The N Word

I’ve certainly known Melissa for a long time. In fact when I first met her she was Miriam rather than Melissa which was the name her parents gave her, mostly on the insistence of her mother who was keen on Biblical names and had already named her first child Isaac. These days Melissa likes to Skype maintaining it’s more intimate than old fashioned telephoning because you can see the person you speak with. She likes to move with the times but there are definitely times when I would rather just be heard rather than seen and heard.

A day or so ago when she and I were discussing my undeniably tardy attitude towards total acceptance of a certain strata of social change on which sits gay marriage, third party reproduction for same sex couples and gender choice for six year olds she actually described me as blinkered and indulging in affectation. I will admit to being a bit hurt – blinkered? affected? – moi? I had been simply mentioning that I was sick to death of settling down with morning coffee and the paper only to have the mundane lives of joyfully cohabiting same sex couples regularly shoved in my face and the woes of parents whose sons had become daughters thrust upon me on a regular basis all before 8am. It was tedious I said and furthermore why was it those in same sex relationships were free to comment upon their Husbands or their Wives in media interviews, fearlessly describing them as such whilst other decent citizens/ratepayers such as myself for example were expected to just have a Partner? Where was the fairness in that?

Melissa said it was because the media was doing a sterling job of educating we who did not fall into the category of those about whom they wrote and I said that I objected to being educated and what’s more it would have to be a very dense individual who did not actually realise what they were supposed to believe. How many of us really need all this media direction? It was as if, I pontificated, the fortunate few who were strangely free to have Husbands and Wives must be placed on a more elevated level than the rest of us and we left floundering below should strive to be like them. As for myself, I had no wish to be like them because I rather liked being what my quaintly old fashioned Husband described as Normal. There it was - the N word, used unashamedly. I knew she was just a tinsy bit shocked because there was a little silence.

But you have to hand it to Melissa. After a sharp intake of breath and a second or two she simply said well that was Life and I should make an effort to get my head around it and I retorted that thrusting such matters into my face on a daily basis was responsible for any lethargy of approval I might feel. It looked as if we would shortly agree to disagree but then she drew my attention back to what we generally call the Good Old Days when we both worked for Danny la Rue in his club in Hanover Square. In those days, she said, I wasn’t nearly as judgmental and there was some truth in that. But it was me who reminded her that back in those days we lived a far more simple life and in any case it was not possible to be hypercritical about Danny who was an employer quite unparalleled in that shady nightclub world as well as a supreme entertainer. We were all a little bit in love with him.

The difference between then and now I told her was that somehow or other situations that once happily occupied the fringes of society have been hurtled into near vision and alongside all the associated Education is a great deal of virtue signaling. Melissa said neither of us knew whether those back then in the situations felt all that comfortable and happy in the place they occupied. We reminded each other of the cigarette girl Jody who was desperately trying to be noticed by Danny’s dresser Toni who seemed oblivious of the heartache she was causing. We laughed a bit about the Cloakroom woman Roza who tried to sit firmly on the fence in all matters concerning sex and viewed Jody’s fixation with horror commenting lamely from time to time that when she was young such love affairs simply were not fashionable – at least not in her Spanish village.

Melissa said again that I’d been much less of a red-neck in those days and I wished I hadn’t told her that I would like to see hanging re-established. Later when repeating some of the conversation with my Partner (can’t bring myself to say Husband yet again) he said that perhaps over the years I had become more Normal. There it was again – the N word!

The Coming of the Postcodes

To my knowledge our corner of North Kent was postcode-less during all the time it took me to grow old enough to triumphantly leave at last and make my way up-river to London. My very first encounter with postal codes was when I moved importantly into the bed-sitter lands of South Kensington and Bayswater conscious of being very grown up indeed. To me these strangely disconnected and incomprehensible letters and numbers were simply part of the mood and character of a city I had longed to be a part of and added to the thrill of at last living there. London postal areas were established as long ago as the 1850s and the system was gradually adopted by other major cities, the process considered to be completed by 1934. It wasn’t until 1959 that the then Postmaster General first trialled the plan throughout England starting with Norwich and apparently a gradual nationwide rollout followed and was at last concluded in 1974.

At some stage during those years Gravesend and Northfleet received their very own postal codes with DA12 bestowed upon Gravesend East, including Chalk, Shorne and Cobham and the now familiar DA11 awarded to Gravesend West which included Northfleet. It’s perhaps surprising that the Thameside community that had grown so rapidly during the nineteenth century had to wait so long to be elevated into the ranks of a Place with a Postcode. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the area had been a centre of industry for centuries with the Romans giving commerce a kick start when they first began to dig chalk from the area. Cement making followed without too much delay and by 1796 one James Parker a former clergyman had set up kilns on Northfleet creek in order to make what he called Roman Cement. The cement industry went from strength to strength with nine plants eventually operating along the riverside, providing a great deal of employment for the locals, one of whom was my father. It had taken some time for Bernard Joseph Hendy to shake off the glamour of foreign travel that the war had afforded him and for several years he regularly reduced both my mother and myself to boredom with his tales of the sunshine, dates and olives of North Africa and the music and food of Italy. Often these reminiscences ended in tears for my mother who would later mutter to her sisters that he didn’t say much about the Fancy Women with the foreign names and that there was no mistake that the war had definitely been the Ruin of him.

To be fair he didn’t always talk about life in far-away places and how superior it had been to that he was now forced to live and after a few months back in North Kent he seemed to develop a keen interest in the social and industrial history of the area. It was he who told me that there had once been a number of dockyards in Northfleet that had over time produced many impressive vessels. One, laid out in the late 1700s was owned by a shipwright called Thomas Pitcher. A list of ships he built included at least two dozen for the East and West Indies services along with many a vessel for the Navy. Pitcher’s yard finally closed in 1860 and more recently I have learned that a local group of enthusiasts as fascinated as my father had been in the late 1940s are now involved in investigations to reveal more about it. Sadly back in the time when my well-meaning father sought to interest me in the topic I couldn’t have been less attentive to details of Mr Pitcher’s shipyard.

Information concerning the nearby paper industry possibly would have absorbed me more because I loved to draw pictures and as I got older to write stories and I was destined to grow up one of the few extremely fortunate children provided with a seemingly limitless amount of suitable paper at a time when it was in very short supply. The paper industry had sprung up during the first decades of the twentieth century in the form of Bowaters then Bowater Scott where my Uncle Walter reigned supreme for many years as a foreman and eventually a union representative. He clearly also had a habit of methodically helping himself to a wide variety of paper products which he concealed in a sack on the back of his bike and delivered to our house at least once a week on his way home to Waterdales. I don’t know how many of his own large family of children were similarly supplied although his youngest daughter Connie always seemed to be able to locate paper on which to draw patterns for dolls’ clothes, but I was able to create endless towns, villages, flower gardens, intricate maps of imaginary islands, short stories and plays for stage and radio, etc year after year. It has only recently occurred to me that this purloining of paper was in fact a very serious matter, particularly so at a time when it was a most valuable commodity. Clearly these thefts were never brought to the attention of anyone in a position of seniority at Bowaters because Uncle Walter seemed to go from strength to strength on the factory floor.

The cable works originally called Henleys and later AEI were yet another noteworthy employer and occupied part of the former infamous Rosherville Gardens. It is proudly claimed that the PLUTO pipeline (PipeLines Under The Ocean) invaluable during WW2, was built there. Uncle Walter’s daughter Connie chose them as her first employer when she left Wombwell Hall School, and became an office girl for Henleys. This was a definite affront to her formidable father who had specifically directed that she should do the Domestic Course at Wombwell Hall in order that she learn to cook and sew for her future family. He was alarmed at the thought of her joining the ranks of more modern thinking schoolgirls like myself who had chosen to take up shorthand and typing and were in danger of having their heads turned as a result. At sixteen years of age Connie’s head had finally turned and she struck out for independence and began to take evening classes in typing and talk loudly about her father’s views being stuck in the Dark Ages. This was in some measure due to the influence of her first boyfriend, Mick the apprentice builder, who had definite plans for their future together and was unafraid of her dictatorial father.
None of us knew a great deal about the one time notorious Gardens at Rosherville that had been the brain child of George Jones and certainly proved a splendid use for the motley and dispirited group of abandoned chalk pits. Although from time to time Old Nan made mention of what a Grand Day Out it had been to go by steamboat to Rosherville and that at Easter time the hats had to be seen to be believed and what a black day it was when the gates closed for ever. They had apparently been one of the largest and most popular of the Victorian pleasure gardens and survived from the accession of Queen Victoria for more than seventy years into the reign of George V. At the time there were a number of extensive pleasure gardens in the London area including Vauxhall near Lambeth on the south bank of the Thames and Cremorne on the river at Chelsea. Smaller gardens also proliferated such as those in Marylebone and Islington both of which had been frequented by Samuel Pepys as long ago as the mid1660s. On one occasion Pepys had gone to Islington in great excitement to drink China Tea only to complain bitterly later about the price of the rather indifferent roast chicken he was forced to order for his hungry female companions. And more than two and a half centuries later my young grandparents, as yet unburdened by the many children they were later to have and celebrating a win at the races, made a very similar complaint regarding the cost of the boiled chicken available at Rosherville. Old Nan maintained that she reckoned it was Daylight Bleeding Robbery and no mistake and in any case the remodelling of the Bijou Theatre into a modern refreshment room had been a gross blunder on the part of the organisers and only served to increase the already exorbitant prices. Except she didn’t actually put it like that.

Although the gardens in the chalk pits declined in popularity over time, for a glorious epoch they towered above similar possibilities for entertainment in the marshy region that sat alongside the Thames and was ultimately to become part of a future postal code. The sectioning of that corner of North Kent into easily distinguishable alphanumeric cyphers would take place long after the little Greek temples and statuary in the cliffs, the archery lawn, the bear pit, the maze, the visit of the American Sousa band and the performance of the great Blondin, Trapeze Artist Extraordinaire had been completely forgotten.
Jeremiah Rosher and his son Joseph who had given their names to the building scheme that saw the advent of a clutch of smart new houses appearing in the area in1830 were great enthusiasts of the Gardens and would undoubtedly have approved of their estate eventually becoming absorbed into the coding system that was to develop many years later. It was evident even as the freshly drawn plans for Rosherville New Town were presented and displayed to all in the neighbourhood who might be interested that the pair had great hopes for the development. Their first prospectus states confidently that it was predicted the area would become to Gravesend what St Leonards and Broadstairs had already become to Hastings and Margate. For a time the homes attracted at least a percentage of those the Roshers had envisaged but over time they would slowly but surely plummet in popularity and by August 1939 when my newly-wed parents inspected a top floor flat in Burch Road the rot had definitely set in. The road had been named in honour of Jeremiah’s father-in-law Benjamin Burch and a hundred years previously had been the smartest place in the district to live. On the eve of WW2 it was what my mother termed a Pig Sty, a slum with no laid on water and a lavatory shared by all and sundry in the house and as the front door seemed permanently open, no doubt by half the street as well. Having been born in a hop garden and brought up variously under tarpaulins in fields and condemned Victorian terraces her assessment was significant. The fact that the famous Rosherville Hotel still stood nearby in all its architectural glory did nothing to alter her opinion. My grandmother said she remembered the hotel in its Glory Days when it was full of mirrors and plush settees and red velvet drapes but added that it had been a hospital during The Great War and in her opinion it was them wounded troops that ruined the place.

During the next war, impatiently waiting to begin, German aircraft were to fly regularly through the Kentish skies above DA11 and according to the residents of York Road, Northfleet where my parents eventually decided to take up the rental of number 28, would deal the worst blows to daily life experienced for centuries. For a time it seemed little might remain of the age-old Thameside communities, little left to be sectioned into alphanumeric districts at the behest of some future Postmaster General.
On the other hand misfortune and catastrophe ebbs and flows and good sense dictates that any situation on a busy waterway would always offer an obvious place for a potential phoenix to arise from hypothetical ashes. The river would of necessity provide a reliable water supply and the means for transporting raw materials and products. The local woodland might at all times be called upon to offer the timber needed for industrious endeavour. And amid the ever-abundant supply of chalk was also flint that at various stages of community development would be found expedient as a building material.

That segment of DA11 now called Northfleet derives its name from its situation on the most Northern reach of Ebbsfleet once simply called the River Fleet. Few who pass through the international railway station of that name that emerged so rapidly a few years ago in Ebbsfleet Valley would know or care that in 600 AD the river was known as Fleote by the Saxons. Neither would they have much interest in the fact that by the time the Domesday Book was completed the little town was known as Norfluet or even that the settlement on the other end of the Fleet is called Southfleet and these days recorded as being in postcode DA13. There might be some transitory interest in the fact that the Bluewater Shopping Centre that I have so far never visited, lies nearby and that the station is part of the Thames Gateway Urban Regeneration, a project of national priority and that it is a mere hop, skip and a jump from the M25 motorway.

Flashing through Ebbsfleet aboard the Eurostar a few years ago I was astonished to catch a glimpse of St Botolph’s Church standing proudly atop of the cliffs that border the long ago chalk excavations and fall as they always did, abruptly into bramble pits. And just for a moment enduring memories of times past surfaced and demanded to be examined. Long ago summer evenings with my mother and Molly, our younger brothers lagging behind and complaining of hunger, thirst and tiredness, foraging for mushrooms among the brambles as the shadows grew longer. Sunday mornings with my grandmother at nearby Springhead, past the pig farm and the abandoned fever hospital, intent upon gathering the wild watercress that had first been cultivated there by Mr William Bradbery in the early 1800s for supply to London.

And because it was Sunday being ever aware of the bells of St Botolph’s loud and clear that must be ignored and those of Our Lady of the Assumption, more indistinct and muffled, but nevertheless to be heeded because they were calling us to Mass. If we had time we would go we said one to another but knew that it was unlikely that we would do so. The gathering of watercress to go with shrimps and whelks for tea was infinitely more engrossing.

Sunday's Child

Every child used to be aware of the day on which they were born at one time and the implications it was likely to have on their life. Monday’s child was fair of face and Molly from number 31 had been born on a Monday. It was one of the reasons she was confident of becoming a Hollywood film star because she knew that she would grow up to have the looks for it. She said she would have been tempted to go into hairdressing if it hadn’t been for the auspicious day of her birth.

Joan Bennett, was not so fortunate being welcomed into the world on a Tuesday by her grandmother who announced at once her delight because Tuesday’s child was full of grace. None of us understood all that well what Grace entailed but it was definitely important to her grandmother who had used it as a given name for Joan’s mother back in 1909 and she’d been born on a Wednesday. Years later Joan’s recently married teenage sister whose husband was Irish and found Joan difficult to like was heard once to say she was graceless.

We were glad not to have to grow up as Mrs Ribbins’ latest baby, Sonia-Kim a Wednesday’s Child and already full of woe judging by the amount of noise she could make which her mother said was just the Colic and something she would grow out of. Aunt Mag thanked the Lord that none of her four ever had the Colic.

My brother was considered a fortunate newborn because Thursday’s child had far to go and Old Nan said he would do well in life just like her Edgar did when he managed to give up the drink. It was odd that she should have made this comment at all as she never managed to give up the drink herself. After a more than shaky start involving problems with the local law enforcement authority Bernard did indeed go far and accomplished much more in his life than any of us would ever have thought possible.

Friday’s child was loving and giving and that description wholly suited the only Friday’s child I knew, my cousin Little Violet who was unfortunate enough to have to live with our Grandmother but bore the difficulty admirably well even at Christmas when the crayons and colouring in book that had been promised her were not at the bottom of her bed on the morning of the 25th. She no longer believed in Father Christmas anyway she said and fully understood that the problem was because Old Nan had been too preoccupied with gin from The Jolly Farmers the day before to even think about heading down to Woolworths. Anyhow Little Violet told us that she wasn’t that fussed about colouring in books and crayons because they were not always all they were cracked up to be and never worth the money. Next year, she decided, she was going to buy her own Christmas present. In the meantime she continued to be kind to everyone else and looked fearful and guilty when Uncle George seemed outraged when it became clear she was the only child in the family without a gift that year. He told the awkward collective of Constant sisters that he thought their mother was a disgrace. To make up for being overlooked he gave Little Violet two half crown pieces and Uncle Harold not to be surpassed in generosity did likewise. She was of course quite delighted with the sudden improvement in her fortunes and later said it had been the best Christmas ever.

The oldest of my nearly grown-up male cousins, Young Harold who I disliked and distrusted was fond of telling us that he would always have to work bloody hard because of being born on a Saturday and we all knew that Saturday’s child works hard for a living. He had just got his first job down at Vickers and had recently bought a smart pair of tight black jeans and boots with heels and managed to attract his very first girlfriend so he felt superior and wanted to be treated as if he was twenty rather than sixteen.

By the time I was two years old I knew perfectly well that I was a very special child indeed having been born on a Sunday. We were all completely aware that The child that is born on the Sabbath day is happy and wise and bonny and gay. Even my grandmother was grudgingly appreciative of the fact that there was a lot to be said for being as fortunate as I was concerning the day of my birth though she insisted it had more to do with basic good luck than anything else. This was rather spoiled later, when at the impressionable age of fourteen, I was told that because my time of birth was midday it meant I was of a very shallow disposition as all the planets were above the horizon. I was for ever destined to have only superficial ideas and a slight understanding of life and all my relationships with people would be at a surface level. I had no idea whatsoever what this would mean for my future but I immediately began to feel rather more shallow than was healthy. I knew my mother was still proud of my Sunday status even though she used to look at me sometimes and shake her head saying nobody would ever think I was a Sunday’s child. She didn’t really mean it and I felt it would not be fair to explain to her how shallow I was.

I sometimes wonder if today's child is aware of the possible significance of being born on a certain day of the week.

The Lives of Children

There would be no exaggeration in saying that in the middle of the twentieth century the health matters that most troubled our community differed vastly from those causing anxiety today. Children in particular were more at risk back then and unlike today parents more eager to take advantage of any government schemes such as mass vaccination that would protect them. There was no need for medical personnel to explain that vaccination was a miracle of modern medicine and that it would save more lives worldwide than any other medical product or procedure. Uneducated though we were there existed a tacit understanding that this was so and in those days there was no knowledge of afflictions such as Autism and those stumbling across it would have been unlikely to recognize it as something that was undesirable or that could have been avoided. They would have found any assertion that it might be connected with their child’s recent vaccination very hard to believe. There was an acceptance that in the midst of any group of children there were those who were different, slower than the norm, with visual or hearing defects, or suffering from an inability to control their impulses. The latter were seen as wayward, described as badly behaved and might be beaten more than was customary and if their parents failed to sufficiently quell their behaviour with violence at home, regular canings could be doled out at school that often had the desired effect.

So we were all vaccinated against Smallpox when we were under two years of age and apparently many children had an unpleasant reaction to the inoculation with high temperatures and were perhaps sick and fretful for several days. Some of them might well have gone on to develop conditions associated with the vaccine but unlike today the attendant gossip about such matters did not particularly proliferate around the neighbourhood. There were no radio Talk Back Programmes on which to air concerns, no television and nobody knew what Support Groups might be. What most pre-occupied our parents was that we should not fall victim to the truly terrible illness that had killed and maimed so many of their own generation. The vaccine did not come accompanied by doubts and uncertainties.

Old Aunt Maudie was profusely pock-marked and in her eighties and her opinion was that Smallpox was a malady that struck with guile and without pity and should never be under-estimated. She was not anyone’s real aunt and her neighbours had quite forgotten whose aunt she had originally been except that his name was Humphrey. He had not been a proper nephew but the son of one of her cousins from Southend who had died in the Flu epidemic just after the Great War. She said The Smallpox when it settled upon her family in the latter part of the nineteenth century seemed to be just a cold in the head and nothing more than that. Victoria was still Queen it being just before she also adopted the title Empress of India, the very same summer in which the Chapel organized an outing by train to Ramsgate. They had lived In Chatham at the time on account of her father’s work in the ropery at the dockyard. Both she and her older sister Gracie had been chosen to go on the outing because of their good behaviour and oh how they had enjoyed themselves. What tales they had to tell when they returned. Gracie had even won a prize at Hoop La - a set of wooden alphabet blocks which she intended to give to their youngest brother who was about to reach his fourth birthday. It was to be a surprise and she hid the box under the bed she shared with Gracie in the attic. None of them were accustomed to birthday presents.

Then they both began to feel unwell and as the days passed her mother had never known such girls for crying and complaining just for the sake of runny eyes and noses. It was surely giving her The Pip and so they tried as hard as they could not to make The Pip any worse. Then she and Gracie began to vomit and to feel much worse. It had taken more than a week for the tell-tale blisters to make their entrance and my goodness didn’t they cause a deal of dread and trouble. At first they seemed perhaps harmless, just little pink clusters but she and Gracie knew it must be bad from the extent of the fear and fright on their mother’s face. They wondered how long it would be before they recovered. Maudie remembered it was more than two weeks before the scabs fell off and it was then she first became aware that at some stage during that time her sister had died and had even been buried for there was no longer any sign of her. Nobody in the bed beside her, no longer a sister to squabble with or to share secrets with. She remembered the alphabet bricks and checked that they were still hidden which they were.

She, Maudie, had been lucky really and most especially when you considered the fact that despite her poor mother’s best efforts The Smallpox had not been content to take just Gracie and within weeks the three little brothers aged six and five and very nearly four were similarly seized, two of them passing in one night. The youngest never did reach his milestone birthday and so never knew about the wooden blocks won by his sister which was a pity really. And now all these years later Old Maudie couldn’t for the life of her remember what happened to them. She said she thought her poor mother had never really recovered from that time of The Smallpox and the loss of four of her five children. And in recent years Dr Crawford had told her that it was a good thing her mother had once been a milkmaid but what he meant by that was not clear except it was something to do with all the children dying.

My father when regaled with the story upon his return from the six to two shift said that several boys admitted to the Chatham Orphanage he grew up in were there because Smallpox had killed so many in their families. And because he thought it was interesting he added that what was more the disease had been active in Egypt thousands of years ago and those that dug up mummies had found evidence of it. My mother said she found that very hard to believe and qualified this remark by explaining that she meant the bit about Egypt, not the orphanage. He replied that the scourge of Smallpox would probably be with us for all time, vaccinations or not. But he turned out to be wrong about that. It’s hard now to know what Old Maudie would have thought about the fact that Smallpox was destined to become eradicated from the face of the earth within two decades.

In the 1940s and 1950s a range of childhood illnesses that are becoming less familiar to us such as Measles, Mumps, Rubella and Scarlet Fever, were run of the mill and every child was expected to encounter them at some stage, suffer the effects that would hopefully be temporary and emerge all the stronger for the experience. There were after all, far more critical onslaughts on the child body. There was Polio for example that nobody wanted to contemplate although oddly enough it largely ignored the working classes and concentrated on those more affluent, the toffs from the smart houses on the London Road, and even those from more moderate homes in Springhead Road. Why this should be was not clear and when a vaccine appeared it was received with relief and delight because everyone in communities like ours had at least heard of children whose lives had been devastated by the disease even though the death rate seemed to be lower than other more feared illnesses. In the late 1940s Polio had spread throughout North Kent. Swimming pools, cinemas and schools closed and the fear of its direct visitation became visceral. There were tales that the more badly afflicted became unable to breathe and lived their lives inside something called an iron lung whilst others recovered with only a limp to show for it. For some children months were spent in hospital. I was rushed to the local doctor one morning by my alarmed mother simply because overnight I had developed a stiff and painful neck. And in the waiting room other parents, pulled their children just a little further away from me and left the chairs on either side of us empty. Dr Outred examined me carefully, taking twice as long as was customary for him and with tight lips and narrowed eyes so that I became slightly alarmed myself turning over in my mind everything I had heard about those unfortunates who fell into the clutches of Poliomyelitis. But I was to be reprieved and in our immediate area only Joyce Martin of Dover Road fell victim to it, was hospitalized for seven months and left with a pronounced limp.

The greatest fear of all was reserved for Diphtheria, the sore throat that killed and was passed effortlessly from child to child. In 1942 three and a half thousand British children died from the condition compared with a mere four deaths in the past twenty years which fact should do just a little to indicate the positive aspects of vaccination. In 1946 Grace Bennett’s Joan developed a sore throat with attitude, and became so ill that her mother feared she had somehow stumbled across the infection and took a torch to peer into her throat, imagining she could clearly see a grey membrane. Old Mrs Bassant next door to us, whose adopted daughter Ina had been a victim years previously, and luckily survived, was called upon to give her opinion which she did and it was to call the doctor even though it was seven in the evening and a Sunday. This advice was coloured by the fact that in 1923 young Ina had all but perished and had been taken hurriedly to the Gravesend Sanatorium in Whitehill Lane where there were beds for those with infectious diseases. She had been lucky in more ways than one because only a few years before she would have had to be taken to Strood where it cost eight shillings a day but the medical care was not as good as it should have been. Gravesend that year had a total of sixty beds of which sixteen were allotted for Diphtheria, twenty for Scarlet Fever and twenty four for Smallpox and the cost of care was three guineas a week. When Ina was there first class care was given by a Matron and two proper nurses with the help of a couple of trainees. It was well worth the exorbitant fee for those who could afford it. They had been stretched to afford it but their Ina was well worth the financial sacrifice. The Matron had said that left another day she might well have had to have a tracheotomy which was where a hole is cut into the throat in order to ensure the patient can breathe. It just didn’t bear thinking about and Grace Bennett should get the doctor to her Joan as fast as possible.

When he finally arrived that evening, charging five shillings and sixpence and slightly ill-tempered because he had been intending to spend the entire evening sorting his boyhood stamp collection into the order he had long imagined would increase its worth, he said it was not in fact Diptheria at all. Their Joan was suffering from a common or garden Quinsy. Apparently a Quinsy was a tonsillar abscess and although in some cases it could be serious in this case it was, in his opinion, not as it was now with his help, to be adequately treated. Joan’s mother was left wondering if she would have been better advised to leave consulting him for his advice until the following morning when the cost would have halved because this was in the time before the National Health Initiative. Most people thought better safe than sorry and even today Diphtheria kills up to ten per cent of sufferers but because of widespread vaccination programmes is now rare in the developed world.

When the National Health Service was finally introduced and news spread throughout the working class streets of Northfleet that consulting a doctor with a sick child would no longer cost half a crown there was disbelief from some. My mother said she had never begrudged the money in the first place, which was not completely true. My grandmother wondered if the free visit would actually result in the kind of care that was worth having in the first place. But within a short space of time the community was reassured and free health care together with the development of vaccination programmes had the intended result.

Over time there were to be fewer funeral processions where the youngest child mourners dressed in white, and less mournful burials involving little white coffins. Mr Horlock and his sons were to be asked less frequently about the possibility of a white plumed horses-drawn hearse even though Old Aunt Maudie said it had always been a sight to behold and that the streets of Chatham had been wet with tears the day her little brothers were buried. My grandmother, who would have been the first to note that as time went on white plumed horses became an option reserved for The Toffs, said that back then all hearses were pulled by horses anyway and white plumes were commonplace. She recalled that when their little Arthur was taken, her Edgar had Polly the little Shetland pony decked out with the finest equine headdress he could find and she was made to pull a goat cart with the little white casket on it all the way to Dartford cemetery. People had stopped in the streets and men removed their hats and the women all cried. I didn’t ask what childhood malady had snuffed out the life of Little Arthur but I wondered. A long time later my brother, having done a great deal of family history research, told me that more than likely the infant had been smothered accidentally in the bed of his parents who in those days drank far more than was good for them or their children. So many aspects of the lives of children have changed for the better.

Tales of Consumption .....

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

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

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

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

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

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

A More Simple Time In Which To Live

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

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

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

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

A Death In The Family

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

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

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