The West Country, 1887
There were hushed conversations in the passage outside Mother’s room: Lucy the maid and Mrs Berry, the lady who delivered Annie to the world, their heads close together. They did not know that Margaret, aged two, could hear, tucked just inside the next room.
‘I don’t know if it’ll survive, it’s that small.’
‘It?’
‘A little girl. Scrawny as a rabbit.’
Days later, on a breezy April morning, Margaret gazed into the pram, hungry to see her new little sister. In her memory she was looking down from a great height. Mother must have picked her up to let her see.
‘There you are, lovey-dove – your baby sister, Annie,’ their mother said. ‘She’s had a bit of a time of it, but she’s here – and one day she’ll be able to get up and play with you.’
Margaret saw the tiny, mauve face of her sister, cradled under the billowing elm leaves behind the modest house attached to the Zion chapel, to which they had recently moved and of which her father was minister.
Leah, their mother, spent what seemed hours holding her tiny child. And Annie survived like fury.
‘She’s a little fighter,’ Mother said happily. ‘We shall all need to look out.’
Their brother John was born in the summer of 1891 and was a sunny, easygoing little boy.
Annie, despite her astonishing appetite, always remained a miniature, wiry version of the other, more substantial, members of the family. Of all of them, she was the one who seemed to have endless energy and was seldom ill. Their father called her ‘our miracle, our little sprite’. Margaret had always felt large and stolid in comparison. Her health was more fragile and she was more afraid of life.
Margaret did not remember their move to the village and the Zion chapel, a small backwater of Congregationalist service. Nor did she remember her father before that time, or what had changed. Only as she grew older did she begin to pick up the threads of history.
William Hanson and Lilian Watts had met when he was serving as an assistant at Carrs Lane church in the centre of Birmingham. Lilian, the youngest and only member of the Watts family to have her soul lit by religion, attended the church. She was employed by her jeweller father at that time, in Regent Place. Soon after they became close, William – Annie and Margaret’s tall, good-looking father – had been moved to a mission on the Tottenham Court Road in London, from where he had wooed their mother with heartfelt letters. The two of them married and continued to work in London, where Lilian changed her name to Leah; it seemed to have been a symbol of her commitment to her faith.
Soon after Margaret was born, when her father was in his early thirties, he had suffered a breakdown – some sort of crisis. The church elders had deemed it sensible to send him to somewhere quieter, a village deep in the countryside, where he could restore himself. And after that, they had never sent him anywhere else.
Margaret had always known that her father was sensitive, fragile in emotion and crushingly hard on himself. He was a man of urgent convictions of black versus white, right versus wrong. It was their mother who could laugh at things – how could she not, being a Watts? – and keep a balance, a flexibility more characteristic of Congregationalism. She seemed less in dread of the wrath of God which seemed to pursue her troubled husband. Leah was in awe of William and always deferred to him as a good Christian wife. But Margaret remembered her mother’s religion as that of service and kindness to others, of light and laughter, rather than the need to purge her soul.
They grew up as a happy household then – outward-looking and kind. Margaret idolized her father. He was a tall, striking man, wide-shouldered from his childhood labouring on a farm. It was in his father’s Shropshire fields that he had first experienced the strange visions which had made him so certain of being chosen by God. Every Sunday he stood in the high pulpit, urgently entreating his congregation of villagers and farmers to the path of righteousness. So far as Margaret was concerned, he was the source of all direction and rightness. She saw how he spent himself to do good. And she even looked like him, with his large grey eyes and wide, upturned mouth which gave him a permanently amiable look and tempered his severity.
The family prayed together. Leah read to her children as they grew and all of them were vividly affected by Dr Barnardo’s book The Children’s Treasury and Advocate of the Homeless and Destitute, full of inspiring stories. As soon as they were old enough, they taught in the Sunday school, visited the sick and troubled in the area and went to the village school.
It was only John who, had he lived long enough, would have been sent away to the Congregationalist school at Caterham. There were such schools for girls, but their mother refused to let them go.
‘I can’t see any point in having children if you’re just going to send them all away,’ she told her husband. ‘It’s bad enough sending John, but I want my girls close to me – they can learn plenty here and make up their minds where the Lord calls them to.’
So all this particular hope was invested in the boy. Margaret remembered the terrible sense of anguish which laid itself upon the house when John died of a fever at the age of three. They all ached with missing the sweet-natured little boy, but it was William Hanson who seemed to take it as a personal affront, a challenge to the force of his commitment. He became more silent and severe.
Annie, as she grew older, thrived on teaching. She had a towering personality and was happy to boss and command even when a number of the village children were nearly twice her size. Margaret liked the company of children. She was gentler and more hesitant, but she did her part, with Bible stories and nature walks. She wondered whether she should be a missionary teacher. They grew up with the idea that they were supposed to be something and when God had decided what that was, He would deliver His message.
Their mother fell ill before the Christmas of 1898. The doctor called every day, treading softly as his patient lay on white pillows, the nightcap sliding from her greying hair as she twisted restlessly. Her lungs heaved and rattled. She took the girls’ hands and smiled at them, hardly able to speak.
When the pneumonia stopped her breath, it doused the family’s joyful flame for good.
Margaret was thirteen, Annie eleven. Their father became silent, forbidding. He employed a housekeeper, Alice Lamb, a straightforward woman from the congregation who, in her late forties, was grieving her own lack of husband and family. The minister’s children were never a substitute she could love as her own but she did her best at least to feed and clothe and pay attention to them.
William Hanson wrapped the Lord about him. But he seldom seemed to feel any joy. Margaret, sensing all his sorrow and being in awe of her father, tried to reach him by pleasing him.
‘Father – would you like a little walk down by the river?’ she might ask on a Saturday afternoon. ‘The air would do you good.’
She would walk with him, trying to get him to talk to her. He strode in his long black coat, head bowed, hands clasped behind his back. Sometimes he spoke about his calling as a youth, standing in a summer field and feeling the mantle of God falling upon him.
‘I knew,’ was all he would say. That kind of knowing would brook no argument. ‘I felt God’s presence and I knew I dared not refuse.’
She would ask him things – about the grandparents in Shropshire that they had never known, about the Bible. Things which would please and soothe him.
But as the years passed, he became more rigid. Graces at mealtimes grew longer; he could not bear the girls to wear bright colours and insisted they reduce their clothing to seemly grey and black and read only religious books on a Sunday. He became overbearing and flew into a rage at the slightest sign of anyone crossing him – as, increasingly, Annie did.
‘What can possibly be wrong with me reading George Eliot?’ Annie argued. ‘You couldn’t find a more moral storyteller if you tried.’ She would sneak off to hidden corners to indulge in the novels she loved while Margaret felt duty bound to stay in with The Pilgrim’s Progress or Foxe’s Book of Martyrs.
‘How does he always know what God wants?’ Annie often grumbled. ‘I can pray just as well as he can.’
As they grew older, Annie’s clashes with their father increased by the year.