Mother would have liked to have met her own mother face to face. Though reared by her mother and with perfect eyesight she never saw her face. Eva Maria was literally face less.
My mother, Alice Mary, was the acknowledged beauty in the area where I spent my rural childhood. With fine features, black curly hair, blue eyes and a perfect figure everyone admired her though she was not glamorous or flirtatious. She was also a first class cook, a thrifty house wife wasting nothing, and an excellent gardener. At sewing, using her prized possession, a Singer sewing machine she could make anything for herself and me too, including my school uniform and all the household sewing. Sixpenny remnants of pretty fabric made me lovely frocks.
She was undemonstrative and seldom gave way to deep emotions. I remember only once her showing pleasure with me; when I won a scholarship to the grammar school. It assured her I could become a nurse which had been her ambition. Nursing meant you earned while you learned, an important consideration when you are poor.
My great grandfather, John Nelson Fraine, left his native Barnstaple where his father was a gunmaker to seek his fortune in the new boom railway town of Swindon where he prospered as a watchmaker. He married and had seven children, the eldest being my grandmother. born on 1878.
Then things went badly wrong. My great grandmother died over the birth of her seventh child leaving Eva to help in the care of her siblings. John Nelson took to drink and their prosperity took a tragic nose dive.
Eva developed in those days a serious skin condition, tuberculosis of the skin for which there was no cure, the condition gradually burning itself out. The condition was not rare in rural areas but the severity of it in Eva’s case was. She spent several years in a London hospital in a futile attempt to arrest the disease but there were no antibiotics or plastic surgery in those days. The disease gradually ate away her face destroying her entire nose, one eye, greatly disfiguring the other and the whole area a puckered mass of keloid scar tissue. Her face had gone. She wore an eye patch over the missing eye and covered the remaining area with a big, thick scarf whenever she left the house. In all my years, working in West Africa with lepers begging around the markets, I never saw anyone quite as badly disfigured as my grandmother.
The family moved north but prosperity had been destroyed by drink. Poverty and disfiguration made a decent marriage impossible. She never married but did find a partner to take her on but he left her leaving her alone to bring up the two girls but all jobs except agricultural labouring were barred to her.
Somehow Eva managed; physically strong and a good manager of her small resources helped her survive. She even managed to save a little for a rainy day. I have a tiny frayed, green leather purse, containing one sovereign and eight half sovereigns which she left dated from 1900 to 1915.
In order to save a few pennies she walked to the nearest town a round trip of twelve miles where prices were cheaper than in the village store. One day on her return she discovered that the butcher’s boy had given her too much change. The next day she walked back to return the money.
My aunt always said the family was a ‘doomed’ family. One of Eva’s brothers had his nose bitten off by a dog - there cannot be many families to have the misfortune of having two ‘noseless’ children.
Eva’s father had an altercation with a train guard on the station platform for tying to board a non-smoking carriage, the guard knocking the pipe from his mouth. In the ensuing scuffle, John Nelson Fraine fell on the track where a passing train severed his lower leg. He recovered but always maintained his pipe was unlit, he was just sucking on it.
She lived until she was 93, leaving five great-grandchildren all of whom went to university and have good careers; they have, for the time being at least, escaped the rut of poverty to which the family had sunk for a whole generation.