The Story of Mary Ann Mayes
Foreword
Dear Isabel
How are you doing?
This is your Great Great Grandmother sometimes known as Polly but, to you, it’s Mary Ann.
It’s been a good sixty-four years since my arrival in the Next Life and, if it’s any reassurance to you, there are many improvements on the previous one. For one thing, there’s a great library here even compared to the Oxford University Bodleian where I see you beavering away at those big books on religion and theology. There’s not much interest in that kind of thing here. But on quiet afternoons, you’ll find me here in the Heavenly Library reading history books and making sense of the spirit of my times. I mean books about people like my family at the receiving end of history, history from the bottom upwards. And I’ve been thinking how I might describe my life to you and feeling that maybe this should be done before it’s time for the Life After Next.
This is my story – it’s all true.
Chapter 1
Not that I recall the event, but I’m born on Wednesday 29 October 1879 in a place called Crouch End in the biggest city in the world, London. My spirited, but mostly toothless, mother is thirty-seven years old and I seem to be an after-thought when it comes to children although, mind you, I’m not imagining there’s much planning involved. And so, what happened to the teeth? Well, this is what comes of being a Straw Plaiter and endlessly passing stalks of straw through your mouth. Mum, not then known as mum but as Sarah Bourne, grows up in the tiny village of Everton in Bedfordshire and at the age of nine is making straw hats alongside her own mother and sisters. Mum says this straw-plaiting is a pretty good business in the 1850s, not good in the sense of being a pleasant way of spending your days, and certainly not good in the sense of being good for your teeth, but good in the sense of providing just enough money, alongside your husband’s farm labouring wages, to feed eight children and pay the rent. And this is how our mum spends the first twenty years of her life before she has the pleasure of marrying the young farm labourer that is my father, known to those who are not his children as George Mayes.
Dad, like our mum, grows up in the village of Everton and works from his early childhood as far back as he can remember as a farm labourer. Like our mum, he’s spared the exertion of schooling and, during his long life, is never fully persuaded that there is much to be gained from reading and writing. He does, on the other hand, have a passion for drinking and has inherited from his own father an impressively robust attitude to authority. We children are regaled with stories of our grandad’s night-time adventures with a large net reclaiming rabbits and pheasants from the stolen land. Even our grandad’s three months’ imprisonment and hard labour for poaching are a matter of some family pride. I’m not sure that our dad has much interest in politics but I think we’re given to understand that we’re not on the side of the landowning class.
I guess that the pool of eligible boys and girls in Everton is not wide and deep but I like to imagine that Sarah and George meet in their teenage years and, like Romeo and Juliet, but with less rhetorical flourish and much less shiny costumes, fall in love. They’re married at the Everton Parish Church in February 1864 only two years after the birth of my brother, Edward. Putting aside the question of whether mum and dad might have organised the childbearing and wedding ceremony in a different order, you must be wondering why it is that, fifteen years later, I’m delivered into this world in the tenements of Crouch End rather than the green fields of a Bedfordshire village. Although I’m assured by mum and dad that living in a small damp cottage in the middle of nowhere is much over-rated, it is difficult to imagine many more unattractive places to live than the poor back streets of Crouch End. But needs must, and Crouch End has the pleasure of our company because mum and dad, alongside the entire countryside labouring class, are stricken during the 1870s by a long agricultural depression. And, at the same time, there’s a virtual collapse of straw plaiting after cleverer, and surely richer, people discover how machines can make straw hats.
And so it is that I grow up in a two roomed flat in a tenement shared between four households at 9 Bloomfield Place in Crouch End. Aside from my parents and baby me, there’s only my eleven-year-old sister, Caroline, who is out most of the day working as a domestic. My only other sibling is the seventeen-year-old Edward who is by now living down the road in Islington and working as a labourer. The relocation to the big city has not resulted in any discernible upward mobility for our family. By the time of my arrival, our dad is working as a Navvy, labouring on the roads, and our mum is working as a Laundress. I’m not confident that we’ve even quite made it to the category of the respectable working class.
Aside from a vague recollection of spending much of my infancy being grumpily cared for by underpaid young teenage girls, my first vivid memory is arriving at the Hornsey National School at the tender age of five years. The political class of the early 1880s have not yet decided that working class men need to vote but have decided that it would be a good idea for their children to go to school. An Education Act of 1880 compels all children, including little me, to attend school from the ages of five to ten years. This is a good thing because I can say with confidence that our dad, never an enthusiastic supporter of education, would certainly have taken against the idea of his daughter voluntarily walking through a school gate. He is comforted in this arrangement only by the idea that the Hornsey National School might at least function as a free childcare facility.
The Hornsey National School is an extraordinary experience for a five-year-old girl living in the tenements of Crouch End where books are notable only by their absence and most would be unable to read them even if they made an unlikely appearance. It is true that the teachers are a fierce lot and that rows of children sit behind desks being shouted at for much of the day. But this feels like joining the big wide world, this feels like the beginning of something, and this feels like freedom. And it turns out that your great great grandmother is a clever girl who, unlike many of her compatriots, is transfixed by the words of the plainly dressed spinster woman who barks instructions from a blackboard. I feel that those of us who learn to read and write will become possessed of special powers. I imagine that there must be a plan for us newly literate children to one day be transported to a beautiful studious place where we shall relax in meadows and talk all day about interesting books.
And so, a dreamy childhood continues in the stern care of the school and the more relaxed, and occasionally absent-minded, care of our mum and dad. There is nobody who could accuse Sarah and George of being over-attentive parents and it sometimes feels as though my presence has almost slipped their mind. It may be that I arrived a bit late in the day and they never quite got used to me. But they are cheerful people, stoically resigned to their arduous jobs, enthusiastic about their consumption of alcohol, and, on a good day, genuinely quite fond of each other. It pays to be happy go lucky when there are so many things that one might reasonably worry about: redundancy, sickness, widowhood, old age, what is to be gained by fretting about these things.
But, as the years roll onwards, it slowly dawns on me that my childhood at school is not forever and that I shall be waving goodbye to the Hornsey National School at the age of eleven however much I may love the reading and the writing. In place of school, I am to become a live-in domestic servant. I’m old enough to understand that this is the well-trodden path for working class girls and that it may be helpful to my family for me to be housed at the expense of another person. But it is difficult, my dear Isabel, not to feel some sorrow and some disappointment. I remember the eight year old Mary Ann hearing Caroline’s description of her exhausting working days and deciding never to be a domestic servant. I imagined this decision would make a difference. I was wrong about this.