A Habit of Dying Read online

  Choosing the second of the two ledgers next, at first glance it also appeared unused, but in fact it was neither empty nor a ledger. Whatever its original purpose, the pages had once been separated by very thin sheets of something which to Lydia seemed akin to the grease-proof paper that her mother might have used for cooking. These sheets were all that remained, since the pages that they separated had all been removed. So it was a book not only void of writing but also of pages and she was about to discard it when a final flick through took her to the last few sheets. It was not void of writing at all. In fact it had a lot writing in different styles and inks, covering perhaps twenty of the translucent pages. It was not what she expected or thought might be valuable in her original purpose, but true to her curiosity she began to read the last and most legible entry.

  It has taken forever to get these first words out of my head onto this page in this old copy book. I have struggled so long and now they are written but none of the words are about what I need to write about. They are written now like this because a woman who I see once a week, an old woman, a volunteer at our local centre, has listened to me breaking into pieces over the last few weeks and the idea of writing out my demons has come up again today.

  Lydia stopped, suddenly shocked and embarrassed that she found herself reading these private words. This was not for her eyes, this was nothing to do with her. It immediately and vividly reminded her of finding letters from her grandfather to her grandmother amongst her mother’s things. They had been written from Tokyo bay in the days after the end of the war in the Pacific. Eventually,she had screwed up the courage to read them and found them so personal, full of love and yearning to be home, full of disgust for the scenes of war still fresh in his mind. Even though it was several years after her mother’s death and more since her grandparents’, she still saw herself as a thief, a peeping Tom. Now these raw words gave her that same sensation. She closed the book and put it back in the box.

  As if needing an antidote to the unexpected intrusion into her own sensitivities, Lydia seized the prize from her collection, lay it squarely on her desk in front of her, hesitated a second to catch the last frisson of anticipation, then opened the collection of Edwardian photographs that had first attracted her. Unseeing faces from long ago looked out at her from the pages, fixed in aspic, forever sepia. Men and women caught at an instant in lives that had long been led, with all the superiority of age, the unknowing freshness of youth. Lydia turned the first leaf and let her eye settle to the photograph that had brought her to this point. A group of fifteen, casually arranged in the time-honoured way, adults seated with younger folk standing behind them, children on the ground. A family, certainly, most likely with grandparents seated in the middle with their children around them, their grandchildren at their feet. Lydia let her gaze fall slowly on each in turn, looking into the eyes, reaching out for the warmth of the summer day, listening for the sounds of an Edwardian summer. And beneath the photo, arranged in three lines to correspond to the three rows of faces, were written the names Mr Melville, Self, Alice, James, Henry and below Beatrice, Isabella, Papa, Mama, Albert, Joseph and finally the youngest Phoebe, Albert M, Albert, Harriet. In the same hand beneath the names was written Longlands 1911. Priceless stuff, thought Lydia, already letting her mind take her to a moment at some point in the future when a great great grandchild of Papa and Mama would be joyfully united with these Alberts and Phoebes and Josephs.

  For maybe half an hour or more Lydia leafed through the album, soaking up the people, studying faces, noting the change in dress, the uniforms towards the end of the album, the same names repeated, children maturing through adolescence. Just as important were the absences of some as time passed. But this was detail that would be noted and catalogued later, for now the only purpose was to get a feel for this family, slip under the skins of these people. For all her looking, for all her breathing in of the faces and lives, it came as a shock to realise suddenly that ’self and Alice must surely be twins. At this stage of her process she did not trouble herself with detail, with noting each name. Lydia looked through again to see if there was a photograph of just the two of them together, but there was not. The 1911 tableau was the only one in the album where they appeared together, stood side by side behind Papa and Mama. At length Lydia put the album aside, content with her progress. She guessed that it covered perhaps the ten years to 1920.

  Two volumes remained in her cardboard box. One she knew already to be a postcard album, but someone had been there before her and stripped out all but a few. Lydia looked at those that were left, carefully removing them from their mounts to check for the message they had contained. All were blank, collected presumably for the sake of the scenes they depicted. A church in Whitehaven, the High Street in Braintree Essex, Christ Church, Oxford, which Lydia recognised with surprise. Random images? Any possible connection remained elusive.

  The last album was more productive. Another family album, most likely from the 1930’s she supposed, with perhaps thirty or forty crisp snapshots, all carefully mounted in the pre-cut slots of the brown card pages. Some with names like Bertie and Henry and Verity. Bertie in an RAF uniform, Verity as a bridesmaid, Henry and Kathleen, smart on town hall steps. Distant lives, distant times. Lydia searched for a key that would move her closer to these people, but found none. Perhaps she was too tired, still thinking perhaps of Papa and Mama in 1911, seeing them as her best way in. She put Bertie and Verity aside, closed her eyes and considered the way forward. She knew what she would do but still rehearsed the process. The first question to consider was whether or not this little job lot of other people’s lives were connected by anything other than the dog-eared cardboard box that they came to be in. The first pass through had shown nothing that stood out as a connection, and anyway, that would wait until Lydia had dragged every piece of information that she could from each of the photographs, noted it, tabulated it, researched it. Then, from these labours, she might possibly find the connection or find that indeed there was no connection.

  The last time that Lydia had performed this oh-so-pleasurably private task had been six months earlier and then, as now, she found herself anxious to establish the essential first piece of the jigsaw from which she might reveal the whole picture. So she started where she always knew that she would start, with the 1911 photograph. She prepared her notepad, her laptop, and the little yellow post-it notes ready to page mark the album. On her computer she made a spreadsheet to tabulate names and comments, with columns set up ready to receive the hoped-for entries from census records, birth, marriage and death entries, war service records, address notes, even columns for as yet unknown sources. If any of her colleagues from work had ever guessed at her doing such things for pleasure they would surely have not believed it, for did she not spend the greater part of her working days entering endless information into spreadsheets? And she would do this for pleasure at home in her own time? But they would also have shrugged and put it down to Lydia being Lydia, a little off beat, a little secretive when surely she had no secrets to keep. She knew that they whispered a little about her, knew that when a casual question about the weekend was posed on a Monday, the question had been decided by committee and the answer would be reported back at the next opportunity. Like most of her sex, her work-mates had a need to chat, to check whether there was any competition around, gain some knowledge and thereby some possible advantage. Sometimes she fed them a titbit or two, sometimes they were true, sometimes they were nearly true.

  First, each photograph was numbered and entered into her list. This was to be her ’A‘ album and when she had finished numbering she found that there were fifty-three photographs. Then each photograph was described, and the number and sex of the people it featured were carefully recorded. All this was simple mechanical work, but what followed was more satisfying. Where there was a background other than a studio backdrop, Lydia examined it for any information that might be normally overlooked. So when she did this with the Longlands
image she saw that it was taken in a garden with a large house in the background which, by its style, she took it to be fairly modern for its day. Looking under a magnifying glass she also saw another figure at one of the windows, and although it was a tiny image, it appeared to be the figure of a maid with a cap and white apron. Having servants was nothing if not the norm for such a family in 1911, and most likely there would be more than one in the household, a cook at least, and perhaps a gardener.

  She progressed through each photograph in this manner and then began the process of matching any information from the captions to the people shown. From there she was able to cross-reference an individual to each photograph in which they appeared. Where there was any doubt over someone being the same person as in another photograph, Lydia also noted this. It was a long and detailed process, but she had proved and enhanced it over the course of her previous investigations. She worked with an application any employer would have been proud of. And she did so in the knowledge that it was a process which could bring results.

  Working on her project in this way, on and off in the evenings through the week, Lydia had gathered and recorded enough information by the following Sunday to assemble a summary of what she had found. She identified ’self‘ as featuring in eight photographs, based on there being seven identified as Alice and eight as ’self‘ or without caption. Lydia reasoned that the album maker would more likely have left herself unnamed than her sister. And then she wondered if being an identical twin might mean that ’self‘ was not sure whether a picture might be that of her sister or herself. Or did a twin always recognise themselves? The presumed grandchildren of 1911 came top of the list with Albert M ten, Albert eleven, and twelve each for Harriet and Phoebe. Lydia put a little note against Albert and Albert M because she could not be completely sure who was who in a couple of cases. Of Mr Melville there was but the one entry in the list, and he was joined in his solitary state by Fanny Francis, and Edith Clopper.

  According to the location of the photographer’s business, this was an Essex family from the area somewhere around Colchester and Braintree. This, together with Longlands as a place name, led Lydia to believe that identifying them and finding a descendant was going to be fairly straightforward. It was this that made her pause in the project. Should she continue with her ’A‘ album and press on to achieve her purpose of finding that as yet unknown but surely grateful descendant, or should she take on the other albums and evaluate them also? Were they projects in themselves or was she dealing with a single enterprise after all?

  As was her habit when any kind of problem needed consideration, she decided to put the detail aside and occupy herself with something completely different, allowing the issue to slip to the back of her mind from where an answer would present itself at some future point. The warmth of the day took her to her little courtyard garden and her pots and plants. It was not the best of places in which to grow anything, being west facing and overhung by too many of her neighbour’s trees. Such light as it might receive was further diminished by the high fence of Miss Affleck who lived next door. But it suited Lydia, it was very low maintenance, and it was her favourite place to think, tidying up a container or two, dead-heading her roses or simply brushing up the leaves. When there were no jobs that took her fancy, she would bring out a comfortable chair and a book or magazine to enjoy the fresh air and solitude. To allow the Longlands problem to find its resolution, she chose to carefully pull out the sprouting weeds around her two pots of tulips. While she did this, Papa and Mama, Isabella and the Alberts, Harriet and the twins resolved themselves into a single project alongside Susan and Paul, with Ethel and Violet, Henry and Bertie. There was no science to this process, simply a matter of finding a course that she was comfortable with.

  2

  After the initial satisfaction of dragging every last piece of evidence from the collection of photographs, Lydia found her first forays into actual identification bore little fruit. She considered that her ‘A’ album still offered the best route in to finding the lost family. Most, if not all of its gallery of faces would have been, or should have been, present on the 1901 census, for which indexed transcripts were readily available from the comfort of her desk at home. Her quest was simply this: to find a family with a mother and father and possible children Alice, Isabella, Albert and another known for the moment only as ‘self ’. Since the grown-up Albert and Isabella were seated next to Papa and Mama she’d calculated they were likely to be the eldest children, and since she presumed that ‘self ’ was also Papa’s child then so too was Alice, her twin. Also possible children were Henry, James, and Joseph but Lydia realised that at least two of these were likely to be sons- or daughters-in-law to account for the supposed grandchildren seated on the ground, so for the time being she excluded them from her search. Even as she began the process, it dawned on Lydia that the task might be beyond her. The starting point seemed naturally to be Essex, since most of the photographs had a connection to that county. A search for Longlands and Essex had brought up a couple of irrelevant bits and pieces and a link to a care home for the elderly. The photos on the web site were of a two storey block with a modern entrance, circa 1970. Reckoning that the name Isabella was the least common of those she had, Lydia tried a search of the 1901 census, guessing at an age of between ten and twenty. The resulting two hundred and seventy-six entries came as a disappointment. Extending the age range pushed it to nearer five hundred. And there was nothing whatsoever to say that Essex was the correct county for these well-heeled Edwardians in 1901, ten years before their summer gathering. Searches for Albert, Joseph and Alice were predictably even worse, returning many thousands.

  Conscious she should not overlook any trifle, Lydia recalled Mr Melville, the only person at Longlands with a surname. But that very fact almost certainly meant that he was not a family member. Using the same age-range, the index returned an encouraging six results, of which the most likely, brothers Charles and Ernest, were residents of Prittlewell, but born in South Africa. Closer examination threw no further light on the Longlands family, but she noted down the details just in case they could be needed in the future, and it did reinforce the Essex connection.

  After so short a time really looking, Lydia could not believe that she could have exhausted her lines of enquiry. She knew so much about these people, and yet knowing who they were was suddenly an impossible leap. What if she made an educated guess at, say, Papa’s name as being the same as one of his sons, possibly Albert who seemed to be the oldest? An educated guess would be that father was also Albert. Trying this did indeed narrow the field. Only six hundred and thirty five such Alberts. Such a guess was no way to proceed, the amount of work involved in examining each of those households to see if there were any brothers and sisters with the right names would be enormous. And all on a guess at a father’s name, at Essex being the right county and that Albert was living with his parents in 1901 and that the Albert in question was Papa and Mama’s son. Lydia liked to work on both the possibility and probability and both were weighed so much against her that she dismissed the thought. And, such was her way, Lydia put the album aside, and put the Longlands family from her head. Given time and space the problem might find its own solution.

  A week or so later and a rainy afternoon washed away the idea of a visit to the flower show at Blenheim. It was too wet to consider any alternative, and in any case, Lydia was more than happy to sit and read in her most comfortable chair. As she flicked through a magazine, she came across an article about wartime postcards, part of a contribution to a project to preserve memories of life in England during the 1939-45 conflict. From this she was surprised to discover that it was common practice, especially among service personnel serving away from their homes, to have postcard prints made up from personal photographs. Such cards must have nothing shown on them that would be of value to the enemy, or they would have been rejected by the authorities. The authorised cards would sometimes have ‘Suitable for Transmission throug
h the Post’ stamped across them. The article was illustrated by just such a card, bearing the picture of a shy young WREN, Victoria Pleasance, posing for the camera in her freshly pressed uniform. She had apparently had several copies of the card made at the same time as having snapshots developed of herself and her friends at training school. Lydia paused after reading this and listened to the distant bell that was ringing in her head. Something somewhere was calling to her, something overlooked or misplaced.

  Her gaze fell on the box of albums, heavy with unanswered questions, gathering dust where she had left it beside her desk. Wasn’t there a postcard album with only a handful of cards, and none of them addressed? Was there something that she had overlooked? She put her hand to the postcard book immediately and opened it for only the second time. Empty page after empty page, then the cards of ‘St James’ Church, Whitehaven’, ‘The High Street, Braintree’, and ‘Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford’. The Cumbrian one had no connection to anything that she knew; Braintree High Street restated the link to Essex; Christ Church was familiar to her, but other than that was just another unattached item. There was nothing on them and when she had double-checked to be completely sure, there was definitely nothing else in the album. What was it then that had stirred in her mind? She ran back through the magazine article; postcards, wartime, forces photos, authorisation. This track took her to her ’B’ album, the one with Henry in RAF uniform, casually leaning against a doorway. And the caption? She had it to hand in a moment: ‘Henry at Flying School’. A little two by three snapshot. But right there next to it on the facing page, the same photo, uncaptioned but larger - in fact postcard size. She had not taken it out and looked at the reverse, believing it had no more to tell her than its captioned twin opposite. Lydia removed it from its simple slip-in mount and carefully turned it over. There it was! The stamp that approved it for transmission through the post. And posted it had been. To Mr and Mrs J D Myers at 27 Grenville Road, Braintree, Essex. Mr & Mrs J D Myers were probably the last people to have read the message it contained when they received it in 1942.