Hidden Lives

by Margaret Forster

  Shock could not adequately describe the sense of outrage in the parlour. It was a trick. What else could it be but a disgusting attempt to extort money? Jean’s and Nan’s faces were flushed with fury, Lilian’s pale with distress. The men wished they had gone to the door and dealt with this intruder. Dave said it was a damned cheek, Jack said such vermin should be reported to the police, and Arthur said nobody should have talked to the woman in the first place. Then, as Jack and Nan prepared once more to drive off, Jack said, casually, very off-hand, ‘Is there a will, by the way?’ Everyone stared at him. The idea had still not entered their heads. Once he and Nan had gone the others discussed this possibility. ‘When Father died there was no will,’ Lilian said, troubled, ‘and Mother said what a mess there was, with there being no will. I wouldn’t be surprised if she has made one. There was the money from this house to leave and a bit more.’ ‘If there is a will,’ said Dave, ‘it will be with a lawyer.’ ‘Or among her things somewhere,’ Arthur said. ‘Maybe still in the house.’

  It was in the house, in the bedroom, in the right-hand small drawer of the chest of drawers. The last will and testament of Margaret Ann Hind, widow, of 14 Peter Street, made on 7 December 1915, three months after her husband died. Lilian found it and at the words on the envelope – My Will – could not at first open it. She handed it to Jean and they both sat down on the bed. ‘Oh God,’ Jean said, ‘suppose…’ ‘No,’ said Lilian, suddenly resolute, ‘not Mother, never. Give it back to me.’ And taking the envelope she opened it and extracted the document inside and quickly scanned it. ‘I knew it was a lie,’ she said triumphantly and passed the will over to her sister. It was unequivocal. It gave and bequeathed all money and possessions to be shared equally between ‘my three daughters, Lilian, Jane and Annie’. No mention whatsoever of any fourth daughter. No need for panic. No need to revise the revered character and conduct of the good, the wise, the kind, the gentle, the generous, the honest, the almost saintly Margaret Ann, their beloved mother.

  The autumn of 1946. A dusty church hall in Raffles where twenty-four Brownies are gathered round Brown Owl. Badges have been competed for, beanbags thrown and caught, and now the whole pack is sitting cross-legged on the floor, attentive and a little breathless from all the Wednesday evening excitement. Brown Owl has something special to say. She is talking about history. First she talks about the history of the Girl Guide Movement and how the Brownies came into being, then about how each Brownie has her own little history, special to her. She wants them all to go home and come next week with their own personal family histories. They are to ask their mothers and fathers and grandpas and grandmas and aunts and uncles and anyone at all related to them, ask them to write down when they were born and married and how many children they had, and with all this information they are to make their own family trees. It will be fun, it will be instructive.

  One of the Brownies, Margaret, can hardly wait to get home. She is such a keen child, keen at school, keen at Brownies. She goes straight into her home and begins asking for names and dates, pencil poised, sheet of paper ready. Her mother, Lilian, likes to see her children keen to learn and is only too pleased, at first, to cooperate. She gives Margaret her own birth date and her sisters’, their marriage details, and she shows her daughter how to set all this out. She gives her husband Arthur’s dates and those of his parents and his brother’s and his brother’s wife’s, and now the tree is filling up, it is as complete as Lilian can help to make it. But not enough for the keen-eyed Margaret. ‘Your mother’s dates,’ says the child. ‘I’ve got those, but not her mother’s. Who was she?’ ‘We’ve done enough,’ Lilian said, ‘time for bed.’

  The following week, Margaret takes her family tree to Brownies. She has more names and dates on her sheet of paper than anyone else, far more, and all so neatly set out. Brown Owl’s brother is with her that evening and is most impressed. He is at university and is studying History and Brown Owl has brought him along to tell the Brownies why history is important and how they are all part of it. Only Margaret pays much attention and Brown Owl’s brother is most gratified. He looks closely at this keen child’s family tree. She points out the gap, where she has been unable to put the names of any maternal great-grandparents. She says her mother doesn’t know who they were. Brown Owl’s brother says if she likes he’ll come home with her and help her mother find out, tell her how she might trace these ancestors. Margaret is thrilled. She dances into the house with Brown Owl’s gawky brother rather sheepishly following her. Lilian is, as usual, polite. She listens to what Brown Owl’s brother has to say about parish registers and so forth, but then becomes distant, rather aloof and cold. She thanks the young man but says that really she would prefer not to carry out any investigation into her mother’s background. A howl of protest from Margaret, but Brown Owl’s brother blushes and leaves.

  That is the end of that. For the time being.

  Four fragments, full of facts but full of hearsay too, the very stuff of family history. Over and over again we get told stories by our parents and grandparents, and sometimes, if these stories are treated seriously and checked, that is all they turn out to be – stories, unsubstantiated and often downright contradicted by the actual evidence in records. But sometimes beneath the stories lurks the history of more than an ordinary person. Sometimes their story is the story of thousands.

  My grandmother’s story seems to me representative in that kind of way. When my mother died, in 1981, I felt freed from the taboo she’d placed on any attempt to unravel the background of Margaret Ann. I could hardly believe that she had never insisted on knowing the identity of her mother’s visitor. Surely, once her immediate distress was over, she could have been asked? But no. My mother was too afraid of the truth. My grandmother’s birth certificate, easy enough to obtain, told a familiar, sad little tale: she was the illegitimate daughter of a servant girl. How pathetic, I thought, that all the mystery was just to hide this banal fact. How ordinary, how disappointing.

  But then I began to think about the various stories handed down. Who was the woman in the car, the woman in black, who came to visit my grandmother not long before she died? What news did she bring? And who was that other woman, the one who turned up on the day of my grandmother’s funeral claiming to be her other daughter? Why did my grandmother give the impression she was from the Newcastle area when she was born in Carlisle? No wonder Brown Owl’s brother was shown the door… What puzzles to solve, what secrets to reveal. How little I really knew of my maternal grandmother and how much I suddenly wanted to know, becoming convinced that her history was somehow essential to understand better not simply my own but that of a whole generation of working-class women (and perhaps of a great many middle-class women too, those who may have had the means and education to be independent but who believed their marital duty was to put their family first).

  MARGARET ANN 1869–1936

  I

  I hadn’t known the name of my maternal great-grandmother, but once I did I thought that might be all I ever would manage to find out. Annie Jordan, the nineteen-year-old who gave birth to her illegitimate daughter on Boxing Day 1869, was and remains almost totally obscure. There is her daughter’s birth certificate, some census information and her death certificate and that is that. My grandmother was lucky to be born at all. The local paper in Carlisle was full, at that time, of pitiful stories describing how unmarried servant girls tried first to conceal their pregnancies and then, when their babies were born, delivered without assistance, to kill them.

  The same month Annie Jordan gave birth there was an inquest in Carlisle on the body of a baby found ‘in the river Eden, among the branches between the bank of the river and some old weiring. A sod was laid upon it… a woman was seen near the place where the child was found, leaning against some railings, apparently in distress and crying.’ The woman was arrested and when it was discovered she was the mother of the dead baby she was sent to prison for six months. Annie Jordan could so easily have bee
n driven to that solution or else to giving birth in her place of employment, as Sarah Potts did a few weeks later. Her employer ‘had occasion to go into Sarah’s bedroom on Saturday morning and observed marks which induced her to believe a child had been delivered. On searching the room she found the child in the chamber-pot.’ Meanwhile, Sarah was scrubbing the kitchen flagstones, busy pretending nothing had happened.

  But young Annie had her child and kept her and had her christened and managed to continue working until in 1871 she became ill and died in five days of ‘epilepsia convulsions, delirium tremens’. She died on 18 December, eight days before her daughter Margaret Ann’s second birthday. On her death certificate she is described as the widow of Joseph Jordan, a butcher, whereas on her daughter’s birth certificate no husband or father of her child is cited. There is no trace of any marriage between Annie and Joseph even though she used his surname (her own was Roscow). Joseph Jordan, whose widow she claimed to be, had died, aged twenty-three, the year before, soon after Margaret Ann’s birth. But though there is no evidence of any marriage, Annie was buried in the same grave as Joseph so their union was recognized by their families.

  Pointless to hope to find out any more about poor insignificant Annie, about what she looked like, what kind of personality she had, but not pointless or hopeless trying to piece together the sort of life she led. Carlisle, in 1869, the year Annie gave birth to her only child, was still a small, compact city, easy to imagine and reconstruct. It had always been from Roman times a frontier settlement which, from the reign of Henry I, gradually became a city of importance in the North. A castle was built, a mint established, a priory and cathedral endowed and a town charter granted. But Carlisle’s most important function remained a military one – it was a city constantly filled with soldiers to keep the Scots at bay. The needs of this permanent garrison stimulated trade and by the end of the thirteenth century Carlisle was the centre of the textile trade in Cumberland, so that later, much later, when the industrial revolution began, Carlisle was perfectly placed to become the fourth most important textile-producing city in the whole of England. The medieval city within its walls remained much the same but without them the change was dramatic. Annie Jordan’s short life spanned the middle period of that change.

  At the very beginning of the nineteenth century all that caught the eye of anyone standing on the city walls and looking west was a general emptiness, the lack of any significant landmark or building. Coming out of the walled city in this direction a bridge crossed the river Caldew, and then beyond there were meadows and an open stream, Dow Beck, running down the wide, cobbled road, Church Street, which led eventually to the sea. Edward I was carried along it to his lonely death out on Burgh marsh, and Robert the Bruce had made his camp here while he contemplated attacking the castle. The city stopped at Caldew Bridge and what lay beyond was of no importance compared with the lives lived in the elegant houses near the cathedral. This outer district was called Caldewgate, a poor district. Into it the Irish and the Scots flocked, looking for work and, as the century progressed, finding it in the mills which had suddenly mushroomed. The water of the Caldew was found to be excellent for use in the textile trade and by 1850, when Annie Jordan was born, Caldewgate had become an industrial suburb. Now, anyone standing on the city walls and looking west saw huge chimneys and factories and scores of houses crammed together.

  There were four printed-cotton works in Caldewgate, a soap boilery, tanneries and breweries, and factories where hats and whips and fish hooks were made. The Dixon family had built a huge factory on the banks of the Caldew (with a chimney said to be the highest in England) and the Carr family, who made biscuits, another on the other side of Caldewgate. But what had changed the area most from being open meadows and marshland to having every square yard filled with houses or factories was the coming of the railway lines running through it. The Carlisle to Newcastle line opened in 1838, the track running under the city walls alongside the river Caldew, and every year after that it seemed another railway company entered Carlisle, and Caldewgate was scarred even more by their lines. The noise and filth of the trains added to the noise and filth of the factories made the district ugly and unhealthy.

  Annie Jordan lived in the middle of it. Her mother Mary ran one of the many public houses in Caldewgate. The Carlisle Relief Committee, founded in 1862, worried about the all too visible poverty in the district. Conditions required soup-kitchens to be set up with monotonous regularity to cope with the larger than usual influx of migrant workers. Annie’s mother, as a publican, benefited from these workers – they drank themselves silly. Beer was cheap and so was gin. Every street in Caldewgate had at least one pub – Mary’s was the Royal Oak in Church Street – and all the city’s breweries were in this one district. Annie’s ‘husband’s’ family, the Jordans, were publicans too. Thomas Jordan, Joseph’s father, ran the Queen’s Head, also in Church Street, but he had another trade, he was a butcher. Caldewgate was almost as full of butchers as publicans, with half the animals butchered coming from across the border with Scotland, captured in dawn raids. There was a flat area of land, a sort of island off the banks of the river Eden, called the Sands where cattle and sheep were auctioned. Before the animals were slaughtered the butchers who had bought them would graze them on what was left of Caldewgate’s meadows. Meat was big business. Carlisle was full of meat markets, whole streets given over to different animals. There were other markets – Carlisle was after all a market town even before it became anything else – but nothing compared with the sale of meat. The butchers had rows of lock-up stalls, called shambles, in the area known as Rickergate, where the slaughterhouses and pigsties were mixed in with the houses, making the district even poorer and less salubrious than Caldewgate.

  Annie had her baby not in her mother’s pub, nor in the pub where she worked as a domestic servant, but in the house of one of her husband’s family. Straight afterwards she went to live in West Walls – described by one observer as ‘broken down in places and crumbling away and almost disgusting with filth’. She lived at number 19 three months after her daughter’s birth, when she was christened, but by 1871, when there was a census, she was back outside the city walls in Caldewgate, living with her mother and two sisters. When she died at the end of that year she hadn’t moved more than a few hundred yards from where she had been born. The same can still be said for many of the population of Carlisle.

  All Annie left behind her was her baby Margaret Ann, aged two. From 1871 to 1893 this baby, my grandmother, disappears from all records. But she, unlike her mother, can be clearly identified and described even if there are gaps, gaps she went to great lengths to keep empty. During her lifetime she managed to conceal everything she wished to conceal. After her death not all her secrets have remained secret.

  There is only so much that can be done when trying to find out what happened to an obscure two-year-old child in the late nineteenth century. The records are meagre. School registers rarely survive, if they were kept at all, and school logbooks, though they do contain names of individual pupils, seldom list entire classes. The best bet for this kind of search are census returns, especially if an exact locality is known. But Margaret Ann Jordan, though born in Caldewgate and baptized at St Mary’s, does not exist in the census for 1871, when she would have been sixteen months old (the census was in April). There are four under-two-year-old Margarets in that census for Caldewgate and one Margaret Ann. She is registered as the daughter of Walter and Elizabeth Graham, who lived at 16 Bridge Street, next door to number 18, where Annie, my Margaret Ann’s mother, died. Was her child already living next door with the Grahams and so became part of their family when, a few months later, Annie died? Perfectly possible, even likely, but no proof at all.

  In the 1881 census the position is the same: no eleven-year-old Margaret Ann Jordan in Caldewgate or anywhere in Carlisle. In the 1891 census still no Jordan but Margaret Ann Graham turns up as resident servant to the Stephenson family at 4 Paternoster
Row, a smart street directly beside the cathedral. This is the family my grandmother said she began working for in 1893 and the house from which she was married in 1899. This, in fact, is where she allowed her own history to begin. How curious that she must therefore have taken over from a young woman her exact age and with her Christian names. Curious, but also acceptable as coincidental. And there is still my grandmother’s only bit of information given to her daughters that she was from the Newcastle area.

  One sister, Nan, was still very much alive and alert when my mother died and I began this search. I showed her Margaret Ann’s birth certificate and she was shocked. It wasn’t the proof of Margaret Ann’s illegitimacy which shocked her – though it did – so much as the evidence that she was born in Caldewgate. Nan and her sisters really had believed their mother was from the Newcastle area. But maybe she was. Maybe the infant Margaret Ann was taken to relatives in the Newcastle area and brought up by them, returning to Carlisle only at the age of twenty-two.

  Newcastle even then was bigger than Carlisle, but not so large that its census returns are too enormous to search. Plenty of Jordans in the Newcastle area and many of them involved in the pub trade, the same as in Carlisle. But no Margaret Ann Jordan in the whole of the census returns for 1871, 1881, or 1891. Was she concealed at every census? Or simply forgotten about? Possible with a child under two, virtually impossible for a girl of eleven or a woman of twenty-one to be omitted. Was she always travelling during each census? Highly unlikely. Whatever the case, my grandmother, whether living under a different name, or miraculously escaping detection, or being in neither Carlisle nor Newcastle (though when she travelled to Scotland at the age of sixty she said Newcastle was the furthest she’d ever been before), simply disappears for twenty years.