The Scarlet Sisters

by Helen Batten

  And that pretty much summed up how Dianne felt – this new baby was a personal coming-home gift from her mother, and nothing could have made her more happy. (Lucky the kitten was forgotten at this point, a baby being a much better replacement.) The only downside was that in order for this baby to be born, Dianne would have to lose her mum for a few weeks again.

  Bertha had had a difficult pregnancy. Everything was swelling up and she was booked to go into Chelmsford hospital around her due date and then stay there recuperating for a couple of weeks afterwards. Dianne was particularly nervous about being left and Bertha struggled with what on earth to do with them. They were supposed to go to Alice’s but Dennis and Jean were still there, and Grace had come round and read the riot act: ‘You can’t do this to me! You can’t force my children out of their home.’

  ‘But what am I supposed to do? Look at me!’ Bertha was over eight months pregnant.

  ‘Well, not send my children back to be bombed.’

  ‘But I’m booked to go in next week! Who’s going to look after them?’

  ‘Not Alice. She’s already busy looking after mine. You find someone else.’

  Bertha was the only Scarlet Sister who had three children – the others had their two and then were careful. (Dutch caps were prolific and surprisingly effective. Mum remembers Nanna keeping hers in a box under the kitchen sink. Although obviously not always used …) Bertha had a feeling her sisters were had taken umbrage at her nerve, or perhaps fecklessness, to produce this baby out of nowhere in the middle of a war.

  Grace stormed out and slammed the door. Unfortunately Dianne had been standing quietly in the corner of the kitchen and had witnessed the row. As Bertha sat at the kitchen table with her head in her hands, Dianne crept over and stood in front of her. With her time at the Barratts very much in mind, she asked, ‘Mummy, who’s going to look after me now?’

  ‘I have no idea, darling. No idea.’ And Dianne watched as her mother, huge with child, sobbed in despair.

  But when Old Uncle and Mrs Beesom heard of Bertha’s plight they immediately offered their services, and a few days later they moved in. Bertha went off on the bus with a little suitcase full of tiny knitted romper suits to have Dianne’s baby.

  It was a satisfactory arrangement. Mum remembers Old Uncle and Mrs Beesom being very kind to her and John. Of course, they were well-behaved too. It was a happy few weeks, although Dianne missed her mum terribly: ‘With Dad gone, Mum had become everything to us,’ she said.

  Then, one morning, Mrs Beesom told John and Dianne that they’d had a call from their mother and she would be home that afternoon with their new baby brother. The morning dragged as the excitement rose but, finally, John and Dianne reckoned it was almost time for their mum to arrive.

  For reasons best known to himself, John said, ‘Quick, let’s hide, so she can’t find us when she gets back.’

  And Dianne, being the little sister, did what she was told.

  ‘Look, Di, come in here,’ he said, pulling her into the bushes by the front gate. ‘This way we can see her, but she can’t see us.’

  They crouched and waited. Finally, they saw an ambulance draw up outside and their mother step down carefully, holding a bundle which must have been the baby. She walked to the door and Mrs Beesom let her in and the door closed and then … nothing. They sat in the bushes and waited, and nothing happened. There was no great commotion or search party as John had hoped.

  ‘Oh, I’ve had enough of this,’ he said and got up and went indoors and Dianne was left alone.

  Over seventy years later Mum says she can still remember the piney smell of the laburnum branches, the prickles of the leaves, and the staring at the door, waiting – for what? She didn’t know. With them in the house and her outside hidden, she felt cut off and a suspense and a suspension, a feeling of the moment before. It was one of those rare occasions when you can sit and relish the feeling of that last moment before your world changes for ever.

  In the end Dianne got up and walked inside too. She could hear them all in the sitting room. The first thing she saw was Mrs Beesom, sitting on the sofa holding the baby, who was all swaddled up in a crocheted blanket – the blanket that Dianne had watched Bertha knitting as her bump grew.

  ‘Come here, Dianne,’ Mrs Beesom said, patting the seat next to her. ‘Sit down beside me and hold your new baby brother.’

  Dianne sat down and Mrs Beesom carefully passed her the baby Nigel and got them settled. Dianne held him for ages. He was asleep and peaceful and she couldn’t take her eyes off his face.

  Mum had never told me the story of Nigel’s homecoming before and I was struck by the emotion in her voice. Mum is not given to crying, even under the most extreme circumstances, but as she told me this story there were tears pouring down her cheeks. I couldn’t make out whether they were tears of joy or sadness. I was confused, but she said: ‘I just couldn’t believe how beautiful he was – this baby, and he was mine.’

  Joy, then, I think? But her words seemed tinged with sadness too.

  From then on Dianne doted on Nigel. To her mind he was the most perfect baby, and then little boy. Bertha needed Dianne’s help, and Dianne was only too delighted to oblige. She nursed him, bathed him and fed him. She was a little mother to Nigel. Not that Bertha wasn’t equally entranced. Throughout her life, Bertha called Nigel ‘her sunshine’. As Bertha lay dying in hospital, Mum remembers Nigel walking into the room and Bertha waking from her final sleep and holding his hand, her whole face lighting up, and gazing at him with the most enormous love.

  Apparently, in those last days, my nanna had only two things on her mind: when was Nigel coming, and how on earth was Helen going to cope with three girls …

  Dianne first heard that she had a new baby brother while having tea at a neighbour’s house. Auntie Katie walked in. ‘Dianne, John, I’ve just had a telephone call from the hospital. Your mother has had a little boy.’ And then she turned to Dianne and said, ‘Bet you wanted a little sister. Well, you haven’t got one. Naaaah,’ and pulled a face.

  Dianne was upset. ‘I really don’t mind what it is, Auntie. I just want a baby.’

  Which was true. Dianne couldn’t fathom the sudden unkindness from her aunt. But in retrospect it’s quite understandable.

  Mum, Nigel, Nanna and John

  Katie

  Katie met Horace Smith when she was fourteen, kicking her heels in the air, doing a particularly enthusiastic Charleston. Like her sisters, Katie loved dancing. She was good at it and always in demand as a partner; she was also in demand in other ways: she had a pink and white complexion, shiny brown hair with red lights streaked through it, and a cute rosebud mouth – neat, pretty, doll-like perfection. She matched this with a bright, business-like, confident air and she did well at work. She’d had a job in Fleet Street as the secretary to one of the editors of the Daily Express. He was always, in her words, ‘pestering’ her, begging her to let him install her in a flat in Mayfair and become his ‘fancy lady’. It seems that Dora was not the only Scarlet Sister to receive special attention from her boss! But the sisters were never attracted to the role of mistress, and Katie changed her job. She did hang on to Horace, though.

  After courting for nine long years, they married in 1936. Horace had trained in retail and they shared a dream to run their own shop, which they duly opened after the war – a grocery store in Grays High Street, rather larger and better appointed than Clara’s shop down the road. Until then Horace worked as a rather skilled engineer. Indeed the Smiths had a somewhat swanky lifestyle. Somehow I’ve managed to inherit Katie’s fur coat – it’s huge! A whopping, luxurious, dark brown, full-length affair. It drowns me and I’m quite tall, much taller than Katie. I could never wear it because it’s so obviously REAL – a large number of animals died to create it. My daughters get it out occasionally and gaze at it in awe – and dismay.

  But it wasn’t just clothes. Like Bertha, Katie loved her home and she put a lot of effort into getting it jus
t right. She made scrapbooks of cuttings from home decoration magazines. Katie and Horace made the most of their leisure time too. They belonged to a tennis club and played in a league. They mixed with the ‘top drawer’ of Gray’s society and went to balls in the grand ballroom of the Queen’s Hotel. They travelled a lot with their friends, and before the war they even went to France, which was quite unusual. They were probably a bit grander than even Bertha with her bungalow and white Lancaster. But, however perfectly set up they were, there was something missing, and that was a child.

  It must have been difficult for Katie to watch her sisters get pregnant, one after the other. There was no one in the family who had had difficulties having children. And there was so little known about fertility, no options other than adoption, and so much social pressure.

  The idea of a couple marrying and not having a family did not sit comfortably in 1930s Britain: people talked about you behind your back, and Katie would have known that. A wife and mother commanded great respect, more so than today. And respect mattered a lot to the three youngest Scarlet Sisters. Right from a girl’s wedding day, ‘well-meaning’ people would be dropping hints about the ‘pitter patter of tiny feet’, and looking for the slightest signs – if you put on a bit of weight, felt a bit under the weather, developed a sudden liking for aniseed balls, they’d be nudge, nudge, wink, wink and, ‘Have you got any news you’d like to share …?’

  Katie was on the verge of being able to give some news several times, but each pregnancy ended in a miscarriage; again, something her sisters had never experienced. Katie felt as if she was abnormal, broken, especially as in those days there was an automatic presumption that it was the woman’s ‘fault’.

  Katie was proud and didn’t talk to her sisters, so they stayed off the subject and merely resigned themselves to gentle gossiping behind her back. But she did talk to her mum. Clara came out with all sorts of weird and wonderful suggestions such as wearing a corset, growing her hair and avoiding exciting pictures, quarrels and hot baths.

  After her third miscarriage, Katie was lying in bed, very shaken. Clara came to see her and sat on the edge of the bed and took her hand.

  Katie plucked up courage and said how she was really feeling: ‘Mum, what’s the point? What’s the point in all this if I can’t have a baby? I feel useless.’

  But Clara had no truck with this. ‘Come on, Katie. The best thing you can do is stop crying and keep trying. Worse things happen at sea. Anyway, you have no choice, so best get on with it.’

  After that, Katie kept her feelings to herself. Inside, though, she was seething at the injustice, but that was better than the fear that crept up on her in the dark hours of the night, because she didn’t know what she would do if she never had a baby. Every pram was a rebuke, and the noise of her nieces and nephews went right through her head. When they were invited round to Auntie Katie’s immaculate home for tea they knew they had to be on their best behaviour, and woe betide them if they dropped crumbs.

  After more than seven years of trying, just at the point when Katie had given up hope, she fell pregnant again and this time the pregnancy was successful. Katie sailed through, passing all those crucial stages: twelve weeks, twenty weeks, thirty weeks. She looked and felt really well, very different in fact, to how she had felt in her previous pregnancies. She relaxed, her hair thickened and grew redder, she grew kinder and invited her nieces and nephews around for tea and ignored the crumbs dropping under the table. She started to see more of Bertha again, especially when her twin announced that she was expecting a baby too: ‘A bit of a surprise!’ Indeed …

  ‘What do you think? Boy or girl?’ Katie asked Bertha.

  ‘What, me or you?’

  ‘Both.’

  ‘Hmmm … do you think we ought to have a bet on it?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I bet you …’

  ‘Hang on. Let me write this down.’

  Katie got up and found a bridge scoring card and pencil in the drawer of her dresser. She sat down and turned it over, pencil at the ready, and said, ‘OK, off you go, then.’

  ‘I think you are having a boy and I am having a boy too.’

  ‘Really? You think we’re both having the same?’

  ‘You know I’m good at sniffing out the flavour of the bun in the oven,’ Bertha said.

  ‘OK. Well, the proof will be in the pudding, won’t it?’

  ‘Or the bun!’

  ‘Yeah, yeah … ha ha!’ She started scribbling: Bertha = two boys.

  ‘So, your turn then, madam.’

  ‘OK. I think you’re having another girl and I’m having a boy.’

  ‘Do you? Why’s that?’

  ‘Well, let’s look at the evidence. You, my dear, are all horizontal, while I’m all vertical.’

  It was true. And according to generations of witchy folklore, ladies go spready with girls, and neat and spherical with boys; although all the midwives I’ve spoken to (and I’ve spoken to a surprising number) say this is nonsense.

  ‘So I say Bertha girl, Katie boy. There. So whoever wins has to buy the other lunch at the Queen’s Hotel?’

  ‘Oh, Katie, top idea, but I can tell you’ve never done this before. I don’t think either of us is going to have time for lunch.’

  Normally that remark would have made Katie bridle, but she was feeling at peace with the world and she let it float off like a bubble in the breeze. ‘All right, then. Ooooh, this will hurt – how about whoever loses has to give the other some of their clothing coupons?’

  ‘Oooooh, that’s quite a serious bet, then! Oh, heavens, why not? What could be more serious than the flavour of a baby? I’m game!’

  ‘Right.’ And Katie scribbled: Prize = five clothing coupons. And she got up and waddled over to her mantelpiece, where she rested the paper in front of the framed photograph of her wedding day.

  ‘Now I’m up, come on, let me show you the nursery.’

  ‘Oh, goody, yes, do!’

  They both climbed slowly up Katie’s stairs, into the small back bedroom which had been her sewing room.

  Bertha was struck by how light it was. The dark, florid wallpaper had been taken down and it now boasted a layer of simple, fresh lemon paint. The sewing machine was stowed in a cupboard, and the sewing basket had been put away. Instead, there was a pretty white chest of drawers and a brand new cradle.

  ‘Grace offered me hers, but you know I wanted to get new.’

  ‘Well, that’s all right, if you can afford it,’ Bertha said, slightly pointedly, ‘And a new nursing chair?’

  ‘Yes. It was a special present from Horace.’

  ‘He must be over the moon.’

  Katie uncharacteristically blushed. ‘Yes, he is.’ And then she changed the subject quickly: ‘Are you all ready, Bertha?’

  ‘Oh, no need yet. I’ve still got a way to go. I always feel a bit superstitious about these things … And, anyway, I don’t need to buy anything. I just need someone to get the stuff down from the loft for me. For some reason I never gave it away.’

  ‘No. I wonder why that might be?’

  Yes, Bertha’s third baby was controversial with her sisters.

  When the time came for Katie to give birth, because she was having her first baby at over thirty years old, she was considered high risk and she went into hospital. It was a long labour, but straightforward. But when the baby was delivered the midwife picked him up and turned him over and then her expression went very serious. Everything was happening quickly for Katie, but she still managed to notice that. The midwife told her assistant to fetch the consultant. The atmosphere in the room changed. Katie heard a gurgle and then a little cry working into a scream as her baby found the use of its lungs. But other than that everything was very quiet.

  Despite the sound of her baby being very much alive, Katie’s instincts were telling her that there was something wrong, but she’d never done it before, so she didn’t know what was supposed to happen next. The midwife was examin
ing the baby.

  Katie asked, ‘Please, can you tell me, is it a boy?’

  ‘Yes,’ the midwife replied but didn’t give any more information or offer to show him to Katie. Then the consultant came in, and a few other people in white coats. They went outside the room and then came back in. ‘Mrs Smith, we are going to take your baby away now. Then, when the final stage of your labour is finished, we need to talk.’

  As the doctor was saying this, Katie saw, out of her corner of her eye, the midwife’s assistant walk out of the room, carrying her baby in a bundle.

  That was the last time she ever saw him.

  Later, Katie was visited by the doctor, who explained that her baby had spina bifida – a congenital disorder where the spinal cord which connects the body to the brain hasn’t developed properly and leaves a gap in the spine. It meant that he had no chance of surviving more than a few days and for that reason it was best she didn’t see him. Katie called him Clifford.

  But Bertha did see him. As Katie’s twin sister, she was the only family member who was allowed a visit. She was taken to a small room where there was nothing but a cradle. Lying in it was a baby wrapped in a blanket. Later, she told my mum that it was heartbreaking: ‘He looked like a normal baby. He was all wrapped up so all I could see was his face and he looked like a perfect baby. He opened his eyes and looked at me. It seemed impossible that there was anything wrong, and it was awful to leave him. I just wanted to pick him up and walk out with him.’

  When a baby was deemed unable to survive in those days, it wouldn’t be fed. It was left to die in its own time of natural causes or, in other words, starve. Clifford lived for ten days. Nobody knows where he is buried.

  In those days it was commonly believed that, ‘Least said, soonest mended’. No one ever mentioned Clifford to Katie: not her husband, nor her sisters. Bertha couldn’t bring herself to tell Katie about her visit – too heartbroken to tell her how perfect he had looked.

  When Clara came to visit her daughter in hospital, she talked practicalities, except her final words as she was leaving: ‘It was meant to be, Katie. He wasn’t meant to live. I’m sorry. But now you have to pick yourself up and get on. Be thankful for the things you do have. The best thing you can do now is get straight on and have another baby.’