The re-imagined story …

Mother went to Mrs Dicks funeral. It was a very quiet affair, she said. Not many at the church and even fewer at the graveside.

“I don’t know why she wasn’t buried at St Mary’s, along with all her family,” said mother. “There’s a long avenue of Tuckey graves in the churchyard there. Great big gravestones enclosed by iron railings. Of course, there was money in the family then.”

A familiar guilty twinge stabbed me.

I used to visit Mrs Dicks most weeks. Mother would send me round with a meat pie or a suet pudding.

“She doesn’t eat very well.”

Mrs Dicks lived opposite us in Hawkins Street. Her husband had died several years before.

“He was a fitter in the Works. Nice man, people said, although a bit of a come down for her. Her first husband had been a wealthy farmer from Chippenham.”

Mrs Dicks’ terrace house was crammed full of great big pieces of dark furniture.

“No doubt from her father’s house in Shaw.”

Sometimes she would open the drawer in the big, old dresser and hand me a tortoiseshell casket and together we would look at her ‘treasures’ as she called them.

Then one day Nellie Fitch came with me.

I usually went to Mrs Dicks on my own but this day Nellie was sitting on our front wall.

“She can smell the pie.”

Nellie Fitch wore shoes with holes in them and her winter coat was too small for her. Nothing unusual about that. During the war most of the kids in Rodbourne wore hand me downs. But then she told me she often didn’t eat.

We didn’t have much, but I always knew I would have a cooked dinner. Nothing fancy mind, but mother was a good, plain cook and she knew how to make a little go a long way.

Nellie’s dad was away fighting the Hun, she told me.

“Nellie’s father disappeared years ago,” said mother. “And so has the layabout she thinks is her father.”

Mrs Dicks opened her front door to a small hallway, just like the one in our house and all the other houses in Hawkins Street.

She was pleased to see me, but less so to see Nellie. I don’t think it was her dirty clothes and shabby shoes that bothered Mrs Dicks. I imagine it was more the fact that now Nellie would know she accepted food from neighbours. Mrs Dicks tried to keep up appearances. She had come down in the world and keenly felt her loss of status. But to me she was just another little old lady who wore old fashioned dresses and spoke in a posh voice.

“Good morning girls. How lovely Violet. Please thank your mother,” she said as she took the warm basin into the kitchen. “Tell her I will settle up with her at the end of the week.”

She always said the same thing. No money ever changed hands, my mother wouldn’t have expected any and Mrs Dicks had none to give.

“Come into the kitchen girls. I was just making a cup of tea.”

If Nellie was hoping for a piece of cake or a biscuit she would be out of luck.

Nellie probably wondered why I spent time with the posh old lady in her dark and dreary house where there was nothing nice to eat.

Mrs Dicks would tell me about the house in Shaw where she had grown up with her eight sisters and her brother. How they played in the orchard at the back of the house and on Sundays they would walk all the way to the church in Lydiard Millicent. She would bring out her photograph album and tell me about the people; bewhiskered old men and wasp waisted ladies.

And sometimes she would bring out the tortoiseshell box and show me the beaded bag she took to dances when she was a young woman, and the diamond tiara that became a pair of dangly earrings at the click of a pin at the back. There was an amethyst ring that had belonged to her grandmother and brooches and pins.

Please don’t bring out the tortoiseshell box today, I silently pleaded. But the atmosphere was awkward with Nellie there. We were probably the only two quiet children in Rodbourne that morning.

I watched Nellie’s eyes grow as wide as saucers as she peeped inside Mrs Dicks’ tortoiseshell box, and she looked at me and smiled. Not a big, open smile, but something sly.

I never wanted to visit Mrs Dicks after that.

“I don’t have time to go calling in on Mrs Dicks,” my mother complained when she had to deliver the meat pie.

Nellie got a new winter coat that year, and a new step father.

“They’re not married,” said my mother. “She’s never marries any of them.” And then they moved away from Rodbourne.

The facts …

Jane Helena Tuckey was born on March 15th 1848 at Langley Burrell, the fourth daughter of Robert and Ann Tuckey.

The 1841 census returns for Yatesbury record wealthy bachelor farmer Robert Tuckey living with Ann Trotman, an unmarried servant and her four year old daughter.

Perhaps Tuckey family opposition to this mismatched alliance delayed a wedding. By the time the couple did get around to walking up the aisle at St. Saviours in Bath they had two daughters and Ann was pregnant again.

But by 1851 Robert had come into his inheritance and the growing family moved into Shaw House along what is now called Old Shaw Lane in West Swindon.

In 1872, shortly after the death of her father, Jane married farmer John Clarke, thirty years her senior, and moved to nearby Kington St. Michael where John farmed 381 acres. With 20 farm and house servants on the payroll, this was a big establishment.

Then in 1882 John Clarke was found dead in one of his fields having suffered a fatal heart attack and Jane’s life was to change dramatically.

In 1884 Jane married Francis Dicks. Her second husband, seven years her junior, was a fitter employed in the GWR works. The couple with Jane’s girls moved into 37 Hawkins Street, Rodbourne where a further two children were born.

In the small terraced house Jane’s lifestyle was far removed from the comfortable childhood she had enjoyed, playing in the orchard at Shaw House.

Widowed for the second time in 1903 she survived on an income derived from taking in a lodger.

Mrs Dicks died on November 26, 1918. She was buried in plot B1494, a pauper’s grave in Radnor Street Cemetery.

Shaw House, Old Shaw Lane, Swindon