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The Blood in the Stone

by Deborah Lane

“The truth about stories is that that’s all we are.” —Thomas King



IN THE WANING SUMMER OF 1943, my mother was summoned to wartime Thirsk from her laundress position at Chatsworth House to look after her dying mother Agnes. Agnes had battled breast cancer and had been cruelly and categorically conquered. After a double mastectomy followed by rounds of the new and agonizingly painful treatment of radiation in a lead-lined tubular coffin, she was finished. The cancer had taken up residence in her brain and she was no longer reliable to care for her husband and three young children.

Interior, Chatsworth House

My Mum first told me the story of Agnes’s passing when I was about seven after I enquired about her mother. Mum described the deathbed scene with the fine brushstrokes of a John Everett Millais painting. Agnes, “a mere skeleton of her former self,” was positioned propped up on a crisp white pillow; her bedding was arranged carefully around her. The blackout curtains were shut and the ornate Victorian fireplace burning rationed coal gave off the only light in the room. She had been in a morphine-induced sleep for three days. 

The small children came and went. My Mum, despite having never attended to a dying person, did her best to make sure her mother looked comfortable and, more importantly, presentable for visitors and the esteemed local doctor. After three days of being unconscious, Agnes finally clawed her way up from the depths of near-death and opened her vacant eyes. Her children were assembled quickly and they stared wide-eyed at this hollow husk of their mother. And then in a hoarse whisper, the tiny, emaciated figure uttered: “I am coming to you now, Mother.” These were her exact words. “And then she was gone,” Mum said. It struck me then as a peculiar thing to say when you have four children and a spouse seeing you off. She wasn’t saying goodbye to them. Agnes was saying hello to her long-dead mother. 

* * *

TWO BROWN-TONED FORMAL portraits of Agnes sit on my dressing table. Monochrome photographs are both a challenge and an opportunity, aren’t they? If you stare at them long enough you notice the details of the portrait. But when you imagine colour they take on texture and depth.

Agnes (photo: courtesy of the author)

In one of these portraits, Agnes is around sixteen; she is seated in front of a mock multi-paned window. She probably chose her best ensemble for the occasion: a modest dark skirt and pale, perhaps white, blouse. Her dark hair is combed flat to one side and pulled back into a practical bun I imagine as concealed from the camera. The simplicity of her clothing complements her uncomplicated child-like round face and healthy build. She stares serenely forward with her lips slightly parted. Young Agnes is without jewelry and hat but holds a prop in her lap: a rather homely artificial flower bouquet perhaps intended to make her appear more feminine. Her pale, flawless skin and the openness of her soft gaze seems guileless and naturally attractive. 

Agnes (photo: courtesy of the author)

In the second studio photograph, taken in England during WWII, Agnes is posed standing with one foot forward and her hand is resting on an ornamental wooden table. She is wearing a plain, brimmed hat and belted patterned dress that reaches her mid-calf. Below that, her plain shoes are in keeping with the fashion of the day for a dignified woman of her age and social class. Based on the height of the prop side table, I would say she looks no more than five feet tall. This version of mature Agnes has a wedding band on the left ring finger. She is in her forties and her flat upper body belies the fact that she has already had a double mastectomy. Her life is almost over. Perhaps Agnes knew this. Agnes’s gaze is no longer soft; there is a steeliness in her eyes as she addresses the camera, but there is also a sadness and resignation. Her unadorned lips are thinner and tightly closed. Undoubtedly, this studio photograph was her parting gift to her survivors. 

* * *

THERE IS AN OVERWHELMING FEELING of loss in me when I examine these pictures. They are the only tangible objects I possess of Agnes. If you have known your grandparents, even one, count yourself lucky. My seven siblings and I come from a couple who were fatherless. Actually, we come from a long line of bastards. The only grandparents we could claim as irrefutably ours and swimming, if only treading water, in our gene pool, were the maternal and paternal grandmothers. Both of them were long gone before Mum and Dad created their post-war family. As a child, I was envious of children who knew their grandparents and still went to their houses to be spoiled, listen to old people stories, learn about the past, play without censure, and get spoiled with forbidden sweets like chocolate buttons and dolly mixture. 

In my childhood imagination, Agnes always wore a crisp white apron that covered most of her front and tied in a cross in the back. There was a sizeable pocket in the front that held practical items like an embroidered handkerchief for a runny nose, lost buttons or safety pins, and impractical treats like sweets.  Usually sucky sweets—barley sugars. They lasted longer. My version of Agnes called me “Deborah,” never reducing it to the more modern “Debbie” or “Deb.” I imagined her holding me to her ample bosom when I fell over and cooing “It’s alright, pet.” In releasing me from her lap, satisfied I was fully recovered, she would pull out a sweet from her apron pocket. Don’t misunderstand me, I was not short of tactile demonstrations from my own mother. Despite her endless and thankless work in a house with seven children, I was “the baby,” and Mum made time for me to sit on her lap for “just five minutes.” It was always longer. I always felt loved. 

I may not have memories of a grandmother’s pocket full of sweets, but I do have those photographs and a handful of stories my mother gave to me. In one such story, which took place between the time the first and second photograph were taken, apparently my destiny was decided. I would not be here if it weren’t for a barely talked-about event that took place in the early days of 1921, when Agnes was 26 years old and a single mother of a six-year-old named Nancy, who grew up to be my mother. The tale took place following the death of Agnes’s mother on December 27, 1920, at the age of only 49, due to pulmonary tuberculosis.

The 1911 census reveals that Agnes and my mother were part of a large, multi-generational working-class family living in a ‘two up-two down’ row house in Wallsend, a suburb of Newcastle. The death of Agnes’s mother, Annie, was the last of three in as many years in that same house. Annie’s brother Joseph was killed in Flanders in July of 1918 and then Annie’s son William died of pulmonary tuberculosis in 1919. I can imagine, according to custom, black crepe was draped in the small house, but I cannot imagine how much grief permeated the festooned walls and weighed down its remaining inhabitants that Christmastime. The brightly-coloured Chinese lanterns, the paper chains, the Christmas tree, and the mistletoe affixed to one of the gas lamps to make things “normal” were probably removed in haste by the grieving family. 

My mother didn’t remember much about Annie other than to say she remembered her grandmother being hunched over a sewing machine. The census record identifies Annie as a daughter of the head of the household, a widow of thirty-nine and a dressmaker. Apparently, she was a well-respected dressmaker and the elaborate dresses that she made for my mother were of good quality and befitting a child of a higher class. I’ve seen the pictures and, yes, my mother was bedecked in frilly dresses and pushing dolls in a tiny, equally ostentatious pram. I figure Annie must have made a decent living. 

According to my mother, the premature death of Annie was a significant blow to the household income; the tight family unit quickly unraveled; Annie’s two remaining boys were sent to live with an aunt while the adults fended for themselves. None of them would share a house again. Agnes was listed as a “domestic servant” on the 1911 census; obviously, she didn’t get the dressmaker gene. Domestic labour wouldn’t get her far or earn enough to support herself and her child. Understandably, the death of Annie was a crisis and plunged Agnes into a dreadful state of fear and despair. 

What transpired in the early days of 1921 was a story handed down to my mother from Agnes herself and it never changed in the retelling of it:

On a bitterly cold January day, Agnes took the six-year-old version of my mother by the hand and they walked together to the river nearby the house on Station Road in Wallsend. Upon arriving at the north bank of River Tyne, Agnes stopped. I would imagine Agnes was deep in thought and the sight of the river’s relentless shipping activity was somewhat coloured by her black, somber mood. The river at that time was always busy with ships that, for the most part, carried coal from the nearby coalfields. Even today, the rough, deep water of the Tyne is daunting yet mesmerizing to watch. As Agnes told my mother later, she intended to throw her in to drown her and then follow her into the fast current. Yet, this plan was aborted at the last second. As the story goes, Agnes heard my child-mother say something and that stopped her from carrying out the murder-suicide. “What was it you said?” I asked the first, and every subsequent time, she told this story. My Mum replied “I don’t know.” After a thoughtful pause, she said solemnly, “But it was enough.”

As Agnes told my mother later, she intended to throw her in to drown her and then follow her into the fast current. Yet, this plan was aborted at the last second. As the story goes, Agnes heard my child-mother say something and that stopped her from carrying out the murder-suicide.

I owed my life to a six-year-old? The knowledge felt like an existential slap on the cheek. What was “enough” consumed my imagination through my childhood. Did this guileless little girl say she was cold and wanted to go home to get warm or ask to feed the ducks? Maybe she looked at the river as flotsam sailed past her and told her mother that it scared her. More recently, I stopped asking that question and redirected my gaze toward Agnes. Maybe Agnes was simply tired of suffering. The death of Annie might have been the proverbial last straw; maybe a few decades of living brought Agnes eventually to the bank of that turbulent river. If I wanted to know who my grandmother truly was and why this woman chose life over death, it was going to take some investigation and my imagination to allow her to speak for herself. My children are grown, I am retired, and I am curious to ‘meet’ this woman. The time had come. 

* * *

MY MOTHER’S ANECDOTES of the older Agnes were a godsend to me; these stories were spoken with no shortage of admiration. Each one illuminated her strong personality and hardiness in the face of adversity. The woman had many sides: there was “fun Agnes” who enjoyed playing whist and dominos in the pub and acting in amateur local plays in a chorus of women with Gypsy costumes and tambourines. She could play the spoons like a pro—if there is such a thing as a professional spoon player. The more “ethereal Agnes” believed fervently in reincarnation and she took pleasure in reading people’s tea leaves. In addition to home remedies to cure all manner of diseases from a mustard plaster for a chest infection and sugary butter for a sore throat, she had an arsenal of superstitions at her disposal—such as death comes in a set of three, dropping a knife meant a man was calling to the house and, one of my faves: you always iron silk in the dark. With a weird sense of pride, Mum added that, if Agnes had been born in the times of the witch trials, she would have been burned at the stake. I have to confess, at times, I think Agnes is behind me as I write this, checking my wording and sometimes getting me back on track. She squeezes my shoulders and says “Don’t be daft!” if I get too sentimental.

The remembered accounts with dialogue revealed Agnes’s strength and resilience in hard times: in them, out comes “feisty Agnes.” In one anecdote, Agnes is in Thirsk during the war in a blackout and embarrasses her daughter by shouting loudly “Turn those lights out!” at a negligent cottage with a chink of light showing. In another, Agnes and my mother are witnesses to a shot-down Spitfire that made an attempt to land on the common in Thirsk. When the pair arrived on the scene, they saw the pilot had attempted to eject and deploy his parachute. His efforts were futile. His lifeless broken body, still wrapped in parts of the parachute, lay awkwardly splayed on the green. Agnes moved without hesitation toward the body and, much to my mother’s embarrassment, she started to gather up the parachute in her arms. When my mother tried to physically stop her, an unrepentant Agnes replied, “That’s good silk going to waste—it will do nicely for my coffin.” Indeed, when Agnes died, the parachute silk was discovered, neatly folded with a fresh nightdress in the bottom drawer of the dresser. 

The stories Mum didn’t know or just didn’t think were important happened long before the war. They are set in Cleator, a village situated on the edge of the Lake District in Cumberland (now called Cumbria) where, in 1851, rich deposits of hematite were discovered. Chances are that this mineral is new information to you as it was to me. It was well-known to the Victorian century industrialists seeking more expeditious ways to make steel and abundant wealth. The word hematite is Latin for bloodstone, reflecting the vibrant red streaks that running through it. No matter what colour or shape it is on the outside, the interior is always ochre. Rich in iron, hematite was valuable in the manufacture of steel. Coal abounded in Cleator Moor, but the money to be made was in hematite. 

Some historians liken the mid-nineteenth century stampede of mine owners and labourers to the Yukon gold rush. A shanty town was erected followed by hastily-built and notoriously unsafe two up-two down housing for the new wave of workers. Mine companies jammed the large families and, in many cases, extra lodgers, into these company-owned dwellings. Some of the houses had thirty people in them. The majority of the miners and families were the Irish escaping the famine to try their luck in this new Victorian boomtown. In 1850, the picturesque village of Cleator, lying in the shadow of Dent Hill, had a population of around six hundred. Within thirty years, the population of the purpose-built town next to the village of Cleator named “Cleator Moor” topped ten thousand. Due to the multitude of Irish, Cleator Moor became known as “Little Ireland.” The Irish brought with them Irish customs, their religions and the insatiable discord of the old country. Violent riots between the “Orangemen” and Catholics in Cleator Moor were commonplace. 

Iron furnaces, Cleator Moor

The once bucolic landscape with green fells dotted with sheep was transformed rapidly into a wasteland filled with industrial debris, the jarring noise of rock crushers, blasting, whistles and trains and toxic air. The five-mile radius contained over two hundred mine shafts and most had train tracks leading from the pits and iron ore furnaces to designated railheads. The Ehen River was rerouted to serve the iron ore companies and was polluted daily with waste. Twice a week, the Ehen ran red with effluence from the furnaces. Waste was piled high into slag heaps and became playgrounds for the children. The black and red dust indiscriminately invaded the bodies and made its insidious and inevitable passage to the lungs of miners and the wretched souls who called Cleator Moor “home.” Black lung disease, or pneumoconiosis, was a death sentence for miners but a complication of this disease—pulmonary tuberculosis—was far less discerning. 

Such was the world Agnes was born into in May of 1894. By that time, the Irish-Protestant Blakeney family had been working the mines and railroads in Cleator Moor since the discovery of hematite for over forty years. Agnes’s father is not named on her birth certificate but the census records show that, despite her illegitimacy, she was not abandoned to an orphanage but absorbed into a multi-generational household of nine people in a two-up two-down row house on Queen Street, a stone’s throw from Crossfield Mine. 

* * *

FROM THE COMFORT OF MY CANADIAN HOME, I tried in vain to imagine Agnes growing up in that industrial wasteland. I knew I had to see it for myself. On a warm, sunny day in September 2024, I found myself walking up the High Street of Cleator Moor. Like many High Streets in spent industrial towns, the centre had deteriorated and many storefronts were vacant. I turned onto Queen Street and quickly found number 4, the Blakeney family home from 1871 to 1901. Queen Street is lined with two identical rows of white-washed two-up two-down houses. I noticed immediately that the row to the right stopped abruptly about half-way up and beyond it was a swath of uncut green grass. I discovered later that there were indeed about five houses more in this row during the nineteenth century but they were pulled down because of the subsidence. Studying the old map in my hands, I can see that Agnes and her family lived in a neighbourhood surrounded by mines—Crossfield, Montreal and Pit No. 4 Iron Ore Mines, and others. A little further away, the map showed Pit No. 6, Pit No. 9, Jacktrees Pit, and landmarks, named ominously old shafts, all connected by an entangled network of train tracks belonging to the Mineral Railway and L & NW & Furness Joint Railway. 

Underneath the row houses, in the centre of Cleator Moor, were mine shafts, some dangerously close to the surface. Local stories about living in these houses have been handed down through the generations. The stories they told described hearing bogies rumbling down the underground tracks and hearing miners talking beneath the houses. Other stories were about the miners not needing a watch because they could hear the church clock in Market Square tolling the hours. The children played on slag heaps and breathed in the dust and fumes of the industry. They slept in beds perched precariously on top of empty and working mineshafts. All of the inhabitants of Little Ireland were exposed to the dangerous hazards of extracting hematite. 

Row houses, Cleator Moor

In fifty years, and over 280 mining accidents, families sacrificed their husbands, fathers, sons, brothers (some as young as 10) to roof falls, explosions, drowning, gas fumes, and choke damp. The nearby Preston Quarter Workhouse was full of miners and their families. All of this for what? To make money for a few select men, with names ending in Esq., languishing with their well-tended families in the well-tended, landscaped homes known by names but never numbers. There are marble tributes to the “great and the good” in the churches and their gravestones were made of granite and marble that withstood the ravages of time. 

Not one single gravestone stands to mark my family. It is as though they didn’t exist. 

* * *

AND NOW I’M HERE standing outside the whitewashed row house that was once home to my ancestors. I take photographs with my iPhone, then knock on the front door. A small, dignified-looking woman wearing a floral apron opens the door and I explain, in case she had seen me through her twitching lace curtains, why I am outside taking pictures. The unnamed elderly woman proudly told me with Cumbrian inflections that she was born in “Cleator Mo-ah” and had resided in Number 4 for fifty-one years. She adds gratuitously, that she put in an extension in the back. I wonder to myself whether it covers the site of the ash toilet that the night soil men emptied. She does not offer, nor do I dare ask to go inside. Surely, that would have been much too cheeky. I’m so enticingly close, a mere doorstep away, from seeing where Agnes spent her childhood. I console myself by thinking it wouldn’t have been the same house anyway. 

For starters, the house of 1901, when Agnes was seven, would not have been white. I can tell from old photographs of the Cleator Moor row houses in the centre of town that the white paint of today would have been black with soot; the plaster exterior chipped and disintegrating. I walked up to the green where the missing houses had once stood and took in the view back down the road towards the High Street. I could see and hear traffic building from the roadworks disrupting the flow of vehicles to repair subsidence of the old water pipes. I started to imagine the world as Agnes knew it. What had she seen? Her experience of ordinary life on Queen Street must have been vastly different from what I observe today. I begin to indulge my hungry imagination, already fed with appetizers of historical documents, maps, and photographs, to create a story of one day, in 1901, at number 4 Queen Street.

A small, round-faced girl with dark brown curled hair, tied up to one side with a white ribbon, is opening the front door. Agnes is wearing a school uniform consisting of a blue-black tunic covered by a white pinafore. She carefully closes the blackened door behind her so it does not touch her pinafore. It’s not that she would get in trouble for getting her pinny dirty. Her mother had sewn lots of them. It was a game for Agnes: on any given school day, how long could she keep it clean? Agnes has just turned seven and is on her way to school early in May from her grandparents’ house on Queen Street. She lives there and not with her mother on Leconfield Street, a newer row house, in the shadow of the sprawling spewing furnace of the Hematite Iron Ore Company. In my vision Agnes is turning on High Street and walking over the soot-coated railway bridge. She is careful not to touch the bricks. The empty trains are already shrieking and belching smoke as they rumble underneath the bridge towards Leconfield Pit. 

Maybe because the menfolk in her family were staunch Orangemen who marched in the violent demonstrations on the High Street she walks on, Agnes resists the urge to glance to her right at the Catholic children playing within the walled confines of St. Patrick’s school. Her destination is within sight. It’s hard to miss. The Montreal Church of England School, with its magnificent clock tower, built by the eminent Montreal Mine owner Mr. Stirling, is bustling with children in the playground. Agnes makes her way towards the stone staircase to wait for the clock tower bell to chime. None of them, nor the teachers pre-occupied with teacherly tasks inside, is aware that the school was built on a slag heap and, in a few years, will be demolished to prevent it from being swallowed up by the subsidence.

Street scene, Cleator Moor

I can imagine the sound of the clock tower bell signalling dinner break at midday unleashes a knot of girls in similar pinafores and ruddy-cheeked, short-trousered boys on to the paved playground. My invented Agnes is retracing her steps at a faster pace homewards looking down with disappointment at the black smudges and fingerprints of her pinafore. As she looks down, her eyes focus on a small black rock with a slightly sparkly sheen that is caught in a crack in the pavement. She picks it up and turns it over in her hand. My Agnes knows her minerals well and recognizes that she’s holding a chunk of hematite; she tests it by drawing a line on the pavement. The ochre line she draws confirms her find. Agnes lifts one side of her pinafore and pockets the rock in her tunic; she keeps walking. 

Before she reaches the turn to Queen Street, she hears the clatter of clogs on the High Street pavement behind her. This is unusual at this time of the day. The ten-hour shift cannot be finished so soon. She recognizes the “red man” dressed in worn red-stained work clothing is looking straight ahead, his face glowing with red sweat. She stops walking to greet Mr. Conway but doesn’t have the courage; his young son, Davey, had died in a roof fall at Montreal Mine the week before. The red sweat is running in streams down his cheeks. They are tears. She stares blankly as the miner keeps walking past without even noticing her.

My imaginary Agnes reaches the house and opens the door into a narrow hallway decorated with faded floral wallpaper and a wave of hot air infused with boiled beef tongue and boiled cabbage assaults her. She looks in the doorless opening to the left and recognizes the grey humped mass on the wooden chopping block. Her fears are confirmed. Her grandmother, Jane, mashing potatoes in a haze of steam smiles her greeting over her fogged-up spectacles in a crisp Scottish accent “Hello my wee pet, how was school?” She doesn’t wait for the answer before saying “Set the table please.” 

Imaginary Agnes asks, “’ow many?” 

Jane replies with a small smile without looking up from her work—“It’s how with an H and only six today”. 

“Is mam… I mean mother… coming?” Agnes asks and her grandmother replies “Aye, but not the lads.” The lads she refers to are Agnes’s infant half-brothers. 

Through the doorway of the sitting room across the narrow hallway, Agnes sees her grandfather, Joseph, seated on a faded green chair fitted with an embroidered linen antimacassar. He’s dressed for his stationary engineer work for the Hematite Iron Ore Company. His clothes are relatively clean because he’s been working above ground with shaft water drainage into the Ehen about 200 yards from their front door. Known for his regular and unchanging habits and good nature, Joseph is reading the Carlisle Journal he buys at the newsagent on his way home for dinnertime. His favourite floral teacup is waiting empty, with the exception of a few strained tea leaves, on a wooden stool in front of him. Agnes enters the room quietly to retrieve the cup but before she goes in, the front door swings open behind her. A small, well-dressed woman enters with a rush of cold air. She wears a stylish Edwardian grey wool coat with black velvet lapels and matching hat adorned with a black velvet band. My imaginary Agnes has an imaginary mother. Her name is Annie. She smiles broadly at her little girl. 

I have no studio photograph as evidence of this woman. What I do know is that, as a dressmaker, Annie would have access to the inner recesses of the homes of the wealthy families in the countryside surrounding Cleator. Wearing fashionable clothing, she infiltrated the upper class to carry out her measurement-taking and private fittings in the bedrooms and dressing rooms of the gentry. While engaging in her work, she probably heard local scandal but rarely spoke. Annie gained a reputation in that circle for her discretion which increased her client list to the point of her engaging her sisters for help with hems and fancy embellishments. In fact, she taught her younger sister, Sarah, to become a dressmaker too. 

Annie watched her wealthy clients carefully and, gradually, acquired their behaviour, facial expressions, their speech patterns and manners while she quietly pinned their gowns. Over time, she was regarded with high esteem by her clients and they passed her name on in their lofty circles. After years being in their service, Annie could easily pass for one of them on the street. Perhaps Annie began to realize that, unlike the men in her life who, generation after generation, went down in the mines, women might actually do better. I imagine that Annie began to hope: with the right amount of effort, she could be seen as of a better class and simply misplaced in the mining community. If an advantageous marriage was out of the question, at least a career as a domestic in a grand house would provide security. Or, failing that, if a woman could attract a man from a decent line of work above ground, she would be set. Certainly, she and her family would be safe in a house in a comfortable setting that would not be falling into the bowels of an abandoned shaft. 

In 1895, Annie impressed a groom who worked for a local mine company owner. Wilfred Fraser and Annie married and took up residence in a newer two-up two-down house in Leconfield, closer to the furnace. Why baby Agnes remained with her grandparents remains a mystery. Perhaps Mr. Fraser made it known after the wedding that he would not abide a baby into their newlywed home. Now, six years and two baby boys later, on this imagined day in May 1901, Agnes’s mother was pregnant again and present for the midday meal. By 1901, Wilfred disappears from the census record. Maybe he died suddenly or he abandoned the family by moving to another community or even North America. That happened all the time. Regardless, I can imagine Annie’s pregnancy without her husband as creating a negative narrative in the posh houses of her clients and undoubtedly on the High Street.

At the imaginary dinner table, six of them are seated in their usual places: Joseph and Jane at the ends and Agnes and Annie on one side opposite Annie’s younger sisters, Sarah and Margaret. The conversation turned quickly into the real reason for Annie’s infrequent appearance at dinnertime.

“We’re moving to Wallsend,” Annie says quietly as she gently puts her knife and fork together on her unfinished plate of food.

The “we” Annie was referencing included herself, Agnes and the two boys. Jane looks towards her husband at the end of the table. He has not flinched but keeps layering tongue, potato, and carrots on top of his overturned fork before carefully manoeuvring the implement towards his waiting open mouth. The quiet is deafening. Sarah and Margaret, their heads bowed, exchange furtive glances. Jane gives a sympathetic look to Agnes, who is busy hiding chunks of grey under her mashed potatoes, and seems oblivious to the gravity of the situation. After a few minutes of awkward silence, Joseph looks up from his unfinished beef tongue and says solemnly, “You’ll not be going,” and then, after a short pause, “without us.” 

I know this family dinner and this conversation didn’t happen. But it could have. Joseph is about to explain himself but then, without warning, my reverie was disturbed by some indiscernible shouting. Not from the dinner table in my imagination but a man yelling obscenities at the flag person on High Street. 

Without Joseph’s explanation, I returned to the census records showing the migration of this family from the town they had occupied for at least fifty years. They were clearly in a hurry. But why? My impression is that Annie was steering the agenda; she was reinventing herself. Perhaps she was leaving a scandal circulating around her clients regarding her pregnancy and mislaid husband. This looks plausible given the lack of evidence about Mr. Fraser. If he had died suddenly, Annie would not likely have left her home town so quickly with a baby on the way. Interestingly, despite being born and raised in Cleator Moor, Joseph was part of the exodus to Wallsend; maybe he’d had enough. Then again, the hematite industry was starting to flag and more miners’ families were moving into Preston Quarter. 

What I can be sure of is that there were nine people, including nine-year-old Albert, on the 1911 census for the house on Station Road in Wallsend. The census confirms that the family moved while Annie was pregnant with Albert, who was born only months later in Wallsend. From the census record, it appears that the decision to move was a good one. With exception of the two youngest boys and grandmother Jane, everyone was employed. Agnes was now 16 and listed as a domestic servant. Annie’s strategy for a better life was well underway and the family was seemingly thriving. They were probably happy in that house—until they weren’t. Until, like the superstition foreshadowed, death came in threes.

* * *

YOU ARE PROBABLY WONDERING how I know so much about Annie and Agnes that I could imagine the words they spoke and how they dressed and occupied their days. Rightly so. You see, my own mother inherited Annie’s ambition for her children. In today’s terminology, this passing down of thoughts, behaviours, and beliefs has a clever name: transgenerational transmission. 

My mother carried this unwavering compulsion to distance her family from the mines or, in the absence of a nearby mine, work in a biscuit factory. It was her life’s mission. Our post-war family was raised with little money but I never felt poor. My father worked two jobs to feed us all and maintain Lynbury, a large, three-hundred-year-old house outside London. He planted a large vegetable garden and the stables were converted to a chicken house. We went tent camping in Wales nearly every summer. Between the tedium of cleaning and cooking, Mum coached us to look, speak and behave better than our class. In Britain, accents gave away your class and she worked tirelessly to make us sound like we belonged beyond the irresistible grasp of Cockney London and more within the hallowed precincts of Oxbridge.

In a weird way, I really do know Agnes. When I looked and listened to my mother, I was looking at and listening to Agnes and Annie. These women are the “bloodstone” of my ancestors: life-affirming red blood encased in impenetrable iron. They courageously took risks, deploying what modest talent they had to seize a better life which ensured a better life for all of us who followed. I now study those photographs on my dressing table and imagine the colours, textures, and vitality of these women. I feel a profound sense of gratitude that life is not black and white.

So, what happened that day on the banks of the Tyne? I am now convinced that Annie’s death was truly catastrophic for Agnes. It jarred her to the core and she momentarily lost her way. She briefly lost sight of the optimism and hope her mother embodied. I think she elected life over death simply because her child interrupted her by saying something naturally innocent and irrelevant. But it was enough. Enough time to remind her that she had inherited “hope” from Annie and was obligated to pass it on to her own daughter. 

My grandmother, Agnes, didn’t have a sweet for me in her apron pocket after all—but she did have a small chunk of hematite.



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Author Deborah Lane

Deborah Lane, currently a graduate student at Simon Fraser University, lives in Nanaimo BC. “The Blood in the Stone” is the first instalment of several essays about the mining culture of nineteenth-century Cumberland in the UK and its ties to the mining communities of Vancouver Island. She thanks Andrew Smith of Nanaimo Bank in Cleator Moor for his unwavering support and contribution of period photographs.

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (nonfiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie


Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an online book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

“Only connect.” – E.M. Forster

10 comments on “The Blood in the Stone

  1. I thoroughly enjoyed your story Deborah! The weaving of history, personal connection and insightful imagination made for a very thoughtful family account! My dad was from a poor brick layers family in Penrith who similarly strove to make a better life!

  2. A sensitive and enlightened expose’ of a strong, determined, and resourseful matriarchal branch of your family through tough times. Good read. Thanks.

  3. Well done, Deborah! Thanks for unpacking those boxes. Such an interesting wealth of knowledge you have discovered. Mum and Auntie Margaret would have been very proud!

  4. Amazing. The personal connection and detail provided shows how much research and thought went into this piece. The imaginative story line with Agnes in 1901 and the present is woven so gracefully throughout, it really made me feel like I was there. Excellent story!

  5. Brilliant! Thanks cousin Deborah for this wonderful collection of facts, photos and your creative power to imagine the lives of our English relatives.
    Love Jen

  6. Great story that really transports you to the time of the hardship of mining and family life. Can’t wait to read more!

  7. What a beautiful story interwoven into fascinating history! I’m looking forward to the next pieces in the series!

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