Her Father's Daughter

by Beezy Marsh

  Ivy’s husband Charlie had come back from the war safely and she was very quickly back under his thumb in a way which kept Annie awake at night, wondering if her sister was happy. Annie, Elsie and Mum all suspected that he was knocking her about a bit when he lost his temper. There were no bruises to show for it but there was something about the way Ivy was quieter around him, and smoked nervously, that set alarm bells ringing. No one ever broached the subject because it probably would have made matters worse and nobody wanted that.

  Poor Ivy. It was just one of those things that families knew about but didn’t like to mention. It caused a few awkward silences at get-togethers but nothing that couldn’t be smoothed over with a nice cup of tea and a chat about how much the kids had grown since last time.

  It was the same in streets all over town. You never really pried too much into what went on behind closed doors.

  It was a grim and freezing morning, the sort of day when Annie was glad to be doing the housework in their flat on Horn Lane with the wireless tuned to the BBC, rather than going out to the shops.

  She was just running over the tops of the cupboards with her feather duster when the music stopped and a voice came over the airwaves speaking in a tone which sent a chill down Annie’s spine. It was just like the darkest days of the war.

  ‘This is London. It is with the greatest sorrow that it was announced today from Sandringham that the King, who retired to rest last night in his usual health, passed peacefully away in his sleep earlier this morning.

  ‘The BBC is now closing down for the rest of the day except for the advertised news summaries, shipping forecasts and gale warnings.’

  Newspaper headlines proclaimed, ‘THE KING IS DEAD!’ and within a day the heir to the throne, Princess Elizabeth, had been named as his successor. She seemed to embody everything that the new decade was about, with her fashionable haircut and beautiful clothes, her dashing husband Philip and their two sweet little children, Charles and Anne.

  The state funeral would take place a week later and it was to be shown on the television, which caused a lot of excitement. Mrs Banks, who lived opposite her mum on Grove Road, had a set in her living room and so the whole street crowded in there to watch the funeral. The kids were herded in there by the dozen to see such an important event and clips around the ear were meted out to any child who dared to speak as the funeral procession made its way into St George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle.

  Winston Churchill was among the mourners, in his heavy overcoat and black top hat, looking so much older. It was as if the weight of the responsibility of leading Britain through the war had finally taken its toll on him.

  There were three queens in attendance, all clad in black and wearing veils to hide their grief. Elizabeth, the young princess who would be crowned next year, old Queen Mary, looking as if she’d stepped straight from the Victorian era in her headdress and skirts to the floor, and the late King’s grieving widow, Queen Elizabeth, the heroine of so many London families to whom she’d been a great comfort during the Blitz.

  They were the past, present and future of the nation, frozen for a moment in their grief for their son, husband and father. Everyone shared in the sadness of their loss. The King had been a tower of strength for the nation during the battle with Nazi Germany, but there was something about the televised images which made it feel to Annie as if they were intruding, peering in on their world.

  Mum didn’t manage to watch the funeral; she was feeling poorly again and so she went for a lie-down. Within a few weeks, she was in hospital. Doctors did some tests and found she was riddled with cancer. There was nothing anyone could do to save her.

  Mum didn’t want a fuss, that wasn’t her way, but Annie and her sisters tended to her every need, taking turns to spend as long as they could by her bedside. The nurses did what they could to make her comfortable but her face twisted with pain every time they tried to move her and in the end, she slipped in and out of consciousness, aided by morphia to relieve her torment.

  She looked so small and shrunken, lying in hospital bedsheets stiff with starch. Annie thought back to her days at the laundry, when Mum would make light work of ironing those sheets. She’d seemed invincible, not just to Annie, but to all the laundry girls, and especially to Bill, who always joked she was too good for him. Annie had secretly agreed with that, until she was older and realized that for all his faults, Bill treasured her mother.

  It was a mercy that he wasn’t there when she finally went.

  Mum had been asleep for a while but she suddenly coughed, her chest heaving with the effort of it, and opened her eyes to look straight at Annie.

  ‘The children send their love,’ said Annie. ‘They’re making you a get-well card and I’ll bring it tomorrow . . .’

  Mum smiled and Annie held her hand and, in that moment, Annie noticed her mother’s fingers were as cold as ice. Mum closed her eyes and Annie watched as all the colour drained from her face.

  ‘Please don’t go,’ Annie whispered. ‘Don’t leave me, Mum.’ But it was too late.

  A nurse came to the bedside and felt for a pulse. When there was none, she pulled the sheets over her mother’s head and opened the window.

  Somewhere outside, a bird was singing.

  The first blossom of spring was on the trees when Mum died. Annie picked some and laid it upon her mother’s grave. She was buried next to George, which was her dying wish.

  Bill was lost without his Emma, the woman he’d wooed in the laundries of Soapsud Island during the First World War, who’d put up with all his grumbling and borne him beautiful daughters. The light went out in his world when she went.

  A year to the day after her death, he was rushed into hospital with chest pains, taking with him his favourite picture of Emma, as she was when they first got engaged. The nurses found him clutching it when he passed away that afternoon.

  Everyone said he’d died of a broken heart. Annie believed them.

  Epilogue

  Kitty

  Newcastle upon Tyne, April 1979

  Kitty shuffled when she walked now, just as Mum had done when her legs gave out and the arthritis got the better of her in her final years.

  Her auburn hair had long since turned grey, but it was every bit as thick and wavy as it had been when Harry cut a great chunk out of it in a game that got out of hand in the back garden when they were bairns. She wore it piled high on the top of her head in a bun but when she glanced in the mirror, the old lady in her eighties who looked back at her still had fire behind her eyes.

  Newcastle had changed so much you could scarcely recognize it and with all the new building work that was going on down at Eldon Square, you could have spent four score years and ten in the city and still not recognize the place. Gone were the elegant Edwardian houses, to be replaced by tons of concrete and glass and a modern shopping centre.

  She preferred it here, in her sheltered accommodation, where she at least had people her age to talk to, people who had manners like hers and who might enjoy a political discussion over a game of cards or a cup of tea and a biscuit. It was nothing like the wonderful afternoons she’d spent with Mr Philpott of the Shipbuilder, of course, but he’d died so long ago she struggled to recall his eyes as green as the emerald ring she wore.

  ‘Charles.’ She said his name out loud, twisting the ring he’d insisted on giving back to her. It sat on her finger, which was so swollen at the knuckle that she couldn’t take it off. He would have liked the irony of that. She thought she heard him whisper, ‘My dear Kitty,’ and she glanced around the room, but he wasn’t there. How could he be, when he’d been gone for so long?

  Yes, her ears were definitely playing tricks on her. Sometimes, in the quiet of the evening, she could hear singing, almost like a choir, and she’d get lost in that music; the more she listened, the louder it got and the sweeter the sound. It reminded her of a Christmas Eve in St Nicholas’s Cathedral a long, long time ago.

  ‘Are you all right, pet?
Who are you talking to today?’ said the carer, sticking her head around the kitchen door, with a dishcloth in her hand. She had bleached blonde locks which stuck up on end; goodness only knows what the latest fashions were these days.

  ‘I was just wondering if you’d left the wireless on,’ said Kitty. ‘I can hear that music again.’

  ‘No, pet,’ said the carer, giving Kitty one of her looks.

  Before she could stop herself, Kitty muttered something unkind about the carer probably coming from Benwell, so what would she know anyway? And then she felt ashamed of herself because she was sure the poor girl must have heard that, and she didn’t mean to be spiteful. She just found herself saying silly things without meaning to, that’s all.

  The past crept more and more into the present and sometimes she’d doze by the fire and half expect to find herself back in Lily Avenue, with Dad smiling down at her and Harry charging about with a catapult or making other mischief, as Mum busied herself or went out to one of her suffragette meetings.

  But Harry had been gone ten years now since the stroke that killed him. That had broken Kitty’s heart, not to mention poor Annie’s too, because the truth finally came out. When her son John went to sort out his dad’s pension, he was told it was going to his wife. The woman at the social services gave him a name he’d never heard of – Ethel. Harry had never divorced Ethel, of course; Kitty knew that. How could anyone afford it back in those days? Divorces were so expensive and difficult to obtain, it was only the upper classes who did that. And then the war came along, and no one knew what tomorrow was going to bring.

  Annie had come into his life, she had brightened his world after he’d thought he could never love again, and they had had their children together. Kitty had tried in vain to persuade him to get in touch with his first-born, William, but to no avail, and the guilt of what might have happened to that child without his real father in his life gnawed away at her.

  Harry had never told Annie the truth about Ethel, even though Kitty felt it was wrong to keep it from her. ‘Whatever has happened stops with us, Kit,’ he said. Kitty said that out loud too. At least, she may have done because the carer gave her another funny look.

  She still talked to him, and why shouldn’t she? He was her brother. The burden of carrying so many secrets weighed heavily on her now she was alone. It was at its worst when Harry died. She stopped eating for a while and she had a funny turn and ended up in hospital, so she couldn’t go to his funeral. She’d never really said goodbye, which made it easier for him still to be here with her, in Newcastle, didn’t it?

  Of course, Annie came to visit when she found out about Ethel, and Kitty could still see her, sitting at the bedside, clutching her handbag on her lap, with a look of such hurt and confusion on her face. Kitty finally told her the truth about Harry’s first marriage and why he’d left Ethel and William and never went back. Kitty didn’t hold back, making plain her disdain for the woman who had pushed her brother to the brink of his sanity with her affair.

  ‘But how could he lie to me?’ Annie sobbed. ‘Why didn’t he tell me the truth?’

  Kitty reached out and held Annie’s hand, doing her best to comfort her sister-in-law. ‘He loved you, he was faithful to you, so you mustn’t think ill of him. He was trying to do what was right and he was afraid if he told you the truth about Ethel, you’d leave him and take the children with you.’

  ‘You were in on it!’ said Annie, pulling her hand away. ‘How could you deceive me like this, Kitty, for all these years?’

  Kitty sighed. How could she ever explain it all to Annie without hurting her feelings or telling her the real reason Harry was so troubled? If Harry lost Annie, he might well have lost his mind for good after all he had been through. Kitty wouldn’t have risked that for anything; she’d vowed to always protect him. She’d promised Dad. Besides, to tell the whole story would mean revealing the one secret she would never share with Annie or anyone else in the family, for that matter.

  She gazed out of the window for a moment, gathering her thoughts before she replied.

  ‘He just felt the past was best left in the past, Annie,’ she said eventually. ‘You were the present and his future. You were everything to him, can’t you see?’

  But Annie didn’t see. She was weeping uncontrollably when she left the room.

  Kitty couldn’t expect her sister-in-law to understand it because she hadn’t lived it. Both she and Harry were bound by the same promise, one which crossed the boundaries between this life and the next, out of a sense of duty to their father. They both wanted to protect the following generations from the shame of it all, from being tarred as the offspring of a murderer.

  Times had moved on. Seventy long years had passed; Lord knows, Kitty had lived through it all, with two world wars. Harry had done his duty for his country and suffered enough in the first of them. He’d been prepared to sacrifice himself and when he was pulled from that shell hole, barely breathing, life had given him a second chance. It had taken her father from her but spared her brother.

  Now Harry’s children had children of their own. Why should they be troubled by the past, even if it meant that secrets had to be kept?

  ‘Pet?’ Kitty called out and her carer came through from the kitchen to join her at the dining table, which was as glossy as when Mum used to polish it, back in Lily Avenue.

  She pointed to the boxes of photo albums, letters and papers which she had carefully sorted from Dad’s old bureau and the tallboy, during those long afternoons, as the clock ticked endlessly on the mantelpiece.

  ‘I want to have a bonfire. Can you help me?’

  ‘Are you sure about this, Kitty?’ said the carer, heaving yet another box into the garden and tipping the contents onto a scrubby patch of earth where this year’s daffodils had refused to grow.

  ‘Yes, I don’t want my family to have to sort through all my old rubbish when I’m gone,’ said Kitty, leaning on her walking stick and pulling her cardigan closed against the chill in the air. ‘They’re far too busy to be bothered with all of this.’

  ‘All right, then,’ said the carer, pulling out a cigarette lighter. She knew better than to argue with Kitty when she was in one of her funny moods. She picked up a piece of paper, flicked the lighter open and held it to the flame. ‘Would you like to do the honours?’

  Kitty nodded and threw the burning letter into the middle of the pile. The flames spread, little by little, until the wind caught them, and their progress was unstoppable.

  ‘Seems a bit of a shame, though,’ said the carer, chewing on her ragged fingernails.

  ‘What’s done is done,’ said Kitty, with a little shrug of her shoulders.

  The fire licked over old photographs, which crackled and twisted, almost as if they were resisting for a moment, before they were engulfed.

  Kitty watched it all burn and the singing in her head started up again. There were so many memories on the bonfire, of a respectable family in happier times: Kitty in a bonnet and a white frilled dress with her hair in ribbons and Harry in his sailor suit, scowling a bit because Dad had told him to stand up straight. Mum in her favourite black straw hat with the green birdwings and Dad in his best suit of light tweed, his moustache perfectly waxed, carrying a walking cane with a silver top.

  Bundles of letters turned to ash; the fine copperplate handwriting of Mr Philpott declaring his affection for Kitty, burning alongside the last desperate outpourings of love from a condemned man to the family who believed in his innocence to the last. They never forgot him.

  All this, all of it; the shame and the sadness and the struggle, all were consumed by the fire, just as Dad would have wanted.

  Kitty smiled to herself.

  ‘Let’s make an end of it,’ she said.

  Author’s Note

  This book is about family and friendships and the will to endure, in the face of adversity. These themes resonate with me as much today as they did for my forebears and I’m sure I’m not alone in that
.

  All families have secrets. Many people live lies and some believe passionately in the version of reality they have created, because facing the truth would be too catastrophic for their nearest and dearest. They must carry the burden of the choices they have made and in the dead of night, before sleep creeps over them, it must weigh heavily, just as it did for my grandfather, Harry.

  From our twenty-first-century standpoint, it’s easy to judge the decisions of previous generations, but while writing this story, I was struck by how different the world was then. That doesn’t excuse people lying or cheating but drawing together all the threads sometimes gives you another perspective; it can help you see the other side of the story. We are all failed human beings doing our best but back then, against the dramatically changing landscape of two world wars, life must have seemed very fragile. It was possible to move from one side of London to the other and start afresh in the hope that the past would never catch up. You couldn’t get away with it today – at least, not easily.

  The terrible event of 1910 unveiled in this book had an earth-shattering effect on the victim’s family, which cannot and must not ever be forgotten. The widow of the murder victim had to fight to get compensation after her husband’s death. The family eventually emigrated. I have not detailed their struggle in this book because I did not feel it was my place to do so. I cannot imagine the pain and suffering they went through and I would not presume to speak for them.

  From the age of fifteen, when my mother, Anita, told me about what had happened to her grandfather John Alexander Dickman, I grew up in the shadow of the shame and secrecy about this murder. How she came to find out about the murder and her father Harry’s secrets is another story entirely and there isn’t space to go into that here. It was a long and convoluted path, spanning forty years, with hurt for all involved, but ultimately, the will to resolve and to find strength in family bonds prevailed.

  In writing this book, I felt it was time, more than a hundred years after the event which so drastically altered the course of my family’s history, to finally lay the ghosts of the past to rest.