Facts known to the Author
A soldier came home ill from France, hurried from Waterloo to his home, and found the door locked. He knocked, and his little boy’s voice came—“Is that you, mother, and are you drunk?” Hearing his father’s voice the excited lad opened the door. “Where’s mother?” asked his father. “Mother?” said the boy; “she’s drinking. She comes home drunk night after night now and knocks the kids about. She daren’t hit me; I’m fair strong, dad; but the other.... And as for baby, she never does nothing for her. I and Freddy takes turns, but I dunno what to give her to eat sometimes.”
Midnight passed before the mother appeared, helplessly drunk. “Did you expect me to sit at home weeping for you?” she said. The next morning, broken with tears, she promised to mend her ways. The soldier went into hospital, and there he had a letter from his boy. This is part of it:
“Dear Dad, I write to let you know mother is going on awful. She has took all Fred and Timmy’s clothes to the pawnshop, and she hit Selina on Saturday with the toasterfork and cut her face. She cried all night, it hurt her so. She is drunk every night and some nights dussent come back at all. She daren’t hit me, but I am getting afraid about baby. We are all very hungry and miserable.”
The soldier got leave, found his wife had disappeared, and, finding charity for his four little ones, he left his ruined home and went back to the hospital.
Facts in possession of the Author
A working-man at Gravesend went to the Front, leaving behind a wife and three children, the baby lately born. His wife started drinking away her allowance, neglected her home, and, full of remorse and shame for the disgrace she had brought on the man who was in the trenches, she hanged herself. The man came home to find waiting for him three motherless children, and one of the most pathetic letters a man has ever had to read.
Records of Gravesend Coroner, 1916
Mothers and Children
It is easy to understand the pitiful appeal of 500 women out of Holloway Prison who begged the Duchess of Bedford to help to close all public-houses during the war. They know in their hearts of tragedies such as these, in which mothers and children die while the fathers fight and the Drink Trade goes on merrily.