The Two Aunts I Never Had by Valerie Fletcher Adolph
I was an only child. So, I was told, was my mother. Then, a few years ago, I discovered from the 1910 British census that my maternal grandmother had given birth to three babies, of whom only one had survived - my mother, Violet. She was not their only child.
I tried looking for their birth or death certificates in our home city, Leeds in Yorkshire, and in villages and suburbs they might have come from. No luck. But a few months ago I came across a professional genealogist from Leeds and asked her to dig further.
It took her a while, and I think she was surprised and professionally pleased to find the records from a completely unrelated village. In Sculcoates, near the port city of Hull on the east coast of England, my grandmother had given birth to twin girls.
Why she was there I have no idea. Had she travelled with her husband as he tried to find a job at the port? Possibly. Being twins they may have been born prematurely so she may have expected to be back home in time for the births.
I imagine her, 17 years old, away from home and family for the first time. She’d be in a cheap rooming house, knowing no-one except her husband, who likely had no clue what was happening as her labour began, or what to do about it. Imagine her fear, her panic – no doctor, no hospital, certainly no NICU for tiny premature babies. Did she even have simple baby requirements? The pain, and the blood. And did she even know she was expecting two babies?
The twins, quickly named Alice and Amy, were born 30th November, 1899. Birth certificates indicate that Alice was born at 9:45pm, Amy was born 30 minutes later. Both were baptized the following day, December 1st. The hurried baptism indicates that the babies were not expected to live long enough for a formal baptism ceremony to be arranged. Alice was buried at All Saints Church in Sculcoates on December 7th, 1899. Her twin sister Amy was buried there on the 16th of December.
For me, it is intriguing that, while we have a couple of women in that family’s history called Alice, we have no other Amy. However, the twin births, baptisms and deaths were all registered by a woman named Amy Pickersgill, who was no known relation.
My imagination shows me an older woman, perhaps the landlady, knitting comfortably by the kitchen fire one dark winter evening, then hearing cries of pain from upstairs. A woman’s voice. Was her husband beating her? The cries grow louder, more agonized. It sounded more as if the woman was… Oh Lord! Amy Pickersgill dropped her knitting and ran up the stairs two at a time despite her bad knees.
Amy Pickersgill had given birth half a dozen times and helped her daughter and a couple of neighbour women through their labour. She knew what had to be done and she took charge although even she was taken aback by the frailty of the first baby and shocked by the arrival of a second, even tinier one. This was not one healthy plump baby you could wrap up and give to the mother knowing all was well. This was two tiny ones, one not breathing for the first few minutes.
Amy did her best, moving faster than she had in years, to comfort this girl, finding sheets, towels to wrap the two thin babies, shooing the worried, pacing husband out of the way on some useless errand. She might have brought first one, then the other twin downstairs to the warmth of the kitchen fire to give them a better chance at survival. All the time she knew they were far too small, so the next day she made sure they were baptized to be sure their wee souls would be accepted into heaven.
I imagine Amy Pickersgill helping to nurture two impossibly weak babies, maybe looking after my grandmother Rose, giving her a little time in bed, assuring her everything would be fine, showing her how to drip warm milk in their mouths if they could not suck, how to wrap and hold two such frail babies, then comforting her as each one breathed for the last time.
I thank this unknown lady who seemed to come out of nowhere to take charge of a young mother facing unexpected births and deaths in a strange place far from home. Her name lives on only in the official records of birth, baptism and burial – and in the name of wee Amy Shaw, who managed to sustain life for two weeks.
I heard echoes of a Christmas story, although I think Amy Pickersgill showed up with a lot more help and support than a flock of shepherds and three kings on camels.?
