Imperial War Museum

The grounds of the Imperial War Museum are the setting for Edwina’s first meeting with Alicia, an encounter that begins in the exhaustion of caring for infant twins and becomes the start of a lasting alliance. Here, Alicia turns a difficult outing into a brief reprieve, then helps Edwina get home; years later, Edwina recognizes how much that support mattered.

The First Encounter

Edwina is sitting on a bench with the pram some distance away, bored by its crying contents and overwhelmed by the prospect of managing the walk home with two small children. She is in two minds about leaving the pram behind, but cannot trust the twins to make the journey without one of them needing to be carried. In this moment of strain, she admits to herself that she sometimes hates them: Charlie is prone to hysterics, while Rowena sulks.

Alicia sits down nearby to tie her shoelace. When Charlie throws a shoe out of the Silver Cross, she retrieves it and discovers that there are two babies in the pram. She responds with face-pulling and animal noises, making the twins gurgle happily. Edwina, who longs for them to be old enough to hold a proper conversation, watches Alicia succeed where she feels she cannot. For a few precious moments, she can sit on the bench and breathe out.

From Respite to Rescue

The relief gives way to an emotional collapse: once Edwina has breathed out, she finds she cannot breathe back in without sobbing. The sky turns a toxic yellow as large raindrops begin to fall. The museum grounds thus hold both the first easing of her isolation and the breakdown that follows when its weight briefly surfaces.

Alicia helps wheel the pram back to Kennington Road. At the house, she carries a baby under each arm up the steps, takes them inside, then returns for the pram and manoeuvres it into the house by herself. The meeting does not end at the bench: Alicia’s help extends through the rain and all the way home.

The Place in Edwina and Alicia’s Story

Edwina later understands the encounter as the beginning of a bond that would sustain her. She says she would have gone under without Alicia, a woman with whom she initially seemed to have little in common who became her closest ally. The grounds matter in the story not as a detailed portrait of the museum, but as the precise setting where an exhausted mother first receives help from the person who will remain beside her.

When they meet, Alicia is a part-time cleaner whose two sons are being cared for by her mother in Kingston; Alicia lives with her husband and some of his cousins somewhere off the Old Kent Road. Edwina never visits Alicia’s home, but Alicia comes to hers every day until the twins are too old to need a nanny, and afterward stays on to do the ironing and cleaning. The first encounter on the museum grounds therefore opens onto a long relationship shaped by both intimate care and the unequal domestic arrangement in which that care continues.