Kate (5 page)

Alice’s daughter Pat Charman, now 75, was very fond of them both. ‘Aunty Em was a bit eccentric,’ she remembers. ‘She was the sort of person you would bump into in the high street during the daytime wearing a taffeta dress and a fur coat. But I loved her to bits. She was very kind and always smiling. She always made you welcome. When she saw you, her face would light up.’

A year later, Ronald’s sister Ede, a shop assistant, followed her siblings down the aisle, marrying labourer Henry ‘Titch’ Jones, also at the Parish Church of St John, although it was a much smaller occasion than Charlie and Emma’s wedding. Both Alice and Ede immediately had children – Alice’s daughter Pat was born in 1933 and Ede’s son Harry in 1935 – and Ronald spent a lot of time with his niece and nephew.

‘As the eldest daughter, I helped look after the others,’ recalls Alice. ‘I was already married when Ron was born, was there at the birth and had quite a lot to do with him. I always had him with me. I used to have my daughter Pat at one end of the pram and Ron at the other. I used to take the two out and people would say, “oh, you’ve got two children,” but of course Ron was my brother and Pat was my daughter. Nobody could have disliked my Ron. He was a lovely little blond boy. We were all blond; we were like fairies, all of us. He was a lovely child and a lovely man. I loved every hair on him.’

The family’s life was sadly changed on 5 January 1938, when Charlie Goldsmith senior died of asthma and acute bronchitis, most likely a legacy of the war, leaving his wife Edith to bring up their two youngest children alone. Kate’s grandfather Ronald was just six years old.

Edith was less than 5 ft tall but a tough, bird-like woman who smoked 20 Woodbines a day and used to send her daughters to the local pub in the evening for a jug of stout and 10 cigarettes. She never really managed to escape her impoverished roots, but she ruled her family with a rod of iron and instilled in her children a resourcefulness and a refusal to be defeated.

After her husband’s death, she was forced by penury to move with her daughter Joyce, then 13, and Ronald to a condemned flat in Dudley Road, a scruffier street in the neighbourhood, parallel to Clarence Street. As she had to go out to work – she was on the production line at Keeley & Toms, making mincemeat, during the war and then worked at the Tickler’s factory, producing jams, jellies and pickles – she farmed her children out to her parents, who lived in nearby Spencer Street, and her elder daughters.

‘My mum had to work hard to bring us all up,’ says Alice. ‘She did not like leaving her children; she had no choice. She wasn’t a bad lady, but she had a temper. You only had to say one word and she would take her shoes off and throw them at you. She would take the odd swipe at her kids herself, but woe betide anyone else who said or did anything to hurt them. She would defend them to the death. She liked a drink and smoked, and who could blame her with what she had to put up with. In those days, everybody was hard up.’

Alice’s daughter Pat still remembers visiting the Dudley Road flat. ‘In the corner of the kitchenette, there was one of those old-fashioned boilers, like a three-corner bath, which had a fire underneath to warm the water,’ she recalls. ‘Granny Edith used to put coal in it. All the washing went in the boiler and she used to do the Christmas puddings there as well. She was the star for making Christmas puddings in the whole family. They were beautiful. The lavatory was next door to the boiler, in the same room. She loved her drink. She used to send my mother with a jug to the Havelock Arms to get some ale. The jug was orange with a pearly sheen and a picture of tulips on the side. I can remember seeing that throughout my childhood.’

On 26 February 1938, less than two months after her husband’s death, Edith’s third daughter and fourth child, Hetty, got married to bricklayer George Clark at Uxbridge Register office. She was seven months pregnant with the first of their eleven children, all of whom were brought up on benefits in a council house. ‘She had a lovely nature, Hetty,’ says Alice. ‘She would give you anything. I don’t know how she managed to look after all those children.’

A year after Hetty left home, life was to change again for the Goldsmith family. The Second World War loomed and the menfolk were off to fight. Ronald was eight years old when England declared war on Germany at 11.15 a.m. on 3 September 1939. Although his father was already dead, his brothers-inlaw Bill Tomlinson and Henry Jones, who were the main male influences in his life, were stationed away from home. While Bill worked on operation Pluto, in which a team of scientists, oil engineers and army officers constructed a giant oil pipeline under the English Channel, Henry was stationed in Rochester, Kent, looking after prisoners of war.

Their wives, Alice and Ede, worked at Hoover’s munitions factory, making caps for shells, and looked after their brother Ronald and their own children, Pat, who was five when war broke out, and Harry, who was three. ‘During the war, if women only had one child, they had to go out to work,’ recalls Pat. ‘They had to do so many hours a week. So both my mum and Aunt Ede worked at the factory and took it in turns to look after us. Mum would die for you. She’d give up her last slice of bread. I remember her during the war telling my dad that she had already eaten so that he would let her give him her meat ration. But she was very strict. My dad was about 6 ft tall and Mum is about 5 ft 4 in., yet she ruled him with a rod of iron.

‘Ron was living in that terrible, decrepit flat, but he was the loveliest person. He had a very hard time of it – he was never even taken to the dentist – but he was very popular because he had a lovely nature and sense of humour. Everybody loved him. He was a real softie.’

During the war, many children in towns and cities were evacuated to the countryside for their own safety. Pat was one of the nearly three million people, the majority of them children, who were moved away from home under operation Pied Piper, which began two days before the declaration of war. She left London at the beginning of 1940 but was so homesick that her mother took her back to Southall with her just before the Blitz. ‘I was staying in a miner’s cottage in Wales,’ she says, ‘and I would see all the miners come down the valley singing. I can remember seeing all these black faces because there were no baths in the mines then. I remember my dad saying, “yes, that used to be me.” My mum came to visit me after I had been there about nine months. I cried so much when she was leaving that she took me back home with her. Neither Ronnie nor Harry was evacuated.’

In fact, Ede’s son Harry stayed with Edith and Ronald during the war. ‘My mother did night work when dad was in the army,’ he remembers, ‘so I stayed the night with my nan, was taken home in the morning to go to school and went back to Dudley Road every night to sleep, except weekends. Ronald and I would often have to get up in the middle of the night and go to the air-raid shelter.’

‘We all grew up together through the rest of the war, bombs and all,’ says Pat. ‘one night when Mum was working at the Hoover factory, Dad and I were in the shelter in the garden when our front door was blown in by a bomb that dropped nearby.’ Southall was struck by German bombs several times. In August 1944, for example, a V-1 flying doodlebug destroyed several houses in Regina Road, a few streets away from Dudley Road, littering the area with rubble and broken glass and killing the occupants.

Edith’s youngest daughter, Joyce, had left school and begun working at the factory with her mother, juggling this with looking after her younger brother and helping out with the other children. ‘Ronald and my mum were very close,’ says Joyce’s daughter Ann. ‘She used to look after him quite a bit. They were quite often hungry as kids, so they used to go to Mitchell’s, the grocer’s shop opposite, and they would give them food and help them out. It was sometimes hard for Edith to make ends meet. She would pawn things on the Tuesday and take them back out another day. I remember my mum telling me she bought Ronald his first pair of long trousers. He must have been about ten. He was really excited.’

The family spent all the holiday festivals together. ‘We were a very close family,’ says Pat. ‘At Christmas, when the men were in the army, we had nothing. We used to get together at Aunt Ede’s house or my mum’s house and they would pool whatever food they had. We used to play charades. Ede was great at playing the piano. I can see her now in my mind’s eye playing “Roll out the Barrel”.’

In 1943 – at the height of the war – Joyce left home, leaving Ronald alone in the condemned flat with his mother. When she turned 18, she married George Plummer, a year her senior, who was a ‘Desert Rat’ in the 7th Armoured Division, fighting in most of the major battles in North Africa, including El Alamein in 1942. After the war, he became a herdsman at osterley Park, a stately home in nearby Hounslow, living in a cottage on the estate and doing the milk round. ‘They met on a blind date during the war,’ recounts Ann. ‘It was love at first sight. He had four days’ leave and then went back to Africa. She went back to work at the factory. She also did fire-watching and worked on the telephones at night.’

Ronald was 14 years old when the war ended and his brothers-inlaw returned home. The family was fortunate to avoid the dreaded telegram announcing that a loved one had died. Like his brother and sisters before him, Ronald left school at 14, and he began dabbling in a series of jobs to make ends meet.

On 1 January 1949, the National Service Act came onto the statute books, obliging all men between the ages of 17 and 21 to enlist in the armed forces for 18 months, remaining on the reserve list for the following four years. Ronald was 17 years old and was sent to Aqaba in Jordan. It was during his time in the army that he worked as a baker, a skill that his grandson James, Kate’s brother, would inherit.

When he came out of the army, he had just turned 18, and he went to work for his brother-in-law Bill Tomlinson as a haulage driver. ‘I have an image of sitting opposite him when I came home from school for lunch,’ says Pat. ‘I can still see him there, looking up at me and laughing. He was the nicest man you could ever meet. Nobody ever had a bad word to say about him.’

‘He was a smashing guy, a top boy,’ adds Harry. ‘We worked together in the ’50s for Alice’s husband Bill, who had set up his own haulage business. He was a good lad. I remember he would always take his hat off whenever a hearse went past. He was a real gentleman, a diamond guy.’

It was those good manners that attracted the attention of Kate’s grandmother Dorothy Harrison, leading to a love match that would change the fortunes of the two families for good.

Chapter 5
Dorothy Harrison and Ronald Goldsmith

W
earing a white satin Norman Hartnell dress embroidered with gold and silver thread and encrusted with pearls and crystals, Princess Elizabeth stepped into the horse-drawn gold state coach in the courtyard of Buckingham Palace. Escorted by the Duke of Edinburgh, who was wearing full naval uniform, and carrying a bouquet of orchids, lilies of the valley, stephanotis and carnations grown in England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales, Prince William’s grandmother was on her way to Westminster Abbey for her coronation.

Prince Charles, who was four at the time, watched the glittering ceremony, which took place at 11.15 a.m. on 2 June 1953, alongside 8,251 guests from around the Commonwealth. Princess Anne was considered too young to attend the service.

It was the very public start of a new age for the royals, but elsewhere, much more quietly, the Harrisons and the Goldsmiths were also about to enter a new era, one that would show how the circumstances of a family can reverse within a couple of generations.

It was the year when Joseph Stalin died after 31 years in control of the Soviet Union, Hussein was proclaimed King of Jordan and the Korean war came to an end. Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay conquered Everest, the first issue of
Playboy
appeared on news-stands and Ian Fleming published the first James Bond novel,
Casino Royale
. It was also the year when Dorothy Harrison and Ronald Goldsmith got married.

Kate Middleton’s grandparents had met at the wedding of a close friend and were instantly attracted. At the time, Dorothy was working as a sales assistant in Dorothy Perkins and Ronald was employed in his brother-in-law Bill’s haulage company. On 8 August 1953, within two months of watching the royal coronation on their black-and-white television, they walked up the aisle at Holy Trinity Church, Southall. The wedding was simple and traditional. Dorothy, 18, walked down the aisle in a demure ivory dress, accompanied by her two matrons of honour and two bridesmaids, Ronald’s nieces Ann, daughter of his sister Joyce, and Linda, the youngest child of Bill and Alice Tomlinson. Afterwards, the couple were photographed on the steps of the church.

The family celebrated at the Hamborough Tavern in Southall, a pub that later became notorious as a haunt of racist skinheads. In 1981, two years after teacher Blair Peach had been killed during clashes between police and anti-fascist protestors, the Hamborough Tavern was burned down by Asian youths during a skinhead gig.

Happy as the two families were, it was hardly a fairy-tale wedding. Neither Dorothy nor Ronald had a penny to their name. Indeed, the bride was so poor that she had to borrow her going-away outfit from Ronald’s sister Joyce, and instead of moving into their own home, they had to squeeze into the Dudley Road flat with Ronald’s mother Edith.

Nonetheless, the couple soon would prove a formidable match. Although both came from working-class families with little money or education, Dorothy had drive and ambition, while Ronald was artistic. He was a talented painter, carpenter and baker. Together, they climbed the social ladder while other members of their families remained in relative poverty. In a sense, Kate’s family history mirrors those of millions of British people who have aunts, uncles and cousins whom they have never met. When one branch of a family thrives, it is not uncommon for them to lose contact with others.