by Beezy Marsh
Dad told Harry to strive to be honest and to lead a good life, and Kitty watched as her brother nodded, understanding that these would be the last words he would hear from the man who had raised him. He crumpled in her arms, like a broken doll.
To Mum, he said, ‘I will burn your letters and make an end of it all, just as I promised. I love you, always.’
After just half an hour, they were told their time was up and they had to leave. Dad waved at them and blew kisses, with tears running down his face, as they were ushered out of the room and that was the last Kitty saw of her father.
The clock on the mantelpiece hadn’t been wound for over a week, so it couldn’t strike the hour of the execution at eight o’clock the following morning.
It seemed almost unfathomable that five months ago they were just a family from Newcastle. Now they were notorious, and Dad would meet his fate at the end of the hangman’s noose.
Time passed.
THE NORTHERN ECHO
Wednesday, 10th August 1910
Alternate light and shadow prevailed yesterday when morning dawned on the day of John Alexander Dickman’s execution and for some it seemed uncertain whether the day would be fine or wet.
The air was cold and raw, but this did not deter people from assembling at a very early hour in Carliol Square to gaze at the gaunt walls of the prison. Policemen were on duty and the front of the prison was kept clear, although at other points people were allowed to assemble and, fully, a thousand were present at the appointed hour.
Extraordinary precautions had been taken to ensure privacy and in front of the scaffold a huge canvas screen had been stretched to shut out the view from an adjacent school roof once used by an enterprising reporter. Even the doors of the trap had been padded so that in falling they would not make a noise loud enough to be heard outside the walls, although in this the authorities were not absolutely successful.
There had been nothing to see for a long time so the arrival on foot of the prison governor and prison doctor was itself quite an event.
The clock in St Anne’s steeple, with its harsh bells, began first to chime the hour and before it had concluded the prison clock struck eight with a haste that was almost unseemly. St Nicholas was the last to take up the chorus, the Canterbury chime preluding Big Ben’s solemn striking of the hour. Hardly had the last gong sounded before a slight thud was distinctly heard by several assembled outside. There was some doubt as to whether this was actually the noise of the falling trap, but corroboration was afterwards forthcoming in the fact that the execution was really about half a minute late.
People began to parade in front of the prison and took increasing interest in a placard posted there, headed ‘Capital Punishment Amendment Act, 1868’ and declaring that the sentence of the law passed on John Alexander Dickman, found guilty of wilful murder, would be carried into execution at eight o’clock.
At 8.30, a warder removed the notice and substituted ten minutes later two others. One issued by the governor, who certified that ‘judgement of death was this day executed on John Alexander Dickman at His Majesty’s Prison in Newcastle and the other by the surgeon, stated that he had examined the body and certified that the man was dead.
It is understood that the prisoner slept well and arose from his bed before seven o’clock. He had bread and butter for breakfast. The prison chaplain waited on him and urged him to confess the truth but to this request, the prisoner made no reply. He did not, as expected, declare his innocence on the scaffold and from the moment his cell was opened for the executioner, Ellis, and his assistant, Dickman never spoke a word. He braced himself up to meet the executioners and arose to his feet on their entrance. He was apparently calmly awaiting the end and submitted passively to the process of having his arms pinned behind his back.
The chaplain, reading the burial service, headed the procession to the scaffold, where Dickman met his death unflinchingly and calmly.
It is stated that in his last letter to his wife, Dickman repeated his statement to her that he felt certain that some day all would be made clear.
‘I can only repeat that I am innocent,’ he concluded.
25
Annie
Acton, June 1944
The silence when the doodlebugs’ engines cut out overhead was the most terrifying thing in Annie’s world.
You’d hear them before you saw them, the horrid metal beasts with wings, as they soared into the skies above Acton making a noise like a lorry zooming along. The whole world stood still when they fell silent and people craned their necks to follow each bomb’s dreadful downward path.
Annie stood in the back yard, with baby Patricia in her arms and little Anita playing with her doll at her feet, as the doodlebug appeared in a clear summer’s sky, its engine sputtering. John, thank God, was under the table in the kitchen with his toy cars. Time stood still.
‘Dear God, no!’ she screamed, watching frozen in terror as it sailed silently above them. ‘Please, not us!’
‘Mummy!’ her little girl cried, clutching at her legs.
Just a few precious seconds saved their lives, as the bomb fell not on them but on some poor souls a few streets away, and as the boom of the explosion reverberated, Annie dropped to her knees in shock, making a grab for Anita and holding the baby close.
This time they had been lucky, but she knew that for some of the other residents of Acton, that fine summer’s day may well have been their last.
At least half a dozen V1 bombs had fallen on the town in recent weeks and in one of the most terrible tragedies, a bus full of people was hit. Harry had tried to spare her the worst of the details but, ever since Vera had died a year ago and it had seemed they were drifting apart, he’d agreed to tell her the truth about what he was dealing with as an air-raid warden. Just being able to talk, even if he told her very little about the awful things he saw in the aftermath of the bombings, had brought Harry back to her.
She’d made him promise not to bottle things up any more. It was never going to be easy. He wasn’t a big talker, but in the dark of the blackout, he seemed to find the courage to share his feelings and, little by little, his thoughts wandered from the devastation of the air raids to the battlefields of France and Flanders.
At first, he was full of apologies, as he clammed up and his hands started to shake.
‘Please, Annie,’ he said, turning to face the wall, ‘I don’t want you to see me like this. I can’t bear to be weak. That’s not right for a man.’
‘It’s not weak to tell me about the things that are troubling you,’ she soothed. ‘We are married for better and for worse and I’m here for you, Harry.’
Some memories were just a blur, but she understood now how he had been little more than a boy when he had gone away to war and had returned, like so many others, haunted by nightmares of what he’d seen, suffering shell shock.
‘I lost my father when I was just turning thirteen, so it was harder for everyone when I went away to the war,’ he said, his voice little more than a whisper. ‘They needed my wage and when I came back, I wasn’t fit to work for a long time. Kitty helped me get better. She just had a way of calming me down, of talking sense into me.’
Annie made a little murmur of understanding. She didn’t like to push him to talk about Kitty, because she still hadn’t met his sister, and it seemed to upset him so much to suggest it. She often watched him reading his sister’s letters, wondering what news was being shared, but he always kept them closely guarded, locked away in the little tea chest, and the key was kept in his jacket pocket. There had been times when he was having a nap that she’d been tempted to take that key and have a little look but then she’d thought better of it. A husband had to trust his wife and she wasn’t about to let him down.
‘What happened to your dad?’ said Annie.
There was a long pause and then Harry said, ‘He died, and it was sudden, very sudden, and a big shock to all of us. I don’t think any of us have ever got over it.
’
‘I understand,’ said Annie, who’d never known her father because he’d died when she was just a baby. Some wounds were just too raw and time would never heal them. She was sure Harry would talk about the memories of his father when he was ready to but for now, she was just grateful that he was sharing some feelings with her because it brought them closer.
He went on: ‘I wanted to go away to war, to fight, to make my family proud of me but, God knows, I was terrified most days and once you were there, there was no going back. Some days, it seemed you were going to get a bullet either way because the deserters got shot at dawn and the rest of us then got blown to bits on the battlefield. I envied the dead because at least they had some peace.
‘My horse, Domino, kept me going. That dumb animal was so faithful, he’d have followed me through the gates of hell if I’d asked him to. And in some ways, Annie, I did.’
He turned on his side to face the wall and she knew he was crying. She put her hand on his back to offer some comfort.
‘When the bombs started dropping on us here, I wanted to help, there was no question of it,’ he said, his voice muffled. ‘But it brought it all back and I started to see things and hear things, every time I shut my eyes. I’ve been afraid, Annie, afraid I would lose my mind.’
‘You won’t ever do that,’ she said.
He turned to her and she traced the line of his cheek with her fingers.
‘You don’t know that. A man can lose his mind and not get it back. The nightmares start creeping into everything. I’m scared, Annie. There’s so much more I want to tell you but I can’t, I can’t.’
‘Shh, don’t upset yourself,’ she said, hugging him so tightly, and they kissed.
‘Let me be here for you, Harry,’ she said. ‘We have so much to look forward to in this life. You just have to trust me. The past is gone and we will get through this war, we cannot give up on that, and we can’t give up on each other either.’
Not long after the New Year of 1944 she’d given birth to their third child, a little girl who had a mop of black curls. She hadn’t enjoyed the pregnancy as much as the others because of the guilt she felt when she jumped the queue for rations with her special green book, which was given to mothers when they were expecting. People had been going without for so long now, it was just an accepted part of life, to get your coupons for butter, bacon, eggs and so on. Pregnant women had the first choice of fruit at the grocer’s, as well as double rations of eggs and a full pint of milk a day. But Annie hated to feel like she was getting special treatment because they were all in this together as a community.
After baby Patricia had come along in January, they’d moved into a new flat in Horn Lane, just a few streets away from her mum’s in Grove Road. With the three little ones it was getting crowded in their old place and this was more spacious than anything Annie could ever have dreamed of. She’d put by as much as she could from her stint of war work and Harry had been saving hard so they could afford it. These days, they tended to stay there during raids, even with the threat of the flying bombs, because people had got tired of all the discomfort of the air-raid shelters night after night.
Annie had got used to gathering the kids and huddling under the kitchen table and saying her prayers. Harry would have preferred her to go to one of the shelters – even the public ones – but she just felt, after Vera had died, that if a bomb was going to drop, there wasn’t much you could do about it. It was strange how many people felt that way after nearly five long years of war.
Their flat was the upstairs rooms above the United Dairies shop and once you came in through the front door, there was a black and white tiled passageway down to the kitchen, which overlooked a yard where a haulage firm parked its lorries. It was home, so Annie didn’t mind. She just put some curtains up at the window to make it prettier.
They had to share the indoor lavvy with the fella who ran the shop, who was nice enough, but he could come in and out of the hallway through a door which was locked from his side when he needed to. Apart from that, the rest of the place was theirs and it had three bedrooms, which was like living in a palace as far as Annie was concerned. There was an inside bathroom, gas laid on to cook with and a boiler for the hot water.
They had a sitting room too, with a radiogram in it. Harry loved nothing more than to relax in there after work, in an easy chair he’d picked up down the second-hand shop in South Acton for next to nothing, and listen to the BBC World Service.
Most days she’d spend the morning doing the housework and then she’d take a daily trip out to the shops before heading down to her mum’s in Grove Road. Today she stopped to buy Anita a carrot on a stick for a penny – the poor little mite had never even seen a lollipop because sweets were on the ration. She was pushing the pram with the two youngest in it and Anita walking alongside down Churchfield Road when she caught sight of Dennis, her old boss from the Acton Works. She hadn’t seen him since she left before she had Patricia and he had barely spoken to her once he saw she was in the family way, in any case.
Now he blushed and pretended not to see her, turning his head to gaze into a shop window as she passed. There was something faintly odd about the way he did that; he couldn’t even look her in the eye, which made him seem rather shifty. It wasn’t as if anything had happened between them, other than that silly dance, but being around him when she and Harry were having problems had been a real comfort to her – she accepted that, with a pang of guilt. Perhaps he had felt it too and had expected more and she’d led him on? She had never crossed the line with him but it could have happened, she knew that, and she might well have enjoyed it; the war had seen plenty of people having affairs. There was a live-for-today attitude, and with women spending more time in the pub, and with husbands away overseas, it gave them more opportunity to stray if they wanted to.
But that had never been Annie’s intention. She’d just wanted to feel close to someone and when it came to it, the person she wanted more than anyone in the whole world was Harry, she realized that now.
‘Good morning, Dennis,’ she said loudly, as she pushed the pram along with her children. She didn’t bother looking back to see if he acknowledged her. Those days had gone.
While Mum played with the children down at Grove Road, Annie mixed up some ‘mock crab’ which was an unholy-sounding mix of margarine, dried eggs, salad dressing, a bit of cheese and some vinegar, before serving it in sandwiches.
Annie loved to listen to the BBC Home Service to get tips on how to make food go further. Marguerite Patten made it all sound so easy, but she’d had a few culinary disasters. Harry still laughed his head off about her ‘goose’ made of lentils that they’d managed to force down last Christmas.
When Bill came in from the back garden, where he’d been bailing water from the Anderson shelter, he poked at her mock crab mixture suspiciously before tucking in.
‘Dear God, Annie,’ he said, struggling to swallow it. ‘You should send this to Hitler, it’ll bleeding finish him off!’
‘Don’t be so ungrateful,’ said Mum, taking a dainty bite. ‘It ain’t so bad.’
She showed Annie the letter she’d just received from George, who was fighting in Italy, and Annie swapped it for a postcard she’d received from him. He’d now been gone from home for more than two years. All his letters were chirpy, but Annie couldn’t help wondering, after speaking to Harry so honestly, what dreadful things her brother might have seen.
She didn’t mention that to Mum, of course, because of her heart trouble, and there was no point making her worry over things that couldn’t be changed. Mum was too busy chortling about George’s latest joke in any case.
Can’t wait for this war to be over so I can come home and make good use of that Anderson shelter, he wrote. I’m planning to keep chickens in it. It will make a lovely hen house. Please tell Bill not to dismantle it!
‘Well, I read in the paper that the aircraft factory got fined for serving their workers too much tea,’ sai
d Mum conspiratorially over a cuppa that was as weak as dishwater. ‘Blooming cheek if you ask me and serves them right.’
Annie had heard the same about the De Havilland factory up on Western Avenue. Even the number of cups of tea served to workers was tightly controlled these days and while everyone else was scraping by or going without, it did cause ill feeling if others were getting more.
The one place Annie and the family looked forward to going to once a month, as a special treat, was the British Restaurant down at the King’s Rooms on Acton High Street. Churchill had set up the restaurants where people could eat a decent meal, off the rations, for about a shilling a head. It was wholesome stuff, stews, usually with plenty of seasonal vegetables on the side and always a pudding of some sort. Elsie was cock-a-hoop about their forthcoming trip because she was planning to introduce her boyfriend, Josh, from Ohio, to the entire family.
He’d taken her up to Rainbow Corner, the GIs’ club in Shaftesbury Avenue, last Saturday night and she’d come home fizzing like one of the Coca-Colas he’d bought her, having danced the night away to tunes on a jukebox.
‘Joan’s coming along too,’ she told Annie, as she pulled out a heap of faded cotton dresses from the wardrobe, holding them up to the light, one after the other, to select the prettiest. ‘I’ve got to look my best and you know I can’t hold a candle to her.’ There was no way that Elsie could get a new dress; clothing had been strictly rationed for years and the coupon allowance cut from sixty-six per year to just forty-eight. Besides, she’d had to get a new winter coat in January, because the moths had been at hers and that had set her back sixteen coupons. She’d shelled out five for a new pair of shoes for the dance later that evening, but Mum had warned her to make do with whatever else was in her wardrobe.
‘Oh, Elsie,’ said Annie, hugging her sister, whose hair fell in curls almost to her shoulders. ‘You are just beautiful. Josh wouldn’t mind if you turned up wearing an old sack, I’m sure, but why don’t I go through my sewing box and see if I can find some nice bits and pieces to smarten up one of your frocks?’
