Edwina meets Alicia

Edwina meets Alicia in the grounds of the Imperial War Museum at a point when she is struggling to care for the twins alone. What begins with a crying pram and a stranger’s practical kindness becomes a lasting alliance: Alicia helps keep the children safe and loved, and gives Edwina support she believes she could not have survived without.

The meeting at the museum

Edwina is sitting on a bench with the pram some way off, worn down by its crying contents and by the demands of looking after two small children without income. She resents the burden, even thinking that she should no longer have to bother with the babies, but knows she cannot trust them to make the walk home unaided. She describes Charlie as lazy and prone to hysterics, and Rowena as a sulker. Her exhaustion is more than irritation: elsewhere in this recollection, she remembers days when she considered throwing herself and the babies from Waterloo Bridge.

Alicia enters the scene while stopping to tie her shoelace. She wears black slacks and cream wing-tipped glasses, with a precarious beehive that makes her watch the threatening weather. When Charlie throws a shoe from the pram, Alicia retrieves it. Discovering that there are twins inside, she immediately begins pulling faces and making animal noises. The babies respond with happy gurgles, and for a few precious moments Edwina can sit and breathe. The relief gives way to sobbing: as Edwina breaks down, the sky turns a toxic yellow and heavy rain begins.

From stranger to caregiver

Alicia does not leave Edwina to manage the journey home alone. She helps wheel the pram back to Kennington Road; while Edwina opens the front door, Alicia carries one baby under each arm up the stairs, puts them inside, and returns for the pram, which she maneuvers into the house herself. By the time they are indoors, both women are soaked and Alicia’s carefully arranged beehive has collapsed into a matted heap.

In the kitchen, Alicia strips and dries the babies, changes them, and finds dry clothes hanging from the pulley. She warms the children with hot toast and honey; placed in their playpen, they settle and play contentedly with their toys. Edwina recognizes that Alicia can manage the children in a way she cannot. She is eager to hand them over, and feels some jealousy at the steady, unconditional love Alicia gives them. Alicia worries about their physical wellbeing and is almost obsessive about keeping them regular, with prunes among her preferred remedies, but she does not judge their characters.

The encounter becomes a long working relationship. Alicia comes to Edwina’s house every day until the twins are too old to need a nanny, and then remains to do the ironing and cleaning. She also takes on most of the cooking and laundry. Edwina’s memory of their first meeting thus marks a change from isolation to dependable assistance: the stranger who carried the children into the house becomes part of its daily life.

Unequal intimacy in the household

Alicia’s care is intimate, but the arrangement is also employment. When Dickie insists that his work shirts be professionally laundered, Edwina tells Alicia, who responds by huffing, banging pans, and showing her temper while Edwina hides in her studio. Alicia is not an endlessly patient domestic presence: she dislikes vacuuming and does not like doing things for Lucas. The feeling is mutual; Lucas’s clothes needing repair are set aside for the school matron, as if he does not want Alicia touching his belongings.

Race makes the unequal terms of the household explicit. Edwina recalls that her mother used a racist label for Alicia and mocked her body. Dickie once remarked that Lucas had not previously come into such close contact with a Black person. Edwina angrily rebuked him for speaking about Alicia in a demeaning, stereotyped way, insisting that such language was unacceptable in the 1970s. She attributes some of Dickie’s attitudes to Wyebourne College, where, in her account, the only Black people he or Lucas encountered were pupils of royal descent or staff cleaning toilets. Alicia is loved and relied upon, yet the household’s assumptions about race and status remain visible in the language and labor directed at her.

Lasting significance

Edwina later describes Alicia as a woman with whom she seemed to have nothing in common, yet who became her closest ally. Alicia’s importance lies not only in the practical work that she undertakes but in the form of care she offers: she can calm the babies, take charge without shaming Edwina, and love the twins without making their mother’s exhaustion a judgment on them. Edwina’s account holds gratitude and discomfort together. She admits how much she depends on Alicia, and even envies the ease of Alicia’s affection, while recalling the racialized and class-bound conditions in which that care is given. Their first meeting turns a moment of near-collapse into the beginning of a sustaining relationship, without making the inequalities around it disappear.