A Habit of Dying (18 page)

In the following week her email produced two replies, both interesting but with no apparent connection to the Longlands family. Lydia recorded the information that they gave, and made special note of one writer’s belief that his great great grandfather
Joshua had emigrated to America in the 1860s. Lydia checked her record and there was a Joshua Joslin, uncle to Papa, of about the right age. One day such information might have value, but she had no intention of following that track immediately. Along with the emails, eight more gone-aways and four more postal replies arrived. Lydia opened them with caution, half fearing a tirade from another maniac. Two were polite notes explaining they were unconnected to Papa Albert, but demonstrating that there were still some who felt it a duty to respond with a letter when written to. A third was comprehensive in its listing of a completely different Joslin family tree. At first sight the fourth had little to commend it.

5 Orke Road

Worthing

West Sussex

Dear Miss Silverstream

Thank you for your letter about the Joslin family. Let me say straight away that I have no real knowledge of my family, but I would like to find out more. My mother was Fanny Joslin, she was born in 1915 and died in 1963. She was born in Essex, Colchester I think. Unfortunately I have lost her birth certificate, but could probably get a replacement. That is about all I can say with any certainty. I know that she had cousins but I have never been in touch. I still have some of her papers and other things which I will try and get down and have a look at. I am getting on a bit and your letter made me think that it would be a good thing if I could find out something about my family.

Yours sincerely

Dorothy Joslin (Miss)

PS I am sorry to waste your time and I don’t have a computor

It probably was a waste of time, but such a letter deserved a reply at the very least, though she couldn’t add much without knowing Dorothy’s father’s name. Lydia referred to her records to see if she had noted one of Papa’s children marrying a Fanny. Albert she knew about, which left Joseph and she did have a note of a possible marriage in 1914 to Holland. Her other note linked back to the
Longlands album and the fact that it contained a photograph of a Fanny. Probably not Dorothy’s mother but it was a tentative connection. It was enough for a talking point in her reply to Dorothy and at the same time she could ask for her father’s name. Lydia took out the album to find the photograph in question. Midway through there it was, a studio portrait of a plain woman, perhaps twenty-five or so, standing posed with an umbrella in one gloved hand, the other resting on a chair back.

Dorothy replied almost immediately to Lydia’s second letter, although without much encouragement. She wrote to say that she thought her mother’s birth certificate would be with her other papers in a suitcase in her attic, but that she was not able to get to it. Dorothy also wrote that she thought her father’s name was probably Weston, but that she was not sure that she remembered correctly something her mother had told her a long time ago. The significance of this little snippet was not lost on Lydia, for if Dorothy’s mother was born a Joslin instead of marrying a Joslin, with an Essex connection already hinted at, then there was a better chance she could be directly connected to Longlands. In the absence of anything more concrete in the post and silence on the message boards Lydia decided to follow this wisp of a trail. Clearly Dorothy was unable to retrieve her mother’s papers without help and presumably had no-one she could turn to. Nor did Dorothy appear to have the wherewithal to do any investigations of her own. It would be Lydia or no one.

After a third exchange of letters they arranged for Lydia to travel to Worthing on the first weekend in March. The Saturday arrived full of driving wind and rain, which made the prospect of a two or three hour drive to the Sussex coast particularly uninviting. But Lydia had committed herself and to judge from her letter, Dorothy was very much looking forward to the visit. To let her down at the last minute would certainly be a huge disappointment, and besides, there remained a small hope that the journey would prove to be of value.

Orke Road and its Victorian terraces was easy enough to find, tucked in between the railway line and the Tarring Road. Number
five was distinctly less smart than its whitewashed neighbours and retained a front garden with a privet hedge behind the wall, whereas nearly all the others were paved over for cars and bikes to stand. Lydia desperately needed a cup of coffee, the journey having been as wearing as she had feared. For the time being, the box of albums were left safely locked in the boot, to be brought out only if it was appropriate. There was little point in starting with them since they might occupy a great deal of time and need unnecessary explanation, all wasted if they were unrelated to Dorothy.

A curtain twitched in the front room of the house. Before Lydia could set her hand to the knocker, the front door swung open and a woman maybe somewhere in her seventies greeted her. She partly supported herself with a walking stick telling Lydia instantly why her attic was out of bounds.

‘Hello Lydia, I hope you are Lydia, please come in.’

‘Dorothy, thank you, how nice to meet you.’

Dorothy led the way into her front room, clearly reserved for visitors and just as clearly rarely used. Dark velvet curtains, sun bleached at the edges, were drawn back while a film of greying net ensured privacy. Two shelves of long-unread books slept behind the sliding glass of a bookcase while a pair of china spaniels sat begging on the mantelpiece above an ancient coal-effect electric fire, one bar of which glowed a meagre warmth into the room. The whole impression was to have stepped back in time forty or more years.

‘Now, you’ve had a long journey and I expect you would like a drink. It really is so good of you to come and see me. Tea or coffee, dear? I have both and it’s no trouble.’ Lydia wondered if she always had both, or whether the coffee might have been a special purchase for the visit.

‘Coffee, please. Let me come and help.’

‘Oh, its an awful mess out the back, dear. But come through if you like.’

Lydia followed and stepped from one world to another. The back parlour-cum-kitchen was as littered as the front was tidy: piles of magazines on the floor, tins of food with doubtful dates on an old dresser, a selection of plates stacked loosely on the draining board
next to a deep square sink, possibly the original fitting. On the yellow formica-topped table were a plate of sandwiches tightly covered in cling-film along with a packet of individual apple pies, two plates and two knives. The whole scene was barely illuminated by a single bulb casting its yellow light from beneath a once tasselled shade. The single sash window grudgingly revealed a dark yard with brick cobbles, grey with age and green with moss. Beyond the overgrown fence at the end of the patch an electric train rattled into the station.

‘Have you managed to find anything of your mother’s, Dorothy?’ Lydia felt it was time to turn the conversation to the purpose of her visit.

‘No dear, as you can see I don’t get about too well these days. To be quite honest with you, I had thought that you might be able to get some things down for us to go through.’

‘I might. Where are they exactly?’ Lydia had anticipated such a possibility and worn a pair of trousers that she thought might be suitable for scrambling about in an attic.

‘Have your coffee and then I’ll show you, dear. I haven’t been up there for years and I don’t know if you’ll manage.’

The trapdoor to the loft was above the top of the stairs on the tiny landing. From the back bedroom Dorothy retrieved a pole with a metal hook on the end. She opened the catch with some difficulty, releasing a shower of dust and cobwebs as the trap swung down to reveal a narrow opening. Then with Lydia’s help she pulled a crude ladder from behind a wardrobe.

‘It was made for just this job,’ said Dorothy as they hooked the top of the ladder over the side of the opening. Two hooks on the lower section steadied it against the banisters. It reminded Lydia of the climb up to her bunk bed in her childhood bedroom. Dorothy handed her a torch. ‘I bought some batteries just in case,’ she said.

Lydia barely fitted through the gap and had doubts about escaping when it came time to descend. In the blackness a few chinks of daylight pierced ill-fitting roof tiles. There must surely be better things to do on a Saturday morning than explore a freezing attic in a stranger’s house with a tiny torch looking for an old suitcase. Not that it took much exploring. A couple of old tennis
rackets, a backpack, a box of shoes, bundles of magazines tied up with string, a rug, rolled and similarly tied, and there, under a wooden clothes horse, a solitary suitcase. Lydia retrieved it and carefully passed it through the hatch down to Dorothy.

‘Oh yes, this is it I’m sure, dear.’

‘I hope it’s worth it, Dorothy,’ was a sentiment truly felt.

‘I’ll let you carry it down, if you don’t mind.’

Lydia squeezed back through the gap and they put the pole and the ladder back where they belonged. Downstairs, Lydia took herself into the little bathroom behind the kitchen and did her best to clean herself up. When she returned to the front room, Dorothy had the suitcase open on the coffee table and was poring over a handful of papers.

‘I cleaned it off a bit, dear, come and sit down and we’ll have a look at what there is. Look, I have her birth and death certificates. They were right on the top.’

The death certificate gave no family details, simply the date 20
^th
March 1963 at Southlands Hospital, Shoreham-by-Sea. Dorothy was the informant. The birth certificate was an original, not the full copy of the registrar’s entry, but the short version given ‘on request to the parent or informant’ and stated simply the name, Fanny Joslin, the date of birth of 19
^th
April 1915, and the date and place of registration as being 20
^th
May 1915 at Colchester.

‘Dorothy, this is wonderful. From this we can find the registrar’s entry and from that we’ll see if there is a connection to the family I’m looking in to.’

‘That’s good, dear. I haven’t really understood why you are looking in to anything.’

‘It will sound a little silly to you I’m sure. Sometimes it sounds a little silly to me, but I have a photo album, in fact I have more than one, and I started off with the idea that I would like to find the family, someone who would like to have it, someone who’s grandparents’ or great grandparents’ pictures are in the album.’ Lydia thought the explanation simple enough, it would not raise Dorothy’s hopes too much and avoided the convoluted story of the journal and all its intricate detail.

‘I see, dear.’ Probably not, thought Lydia.

‘You have a lot of stuff here, what else might there be to tell us about your mother?’

‘Well, I have a few photos, here. I don’t know who the people are. Except this one, this is my grandmother, look you can see on the back where it’s written.’ Dorothy turned the photo over to show Lydia the words ‘My Mother’ in a female hand written in faded blue ink. When Lydia turned the photo face up it was with the shock of recognition. There was the same twenty-something woman, the same umbrella in the same gloved hand. She was looking at the photograph of Fanny from the Longlands album.

‘Oh.’

‘It’s a nice picture, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, very nice.’ Suddenly she could see the end of her journey, handing over the albums, and she did not want it to end just yet, it was her story as much as Dorothy’s. Lydia chose her next words very carefully. ‘Dorothy, I have seen this photograph before. It is in one of the albums I told you about. Her name was Fanny, the same as your mother. It is possible that you are directly connected to the family I have been looking into. But it’s not certain, just a possibility. Or maybe a probability.’

‘How is that then, dear?’

‘All I can say for certain is that your grandmother is in the family photo album, but she may be a cousin or just a friend of the family. I should be able to find out quite easily if she is closely related. If she turns out to be a friend or a distant cousin then that will be harder to work out. But Dorothy, it is very exciting.’ Lydia was not sure that Dorothy shared her excitement. ‘I must start making a few notes.’

For the next hour or so, Dorothy mulled over the contents of the suitcase, while Lydia took notes and asked questions. Dorothy’s own memorabilia were mixed with her mother’s. As she leafed through the papers there were long silences as she read long forgotten birthday cards, re-took the maths test in her first school exercise book, mouthed the words of the hymn in the order of service for her mother’s funeral. As something took her particular
interest she would pass it across for Lydia to inspect it more closely. For the most part there seemed to be more of Dorothy’s paper’s than her mother’s. Lydia decided to venture onto the potentially delicate subject of Dorothy’s own birth.

‘Do you have your own birth certificate in there?’

‘Yes, here in this pile I’ve looked through. I didn’t think you’d be interested in it. Here have a look if you like.’

Lydia took the paper and unfolded it.
Dorothy Joslin, born 14
^th
May 1932 Downland nursing home Broadwater, Worthing, Sussex. Father Byron Weston, Seaman (RN) Deceased, mother and informant Fanny Joslin, registered 9th July 1932
. She looked up at Dorothy with what she hoped was a reassuring look. ‘So you kept your mother’s name. Not easy for her then, I should think.’

‘She never talked about it much, people didn’t in those days, dear. She once told me he died at sea, but I don’t know if that’s true. She’d no parents herself and I never questioned it. You don’t, do you, not when you’re young.’

‘Why do you say she had no parents?’

‘Well, I don’t mean that, what I mean is that they died when she was young and she was brought up by aunts and uncles. I think when she was older she lived with her cousins for a while, then I came along and they packed her off here. Not that she ever said as much, just a feeling I got. I think that’s why she never talked much about family and that. Funny now, isn’t it, me getting interested in it after all these years. It was your letter what set me off. Now here’s you looking for someone today and me looking for someone from yesterday.’