Kitabı oku: «Lost Voices of the Edwardians: 1901–1910 in Their Own Words»

CHILDHOOD
Nicholas Swarbrick

I was born in Grimsargh, Lancashire. My mother died quite early of tuberculosis. In those days tuberculosis was incurable, and it was rampant. I was about four when she died, so I never really had a mother. I had one sister and a brother and my sister died of the same disease. She was in her late teens or early twenties. Of course, in those days, consumption used to establish itself, then it became infectious, but it was not infectious in the early stages. It became infectious in my mother when I was about two, and for that reason we had to be kept away from her, which was a dreadful situation. I can remember having to keep some distance away on account of her coughing. So I never had the sort of mother where you could fly into her arms. That was the very thing I was never allowed to do. I didn't know any different, though.

Alfred Anderson

My two older brothers, Dave and Jack, were born in Chicago, because my father had been one of many Dundee men who got recruited to go and help with the building of Chicago, and my mother followed him out there. They came back to Dundee before I was born in 1896. My father continued as a joiner and undertaker and my mother went to work in the jute mill – like her four sisters. I remember in those days we had gas lamps for light and coal fires at home – and we lived on a hill, so the horse-drawn carts had to struggle up and down. I used to play outdoors, and one day I saw two soldiers coming down the road – it was 1902 and they were returning from the Boer War. They were so glad to be back; they picked me up and carried me on their shoulders down the road.

Albert ‘Smiler’ Marshall

My father, James William Marshall, was a farm labourer, and he married a local girl, Ellen Skeet. When I was very small, my father put me onto a wooden cart pulled by a billy goat. When I was two and a half, he put me on the goat's back. The goat didn't like that at first and he bucked me off. My father picked me up and showed me that if I sat facing the tail and kept my arms round him, I could stay on. After that, I progressed to a pony and later to a horse. On most Sundays, my father took me to Colchester to see the soldiers' parade for church. Each regiment had its own particular marching music and I can still recall most of them. What excited me was their red coats. Many of the soldiers had just returned from the Boer War and they were wearing all their medals. At one of the parades, my father was approached by a sergeant of the Devonshire and Somerset Yeomanry who wanted me to become their mascot, but he said no.

Bessy Ruben

I remember arriving in this country. We came from a little village near Lvov, Ukraine, and our passage was booked through an agent. How on earth people arrived here intact, with their family and their few goods, I don't know. We went by train as far as Bremen. As soon as we got there, Mother got lost. She had three children with her, two boys and myself. My younger brother wasn't very strong, and she carried him over her arm. She was twenty-six or twenty-seven at this time. I remember my mother just standing there, waiting. Everybody ran to meet this agent, and Mother couldn't run with the children. My older brother, Sam, was acting like her husband. He looked after her on the journey. She said to him, ‘We're lost. I've lost the people we're supposed to meet. What am I to do?’ ‘Well,’ my brother said, ‘go into that shop.’ And I remember the girl in the shop was jerking some lemonade into a glass, and Mother could speak German, and she went in and she began to cry. This girl said, ‘Just sit there for a while, and perhaps they'll come and look for you’ – which they did! This agent was just as anxious to find us as we were to find him, and I remember that she was so overjoyed at meeting this man that she took his hands and kissed them.

We got on this cattle-boat – that's all I can describe it as. There were a lot of girls from Hungary going to America, and they took me under their wing. I remember they gave me a bit of chicken to eat. Mother asked me what I was eating and I didn't know what it was – this lady gave it to me. My mother said, ‘Throw it away. It's trefa – it's not kosher.’ Mother was seasick for the whole journey – she didn't eat anything at all, not anything. When we finally arrived in England, I didn't speak any English – only Yiddish. We lived above a shop and she sent me down with a penny farthing, to buy a pound of sugar. I went in and asked for a fing of gemulenin sicha in my best Yiddish. And everybody in there burst out laughing. I didn't know why. I was so confused. I was only five years old and I stamped my foot and started crying. ‘Wo wus yachtielare?’ I shouted, which means ‘Why are you laughing at me?’ I walked slowly home to my mother with the money. ‘Where's the sugar?’ she asked. ‘I don't know,’ I said, ‘they just laughed.’

William Roberts

My brother died when he was very young. I remember playing under a table with him. We put a cover across and played tents. We really enjoyed that. When he died, a horse and cab came and took him away. I remember him being carried into the cab through a door at the side. I wasn't supposed to see it – I was very young. They buried him on the edge of the old town.

Bob Rogers

My mother had sixteen children. She had diseased kidneys from too many births. My oldest brother died at twelve months. My second eldest died at ten months. Only me and one sister grew up. My mother had so many miscarriages. In the end, it killed her. She died at the age of forty-six.

Fred Lloyd

I was born on 23 February 1898 at Copwood in Uckfield. There were sixteen of us in our family – I had eight sisters and seven brothers. My parents really loved children. My mother died when she was forty-three – I learned from one of my sisters that she died in childbirth. My father died soon after and they said it was from a broken heart.

Edith Turner

When my brother was three days old, my mother had milk fever. That's when a baby can't suck the milk from the mother and the milk goes to the brain where it causes something like meningitis. It came from worry, anxiety and unemployment. My mother was unstable. She didn't know what she was doing. She smacked my brother's bottom till it was blue, and he kept crying. The more he cried, the more she smacked him, and she couldn't feed him because we hadn't any milk. My father went to the Board of Guardians in Dalston. They sent a doctor to the house and the doctor made an order that my mother should be taken to Homerton Infirmary. So my mother was taken away with my brother strapped to her side on a stretcher. At the same time, a nurse carried my youngest sister downstairs because she was found to have double pneumonia. That left the rest of us with my father.

Jack Banfield

In my family, there were seven children as well as Mum and Dad. Two of the children died as babies. That was very common. When you got over the age of about ten, you were past the post. Until then, there was measles, whooping cough, chicken pox, scarlet fever, so many diseases.

Florence Hannah Warn

When a tiny child died, the cost of a funeral was beyond the pocket of a poor family, so an arrangement was made to bury the infant at the same time as an adult's funeral. In front of the glass hearse there was a little glass compartment running the width of the hearse, and the little coffin was placed there, and so buried in the adult's grave. We had a little brother, Gilbert, who died of pneumonia, and this was the form his burial took. None of us attended the funeral, but I remember we had black sashes to wear on our Sunday dresses.

Don Murray

When I was at school, every class had at least two or three children who were knock-kneed, bow-legged or hump-backed. There was something wrong with at least three or four in each class.

John Wainwright

I had a little sister who died when she was eight. She was out one day, watching my elder brother play football at the local ground. She got a terrible drenching and she finished up with pneumonia. She died soon afterwards.

Edith Turner

I was undernourished and I developed ringworm and eczema. All of my head was covered with sores. I was taken to Homerton Infirmary where all my hair was cut off and my head was covered with a cap and bandages to cover the sores. I was in a proper ward but I was shut away because I was contagious. The treatment was free and supported by voluntary contributions. When I was better and able to come home, my parents were unable to take me. So I was put into the Cottage Homes, which was a place similar to Doctor Barnardo's, where children that they thought were unwanted were cared for until the parents could take them again. There was a matron but I didn't learn any school there. It was more like jobs around the house.

Rosamund Massy

I shall always remember staying in a Salvation Army hostel in a shipping town in the North. Inside that house, run by a remarkable woman, there were many little girls living there for safety, having all been criminally assaulted. These poor little children were between eight and ten years of age and their little old faces were heartbreaking. One of them told us that she had never had a toy in her life.

Florrie Passman

I was involved with a day nursery, and I used to visit the mothers who had young babies, in their homes. They used to take them to the nursery at about two weeks old, until they were four or five. The little girls were dressed in pink, and the little boys in blue, and when they went home, the clothes they'd worn in the daytime were put into tubs and washed, and they went home in their own things, which had been fumigated. This was because in the rooms of the places they came from there were bugs on the walls. They were difficult to get rid of because there were so many children living together.

I can remember a Rabbi telling me, ‘Do you know, when I first came to England, I fell on my knees and I was kissing the earth. In Russia I was frightened to walk through a street in case I was going to be arrested – for doing nothing. But here you can walk about – you can laugh and talk – and no one's going to touch you here. What better place can you be in than in England?’