It would definitely be true to say that education was not high on the daily priority list for my grandparents on either side of the family. The lack of interest from certain corners of the Constants I have often somewhat flippantly documented and that frivolous attitude is in itself more than likely due to a fascination with the notion that anyone could care so little for that particular convention. However, as my brother was invariably at pains to point out, at the stage when our maternal grandmother should have been preparing her young daughters for regular school attendance the Act itself was still seen as a novel idea by a great many of the working class. Nevertheless, by the time the attention of the populace was fully occupied with the Home Front intricacies of the Great War it would be fair to say that the older Constants were at least nominally enrolled in the closest Roman Catholic School and at times when not needed for field work actually attended.
My mother in later years related a number of nightmare experiences she had during her school days largely involving the merciless brutality of various teaching nuns. It’s difficult to know how much exaggeration was involved but even if the tales were merely half true they indicate a level of cruelty that would be quite unacceptable today. According to her accounts she was caned for being absent from Sunday Mass, caned again for wearing grubby pinafores on Monday mornings and yet again for not reliably eating fish on Fridays. At seven and eight years of age she was not responsible for the family wash and definitely not put in charge of food shopping so she quite rightly felt that at times the punishments were uncalled for. She was particularly outraged by being addressed as Helen when her name was Nellie, her mother being unaware that this was a diminutive rather than a given name in the proper sense. When she tried to explain she was told she was being impertinent so she seethed with indignation instead. It’s more than likely of course that the ongoing persecutions had more to do with the fact that the entire Constant family was a thorn in the side of both School and Church rather than the particular wrongdoing of one of its small members. Whatever the reason the catalogue of misdemeanours was endless and the penalties over a number of years were severe. Quite the worst of which in her opinion was that of the occasion of the dying baby thrush.
She had a habit of regularly telling us that we must never ever hold a baby bird in our hands no matter how tempting that might be should we come across one that had fallen from the nest. The heat of our hands would undoubtedly kill it we were advised and that would lead not only to a great many tears but perhaps punishment as well and nobody wanted that. Eventually she related the anecdote concerning the particular baby thrush stumbled upon on her way to school one Monday morning in her grubby pinafore already worrying because she was late. And she was late because she had been the one called upon to help her mother with the newest baby born just a few days previously. How she foolishly stopped to examine the bird, wondering if there might be any way of returning it to its rightful place, how she unwisely picked it up and decided to take it with her, carefully sheltering it from wind and rain and running in triumph towards the ultimate good sense and perception of Sister Joseph. What a good, kind, pupil that greatly feared pedagogue would then see standing before her.
But by the time she arrived the week’s spelling list was starting – Piece, Niece, Achieve ….. i before e except after c and the woman’s startled short, sharp scream as she dropped the forlorn little bundle of feathers on the desk in front of her rang in my mother’s ears for many a long year. The sad little bird had already died, its demise coming about she was told on account of the hot and clumsy hands of a cruel eight year old. Slaughtered by the most disobedient and unruly student in the school, one who was known to regularly miss Sunday Mass and who ate meat rather than fish regardless of the day of the week. Now standing there in a pinafore that had not been washed for days she found herself responsible for the death of one of God’s creatures, slain in an untimely manner by the heat of her own callous hands. She was given three strokes of the cane on each of those iniquitous hands for their wickedness. When she tearfully related the story to her mother later that day she was advised she should have known better and that the punishment must have been deserved because the Blessed Sisters surely knew best. The baby thrush, however, proved hard to forget.
Unhappily not one of the Constant children of Maxim Road Crayford was able to take full advantage of the opportunities afforded by the new-fangled Education Act because their attendance was generally an ad hoc affair and their mother’s disinterest, tinged with fear, only compounded the problem. Nellie though always maintained that she was glad she learned to read, she enjoyed reading and did her very best to be present on Wednesday and Friday afternoons when there was a Silent Reading period. Perhaps even more surprisingly she revealed on more than one occasion a love of poetry, demonstrating that she still recalled verse after verse of The Forsaken Merman and Home Thoughts From Abroad though she was unsure as to the authorship of either. This predilection for the written word did little to protect her however from the school’s worst excesses of minor tortures and torments and she claimed that on Monday mornings when Father Carrol’s housekeeper needed help from the older girls in order to complete her duties she was invariably the one nominated to empty his chamber pot. Never finding it unused overnight she had to lift it carefully and negotiate the steep stairs to the floor below setting it down again in the kitchen with anxiety before opening the heavy door to the backyard where the evil looking contents could be finally emptied into the outside privy. Heaven forbid should there be any spills on the journey. Even Old Nan was to some extent affronted that one of her brood was so regularly selected to be responsible for the Reverend Father’s Piss Pot and said the housekeeper was a lazy trollop. She was never slighted enough though to open a debate with the woman because after all somebody had to get the job done because it would never do for the Reverend Father to find it unemptied the following night would it? Nellie should take a leaf out of Mag’s book and that was a fact!
Mag was always described as crafty, managing to dodge not only the most unpleasant duties such as those concerning the parish priest but also a lot of the other troubles at school that so often beset Nellie. It does seem that there were times when my mother went out of her way to court disaster and that there was a part of her that half enjoyed the attention gained by becoming the family whipping boy. At the same time, however, a growing abhorrence was inculcated within her for the Roman Catholic Church which eventually led to a firm determination to keep away from it as far as possible in the future. Wisely she did not share this stance widely within the family, taking part in the rites and occasions necessitated by births, deaths and marriages over the years without undue comment except on occasion to Mag. None of them had emerged as having more than the basic interest in religion that was necessary to still feel they had a stake in it, a right to identify themselves as part of it. All new babies were baptised in the first few months of life without incident and each went on to attend the nearest Roman Catholic school where luckily the new breed of teaching nuns proved to be less bitter and spiteful than their predecessors. By the 1930s it was not deemed quite as necessary for whole families to attend Sunday Mass on a regular basis. Good Catholic mothers after all were needed at home to prepare the roast lamb or beef, the various vegetables, the stewed fruit and custard and so for them once a month seemed to suffice to hold on to their rightful place in Catholicism as long as they went regularly to Confession. Children were just a little less likely to be cross examined about what they ate on Fridays and luckily the starched white pinafores of the Edwardian era had completely vanished.
It became relatively easy for Nellie to manage a reasonable silence over most matters pertaining to Faith even when her adored fiancé Poor Fred succumbed to TB and his family turned out to be Anglican; so peace and harmony could be maintained all round. That was a blessing because it was most unwise to deviate too widely from the opinions of the Constant family. In fact a year or two later when she was slowly recovering from Fred’s death she even told them she’d had no knowledge of where his family worshipped and it was something never broached for discussion. That was of course quite untrue but because her anguish and despair had been palpable they asked no further questions and instead they said she had suffered a Breakdown and diligently continued to feed her the pills the doctor prescribed.
It was a number of years before she met Bernard Joseph Hendy and he asked her to marry him, rather too early in their relationship as far as she was concerned and she wasn’t expecting it. She had no real intention of taking it seriously anyway because nobody would be able to replace Poor Fred. At thirty one years of age she was an Old Maid, firmly on the Shelf and resigned to remain so, living with her sister Mag and looking after the children while Mag worked shifts down at Vickers. Vickers-Armstrong was an organisation that even in the 1930s distinguished itself with its forward thinking attitude towards the employment of married women. They were of course on a pay scale considerably lower than the men but this was a time when women were quite accepting of discrimination. Feminism was well into the future except for a few of the fashionable and middle class, female liberation had yet to emerge and men had families to support. Mag was more than delighted to become a working woman and her Harold was more than proud of her.
It never became completely clear to Nellie’s future children why it was their mother had agreed to the ill-fated marriage proposal that resulted in their birth but perhaps she was urged to do so by her family. It was as clear as daylight that Mag would soon need that back bedroom for her growing family. It wasn’t really Right that little Margaret still slept in the same room as the two boys and they were of course now quite old enough to keep an eye on her and each other. These arguments if presented, which they probably were not, would have sounded quite specious. The Constants as they grew up had slept where and how they could, huddled together under tarpaulins in the corner of fields during the Spring and Summer so having a roof of any kind overhead was seen as a bonus, separating boys from girls an extravagance. The idea of any of them needing constant adult supervision once they could walk and talk would have caused merriment.
Whatever the dialogue was, somehow or other at the beginning of that summer in 1939 the church had been booked and with trepidation my mother knew that the time had arrived for a frank exchange of views regarding religion. Her future husband had revealed himself to be a Good Catholic and he had clearly been lulled into a false sense of security by the outward signs of similar commitment within the Iron Mill Lane homes he had visited. On Old Nan’s kitchen wall the Bleeding Heart of Jesus was flamboyantly displayed and elsewhere among the sisters little statuettes of the Virgin clothed in blue, some holding the infant Jesus in their arms sat on sideboards. The plethora of small children called Patricia or Michael or Veronica served to seal his overall approval. For a young Catholic man considering matrimony this seemed to be a family sufficiently devout for his future fellowship and association but of course he had made an error of judgement.
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