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"A TRUE LOVE STORY"
(author unknown)
It was a fair enough question, under the circumstances. Seventeen-year-old Jessie was unmarried and pregnant. In 1944, there was no greater shame. The war was raging, but Jessie knew the hostilities would have nothing on the murders that would break out when her father got home.
Jessie’s mum, Elizabeth, and dad, William, were respectable working-class. She had been raised to keep her hand on her ha’penny until she had a ring on her finger. But that was before she met Arthur Smith. Oh, Arthur. Just the thought of him made her smile.
They’d met when she’d got a job in the same rag factory as him in Plaistow, East London. He might have been shorter than her, but what he lacked in size, he made up for in sparkle. On their first date, she’d been late.
‘You got one more chance,’ he’d said cockily, his eyes twinkling as he pushed back a mop of thick, dark hair. After that, Jessie hadn’t been late for any of their dates. There wasn’t much to do after dark in the blackout, so they’d made their entertainment – which was why she was now in this mess.
‘I’m sorry, Mum, but I love him,’ she protested.
‘I’d like to marry your daughter, Sir,’ Arthur said bravely to her father later that evening. ‘I’ll work my socks off to support us.’
‘I should bloody well think so,’ was the reply.
In October 1944, a scandal was averted when Arthur and Jessie tied the knot at a registry office in Stratford, her four-month baby bump covered by a simple white dress. East London looked as patched up and war-weary as the rest of Britain. Five long years of war had taken their toll. But Arthur and Jessie were the proudest, happiest couple alive. They were young and in love, and nothing else mattered.
There was no money or food for a reception, so they went to the pictures instead. Jessie can’t recall what they watched, because they were too busy kissing and cuddling. In the snug, dark warmth of the picture house, cocooned from poverty and the war, she melted into Arthur’s arms.
‘I don’t half fancy you, Mrs Smith,’ he whispered in the darkness. ‘I can’t keep me hands off you.’
‘You’re not so bad yourself, Mr Smith,’ she giggled.
Jessie waited for the romance to fade, as so many people told her it would. But the strange thing was, it didn’t. Not after their first daughter, a little girl also called Jessie, screamed her way into the world in March 1945, two months before the war ended in Europe. Nor when their second daughter, a little smasher by the name of Maureen, joined their family sixteen months later.
When she gave birth to baby David in September 1947, followed by Brian just over a year later, she was as crazy over her Arthur as the day they had set eyes on each other in the rag factory.
‘Blimey, love, I’ve only got to wink at you to get you in the family way,’ Arthur joked, when she gave birth at home to Linda in November 1949, followed by Pamela in February 1951.
‘Just as well we like nippers,’ she laughed. And she really did. Every child born to her and Arthur was an extension of their love, and their family grew stronger and happier with each perfect baby she delivered.
In 1948, they got a council house, a lovely new build in Dagenham, with, glory of glories, an indoor lav, running water and three whole bedrooms.
‘How do you do it, Jessie?’ her neighbour May Spratt asked, over their twice-weekly treat, a fag in the kitchen, shortly after she gave birth to their seventh child, Julie, in July 1952. ‘All your kiddies are immaculately turned out.’
‘Search me,’ Jessie shrugged. ‘Actually, tea. That’s what keeps me going, so be a pal, May, and stick the kettle on!’
Tea definitely helped – there was a never a time Jessie didn’t have a huge brown pot covered in a knitted tea cosy on the go – but there was something else she realised as food rationing ground on and on. The war had been horrible, but it hadn’t half made her resourceful. She never bought anything that she could make herself, and all her free time was spent sewing and knitting baby clothes. Jessie’s hands were in perpetual motion and she could jig a baby on one hip, whilst stirring a pot or unravelling knitting with the other.
Breakfast was an enormous pot of porridge made with water, and tea was bread and jam, or bread and dripping (with yesterday’s bread), washed down with a gallon of well-mashed tea. Once a week, Jessie would cook a stew, made of scrag-end meat simmered for hours with a pennyworth of potherbs. She had an alchemist’s gift for conjuring up meals from nothing.
When she wasn’t cooking, cleaning, darning or wiping noses, Jessie was scrubbing. Cloth baby napkins and Arthur’s work clothes would be scrubbed down in the old dolly tub, before being wrung out through a giant mangle.
Arthur did his bit too, and true to the promise he made as a seventeen-year-old lad, he did work all the hours God sent, and more besides, even getting a second job as a painter and decorator to support their ever-growing brood.
In July 1954, food rationing finally ended in Britain, but it didn’t make much difference in the Smith household, as by the December of the same year, they had another mouth to feed, their eighth child, a little girl called Lesley.
However, that Christmas was Jessie’s happiest ever, as their children unwrapped one present each. It wasn’t much – just a scooter or a dolly – one toy was all they could afford from the little bit of money they had managed to squirrel away each month from Arthur’s wages.
‘Where’s my Christmas present then?’ Arthur murmured in her ear as they snuggled up in bed later that night.
His present came in the form of another son, Michael, born in June 1957, then Peter in November 1959. Arthur took on yet more work to cope with the demands of their large family, but he was always there on a Friday evening for the weekly bath-time fun. Together, they’d drag in the old tin bath from the garden and fill it with warm water in front of the fire, and in they went, two at a time.
‘Blimey, this is like a conveyor belt,’ Arthur joked, as he struggled to contain a slippery little person, desperate to avoid the weekly wash. It was worth the effort, though. What was better than seeing ten perfect, clean little children snuggled in front of the flickering firelight in their pyjamas and nighties?
As a new decade dawned and the 1960s exploded, Jessie realised that she’d been having babies more or less non-stop for fifteen years. There was no swinging in the Smith household, just scrubbing! The new fashion for beehives and mini-skirts passed Jessie by, especially when she fell pregnant with their eleventh child. Barbara was born as 1961 came to a close.
Package trips to sunny foreign climes like Benidorm were beginning to open up to curious Brits, but not for the Smiths, where a yearly camping trip to the South Coast was all the household budget could stretch to. Jessie would pack up a bumper stack of Spam sandwiches and off they’d go for a day at the beach. Days out were so much more fun with eleven kids to help bury Dad up to his neck in the sand!
After one lovely day at the beach in Brighton, Arthur flung his arms around his wife and kissed her, his lips tingling with salt.
‘I do love you, Jessie,’ he whispered. Jessie took in his thick dark hair, now sprinkled with grey and his eyes, baggy with exhaustion. She felt the same as she did all those years back when they’d had their shotgun wedding.
‘Smile for the camera, lovebirds,’ said a friend, who’d brought down an old Box Brownie. Larking about in front of the pier, Jessie hitched up her skirt and whooped it up for the camera. ‘And you still got a cracking pair of pins!’ Arthur grinned.
Heading back home to Dagenham, Jessie realised she’d never been so content. They turned down their street in a great belch of petrol fumes, their old car bursting at the seams with sun-kissed kids – no such thing as seat belts in those days.
By 1964, most homes down their street had televisions, but not the Smiths’, so they had to make their own entertainment. And so it was that Jessie gave birth to their twelfth, and final, child.
Their family was finally complete.
Fast-forward a few years, and her family grew somewhat larger. Jessie eventually became the head of an enormous clan with, wait for it, 44 grandchildren, 99 great-grandchildren and 20 great-great grandchildren! So many, in fact, her family had to made her a spreadsheet so she could keep track. The papers dubbed her Supergran in June 2017, when her 175-strong brood threw her a surprise ninetieth birthday.
Camera crews from around the world beat a path to her door to interview this mighty matriarch, but Jessie is an unassuming, humble woman and declined. Fortunately, she did open the door to her Dagenham home to me and we had a wonderful trip down memory lane. Many cups of tea were drunk as we looked through her family album.
We paused on a glorious photo of her and Arthur, taken that day when they larked about in front of Brighton Pier in the 1960s. Despite its seaside sauce, it had such an innocent quality. You could almost smell the chip fat and candyfloss.
‘Look at me flashing my knickers!’ she laughed. ‘I was a caution back then. I still can’t believe he’s gone. We were so in love. We never went to bed without a kiss and a cuddle on the settee.’
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