M for Mother
A city girl escapes the London Blitz for life in rural Herefordshire
Born on the 13th July 1917, Ivy Maud Jeffries was an only child who spent most of the first two decades of her life in Stoke Newington. Her father, Lloyd, was a barber, her mother, Beatrice, a domestic servant. An older brother had died before Ivy was born relatively late in Beatrice's life. An intelligent child who would undoubtedly have benefited from a longer period in formal education she had to leave school when her father died soon after her 12th birthday. This would have been at the time of the great recession. Ivy would have had to take on the role of breadwinner, sharing that role with her mother.
She worked for a while for a sweet manufacturer but soon joined the tailoring company, Simpsons of Piccadilly, in their Stoke Newington factory. She became an accomplished needlewoman, proud of having contributed to the manufacture of the prototype for Daks, the first trouser to have a concealed adjustable waist band. Throughout her subsequent life she knitted, sewed and embroidered, making clothes for herself and her children as well as tablecloths, runners and other small items as gifts for friends and family.
She married my father on 2nd January 1940, by which time she was a volunteer with Air Raid Precautions. I have no idea how the couple met. I imagine it would have been at a dance, perhaps in the very town hall whose basement housed the ARP control centre.
Around the time of her father's death she participated in a scheme to provide city children with a holiday in rural England. This time was spent with a family in Herefordshire. When, in the spring of 1941, she discovered that she was pregnant, she was able to contact the same family in order to arrange temporary accommodation for herself and her mother away from the capital and the threat of nightly raids by the Luftwaffe.
I know that they lived for a while in a house shared with at least one other evacuee family. By the time I was 6 months old they had rented a stone cottage in the hills to the west of the Golden Valley. I can't begin to imagine her feelings when she received the news, in November 1943, that her husband had been killed in action. She told me years later that she believed he was on the verge of leaving her for someone he had met near his RAF station.
Something happened in the summer of 1945 that resulted in the arrival, in March 1946, of a baby girl. Soon my sister and I became good companions. Our grandmother died in February 1948. Shortly afterward we accompanied Ivy on a visit to London. No doubt she was considering the possibility of returning, finding accommodation and a job. I can only suppose that the relatives and others we visited pointed out the problem of scarcity of suitable housing. There may also have been some prejudice on display when she presented with an illegitimate child in tow. It has long been my theory that such prejudice was responsible, at least in part, for the subsequent lack of contact with my father's parents and siblings.
By comparison to her former life in London, the isolation of the cottage, a quarter mile from the nearest other dwelling, completely lacking in basic facilities such as piped water, electricity or sewage disposal, must have induced a good deal of loneliness and depression, especially following the death of her mother. She had a couple of former friends in London with whom she exchanged frequent letters. She also followed through with various newspaper schemes to encourage pen friendships. One led to many years of correspondence with a much older woman somewhere in England. Another spawned two somewhat shorter periods with ladies in different parts of the USA.
Her most enduring remote friendship came about from an attempt to contact the relatives of other members of the crew of my father's aircraft. The parents and siblings of Edward 'Teddy' Clements lived near Swansea. The friendship between my mother and this family provided many summer seaside holidays and engendered a love of everything Welsh, especially the landscape of the Gower peninsular. A few months after Ivy's death her children gathered there to dispose of her ashes, previously mingled with those of her second husband, above Oxwich Bay.
Another source of relief from the isolation and deprivation of the cottage was the mobile library operated by Herefordshire County Council. This visited every six weeks and from it she borrowed numerous books. Popular novels, travelogues and biographies were the mainstay of her love of reading which she shared with my sister and I.
Her relationship with her second husband began in 1954 and resulted in the birth, in April 1955, of a second sister for me. I remember sunny days during the summer holiday that year during which she seemed happier than I had ever seen her. By the autumn of 1956 I had a third sister and a new home as described in the second post in this series, B for Bruce.
The happiness I perceived in the summer of 1955 did not last long. The pressures of parenting two toddlers and two teenagers, one of them a moody youth mostly either sulking or raging, whilst in her forties, destroyed it. At the same time, her lover was going through an acrimonious divorce, so they were living together though not yet married. The sort of thing that must have raised a few eyebrows in a small community in 1950s rural England. Nevertheless, she was able, with the oldest daughter's help, to start a brownie group in the village when the two youngest were of an age which would have made them eligible to join.
For my mother, true happiness did not return until all four children had become adults and left home. The period from around 1974 until her second husband's death in 1996 were decades of contentment. The county council opened a branch of the registry office in the village and she obtained a job running it with another woman with whom she got on well.
The years between my leaving school and leaving home had a lasting effect on my relationship with her. She did not approve of my decision to become engaged, at twenty, to a girl of seventeen. In time she came to accept all her children's spouses but found it difficult to come to terms with our generation's rejection of her generation's prejudices. Her oldest daughter was probably the only child with whom she had a close relationship. For the rest of us there always seemed to be tensions present on the rare occasions we met her. I can recall only one time when, in adulthood, we shared a hug. Instigated by me, it was as my wife and I were taking our leave of her the day after her husband's funeral. I suspect it was as embarrassing a moment for her as it was for me.
A few years later she moved to Kent to a sheltered apartment within easy reach of my oldest sister and her adult children.
Less than an hour after I arrived at work on the morning of July 7th 2005, I received a phone call from my wife. She told me of a radio report about bombings on London Transport. My sisters worked in central London and my wife was concerned about her and how my mother might be reacting to the news. Half an hour later she rang again to say that she had received a call from my sister. Thankfully, she had not been affected by the bombs. Upon her own arrival at work, however, she had been told of a message from a member of staff at our mother's sheltered accommodation saying that Ivy had been found unconscious on her bathroom floor and was now in hospital in Canterbury.
I cancelled a prior arrangement to travel to Ireland that weekend with the dual purpose of looking at houses and bringing our grand daughter to England as a surprise for my mother’s birthday. Instead we drove from Yorkshire to Kent to be at Mum’s bedside.
She never recovered consciousness and passed at around 7pm the following day, just five days before her 88th birthday.