The Scarlet Sisters

by Helen Batten

  At which point Bertha slumped into a kitchen chair, put her head in her hands on the table and sobbed. Then she lifted her head and shouted: ‘I’m ashamed of you!’

  William hovered. His first instinct was to walk out but he increasingly wanted to stand his ground and fight back. It was beginning to feel like his very existence was at stake.

  ‘I was smoking when I should have been working because I don’t want to do this job any more. I’ve told you, I don’t even want to be here, and it’s killing me because I feel like I’m wasting my life, when there is something so much better waiting for all of us. If only you could open your mind and let go of whatever you’re trying to do here. What are you holding on for? What are you trying to prove?’

  ‘I have no idea what you mean. I’m not trying to prove anything.’

  ‘Are you sure? I think you’ve spent your whole life trying to prove something to those sisters of yours and, Bertha, I tell you now, it’s not worth it. You’re wasting your time and your life … and mine too, for that matter.’

  ‘What I don’t understand is how you’ve been sacked and somehow I’m the one to blame.’

  ‘Think about it, Bertha. Just think about it. I think maybe you are the one to blame.’

  And this time William did walk out.

  But, finally, he had said something that had got through. Because Bertha did think, and started to wonder how much she had been trying to prove something not just to her sisters but, more importantly, to herself.

  A couple of weeks later Bertha asked William to go for a walk. They strolled along the seafront promenade, with the gulls sweeping by and the fresh sea air playing havoc with Bertha’s neat red ringlets. They stopped and looked out across the estuary to the open sea and she said, ‘It’s taken me a long time but I now realise how unhappy you’ve been. I can see you no longer feel at home here, but it’s been hard for me to understand – this is where you were born, where you grew up. But there it is. And if you don’t feel at home then it’s difficult for the rest of us to feel at home. So I agree. I think it’s time to look for a place which can be a home for all of us.’

  William stared at Bertha, hardly able to believe it.

  ‘So this means you’ll move?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Abroad? Emigrate? Get on a ship and sail a long way from here? Probably for ever?’

  ‘Yes.’

  And William flung his arms round her and hugged her and spun her around.

  William subscribed to a monthly geographical magazine and at the back of it were advertisements for jobs all over the world. He applied for a job in New Zealand and got it. He had just enough money for the passage for all of them.

  It would take three months to sail down and through the Suez canal, round India and across to Australia, with New Zealand as the final destination. It was only once their passage had been booked and they had their departure date that Bertha told her mother, Clara, and then her sisters in turn.

  They were horrified. Clara’s first reaction, and indeed what she kept saying to Bertha over and over was: ‘But I’ll never see you again.’

  And the problem was that Bertha couldn’t argue with that. The chances were that none of them would ever see her again. The passage to New Zealand cost £350 for the family, the equivalent of over a year’s wages for William, and took six weeks. Flights only went to European cities.

  Clara was now seventy-two years old. ‘I can’t believe you’re really going and leaving me. You may as well be dead.’

  ‘Mum!’

  But in a way Clara was right. It wasn’t even possible to telephone New Zealand. Letters took months to arrive, if at all.

  Clara had lost one of her children already. She felt a familiar, horrible tug like she’d experienced when Alice had eloped, but which actually stretched back through to those first terrible days and months and years after Charlie Junior had died.

  On their last visit to her house, Clara gave my mum a silver cross. It was delicate, engraved with a pattern. ‘Here, Dianne. Something to keep you safe,’ she had said and put it around her granddaughter’s neck with tears in her eyes.

  Years later, Mum was in intensive care, having had a heart attack. I took the cross in to hospital and put it around her neck saying, ‘To look after you,’ because it felt, and still feels, like a talisman. When I went away to boarding school she gave it to me, and I wore it through my A-levels and at critical moments through my life. Something blessed by Nanna’s love – the most, unconditional love of all – must work. And Mum got better and is still with us at the age of seventy-seven. It works. The problems come when I haven’t been forewarned and it’s been left at home in a box.

  Bertha’s sisters were unimpressed. Katie was the only one who dared to voice what they were all thinking (and saying to each other): ‘England not enough for you, then?’

  Bertha was rather at a loss what to say, but Katie continued: ‘You always want more, don’t you?’

  Of all the sisters, Katie could understand Bertha’s move the least, and was the most hurt. Katie’s whole life was embedded in the community – with her shop and social life, with her mother around the corner and now her son. For her twin to leave felt like some sort of comment on the life she’d built for herself.

  ‘I don’t expect you to understand, Katie. But I hope you can still wish us well,’ was all Bertha could say in the end.

  Katie nodded and they embraced, but Bertha had a feeling that, deep down, it took Katie a long time and many more things to happen before she would forgive her.

  1952, and the Kendall family stood on the deck of the SS Otranto in Tilbury Docks. On the quay a brass band was playing patriotic tunes. Hundreds of people had come to see their loved ones go. For many this would be a last goodbye. No one was more aware of this than Old Uncle. With faithful Mrs Beesom at his side, tears poured down his face as he took his last look at the family that was the closest thing he had to having a son and grandchildren. Beside him stood Clara and her remaining daughters and their children.

  Jackie and Angela, by then almost teenagers, remember the occasion vividly, especially Old Uncle’s tears. Bertha waved her flag at them, trying to smile, while battling with a streamer that had got caught up in that elaborate red hair.

  She turned to William. ‘You know the first thing I’m going to do? I’m going to change my name. From now on, you’re all going to have to call me Betty.’

  And the ship’s horn sounded, the ropes were thrown, and with a chorus of shouting and cheering, the boat started to move off slowly, out into the estuary, towards the open sea. It was the first step on a new journey, a new beginning and a new home.

  CONCLUSION

  Breaking the Spell

  I started this rummage in the family’s attic looking for patterns and spells. I think I found them. What’s harder is the question – can they be broken?

  I’m sitting at my desk again. It’s early morning, my favourite time of day. I’ve tiptoed past my girls’ bedrooms – I can hear Scarlett gently breathing, the Little One snoring, and complete silence as ever from the Big Girl. I’ve left Mr D sleeping like a cat in my bed. A new day. I’ve put the fire on but the sun is coming up. I’m feeling optimistic.

  The other day I happened to find myself at a party, seated next to a biologist. I was telling her what I’d found.

  ‘Well, of course,’ she said, ‘it’s hardly surprising when you think that a woman’s eggs are formed pretty much as soon as she is conceived. We are literally carried by our grandmothers, and experience everything our mothers experience until we are born.’

  In which case, part of Nanna experienced the disgrace and bereavement that Clara suffered when Alexander Crisp fell from grace, and watched as Charlie Junior fell ill. And then my mum in some way witnessed Charlie Junior’s death and the violent, alcoholic arguments between Charlie and Clara. And it could be said that 50 per cent of me actually lived through the war. And, of course, that means that some part of me was
present when Charlie Senior died – however he died – and I was there for those years that Mum was sitting on the chair at the Barratts. And I guess that also means that the girls were in some way witnesses to the death of their big sister, Poppy, and my grief. And if they have children, they will have already been through the trauma of their grandparents separating.

  I no longer underestimate the pull of these undercurrents and their consequences.

  I love the Norfolk coast, striding backwards and forwards across the marshes looking out to the North Sea. I feel at home there. And yet I have no connection with it. Or at least, that’s what I thought. Now I’ve found out that, on my dad’s side, we come from generations of fishermen based in Greenwich who used to sail out into the North Sea and up that East Anglian coast to catch wives as well as fish. Perhaps, as a salmon returns home to mate, I’m being drawn by some ancestral pull to wander the North Norfolk coastline, scouring the sea looking for a man to sail past and take me home to be his wife. Which, eerily, is exactly how my dad met my mum: following in his forefather’s footsteps, sailing the seas with a twinkle in his eye, but in this generation she was standing on the quay of Auckland harbour in New Zealand and he was an officer in the Merchant Navy and he saw her from the boat and took her back to England with him.

  Which had huge consequences for the family: my Nanna, Bertha, said to her husband William, ‘I cannot live halfway across the world from my daughter.’

  So, after eighteen happy years in New Zealand, the Kendall family followed Dianne and came back to England and settled where Dianne was living, in the New Forest. Betty became Bertha again. The pull of her daughter was too much.

  Years later, in a strange twist, Katie’s son, Barry, went travelling to New Zealand, fell in love and settled there. Like her twin sister, Katie could not be separated from her child, so she went the other way and emigrated to New Zealand. Bertha and Katie had a complicated relationship, but I witnessed my nanna’s real distress and sense of bereavement when Katie left.

  I have one more photograph above my desk. It’s a photograph of Clara holding her first great-grandchild. It is Alice’s granddaughter, Audrey. Clara seems oblivious to the camera. Her gaze is fixed on the baby she gently cradles in her arms; it is a look of delight and love. When Brian gave it to me I was deeply moved. For me, that look holds an answer. The sisters said that Clara never got over losing Charlie Swain Junior, but that photo is telling me something different, or at least something more complicated – that whatever Clara’s grief at losing her son, and I’m sure that was enduring, this did not stop her being able to experience great joy with her surviving children, and grandchildren and then great-grandchildren.

  Clara and Audrey

  After the war Clara went back to Grays. She never remarried, or reopened her shop. Instead, she spent the last fifteen years of her life moving between her daughters, helping to bring up their children and their children’s children, including her great-granddaughter, Audrey. ‘She was a kind, gentle, loving soul,’ was how Alice’s son, Brian, described her to me.

  Of course that’s just how I remember my nanna too. She was hugely loved by all her children and grandchildren. She was right at the centre of us all, leaving a lasting feeling of love.

  And that has been one of the most striking things that has come from my encounters with the Scarlet Sisters’ children – how much Alice, Grace, Dora, Katie and Bertha were adored by their children, and made their children feel loved in return. All of them were widowed at a relatively young age. None of them remarried, but they all dedicated the rest of their long lives to helping their children and looking after their grandchildren.

  I write a letter to my daughters, but it could just as well be to myself.

  Dear Amber, Scarlett and Daisy,

  How to Break the Spell

  A bit of Ecclesiastes: ‘To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: A time to be born, and a time to die….a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn and a time to dance’.

  Which is fine, but just be aware what ghosts might be leading you in your dance. Find out what went before. Keep it in mind. Be vigilant, so they don’t haunt you and you can push them away: you can dance a new dance to a new tune, your own dance, in your own time and not someone else’s.

  Socrates encouraged men to ‘Know thyself.’ But I think this must include knowing your ancestors too, and this knowledge gives you the power to make a choice. Because I think it is a choice – it’s not just about knowing the facts, it’s what you make of them. In theory trauma keeps repeating when it hasn’t been worked through. To work something through requires uncovering it, exploring it and taking some meaning from it, and then moving on. But it might be that the meaning you take is just as important as the uncovering in the first place.

  Clara and her daughters may have had difficult marriages and traumatic experiences, but they survived in spite of them. They always picked themselves up. They created homes for their children and they worked hard. In the end they were undefeated and I feel privileged and proud to have such resilient, loving female ancestors. This is something I want you to remember and hold on to when life throws difficulties at you, as it most surely will. Whatever has happened in the past, what you take from it is up to you, and you have a choice where to go next. And, goodness, that is another thing that has struck me – how much greater our choices and opportunities are as women in the twenty-first century.

  In a way, everything follows from this. I could say all sorts of things about the specifics – don’t settle down too young, don’t look for a hero, be a heroine and don’t try to keep up appearances – but, actually, as long as you use your knowledge and use it wisely, all these things will happen by themselves.

  Love,

  Mum

  So, that’s the girls, but what about me? What does this mean for me and Mr D?

  Going back to the bet we had on the Scottish Referendum, the one where he said that if the ‘No’ vote won by ten points or more he would show me New York, and which (for once) I actually won … well, after the text exchange on the morning after it, there was complete radio silence. He didn’t mention it again. And it was a bit embarrassing, because I’d told all my friends and the girls and they kept asking when I was going, and all I could do was shrug … and, if I’m honest, I was disappointed. After all I’d always honoured my debts – witness naked runs and Korean air stewardess uniforms – and it seemed symbolic, like more than just a trip to New York. I started to wonder where we were going – literally. Just how serious was he about me? Was he prepared to do as much for me as I was for him?

  And then about a month later, on a Friday night after a long week apart, we were having supper, just the two of us, at my kitchen bench and he said, ‘Are you busy in February?’

  ‘Why?’ I was feeling playful.

  ‘I was just wondering. Is there any way you might be able to come to New York with me in February?’

  I was enjoying the moment and so paused and kept a straight face. ‘Well, I’m not sure …’ And then I squealed, leapt up and showered the top of his head with kisses, and I swear he blushed …

  So it looks like we are off to New York after all, and I’m aware that there is a perfect way to end this tale. If this was a novel it would be easy and I could tie it up to everyone’s satisfaction, not least my own. But it’s not. Life is far more complicated and subtle and deep. And if I did it like that, then I’d be ignoring another thing I’ve learned from the Scarlet Sisters, and that is that I’ve got to let things take their own course.

  The story of me and Mr D has to be left to write itself.

  Bertha, Alice, Grace, Katie, Dora

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I would like to thank my mum, her brothers, Nigel and John, and my second cousins, Brian and his wife Barbara; Jean, Dennis, Jackie, Angela and Barry for all their help in writing this book. Of course I couldn’t have done it without them. Not only did they answer my q
uestions with honesty, courage and humour, but they welcomed me into their homes and their lives.

  I would also like to thank Professor Peter Clarke, formerly my supervisor at St John’s College, Cambridge, who, as ever, answered my call with both seriousness and kindness, and guided my research into the context of my nanna’s and her sisters’ lives. I would like to say a special thank you to Rob Thompson of the Western Front Association and Chris Baker of fourteeneighteen. I’d also like to give a big cheer to the London Metropolitan Archives for their interest and enthusiasm in this project.

  Thank you too, to Emma Heard and Sally Floyer, precious friends and unofficial editors, who have been with me all the way, and to Laurie Slade for his wisdom. I am also grateful to my editor, Charlotte Cole, who once again has been a joy to work with.

  I’m deeply grateful to my daughters Amber, Scarlett and Daisy for all sorts of things. But in this instance you have tolerated endless streams of family anecdotes and I have appreciated your support and excitement for me and for the book.

  Lastly, thank you to David Thompson, for being my special correspondent and historical consultant.

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