Happy birthday, Mum

My mother recorded in her family history

On the morning of October 22nd 1923, in Bootle on Merseyside, two little girls were going to school. They were cousins, eight years old and good friends. Their route to school took them down Linacre Lane, across Stanley Road, and on through side streets to St. James' Select Catholic School. It was on one of these side streets, Balfour Road, skipping and playing as they went, that one of them, named Edith, but at this stage of her life known in the family as Girlie, looked behind them and said, 'Look Gracie, isn't that your Dada?'

Grace turned round and saw her father on his bike, head down, pedalling rapidly towards them. Before he reached them however he crossed the road, parked his bicycle and hammered urgently on a house door. Grace and Edith called and waved but he neither saw nor heard them. The door opened and he vanished inside. The two little girls went on their way wondering what it was all about. Grace found out when she went home for dinner. As she went up the entry which  led to the back door of the house she passed her Aunty Sally, Edith's mother, who smiled at her and said, 'Hurry up, there's a real live doll for you at home!' In her mother's bedroom a minute baby sister lay in the cradle, and the midwife, so suddenly and urgently called for had just left. Willie, her younger brother, had been called in from play to see his baby sister but had been more interested in enquiring of Nurse Scott why his mama was in bed in the middle of the day. Five weeks early, a not really wanted fourth child, born nearly five years after the family had, hopefully, been completed, I lay in the cradle and cried lustily. The midwife,calling a few days later when my mother was downstairs again and busy in the kitchen, listened and said with satisfaction and some surprise, 'Well, that's not a premature cry!'

I was small though, and weighed only four pounds when weighed for the first time, fully clothed, at four weeks. My father held me easily in one, admittedly rather large, hand and used to tell me that my head was no bigger than an orange. "No bigger than that!" he would say, picking one out of the fruit bowl to show me. But I thrived, and was showered with love and attention by parents and siblings. My mother had born the other three closely, one after the other, during and just after the first world war. With her husband away at sea and in danger, she, alone and pregnant, must often have been too weary and too worried to enjoy her family. And our father, having missed much of his children's babyhood became a rather strict Victorian style parent on his return. For both of my parents this new 'unwanted' baby was a new shared experience.

Mum thrived indeed, living into her nineties. Happy birthday, Mum. Remembering you.