Sponsored by
Jayne Dawson: War casualties
FORMIDABLE: Mary Ann Merillion.
This week, Fanny, Blanche and Mary Ann stepped out of the wardrobe.
Out of my mother-in-law’s wardrobe, to be accurate, as we continued our joint project of sorting the possessions she has gathered over 86 years, passing on the memories and preparing for...the future.
Fanny and Blanche were sisters and products of the Victorian age, both being born at a time when that queen was on the throne and girls could be named Fanny without fear of consequence.
They lived in the Arthingtons in Hunslet and never married, remaining what was then described, without sympathy or ceremony, as “spinsters”.
My mum-in-law, Joan, was their second cousin, but since their relatives were few, the connection was significant to them, and it was she who inherited their personal documents, which she has kept for many years in a biscuit tin in the wardrobe.
On Sunday, the biscuit tin came out and my mum-in-law fleshed out the bare bones with her memories of Fanny and Blanche – but first there was their formidable mother, Mary Ann, whose will I held in my hands.
It was brief, but then Mary Ann wrote it, in true Victorian style, on her deathbed.
The solicitor was called to the house, she told him her simple wishes and, very shortly afterwards, was no more. It was 1942, the middle of the Second World War, and her funeral service was held at her Hunslet home.
In life, Mary Ann was a tall, straight-backed and thoroughly intimidating woman, the epitome of Victorian formality, who entertained the young Joan and her parents and sister to Sunday tea. It was, the now much older Joan says, a terrifying experience for all concerned, plus the bread was sliced so thinly it practically floated.
Fanny and Blanche were there – they were always there since both had the misfortune to be among that generation of women whose hopes of marriage and motherhood died alongside the young men slaughtered in the First World War.
Blanche had been engaged but her fiance died at the Somme. No doubt she had had the normal hopes of a young woman in 1914 and they probably did not include working all her life in an office in Leeds but that is what happened to her. The young woman of 1914 was destined to become the office battle-axe, feared by all who crossed her, so the family history goes.
Fanny was a gentler soul, who lived on into the time I entered the family, and I remember the old lady who could not watch television. She had never owned one, could not bear the idea of sitting to watch one, she said.
She was a retired Co-op cook and at the stage of life where she was giving her possessions away, so I took her spare blankets.
There were letters in the biscuit tin too, but they were few: “I am writing to say mam fell down on Monday morning” goes one. “Our lives are busy with chapel and other village activities” goes another.
Mostly they are letters and cards from the seaside, from acquaintances on their annual holiday, and they describe the episodes of sunshine and sea mists in astonishing detail.
But there wasn’t much else – apart from a list of meeting dates for a society known as “The Evangelical Society for the Evangelization of the Jews”.
For Fanny, as for Blanche, there was no weddng certificate, no children’s birth certificates, no passport, not even so much as a television licence. For both of them, the only certificate of importance records their death.
So I was glad Fanny and Blanche and their mother Mary Ann had been freed from the wardrobe for the afternoon, but I was left feeling quietly sad for quietly unfulfilled lives.
Email to a friend
Print this page- Politics: Mark Hookham's Westminster blog - 5.33pm
- Castleford RSPB Fairburn Ings: High wire act Swallows’ summer parade
- Worker dies on North Yorkshire Moors Railway
- Video: Restaurant reopens on Leeds Harry Ramsden’s site after £500,000 refit
- Chocolat author will tempt guests at Leeds Big Bookend Festival
Looking for...
Featured advertisers
Jobs
Search for a job
Motors
Search for a car
Property
Search for a house
Weather for Leeds
Thursday 24 May 2012
Today
Sunny
Temperature: 10 C to 26 C
Wind Speed: 10 mph
Wind direction: North west
Tomorrow
Sunny
Temperature: 10 C to 23 C
Wind Speed: 20 mph
Wind direction: East
Comments
There are 1 comments to this article
Page 1 of 1
thequietman
Wednesday, January 25, 2012 at 10:02 PMEntertaining, educating and moving. A lovely piece of writing. Hope it gets a wider readership somewhere.
Page 1 of 1
Your view
Please sign in to be able to comment on this story.