Chapter 5: A Child - and Chickens
Then on the morning of the 14th of July we saw Finistère; then slowly we caught sight of the English coast. As we got nearer London, it grew misty and we could see less and less. We landed at Tilbury, which I thought not the best place to land for the first time in England. It does not give a very good impression, and coming into Plymouth or Southampton would be much more exciting. I was disappointed not to see the English countryside that I had heard so much about and seen so many pictures of: green fields with hedges round them and rabbits hopping about.
My husband's brother came to meet us and we all went to my husband's aunt who lived in Hayes. Their garden was enchanting; I liked the house and I liked my new relatives. First of all I looked at my new aunt's feet, because I had been told that all English women have big feet because they drink beer. Hers were the smallest I have ever seen on a grown woman. She always used to get her shoes cheap because they could not sell them in the shops. So it was the first joke against me. Of course I have seen some big feet since then, but it is not due to drinking beer, I am glad to say.
We stayed in Hayes for the weekend and on Monday left for London. My husband had to get his discharge papers, so he left me at the British Museum to wait for him. He expected to be back at about 2pm, so at that hour I came out on the steps of the Museum, but he was not there. He did not arrive until five. All this time I walked backwards and forwards, imagining all sorts of terrible things had happened to him. I did not know his aunt's address where we had been staying, and I did not know his father's address where we were going to that night.
At about 4 o'clock I noticed a lady looking at me, and after a little while she came and asked me if I was waiting for anyone. I told her that I was waiting for my husband who was an officer and had gone to get his discharge from the army. She asked me where we were staying and I told her we were going to stay with my husband's people. When she asked where they lived, I said I did not know, but that we were going there that night by train.
She looked at me seriously and said, "I am afraid he has brought you to England and left you; but never mind, little girl, I will see that you are all right."
I had no fears like that, but I thought, as most young wives do, that he had met with an accident. She stayed with me until my husband came at five. They had kept him all day as there were hundreds of them, and he could not leave, not knowing when he would be called.
We arrived at my husband's family home in Sussex at about half past nine. They did not expect as we had forgotten to send them a telegram. The meeting was quite different from what I had imagined. Their younger son's homecoming with a Russian wife was a tragedy for two reasons. First, he was too young to marry, having got his commission straight from school, and he had no means of supporting his wife. Second, they were terribly conservative and I was a foreigner. I am afraid they showed their disappointment very plainly to me. It was a most depressing experience and I can never forget it. I was so ignorant and romantic that I had never looked at things from their point of view. They plainly showed me that I had ruined his life. I can see their point of view now, though it did not turn out as badly as they expected it to. I could not eat anything and I went to bed like a naughty girl without supper that night. Life had suddenly become very serious and difficult. I had never before lived with people who did not like me, and these were the people of the man I loved.
Those were sad times, and my soul grew frozen. For the first time I met a real problem in life. I was alone then, because I could not tell my husband that his people did not like me, and they hurt me by their disapproval. He had begun his studies and was out all day, and when he got back in the evenings I was anything but cheerful. I was getting more and more morose and did not want to talk to anyone, because I knew whatever I said was criticized, and I could not even get the words out sometimes. I lost my appetite and often did not go to meals during the day, as I felt better in my room, not being watched. We were asked to the houses of many of my husband's friends, but I could not shake off my unhappiness. I was dull and wanted to cry all the time. In the end I fell ill. I know it is very old fashioned to die of grief, but then, I really would have died of unhappiness. My husband insisted on my going to the doctor, so I went, and he could not find what was wrong with me. He could see that there was something worrying me; when he insisted that I should confide in him, I said I would if he would not tell my husband. The doctor, however, had a talk with my husband and told him that if he did not get me away from my present surroundings, I should be very ill.
We moved into rooms and I began to feel better. My landlady taught me how to cook - I quickly learned - she was very kind to me. When I had learned how to do the housework and could cook quite well, we went into cheaper rooms in the country, and I did everything for myself.
But I never learned to know the different joints of meat; I used to go to the butcher, look at the meat, put my finger on the selected piece, and say, "I want a small piece of this, please."
In the autumn of 1922 we managed to get a small house, and in December 1922 our daughter Helen was born. The district nurse whom we engaged did not call the doctor for my confinement, as she said I was very fit and that the doctor would only be in the way. We were left to look after the baby ourselves the first night, as she had another case coming on. We felt very helpless about it, but all was well and the baby was very good. On the third day my in-laws came to see their first grandchild. It gave me a shock as I had not seen them for a long time, and I was not well for some time afterwards. My mother-in-law was very good; she stayed and ran the house and looked after us. Before she came, there was only a neighbour to look after me and the nurse who came twice a day to wash the baby and attend to me.
The next summer, when Helen was nine months old, my husband finished his training as a pupil and got a post at once. He was transferred to another town and we gave up our house and found some rooms near his office. We took our belongings by lorry, and when we got there, my husband started to unpack. I put the baby into the pram and went shopping, taking our black cocker spaniel Sheila with me. It was dreadful weather, raining and with a gale blowing. As I was wheeling the pram round a corner, the wind blew the pram over and threw the baby out with all the cushions and blankets. I picked Helen up; she was absolutely still.
I ran into the nearest shop, which happened to be a chemist's, and said, "I have just killed my baby!"
They took her from me and unwrapped her, and she was fast asleep. Afterwards we often laughed about it. When I had finished my shopping and started to walk home, I suddenly realised that I had never asked my husband what the address was, and I thought hard. Sheila was merrily trotting in front of me, so I said, "Sheila, go home," and I followed her and she brought me home. She was a wonderful little dog, most intelligent, and she learned to be a good nurse.
When Helen began to walk, Sheila always came to tell me if Helen was in mischief; also, she used to pick up all the parcels that the baby had quietly thrown out of the pram when I was shopping. In the winter evenings we had games with her; we used to let her smell some little thing and then send her out of the room while we hid it, and then call her back and tell her to look for it. She would look all over the house and always find it wherever we put it. Sometimes we used to forget all about the object until she put it at our feet, terribly pleased with herself. She prolonged that game as much as she could because it was the only time when she was allowed on tables and chairs. We stayed in rooms all the winter, and it was very trying as Helen was crawling and would escape as soon as anybody opened the door. My landlady was very kind to me; if I was feeling unwell, she often washed Helen's clothes.
In the spring we started to build a house twelve miles outside the town, and it was very exciting to go every Saturday and see it grow. Then the building strike started, and the house stopped growing. We got tired of rooms and went camping. It was in the village where we were building the house. A farmer let us put our two tents in a field near his house. It was lovely weather, and we enjoyed it immensely. We arranged with the farmer that we should come in to the house when it rained, except during August Bank Holiday week, as they would be full up with friends. It rained the whole of that week, and we were damp through and through, as were all our clothes, food, and everything we possessed. Soon after that, a furnished summer bungalow belonging to a doctor who lived in town fell vacant; they let us have it very cheaply because the property was better off being occupied. It was on the bog, and in a very lovely spot. In the winter, nobody came there, except on Saturday when they played football in the next field. The farmer and his wife delivered our milk every day - they were the only people I saw. One day the wife told me that a lunatic named Norman had escaped and was hiding somewhere on the bog, so I had better look out and not leave my door unlocked and not let Helen play in the garden as I usually did. She stopped and chatted a little longer and was just going when Norman appeared. He looked very tired and unwashed. She knew him, as his father lived in a shack on one of their fields.
She said, "Hello Norman, what do you want?"
He replied, "Some bread and cheese," so I gave him some and some cake and other things, and he went away, but was captured the next day.
The lanes were very muddy, and I did not go out much. It was always misty, so Helen and I stayed at home playing games, reading stories, and I knitted and sewed. Helen was nearly two then. I used to go to town once a week and take Helen in the pram. We had early lunch before we started, and when I got to town, I put her to sleep in the pram with the hood up and left her in the parcel office in one of the big stores. She was a very good baby, and I knew she would not do anything alarming even if she did wake up. I ran round, got my shopping done, and then came back and collected her. One day she woke up and asked the girl if she could get up. The girl was very startled, as she did not know there was a baby in the pram, and she told me about it, as it was against regulations to leave babies there. On another occasion, I had a cousin of my husband's staying with us, and we took a train to town to shop. I had to get off a stop early in order to pay some rates, so I told her to go on with Helen, who would show her the way to the store at which I shopped, and I would come by the next train and join her there.
When they got out of the train and Helen had been put in the pram, she said, "Now I must go to sleep; Mummy always puts me to sleep when we get out of the train; you go straight on, you will find the shop."
There she was, poor girl, in a strange town, with her guide fast asleep!
In March they finished our house; we moved in and did the painting and the decorations inside ourselves, and this kept us busy all through the summer. When we were moving, one of the workmen put a parcel of clothes in the kitchen on what he thought was a nice table. I was passing when it caught fire; he had put it on the kitchen range, which burned anthracite and was all closed in. He had never seen one like it before.
We worked hard in our garden all that spring and summer. We had a neighbour, an inquisitive old man who always told us that we were doing things wrong. As soon as we came out to do anything in the garden, he was out there too. When we hired a man to do some digging, he spent all day talking to him. We planted some Jerusalem artichokes to screen ourselves from him, and later in the summer we could not see even his beard, and we went on enjoying doing things wrong.
When my father-in-law came to stay that spring, he said we had too big a garden and that it would be hard work to look after it. He suggested that I keep chickens on a piece of the garden. I knew as much about chickens as I did about sweet peas, but I thought the idea was good. I went to a poultry man and bought a few hens and a cockerel. We did not get many eggs, as the man sold me duds; every one of them had something wrong with it. We scrapped them, and I went to town and bought a box full of day-old chicks from a shop that had them running about in the window. We had them in the kitchen the first few days; they slept under the kitchen range as it was raised a few inches from the floor. They soon got strong and became a nuisance, so my father-in-law presented us with a small chicken house. Before the winter we had to build a big chicken house for them, as they had grown into a good-sized poultry farm. I got some books on poultry, and soon I was doing all the right things to make them grow; they were all very tame as we always walked about quietly, never startling them. After we had sold the cockerels, we felt quite like capitalists.
My husband never really liked the chickens because they always got out and scratched up his flowers. I had not yet learned all the flower names. Helen had, though - she had a wonderful memory for long, difficult words. One winter's day I went to a nurseryman to get a pot plant for the house. When I got there, I had forgotten the name of it, so I told him I had forgotten what it was called, but that it flowered at Christmas.
Helen had heard her Daddy and Mummy talking about it that morning, and she said, "Mummy wants Primula malacoides."
She was not two then, and the nurseryman was very amused.
When the chickens started to lay in the autumn and the price of eggs later went up to four shillings a dozen, my husband forgave them their summer crimes and even used to come and have a look at them sometimes, saying in the way of praise, "Aren't they whoppers!"
We planted a lot of fruit trees that autumn, and the next year Helen was practising her arithmetic on how many apples, pears, plums, and cherries we had. It was very exciting; one apple tree had fifty two apples, and she could not count that high. There were a lot of nice walks all round us, and Helen and I went every day, taking Sheila with us. There was one place where a row of trees grew all the same distance apart; we used to pass them on the way to a pond where we fed the ducks.
I asked Helen to look carefully to see which two trees were the furthest apart, and she could not tell, so I told her, "The two end ones!"
and she was very fed up that she had been caught like that.
We stayed there two years; then my husband decided to go abroad. He applied for and was offered a job in Nigeria. We had never met anyone from the West Coast of Africa and knew nothing about it; when he applied, we thought it might have been Persia, as we heard they were going to build a railway line there. We had to go to a library and get all the books we could find about Nigeria. We learned that there was very heavy rainfall, and that was the only thing that the books were correct about.
When I told one of our neighbours, she said, "Now your husband will be able to wear that Russian fur coat that you put on the line to air!"
Helen was only four, and we did not tell her very much. My husband was told I could not go with him at first but would probably be able to join him later. So that was that.
Within two weeks we saw him off from Liverpool. It was a funny old boat called the "Zaria". When Helen went to see Daddy's cabin, she saw only two bunks; she looked round and asked where she was going to sleep.
I told her that we were staying at home: "Daddy is going by himself; he will send us some photos of lions, palms, and monkeys."
Then she cried and said she did not want any photographs; she wanted Daddy. It was a mistake for Helen to go and see him off, and I would not do it again. Back at home, my mother-in-law stayed with us for some time, until I got used to being by myself.
Helen and I used to look after the garden and the chickens. Sheila had some mongrel puppies. If anybody came and we told Sheila to go and show her puppies, she was unwilling, as if she was ashamed of them. We found a home for them; they were like Sheila on stilts, having Sheila's body and long ears, but with long, whiskery legs. They were funny; their owners still love them; they made intelligent house dogs. There was a disagreeable little old terrier called Judy down the road, and every time we went to the village, Judy went for Sheila. She used to hide and attack unexpectedly. One day, after Sheila became a matron, we were walking along and I saw Judy in the hedge, so I said to Sheila, "Look out, it's Judy!" Sheila jumped on her and nearly squashed her; she did not bite her, she only wanted to assert her authority and show Judy that she was not going to stand any more nonsense. Judy never went for her again.
In September I left Helen at a boarding school in Bognor and Sheila with some kind people that had nursery gardens, and went back home to pack up and sail for West Africa. It was lovely, our little home. I got a cinder in my eye on the way home on the train. I did not see anybody that came to the door, except one, a dear friend. In all the years I knew her, she was always the same: loyal, understanding, reserved, and kind. I remember when, years ago, I wanted £25 to enable me to do something that I had set my heart on, and she knew it, so she gave it to me. She and her husband are very methodical, and everything is well arranged, and life has no unforeseen discomforts, except occasional colds. I am different, and a lot of unexpected things happen to me that really should be foreseen. But we are great friends, and she does not mind my ways.