1920 - 2003 Freda Webber a.k.a. Freda Hutton a.k.a. Carol Nash a.k.a Carol Batten
She was my mother. Like so many people in this family she is/was something of an enigma. There is so much I know about her but sadly this is balanced by how much I don't know. Sadder still, I'll never know any more now.
She took so much to the grave. Both details about herself and about other people in the family.
I realise that you "younger" folk feel less concern about the unknown than I. I seem cursed with a sort of 'historical curiosity'. Silly perhaps, after all it's the now and the future that should concern us. I was like that once but the I caught the "Who am I and where am I from?" disease.
I thought I'd write an "occasional series" on family members as seen through my eyes. Here to start it is:
My mum. She was born February 17th 1920 to Alfred Ernest Webber and his wife Florence in Halifax, Yorkshire. She was an only child and christened Freda, it was a name she hated.
It should have been, and perhaps was, a happy childhood. Florence came from a very well-to-do background. Her parents ran a succession of businesses which AEW seems to have mismanaged into a series of disasters. But that perhaps belongs to "their" tale when I get around to telling it.
Florence was a well known and well travelled contralto and sang in choirs. Quite well known by all accounts. She came from a very musical family and Freda seemed to follow the same path, whether pushed or led or willing I don't know. She learned song and dance and the piano.
Ernest, as Florence called him, was a strict, fussy, fastidious and perhaps bullying man - I was to find that out in due course. I suspect my mother was a spoiled but rebellious child and that sort of personality would have clashed soon enough with her father's.
I know little of her childhood but suspect it was a stormy affair. A foggy tale emerges somewhere, of her running away to London and perhaps her father bringing her back. She was married at seventeen to Harold Eric Hutton and I would guess it was because she was pregnant. Not a good start to 'adulthood' now and certainly not then. But married she was and "the guessed at baby" didn't survive. Two years later I arrived when she was only just nineteen; March 13th 1939
Much mystery surrounds the hows and whys of her brief marriage to my father. Perhaps he couldn't keep her in the manner to which she had become accustomed. She painted a terrible picture of the man and seemed to blame him for all manner of woes. I was later to hear a better side of him from his second wife. Who knows? ....... they separated at or maybe even before my birth. So he became the man I never met, the father I never had.............. (His tale another day)
About the time I arrived, the bakery my grandmother was running into financial trouble, soon going down into bankruptcy. Probably the third business to fail for my grandparents. Circumstances and reasons not known but my grandfather did seem to have been a less than astute businessman ... but it's mostly guesswork and rumour.
Perhaps to escape the shame and the creditors, the family fled southwards. Ernest and Florence and Aunt Annie and my mother and I next surfaced in Sevenoaks, Kent.
The second World War broke out and soon after, my mother joined the WAAF (Womens' Auxilary Air Force). She left me with her parents and went off to endure or enjoy the war.
She seems to have had a quite exciting war. She went into MT (Motor Transport) and was taught to drive at RAF Weeton near Blackpool (I'd be there about 17 years later). She was posted to RAF Tangmere on the Kent coast and to RAF West Malling (I was posted there too in 1957!), quite near Sevenoaks. Finally she was sent to the Isle of Wight where many of the radar stations were sited, at Ventnor for instance. Over my childhood years I was to hear of her wartime adventures. She was shot-up at least twice by German fighters on the Isle of Wight, seeking refuge under the vehicle she was driving. Stories too of driving on the island's steep and narrow roads. I remember her bringing home a succession of 'boyfriends' - to my grandmother's dismay. I used to call them uncle. I don't think I really saw much of her - there was a war going on. She had the nickname "Kit" in the Air Force.
Mum attained the rank of Flight Sergeant before war's end, no mean achievement I suspect.
After the war she left the WAAF and went into show business, mostly 'in chorus.' The picture above is of her in the cast of "Song of Norway" which ran in London. SHe took the 'stage name' of Carol Nash and was known as Carol from then on. I think the theatre industry was struggling by then then and work got scarcer as television and bingo halls caught at the public's imagination and pay packets.
She met Reginald William Batten and they teamed up, as it turned out, for life. I've never been sure if they married. He was a tragic figure and I'll write in full about him later.
He was married to a wife who'd gone insane. He had two children, called Christopher and Felicity. I think he'd turned to the bottle and my mother essentially saved him from himself. Much of this is conjecture. They became devoted to each other for the next 30 years.
She bore him twin girls in the early fifties but both died soon after birth. Names?: they'd have been christened Valerie and Vivien. (Vivien? Yes that's right)
He was a violinist, a brilliant one by all accounts, but I think he was out of favour in 'the proffession' and work was hard to come by. They lived a hand to mouth existence I fear. Their situation wasn't helped any when my grandmother died and I went to live with them in London.
They gave me a home until I left to join the RAF.
Those four or so years in London were a dreadful hand-to-mouth existance I fear. There seemed to be almost no work for a violinst, no matter that he was a very good one. Mum wouldn't let him seek other employment lest he ruin his valuable hands so he appears to have done nothing. Mum worked at keeping us all three, we didn't eat or dress or live very well I'm afraid. After life in Farnborough it must have been a big step down for me.
She did her best I think. She helped us survive. We moved frequently from one little flat to another for reasons I didn't understand; at least four adresses. Mum seemed to always work as a "demonstrator", selling some productor other in some big store.
I saw all this through the eyes of a puzzled boy in his mid teens. For her it must have been heartbreaking. The little rich girl who'd gone into the the excitement and almost glamour of life in the war, then out into show business with, no doubt, high expectations ... and now this! Selling cookware to support her new, unemployable husband and suddenly arrived teenage son.
The picture will fill out better as I tell Reg's story and mine over this period.
Out of the blue came the move to Southend-on-Sea, 30 or so miles east of London, to live with Reg's aging and ailing dad. Freed of rent, the money crisis must have eased a little.
I left to join the Air Force and mum continued to live in Southend with Reg until his dad died. The details of all that never surfaced and seemingly they moved back to London.
Another move followed. This time to Yorkshire, a little village called Foxholes. This move is shrouded in mystery too. The small house/cottage would have been cheap, mum would have been back in her beloved Yorkshire. Did they benefit financially Reg's father's death? Who knows? They had acquired a car, a Mini. I like to think they had some joy in this brief period, heaven knows it had been a joyless time since they'd begun their struggle together.
Reg was to die soon enough. Blood clot, leg amputated, gangrene. Mum's lip service to Christian Science and resulting reluctance to yield Reg up to proper medical help played a tragic part in all this. The whole epidode makes me shake my head in sad disbelief. By then I'd emmigrated to Montreal, Canada.
Soon after this, mum moved to Florida. Who or what prompted this breakaway move I don't know. Suddenly she was being employed as 'companion' to a succession of well to do older ladies who could afford a "live-in" help.
Then she moved to Toronto and the same sort of employment. Give the lady her due, she didn't lack "get-up-and-go"!!
None of this so far gives any sense of our relationship. We were never close from my point of view. She was hardly a real mother until I joined her inLondon when my grandmothers death kind of forced her hand. Her very real dislike and distrust of Glennys always formed a sort of barrier too. She had vigorously resisted our marriage and of course any young person who runs into oposition from a parent always fights the harder.
She always called me Derry and was "too" motherly, crediting me with virtues I truly lacked. When she reached Toronto I began almost to panic, fearing she'd arrive on 'her Derry's doorstep to stay forever. She never did appear but I was forever haunted by the prospect.
She retired in Toronto and lived a quiet, rather lonely, apartment dwelling existence. I visited occasionally when my job took me to Toronto.
Towards the end (as it turned out) Vivian organised me and my mother .......... we made weekly phone calls and twice a year visits.
One of those Friday phone calls produced the realisation that she'd had a stroke and was sitting alone, waiting to be found. We organised her 'rescue' by phone. In the next months she was moved from hospital to a 'nursing home'. We visited and did what we could to help and, perhaps for the first time, we approached a proper mother/son situation.
In the early morning of March 24th 2003, 83 year old Carol Freda Batten quietly slipped away. A tough and troubled life was over. She left a thousand questions unanswered and I was suddenly "the old man of the tribe." Now, too late, I miss her.
She's buried in Plot 83 at the Duffin Meadows Cemetery, Pickering, east of Toronto.
