Jinxing by Gin

          The childhood of my mother and her siblings was blighted by alcohol, primarily gin and draught beer or that was what I was told.   It wouldn’t have been a particularly joyful childhood in any case as there were too many of the little Constants and never enough money but there is no doubt that the copious consumption of alcohol by their parents made the situation a great deal worse than it might otherwise have been.   Presumably, despite the original Gin Craze being well and truly over, it was still cheap enough or palatable enough to be downed on a regular basis by the working classes and my grandmother was drawn to it like a bee to honey until the day she died.  My grandfather favoured beer when offered a choice but was not against a glass or two of gin if it was more available.

          Originally gin was sold in earthenware crocks but then a heart shaped green glass bottle was developed and not long afterwards improvements in glass technology allowed the production of clear bottles that showed with no doubt at all the purity of the liquid within.  By the time Margaret Rearden married Edgar Constant in the first years of the new century the clear glass bottle was everywhere and the young bride took to it with real enthusiasm.   To be fair to them both, it is said that they usually did not drink midweek there being field work of various kinds to be done if they were lucky and other less appealing work if they were not, so their lengthy Public House visits usually took place on Saturday evenings and when baby Margaret was born, they could take her with them.  Children were not banished from licensed premises until 1908 so nobody minded and should little ones start to cry they could easily be comforted with a spoon dipped in gin and sugar.   That was the splendid thing about gin, it had a multitude of uses and throughout her life Maggie was to lean upon it to assist in solving her domestic and emotional problems.  

          Edgar and Maggie as I have said, had a great many children and it has been variously reported that there were twelve, thirteen, fifteen and even more.  The total is destined to remain for ever debateable as a number of the births remained unregistered for various reasons that sound remarkably foolish to us today.  This is because as a family we have gone up in the world and the present generation has never been faced with the struggles and troubles that so beset Edgar and Maggie.  That first decade or two of the twentieth century could be a traumatic time for both children and adults if they were unfortunate enough to be placed at the very bottom of the social heap as the Constants definitely were.  Bad housing, extreme poverty and lack of healthcare meant that many youngsters were extremely unhealthy and it was expected and accepted that they would experience serious illness in early childhood.  At the turn of the century the worst infant mortality figure ever was recorded with 165 in every 1000 babies dying before their first birthday.   This compares with about 5 per 1000 today.   To drive home the point, the infant mortality figures were almost twice as high among the working classes as the middle and upper classes.    According to my brother who over some years carried out a great deal of family research, one of the unregistered Constant infants was upon his death taken by Edgar in a cardboard box to Dartford Cemetery where a helpful gravedigger ensured he went into a common grave.   Later my grandmother was sometimes heard to comment on this unhappy incident and express her distress at not ever knowing the child’s final resting place. 

          It was a not terribly well-kept family secret that before the first World War two of the babies had died as a direct result of their parents’ involvement with alcohol.   The period between the deaths has never been made clear, in fact a great many of the details remain obscure except that one of them was called Arthur and it is likely that he was the one in the cardboard box.   It was the first of these deaths that is said to have so traumatised my grandfather that he gave up drinking to excess until all his children were grown with families of their own.   The details of the death of Baby Arthur are sketchy but it seemed to involve him being overlain and hence smothered in the bed of his inebriated parents.   In itself this was not an altogether unusual event.

          What was perhaps pertinent was that although Edgar was able to curb his drinking over the years, it was quite beyond Maggie who now, looking back through the intervening decades with the benefit of hindsight seems to have been unfortunate enough to have had an addictive nature.  But then it is only in more recent times that we have really begun to understand the nature of addiction and accept the fact that there is said to be a gene that might very well pre-dispose some of us towards an inability to control certain behaviours.  

          The little Constants oblivious and generally accepting of the difficulties of their childhood loved their parents dearly and the girls in particular vied for the love and attention of their diffident mother long after they had left childhood behind them.  And as they grew a few of this next generation were to experience similar difficulties with alcohol, in particular Young Edgar who eventually became the only living son of the family.   My own memories of him are chiefly when he was hovering on middle age, a cheerful, red faced individual emerging unsteadily from the public bar of The Jolly Farmers on Saturday nights to distribute crisps and lemonade to the group of hopeful nephews and nieces outside.   Uncle Edgar was invariably jovial and jaunty, an optimist who would give his last ten pence away and this made him always popular with the younger members of the family.   And he could generally be relied upon to be the very last to leave the pub each weekend, singing his way along Iron Mill Lane in regular disturbance of the neighbours.   But back then of course displays of intoxication were common and rarely triggered comment or complaint in the local community.

          For my mother the consequences of growing up alongside determined alcohol abuse served to ensure that she maintained excessive caution at all times, always claiming that she was definitely not a drinker, that she could in fact AlwaysTake It or Leave It.    And for the most part this was correct.   My own earliest memories of alcohol of any kind was on Christmas Day mornings when it was traditional that we should all, children included, drink strong tea laced with whiskey.   I have no idea where this tradition came from or when but it was something that none of us appear to have deviated from to this day.   Whatever we thought of drunkenness, alcohol went with Christmas like eggs went with bacon.    Even during the war years, a small bottle of whiskey and one of cherry brandy would be purchased a day or two before Christmas Eve by my mother for the express purpose of the upcoming celebrations.  

          When he came back from the war, my father, himself never a committed drinker, would occasionally go to The British Volunteer with old Mr Bassant next door and they would sit for an hour over Pints of Mild.   From time to time my parents went together and my mother might then have a small sherry.  Sometimes she would even ask for it to be diluted with lemonade in further indication that she was no slave to the Demon Drink.    As far as any hard and fast association with alcohol was concerned, they clearly lagged behind the curve but even so my mother lost no time at all in informing all who would listen of her sobriety adding that she had seen enough of what Drink did to families to last her a lifetime. At times like this my father might look just a little bit embarrassed and even at the age of seven or eight I could tell that he wished she would just shut up.  Many years later I realised that his discomfiture might have something to do with the fact that during his war years and exposure to significantly different attitudes to alcohol in other countries, he had become less critical than previously.

          Meanwhile infamous Uncle Mervyn, married to Aunt Rose was disapproving in the extreme which my grandmother said was because he was a Chapel goer and that anyone with any sense would steer clear of those who were Chapel and she for one could never understand what her Rose saw in him.      Her daughters were of the opinion that their sister’s devotion to him was more to do with what these days we might call a desire to be upwardly mobile because the War had been kind to Mervyn and he was definitely Going Places in the RAF.

          Whatever he did for Rose’s social ambitions, and I was in no position to judge that, he certainly, to quote Aunt Martha, - put a Right Bloody Dampener on Christmas 1953.  Later when discussing the matter it became clear that the dampener had quite a lot to do with alcohol or the lack of it.   We had been invited to spend Christmas with his family in a village called Patrington in Yorkshire where there was an RAF base at that time and where he and Rose and their three children lived in a very smart house because he was a Squadron leader.  The guests were to be my mother, my brother and myself together with Aunt Martha and her daughter Pat.   It was Pat who explained to me the significance of being a Squadron Leader and urged that I should take note of the way lower ranks saluted Uncle Mervyn as he accompanied us around the base.    

          The first surprise was the absence of cherry brandy with the Christmas Eve mince tarts, the second was the absence of whiskey for the Christmas morning tea.   I had not noticed the first omission because I was still considered too young to drink cherry brandy so I was only aware of the looks that passed between my mother and my aunt but I certainly noticed the second.  Pat told me that her mother always said that Uncle Mervyn was known for being Tight Fisted and not to forget what Old Nan said about him.  I knew very well what our grandmother was known to say but did not repeat it because it fell into the category of what was called Being Foul Mouthed and I was at 13 as yet considered too young to be Foul Mouthed.  

          That Christmas Day passed somewhat unmerrily as far as we visitors from the South were concerned, the only alcohol that appeared being small glasses of sherry in the middle of the afternoon of Christmas Day.   To add insult to injury we children were expected to go to bed by eight o’clock when it was a Constant tradition to stay up as long as you wished over Christmas and New Year no matter what your age was.  Overall it was not the joyous occasion we had expected no matter how deferential the lower ranks were to our Uncle and how much I at least secretly rather enjoyed the reflected glory.

          On the train back to Kings Cross Aunt Martha said to my mother that it was on account of the two of them being widows that we’d been invited in the first place and that Mervyn had no time at all for the men of the family considering them to be Drunken Louts.  She added that it was a good thing he was not aware how her Paddy had died or we’d never have been on their guest list at all.   Pat and I exchanged glances because we both knew that her father had been killed after consuming a great deal of red wine before falling off a balcony in Italy whilst celebrating the end of the war.   My mother sat very straight, her arms folded across the front of her new red wool, belted coat, bought especially for the occasion.   She said she’d never taken to Mervyn really and she couldn’t for the life of her see why their Rose had married him because their little Tommy had not been born for more than a year after so it wasn’t as if she’d had to.  Aunt Martha said well he probably rationed how much of his You Know What he doled out too so that didn’t surprise her at all.   Pat and I slid glances at each other and put on innocent faces pretending we had no idea at all what this comment meant. 

          Later in discussion with our grandmother that Yorkshire Christmas was discussed in some detail and so was everything they disliked about Uncle Mervyn who hopefully always remained oblivious to the distaste he generated.   Old Nan maintained that his Tight Arsed attitudes were enough to drive anyone to drink and it was his kiddies she pitied but of course none of us believed that.    Nevertheless I’ve often wondered what it was that made him quite as firmly opposed to enjoying life as he appeared to be, and every year as Christmas draws near I am reminded of that particularly bleak Yorkshire Yuletide.   I’m also reminded of those life events that have occurred at this particular time of year of course like the death of my father all those years ago.

          And strangely or perhaps not so strangely over the years I have carried on the odd tradition of whiskey in Christmas morning tea because the day would not be quite the same without it!  It appears that some customs effortlessly attach themselves and become habits and I know that my children, in various parts of the world – do exactly the same! 

The Ultimate Folly of Smoking

           I had definitely seen the act of cigarette smoking as the embodiment of all that was stylish since I had been allowed to occasionally go to early evening showings at The Wardona, Northfleet and sometimes even The Regal in Gravesend with Molly from number 31.   You have to realise that there was a great deal of smoking taking place on the Big Screen back then and not just in those films more suitable for adults although the latter were of course those we were most keen to see by claiming we were both definitely fourteen.   The only time we were challenged was by Priscilla Horsfall who was my form at Wombwell Hall even though she was more than a year older than the rest of us.  On the occasion in question she was importantly doing her first Saturday job and as Molly had in fact reached the magical age she was deemed to be a Responsible Adult and so we both gained entry anyway once a threat of calling the manager was made.  But that is of course all beside the point. 

          It was hard to imagine Humphrey Bogart without a cigarette and though I can’t remember the first time I saw Casablanca and whether or not I was with a bona fide adult, I do clearly recall that when Rick Blaine first appears it is as a hand lifting a half-smoked cigarette after signing a cheque.   Not very long afterwards Paul Henreid lights up as he tells Ingrid Bergman that although he is terrified he must nevertheless attend a dangerous meeting.   What a hero!   And long before The Marlboro Man, in Stagecoach, John Wayne, one of my mother’s favourites bends forward to light a cigarette from an oil lamp impervious to coyotes howling in the background and clearly not so very far away which was a very sexy gesture.  Little wonder that so many young men rushed to emulate him.   And it wasn’t just the lads because once Anne Bancroft blew smoke into Dustin Hoffman’s eyes whilst trying to seduce him in The Graduate most of us avid cinema-goers, male and female alike were well and truly hooked.   

          I personally became nicotine smitten at the age of fifteen when I witnessed James Dean becoming a misery to himself and a burden to his parents in Rebel Without a Cause.   I was with Pearl Banfield from the top of York Road because Molly now worked at Featherstones and was often busier than previously.   Pearl was a less than satisfactory cinema companion who never took up the smoking habit and seemed unmoved by the charms of James Dean.  Although by the time East of Eden came to Gravesend I was completely beguiled by him, and he was still an enthusiastic smoker, I was not actually smoking myself simply because I lacked the necessary finances for funding the habit.   

          In defence of that younger generation of which I was a part, it perhaps hardly needs to be pointed out that everyone around us smoked and it seemed to us, always had done.   Strangely my own parents were not smokers, my mother only taking it up after my father died, astonishingly on the advice of our family doctor who said a cigarette and half a pint of Guinness on a Saturday evening would be beneficial and help to calm her nerves.   She never became as dedicated a smoker as me and remained a ten Woodbines a week woman for years, eventually giving up the habit with ease in her late sixties.  

          I had been working at Francis, Day & Hunter in Charing Cross Road for at least six months before I felt financially stable enough to even begin but it was with enormous pride that I ordered ten Du Maurier at the little kiosk on the concourse at Charing Cross Station.   I was feeling so sophisticated in fact that it was a full five minutes before I realised that I had forgotten the matches and had to rush back and purchase them, almost missing the 6.42 fast train to London Bridge, Woolwich Arsenal, Dartford and Gravesend, and whatever destinations followed which I’ve now forgotten.   I would set about practicing smoking on my way home and by the time Gravesend was reached I would undoubtedly be an expert!

          I chose an empty carriage far forward on the train because I wanted no witnesses to anything that might go amiss and have me categorised as a rank amateur.    It was a good thing I did because it took a full six or seven minutes and half the matches to get the first stylishly tipped Du Maurier lit.   But at last the job was done, it was burning nicely as were several of my fingers. I had been told that in order to get the very best out of nicotine I had to inhale the smoke, alien as that sounded and so by the time it was half burned I managed to do so with some difficulty.   That very first inhalation was unpleasant in the extreme, my initial physical reaction being first light headedness followed by extreme vertigo, followed by nausea.   Why on earth did anyone in their right mind take up smoking?    But of course I knew the answer to that question was because it was to be seen as grown up, sophisticated, a woman of the world.   However, it was a week or two, or even three, before this particular woman of the world became confident enough to display the new and admirable habit more publicly.  Even I knew that turning pale and gripping my handkerchief nervously to my lips rather spoiled the ambiance of sophistication I was working towards and definitely was not going to impress a great many people.   To create the right vibe I just had to get on top of the nausea and dizziness upon inhalation problem.   And of course with time and effort I did and within a few months you would never have known that I hadn’t been born with a cigarette in my right hand. 

          For economic reasons I had to give up du Maurier quite early in my smoking career and move on to Bachelor Cork Tipped which I was assured by magazine advertising was a great deal healthier let alone cheaper.   By the time I was seventeen I was smoking ten a day which had not initially been my intention at all.   For my mother, strangely, smoking remained a one a day, two at weekends habit.   Perhaps she had experienced the same inhalation problem as me and wisely chose not to overcome it.    All of my aunts with the exception of Rose whose husband did not allow it, smoked profusely and Old Nan, their mother had always rolled her own and continued to do so her whole life.  All newly born first and second cousins were liberally smoked over from the day of their birth and as they grew older were accustomed to running to the corner shop with instructions to buy ten Weights or ten Woodbines for any adult who was running low.

Such purchases made by eight and nine year olds were never rejected by shocked shopkeepers and as the younger members of the family grew old enough to embark upon their own smoking habit it was never suggested by those older and hopefully wiser that it might be more sensible to give it a miss.   Little Violet, being raised by Old Nan because of the death of her mother, got her first job in retail at the age of eleven, as a Saturday shop assistant for Big Elsie in the small store at the bottom of Iron Mill Lane that primarily sold sweets, tobacco and ice cream.   She proudly began to buy her own Woodbines by the age of twelve and not even her employer discouraged her.   Old Nan’s only comment revolved around her own disappointment that even having a grandchild working in the trade did not seem to afford her cheaper prices and she would have expected at least the courtesy of a substantial drop in price for her own Hearts of Oak and Rizla papers.  It only confirmed her opinion that Big Elsie was a Tight Arsed Mare if ever there was one.

Much as I deplored the money that smoking of any kind seemed to be able to scoop up I did not at this stage seriously consider giving up which was a pity because it might have then been considerably easier than it proved to be later.    It certainly had not brought the glamour into my life that it seemed to promise and I was still not getting the invitations to glitzy events that I had once hoped for.  Neither had it brought handsome young men in sheepskin coats with names like Damon or Nico into my orbit.   I longed for men knee deep in invitations to film premieres who regularly dined at The Ivy and spent summers in the South of France.  They failed to cross my path, however, and there were times when I wished I had not launched into smoking with quite as much enthusiasm.

I was clearly destined to spend more time by myself so when the most alluring advertising campaign for Strand cigarettes hit the small screens of the Home Counties I certainly found it reassuring.  The ads showed a Frank Sinatra look-alike in trilby hat and trench coat wandering rain swept streets and despite his good looks and sex appeal remarkably alone.   I made serious attempts to read the novels of Camus and Sartre – not altogether successfully, and began to save for a proper trench coat.   And naturally enough I changed immediately to Strand, the cigarette that displayed for all the world to witness that existential angst was bearable; just as long as you chose Strand for your smoking pleasure.  Meanwhile Cliff Adams’ evocative Lonely Man theme reached the charts and the man in the trench coat became an immediate icon of Really Cool and the sale of similar rainy weather wear increased.  

But what should have been an all-round successful advertising campaign turned out to have a twist in its tail.   At that time smoking was most definitely considered a very sociable activity and being alone enough to have to be consoled, propped up even by a particular cigarette brand was suddenly seen as socially disastrous.   No matter what impressionable young women like me might have thought, sales somewhat astonishingly all at once evaporated and the cigarette itself was withdrawn without comment.   But somewhere along the line of progress towards commercial disaster, the ad campaign had hijacked enough aspects of existentialism to turn that corner of philosophy into a joke which festered largely unrecognised by people like me who were beginning to find coffee houses intellectually exciting if they attracted bearded young men in black polo necks clutching copies of paperbacks with titles like Sartre’s Concept of Freedom.

  The Strand advertising image had been extraordinarily powerful and had touched a raw nerve in the public psyche.    I ditched the trench coat idea and looked around for a duffel coat.  I also began to knit a black sweater and decided to take an interest in modern art.    I had already changed to menthol cigarettes because all the advertising assured me they were unbelievably healthy.

Travel and the Working Classes

 Strictly speaking it was my father and all his companions in the Eighth Army who were the first in my immediate family to experience foreign travel.   And as I grew older I learned that he went to a great many places, some of which I had never heard of and had to pretend that I had.   He seemed to enjoy Italy and North Africa above everywhere else, especially North Africa.   Nevertheless after a lot of thought I decided to draw a line under destinations to do with war and concentrate on those I was hopefully about to experience in the post-war future.  

It was annoying to discover that it was my older cousin who was going to be first in the family to leave our place of birth and strike out for foreign places.   To be fair it was simply a long weekend in Paris which later I decided didn’t really count if I didn’t want it to.  Not emerging as the first was a blow to be honest.   If she had still been married to Jack the trip would never have happened in the first place because for one thing he was much more interested in cars than travel and secondly in the drama of the marriage break up Margaret had given up the good, solid job in Dolcis and moved on to what her mother claimed was a much better one, as secretary to a man who was in the Importing/Exporting business.   I was somewhat confused as to how she could be an actual secretary since as far as I knew she was unable to type and she certainly couldn’t do shorthand but when I mentioned this Aunt Mag simply advised me to Button my Lip and added that there was nothing much to typing.   That observation didn’t please me at all because I had recently spent three years at Wombwell Hall acquiring that particular skill, but I buttoned my lip as directed because back then as a teenager, largely you did.  

My mother agreed that it was odd to be able to get a job as a secretary if you couldn’t type but on the other hand you could go to night school and learn easily enough and in fact perhaps that’s what she’d done because there were no flies on Margaret and she was a quick learner.   Anyway the job did not simply involve typing letters, she had to organise meetings and do travel bookings as well and act as receptionist in the Dartford office so she now had a weekly appointment booked at Gloriette’s in Crayford for a shampoo and set.  Aunt Mag said it was a Responsible Position and not one that every girl would be able to do.   She gave me a long, hard look as she said this which was annoying.     Margaret was living at her mother’s place at the time because Jack had refused to leave the flat in Slade Green but it was not something any of us talked openly about because back then you didn’t.  Instead we were directed to admire her new high heeled shoes and the pleated skirt that swished and swung pleasingly when she walked ensuring she looked every inch the high powered 1950s PA.  These were things it would have been impossible for her to buy all the while Jack had an interest in the spending.    On the other hand marriage break-ups were nothing to be proud of and that was a fact

The Paris trip was something that was definitely discussed in some detail and it took place at Easter that year, and was all to do with an urgent job the new boss had to carry out.   It entailed four nights in a hotel with a swimming pool and a restaurant where each female diner was given a rose.   I wondered how Margaret coped with the rose because she suffered badly from hay fever at the time and said she was adversely affected by flowers.  What’s more she certainly had never learned to swim as far as I knew so would be unable to take advantage of the swimming pool.   My mother said to Aunts Martha and Maud that if you believed the story about the urgent job that could not be done either before or after the Easter break then you’d believe anything.   She said nothing to Aunt Mag of course because although she had of late been very talkative about travel she was certainly not inviting questions on the topic.

When she returned I was more than keen for Margaret to tell me all about Paris but she seemed quite reticent to do so and her answers to my eager questions were uncharacteristically taciturn.   It was all most unsatisfactory.   It was around this time that some of her sudden reputation for international travel had to be shared with another Cousin – Aunt Martha’s June who had just married a young man whose name escapes me but who had several years’ experience in the plumbing trade.   It was at their engagement party that June announced their intention to leave Crayford for a life in South Africa which was a lot further away than Paris as most of us realised.   She made several announcements at the party, one of which was that at her upcoming wedding she did not want any of the women in the family wearing dangly plastic ear rings because in her opinion they had a common, vulgar look about them.    Being fond of plastic ear rings at the time, especially dangly ones, I recall feeling almost as offended as I felt when she did in fact leave the back bedroom in her mother’s house in Mayplace Avenue for a new life in Cape Town.   Unlike Margaret, Cousin June was more than keen to tell us all about her new life, especially about the fact that she now had a woman come in each week to do the ironing and she wrote excited letters back, mostly to Crayford but once or twice to us in Northfleet also. 

Meanwhile, yet another cousin, Connie from Waterdales, my father’s side of the family, was making preparations to join her fiancé Mick the Builder in Auckland, New Zealand and the long boat trip was going to take her to a number of places that so far both of us had only read about in books.   I had to accept the fact that I was definitely not going to be the first and that was palpable because as a group the lower classes were beginning to move out of the confines of the demographic they had always occupied.  They were studying brochures, beginning to realise that it wasn’t necessary to always spend holidays at Tankerton caravan and chalet camps or even Butlins at Skegness, and gathering the necessary courage to make applications for passports.   And getting a passport, Aunt Mag said, was not as easy as you might imagine because there were forms as long as your arm to be filled in.

As someone who definitely considered that I ought to be at the forefront of all that was seen as in step with the times even if it was glaringly obvious that I was not, it was sobering to be so clearly lagging behind.   I wondered why it was and after consideration decided that it had something to do with not being part of a couple.   As a couple it seemed to be in many ways easier to make decisions and act upon them and most importantly to be able to finance them.   There wasn’t a great deal that could be done with a mere five pounds weekly wage as a shorthand typist when I was regularly paying both the Provident Society and the Typewriter Shop near the station on a regular basis.   This was also a time when males, even those under twenty, were still paid significantly above women.  

In fact I was not to become launched into exotic places for another two years and as I had suspected it came about when I became part of a couple though a not particularly wholesome or stable couple and a short term one of necessity.   I didn’t actually mind any of that terribly especially in retrospect because Luuk Nijhof, Radio Veronica’s Technical Director, fitted the bill well enough.   He was a rather charismatic Dutch sound engineer who later turned out to be a heating engineer and knew little about the intricacies of sound.   But this understanding and awareness came only after the money that should have been spent on a radio transmitter had been spent on living the high life in London and Amsterdam.    It’s a long and perhaps familiar story and culminated in him serving a prison sentence.  However, the short period that preceded that was filled with excitement as we hopped from one five star hotel to the next, shopped in Bond Street and most importantly filled in those forms as long as your arm that resulted in a passport.   At last I was pleasingly embarked upon foreign travel!  What more could a girl from Gravesend want?

What I did not anticipate was the change in the way all of us began to view travel ensured that even my mother became a passport holder before too long and made regular trips to Southern Spain to the rather splendid holiday home now owned by Margaret and the New Boss who had in the interim become her New Husband.   This change in his status meant that it was no longer acceptable to discuss him in derogatory terms or make reference to her previous husband who still occupied the flat in Slade Green. 

A Change in Fortune

 

            Whenever my mother wanted to listen to conversations that were going on in the house next door she put an empty teacup against the wall and then put her ear to it.   As she did this she would place her finger against her lips and shush me so that I didn’t start asking questions in what was then a piercing pre-school voice.   Surprisingly, because she did not seem to be all that troubled by such emotions as shame, she continued this practice as my brother and I grew older and when he was about six, he told me the teacups in our house were actually telephones.  He had been in school for over a year and was fully conversant with telephones, there being one of what seemed to him, ominous size in Sister Joseph’s office.  They were all without exception black in those days and it was years before there was a choice of red, blue or cream.   Our mother, possibly because confusion reigned as it often did for us, agreed with him.

            As far as her investigations were concerned, hard as she tried I’m not sure if she ever heard anything scandalous over the years of her teacup eavesdropping    When I thought about it later, I decided she would have greatly enjoyed being one of those early telephone operators, connecting all and sundry and listening in on the conversations of others on a daily basis.    It was especially easy, though at times hard on the back, to carry out teacup surveillance upon the neighbours because narrow terrace houses with slender partition walls seemed to lend themselves to the practice.   Apparently my Aunt Mag’s house in Iron Mill Lane, Crayford was not nearly as rewarding when it came to keeping an ear to the wall, the walls themselves being far more solid and that, it appeared, could be a Real Bugger.           

None of us in York Road or the surrounding streets had home telephones in those first years after the war.   There were occasional exceptions of course such as the proprietors of the area’s corner shops but they were in a different category altogether.   Telephones were also absent from the more upmarket homes in Springhead Road and even Mrs Frost who gave piano lessons was without one until the mid-nineteen fifties and she might have found one useful.  The three Campbell girls, living a few houses along from her apparently ordered one when they became involved in running the Brownie Pack at St Botolph’s Church.   This wasn’t without incident and certainly caused a skirmish or two because in the first few months of ownership they were granted what was then called a Party Line which meant it had to be shared with someone else.   The Campbells who were admittedly an overdramatic trio were convinced that their calls were not private.   The sharer of their line had a habit of snooping they claimed.   A Party Line was clearly something my mother would have greeted with real enthusiasm but of course it was sadly something you could not guarantee by ordering in advance and in any case she wasn’t to know all this at the time.   

Although it seems quaintly old-fashioned looking back, it was to be some years before any one of us would consider a phone to be a necessity.  It might have been convenient to be able to ring the local Doctor to make an appointment but of course, conscious that his patient base was totally telephone-free he didn’t operate an appointments system in the first place which was sensible of him.   And on rainy days our mothers could have given Penny, Son & Parker on The Hill a call to place the weekly order if they didn’t enjoy chatting in the queue quite as much as they obviously did.   Shopping seemed to be a much more relaxed and social activity back then.

If you were desperate to make an actual telephone call to someone who had an actual telephone then there was always the phone box by the 480 bus stop opposite the Roman Catholic Church where, from memory, two pennies in the slot and a quick press of Button A would do the trick nicely.  If the person was not home or you got an Engaged signal then you simply pressed Button B and your money was returned to you.   I hasten to add that this was not an activity I participated in myself but I was aware via others that this was the process.  

The more tech-savvy among us had discovered by 1954 that it was possible to make calls from one red telephone kiosk to another and therefore lengthy conversations could take place between duos without having to meet up!   This was seen as a great step forward especially for local youth already involved in relationships with the opposite sex though it emerged early on that lengthy phone calls appealed more to females than males.

My grandmother had never used a telephone in her life and was extremely suspicious of them because having any conversation with somebody who couldn’t look you in the eye seemed all wrong to her.   How would you know who you were really talking to?   My mother and aunts were equally hostile towards the idea with the exception of Aunt Rose but she was married to Uncle Mervyn who was in the RAF and so apparently it Stood to Reason.   Anyway we all knew that since she married Mervyn my aunt was growing more like him every day and he was known for being Right Up His Own Arse.  Even my sensible cousin Margaret said they had become Cut Above the rest of us.   

However, by the time she got married to Jack in 1955 Margaret was herself warming to the idea of becoming a home telephone user and this was because she now worked in Dolcis Shoe Shop in Dartford where, she told me, the phone at the rear of the premises never stopped ringing and it was her job to answer it.   She said that when she and Jack moved into their new flat in Slade Green, conveniently close to the station, she was definitely going to investigate what the overall telephone installation costs might be.  I worried that she was beginning to become a little too much like Rose and Mervyn and would end up a Cut Above the rest of the family but her younger sister Ann told me that was most unlikely because her Head was Screwed On.

Growing up with so little experience of what was to become an essential communication tool was not something that generally impeded progress through life for me until I started my first job at Messrs Francis, Day & Hunter in Charing Cross Road.  I discovered that operating the six-line switchboard for one hour one day a week whilst the telephonist took her lunch break was part of my job description.   At the time this was a horrifying idea and you could say that I was thrown into the Deep End of 1950s telecommunication awareness.  Nevertheless, with support from those in the typing pool with more telephone know-how, I managed to overcome what had at first seemed an impossibility, quite rapidly.  

Over the next year or two, several members of the family discussed the idea of Going on the Phone but my mother was destined not to do so until she had moved out of York Road when the homes on our side of the street were about to be demolished.   It was at that stage that my brother and his new young wife supervised her gentle entry into the ranks of those who could place orders with the local grocer or ring the New Doctor who did not like to run his operation in the same manner as his predecessor.    I was living in a London bedsitter by then with a telephone for the use of tenants by the front door, and feeling very sophisticated as you might imagine.   No-one would have ever known that this aid to communication had not always been part of my life.

It is surprising how rapidly families like ours, at one time almost resigned  to our place at the bottom of that post-war heap could adapt to a change in fortunes.   Because it wasn’t just the telephone we took to, sadly non mobile though it was to be for decades - car ownership followed hard on its heels, with Margaret’s Jack taking ownership of a second-hand red sports car in which he drove us to Herne Bay at almost thirty miles an hour most of the way!    Uncle Harold, his father-in-law, proclaimed loudly and frequently to any of us who would listen that twenty miles an hour was fast enough for anyone with any sense and that was a fact.

  My mother said that the trouble with Harold was that he’d never been Backward in Coming Forward and by rights it was nothing to do with him so he should keep his Trap Shut.   She only said that behind his back of course.    That’s always been the way in our family.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Where Charity Begins

 

The manner in which we view those in need has changed drastically in half a century and that’s almost a matter for some rejoicing, even among those who definitely feel so-so about charity to begin with.   I should emphasise that I am among those feeling so-so, in fact very much so.  This is not because I disapprove of helping those in need but more on account of a very unpleasant experience with those dispensing measures of altruism and generosity many years ago.  

I was living in a damp Paddington basement with my three-year-old son, not one of those houses owned by the infamous Peter Rachman but one owned by a landlord in many ways similar, Herbert Mortiboy.    This was a time when pre-school education was considered to be of vital importance and keen young mothers were urged on every side to ensure that their under fives were attending the most desirable pre-schools where Early Reading Programmes abounded and they learned to tie their shoe-laces.  The awful alternative was something called Day Care run by the local council where the queues for acceptance were endless and tied shoe-laces were unheard of.  I definitely wanted the former for Patrick and the daily sessions at Aunty Moira’s Nursery School nicely coincided with my part time job.  The problem was that at the time I could not really afford the elevated fees.   You definitely paid through the nose, as my mother would say – and maybe did say - for tied shoelaces.

Someone suggested that I apply for financial help via a well-known aid agency.   The finer details of the organisation have become lost over time and all I now remember is that it was somehow connected with the Royal Engineers and had been suggested because of my father’s war service.  I was pleasantly surprised to find that I was not required to descend into the depths of Chatham or Maidstone or Gillingham for the required interview, but was instead directed to a rather plush office in Mayfair.   My evaluator was a ferocious woman with natural voice projection and an impressive title and I only wish I could recall her full name.  I will call her Lady Shout-a-Lot.    She was ably assisted by a non-titled minion, tall and thin and slightly stooped and very much in awe of her aristocratic colleague.

I had spent a lot of time on my letter of application.  It was typed on white quarto paper, spelled and punctuated perfectly and this Lady Shout-a-Lot now waved at me in a most threatening manner announcing - `So you own a typewriter I see.’   Her assistant clasped her hands together in horror and echoed ….. `a typewriter’.     They managed to make it sound like a serious offence which was odd. 

I was then allowed to re-iterate the reasons why I needed financial help from them over the next few months or perhaps, heaven forbid, even one year.    After listening with an air of impatience my titled interrogator said in a tone of some triumph - `And you have included a telephone number in your contact details – am I to assume that you also have a telephone?’    At this the subservient subordinate very nearly choked on her next sharp intake of breath repeating `- a telephone!’   

I nervously explained the concept of shared hallway telephones in the rooming houses that proliferated West London at that time but the blank look in their eyes convinced me that this was a notion neither of them was at all familiar with.  Perhaps they had never ventured into the dark and dingy streets of Paddington and Bayswater.

I don’t now recall the finer details of the remainder of the interview, such as it was.   I do remember, however, the next prime demand thrown in my direction by she of the cut glass accent - `Miss Hendy, explain exactly how fond you are of the child.’    This was most unexpected and met of course with an embarrassed silence whilst I fumbled nervously through the various responses I might give.    Lady Shout-a-Lot did not like silences and she impatiently repeated the sentence, reformed as a question - `Exactly how fond are you of this child?’  

It was at this juncture that I simply burst into tears and was unable to say anything further.   Meanwhile my aristocratic persecutor explained with some relish that it was all very well to sit there crying but she could hardly condone handing over any of The Organisation’s precious funds to someone who owned both a typewriter and a telephone and what’s more lived close to central London.  Neither she nor her assistant owned typewriters, nor did they live as centrally as I did.  But even more importantly I seemed incapable of making the sensible decision to give up my child to a family who would be able to give him those educational advantages I seemed to think he needed.

I can’t remember what happened next and whether I stopped crying for long enough to say something flippant or cryptic before I left.  Somehow I doubt it.  I do know that since that afternoon when I was so thoroughly reduced to tears in that Mayfair office, I have viewed all charities with great suspicion.   Recently I was cautiously pleased to be told how much they have changed in the intervening years. 

A FURTHER WORSHIP .......

 

As befits a great cathedral city, Canterbury is of course associated with a number of writers of whom Geoffrey Chaucer is the most immediately obvious.    Admittedly I found him mostly incomprehensible until in the mid 1990s a friendly English Literature teacher engaged in revealing the joys of The Canterbury Tales to a group of 8-10year-olds (who appeared not to be having the problems with the writer that I had) showed me how to crack the Middle English code.   Once accomplished I realised that it’s relatively easy to become addicted to the works of someone born as long ago as the fourteenth century.    

The poet Patience Agbabi who lives in Gravesend with her family cites Chaucer as a major influence on her own work so clearly he was never quite as impenetrable to her as he was to me ensuring she became addicted long before I did.

Christopher Marlowe was born in Canterbury and attended the King’s School, going from there to Cambridge on a scholarship.  Strangely little is known about his life although he is reputed to have been a spy and he was killed in a tavern brawl in 1593 at the age of only 29.  

Another famous King’s School old boy was William Somerset Maugham who was brought up in his clergyman uncle’s family in Whitstable.  It’s claimed that in his autobiographical novel Of Human Bondage, Whitstable becomes Blackstable and Canterbury, Tercanbury.   H.G. Wells who I recently learned is another Kentish writer was also prone to somewhat unimaginatively disguising place names.  He hailed from Bromley but in The New Machiavelli calls it Bromstead.   Before he began to write full time he was a teacher like yet another Bromley writer, Richmal Crompton author of the Just William books.  She was the Classics mistress at Bromley High School for Girls and lived locally in Cherry Orchard Road where she seemed to be able to combine writing with teaching reasonably effortlessly.

Poet Wendy Cope who I only came across a week or two ago was born in Erith.  Like Wells and Crompton she was drawn to teaching and taught for years before concentrating completely on writing.  It’s definitely true these days that most writers will need something other than their writing with which to support themselves but possibly this was not quite so crucial in the past.

One particularly acclaimed writer who found the Kentish countryside to provide a great deal of inspiration for his work, is H.E. Bates who lived in an old granary in Little Chart for 40 years.  He was apparently a very keen gardener and his home was renowned for his ability to turn acres of rough ground into a riot of colour.  He is said to have written a number of gardening books.  

I was recently told that Maisie Stone creator of Annie Violet the Story of an Edwardian Servant Girl is from the Gravesend area and lived locally for a number of years.   I haven’t yet read it but a few days ago I read, and enjoyed  Gravesend Girl Jennifer Barraclough’s just published novella, Cardamine from Overcliff Books.

My search for Kentish writers, most particularly those of North Kent, and even more particularly of the Gravesend area, turned up some interesting information even if not all of it is relevant.

Apparently R.M. Ballantyne lived in Ramsgate researching for The Floating Light of the Goodwin Sands …. Frances Hodgeson Burnett based The Secret Garden on a house she rented in Rolvenden ….. Sir Philip Sidney, Elizabethan poet lived at Penshurst Place ….. Frederick Forsyth was born in Ashford and went to school in Tonbridge …..  George Orwell lived in Paddock Wood during his hop picking sojourns …..  John Evelyn lived at Sayes Court in Deptford which is sometimes seen as London and sometimes as North Kent, depending upon the view of the individual ……  TS Eliot wrote Part III of The Wasteland in Margate whilst recovering from a nervous breakdown.

And there are certain to be more from Gravesend lurking in the dusty corners of the world-wide-web.

A WORSHIP OF WRITERS

Apparently it was as long ago as the fifteenth century that collective nouns emerged as being all the rage.   We are all familiar with a Gaggle of Geese, a School of Fish and a Pride of Lions but many equally colourful terms have been lost over the superseding centuries.     Few of us would be equally familiar with a Smack of Jellyfish, a Business of Ferrets or an Impatience of Wives.   I found myself particularly taken with a Rascal of Boys and could almost see the exasperating bunch of them – I certainly could hardly wait to resurrect a Worship of Writers!   Along with a Gang of Labourers and a Sentence of Judges it does seem an inordinately apt piece of jargon.  

Writers, would-be-writers and once-were-writers are everywhere of course but from time to time over the years it is those of Kent I find myself to be particularly drawn to.   The county has spawned a great many outstanding wordsmiths over the centuries.   Despite Mr Jingle’s observation in The Pickwick Papers, that Kent was primarily known for its apples, cherries, hops and women, that is not altogether accurate. 

Dickens was the first local writer of note that I became familiar with and this was precisely because so much of his work was set in the countryside around me, the towns and villages I already knew well and his characters reliably could be found favouring the very same taverns and ale houses supported by members of my own family.   This admiration of all things to do with Dickens was fostered by local schools so that there were few North Kent children who were not completely comfortable with the early life of Dickens by the time they were eight or nine years old even if they were not yet mature enough to read him for themselves.   Primary school excursions in the final term of the school year had already ensured that most of us knew about the little row of infant graves in the churchyard of St James Church, Cooling that we thereafter identified as Pip’s Graves, giving us relatively painless access into Great Expectations and we certainly became more and more familiar with A Christmas Carol each year at the appropriate time.  So firmly was Charles Dickens linked with the local area that I was surprised as I grew older to find him also inextricably connected to London and even more startled to learn he had actually completed David Copperfield in Broadstairs which to me at the time seemed a great distance from the Thames Estuary.

Eventually I discovered John Buchan also favoured Broadstairs as a writing environment and produced The Thirty-Nine Steps whilst convalescing there.  In fact the steps down to the sea from North Foreland provided inspiration for the title.   Considering all that maybe it wasn’t too bad a place despite all the unpleasant things my mother had to say about it but it was never going to be listed among my favourites.  I was always much more comfortable in Ramsgate and Margate so when I found that well known writer, Frank Muir who I greatly admired, was actually born in Ramsgate I of course immediately read his autobiography – A Kentish Lad.   Later I learned that he was in error with the title and it should have been A Lad of Kent since Ramsgate is definitely east of the Medway.   Perhaps that simply didn’t matter.

Another Man of Kent, Arthur Thorndike, lesser-known brother of the famous actress Sybil hailed from Rochester and used the Romney Marsh as the setting for his Doctor Syn books.   I have never read these books but apparently Dr Syn was the vicar of of Dymchurch parish by day and the leader of a gang of smugglers by night, and known as The Scarecrow.   I’m told that in Dymchurch there is still a Day of Syn festival during each August of even numbered years where locals in costume re-enact scenes from the books.   They sound worth reading don’t they?

Over time I have become increasingly fond of the great Romney Marsh and delighted that it is really and truly part of Kent, if somewhat distant from Northfleet and Gravesend.   I fully expected to find that one of my favourite childhood writers, Monica Edwards was actually from one of the little marshland villages and disappointed to learn that she was in fact born in Belper which is near Derby.   She certainly wrote very convincingly of the area so I refuse to believe that she had no connection with the marsh at all. 

With Monica still lingering in mind it was reassuring to learn that Dymchurch was a favoured holiday destination for E (Edith) Nesbit and that she lived for several years at Halstead where she first devised the idea for The Railway Children.   The local station was originally called Halstead for Knockholt and became Knockholt in 1900.  Although her writing for children is Edwardian in nature for the majority of young readers then and now it is more than stimulating, Edith herself caused a great deal of comment and gossip whilst living on the Marsh.   Her domestic situation would be considered scandalous even by today’s standards but in the early nineteen hundreds must have caused endless comment across the marshland villages.   It is said that some time passed before St Mary’s parishioners would allow her grave to be indicated in any way.   This was a pity because by the time she died the more disreputable aspects were well and truly in the past and she was contentedly married to a decent, doting man, Thomas Terry Tucker, who gave her his total love and attention.  His enduring love must have felt quite unfamiliar after years of marriage to Hubert Bland who demanded a great deal and gave very little to the relationship other than the children of his various mistresses some of whom were dutifully brought up by the ever-faithful Edith.

Noel Coward also lived on the marsh at one time but when his house was requisitioned by the army during WW2 he moved on to St Margaret’s Bay, Dover having purchased a house aptly named White Cliffs.  He eventually sold White Cliffs to Ian Fleming who used it as a weekend cottage and did a fair amount of writing there.   Various references to Kent appear in his books including the local golf club in Goldfinger, although renamed. 

I very much wanted to find writers with more direct links to Gravesend and I spent a lot of time searching for them, largely without success.  Strangely I even failed to find any writing groups, get togethers for those interested in writing although there were plenty of people who will help you with your writing if that’s what you want, ever helpful and checking spelling and sentence structure.   Do the residents of Gravesend and its environs not encourage writers?   It was almost discouraging enough to turn me back in the direction of Dickens.  But casting him firmly aside because he gets altogether too much mentioning without really trying, I found that Joseph Konrad meandered in and around the town when he was busy producing Heart of Darkness and seemed in fact quite familiar with the place.  The town is given more than a casual mention in the book.   That was immediately heartening of course and I can’t think why I wasn’t aware of it when I first read the book as a teenager, possibly I thought he was referring to another more exotic Gravesend perhaps the one closer to New York.  

Eventually I came across Angela Young’s Hollow Victory which I rather enjoyed, particularly her descriptive passages about the town and the river.   I also enjoyed J.J. Irwin’s Once a Boy which is a memoir about growing up in a house in Waterdales in the 1950s and full of reminiscences that are immediately familiar to any of us growing up nearby at the same time.   Then I found all the detailed booklets by Alex Pavitt concerning his own memories of the local area of his childhood including fascinating history of the various streets and shops.  His photos and the illustrations within add a great deal of extra interest to these jam-packed volumes.   Lynda Smith’s book on Rosherville Gardens, The Place to Spend a Happy Day is also an informative read.  

Try as I might though I could find little or no fiction other than Hollow Victory mentioned above, which was disappointing.   However, before I turned somewhat reluctantly back towards Dickens, I was somewhat comforted by the fact that Jennifer Barraclough, who grew up in one of what I most definitely regarded as the very grand houses on The Overcliff is still writing.  She is most definitely from Gravesend and what’s more her last book was set on the marshes close to Gravesend and called You Yet Shall Die.  I’m not completely sure what she is writing at the moment but it’s certain to be worth reading!

Losing Gordie .....

In just a few days and rather astonishingly, it will be a whole year since the death of my much-loved Gordie and although I was hopeful that by this time I would be feeling much better about losing him I can’t honestly say that’s the case.   This has been the hardest year of my life which I suppose is not surprising. 

I’ve not been good at reaching out to the very people who might have made it all a great deal easier.   Most especially in those first painful weeks it was infinitely more comfortable to simply hide away, largely ignoring all attempts to reach me.  There was only one message I hoped for anyway and that one never came either by telephone, text, email, snail-mail or carrier pigeon!   It still hasn’t eventuated and perhaps that has been the hardest thing to deal with.  

During moments of whimsy when I examine whether the entire existence of Himself really is over, I wonder if he is completely ignorant of this perplexing lack of concern. Or does he somehow, somewhere feel the same pain as I do?     When living he was always a reliably more decent human being than me so I am confident he will not feel the same rage.

The virus has been a stroke of luck making a funeral impossible and rescuing me from the concern of the people who cared about both of us.   I simply was not ready to share my anger and my misery – possibly I never will be.  

Con's a Slinger!

 

 

          Particular names featured prominently in our family.   On my mother’s side it was definitely Margaret at least as far as the first-born girls were concerned.  Slightly adapted as Mag, Maggie, Meg, Mig and sometimes even Daisy or Peggy, which I found inexplicable, the Margarets pushed their way into each generation.  This trend only ceased in 1962 when Aunt Mag’s daughter, Margaret Rose firmly gave her own daughter the name Jayne.   Both her mother and Old Nan felt she had let them down and lost no time in telling her so.   But that really is beside the point because it is my father’s family I now want to focus upon and they unquestionably favoured Constance and by the second half of the twentieth century that name was firmly established and appeared wherever in the world little pockets of the family had assembled.   All the little Constances rapidly became Connies as they took their first steps away from babyhood and remained so until reaching grandmotherly maturity when each one became Con.   This custom at least helped somewhat to differentiate which of the Constances you might be referring to when you needed to.

 

          Aunt Connie was my father’s older sister and I was fearful of the very idea of her probably because all I knew about her for sure was that she was a powerful woman and not afraid of defying convention.  At any mention of her my mother was inclined to purse her lips, fold her arms across her chest and mutter mysteriously about things that would never have been allowed within her own family and that there were some who by rights should be ashamed of themselves.   What she was somewhat obliquely referring to was the abandoning of my father to the Workhouse at the age of three and her profound shock that it should have happened when by rights siblings should be stuck together like glue.   

 

Decades later my brother and I were to discover that along with three-year-old Bernard Joseph, an infant sister, Mary Elizabeth whose very existence was a surprise to us, was also cast aside.  And despite our mother’s years of condemnation, we eventually learned that the reason for the extended family failing to care for these two youngest children was in fact quite normal for the time and to be expected.   The births of neither child had been formally registered and it was to emerge that this was most probably because their father was not in fact Mr Charles Hendy at all but a shadowy stranger, one Mr Gam.  We were to learn little about him except that we assumed because of the fashion for naming boys after their fathers, that he may have been Mr Bernard Gam.    My mother was certainly unaware of these most salient facts during those years when she was to liberally castigate the teenage Aunt Connie for not ensuring that her little brother was embraced into the arms of the family rather than shunted from workhouse to boys’ home. 

 

A century later the main concern of Connie Hendy’s nephew and niece sitting in the Aga warmed comfort of the Tysdale Manor kitchen and a million miles away from the misery and poverty that governed the lives of those born before them, was that they had been abruptly made aware that they were not bona fide members of The Hendy Family.  As Bernard admitted, it was a rather odd feeling and he wondered if such a thought had ever crossed our father’s mind.  

 

As a child I fully accepted my mother’s unquestionably harsh summation where the conduct of Aunt Connie was concerned which over time resembled more and more the kind of behaviour more becoming to the devil incarnate than a teenage girl whose family had been torn apart.  And as the years passed and more was uncovered with regard to the drunkenness and aggression of Kate, her mother and the total disregard she appeared to hold for the general welfare of any of her offspring, it was her oldest daughter Connie who continued to hold place as the firm villain in the saga at least as far as my mother was concerned.

 

Sadly Kate Hendy was renowned in Chatham for neglecting her children and was said not to care tuppence about them.   The Stipendiary Magistrate, Mr Alick Tassell summed her up in precisely this way in November 1913 when sentencing her to prison with hard labour for a period of three months.   He also noted that her lack of concern appeared to come about because of her addiction to alcohol.   At the time only three of her eight children were in her care, Walter aged 13, Bernard aged 3 and Mary Elizabeth aged 6 months.  She was charged with neglecting them in such a manner as to cause them unnecessary suffering.

 

One Mr L.A. Goldie prosecuted on behalf of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children and he said the case was an extremely alarming one, entirely due to the woman’s intemperate habits.  He further announced that her husband, a pensioner from the Royal Marines, was a man of most excellent character who had lost both his home and his job on account of her aggression and drinking habits.  He now felt compelled to live apart from her.  

 

Annie Burton, a neighbour attested that Kate was seen drunk most days, left the youngest children alone for hours and when she did take them out with her, was frequently seen stumbling drunkenly in the street with the baby in her arms.   When given notice to quit her room her habit was to both ignore the demand and threaten the messenger.  She seemed to fear no-one, Police included.   Inspector Collard, NSPCC, said when he made a visit on a Saturday morning he found the baby lying in an old tin bath upon a dirty pillow and the youngest boy sleeping on bare boards.  They were both filthy and verminous and their mother was nowhere to be found.    That evening a further visit was made by two inspectors and Kate was arrested in consequence of her extremely abusive behaviour towards them.  The children were removed to The Workhouse the same night. 

 

When she appeared in Court my grandmother denied neglecting her children and told the Magistrate that she had always done her best for them.   She further added that she would never do anything to harm them and woe betide anyone who did!   She admitted that her husband declined to live with her because the two youngest were not his but that his absence had nothing whatsoever to do with her drinking.   It was at this point that the Magistrate pointed out that there was overwhelming evidence to show that the children had been seriously neglected and that the prisoner clearly did not care tuppence about them – and sentenced her to prison.

 

Easily shocked, especially where the lapses of others were concerned my mother was fortunately totally ignorant of these rather distasteful details of the family story.   She had Right on her side to some extent for although her own parents had frequently fallen down significantly in their overall nurturing ability, neither of them as far as we knew had featured in NSPCC newspaper reports or been sent to prison for their failures.   It was perhaps this ignorance of all the facts that served to keep the much maligned Aunt Connie in her place as the rather baffling harbinger of my father’s early misfortunes.  

 

Growing up I gave my father’s side of the family scant attention and had no curiosity about them whatsoever.   For a number of years we visited the family of his oldest brother, Walter but I did not give much thought as to where he and his ten children fitted on the branches of the family tree. Uncle Walter ruled with a never wavering rod of iron which triggered not only his wife and children to treat him with a great deal of respect but also my brother and myself.   His eight sons and two daughters were somewhat surprisingly each possessed of rather more intellect than would be expected at first glance considering the lowly circumstances under which they lived.   Despite the fact that they were given little attention from either parent, and learned to demand nothing from them, and that they neither individually nor as a group owned books or toys, somehow or other this innate ability struggled through for each of them.  This ensured that when the time came they one after another passed the dreaded eleven plus examination with ease.  Being allowed to take advantage of this opportunity was a separate hurdle and a lot of discussion was ploughed through before Uncle Walter could be persuaded to capitulate. This mostly had to do with the cost of the many uniform items involved in attending the local grammar school.   Furthermore, like The Taliban, Walter was particularly against girls gaining too much education and his youngest, again a Connie said that she, in particular, only escaped the clutches of the Secondary Modern school via Wombwell Hall when she was thirteen.  Even then her father insisted on choosing her subjects and she was registered into the domestic course against her will. 

 

Conversely my own father placed a great deal of emphasis on education for all and the need to grasp every chance that might come your way.  At the time I was of course ignorant of the fact that being raised within the confines of the Medway Cottage Homes was not as bad a fate as might be imagined.   Quite apart from what the future had in store for each of the children born to Kate Hendy, it now seems clear that perhaps surprisingly, the oddly placed thread of intelligence and application ran through the entire family.   Even those spawned at a time when their mother consumed alcohol on a daily basis seemed to escape the worst possible outcomes of this activity.  

 

Aunt Connie herself was forgotten for decades until, I met up with her quite unexpectedly in the nineteen seventies in New Zealand by which time she had become Con.   Then in her seventies she had embarked on a two-year working holiday during which time she organised several family weddings and took a job as housekeeper to the then Chairman of the Auckland Hospital Board, Sir Frank Rutter.   Con had definitely not morphed into a Little Old Lady, this was still clearly a woman of independence and determination.  I was keen to meet her but at the same time cautious.

 

Aware of the past vitriol and bitterness that had invariably accompanied any gossip that surrounded her I was uncertain and wondered what her view of me might be.   Reassuringly she was both charismatic and friendly, a larger than life character with the kind of personality that it was impossible not to be drawn to.   We met regularly over a year or so at the homes of several first and second cousins who were still Connies.  We spoke a great deal about the past, though she displayed some reluctance when speaking of the worst excesses of her mother and was not nearly as condemning of her as might be expected. There was not a vestige of the victim about Aunt Con. 

 

Admittedly of her many stories I only half believed her when she told me of her exploits during The First World War and that she had been the first female crane driver at Chatham Dockyard.  I decided that she was doing what I might once have done myself and simply elaborated upon the facts to ensure that the story appealed to the listener.    Those were the days, she said, pouring herself another cup of tea and settling back in her chair with a faraway look in her eye - and what days they had been!   And then when the time came for her to return to England, once more she was forgotten as day-to-day life took over, eclipsing such episodes of memory whether they were true or false or exaggerated.

 

 It was therefore with some surprise recently that I learned from Linda, a third cousin that this redoubtable Aunt, was never completely suppressed and had surfaced once again and now featured in an exhibition at her greatly loved the world-famous Dockyard.    And those tales of hers of a hundred years ago were completely accurate! Clearly Constance Huggett (nee Hendy) was, despite the difficult circumstances of her early life, always destined to find a place in that very special breed of twentieth century women - the group ordained to lead the charge in the emancipation of their sex.  These were the women who combined strength with stamina and resilience and achieved things that would never fail to surprise the generations that followed them.   As long ago as 1917 the redoubtable Aunt Con was exactly what she said she was - a Slinger!