Your letter to hand reminding me of my promise to let you have a few
details of my neighbour’s life. At first she hesitated about telling
anything, as she said it was all past and done with, and at times felt
ashamed at having had thirteen children, especially to a man like her
husband (who is a drunkard). She looks back on her past life at the
age of forty-eight with different feelings to what she had at thirty.
Then she thought it was her “lot,” as she terms it, to have so many
children, and so many sickly ones, but now she feels she has been to
blame for many things--for instance, for the number of children she
has had; for the dulness and lack of energy in two of them; for the
feeble-mindedness in a third; deafness and sore eyes in a fourth.
She blames the conditions under which she bore those children during
pregnancy. She was married at nineteen, and a mother before she was
twenty, with no knowledge whatever of the duties of motherhood. Her
first five children came in rapid succession. While she was pregnant
of her sixth child her husband fell out of work, and was out of work
six months. During this time they had 10s. a week to live on (from the
husband’s trade union). She went out washing and cleaning-up to the
last week of her confinement. While cleaning windows at one of the
houses she slipped and fell, hurting her side. Three days later the
child was born, apparently all right, but as time went on the mother
noticed there was something wrong, but nobody seemed to know what. This
child did not cut its teeth till two years old, nor walk without help
till it was seven, and now, at the age of eighteen, you can hardly
make out a word he says. He is not exactly an imbecile, but he is
feeble-minded, and all this could have been avoided could the mother
have had proper nourishment during pregnancy, and less work. The mother
had to work hard all day, and got little rest at night, as the fifth
child was weakly and ailing, and the neighbour who looked after the
child during the day used to put gin in its milk to stop its crying,
which it did till the effects of the gin had passed off. The poor
mother, not knowing that gin was given to the child, would often, after
a hard day’s work, spend most of the night pacing the bedroom floor,
trying to soothe the fretful child, and often had to go downstairs
because the crying disturbed her husband. It was not until her sixth
child came, the feeble-minded one, that the neighbour admitted giving
it gin. Consequently the lad has grown up dull, never made any headway
at school. He is a labourer, and twenty years of age, and will never
be anything else but a labourer, because, as his mother says, he has
no “head-piece,” and cannot do a simple sum in arithmetic to save his
life. The mother firmly believes her children would have been as bright
as anybody’s could she have had proper nourishment during pregnancy,
and herself cared for them after they were born. Her girl of sixteen
is deaf in one ear, and has weak eyes, the after-effects of measles
when a child. The mother nursed this child a fortnight, then was
obliged to leave her with a neighbour while she went out to work. The
neighbour neglected the child in letting her run out too soon, etc.,
and as there were no school clinics when her children went to school,
some of them are suffering to-day from diseases which might have been
cured, could they have had attention at the proper time. Now that they
are grown up they seem fairly healthy, though undersized, but when one
considers their childhood, the want of sufficient food, lack of fresh
air (the younger ones always slept four in bed, two at the top and two
at the bottom), one wonders they are as healthy as they appear to be.
They seem to be fairly good workers, but not one good scholar among
them. And to add to the above discomforts, they had a drunken, brutal
father. He was never a real father, a surly, gloomy man, never a kind
word for his children, and not one of them remembers a caress from him.
I can quite understand the woman being ashamed of bearing thirteen
children to a man like him, and having to rear them in surroundings and
conditions which she has reared hers. It takes it out of the mother
mentally and physically.
_Wages 16s. to 30s.; thirteen children._