their children, relations and neighbours.

  After the first few weeks, when it became clear that Hitler wasn’t actually going to bring Armageddon on the capital straight away, the Swains gradually trooped back to London having had a bit of a holiday.

  ‘We may as well go back, then,’ Charlie said to Clara.

  ‘You can. I’m not.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘No. I’ve been here long enough to know where I’m really needed. I’m staying with Alice. Tom’s off to war. I’m going to look after the children. Sometimes you still need your mum.’

  Charlie was momentarily speechless. ‘What about me? Who’s going to look after me?’

  ‘You’re a grown man. I’ve looked after you for forty years. Little thanks I’ve had for it. Now you’re on your own.’

  Charlie stared at Clara, looking for any signs of regret or apol
ogy. But she stared right back at him, her expression defiant. Charlie was too proud to say anything else except, ‘Have it your way, then.’

  ‘I will, Charlie, I will,’ Clara said, and finally it was her turn to march out of the room.

  She felt no remorse, only a light-hearted elation.

  Ever since Dora had left, Clara had missed her daughters. An unbearable loneliness had descended during the long nights sitting by the fire by herself. The hours dragged and there didn’t seem to be any point, even her enthusiasm for her shop had gone. It was like being homesick in her own home. No daughter to confide in, to gossip with, to smile and admire and see love reflected back in their eyes. Clara had spent her life surrounded by six sisters and then five daughters, and it felt too late to try and reconcile herself to being on her own now. Especially when she was so needed.

  The first day she had arrived at Alice’s and seen her struggling to draw water up the well, cook something hot for the family, keep her children out of trouble – all the while holding down a full-time job – Clara knew she was not going back to Grays. And when she heard the shouting late at night between Alice and Tom, it brought back memories. As she had prophesied, Tom had turned out to be hard and rough with Alice. It felt like history repeating itself. But this time Clara resolved it would be different. Alice would have her mother there, in the same way that Clara wished she’d had her own mother to support her in her battles with Charlie. No, Charlie could lump it. He deserved nothing. And she shut her shop without looking back.

  So Charlie was forced to go back to London by himself. For years he had bemoaned being surrounded by women, but now the house seemed empty, eerie. He had never lived on his own and he couldn’t bear to be there by himself. He stayed longer in the pub.

  Dennis remembers coming across him swaying along the road, drunk in the middle of the day, hardly recognising his grandson.

  And then, on his first visit back to High Wycombe, Charlie was found dead at the neighbour’s house by Clara.

  No one remembers a funeral, any grieving or, indeed, Charlie’s death being talked about at all. But, years later, my mum and her brother John were spending the afternoon with Clara when she said, ‘Put on your coats. There’s somewhere I want to take you.’

  They trotted off down the street and across town. The children were intrigued. Clara was almost furtive. They went right through to the very edge of the cemetery, where it was all wild and there were some graves overgrown with grass.

  Clara pointed to an unmarked grave and said, ‘That’s where your grandpa is.’

  She looked very sad. John and Dianne didn’t say anything. They walked home in silence.

  So Charlie seemingly disappeared from the family consciousness. Unmentioned and unmissed, except by his young grandson, and his daughter Dora, who true to form seemed to take on the shock for all the rest of the sisters put together.

  When Charlie died in August 1940, Dora was in the final six weeks of her pregnancy. Spencer had been sent to South-East London to train for the army and Dora was living with his parents in Grays. When she heard the news of her father’s death she went into her bedroom, drew the curtains, got into bed, pulled the covers over her head and refused to get out. The world seemed more dangerous than ever. If her father could just disappear, what next? Spencer’s removal from existence seemed only a matter of time, and then what would become of her? Dora could not eat, and only managed a few sips of the endless cups of tea her mother-in-law brought her.

  Spencer’s mother was a stoical woman who was nonplussed by her daughter-in-law. She tried gentle encouragement: Dora’s favourite supper, her favourite radio programme, her doggy, Suzi, was missing her. Then she tried more brutal methods: marching in, opening the curtains, turning on the light, ripping back the blankets, telling her her baby was in mortal danger if Dora didn’t move herself and eat something – a counterproductive tactic which resulted in sobs and shaking.

  After a couple of days, Mrs Sier sent for the midwife. This only compounded the problem. The midwife gently coerced Dora into a routine examination, paused long and hard listening with her stethoscope at different points on Dora’s surprisingly large bump, and then started feeling around and listening again. It was dreadfully uncomfortable, and there was a sudden feeling of tension in the room.

  ‘She can’t find the heartbeat,’ Dora thought to herself. ‘Bad news comes in threes.’ And then, ‘It’s dead.’

  ‘It’s twins!’ said the midwife.

  Which was not what Dora was expecting, but still qualified as the third piece of bad news as she rolled over to one side and threw up over the side of the bed.

  The midwife went downstairs and had a word with Mrs Sier.

  ‘I really think for all sorts of reasons your daughter-in-law needs to come into hospital and be looked after by professionals.’

  Mrs Sier heaved a sigh of relief. The next day an ambulance came and spirited Dora away into the City, to the London Hospital in Whitechapel, and right into the middle of the Blitz.

  Most of the London hospitals had been evacuated to the home counties; however, a few were left open for emergencies and the casualties of the bombing. The London Hospital in the East End had anti-splinter glass put into the windows. When the air raid warning sounded, the babies in the maternity unit were put into little gas chamber carrycots and taken into a concrete room. The mothers had gas masks placed over their faces and were wheeled into the corridor, where they were given a cup of tea and encouraged to knit for the troops until the raid was over. How they were supposed to drink tea with their gas masks on, I don’t know. But it was all very necessary because the London Hospital was hit several times by bombs and patients killed.

  Of course, this environment did nothing to dampen Dora’s state of anxiety and nervous exhaustion. She longed for Spencer but he was only allowed to visit her a couple of times, and then seeing him in uniform and not knowing if this was the last time they would meet left Dora crying and clinging to his sleeve. Bertha came to visit but she wasn’t much help. She refused to discuss anything that really mattered, such as Charlie’s death or the impending birth, with the fashionable view that it would only cause more upset. She didn’t even have anything good to say about being a twin (‘Carnation milk’ summing up how she felt about that whole experience), so she avoided that subject too. It has to be said my nanna was very good at discussing distressing subjects as long as they had nothing to do with her or the person she was speaking to. This was the way she’d been brought up. On this occasion it left Dora feeling even more abandoned.

  Every night Dora lay in bed waiting for the sirens to start, aware that she was far from home, surrounded by strangers. There was always noise and upset. The shouts of pain of mothers in labour, babies crying, doctors and nurses rushing backwards and forwards from one emergency to another. It was unfortunate that only really extreme obstetric cases made it into hospital. Dora saw and heard some terrible tales. She got no sleep.

  Finally, after a month, Dora went into labour. Through the night, as the hospital shook with bombs, she was in agony and terrified. A message had been sent to Spencer, but with the Blitz all around, his ability to make it across London was severely hampered. Eventually, though, the twins Jackie and Angela were born, and Spencer made it to see them.

  This turned out, however, to be just the beginning of Dora’s nightmare.

  Two months later, she found herself in an unknown small town in North Wales with her newborn twins in her arms, knocking on doors, looking for shelter.

  ‘Really?’ I asked the twins.

  ‘Yes,’ they said in unison.

  ‘Surely they didn’t just put her on a train with no idea where she was going?’

  ‘Yes, they did. It was different in those days,’ Angela said.

  ‘It was the war,’ said Jackie.

  ‘She had to leave London. There were too many bombs, so they put her on a train, and she got off at the end of the line somewhere in North Wales.’
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  ‘Dad was sent away, you know. He went to fight.’

  ‘Yes. Poor Mum, it was hard. She literally had to walk through the town knocking on doors, asking for a room.’

  ‘And no one wanted to take her. Well, you can’t blame them, really. Two new babies. It was a bit of a handful.’

  ‘Luckily she went into a sweet shop and Dolly took her in.’

  ‘They were marvellous. We stayed with them for the whole of the war.’

  ‘And they brought us up. Mum suffered with her nerves terribly at first.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, she wouldn’t get out of bed.’

  ‘So they bathed us and changed us and fed us.’

  ‘And then Nanna came down.’

  ‘Clara went to Wales?’

  ‘Yes. It got so bad someone sent for her and she helped too, for a bit. Mum couldn’t be left alone with us, you see.’

  ‘No, she didn’t trust herself.’

  It started to feel a bit dark and I wondered about poor Dora. Today I’m sure she would be diagnosed with post-natal depression – in those days, particularly during the war, post-natal depression was not recognised or understood. Which is tragic, because research shows that early intervention can be very effective at a time when the establishment of a mother’s relationship with her baby is so crucial.

  Any new mother can succumb to post-natal depression but there are factors that make it more likely – bereavement, trauma, a lack of a support network, absence of a partner, a history of depression or mental illness and, of course, Dora had all of these.

  Hearing about Dora took me back to the first months of having Amber. It’s the only time in my life I have been depressed. What I know now but wished I’d known then (it would have saved a lot of guilt), is that 80 per cent of mothers who lose a baby experience depression after going on to have a healthy child.

  I started waking up in the mornings and feeling as if my life was over. I could see no future, just a horrible grey fog. I was also feeling guilty – if I loved Amber, I felt I was being disloyal to Poppy, and I felt ashamed because I couldn’t feel the love for Amber I felt she deserved. By day I could feel no joy and by night I couldn’t sleep. And when I did sleep I had a recurring nightmare that I was in a hot-air balloon and Amber was there but there was also a skeleton and the skeleton was Poppy. She was crying because I couldn’t feed her and she was withering away. I would wake up sweating, terrified of going back to sleep. I couldn’t tell anyone because it would seem so ungrateful, shameful, when I, of all people, knew how lucky I was to have a live, healthy baby.