A life that had more than its share of sorrows and traumas

A copy of A Matter of Chance, has kindly been sent me by Nancy Hancock's daughter Mrs Vivien Hall of Haverfordwest, Dyfed, who, with her husband David, edited the hand-written memoirs for publication.

Nancy Hancock (maiden name Jones) spent all her 79 years in Worcester and, having read her memoirs, I share the view of Nicole Burnett of the city's Museum of Local Life, that she was "a remarkable Worcester woman whose life experiences - the good, the bad and the ugly - have thankfully been recorded for the benefit of future generations".

Among the sorrows and traumas in life for Nancy were the death of her father fighting in the First World War when she was just five, the severe illness of her mother during the Armistice Day celebrations, being rescued from drowning in the Severn, inexpicably finding herself locked up in Powick Mental Hospital for about two years suffering from a broken heart after an unrequited love affair, having a miscarriage and then a still-born baby in the early years of marriage, and finally nursing her husband for years after he had suffered brain damage in a road accident.

Among the compensating joys were happy school days, the pleasures of youth going to "picture houses," funfairs, dances and on countryside outings, and the birth of her three daughters.

Annie Jones was born on August 6, 1910, the youngest of six children of George Charles Jones and his wife Annie Sophia, who were then living in Copenhagen Street, Worcester.

However, they moved shortly afterwards to a house at Lich Street in the shadow of the Cathedral, sharing an outside water tap and communal wash-house and lavatory.

Annie was christened at St Andrew's Church but soon became better known to family and friends as Nancy. Her earliest memories were of going to Hounds Lane Infants School as a three year-old.

"When the doors opened, we would all cram inside, dropping our lunches in a basket. Often lunches were wrapped in newspaper. We used newspaper for most things - we were poor people. Inside the newspaper would be bread and butter or dripping and a piece of toffee - stick-jaw we called it.

"The headmistress was Miss Teague - to me, she was like Queen Mary. I loved school life. I took an interest in all around me. The school seemed to be enormous - I felt I was amongst thousands of children, and I loved to sing hymns."

However, Nancy recalls that getting the cane was a fairly regular occurrence for Hounds Lane pupils, especially for being late.

"Most of us didn't have a clock at home that kept time - we relied on the Cathedral chimes."

In 1914, Nancy's father was among the first local men to join the Worcestershire Regiment on the outbreak of the First World War.

"To me, my father was suddenly there in uniform. He looked very tall, smart and clean with sparkling brass buttons. He was slim, fair of complexion and had a moustache, the ends of which he pinched and twisted straight."

Alas, it was to be Nancy final image of her father because less than two years later, he was dead - killed on a battlefield in France.

"The letter arrived by Sunday morning post. Mother opened it, and we knew by her white face what it contained. At that moment, I felt fear, great uncertainty and sadness, emotions which have stayed with me all my life."

Nancy was just five years-old when this devastating personal tragedy struck the family.

Her mother obviously had to continue going out to work to support her children, "scrubbing floors from 8 am to 6 pm.

"The war resulted in a great loss of manpower. Children were left fatherless. Their mothers sometimes went to live with other men and had more children, but dare not re-marry because their war widows' pensions would be stopped.

"There was little chance of work for the men so they resorted to any method they could to exist. Men with no arms had music boxes to beg for money. Blind men had caps on the ground and asked for coppers. Sad were the times around us and in our home, but as a little girl of six, I just wanted to play."

Nancy and her sister Mary would regularly collect coal and lug it home but also found time to peer in the windows of the many shops in Worcester.

"Each day, I had to cross High Street to go to school. There were horses and carts but very few motor cars. Sometimes on a Monday, market day, butchers would drive a herd of cows across our path - their hooves clattering on the road."

Nancy also enjoyed going to "picture houses," attending Brownies, sitting in "the Gods" at the Theatre Royal for pantomimes, trying in vain to learn to swim in the Bathing Barges at Pitchcroft, and going out into the countryside for bluebells, hedge nuts, blackberries and cider apples.

"Only later in life do you realise how happy you were out-of-doors then.

"They say the youngest in the family never grows up, and I loved fairy tales. Some days my friend Nellie Carpenter and I would go walking up a slippery path by the Diglis Weir and listen to the sound of the rushing waters. I would lie on the sewer wall and watch the water gushing out and flowing into the river. Both Nellie and I would take off our black stockings and black boots and paddle along the sides of the river."

Later in her teens, Nancy regularly strolled from Lich Street across to the Cathedral riverside promenade.

"Looking from the high wall, I would see so many people walking near the Cathedral Watergate. I felt at home there, looking across the Severn to the outline of the Malvern Hills."

An event vividly recalled in Nancy's memoirs was the signing of the Armistice to end to the First World War.

"That day mother lay very ill on her bed at our Lich Street home. Somehow the proprietor of the nearby Punchbowl pub knew she was sick and sent over a bottle of brandy, so my sister Mary and I poured some out and wet her parched lips. She looked so sorrowfully at us.

"We could hear the military brass band, and I ran out under the arch of the historic Lich Gate towards the Cathedral where hundreds of people had gathered. Choirboys were singing O God, Our Help In Ages Past. Toy trumpets were being blown by adults. Church bells clanged, and people shouted in chorus, 'Hooray!'

"Everyone seemed happy, except us. Our father had been killed in that war, and now our mother was very ill. I went home and shut the door. Upstairs, mother seemed to be sleeping. She had missed all the jubilation. Eventually the noises of merriment sent me to sleep, but in sorrow. Ah, but the brandy was good for mother and she recovered."

Nancy then moved up into the "Big Girls" school at Hounds Lane and was confirmed by the Bishop of Worcester at St Peter's Church.

"Mother bought me a new white dress, a white veil and almost white kid shoes."

Nancy left school at 14, in 1924, and was lucky enough to find a job straight away in the printing shop of the nearby Royal Porcelain works.

"School days suddenly changed into factory life for me. I was grown up enough now to work with adults. The hours were from 8am to 5.30 pm and I earned 7/6d a week."

Two years later, however, Nancy, then 16, changed jobs and became a fur cutter at Fownes glove factory.

"The fur shop was up a flight of steep steps, and I would stand at a bench using a knife and inhaling the loose fur. There were no taps, sinks nor toilets near at hand. We had to go down the stairs and across an open dirt yard in all weathers to get to the toilet. Then, sometimes we had to wait as there were lots of women and girls employed in the factory much nearer the toilets than we fur cutters were. So the discomfort was always with us as young girls. We suffered but did not complain, no one dared - it was vitally important for us to keep our jobs."

Romance began to blossom for Nancy in her late teens, though one river outing at 17 with her sister Mary and two lads could have had a tragic end.

While changing seats in a rowing boat under the railway bridge, Nancy lost her balance and fell into the Severn, fully clothed and wearing a hat. The situation was desperate as Nancy could not swim.

"I remember seeing a decaying chain through the glassy waters, lying on the riverbed. Somehow I came to the surface, and those Worcester lads clutched me firmly and I was pulled into the boat. Shall I ever forget their valour?"

Nancy, dripping wet, was rushed home by sister Mary and whisked into a bedroom without her mother knowing. The rescue from drowning was never disclosed to her mother on the grounds that she had already suffered enough traumas in life.

Nancy's first real romance was with a local soldier serving overseas, but next came arguably the love of her life and one which was to have a devastating impact on her.

A young man, named only as Albert in her memoirs, captured her heart and courted her for many months, giving her presents and taking her on holiday to Swansea.

"We would go to Malvern on the train, night after night. We would have tea in the Priory Park listening to the string orchestra, or go to the Winter Gardens cinema. We would also go to the Birmingham theatres. There would be lots of chocolates and a glass of wine at a pub, and we would go on picnics too.

"I was a Sunday school teacher and took him into the Church Club Hall where he saw us organising parities. He also came with me to see the Prince of Wales (later Edward VIII) open the widened and reconstructed Worcester Bridge in 1932. I just couldn't live without him."

However, there was "never a word nor sign of engagement or marriage" from "Albert" and finally, in desperation, she very reluctantly gave this young man his marching orders. "I was turned 22 and felt 90 and wretched."

Alas, the broken love affair sent Nancy into a deep depression, and one day she collapsed in a faint at Fownes and was taken to hospital.

Just three years before her death at 79, Nancy added a final revealing chapter to her memoirs entitled The Skeleton in the Cupboard. She disclosed a weighty secret she had concealed for more than 50 years.

Nancy told how, for reasons unknown to her, she was sent to a large mental hospital (almost certainly Powick) where she ended up for a time in a padded cell and in a strait-jacket, even though she was not a danger to herself nor her carers.

"I was a shy, under-developed young woman, dreadfully poor, whose father had given his life for King and country. I had given up a young man who had then walked out of my life. I had cried and cried, but how had I been brought to this massive building and why?

"I was haunted by the experience of that padded cell. I was becoming an inmate, resigned to the needle, tablets, medicine, and sleep and unconsciousness. I submitted to all the treatment that was offered. Visitors came while I slept, or so I thought. I heard them but my interest had gone. I was lost. I forgot my age, forgot my home and forgot my chap. It was all worlds apart from my previous way of life.

"I was getting fat. I now had three regular, well-cooked meals a day and gradually became stronger - strong enough to work in the hospital which certainly needed plenty of workers. We scrubbed floors and washed soiled linen by hand, but there were occasional entertainments such as dancing to the hospital's brass band.

"The years were passing, and the work became a bore. I pondered on what had happened that caused me to be incarcerated in a mental hospital. I would not know - I was just me."

Nancy was eventually allowed home for trial periods and "saw once more the poverty of the common people of England".

She had at least been well-provided for in hospital. Her full release back into the outside world came after a stay at Powick of about two or three years. It was the end of a harrowing tale of the consequences of unrequited love.

Nancy thus began her life afresh at the age of 26, and it was not very long before there was a new man in her life - the quiet bespectacled Henry Charles Hancock, whose family had once also lived in Lich Street.

They courted for months and were married early in 1939, at Holy Trinity Church, Worcester, when they were both 28. However, there was to be no early wedded bliss such as a honeymoon away, and they went immediately to live with Henry's mother and two brothers in a Worcester council house. Just months later too, the Second World War began.

In her memoirs, Nancy paints a picture of a not very considerate husband in their early married years and, alas, personal tragedy was to strike again - twice. Within months, Nancy suffered a miscarriage and later became pregnant again, only to go full term to deliver a still-born son.

Happily, Nancy and Henry then moved out of his mother's house and set up on their own, first in Severn Street and then for several years in a little rented house to the rear of the shop at No. 21 Sidbury.

"Time is a great healer. I needed time and I had time - to become pregnant again," recalled Nancy, who went on to have three lovely daughters.

Olive was born in November 1941, Vivien in September 1944 and Henrietta in May 1950 - all at the house off Sidbury.

"Unfortunately, I had to share a water tap and go outside in all winds and weathers, storms and snow, to fill a kettle and to use the lavatory, but I was in the centre of town for the shops. In fact, the day Olive was born, deep snow covered everything. German prisoners of war swept it quickly away, leaving the streets near the Cathedral clean."

Not long after Henrietta's birth, however, the family were allocated a three-bedroomed council house at 16 Liverpool Road, Ronkswood, where they were also joined by Nancy's mother.

After attending local primary schools, daughters Olive and Vivien won places at the Worcester Grammar School for Girls while Henrietta went to the Nunnery Wood Secondary School.

Around this time Nancy also took up a part-time job at the Cadena Restaurant in High Street - "washing up and earning just under 10 shillings a week, enough to buy me a pair of stockings if I so wished".

Henry's jobs over the years were at Windshields, Ebenezer Baylis and Metal Box, and at some stage the family moved again - to a brick-built council house at Ronkswood.

However, in 1961, personal trauma struck once more when Henry suffered severe head injuries in a road accident and was rushed to the Royal Infirmary where he remained in a deep coma for months as doctors battled to save his life.

Few friends and relatives thought he would recover but he did eventually come out of the coma and was finally allowed home, though with brain damage.

Nancy had to nurse him over a long period as a disabled person but he responded gradually to physiotherapy and also to speech therapy in Birmingham. Henry's solicitors also sued on his behalf for injuries compensation, and he was awarded £16,000 in the High Court.

The money enabled Henry and Nancy to buy a small bungalow in Malvern Road for £4,000, and they spent the rest of their married life there, celebrating their Golden Wedding anniversary - 50 years of marriage - in 1989.

Alas, Nancy died the following year at the age of 79, but Henry survived her by nine years, living first in a Malvern Road nursing home and then in another near his daughter in Pembrokeshire.

Henry and Nancy's daughters Olive, a radiographer, and Henrietta, a teacher, both married and moved to Canada, where they both still live and work today. Daughter Vivien spent her career in teaching in various parts of England, but has now retired.

Annie Hancock ended her memoirs thus: "As for me and my life story, there is nothing good that I have missed. Tears are like rain, but there is a rainbow in life too.

"All our momentary worries, fears and impossibilities are swept away, surely by the grace of God. My years of extreme sorrow or joy have passed by."

n A Matter of Chance: The Memoirs of Annie Hancock, edited by Viv and Dave Hall (published privately in association with History into Print of Studley, £6.95).