Biography of Alice

I can remember very little about my grandmother, I was only just
coming up to 10 years of age when she died but my impression as a
child was of a very gentle victorian lady living in a house that seemed to
be in a time warp of that age. Alice was reticent and calm - never
seeming to say very much and usually, when we visited, to be found
either in the kitchen or sitting at a very large mahogany table in the
front sitting room. The table had an enveloping deep red velvet cloth
draped over it and this had tassled edges that swung about - there were
also long velvet curtains over the double doors into a smaller sitting
room. I remember my surprise at discovering the doors behind the
curtains one day when I was very small, not realising that they led into
the same room which also had a door in the hall. The room had been put
into service as an extra bedroom from time to time in it's history. Most
probably it was the room my grandfather was nursed in by Alice during a
part of last illness, it was certainly the room in which my grandmother
spent her last week of life following a heart attack. One must suppose
that possibly the room was used for this purpose on other occasions of
illness for family members - the house being stretched up over four
floors with two rooms on each would make the nursing of anyone an
exhausting business. The house being full of people as well, must have
made it an essential arrangemnt. There was within the overstuffed and
hard victorian bench settee on which the babies were laid for their
christening pictures - the upright piano on which my mother could play
any tune having but heard it, and without a musical score - the little
round three legged mahogany table on which sat the essential victorian
aspidistra plant. That little table is now in my hall (without the
aspidistra) and I delight in it's history, the events it has witnessed, good
and bad. This room was, I am sure, used also for the victorian fashion of
keeping the recently deceased for respects to paid, it had that
atmosphere of heaviness about it, and it's normally closedupness, doors
locked - spoke volumes - in fact my mother remembers being lifted up to
view her grandfather in his coffin when she was only 4 years old and
feeling distressed and frightened by this. In my grandmothers time,
when I knew her, the room only seemed to be opened up for Christmas
when the extended family gathered, and to the excitement of us, her
grandchildren, the place where the Christmas treee stood, lighted
candles dancing in the drafts and waited for Alice to arrive, having
refreshed herself at her washstand - when then, and only then, it could
give up it's numerous crackly parcels with the help of an (undetected for
some years) Father Christmas uncle

My grandmothers large extending mahogany table was the centre of
those Christmas events, with around 16-18 shoulder to shoulder
around it, once in place you were there for the duration for how could
you make many people get up and out of the way so that you could
dismiss yourself. As children, we were better served by our smallness
and would slide under, to escape or just to enjoy, the crawl slowly
along between the ranks of legs trying to remember which belonged to
whom. Once the meal, which to me, seemed to last for hours, was
over, aunties and cousins darted around back and forth, clearing it all
away, it was then time for the card games and back everyone sat,
other than those few brave souls who decided to decline to the
accompanying joshing of spoil-sport, and such like.

A simple glittery glass chandelier hung down over the centre of that
table. This had to be lit with a match as electricity had still not entered
my grandmothers world, even in the 1940's - the gas hissed casting
light and shadow over the glass prisms and cast further shadows
around the walls. Lighting up time arrived long after the room had
been allowed to become gloomy with the only light flickering from the
coal fire which, - apart from the kitchen range, black and slumbering for
the most part, and the boiler in the scullery - was the only means of
heating in this very cold damp house. Lighting the gas mantals was in
the province of my 'live at home aunt' and was done with a certain
amount of ceremony, and usually in response to calls from varied
visiting family for 'lights Doll, lights' and she would bustle in - after a
few shouts off stage as to where the matches were - matches in hand
and with a fierce determination to refuse all offers of help and
unwanted advice from siblings, should the gas dare refuse to flare, in
fact the whole affair did seem to be a finely tuned manoeuvre.

Alice was always, when I was young, dressed in a black dress which
enveloped her in much the same way as her table was dressed,
hiding her completely under the voluminous folds. There were black
dresses for morning covered with a washed out patterned pinafore,
and black dresses for afternoon, but in my view they were all the
same. I do not remember her talking to me although she must have
done so, but she would put her arm around my waist as I leant
against her, but no grandmother to grand-child bond formed, we did
not know each other - there were always aunts and uncles, cousins
and friends who came and went, all with load voices and with plenty
to say and Alice seemed to be a quiet oasis in the middle of this busy,
bossy family all vying to catch her attention. At times towards the
end of her life she was to be found sitting in her arm chair, but poised
as if at a half-way point and about to go elsewhere, a plate would
sometimes be resting on her black clad lap. A piece of cake crumbled
into small pieces which she would nibble at occasionally to the sounds
of my aunt tutting and saying " she eats like a bird, she does" To
enquiries she would agree she was not feeling so good but would
resolutely remain and join in the conversation now and then, her
white silvery hair escaping from the loose bun clipped to the back of
her head. At other times she would disappear to the kitchen leaving
my uncle to do the milk round accounts while we waited impatiently
for his attention. I would often not see her again until it was time to
leave, having presumerably been talking about 'things not for
childrens ears' in the kitchen.

I am told that she would disappear now and then and would be
tracked down in the cellar where it was thought, by my mother, that
she went to when in need of some peace and quiet, but I am doubtful
of that, as would anyone who had ever been down there, and in
contradiction, is the story that she always set the clocks at differing
times so that nobody knew what the time was and would have to seek
her out if they needed to know. While being retiring and reticent in
character she was nevertheless quick to hold out a helping hand to
anyone in dire need, be it money, food or her drawing room floor
borrowed for a nights sleep. My mother remembers that it was not
unusual to find someone stretched out of a morning, they having slept
the night there. A hard luck tale would be told along with the paying
up, or not, of the milk bill to Alice, she being the wife of a Master
Dairyman and this the base from which the milk deliveries went out to
the local community.