Tales of Consumption .....

Even as late as the early nineteen fifties one of the most common causes of death in our corner of North Kent was Tuberculosis known as Consumption and it penetrated local families with a quiet persistence determinedly stealing away youthful health and vigour. When I speak of our little corner I mostly mean Gravesend and Northfleet followed by Dartford, Crayford and Erith. Most of my mother’s family, all my aunts and my numerous cousins lived in and around Iron Mill Lane, Crayford though some were being pressed to consider moving to new estates just a little further afield. Wherever their main base was, however, Consumption was never far away.

My mother said she had wept copiously when Greta Garbo died in a film called Camille in 1938, shedding far more tears than had fallen for her own younger sister who had perished in 1937. This was mainly because Greta Garbo was resigned to her fate whereas Phyllis was convinced she was going to recover – it was merely a matter of time. This particular aunt, gone long before I had a chance to get to know her had been the family extravert, always happy, always sharing a joke and yet she succumbed so easily to the illness becoming pale and thin and no matter how positive her attitude was, dying within a year.

By the time I was a preschooler and more aunts had perished my mother had developed an exaggerated fear of Consumption despite the fact that there was by then an assurance that medical treatments were rapidly improving and very soon a cure might be possible. This fear was handed on to me to whom she elaborated upon the various states of the sufferers among our immediate neighbours. These information updates ensured that I hurried past their homes not daring to breathe until I had safely passed the places where the not-yet-deceased but dangerously disease-ridden victims lived. When Mrs Morris, two doors along from us whose bouts of coughing could be heard from dawn to dusk, decided to donate the remaining bones of each Sunday dinner to our decidedly underfed pet dog I was horrified. I risked being savaged by him on a regular basis by wrestling them from his jaws once she had safely disappeared back through her scullery door so great was my fear that he would contract the disease. And if he happened to win the occasional struggle for the next ten days I found it hard to sleep at night and by day hovered around him ever vigilant that he might start coughing in a dry and tubercular manner. Fortunately he escaped the clutches of the disease but the weekly combat changed our hitherto friendly relationship and he found it impossible to forgive me which he demonstrated by treating me to menacing looks coupled with an occasional snarl and refusing ever again to join me for walks around St Botolph’s Churchyard.

Although it became clear that Consumption did not affect canines it continued to spread with ease from person to person. Sometimes the newly afflicted were sent to special hospitals called Sanitoriums where they remained for months at a time, enjoying gentle walks in the fresh air and good, wholesome food. One of my uncles even sent his two daughters to Switzerland, the place where Heidi and Peter spent their time tending goats but then he was said to be Flash and Made of Money. Many sufferers were thus destined to recover but there was a strange reluctance among a sizeable proportion of the working classes to actually avail themselves of such an opportunity.

Patsy Pitt, who lived in Springhead Road and was therefore almost but not quite middle class decided she would take the offered Cure. This was not simply because of being almost middle class but also because she had at the age of thirty found herself a Young Man called Alfred to whom she quickly became engaged only weeks before finding out that her sudden weight loss was not simply Love, but the first sign of the illness. Concerned to ensure she would be fit for her planned summer wedding she agreed to three months on the South Downs without argument as long as her beloved would agree to visit every Sunday without fail, which he did. She was later devastated to find herself jilted shortly after finding herself cured and sank into a deep depression.

My mother said she did not have much sympathy since Alfred had kept his word about the visits and had waited until she was pronounced Fit and Well before casting her aside for an usherette who worked at The Majestic. In her opinion Patsy Pitt should simply Get on With It as she herself had been forced to do when her Poor Fred had perished in similar circumstances back in 1930. Whenever Poor Fred was mentioned, which was never ever in the presence of my father, she paused a moment, eyes glistening and might then perhaps be forced to brush a tear from her cheek because no matter how hard she tried she had never been quite able to stop loving him.

A More Simple Time In Which To Live

Years ago it would be true to say that older family members were always totally prepared to throw themselves into all that was customary and went hand in hand with a relative’s passing. This wasn’t simply in our family, but also in those around us. Rather ungraciously I have in the past been wont to say that with us it was entirely because the end of life also went hand in hand with a great deal of alcohol but maybe that is not entirely correct. My grandmother and aunts on hearing of the latest death immediately busied themselves with the covering of mirrors and ensured that all photographs were laid face down. This was because they were in every respect superstitious and wanted to be on the Safe Side. My grandmother was so keen for us to be safe that when we walked at night she was apt to insist that we walk in the middle of the road so as not to disturb the spirits of the wayside even when that wayside consisted merely of the meagre little front gardens of Iron Mill Lane. They had some very odd ideas. Aunt Mag once told me that the stubs of funeral candles could be beneficial when laid on burns and at least one of the aunts warned us all to take care when walking in graveyards and not stumble close to new graves for to do so would ensure we would be dead within a year and so of course we walked very carefully indeed. Whether these beliefs had first and foremost come out of Ireland generations previously, or whether they were more recently acquired Kentish beliefs is hard to say. It’s possible that they were simply the false notions of their time and more widespread than immediately obvious. Along with these viewpoints they also held firm ideas about the cause of illness. Sitting in a draught would result in pneumonia especially if you had just washed your hair. Women should never wash their hair when menstruating for fear of something so disastrous it could not be openly discussed. Sitting on a cold step would certainly give you Piles.

My grandmother avoided the marshland so loved by my teenage cousins Harold and Leslie with their rabbiting rifles. The Crayford Marshes directly flanked the early estate housing where she lived and lay beyond The Jolly Farmers and The London Road, and it promised all manner of exciting activities but our grandmother asserted that it was the Ruin of the lungs and hers in particular. The Hearts of Oak roll ups she determinedly smoked, she assured us helped to counteract the deadly vapours that rose up from the damp terrain and gave you Marsh Fever. She was strangely unconcerned about the layers of cement dust that coated the roofs of Stone Village, a few miles further down the river and passed regularly on the 480 bus route to Gravesend. There was something slightly exotic about the riverside village of Stone that had grown so rapidly during the middle of the nineteenth century, sprouting row after row of Victorian terraced housing to accommodate the local cement factory workers. When I was six or seven years old I was convinced that the grey-white covering on rooftops and bushes was a kind of everlasting snow, unbending to the heat of summer and I had envied my cousin Little Doris, whose mother had died at her birth simply because she and her father Poor Arthur Steele had briefly lived there. My Grandmother would gaze fondly from the windows of the bus and comment that she had a lot of time for Stone, and that years ago she had spent many a happy hour with her Edgar at The Brown Bear that lay just beyond the Almshouses and that she had pitied the women forced to live in Them Places, crowded in together and never once allowed an evening out at The Bear even though it was right there on their doorstep. Even at the time I marveled at the fact that she and my father viewed the area quite differently, he telling me more about the local castle that was made completely of flint and built as long ago as the reign of King Stephen, whenever that might have been. Neither of them seemed unduly concerned about the effects of the cement snow upon the health of those living in the area.

In comparison, Northfleet and its surrounding environs seemed then a surprisingly healthy place in which to live considering the amount of industry that polluted Thameside settlements at that time. If you avoided renting those houses closest to the various cement works, you were unlikely to be overly bothered by the contamination they caused though conversely neither would you be so close to your probable place of employment. All this meant you simply had an important choice to make about your workplace and any repercussions would be nobody’s fault but your own. In many ways it was a more simple time in which to live and the widely held belief systems were equally simplistic and if not everyone actually believed in them wholeheartedly, they at least paid lip service to them.

I still wonder about the advisability of sitting too long on those cold stone steps!

A Death In The Family

There has never been any doubt whatsoever that when it comes to death, the Irish do it better than most. My grandmother, although not particularly attached to the country of her predecessors, having minimal allegiance to the Riordens and not especially bound to the Catholic Church, would generally come into her own on the occasion of a death in the family. She had an uplifting attitude to the conventions of a community. I clearly recall her determinedly putting out teacups on All Souls’ Day for the two aunts recently taken by tuberculosis, each one leaving a newborn girl. One of my older cousins said it was in the hope of the dead returning but in his opinion that was a load of baloney and it would be difficult if they did. This was because the one who still had a husband had just left him and both aunts had been sharing bedroom space in the ever more crowded house at the bottom of Iron Mill Lane. But he said all this softly and with hesitation fearing the clip around the ear it would earn him should he be overheard.

Despite their at times half hearted attitude to the One True Church my mother’s family was too intimidated by the thought of everlasting fire to completely ignore the rituals expected of them. Wakes were essential and held a day or two before a funeral Mass, usually at night. The women cried a lot into their white handkerchiefs newly ironed for the occasion and the men talked about how wonderful the deceased had been and then everyone got drunk and ignored the children who fell asleep under the nearest table. These affairs, looking back on them, were considerably more elaborate when the newly deceased were male. As we were a family overburdened with women the more emotionally charged gatherings were few. After the Mass there would be a gathering at The Jolly Farmers where everyone got drunk once again. Occasionally there might even be a Memorial Mass a month or so later.

My father, always a more devout believer than my mother might well have been seduced into the family in the first place by all the apparent devotion to the religion he had been raised within. Sadly, in the case of his own death few of the possible traditions were observed. Nobody would have thought to put out a teacup for him at the next All Souls’Day and the Wake, if indeed there was one, would have been a subdued affair. This might have been simply because my mother was theoretically making all the necessary decisions and she had always harboured a certain amount of hostility towards the Church and in recent years a great deal towards her husband. Decades later my brother’s demise occasioned a similar disregard, for similar reasons. No matter how elaborate the memorial event held some months later might have been, the stylish venue, the champagne and smoked salmon canapes could never erase the indifference to what basic Catholicism demanded and what he would have expected had he been able to voice an opinion. The imperiling of his immortal soul by dispensing with such traditions was glaringly obvious to all family members, lapsed though they might be if not to his cheerfully atheistic wife and her relatives, creating little pools of discomfort here and there. My cousin Margaret courageously observed that she had now outlived two Bernards and added that neither death had elicited the Send Off she would have expected. Then she fell into silence when her daughter, my Second Cousin Jane-Marie, who once upon a time was simply called Jayne, pierced her confidence with the kind of gaze intended to do exactly that. But a moment or two later her mother added in a voice both daring and tremulous that our grandmother would never have allowed such a thing to happen and Jayne, stuck to her mother like glue for reasons best known to herself, looked confused because she had little direct knowledge of her notorious great-grandmother. Unfortunately having little knowledge does not always elicit the most sensible reactions to situations of course, particularly where family is concerned and the deaths of family members, particularly when they are unexpected, throw up unexpected emotions. These are the times when even the most progressive among us are found to embrace the comfort of traditions.

Armistice Day

We were determined today to attend the one hundred year commemoration of The Armistice today to be held appropriately outside the Auckland War Memorial Museum and indeed we did, arriving just in time to catch the beginning of the ritual. The Mayor looked splendid in his official regalia and when he spoke he did so well and was pleasingly brief. A schoolgirl called Fabiana spoke passionately about the actions of hands in war, the consequences of those actions and I began to think of Dylan Thomas - `The hand that signed the paper felled a city’.
An elderly man, standing straight and tall, spoke eloquently in Maori, the words so powerful that I wished I understood and later wished I had paid attention to his name because I failed to find it when searching through the Order of Service. The Master of Ceremonies, whose name I did find, spoke about the fact that many New Zealand families lost more than one son in the conflict with a notable few losing three or even four and this made it sound like the breathless countdown to destruction that sometimes happens with road deaths on statutory holidays. Later as we trod through the rows of twenty thousand crosses I bent to look at a photograph someone had placed in a plastic bag and entwined around the cross. Four handsome young men with half smiles stared up at me, proud in their uniforms and off on an adventure, off to see the world. I had found one of those special families!
It began to rain, not the usual harsh semi-tropical rain we are accustomed to in Auckland but gently, persistently, Dylan-Thomas-like - `hands have no tears to flow’.
As children we never really understood what marking Armistice Day was all about because by the time we had any perception of it they had changed the name to Remembrance Day which then became Remembrance Sunday and finally Poppy Day. Despite all this the Crayford aunts firmly continued to refer to it as Armistice Day with their voices slightly lowered and even my grandmother would halt momentarily when it was mentioned and stare into the middle distance for a second or two and perhaps mention Poor Violet Eves who lost her young husband in 1917 and their son in 1944. This undoubtedly made her special.
The first Armistice Day I remember was almost certainly 1945 when I stood with my mother at the War Memorial on The Hill and thrilled to the sound of The Last Post whilst men bared their heads and a nearby tall green bus became silent and still in reverence. The day was crisply cold and my fingers were numb even in my newly knitted green mittens. This might have even been the advent and re-establishment of church bells after the war because all at once there was a burst and discord of bells, a cacophony I was not accustomed to and momentarily terrifying.
Today, although we had been promised bells, for some reason we did not hear them from where we stood and we commented on it as we walked back down Parnell Road, stopping off at Non Solo Pizza for coffee and Amoretto, the latter because it was a special Sunday and the rain was still falling - raining a century of tears.