BooksBarbecue
Back Sisters of Gold Save as PDF
Chapters (64)
  1. Cover
  2. Title page
  3. Dedication page
  4. A Week’s Work in Birmingham
  5. I
  6. One
  7. Two
  8. Three
  9. Four
  10. Five
  11. Six
  12. Seven
  13. Eight
  14. Nine
  15. Ten
  16. Eleven
  17. Twelve
  18. Thirteen
  19. Fourteen
  20. Fifteen
  21. Sixteen
  22. Seventeen
  23. Eighteen
  24. Nineteen
  25. Twenty
  26. Twenty-One
  27. Twenty-Two
  28. Twenty-Three
  29. Twenty-Four
  30. II
  31. Twenty-Five
  32. Twenty-Six
  33. Twenty-Seven
  34. Twenty-Eight
  35. Twenty-Nine
  36. Thirty
  37. Thirty-One
  38. Thirty-Two
  39. Thirty-Three
  40. Thirty-Four
  41. Thirty-Five
  42. Thirty-Six
  43. Thirty-Seven
  44. Thirty-Eight
  45. Thirty-Nine
  46. III
  47. Forty
  48. Forty-One
  49. Forty-Two
  50. Forty-Three
  51. Forty-Four
  52. Forty-Five
  53. Forty-Six
  54. Forty-Seven
  55. Forty-Eight
  56. Forty-Nine
  57. Fifty
  58. Fifty-One
  59. Fifty-Two
  60. Fifty-Three
  61. Acknowledgements
  62. Further Reading
  63. About the Author
  64. By the Same Author

‘There you are, lovey-dove – your baby sister, Annie,’ their mother said. ‘She’s had a bit of a time of it, but she’s here – and one day she’ll be able to get up and play with you.’

Margaret saw the tiny, mauve face of her sister, cradled under the billowing elm leaves behind the modest house attached to the Zion chapel, to which they had recently moved and of which her father was minister.

Leah, their mother, spent what seemed hours holding her tiny child. And Annie survived like fury.

‘She’s a little fighter,’ Mother said happily. ‘We shall all need to look out.’

Their brother John was born in the summer of 1891 and was a sunny, easygoing little boy.

Annie, despite her astonishing appetite, always remained a miniature, wiry version of the other, more substantial, members of the family. Of all of them, she was the one who seemed to have endless energy and was seldom ill. Their father called her ‘our miracle, our little sprite’. Margaret had always felt large and stolid in comparison. Her health was more fragile and she was more afraid of life.

Margaret did not remember their move to the village and the Zion chapel, a small backwater of Congregationalist service. Nor did she remember her father before that time, or what had changed. Only as she grew older did she begin to pick up the threads of history.

William Hanson and Lilian Watts had met when he was serving as an assistant at Carrs Lane church in the centre of Birmingham. Lilian, the youngest and only member of the Watts family to have her soul lit by religion, attended the church. She was employed by her jeweller father at that time, in Regent Place. Soon after they became close, William – Annie and Margaret’s tall, good-looking father – had been moved to a mission on the Tottenham Court Road in London, from where he had wooed their mother with heartfelt letters. The two of them married and continued to work in London, where Lilian changed her name to Leah; it seemed to have been a symbol of her commitment to her faith.

Soon after Margaret was born, when her father was in his early thirties, he had suffered a breakdown – some sort of crisis. The church elders had deemed it sensible to send him to somewhere quieter, a village deep in the countryside, where he could restore himself. And after that, they had never sent him anywhere else.