William's Wife

She has a nice face doesn't she? - wistful and sad. Well, she had good reason to be sad but, believe me, she was a tartar!!! She tore her family apart with her evil tongue and her lies.

When I think how lovingly I was able to write about my other Grandmother and her house, it saddens me to think that I can only remember this Grandmother with fear.

Her name was Lily. Well, that is what she put on her marriage certificate. Through research I later found out that her name was Lilly Mary. However, to her children and everyone else in the family she was "Mater".  Her Mother was Mary D who had come from a wealthy Irish Catholic family who owned a large factory and employed several servants.  Mary was always rebellious. Horror of horrors, she met and fell in love with an English soldier who was a protestant.  She was only sixteen at the time. Despite the pleadings of her priest and her family she ran off to join him and was excommunicated from the Church and disowned and disinherited by her family.  That lady certainly sacrificed much for love.  However, she retained her ladylike ways (difficult as an army wife) and passed  these on to Lily.

Lily probably met Grandfather William at an army base. Her father, George was stationed at the same camp and there would have been many chances for them to get to know each other.

I believe that it was while William was still in South Africa that the tragic event occured that was the start of her turning into a bitter and twisted woman. Her eldest son, George William met a terrible fate and it was largely her fault.  They had employed a young servant girl at the time which was common in their circumstances.  Whether she had left or was away or  had been dismissed is not known but one December morning in 1902, Lily, who never liked to get her hands dirty, decided to call for young George and tell him to go and start the fire and make some tea.  I cannot describe the army house because I know nothing of it . Perhaps the kettle was hung over the fire to boil.  Anyway, George had difficulty in getting the fire to ignite and used the bellows.  Something must have gone badly wrong because his linennightshirt.caught fire.  Instead of screaming for help, George walked back up the stairs to get to his mother's room.  His sisters, Lilian and Beatrix were sleeping in a room directly opposite the top of the stairs. They always kept their door open.  Beatrix was awake.  She called to Lilian "wake up Lily, there is an angel on the landing".  What she had seen of course was ten year old George blazing from head to foot. Lily woke and, being the eldest, immediately realised what this apparition was.  She ran screaming to her Mother and between them they threw a blanket around him and rolled him on the floor to extinguish the flames. Poor George, little could be done for severe burns in those days except giving doses of Laudanum.  His suffering came to an end 24 hours later.

George William - taken the year of his death.

News was immediately dispatched to Grandfather in South Africa but he was on his way home by then.  Heaven knows the agony he must have experienced when he arrived home to find his eldest and, at that time, only son, dead and his wife in a state of collapse.  I have tried to make allowances for Lily because this has to be the worst thing any mother could face.

It definitely put a wedge between my Grandparents.  In his heart I think William blamed her as well.  They went on to have four more sons who survived, plus stillborn twins and several miscarriages.  With each birth Lily became more and more possessive of them and yet left their care to others. She would sit by the window, from where she could see George's grave, and wail for hours.  The doctor said unless she was removed from there he feared for her sanity - so Grandfather transferred them to another part of the camp.

I think it was one of the reasons why Grandfather eventually took the family to Bermuda.  She was in her element there, like her Mother had been years before, she was surrounded by servants and never had to lift a finger.

In middle years, disaster struck again.  She was involved in a car accident , the year would have been around 1935.  She had a leg badly smashed but she was alsoin a coma for threeweeks and it was feared she would never wake.  She eventually recovered but the smashed leg did not.  It was several inches shorter than the other one and from then on she had to wear a caliper and use a walking stick.  This only made her even more bitter.

She opposed each of her children's marriages and tried to wreck every one.  Beatrix, her second daughter, hated her. She blamed her for George's death and could not stand her tyrannical attitude.  She left home at the earliest possible opportunity and had little contact with her Mother ever again.

When Grandfather was very ill, long before his death, Mater would have nothing to do with him.  As the elder children had flown the nest, it was left to my Father, aged only fourteen and the baby of the family, to feed him and care for him. He had already developed a great fear of fire, because of what happened to George, and he has passed this on to me.

So, Mater would arrive at the house of one of her children.  No announcement, she would just arrive.  A furniture van with all her belongings would pull up outside the house and she would demand that whatever son or, often daughter Lilian, empty a whole room of their belongings and she would then have her stuff moved in.  She stayed as long as she wished, sometimes months and sometimes years causing nearly the breakup of each marriage in the process.  Eventually they could stand no more and  would ask her to leave.  She would then move on to the next child and there proceed to tell how she had been beaten, starved and abused by the previous one.  She was a very plausible woman was Mater and had a way of making you believe her.  So eventually all the brothers stopped talking to each other and the whole family was torn apart. From what had been a close knit band of brothers, little was left.  Eventually Harry was not talking to Syd, Syd was not talking to Frank, Frank was not talking to Lily or Harry or Syd.  So it went.

Eventually Syd, Frank and Lily washed their hands of her.  It is understandable.

My Father had always despised his Mother for all the reasons given above. Nevertheless, one day the van drew up outside our house. Dad was a gentleman in every sense of the word and wouldnot turn her away.  This caused immediate tension between my parents.  Of all the marriages Mater had opposed, their marriage was the one that really galled her.  My mother was an East End Cockney and far too beneath her son.  My mother followed the latest fashions and coloured her hair. To Mater she was beyond the pale, she considered her little better than a prostitute, more so because Mum had been engaged before.  Yet, Mum welcomed her, ready to forgive and forget.  Mater took over our main front room and we were forced to live in the smaller room. Things went on for a while, an uneasy truce you might say.

Matters came to a head when I was about four and a half.  We had a large hall in that house, it was really like a room in itself which, just by the stairs, narrowed into a short corridor that led to the kitchen.  So the hall was where my beloved rocking horse was kept and I spent hours and hours riding on him.  Mum had told me always to be quiet outside the door of "Mater's room" (our room) but a child is a child and one day I had been riding my horse, got bored and began skipping up and down the hall singing to myself.  The door flew open, out came Mater.  She grabbed my arm with a grip of iron making me scream with the pain, raised her stick above her head to bring it down and me and shouting that I was a "hideous little brat who should have been drowned at birth". Mum came running at my scream.  She grabbed the stick and pushed Mater back into the room, slamming the door. It took a long time for her to calm me down.

That evening Dad returned from work and Mum told him what had happened.  He disappeared into Mater's room and a loud argument ensued.  I heard it all going on, lying trembling in my room.  He must have asked her to leave.  Then he came back into the hall and I heard him say "If you are here tomorrow when I get home, I will bodily throw you out myself".  Mater departed the next morning. She went back to York where she told Syd horrible tales of how we had mistreated her!!

We never saw her again.  In fact, she had been dead and buried for two years before Dad found out she had even died. That is how much she destroyed the family.  His reaction on eventually hearing the news was "good riddance". His dislike for her must have gone so deep, because Dad was normally the kindest man you could ever wish to meet, always helping others.

 To this day, most of my male cousins will not speak to me or have contact with me, although two female cousins, one a daughter of Harry and the other a daughter of Syd are in regular contact.  To think that one person could cause harm so deep it still echoes down through the years.

So, from a large and once close family only Dad and Frank still spoke to each other. When Frank died in his early sixties,Dad had no more contact with any of his family except his sister, Lilian, whom he adored.  He was not told of the death of any of his brothers (he outlived them all) but he was very upset at the death of Lilian and did attend her burial. When he , in the course of time ,died none of his nieces and nephews attended his funeral.

Mater eventually died in Liverpool in her nineties.  She lived out her last years with eldest son, Harry.

It is sad that I can write nothing good about her.  She must have been pretty judging by her photograph and I think in her early days she must even have been fun.  However, it is very difficult to love someone who caused so much damage and who frightened me so badly.  I am older and wiser now and I do think that her brain was affected by the death of George and then her accident.  I think she became so totally possessive of her other children she just could not let go. She also hated to see them happy with their wives and children.

Poor Mater, how different things might have been if life had taken a different turn.  Anyway, I hope she has found peace now.