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!