by Beezy Marsh
Her Father’s Daughter
BEEZY MARSH
Contents
Introduction
Prologue: Kitty: Newcastle upon Tyne, August 1911
1. Annie: Acton, May 1940
2. Annie: Acton, May 1940
3. Annie: Acton, June 1940
4. Annie: Acton, June 1940
5. Annie: Acton, September 1940
6. Annie: Acton, October 1940
7. Annie: Acton, November 1940
8. Kitty: Newcastle upon Tyne, May 1916
9. Kitty: Newcastle upon Tyne, September 1916
10. Harry: Cambrai, France, 30th November 1917
11. Kitty: Newcastle upon Tyne, December 1917
12. Annie: Acton, October 1942
13. Annie: Acton, May 1943
14. Ethel: Newcastle upon Tyne, June 1923
15. Ethel: Newcastle upon Tyne, January 1924
16. Ethel: Newcastle upon Tyne, May 1926
17. Ethel: Clapham, March 1929
18. Ethel: Clapham, November 1929
19. Ethel: Clapham, January 1930
20. Ethel: Clapham, August 1932
21. Harry: King’s Cross, February 1933
22. Kitty: Newcastle, March 1910
23. Kitty: Newcastle upon Tyne, July 1910
24. Kitty: Newcastle upon Tyne, Monday, 8th August 1910
25. Annie: Acton, June 1944
26. Annie: Acton, May 1945
27. Ethel: Clapham, May 1945
28. Annie: Acton, January 1946
29. Annie: Acton, February 1952
Epilogue: Kitty: Newcastle upon Tyne, April 1979
Author’s Note
Acknowledgements
For my family
‘There is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind’
– Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 1929
Introduction
As the storm clouds of war gathered over Britain in the late 1930s, working-class families braced themselves to make more sacrifices.
Brothers, husbands and fathers had been lost on the fields of France and Flanders in ‘the war to end all wars’ of 1914–18, but now another generation readied itself to take up arms to defend the nation.
Those lucky enough to survive the First World War had returned to battles on the home front: the daily struggle to make ends meet, the fight against deadly diseases with no money to pay for medical care, and the reality of life on the dole or on the breadline throughout the hungry years of the 1920s and 1930s.
Yet through it all, against the odds, families survived.
Children thrived, women coped, and people made the best of it. The turbulent years between the wars saw huge social changes and upheaval, with mass unemployment, marches and strikes as unions fought for better pay and conditions. Working-class men and women gained the vote for the first time. It was inconceivable to many ordinary folk that they now had their say at the ballot box but there was no turning back. However, many would grumble that the vote didn’t put bread on the table or mend the holes in their kids’ shoes.
For most women, day-to-day life went on much as it had done for their mothers and grandmothers. Keeping the family clothed, clean, fed and healthy was a full-time and gruelling job. It was a thankless task, but it was done with love and the support of an extended network of aunts, cousins, grannies and neighbours, who were there to provide a listening ear, words of comfort or just a nice cup of tea when the going got rough. Hopes were brewed, poured and sipped at in Britain’s sculleries, as they had been for generations.
The old adage that kindness cost nothing was woven into the very fabric of the clothes that were knitted and sewn and mended by the hearth, in the failing light of gas lamps. All life’s troubles were scrubbed away at the washboard and run through the mangle in the back yard before being hung out to dry in the alley in the cold light of day, because all the neighbours knew your business anyway.
In the cramped rows of two-up, two-downs, the spirit of community was forged in the pit of poverty and despair.
This is the true story of a family who lived through these trying times and their journey through the first half of the twentieth century, which tested the mettle of the entire nation.
Annie, calm, kind, accepting of her lot, was like so many other working-class women, mothers and wives. She was raised in Soapsud Island, the close-knit community of London’s laundries, and her expectations extended little beyond the washtubs where she worked from the tender age of twelve to earn her keep.
Her mother, Emma, a respected and highly skilled silk ironer, kept a secret from Annie to spare her the shame of a choice she’d made in the grief of widowhood when Annie was just a baby. Annie and her brother George grew up believing their father had died a hero in the First World War. But after Annie discovered the truth about George’s parentage, which is revealed in the prequel to this book, All My Mother’s Secrets, she began to understand why her mother had lived a lie. The bonds between them were strengthened by the half-truths told in order to survive in a world which judged women harshly. Annie vowed to keep the shocking truth from her brother George, just as her mother had done.
She accepted, as so many did, that some secrets are kept for a reason; some secrets must never be told.
Her mother Emma got married for a second time, to laundry hand Bill, and they had two daughters, who Annie helped raise from the age of fifteen, as well as working all the hours she could. She was selfless and single until her mid-thirties, when she fell in love with their lodger, Harry. On the eve of the Second World War, Annie married Harry, a dependable union representative from the local factory, and all her dreams of starting a family of her own began to come true.
She was in awe of Harry, who was eight years her senior, taciturn, political, well read but strangely reluctant to talk about his upbringing in the Northern powerhouse of Newcastle, where coal and shipbuilding were king. Harry received letters from his sister, Kitty, a mysterious and forthright woman who worked as a journalist at a time when women simply did not do such things, but Harry never invited her to stay.
When war came to their doorstep with the harsh reality of the Blitz, the world as they knew it was turned upside down and the past came back to haunt Harry and threaten Annie’s happiness.
This is their true story, of loss and hope, of enduring love and the unshakeable bonds that bind generations through all life’s hurts. It is one of secrets and lies and the will to survive.
It is the true story of a family facing extraordinary choices to keep living ordinary lives in a world where nothing would ever be the same again.
Prologue
Kitty
Newcastle upon Tyne, August 1911
Kitty had got used to the sound of crying in the house since her father had gone.
Mum made no attempt to hide her sobbing and most evenings, as she sat in her armchair in the parlour, she’d put down her sewing and let grief wash over her.
Kitty would go to her then, knowing that words were useless because nothing could bring him back. The clock on the mantelpiece would strike nine and then ten but their loss had no respect for seconds or minutes or hours. They were caught by it, suspended like flies in amber.
The cries coming from upstairs grew louder, but it was too early for Mum to be back from work.
Kitty hesitated for a split second on the stairs, catching sight of her reflection in the hallway mirror. She’d glanced at herself hundreds of times going up and down those stairs in all the years they’d lived in Lily Avenue. It had been her little secret before she went to school, checking if her collar was straight and her unruly auburn hair tied neatly with a velvet ribbon, just the way the teacher liked it.
&nbs
p; So much had changed in the past year. She didn’t care one jot what she looked like these days. People stared at her and so she’d got used to staring back at them, almost daring them to mention her father’s name.
She’d reached the top of the stairs now. The sobbing was coming from her little brother Harry’s room. Kitty pushed open the bedroom door and Harry looked up at her, grey eyes filled with shame and anger, his lip cut and bleeding and a livid purple bruise darkening on his cheek. ‘I don’t want you to see me like this, Kit,’ he howled, hurling himself face down on the bed. ‘Just leave me alone, will you?’
She ran to him and kneeled at his side, watching his shoulders heave with each sob. The back of his shirt was streaked with dirt where he’d been knocked to the ground.
‘I promised Dad before he went: I won’t leave you ever, so don’t be a soft lad and keep asking me to go,’ she said, fighting back tears of her own. ‘Who did this to you? Was it the Jesmond Dene gang again, that bunch of layabouts?’
He turned his face to the wall and her hand found his. He didn’t speak but he clasped her fingers tightly, just as he had the first time she’d held him, when he was just a baby.
‘It’s you and me, Harry, against all of them,’ she whispered. ‘We’re family, don’t ever forget that.’
1
Annie
Acton, May 1940
Night, when it fell in London, was as dark as it had been in the years Annie spent as a child at her aunt’s farm in Suffolk, with only the stars and the moon to guide her home from the fields.
But there was no thrill in looking up at the twinkling blanket overhead these days, just the fear of what might be coming their way from Germany. Even the sound of footsteps approaching in the gloom of the terraced streets that she knew so well made her nervous. Then there were the lamp posts to contend with. Her stepdad, Bill, had got himself a proper shiner when he’d walked slap bang into one the other night on the way home from the pub.
He’d blamed Hitler, of course, but most folks managed to spot the white stripes that the Air Raid Precautions’ wardens had carefully painted on the posts at waist height to help guide people home in the blackout. You couldn’t blame him for having a drink or three; poor Bill, he was too old to fight, and he was scared out of his wits by the fear of invasion.
Mum joked that he’d wage a war of words fierce enough to defeat Jerry and he was keeping an old shillelagh under the bed ‘just in case’. They never spoke about the real reason he’d hit the bottle – he was worried sick about the strain of the war on Mum’s heart. She’d given them all a few scares and the doctors had warned her not to overdo it, but Mum soldiered on regardless.
Annie pulled the sides of her coat together against the chill of the night air. She couldn’t fasten it any more. She was seven months gone now and with every passing day she felt more like one of the floppy, grey barrage balloons bobbing about on wires above the depot at Acton station. The baby kicked, and she patted her belly and whispered, ‘We’ll be home soon, don’t you worry.’
She’d only popped out to take Mum some tea, but they’d spent ages in the scullery, nattering over a cuppa that was as weak as dishwater but warming nonetheless, so you couldn’t grumble, really. She didn’t like leaving Mum on her own too much while Bill was out down the boozer, and with her old man Harry out at the Air Raid Precautions’ station with all the other wardens, she was glad of the company, even if it meant a short walk home alone in the dark.
Besides, her youngest half-sister Elsie had clocked off at the cardboard-box factory and gone off dancing up in the West End again, which was giving Mum more grey hairs.
‘I don’t know what’s got into her lately,’ Mum had confided, as she fried a solitary egg on the range. ‘All she talks about is the dances these days. She used to be such a sensible girl. It’s like the world’s turned upside down with this fighting. At least Ivy’s already turned in. I don’t have to worry about her.’
Ivy was Elsie’s older sister and she was keen on her beauty sleep these days, having just accepted a proposal of engagement from Charlie, a local painter and decorator. Ivy was always more sensible than Elsie, planning carefully for the future, but when the pair of them got together they were still as thick as thieves and neither was averse to making a bit of mischief at Annie’s expense, just as they had done when she was helping to raise them. Annie was fifteen when Ivy was born, because Mum had remarried during the First World War, so both the girls treated Annie as more of a mother than a sister. Annie’s dad had died long before then, when she was just a baby, and it was no secret that she and Bill had never quite seen eye to eye. Bill doted on his daughters and it was as plain as the nose on his face that Annie was second best in his eyes, but he’d mellowed with age and Annie, well, she was kind and forgiving to a fault. She knew Bill worshipped the ground that Mum walked on and that was enough for her, even if he did like to pinch all the best bits of bacon for himself. Mum slid the egg onto one of her best blue and white china plates with great care, offering it to her daughter.
Annie looked up at her mother’s careworn face. ‘Bill will want this for his breakfast, won’t he?’
Eggs had been scarce since food rationing had started a few months ago but Mum always seemed to find some little extra morsel to feed her.
‘Well, what he don’t know about can’t hurt him,’ she said, tapping the side of her nose conspiratorially. ‘I hid it behind the cod liver oil in the larder because he can’t abide the stuff, so I knew it would be safe there. And anyway, you’re carrying my grandchild. Your need is greater than his.’
He’d been grumbling about anything and everything since war broke out and Annie got the impression he was getting on Mum’s nerves a lot. The house was a smart three-bedroomed terrace in Grove Road, just off Acton High Street, and the yard out the back had a strip of garden wide enough for Bill to dig down and install an Anderson shelter. Of course, he moaned he’d put his back out doing it.
Annie balanced the plate on her knees as Mum offered her a crust of bread to dip in the runny yolk, which was the best bit. She was constantly hungry with this baby growing inside her. She’d spent the first four months barely able to keep anything down but since the morning sickness had stopped, she’d been ravenous. She tried her best not to think about it when she went to bed hungry, because it seemed a bit unpatriotic to complain when there was a war on.
It wasn’t a case of starving on rations – she went along with her coupons to the butcher’s and the grocer’s like everyone else and she was allowed to go to the front of the queue because she was in the family way. Harry always made sure she had the biggest cuts of meat and the most potatoes, because he could get extra to eat down at the ARP centre on the night-shift.
Anyway, it seemed to make Mum feel better to feed her up a bit.
It was so cosy in the scullery at her mum’s with the wireless tuned in to the BBC, which was playing cheery songs from the varieties up North tonight. The front room had a couple of nice armchairs in it but they were covered with sheets unless they had company – and by that Mum meant the vicar – so that room was kept for best. Mum always had one ear out for any broadcasts about the forces and when the news was on, the world stood still and you could hear a pin drop.
Finishing up the last of her egg, Annie spotted Mum holding a letter between trembling fingers. ‘Is it another one from George?’
Mum nodded solemnly. Annie’s younger brother George had been among the first to volunteer for active service when war had been declared and was over in France, with the British Expeditionary Force. He was a despatch rider for Lord Gort, the head of the whole army.
George wrote home regular as clockwork, but of course he couldn’t say too much, other than that the French food wasn’t a patch on his mum’s cooking and so on. Mum had got quite a collection of letters together and they took pride of place on the mantelpiece over the range in the scullery during the day, next to a picture of him in his uniform, and then they were c
arried up to bed, with a candle, to be pored over once more before she went to sleep at night.
‘Well,’ said Annie brightly, ‘what’s the latest? I bet he’s having the time of his life with all the French girls! Ooh la la!’
It was a running joke between her and Mum that George would come swanning in one day in his khakis with a raven-haired mademoiselle on his arm and walk her up the aisle in Acton, which would really set tongues wagging. But Mum didn’t laugh at the joke like she normally did.
‘He says they’re on the move again but there’s something up,’ she said, her eyes flickering across the page. ‘I can feel it in my water. It’s as if he’s saying goodbye.’
Annie stood up, heaving herself out of the chair, and went to her mother’s side. ‘What do you mean?’
‘It’s right here, plain as the nose on your face,’ said Mum. ‘He’s signed off differently, look.’
Annie read her brother’s words: Take care, kiss Annie for me, and the baby when it comes. I will always be your George. I hope I can make you proud . . .
Annie reached over and untied the bundle of letters on the mantelpiece. ‘But he always says “take care” and mentions the baby!’ she said. ‘Don’t upset yourself over nothing.’
‘I just know he’s in danger,’ said Mum, clutching at her chest for an instant as the colour drained from her face. ‘You’ll understand when you’ve had the baby. It’s a mother’s instinct.’
‘But, Mum,’ said Annie, ‘all the newspapers have been full of stories about our boys going off to Belgium and being welcomed like heroes! People have been chucking flowers at them. We’ve got the Germans on the run.’
Mum just shook her head. It had taken another cup of tea and a slug of brandy from the cupboard under the stairs to calm her down after that and Annie couldn’t help noticing the tears in her mum’s eyes when she left.
Annie hurried on past the shops of Churchfield Road, their blinds drawn, sandbags piled high under the windowsills. It took a while for her eyes to get used to the dark, but the moon was out tonight and that helped light the way. Her younger half-sister Elsie had been hankering after a set of buttons for her coat which would glow in the dark and all the newspapers were telling people to wear white to make it easier to be spotted. That was all very well, but white clothes got dirty so quickly and what with cleaning and shopping and all the rest of it, that just wasn’t practical. And in any case, who had the money to buy a new white dress or a skirt? Only the posh folk, that was for sure.
