Fifty Years a Medium – Chapter 1, 6/8 by Estelle Roberts

I had to be the breadwinner. With an invalid husband and three children to maintain, our meagre sickness allowance of ten shillings a week was woefully inadequate. I found employment doing housework from eight in the morning until two in the afternoon at a nursing home in Twickenham. The pay was small and insufficient for our needs,

but it enabled us to keep going even though I had many a time to go without meals in order to feed my little ones. Clothes were an even greater difficulty, and the only solution to the shoe problem I could find was to stuff the soles with newspaper. It was not very effective in wet weather.

One snowy morning I set out to work without having eaten and collapsed in the snow. I was found by the police, who took me home, where I had to remain in bed for several days. The doctor who called advised me strongly to take my husband to live by the sea and I, willing to do anything to help him, readily agreed. We went to Hastings.

Again Hugh tried to work, but his dropsical condition made it impossible. We rented a flat in Hastings and I began to take in paying guests, but as a result of trying to nurse my husband, look after the children, and take care of the guests as well, my health broke down and I again had to take to my bed.

My husband called in a doctor, a Frenchman, who examined me and made the obvious pronouncement that I needed rest. How well I knew it, but what rest could there be with four hungry mouths dependent on my efforts! I had become very thin and Hugh anxiously pointed this out to the doctor, who replied with true Gallic gallantry: “Did you ever know a thoroughbred horse that was fat?”