(My aunt, c.1934)

I have a photograph taken thirty two years ago of four nuns standing in a circle pointing their toes. In the centre is one of my daughters, then four years old. She had just started ballet and was giving the nuns the benefit of her learning. Good toes, naughty toes.

I’d traveled with her to the convent where my aunt – her great-aunt – a nun, was celebrating her golden jubilee. The invitations had extended to immediate family, and second generation only. But my daughter had cut her face badly the day before and needed spoiling. An exception was made for her.

My aunt, short and wide, her plump, plain face hidden behind thick, horn-rimmed glasses, had been a linen maid before she took her vows. She cleaned her plate with bread, and spoke with the lilts and brogues of everywhere she had lived in her fifty years as a nun: London and Ghent, Sheffield and Sunderland, Hanley and Bristol. Known as Viley to my mother, Sister Bernadette to my father, we called her Auntie Bernadette. She was a Little Sister of the Poor, devoted to the care of the indigent and elderly.

In the days before the welfare state, old age was to be feared. The elderly poor, often infirm, who had no one to provide for them had to fall back on the workhouse. Forbidding institutions, built to deter all but the truly destitute, they separated the healthy men and women and housed them in long, soulless dormitories. The old and sick were put in grim, segregated infirmaries. The Little Sisters of the Poor established their homes as a kinder alternative to the workhouses, in the heartlands of England’s industrial cities. Brick built and Victorian, they, too, separated men and women and housed the inmates in dormitories. But these were welcoming institutions with polished chequered floors, bright sitting rooms for the day, and grounds for exercise and enjoyment.

The nuns produced what they could, and begged for the rest. The convents were in the poorer parts of the city, within sight of the factories or kilns or steel works. The kitchen gardens supplied the home with fruit and vegetables, eggs and poultry, pork and bacon. The nuns may have employed gardeners, but in my memory it was the old men who herded the screaming pigs towards the abattoir, they can smell death, they’re clever, pigs. It was they who dug the land and hoed the weeds, who fed the chickens and the farmyard dog, a smelly English sheepdog called Lassie. For a city girl, my country memories were formed in the industrial slums of England.

We visited every summer, staying in the guest quarters. In post-war Britain, with the scars of the Second World War still visible and where disposable income, at least for my parents, was non-existent, a free holiday was a welcome break. We children were fed five meals a day, and given presents, always books. Adventure stories for my brothers, an Enid Blyton story for me. I was an ungrateful recipient. A precocious reader, Enid Blyton’s plots, prose and vocabulary never passed muster. I would read it in two hours. And then I would wander.

The old women, for the most part, sat around the walls of the communal sitting room. Some knitted or crocheted but most were slumped silently in their chairs, dozing and drooling. The women who ventured outside were livelier and welcomed a young visitor to talk to, who thrilled to the tales of the father who bit off the puppy dogs’ tails, of the mother driven to despair by her starving children, of the wife cowed by violence and the husband belittled as a pauper. Grown up stories, from before the war. Shocking. They’d give me sweets, sometimes out of their mouths, hold my hand, tell me I was a good girl. Come away, my aunt would say, these are not suitable people to talk to.

The old men, on the other hand, sat at tables in their communal sitting room. With unshaven, unwashed faces smelling of stale tobacco, they played cards or draughts or dominoes, pulling me onto their laps and teaching me the rules so I could slap down the chips with the best of them. Their stories were of the Great War, heroic tales of valour, never their own, always their friend, before the tears fell and a vein riddled hand wiped them away.

England’s history came to me through the living memories of the frail and elderly whose lives, materially poorer than my own, veined with heartache and tragedy – the baby’s coffins witnessed on the way to school, the humiliation of the workhouse – nevertheless spoke of the human capacity for survival and joy. This was not something you read about in school, bore no relation to the mnemonics of kings and queens that we recited, the flags we waved on Empire Day. This was an altogether different rendition of the past, subversive and threatening. It was the narrative of the poor, the unsuitable.

It stirred my love of history and led me in later years to use a tape recorder as my tool, be part of the movement of history ‘from below’ as it sought to enfranchise, in their own words, those disinherited from their past: women, workers, people of colour. The seeds for this were laid not in the academy, but in my childhood memories of the impoverished industrial classes of England and the rough and tumble of their lives.

When my daughter and I returned in 1984, it had all changed. The grounds had gone, different standards of geriatric care prevailed. My daughter, a town kid too, never learned to love the countryside through the smuts of a city, or have her imagination filled with the memories from a bygone age.

I don’t know what the old men and women do, these days.

There are pictures of me as a young child in my parents’ house. My mother moved there in 1941 after her Walworth home had been damaged in the London blitz. My parents had married in 1940 and, with my father away in the war, my mother continued to live in her mother’s house, in a street coloured ‘pink’ – Fairly comfortable: good ordinary earnings – in Booth’s Map Descriptive of London Poverty of 1898-9. My maternal grandfather was a printer. Although he died in 1926, his trade union provided well for his widow. She continued to rent the whole house, and brought up six children there, along with two grandchildren. They had a lodger, Uncle Jack, my grandmother’s brother. My family, on both sides, can be traced at least as far back as the 18^th century in London. South of the river, Bermondsey and Shad Thames, Borough and Walworth. My father’s street was dark blue in Booth’s memorable map. Very poor, casual. Chronic want. My paternal grandfather was a docker on London’s corn wharves and died early, of pneumonocosis. My social, and political, DNA is rooted in the skilled working class of the inner city.

After the bombing, my mother and grandmother sought refuge in the suburbs. My mother refused to let my grandmother bring her furniture, claiming it was too large. ‘Can’t be much of a house,’ was my grandmother’s verdict. But my mother was paying the rent, and this was her first home as a married woman. She was calling the shots.

I look at pictures of the house now and what strikes me about my childhood home was how new it was. When I was born, in 1947, it was ten years old, if that, part of the straggling ‘ribbon’ developments of outer London which the inter-war London County Council hoped would be one solution to the chronic overcrowding of the inner city. But you had to be affluent to afford the rent, and the commute. London’s overcrowding was, by contrast, among the poorest: the unskilled and semi-skilled, for whom these private developments were unaffordable, and would do little to help. It needed state involvement to solve the slums and the post-war housing crisis, but that’s another story. My mother was a primary school teacher, and could afford the rent.

When I lived there, the pebbledash was fresh, the gardens full of builder’s rubble, the hedges rudimentary. A few years earlier, it had been countryside, farms and lanes and woodland. There was still woodland of sorts, scrubby remains of land gone to seed.  There were no shrubs or trees in the gardens, no lawns or borders.  The woodwork was painted dark green or brown, the pebbledash a dull, sandy beige. Black and white photographs compound its gloom.

Everyone else in that road were newcomers, too. What could that have been like, moving to a neighbourhood of strangers? Where had those other people come from? The men home from war had to find work, learn to live with wives whom they hadn’t seen for years, or had never lived with, children they’d not met. What went through their minds? What secrets and horrors did they suppress, what dreams did they embrace? Where were the tension points in those quintessentially and very new suburban lives, those uprooted, rootless families?

My parents never moved from that house.  They couldn’t believe their luck.

1. From the very beginning of the story, we learn that Ada Vaughan is ambitious and driven: “Ada would go far, she knew, be a somebody” What are the upsides, and downsides, to Ada’s ambition? How does her ambition affect the decisions she makes, at various junctures in the story? Does Ada ever lose her ambition?
2. When Stanislaus appears, near the beginning of the story, Ada falls for him almost instantly. Why do you think she is so susceptible to his charm? What are some of the possibilities that Stanislaus represents, to Ada? Is she changed by him, and if so, how?
3. Ada describes her employer, Mrs. Buckley, as someone who is “crafted through artifice.” Throughout the story, there are many instances of people attempting to look like something they are not; people changing their appearances. What are some of these instances, both good and bad? How does dressmaking, and clothing in general, relate to this theme?
4. We learn that Ada is good at improvising. When she meets Stanislaus, she is “out of her depth. But she’d learn to swim, she’d pick it up fast.” Ada’s skill at improvising is a theme that runs through the book. Do you think this knack is ultimately a good thing, something that keeps Ada alive? Or is it more harmful than helpful?
5. Why do you think Ada ignores the warnings of war, when Stanislaus invites her to Paris? How might her life have turned out differently, if she hadn’t gone?
6. As a dressmaker, Ada is always attentive to the way people dress, the clothing they wear. Is clothing an important signifier, a way of learning something about the person who wears it? What are some of these noteworthy outfits in the story? What are some of the moments when Ada discerns something important from the way someone is dressed? What role does Eva Braun, and her vanity, play in this story?
7. Ada calls the teddy bear she finds at the Belgian border her good luck charm; she says it has “kept her alive so far.” Later in the book, back in London, Ada also calls her blue dress lucky. What is the role of luck and chance in this book? What events does Ada think of as “lucky” in the moment, that might appear different in hindsight?
8. During Ada’s trial, near the end of the book, the question of Ada’s sanity during wartime starts to come into question. How much of Ada’s decision-making in wartime seemed like a rational choice to stay alive? Did any of her choices seem irrational, in the moment? If you had been in the same situation as Ada, during the war, what would you have done the same, or differently?
9. How does hope keep Ada going, throughout the story? What are some of the ways that she remains hopeful, even in the darkest times?
10. Back in London, Ada finds that most people don’t want to talk about the messy or complicated parts of the war. There is a notion of a so-called “good war”—what do you think this means? Why would Ada’s war not be considered a “good war”?
11. After the war, Ada becomes, in effect, a prostitute, operating beyond acceptable social and sexual mores. What part does this play in her downfall? How do we see double standards—one law for women, one for men—at play in the way she is treated? Why were her ‘clients’ so keen to talk to her, but not to defend her?
12. At the end of the story, Ada’s version of events clashes with the prosecutor’s version. She observes how the facts can be twisted, but wonders where is the in-between: “the truth, that connected one fact to another.” What are some instances where you’ve seen this happen in real life, where two narratives are spun from the same set of facts? The jury ultimately accepted the prosecutor’s narrative, not Ada’s. Why do you think some narratives are more acceptable than others?
13. There are many novels and stories now set in World War I and World War II. Why do you think stories of war endure? Is there something about a war that reveals the strengths and frailties of human beings?  How have stories of war—the way we write, talk, and think about them—changed over time?

Is coming soon… in the meantime, you may be interested in the links below to articles I have recently written.

http://www.foyles.co.uk/Mary-Chamberlain

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/my-secret-war-against-apartheid-mary-chamberlain-risked-everything-to-help-break-the-regime-in-south-africa-10163546.html