That We Shall Die by Peter Hey

Author:Peter Hey [Hey, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: UNKNOWN
Published: 2021-02-18T22:00:00+00:00

The Oakleys and the Ostels

Elizabeth Ruth Oakley, also known as Birdie, married Alan’s estate agent grandfather, John Shaw, towards the end of 1930. The ceremony was in Southsea but the newlyweds set up home in Solihull. Elizabeth gave birth to Alan’s mother, Pat, some five years later. By the standards of the time – when middle-class women were expected to raise families and never go out to work – that seemed to Jane something of a delay. Perhaps Elizabeth had had problems. She certainly had no more children until she adopted Alan’s aunt, Barbara, in 1946, though her husband’s wartime service in the RAF had intervened. Barbara had described Elizabeth as cold, incapable of affection. But Jane knew all about emotional skeletons and wondered if that was as much a reflection of the daughter as the mother, stemming from the insecurity of not being a biological child.

If so, Elizabeth might have shared similar scars. She had herself been adopted, albeit by close relatives, after her mother died at the age of 29, leaving an architect husband with six children. Five-year-old Elizabeth went to live with her father’s brother, an affluent wine merchant who occupied a fine villa on one of the grander streets in Southsea. He and his wife had been married nearly 20 years, and the 1911 census confirmed they had never had any children of their own. There were three photographs of Elizabeth in the album, the earliest taken when she was a girl of around ten and holding an expensive-looking doll. The images all had one thing in common: a straight-lipped mouth that seemed to be struggling with a smile.

So who were the Oakleys? Elizabeth’s father and uncle were from a family of 12 siblings, all of whom survived to adulthood, a rare distinction given the death rate among children in that period. In 1851, their mother had been a 14-year-old general servant living in the household of a London goldbeater. That was to be the profession of the man she married, though his background was a little more complicated. John William Oakley was a printer’s son from the Yorkshire city of Leeds. For some reason, he did not enter into his father’s trade but was sent south to prepare for a maritime career. In 1851, he was a ‘marine boy’ living on the Venus, an old, wooden-hulled Royal Navy frigate moored at Woolwich Dockyard. A life under sail must not have suited, and somehow or other he managed to switch to an apprenticeship working precious metal. The 1861 census listed him and his new bride in a shared house on a densely populated street just off the Euston Road in London. They already had two sons, whose ages confirmed they were born before their parents’ recent wedding. Two more boys followed prior to the Oakleys relocating to Portsmouth around 1865.

Jane’s research told her the production of gold leaf was a craft that could be traced back to the Ancient Egyptians. In Victorian England, every town would

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