Charlie Junior, Alice and Grace
Charlie Junior, Alice and Grace
I am staring at a photograph on my desk of three children. Its faded sepia tones can’t hide the look of mischief in the eldest girl’s face as she peers through the bow covering half her head, at someone standing to the right of the camera. Maybe it’s her mother, Clara. ‘There’s trouble,’ I think. She makes me smile and I know without needing to read the inscription on the back that this is my great-aunt, Alice, the eldest of the Scarlet Sisters, Charlie Swain and Clara Crisp’s children. I can’t see the face of their second daughter, Grace. She’s looking down at a book on Alice’s lap. But I can see her beautiful, shiny, thick ringlets, pinned back from her face by two huge bows. I wish the photo had been in colour so I could see the famous chestnut shade of her hair. Both girls are dressed beautifully, as I would expect from Swains about to have their photo taken: big, fluffy, white dresses with many layers, and an overkill of lace and embroidery. I know what nimble seamstresses the Scarlet Sisters were, and I wonder whether they inherited their talent from Clara. They certainly don’t look poor – they’ve all got beautiful ankle boots with buttons up the side.
But the person I study longest is the boy, Charlie, who was named after his father. With his chin on his fist and his mouth turning down at the edges, Charlie looks a bit cheesed off, as if he’d rather be running around outside. He’s got a big moonface like my nanna and what looks like sandy hair. I turn over the photo and read the inscription. It says: ‘Charlie, Alice, Grace 1910’ and I feel a chill.
It’s the date – 1910. Now the photo has taken on a whole new significance.
It was a warm, sunny day at the height of the particularly languid summer of 1910. Three children were trying, and largely failing, to spin their hoops along the towpath by the banks of the River Thames in Marlow. It was not an obvious location choice for chasing hoops – the wider, flatter street outside their house in Station Road would have been better. But nine-year-old Alice Swain had fallen foul of their neighbour and local busybody, Mrs Dossett, and was still smarting from the clipped ear she got for playing ‘Knock Down Ginger’. This was a popular pastime for bored Edwardian children and involved knocking on a neighbour’s door and then running away. Being Charlie Swain’s daughter, Alice could never resist a wager, and when Johnnie Best bet her she couldn’t do it to the ‘Old Dossett Dragon’, she had been put in an impossible position. Nor was she helped by the fact that when Mrs Dossett went to answer the door and found no one there except the hem of a gingham smock poking out from behind her front wall, and then chased the gingham smock down the street, Mrs Dossett’s currant buns were left too long in the oven and burned. All of which meant Alice got an extra blow from the belt of her mother when she got home.
So now Alice had taken her little sister, Grace, and the baby of the family, Charlie, down to the banks of the River Thames and out of harm’s way – or so she thought.
‘Oi, Charlie, look out, yer great lump!’
Charlie was standing right on the edge of the bank, peering over at the perilous eddies which swirled around where the water plunged over the top of the weir. But the sound of the rushing water at Marlow lock swallowed Alice’s shouts, so she threw down her hoop in frustration and ran over to where five-year-old Charlie was teetering on the brink, as if mesmerised by the whirlpools. Alice had a vision of him tumbling into the water, ginger head first, his loose shirt all untucked, button-up boots following the knee britches that she’d watched her mother make with such pride.
Charlie was blessed with his elder namesake’s ginger hair, freckles and fair skin; his sisters, however, were a little darker: Alice did have strawberry-blonde hair, but her skin was more golden, while Grace, like her mother, Clara, had been blessed with the most extraordinary mop of chestnut ringlets, which today were elaborately tied up in big floppy lilac ribbons. Only a month into the school holidays, her skin had already turned the colour of toast on a grate.
Alice’s stomach lurched. Sometimes there were advantages to being the eldest, but today the responsibility was making her feel ill. In a family that only seemed to produce girls, the only son was treated like they’d found the needle in the haystack.
She pulled Charlie back from the edge and pinched his arm. ‘You great nincompoop! What are you doing? Do you want to get me thrashed?’
‘What?’
‘What’s wrong with you?’
Charlie gazed back at her with glazed eyes. She pinched him harder, but for once he didn’t hit her back.
‘Is ’e all right?’ Alice’s sister, Grace, had trotted over and was peering at him too.
Charlie’s eyes were rolling slightly. Despite the hot day, his pale, greyish face was reminding Alice of the trout she’d seen pulled out of the river, and he was sweaty.
‘Dunno. It’s like he’s gone all balmy on the crumpet.’
The sisters looked at each other and giggled. They were both aware of the comical effect of too much drink. Their father, Charlie Swain, had a habit of crashing into their bedroom after a long night in the Two Brewers, collapsing on the bed and proceeding to tell them all, but particularly his son, how much he loved them.
‘Maybe he’s had too much sun?’ Grace was only seven, but she was already practical.
‘Yeah. Crikey, I’m hot.’ Alice mopped her brow and, in a movement her mother would not have approved of, undid the sash around her waist, dropped it on the ground, picked up the hem of her pretty smock, and vigorously waved it up and down in an attempt to cool down.
‘Alice, don’t! I can see your drawers!’
‘Keep your wig on! No one can see.’
‘I can and that’s enough.’
‘Stop cheeking me, Gracie. Respect your elders.’
At which point Charlie, who’d been forgotten in the frequent, small-scale warfare between the sisters, collapsed to the ground.
Alice squealed. ‘Oh, lordy! Charlie!’
Grace snatched up Alice’s sash, dipped it into the river, and put it on his brow. But Charlie still didn’t wake. His eyes were rolling and he’d gone all limp.
‘Quick, go and fetch Mum. ‘E’s not right,’ Grace pleaded with her sister.
Alice set off at a pace to the shop just off Marlow High Street that her mother owned.
A hundred years ago, it was a badge of pride to be able to stay at home and dedicate yourself to being a wife and a mother – a signal to the world that your husband (and, by marrying him, you) had made it. But Clara was not like most women. She had experienced the shame of a family running out of money and she was quietly determined to do everything possible not to find herself in that position. And so, despite the fact that Charlie was doing well at the brewery, she had taken on extra baking and needlework and saved up enough money to take a lease out on a small shop around the corner from their house. Darn It! was her pride and joy. As well as basic needles and thread, she had filled it with beautiful ribbons, unusual fabrics and knobbly wools. It was a shrewd move. Marlow’s high street did not yet have a department store, and most women still made their family’s clothes. Clara had a steady stream popping in to make little purchases. As she walked around the town she got a sense of deep satisfaction when she spotted people wearing the distinctive fabric and ribbons from her shop.
Alice flung open the shop door, making the bell ring urgently. ‘Mum! Quick! Charlie ain’t right. He’s lying on the ground and we can’t get ’im up.’
‘What? What have ya done?’
‘I ain’t done nothing. Honest. One minute ’e was up, next ’e was down. Please come quick.’
Luckily no one was in the shop, so Clara tore off her apron and hurried out after her daughter.
By the time she reached the river, Grace’s ministrations with the sash seemed to be working. Charlie was still lying on the ground, but he was awake.
‘Charlie, what’s the matter?’
Charlie looked dazedly at Clara and mumbled, ‘I wanna go home.’
She felt his forehead. He was hot and clammy.
‘Yes, love. Let’s get you home.’ Clara was short but strong. She picked her son up and carried him the quarter of a mile down the road, Grace and Alice trotting behind in a sombre silence. Every so often she’d bump into a neighbour or a customer: ‘Ohhh, little Charlie don’t look too good.’
‘No. Just getting him home, Mrs Waites,’ she would reply, a fixed smile on her face.
‘What’s the matter with him?’
‘Just a bit hot.’
She hoped Charlie was just a bit hot. A visit from the doctor cost the equivalent of a day’s wages.
As she turned the corner to Station Road, old Mrs Cadwallander stopped scrubbing her doorstep and looked up. ‘All right, Mrs Swain?’
‘Yes, he’s just got a bit hot.’
‘It’s that red hair of his. Pity he took after his father, eh?’
Clara ignored this comment and quickly opened their front door and shut it behind her. Her reluctance to join the street gossips and persistence in getting her own shop, not to mention the fact that she came from ‘that London’, had not endeared her to the female community.
Charlie spent the next couple of days in a made-up bed in the front room. He seemed to have the ’flu. Clara went to the chemist and bought him some Beechams Powders and left him in the care of his squabbling sisters but, back in the shop, she had to work hard to keep a smile on her face for the customers.
It didn’t matter how much she told herself Charlie only had the ’flu, Clara had a very strong feeling that she wanted to be back in the house watching over him, as if just by being there the sheer force of motherly love could fight the image of the Grim Reaper that insisted on appearing in her mind.
Over the next few days, Charlie would seem to be on the mend and Clara’s world would be all right again, but then he would worsen and that feeling of dread would come back.
‘The house is so quiet. It’s horrible,’ Charlie Senior said when he came back home from the brewery. He kept catching sight of the small wooden train engine he’d made his son for Christmas lying abandoned in the corner of the kitchen. ‘It’s odd, isn’t it – you spend your whole time telling him to shut up, and then when he’s not here it’s too quiet.’
Clara nodded. Having a son had made a disproportionate impact on the noise level in the house.
‘Let me take the poor mite his supper.’ Before she knew it, Charlie had taken the tray she was preparing and was heading off to see his son in the front room.
On the third day, Clara managed to persuade Charlie Junior to get off the sofa. He swung his legs round and tried to stand up but as he took a step, he buckled over and collapsed.
‘What’s the matter? Lost the use of your legs?’
‘I don’t know, Mum. I can’t feel nuffin’ in me leg.’
‘What do you mean?’
Charlie started to sniffle.
‘Come on, Charlie. You’ve just not used them for a while. Let’s ’ave another go.’ Clara picked him up and held his arm. She noticed that his baby fat had all disappeared. It was like holding on to a twig. ‘Come on now. There we go.’
Charlie took a little step with his left leg.
‘If you don’t use them, you lose them,’ she said and then wished she hadn’t. He couldn’t move his right leg, and she had to stop him from falling over again. She moved it for him, but it seemed to have no strength.
‘Dear Lord, he’s like a stuffed toy without any filling,’ she thought.
‘Mum, I can’t.’ He sniffed again. ‘I feel real dizzy and my head … it’s got a hammer in it.’
‘All right, let’s get you back to bed.’
Clara kissed the top of his sandy head and gently lifted him back onto the sofa. As she tucked him up, he closed his eyes and seemed to sink into an exhausted sleep.
Clara sat beside him and stroked his forehead. The Crisps had never been a religious family but at this point she found herself saying a prayer, and surprised herself with the words that came tumbling out:
‘Dear Lord, I know I have been greedy. I have wanted too much. I have been too proud. But please, please save my son. Make him better. Let him walk again.’
Then she started whispering in Charlie’s ear: ‘Charlie, you need to get well. There is so much for you here – running on the grass, climbing the trees, all your little friends and your sisters … I know they’re a bit bossy, but they love you. Come on, son, for your dad. You make his world go around.’ Then she heard her daughters fly in the front door, fresh from playing, all a-clatter. She quickly wiped her tears and hurried out to prepare tea.
Although Clara put on a brave face, Alice and Grace watched anxiously as she dropped the pan; and they rolled their eyes at each other when they tasted her stew. Normally it was delicious; today it was awful. There was a battle going on: Clara’s head was telling her it was just ’flu, and her intuition was telling her it wasn’t.
Her sense of panic had got so acute that when Clara opened the door to the front room after tea, she half expected to find Charlie dead. What she found was an alive Charlie, but not in a condition that put her mind at ease: he was unconscious, sweaty, and lying rather stiffly on the couch. His soaking hair had lost its ginger sheen and looked almost black, his skin a corpse-like grey. He seemed shrunken. But it was his raspy, irregular breathing that sent Clara shouting: ‘Quick, Alice, go and fetch Dr Pincus! Tell him he needs to get here right away.’
Stunned, Alice hesitated at the threshold.
‘Just go!’ Clara yelled.
Alice had never heard her mother shout like that before. She fled.
Half an hour later, Dr Pincus was in the Swains’ front room, examining Charlie Junior closely. He asked Charlie to move his legs or his arms, but by this time the little boy was beyond taking instructions. He couldn’t seem to bend his neck and was moaning as if he was in pain. After five minutes examining him, Dr Pincus shook his head and said, ‘Mrs Swain, I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but I think we need to get young Charlie to hospital. We need to check that he hasn’t contracted something called polio. Have you heard of it?’
Clara suddenly felt very calm, as if Dr Pincus was telling her something she’d known all along. She nodded. The newspapers had been full of news of ‘The Crippler’ sweeping the country. Only a week before she had overheard a couple of mothers talking about a child who had died of polio a few miles down the road in Bourne End. It had been her first thought when Charlie buckled over.
For hundreds of years children had been catching polio, but only a small number went on to develop the more severe forms that led to either being crippled, or death; but, by 1910, better sanitation and hygiene had left the population vulnerable in a new way to this old disease. Polio is passed through contact with infected faeces. Children used to be exposed to the polio virus when they were babies and still had some immunity inherited from their mothers. Now, because people washed their hands and there was an effective sewage system, there was a generation who had far less immunity. Polio thrived in hot weather, so the balmy summer of 1910 proved the perfect incubation ground for a major outbreak of the disease.
Charlie was taken away in a horse-drawn ambulance to the local hospital. Clara was not allowed to go with him. As she watched the ambulance rattle down the road and turn the corner out of sight, she felt disconnected, unreal. She was determined not to lose control in front of the neighbours, so ignored the seemingly friendly shouts of enquiry from across the street, nodded a greeting, and went indoors. It was when she caught sight of the abandoned bedding that she collapsed on the sofa, holding the blankets that still smelt of Charlie close to her face and crying visceral sobs.
In those days, hospitals were places you rarely came back from.
In the corner, unnoticed, Alice and Grace held each other and watched in horror.
For the next two weeks Charlie Junior fought for his life in the little isolation ward in Wycombe cottage hospital. The doctors performed a lumbar puncture on his spine, and found that Charlie did indeed have polio. As the virus attacked his spinal cord and the command centre that controlled his lungs, Charlie struggled to breathe. Alone in a dark ward one night, Charlie hovered on the threshold between life and death … but when the nurse came round in the early morning, she found that the fever had broken – the signal that the virus had run its course in his body. Charlie was going to live.
Now the issue was going to be the damage that it had left behind.
Just over a month later Alice and Grace were skipping in the street outside their house in Station Road. Alice had no choice but to brave the wrath of the Dossett Dragon because her mother had given her strict instructions to keep watch for the ambulance that was bringing her brother back home. It was turning out to be just another strange day in a very strange month for the girls.
At the start, there had been more food at mealtimes and more time to eat it, without the constant distraction of their brother pinching stuff from their plates, kicking them under the table, generally being a pain, and, as far as the girls could see, getting away with murder. They also got more sleep without Charlie wriggling in the bed they shared.
But then the novelty had worn off. They had started fighting with each other over the bed blankets, which ended in the usual kicking, hair pulling and insults (spoken in hisses, because if they woke their mother, she’d come in and clobber them).
‘Do you miss him?’ Grace asked her sister one night.
‘Suppose so. Wobbleface …’
‘Yeah.’
Gracie tried to do an impersonation of Charlie’s frown and trembling bottom lip when he was just about to cry.
‘Ahhh. Bless ’im. He’s only little,’ Alice said, stroking Grace’s head.
After years of practice, she had pretty much perfected her impression of her mother. The girls started to snigger and this turned into uncontrollable laughter and then they had to stuff the blanket in their mouths to keep quiet. Fits of giggles were endemic and infectious, and the Swain sisters were infamous for them.
Once they’d got themselves back under control, Grace piped up, ‘Suppose there’s going to be lots of wobbleface now.’
‘Oh, Grace! Don’t, that’s horrible! We don’t know that.’
‘Well, it don’t look too clever, does it?’
‘Hmm.’
As usual, no one had told them anything, so all they knew was what they’d managed to learn from bits of conversations – and the scene in their backyard the day before, when they’d found their father hard at work, making what looked like a small coffin.
‘Crikey, is that for Charlie?’ Grace had said, peering out of the window.
‘Holy Mother of Jesus!’ Alice had crossed herself enthusiastically. She’d come under the influence of a nun who’d started teaching at their local school. The ritual and performance of high church appealed to her sense of drama, although most things to do with church were very much frowned upon in the Swain house.
‘I didn’t know he was gonna die. Do you have to make your own?’
‘No, look, it ain’t a coffin, you juggins. It’s got metal levers and straps and things. Coffins don’t have nuffin’ else inside.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Jamie up the road took me in to see his nan.’
‘Ooh, Alice, you didn’t tell me.’
‘No, and you still ain’t heard it, right?’
‘What she look like?’
‘Like the cat that got the cream.’
‘What?’
‘Well, you know how miserable she was? Wasn’t she lying there with a grin fit for the Cheshire cat ’imself.’
‘No! Alice Swain, you’re pulling my leg.’
‘No, I’m not. Ask Jamie. No, actually, don’t ask Jamie. If you do, you’ll get one in the eye from me, because it’s a secret. Now shut up. What’s he doing?’
‘Why don’t you ask him?’
Alice looked around at her sister in amazement. ‘You jolly well go and ask him!’
‘You’re the eldest.’
‘Yeah, and I’m old enough not to be that stupid.’
‘If you don’t, I’ll tell Mum about you kissing Archie Beard.’
At which Alice grabbed her sister’s long chestnut ringlets and gave them a good hard yank.
Grace squealed and their dad looked up and shouted, ‘What’s going on in there?’ and the girls ran.
Part of the reason they were free to snoop on their dad was that the girls had been left to their own devices pretty much all month. Most of the time their mother was busy in Darn It!, trying to earn as much money as possible to pay Charlie’s hefty hospital bills. When she was home, she was very preoccupied. On the one hand this was good because she didn’t notice Grace stealing biscuits from the tin, but on the other it was bad because the slightest noise or light squabbling between the sisters would bring out their mother’s wooden spoon. Whenever the sisters thought their mother was in a bad mood they would mimic a couple of horns on their forehead and mouth ‘Blue’, which was their code for their mother having ‘a fit of the blue devils’. They had done this just about every day since Charlie had been taken to hospital.
Meanwhile their dad had become more elusive too. There was a certain day when Alice was sent to get Charlie Senior from the brewery because he was late for lunch. She waited outside the big iron brewery gates sniffing the familiar smell of hops coming from the chimneys and peering, on tiptoe, trying to spot her father’s familiar red hair. In the end she plucked up courage to tug the sleeve of one of Charlie Senior’s mates. ‘Excuse me, Mr Waters, have you seen me dad?’
‘Hello, Alice. Yes, I think he’s down the pub.’
‘Oh, right … thanks.’
Alice was a bit perplexed. She was used to having to retrieve her dad occasionally from the Two Brewers for tea, but she’d never known him go down there before his lunch. Well, maybe on a Sunday, but never during the working week.
She went home and told her mum, and saw the frown on Clara’s face deepen, and then her mum took her dad’s plate off the table and scraped the food back into the pot with special rigour.
So the Swain sisters didn’t know quite what to expect when the clip-clop of the horses’ hooves finally heralded the ambulance’s arrival.
Charlie was lifted into the house on a stretcher. He looked like their brother except the moonface they used to tease him about had gone. He’d sort of shrunk. Suddenly shy, the girls couldn’t say anything and watched as Charlie was carried past, staring back at them, his eyes haunted and hollow.
He was taken into the front room and Clara shut the door firmly behind her so they couldn’t see what was going on. The ambulance men left and then, five minutes later, their mother came out and shut the door firmly behind her again and leaned against it, just to make sure. ‘Now, listen, girls. You are not to go in there, right? And you are not to talk to no one about Charlie. He’s our business and no one else’s. If anyone asks, you say he’s still in hospital. Got it?’
The girls nodded solemnly at their mother. But like Eve with the apple, how long can children resist the forbidden fruit, especially when they have a brother behind a closed door, who they haven’t seen for a month and who shows no sign of ever coming out? Often the girls paused on their way through the hall and listened at the door. Sometimes it was silent but sometimes they could hear Charlie crying. Once or twice they heard him shouting for his mum, which sent Clara scurrying into the room. Meals went in and out. Mainly soup or things cut up small. A chamber pot also came in and out a few times a day.
One day, Alice suddenly realised she had not seen her father go into the room since Charlie had come back. In fact, he had hardly been in the house at all.
The Two Brewers seemed to be his new home.
A few days later, their mother was out and Alice and Grace were listening at the door of the front room again.
Alice pinched Grace’s arm. ‘Come on, I’ll go in if you come too.’
‘Lordy, do you think we should?’
‘No. But it’s the best chance we’re going to get.’
‘She’s not gonna come back, is she?’
‘No, not for ages.’
‘Go on then!’ Grace pushed her big sister and they both giggled.
‘Stop it, Gracie. Now be quiet.’
Alice grabbed her sister’s hand, slowly turned the handle with her other hand, and then pushed gingerly at the door. It opened a crack and Alice stuck her head round.
She couldn’t help taking a sharp intake of breath, and Charlie looked up, straining to catch sight of her.
‘What is it? Let me see,’ Grace whispered, tugging on her sister’s sleeve.
But all Alice could do was stare. She could now see what the coffin was for. It was on the table in the middle of the room, and Charlie was lying inside, all strapped up, with leather buckles around his waist and chest and a complicated system of metal levers and splints attached to his legs.
Grace pushed Alice into the room, stuck her head round the door, and broke the spell with a loud exclamation of, ‘Crikey, Charlie, what’s goin’ on?’
‘Alice? Gracie?’
‘Yes, Charlie.’
Grace walked straight in and over to Charlie in his box. Without thinking, she leant over and kissed his forehead. ‘Oh, no, Charlie! What are they doing to you?’ And she took his hand, which was strapped down, and immediately huge tears started rolling down her cheeks. Alice now found the courage to come over to the other side of the box and take Charlie’s other hand and kiss his forehead and before she knew it she was crying too, and then Charlie started crying and suddenly they were all sobbing and talking over the top of each other.
‘Charlie, you poor, poor thing!’
‘Oh, Charlie, this is awful!’
‘Let me get you out. Surely Mum don’t want you in here?’
Charlie, buried in a river of the girls’ hair and tears as they leant over his face, struggling to speak in between sobs, said: ‘I can’t get out. It’s me legs. I can’t walk no more.’
At which a fresh round of wailing broke out from Alice.
Grace stopped stroking his forehead and moved down to the far end of Charlie’s box. She gently prodded his legs. They were there, but a bit shrivelled.
‘Can you feel this?’
‘No. Can’t feel nuffin’.’
Grace pulled a face at her sister and started examining the splints and levers that encased both his legs with interest.
‘So, what’s this for then?’
‘It’s to keep me legs growing, ’cos they won’t do it by themselves no more.’
‘Crikey!’
‘If they keep growing then surely they’re gonna work again?
‘Don’t fink so.’
‘Come on, Charlie. Where’s ya spirit? Dad’ll get them working again. He can fix anything.’
‘Don’t think engines are quite the same thing as human beings, Gracie,’ Alice said, then stopped as she saw Charlie starting to cry again.
They both started patting him and kissing him.
‘I’ve got to stay in this box for ever. It’s like I’m dead.’
‘Ohhh, Charlie, no, you won’t! You’ll get out one day,’ the girls chorused together.
Then Alice spoke up: ‘Look, Mum says we’re not allowed in here. But we’ll find a way to come and see you every day, won’t we, Grace?’
‘Yes, we will. And we’ll bring you things.’
‘And we’ll tell you what’s going on.’
‘It’ll be fun.’
‘We won’t forget about you.’
Which sent Charlie into howls of tears again and earned Alice a kick from her sister. Alice was about to hit back when she stopped. ‘Shhhhhh!’ The sound of their mother’s footsteps could be heard coming down the pavement, heading swiftly towards the house. The girls ruffled Charlie’s hair and got out just in time.
From then on they used to creep in and kiss Charlie like he was their pet. There was always at least an hour between coming home from school and their mother arriving home from Darn It!, which they could spend with him. They saved sweets, picked flowers and drew pictures for him. Sometimes they’d read stories from their Grimm’s fairytales book, or Alice’s favourite – compose rude rhymes. But what Charlie liked most was to hear the gossip – who had hit who, who was kissing who, who was in trouble with the Dossett Dragon that week.
What the two sisters didn’t tell their brother was that the greatest amount of gossip was about themselves. The Swain family had come under the community spotlight because of their amazing disappearing child …
‘Where’s Charlie, then?’ Johnnie Best would call after Alice. And when she ignored him he’d start saying worse. ‘Lost a brother, then? What, is he a mentalist? A spaz? What you done with him? Put him in the loony bin?’
And they’d all start laughing so that one day she was so sick of it she turned around and said, ‘He’s dead, so you may as well shut up.’
They had all gone quiet. Alice had fled home and scrabbled in her drawer for the secret rosary the school nun had given her and there, on her knees, her shaking fingers rubbing the beads shiny, she had asked for God’s forgiveness for saying such a dreadful thing.
‘But, in a way, Lord, he is dead. The old Charlie is dead. But we have a new Charlie, so thank you, Lord.’
And she had cried with her head pressed into the covers of her bed, leaving a wet patch her mother would puzzle and tut over later.
Nor was Alice the only victim of wagging tongues.
Clara was hurt but not surprised when the likes of Mrs Waites and Mrs Cadwallander gave her a wide berth in the street. It was like the parting of the Red Sea – no one wanted to get too close, as if she was infectious. Customers no longer lingered gossiping in the shop. Takings were down. One day she saw Mrs Brookes whisper in the ear of a lady with a young toddler who had just come into the shop, and gesture at Clara, and the lady had scooped up her little boy and hurried out.
That night she couldn’t help but blurt out the story to her husband, but all Charlie Senior would say was, ‘You can’t blame them. It’s like the plague, innit?’ And then he had grabbed his coat and walked out, off to the Two Brewers, as if he thought she might be infectious too.
Left on her own, Clara stared into the kitchen fire and thought about the stories she’d heard of what rich people did with their crippled children: they were sent to special homes in the countryside hundreds of miles away and effectively hidden. Sometimes the family even pretended they had died. It sounded a bit cruel, but was it? It meant the child was looked after properly and the family could get on without the terrible shame of a child who wasn’t right. Well, it wasn’t an option for people like them – all they had was the front room.
It was at this point that Clara suddenly had an idea of another option that was open to her, which didn’t involve money – well, not at the start anyway. If it felt like her life was unravelling, perhaps she needed something to glue it back together – to make her husband stick to his home as opposed to the side of his beer glass, to bring her family back together, to fix together the broken pieces of her heart …
I look at the dates on the birth certificates of Charlie and Clara’s children and I am impressed: three children born exactly two years apart, starting from two years after their wedding day. And then the children stop. It’s in sharp contrast to the spacing of Clara’s own siblings, and indeed both the Swain and Crisp families generally, who seem most prolific and to have had children straight away for years, without a break, and with no heed of their financial situation.
It seems Clara, and maybe Charlie too, had made a choice to limit their family. In this they were not so much unusual for their time, as slightly ahead. Long before the invention of the birth control pill women had found ways to prevent conception, but because sexual intercourse was such a taboo topic, it’s difficult to know exactly how or why people started to practise birth control, although it’s thought the working classes generally relied on abstinence, withdrawal or the safe period. What is known is that during the Victorian period the average size of a family was between five and six children, but this had fallen to 2.2 by the 1920s.
From 1902, children had to go to school until they were fourteen, which meant that, financially, there was much less advantage to having a big family. The fall in the death rate also meant that more children were surviving to adulthood. For Clara herself, she had watched her mother struggle with eight children, and in the end their existence had not stopped Alexander ending up in the workhouse. So, once she had had her son, she had decided to stop having children and concentrate on her other requisite for a contented life: a successful business.
But now that Charlie was crippled, Clara’s world looked very different. As she went about Marlow, she was alarmed to find she was a bag of new, unpredictable and powerful emotions. She hid it well, but ‘unhinged’ was the word that kept coming to mind. One day she saw Mrs Best ruffle the dreadful Johnnie’s hair and she wanted to go over and spit. Little Billy Waites bumped into her chasing his marbles and it was all she could do not to push him into the road into the path of a cart. It was the injustice, the temerity of them being alive and well and healthy when her own precious son was lying in a box all twisted and broken in her front room. She had an even stronger reaction to baby boys. One of their neighbours had just had a baby boy and Clara had to walk past her neighbours admiring him in his perambulator in the street. She had never been particularly fond of babies except her own, but she found herself experiencing such a wave of envy she couldn’t even bring herself to go over and have a look.
Clara could only see one solution – she had to have another son. People would stop gossiping about the missing one and look at the new one; Charlie would stop seeking solace in the pub. And, most importantly, the new baby would snatch the reins of her senses back from the malevolent fairy. She was finding it impossible to live with the physical ache in her heart.
So it was, almost a year to the day after Charlie fell ill, that the next baby Swain arrived in the front bedroom. But when the baby slipped into the capable hands of the local lying-in lady, Mrs Coates, and she said, ‘A girl, Mrs Swain!’ Clara was dumbfounded. Despite the fact that in both the Crisp and Swain families, girls outnumbered boys by a ratio of six to one, everything about her pregnancy had screamed ‘Boy!’ – her hair was glossy, her skin was dry, her bump was low, and she hadn’t felt that sick. Most importantly, when she had lain down on her bed, hung her wedding ring on a piece of thread and dangled it over the bump, the ring had gone round in circles. The ring had never lied before, so why now? Someone was taunting her.
Charlie had walked out in disgust.
It was not the best start for the third Scarlet Sister, baby Dora, but Clara was determined not to be defeated. On her first outing with Dora in the pram, she walked down Marlow High Street and straight into the elegant, gothic All Saints church that sits gracefully by the Thames. Not daring to look around, Clara pushed the pram straight up to a statue of the Virgin Mary in the side chapel. She took a candle, lit it and placed it in front of the Virgin. She didn’t kneel or close her eyes. Clara stared straight at Mary and for the first time felt a real connection. ‘Yes, you know what I’m talking about, don’t you? You lost your only son. I understand that. Help me now. Help me to get him back.’
And she found herself bobbing a small curtsey, taking the handle of the pram and marching out with her head held high.
On 27 May 1913 Clara went into labour again. It was exactly thirteen years to the day since her father, Alexander Crisp, had died in the workhouse. It was a sign – Clara felt almost elated.
The birth progressed quickly and within hours a baby appeared, healthy and screaming. The lying-in lady, Mrs Coates, smiled and exclaimed, ‘A girl, Mrs Swain!’
Clara was flabbergasted, but before the despair had time to hit Mrs Coates said, ‘Hang on! What have we here? We have another baby coming, Mrs Swain. Twins! Prepare yourself!’
Under normal circumstances Clara would have been horrified, but today of all days, she felt only a huge wave of relief and excitement – her deal with the heavens was about to be fulfilled and God had answered her prayers after all.
Within minutes another baby was entering the world: ‘Oh my goodness – another girl, Mrs Swain!’
At which point Clara’s usual iron composure broke and she screamed, ‘No! That’s not the bloody deal!’
Mrs Coates was used to all sorts of interesting things being said, or indeed screamed, during childbirth, so she ignored Clara and proceeded to chatter away about how wonderfully healthy both girls were and how they were fortunate to have each other, that they would always have a friend – and other such ‘helpful’ comments.
Clara couldn’t hear her. She felt utterly exhausted and defeated. For the first time the thought entered her head that she had made a massive tactical error: of course, the Virgin Mary’s son had never been replaced. Well, this served her right for being so presumptive.
And that is how my nanna, Bertha Swain, entered the world. Her sister, Katie, was the first twin, and Nanna was the second and indeed last Scarlet Sister to be born.
Clara vowed there and then to give up trying to have a boy.
Later on that morning, after Mrs Coates had left and all was quiet, Clara looked down at the two girls, tightly swaddled, asleep in the box that served as a crib on top of the chest of drawers. Twins, yet completely different: one big, bonny, rosy cheeked; the other tiny, with translucent white skin and bright red hair.
She felt nothing … except guilt for feeling nothing. By an unlucky coincidence a photo was propped up beside them: ‘Charlie, Alice, Grace, 1910’. Clara picked it up and stared at it for a few minutes and then flung it across the room with such force that the frame dented the wall. Nothing stirred. Not even the babies.
Clara sat down on the bed, shocked. A shaft of early morning sunlight shone through the window and hit her face. A story she’d been told came to mind: the man who had made himself wings and flew too close to the sun. He fell down in a ball of flames. Yes. Clara went over and picked up the photo of her perfect family and put it away, underneath all the clothing in her bottom drawer. She’d learnt her lesson.
She would never look at it again, and she would never have any photos taken again.
One hundred years later, this photo is finally out and on display. It is sitting on my desk and, as I look at it, I feel its pathos – although the cheek in Alice’s eyes amuses me too. I can look at the photo of Clara’s family that wasn’t to be, and yes, I feel sad, but it doesn’t mock me as it did her.
I can’t, however, look at my own family that wasn’t to be. I have my own photos at the bottom of a drawer: a photo of a precious baby with unfeasibly long legs and a mop of golden curls in a hospital incubator; a photo of a young girl in a big hat and her new husband in his velvet suit with confetti swirling around their heads; a party in a garden with bunting hanging from the tree and a husband playing his guitar with his three daughters dancing around him.
Will it take a hundred years, three generations and a great-granddaughter before the pain has melted enough to allow these photos out again?