A Wartime Wallflower

My formative years were spent mainly in the company of my mother. We lived together, in a small flat shared with a dozen or so similar flats, my father having elected to stay with his mother, who lived less than half a mile away. Our flat was E flat on the first floor within the confines of a rambling dilapidation, in the crumbling regal facade known as Kent House in the small town of East Cowes in the Isle of Wight.

Kent House had been just one of the many beautiful summer residences that surrounded Queen Victoria’s Royal Osborne. Kent House, they say, had once been lived in by no less than Princess Louise, Duchess of Argyll, which her mother Queen Victoria had purchased for her in 1864.

All this past grandeur was in dark contrast to a committee of 'Young Wives' a staunch proponent of Cowes and Northwood District Wesleyan Baptist Mission, the new owners of the house. Meeting every second Tuesday of the month they offered inimical sanctuary to those women less fortunate than themselves. Women who had, for whatever reason, suffered the misfortune of losing their husbands, and gaining a child in the process. Although the good chapel mothers stood their high ground on morals and were somewhat parsimonious with their compassion they did their best to help, Cowes was a very close-knit community.

I had no way of knowing that my own mother was a woman distanced by her own family and friends due to the ignorance and stigma that existed at the time in our small community on the Isle of Wight.

My mother, the youngest of five God fearing sisters, why should they have been expected to do more? What more could they have done anyway? Life and times were hard, it was all they could do to keep their own young families; besides, they hadn’t been stupid or selfish.

A pretty wallflower pregnant at sixteen and married in such unseemly haste…

Well, it was wartime!