I was sorting through some of Grandma’s things and remembered her old diary. I know we talked about her the other day and when I saw it, I thought that you should have this. I found it hard to read, but you and Grandma were closer than she and I were. I think she would want you to have her things, not that there were many.
Love, Mum xx
So, this was Grandma Elise’s book. Deb carefully flipped to the first page, forgetting that she had intended to make herself a cup of tea, and started to read.
15 March 1934
Played with Tessie and the other girls. I skinned my knee and Mother put salt water on it. Ouch! Tom ate the last biscuit. I told Mama but she said there’s no more hush your whining.
20 May 1934
My birthday. I got a new blue coat and some flower seeds to plant. Tom drew me a card that said Best Sister. The seeds are sunflowers and some others that Father dried from the woodlands. I hope it will be poppies. Mother made me a cake. It has jam in it.
Deb flicked through the childlike entries, smiling at her grandma’s childish observations. There was a long gap in the dates recorded, until a flurry of entries in 1935.
3 September 1935
Mother says we have to leave the cottage in two days. The Laird came round and gave us a basket of food and said we were good not to cry. Tom said there was cake in the basket and hot chocolate powder but I didn’t see it because Father took it away and put it in the cupboard and said not to look.
6 September 1935
We are living in a house with my aunt Lotty but Father says she is a hussy and we cannot stay here long because she keeps house like a slut. Mother said shush when she saw melistening and sent me to bed. But there is hardly room for us here anyway.
Tom and I are sleeping in the same bed, top to toe and we share a room with Mother and Father which is Aunt Lotty’s bedroom and she is sleeping on the chair in another room. Tom kicks in his sleep. I pretend to be asleep when Mother and Father come to bed but they smell of sherry like at Christmas and argue loudly. Tom says he sleeps through it but I know he is awake.
I miss our cottage even though it was never tidy and Father used to shout at Mother for being a sluttish housekeeper then too but at least it was home. I don’t know why we had to leave.
28 September 1935
Father says we must leave Aunt Lotty’s house because there is no room for us. I overheard Father and Aunt Lotty – who is my Mother’s sister – arguing and him saying he wanted to leave me and Tom here but Aunt Lotty said no, what would she do with two bairns and this was only a temporary arrangement. Father called Aunt Lotty some bad names like he would say to Mother sometimes when he had been on the drink but unlike Mother Aunt Lotty called him some names back and said get out of my house you ungrateful drunk and so we all had to leave.
Deb’s heart clenched. Poor Elise. She’d had no idea that anything like this had happened to her grandmother. It would have been heartbreaking to read a diary like this belonging to any child, but knowing that this was something that happened to someone that she loved was terrible.
14 November 1935
It has been three weeks since Mother and Father left us, and I don’t think they are coming back. Tom and I got so hungry and cold begging on the streets that I thought we might die and then Tom said lets go in the Church here and sleep on the pews at least it will be out of the wind.
So we did and the vicar found us but instead of shouting he said where are your parents and when we said they have gone sir and we don’t know if they are coming back he said we were poor lambs of God and gave us some soup and a couple of new cardigans from a box in a room at the back of the Church.
A family called Smith is looking after us now and they are very Godly and tell us that we are heathen children for not knowing how to pray or have good ways but that they will set us on the Straight and Narrow. Tom says at least we have a bed again and food but I miss our real home and I wish we were back there even if Mother and Father were always arguing.
Deb flicked through the pages of Elise’s little diary, written in her careful childish hand. It was full of spelling mistakes and odd capitalisation – and Elise didn’t appear to know how to punctuate a sentence – but Deb wondered how much schooling she had been able to have. Certainly, if she and Tom had been going to school in their village, then their education would at the very least have suffered a break when they became homeless. Deb wondered if the Smith family had sent them to school. She looked ahead in the diary. The entries were sporadic, but Grandma Elise had only been eleven. For a child undergoing such disruption, it was amazing she’d written a diary at all. She continued reading.
20 December 1935
I hate it here. Mrs Smith never stops telling us we are ungodly children and need correction. She beats us with a wooden walking stick across the back, hands and knees. Mr Smith does not help us, just tells us that we should be grateful that him and Mrs Smith took us in at all because The Lord told them to. Tom couldn’t walk for a week after Mrs Smith hit him hard on the ankles with the stick for forgetting a line of The Lord’s Prayer. He is hobbling around now and it is breaking my heart to see him. I hate Mrs Smith.
Deb looked up from the page, tears springing to her eyes. How could someone do something like that to a child? Now she knew why Janice had found the diary difficult to read. This was heartbreaking, and it made Deb wish that she had known this while Grandma Elise was still alive. Not that she could have done anything about it, but at least perhaps Deb could have talked to her about it.
There was a few months’ gap until the next entry.
8 April 1936
I am at a new family now and I hope it will be better than Mr and Mrs Smith’s house. The vicar had us moved when he found out about Tom’s broken thumb and his ankle which is good but neither of them healed right and he says they ache.
However this time we did not get to stay together and even though I asked for Tom’s address the vicar did not give it to me because he says what would stop me running away from my new home to see Tom and such disorderly behaviour will not be tolerated by our new families that have been so kind as to take us in being the ungodly heathen children of sinners.
So I do not know when I will see Tom again and I miss him terribly even though he could be annoying at times. Thenew people seem all right so far but I keep mostly to my own room when I can though Mrs Ainslie has a new baby and twins that are two years old and I am to help with them so I don’t get much time to myself.
