Five Under Six
My mother-to-be was conceived passionately and inconveniently in early 1916 in a quiet corner of Wales.
Maggie was a milliner and dressmaker, twenty-six, petite, vivacious & pretty, out of an upright and prominent Welsh speaking chapel family. Living in Pembroke with foster parents since eighteen months old ( her mother having died ), she was currently betrothed to a dull and reliable accountant way up the coast in Aberystwyth. But, it being wartime, she had happened upon Bob, a handsome young military engineer, briefly billeted in Pembrokeshire, and Maggie was soon swept off her dainty size three feet by a whirlwind of worldly charm.
As soon as they realised she was beichiog (pregnant, ‘burdened’ in Welsh), they fled to the anonymity of London and were hastily married in Bow. Halfway through World War One, life was not going to be easy. Maggie’s sudden husband was a charismatic, hard-working, shrewd and resourceful man, sadly marred by a fierce relationship with alcohol.
Megan, my mother-to-be, would be born on a harsh November night in damp digs within the sound of Bow bells. But all through her younger life, her official birthday - for the purpose of the Welsh family - was in late February. Her mother had conveniently spilled copious ink on both the wedding and birth certificates. A complex and difficult secret for a little girl expected to honour and negotiate two birthdays.
Her parents’ stormy relationship would rapidly produce four brothers for Megan, who would forever be the eldest of the “Five! Under six?! ( and none of them twins … )” as exclaimed by all. Maggie, who had lost her own mother to childbirth, was utterly unskilled in such intensive parenting. Bob, raised in an orphanage, spent his time focussing on the provision of bed and board for his brood. He engineered whenever he could, but primarily repaired and sold second-hand furniture from the small shop in Brixton where they also made horsehair mattresses, whilst Maggie conjured clothes out of thin air and old curtains. Little Megan became Peggy, in deference to her middle brother’s speech impediment, and was soon known by the Brixton street community for her capacity to represent and manage her charmingly dysfunctional family. All around them, the consequences of the war had made London people proud and resilient and united in the face of harsh deprivation.
Constant tragedy and twists of fate would beleaguer Maggie & Bob. When Peggy was two, she fell dangerously ill with diphtheria, at the same time as her father developed Spanish flu and pneumonia and was rushed to hospital. Believing his little daughter was dying, he stopped fighting for his own life. My mother always clearly recalled what then happened, as, now out of danger, she was bundled up and taken to the hospital at night, when no visitors were permitted. She remembered being carried shoulder high by a doctor, who paused at every bed on the men’s critical ward, where she was instructed to say “Hello, man” to each occupant. Her father had been promised by the doctor that he would give him proof of her survival provided he wear a mask and did not acknowledge her. She too did as she was told, and they both recovered well.
In the ensuing years, her youngest brother would be killed at two years of age, whilst holding his mother’s hand, when a lad on a stolen motorbike mounted the pavement. Their third son was temporarily placed with a childless couple to ease the pressure (after Maggie fell from a window and broke her back), and would soon become relocated, estranged, and tragically lost to them. (He was finally found by Peggy, but not until after Maggie’s death forty years later.) Meanwhile, their sweet learning disabled son would be cunningly groomed and violently abused by a credible benefactor at the age of nine. Unsurprisingly, Bob’s heart began to falter, and Maggie’s courage wobbled, but young Peggy and her oldest brother Len kept the ship on course until (and indeed long after) Bob died, in the midst of the Great Depression, when Peggy was fourteen.
Little Maggie struggled on with a forever broken heart, comforting her soul with new hats, visits to clairvoyants and the wistful vibrato singing of Welsh hymns as she leant over her sewing machine. Until she was rescued five years later by another charismatic gentleman orphan - this time a successful Glaswegian puppeteer and magician. When they married, Peggy could at long last pay a little more attention to her own life - for a short time.
She studied hard, became a teacher, met a kind and handsome man, and married him just as the next war broke out. A war that would drag both her brothers across the world, and in which Len would be shot down and forever lost at sea, and her chirpy disabled brother would return from the North African desert campaign with cruelly severe ptsd. And as the war was coming to a close, dear Peggy, so hopelessly mothered by a motherless child, and having mothered her own four brothers, became a real mother herself, giving birth to a daughter, whom fate would determine to be an only child.
That was me, on this very day long ago …