‘Oh my goodness – another girl Mrs Swain!’
Clara’s usual iron composure broke and she screamed,
‘No! That’s not the bloody deal!’
And that is how my Nanna, Bertha Swain, entered the world.’
This is the true story of five sisters growing up at the beginning of the twentieth story and their various triumphs and struggles through two world wars. With their red hair, the Swain sisters always turned heads - they had a passion for outrageous clothes, dancing the Charleston and falling in love. Born into a precarious family in London’s East End, the sisters worked very hard to escape poverty and have some fun, with mixed results. It’s a story that’s particularly meaningful to Helen as it’s the story of her Nanna and her great aunts.
When Helen was asked if she could go on a ‘Who Do You Think Are?’ type journey to find out about some female ancestors, preferably urban, British and working class, she thought of her Nanna and sisters. As far as Helen knew they had had very ordinary lives and they had been rather evasive about their pasts. Keeping up appearances was very much a thing, there were all sorts of inexplicable gaps and now they had all passed away – they were something of a mystery. But the sisters had all married and had children, so Helen travelled the country reuniting and sometimes meeting for the first time, this extended family of aunts, uncles, cousins and second cousins. Meanwhile the internet gave access to military, criminal and workhouse records, so that secrets that had been kept for generations were no longer hidden.
The tale that unfolded was darker than expected, both more tragic and therefore more heroic than Helen could have guessed. There was a death in a workhouse, a military tribunal, a secret elopement followed by a tragic early death, the loss of children and a suicide. But there was also survival, and a deep bond of love between the sisters - they liked to laugh and dance and most of all, always to look their best. The hard lives the sisters led was humbling – naughty Alice, funny Grace, glamorous Dora, hardworking Katie and her twin sister, the elegant and clever Bertha. But in the end the heroine was their mother, Clara Crisp, who sacrificed so much in her determination to make a better life for her daughters.
The Scarlet Sisters were not extraordinary in that many of our ancestors led much more interesting lives than we realise, and discovering these lives, having a greater understanding of our own context, can be deeply empowering. The Scarlet Sisters tells a universal story about what it was like growing up, falling in love, and having children as working-class women in the first half of the twentieth century.