All My Mother's Secrets

by Beezy Marsh

  It was a secret she was determined to keep forever, not for her sake, but for this baby and, above all, for her daughter Annie, who must never find out the awful truth of what she had done.

  29

  May 1915

  Bessie was busy putting together a food parcel for her boy, Thomas, whose last letter from France said he was going to the Front.

  ‘Smokes, matches, corned beef, bar of chocolate, tea, evaporated milk,’ she rattled off the list as she wrapped it all up in brown paper and tied it with string. She’d scrimped, saved and gone without to put it all together for him. ‘And that lovely scarf you knitted him, Em, he’ll be glad of that, won’t he?’

  But Emma didn’t reply. She was clutching her stomach, like she was winded. ‘Oh, good Lord,’ she said, sitting down on the old armchair in the corner of the kitchen. ‘I think the baby’s coming.’

  She’d got some things ready for the baby: a drawer lined with a straw-stuffed sack for a mattress, some linen, shawls, napkins, bootees and a hat. But because she was on her own, she just didn’t feel ready for it, not like when she had her first, with her mum at her bedside, offering words of comfort and advice, with Henry excitedly pacing up and down in the scullery, waiting to catch a glimpse of his new baby. She’d heard nothing from Arthur since they parted, months back, and it was better that way, for all of them, but it left her desolate.

  The Missus had given them the name of a local woman, a seamstress, up at The Steyne, who helped women in labour. She wasn’t a popular figure, not someone people spoke to unless they had reason to, because she also helped women who were pregnant get rid of their unwanted babies, for the right price – but no one talked about that.

  ‘Right-ho!’ said Bessie, pulling on her coat. ‘I’ll go and get her. Just keep breathing deeply and walk about if you can. I found that helped me with my Tom and he was a big bugger when he popped out.’

  Emma paced about the tiny kitchen, wishing that the woman would hurry up and get there because the contractions were getting stronger. This wasn’t like her first, where she had spent the best part of the day sipping tea and even darning a pair of socks in between labour pains. Everything seemed to be happening much faster and, as she went to sit down, there was a gush of liquid down her thighs, as her waters broke. ‘Ooh, sweet Jesus, help me,’ she groaned, sinking onto all fours.

  There was no time to mop anything up, the contractions were getting closer together, and all she wanted to do was bear down.

  Suddenly, Bessie appeared, flushed from running, with a rotund little woman pushing her way through the door behind her. All her features were rosy and round apart from her eyes, which were flinty and hard, like two little pebbles.

  ‘Now, Emma, isn’t it? Let’s have a look at you.’

  ‘I can’t move!’ she cried. ‘I feel like the baby’s coming.’

  ‘All right, dearie.’ She felt the woman’s hands lifting her skirts and pulling down her drawers. ‘Oh, you’re quite far along already. Yes, yes, the baby’s head is here but it’s important for you not to push until I say, or you’ll rip yourself to bits, d’you see?’ She plonked a basket down next to Emma on the kitchen floor and pulled out some linen cloths. ‘Or I will have to be sewing you up, dearie, and I’m a dab hand with the needle but we don’t want that if we can help it.’ She mouthed to Bessie: ‘Costs extra, you see?’

  Emma nodded, but she could no longer speak. She just wanted this baby out. Now.

  Bessie wrung out a dishcloth and dabbed some cool water onto Emma’s forehead, whispering words of encouragement to her friend: ‘Just breathe, breathe.’

  ‘All right,’ said the seamstress. ‘He’s face-up but it’s too late to change that now. This baby is ready to be born. On my count, dearie, push.’

  Emma pushed with all her might as her stomach went rigid with the contraction and the seamstress counted out loud to ten. ‘And again!’ she ordered. ‘Keep going, push.’

  The pain was searing through her, but she pushed with every ounce of her strength, screaming out all the anguish of losing Henry and the pain of betraying her sister Kizzy with Arthur. The next thing she heard were the cries of a newborn baby, as Bessie hugged her, saying: ‘It’s a boy! A beautiful boy!’

  The first Zeppelin raids on London happened just days after the baby came, killing seven people in the East End, bringing the terror of war to their doorsteps.

  ‘They bombed families and babies,’ said Bessie, almost spitting with rage. ‘It ain’t right, Em. Makes me proud my Thomas is out there fighting them, filthy beasts.’ She turned to the baby and picked him up, cooing: ‘But you’ll be safe here with us, won’t you? Ain’t it about time this child had a name Emma? I can’t keep calling him “Baby” much longer.’

  Emma hesitated. Yes, he was the image of Arthur because boys always looked like their fathers, she knew that, but part of Henry lived on in him too, she could feel it.

  ‘I’ll call him George, after the King, I think, because that’s patriotic, isn’t it?’ said Emma, feeling the warmth of his tiny body next to hers as Bessie handed him to her.

  ‘Yes,’ said Bessie, glancing up at the mantelpiece to her son, who she prayed for every night. ‘Any soldier worth his salt would be proud to have a son called George . . .’

  ‘And his second name will be Henry,’ said Emma as his tiny fingers gripped her hand, tightly.

  When she took George down to Brentford to officially register his birth, the registrar asked: ‘Name and occupation of father?’ He glared at her for a moment, over his horn-rimmed spectacles.

  Emma looked at the floor and said, ‘Leave that blank.’

  When the baby was a fortnight old, the Missus sent word from the laundry that she wanted to speak to Emma about coming back to work, so Bessie stayed at home and minded him while Emma heaved herself back into her corset and off to Hope Cottage.

  The Missus was waiting for her, in the hallway, sitting in her rocking chair, with her ledger on her lap. And standing beside her, looking thunderstruck to see her daughter appearing through the front door, was Mum.

  ‘I don’t know what you think you’re playing at, Eliza, but I ain’t staying here to chat if she’s here,’ said Mum, making to leave.

  ‘Oh, stay put and listen!’ said the Missus, crossly. ‘I pay both your wages, so I can call you here any time I like. I need Emma here to come back to work and she’s got a baby at home needs looking after.’

  ‘Well she should have thought about that before she went and got herself pregnant,’ said Mum, turning her face away, so she didn’t have to look at her daughter.

  ‘The point is, I need her to come back to work and I need you to help her out by looking after the child.’

  ‘That’s meddling in our family business! You’ve no right!’ Mum stamped her foot in fury at the sheer cheek of the Missus.

  ‘I’ve every right to stop you doing something stupid out of stubbornness, Susan. Gawd knows, I have known you long enough. You’ve lost one daughter, it’d be careless to lose another wouldn’t it?’

  ‘You don’t know the half of it, Eliza. It ain’t what it seems. What will folks round here say?’

  ‘Oh, pish,’ said the Missus. ‘Tittle-tattle. Who cares? Sticks and stones, Susan. They’ll be gossiping all the more if you don’t have your own flesh and blood growing up under your roof. Then folk’ll start to talk – just see if they don’t? More fool you for giving ’em something to talk about! And anyway,’ continued the Missus, who was like a river in full flood by this point, ‘no one at Hope Cottage dares say a bad word because they know they’ll get their marching orders from me. A child is a good in itself, Susan, and it don’t matter to me one jot how that baby came to be, and it shouldn’t matter to you neither. Take her back. Make the rules, if you want, for her to live by, but take her back.’

  ‘I don’t know the first thing about the child,’ said Mum, picking at her fingernails. ‘Got no interest in it and, anyway, I’ve got to come to work here, or have yo
u forgotten that?’

  ‘That’s the thing,’ said the Missus, standing up and placing her hands, gently, on Mum’s shoulders. ‘You’re not getting any younger, Susan, and I thought maybe I could give you a couple of quid to make life a bit easier just until you can get your granddaughter here to work for me at the laundry, to take your place, so to speak . . .’

  ‘My Annie?’ said Emma, alarmed by this suggestion. ‘She’s a bit young, not even twelve yet . . .’

  ‘I’d turn a blind eye to that,’ said the Missus. ‘She can start after the summer. That way, we keep the laundry business in the family and everyone happy, don’t we?’

  Emma was horrified, but she knew she had little choice but to agree to it. The Missus had them all in the palm of her hand.

  The Missus pulled out a couple of ten-bob notes from her pocket and handed them over to Mum, who then turned to Emma: ‘This doesn’t make it decent, you know.’ She waved the money under her daughter’s nose. ‘You could give me all the tea in China and it wouldn’t buy back my respect, my girl.’

  As the leaves fell from the trees and the nights turned colder, the situation at the Front was so serious that the government started a new recruitment drive.

  A crowd gathered outside the grocer’s on Acton High Street as a new recruitment poster was hastily pasted up in the shop window.

  MARRIED MEN! ENLIST NOW!

  You have the Prime Minister’s Pledge that you

  will NOT be called upon until the young unmarried

  men have been summoned to the colours!

  SINGLE MEN!

  Surely you will recognize the

  force of the Prime Minister’s statement

  and ENLIST voluntarily.

  All the talk was about Lord Derby’s scheme, which wasn’t too popular, as it involved canvassers banging on doors around Soapsud Island and cajoling or shaming men aged from eighteen to forty into either volunteering on the spot, or at the very least saying whether they would be prepared to fight.

  Women like Bessie, with her son away at the Front, had little time for those who didn’t promise to fight, even if they only chose to defer it. ‘Skrimshankers and cowards, the lot of you,’ she’d mutter at the washerwomen who complained about their boys being bullied into it.

  Bill and the other laundry hands did their duty and signed up, returning to Hope Cottage, all proudly sporting a grey armband with a red crown on it, to show they were part of the Derby Scheme.

  ‘I suppose this means I will be having boys who are wet behind the ears to deliver my laundry and be my dollymen if you lot have to go away and fight,’ grumbled the Missus.

  ‘Now, now,’ said Bill, giving her a toothy grin. ‘We’re just doing what’s right and we won’t be in the trenches unless we’re needed. In any case, I’m knocking on forty – who’s going to want the likes of me?’ He’d enlisted with the Duke of Cambridge’s Middlesex Regiment, as a reservist, and been told he could return to work until called on.

  Those armbands could be spotted all over Acton lately. Any single fella who didn’t have one risked being given a white feather, publicly shamed as a coward. It took a lot of brass neck to live that down, and there were many boys would rather die on the Front than be shunned by their sweethearts for failing to get into khaki quick enough.

  Anyway, Bill was nice enough, always making himself useful, even if he was a bit showy about his volunteering for the Army. When Emma had been big, carrying George, he’d offer to take baskets of ironing down to the sorting room for her. The story around the laundry was that her bloke was away at the Front fighting, and Bill seemed to feel it was his patriotic duty to keep an eye out for her.

  She overheard him chatting with Bessie in the washroom one day. ‘Such a fine-looking woman, that Emma,’ he said. ‘I bet there’s no bloke in France wishing for a speedier end to this whole war business than her fella, the lucky sod.’

  That made Emma smile more than she had in a long while.

  30

  July 1916

  Baby George took his first steps in the summer, toddling across the scullery, with Nanny Chick holding her arms open, ready to catch him if he should fall.

  ‘Oh, who is such a clever little soldier?’ she cooed, scooping him up and covering him with kisses.

  Arthur had been as good as his word, keeping out of their lives, but at moments like this, Emma couldn’t help wishing he’d been there to see his son. She’d not seen hide nor hair of him since they parted, but a week later Bessie sidled up to Emma in the ironing room one morning, clutching a letter.

  ‘This came, addressed to you. I think it’s from your fella,’ said Bessie, conspiratorially. ‘He must be home on leave, though, because the postmark is from Leeds. Ain’t he coming to see his child?’

  ‘Oh,’ said Emma, who was completely flummoxed by this bolt from the blue. ‘No, it’s too difficult with things as they are indoors, with my mum, you know. But I’m so grateful to you for bringing it to me, Bessie. It means the world.’

  Bessie gave her a wink. ‘It’s fine, you can rely on me. He can write to you at my place, if it helps. I know you don’t need no more trouble, Emma, but it’s a shame a man can’t know his own child, that’s all.’ Bessie knew better than most how that felt, because her fella was a bricklayer who turned out to have a wife in Shepherd’s Bush, but not before he’d got Bessie up the duff. Nobody spoke about that.

  Emma stuffed the letter down her corset for safekeeping and at tea break stole away into the lavvy in the back yard to read it.

  Her hands began to shake as she read:

  Dearest Emma,

  I know I promised I would stay away, for all our sakes, but I’ve got my call-up papers for the Army and I fear I will soon be sent to France.

  I had prayed that this day would never come, not because I am a coward, but because of the thought that I may not live to see you again.

  Would you write to me and let me know that the child is well? It would help me face whatever war brings, just to have any news that you could give me.

  With fondest affection,

  Arthur x

  She tried to keep her reply brief and to the point, but in her heart she yearned to feel his arms around her and for him to see the beautiful baby they had made.

  Dearest Arthur,

  The baby is a dear little thing and is running rings round us all, as he is learning to walk. I think he has a look of my Henry about him, but his eyes are so like yours. He would make you very proud. I have called him George.

  I am praying to God to keep you safe,

  Yours with fondest wishes,

  Emma

  That was the start of regular correspondence between them, and a deepening of their friendship, which was something that Emma could never have foreseen. She kept the letters secret, tied with string in a tight bundle and hidden behind a chest of drawers in her bedroom. Arthur couldn’t say too much about what he was doing in the war, but he’d been conscripted into the Lincolnshire Regiment and had found army life hard at first but was determined to ‘keep his spirits up’ and do his duty. There were route marches and drills and he learned to fire an ancient rifle that had last seen service in the Boer War. ‘No one had any idea if we actually hit a target,’ he wrote. ‘It was freezing cold and we could barely feel our fingers.’ She knitted him socks and a pair of fingerless gloves, telling her mum that they were for Bessie’s boy.

  After a month, he left for France and the tone of his letters changed; he became wistful, wondering how little George was getting on. Every time Bessie secretly passed her a letter, Emma’s heart would skip a beat, just to know he was safe. ‘We were terribly sick and cold on the crossing and it was a relief to be back on dry land. I never thought I’d say this, but the streets of Soapsud Island seem like a paradise in my mind and I dream of them a lot,’ he wrote. ‘I see George sitting with you and it is the most perfect, happy thought.’

  The boredom of life in the Army training camps over there, with its end
less drills and exercises and target practice, was soon replaced by the harsh reality of life on the front line at the Somme, with weeks on end spent in the trenches, but still he found time to joke. ‘It was a sea of mud,’ he wrote:

  The first soldier I saw was covered in it, head to foot: How terrible, I thought. Now I am the same as him. We do what we can to keep the lice out of our clothes – a hot iron wouldn’t go amiss. The land ahead of us, over towards the German lines, is full of the biggest shell holes, sloshing with filthy water. That reminded me of the Ocean, back in Notting Hill . . .

  The shells come over at all hours, making a screeching sound, and any man fool enough to pop his head up from his dugout is fair game for the enemy. Sentry duty is one hour on, one off, all night. I have lost friends, too many to mention, to the snipers’ bullets.

  The gas attacks were what he feared most, or being ‘buried by a shell’, as some of his comrades had been.

  Not long after the New Year of 1917, a letter arrived which shocked her. His handwriting, usually a neat copperplate, was a spidery scrawl.

  My dear,

  It is as near to hell on earth as you could imagine. Nowhere is safe. I only pray we may be together again one day. Kiss the boy for me.

  Arthur xxx

  She pulled out the bundle of letters from their hiding place and was sitting on the bed, reading through them, imagining what he had gone through, when she felt a presence in the room. Glancing up, she saw her mother, standing there, hands on her hips.

  ‘What in the name of God Almighty have you got there?’ said Mum, rushing forwards to snatch the paper from her. She read the letter. ‘You lied to me!’ she screamed, slapping Emma’s face. ‘Well, this stops now, or you are out on your ear, do you hear me?’