Memoirs of Ellie Warburton

Joyce Marlow

Description

This well written, poignant, fast-paced novel focuses on what women did in the Great War that turned Europe upside down and devastated so many millions of lives. It follows the path that leads Ellie Warburton from a curiously isolated, upper class childhood in the wilds of north Lancashire, to pre-war campaigning as a non-militant suffragette, to her wartime role as mobile kitchen and ambulance driver in Flanders' bloody fields.The youngest of "the three beautiful Warburton sisters", Ellie is idealistic, romantically minded, yet determined to make her mark in the world. The eldest sister Matty is ambitiously self-centred. While she cares deeply for suffering humanity en masse, she has no understanding of individual emotion. Vicky is a born hedonist and while similarly self-centred, she radiates charm, effortlessly drawing people, notably men, into her web. Both, particularly Vicky, affect Ellie's life. Virtually all the men in their lives went to war. They raised companies, served as intelligence officers and doctors, while the great love of Ellie's life, Luke Stoddard, born and brought up in a dreaded workhouse, served as a 'tommy' in the trenches before becoming a famous war artist. They were a doomed generation. How many survived the war?

Sujets

• Historical fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Andrews UK
• Date de parution: 01 mai 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783335855
• Langue: English

Extrait

Title Page
The Memoirs of Ellie Warburton
by
Joyce Marlow



Publisher Information
This edition published in 2014 by
Acorn Books
www.acornbooks.co.uk
Converted and distributed by
Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
Copyright © 2014 Joyce Marlow
The right of Joyce Marlow to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.



Foreword
by Miranda Hallam
Among my happiest childhood memories are those winter evenings sitting in front of a log fire, poring over my grandmother Ellie’s First World War scrapbooks. These were kept in the oilskin-lined basketwork trunk that had transported her wartime belongings and I longed to know what else lay in its capacious depths. When I was about fourteen grandma found me trying to prise open the ancient lock. I shall never forget the mortification of being caught in the act but all she said was, ‘I have the key, Miranda, but if I leave the contents to anybody, it will be to you.’
To her last days Ellie’s mind was pretty lucid but her body crumbled and early in 1993, in her hundredth year, death came as a friend. Among the bequests to “my grand-daughter Miranda Hallam” was the basketwork trunk. When I opened it the only things inside were the scrapbooks already seen and a small book of pressed flowers, unsurprisingly brittle with age as they were annotated “Hellfire Corner 1915”. Grandma had, I regretfully concluded, destroyed whatever else had been inside the trunk.
Then, last year, Rose Cottage changed hands and amidst a pile of junk in the loft the new occupants found two large cardboard boxes. I can only presume it was grandma herself who had the boxes transported there - for auld lang syne? - and fading memory forgot them. Fortunately the new occupants knew who Ellie Warburton was and having opened and riffled through the contents they contacted me. Once I’d read them and examined the astonishing drawings carefully wrapped in tissue paper, I realised why grandma, the wordsmith of the family, had refused all offers to publish a life story more packed with incident than most and why she’d kept the basketwork trunk securely locked.
There was also a letter addressed to me. Reading it so many years after her death sent shivers down my spine. I’m including an extract which explains why grandma wrote these Memoirs:
As you know, I was among the few women officially invited to the opening ceremony of the Menin Gate Memorial to honour those British and Commonwealth soldiers who had “no known graves” . When the invitation arrived my instinct was to refuse. Too many memories, but eventually I was persuaded to attend.
So t here I was on Sunday 27 July, 1927, among the elite in a reserved seat close to the massive arch. I’d done my homework and hadn’t been in the least surprised to learn that somebody had blundered and there wasn’t enough space on the Memorial for all the names to be inscribed on its walls. Those who disappeared into the mud or were blown to buggery after August 1917 had their names inscribed at Tyne Cott cemetery. I wondered who counted them - 54,896 at Menin, 34,984 at Tyne Cott - and how correct they could possibly be.
In the nine years since the Armistice, shattered Ypres had been partially rebuilt but it still looked shell-shocked. (It was 1968 before the medieval Cloth Hall was finally restored. Mind you, another World War had intervened.) On that Sunday in 1927 the town was packed to the gunnels, people hanging out of windows, press photographers up on the ramparts or perched perilously on ladders, British and Belgian bands playing Great War tunes, including of course “It’s Long Way to Tipperary” which, as anybody who’d been there knew, the troops rarely sang.
It was when the mass of relatives approached the Memorial from their assembly point in the market square, their packed bodies rippling like the wind in a cornfield that, as I’d feared, the memories came flooding in. Me driving Sheba, our mobile canteen, past the Menin Gate when it was a gaping hole in the ramparts guarded by what was left of two stone lions; Billy Maynard and I being driven across the square when Ypres was smouldering but the Cloth Hall was still standing, just about; Harry inching Sheba through the Gate after the gas attack and....and....It was after Lord Plumer’s voice stopped booming inaugural platitudes through the loudspeakers, as buglers from the Somerset Light Infantry played the Last Post that I wept . Not only because its sounds are so haunting but because Wilfrid Fenton had been in the Somersets .
Back home I decided it was time to put my talent as a writer to personal use, to examine the people and events that led me to Flanders’ Fields. In the process I hoped to lay most, if not all, of my ghosts. Over the decades that is what I have done. As is obvious, although I wrote these Memoirs mainly for myself, the instinct to address an audience survived and obviously I did not destroy them. Once you’ve read them I hope you will understand why I never told you the truth and will forgive me. Should the hereafter exist in any form imagined by true believers (which I doubt), be assured, my dearest child, I shall watch over you.
Your loving Grandma.’
Yes, you should have told me the truth, grandma, particularly when you took me on that emotional journey to the Flanders’ fields and cemeteries. But you kept your secret and it’s too late to argue the toss now. The text is as Ellie edited and re-edited it over the years, I’ve merely added this Foreword and the Post Script.



Part 1
1.
Where to start? Why not with the first time we three Warburton Sisters made the news? Which was during our visit to Hawarden Castle in 1896. I was the cause of the hoo-hah but being only three years old, what I know comes from other people’s accounts and what I imagine went through my infant brain. We were invited to the annual Hawarden fête because one of Daddy’s brothers was a local Liberal MP. Incidentally, “Mummy” and “Daddy” were replacing “Mama” and “Papa” in families that considered themselves modern which our mother, if not our father, did.
Daddy was, as usual, conspicuous by his absence. For example, when Matty was born in autumn 1890 he was in Kashmir, when Vicky appeared in summer 1891 he was somewhere up the Amazon and when Ellie (me) arrived on May Day 1893 he was in California. The son of a rich, self-made cotton manufacturer, Hugo Arthur Warburton was educated at Rugby and Cambridge. As an adult he played the stock market assiduously and indulged in the late Victorian pastime of the well-heeled, travelling abroad and collecting plants. Otherwise he existed on his own isthmus, from time to time visiting the mainland where the rest of humanity lived.
So it was Mummy who took us to the fête. She was born a Partington and their estate included Grangefell Hall, the village of Grangefell-by-Bowland, undulating wooded country and miles of Pennine moorland. By the late 1880s the estate was virtually bankrupt which was when Daddy, increasingly disenchanted with the smoke and grime of his native Manchester, on the look-out for an imposing house with large grounds as his English base, surprisingly came to the rescue. I say “surprisingly” because he was not a social animal but he happened to attend a reception where he met the Honourable Charlotte Partington, known as Lotty, who had been sent to Manchester to find a wealthy husband to save the estate. The rest, as they say, is history or at least it’s ours.
The family, minus its paterfamilias, travelled to Hawarden by coach and train via Preston, Manchester and Chester which was exciting, though the house itself was a big disappointment, not at all my idea of a castle. On arrival we were ushered into a large room overlooking a terrace, where Matty, Vicky and I were told to sit on stools which we obediently did. Then the old, old man came slowly into the room. Perhaps it was the reverence that greeted his arrival or maybe it was his white hair but I immediately thought of the pictures of God in my Bible Stories for Children. His wearing a black frock-coat, rather than a long white night-shirt, did not upset the image. He smiled at us and in a mellifluous, if quavering voice - well, God was very old - enquired, ‘Who, pray, are these delightful little Miss Muffets sitting on their tuffets?’
When somebody proposed a picture of him with the little Miss Muffets, a photographer and reporter were summoned. Our stools were arranged round the chair in which the old man had been carefully seated and we were told to look at the birdie. I actually have a memory of the magnesium flashes making me blink. The photographic session finished, our family details taken by the reporter - we were the sweet little daughters of H.A. Warburton Esq. of Grangefell Hall, Lancashire - the old man was helped to his feet and led through the French windows to the terrace. On a lovely summer’s day some twenty-four thousand people had turned up for the annual Hawarden fête and the roar that greeted the old man’s appearance on the terrace shook the very heavens.
It made me certain of His identity and I piped up, ‘That is God, isn’t it?’
‘Don’t be silly,’ sa