Chapter 3. Seventh of Ten

When Mrs Gloria Wall was a teenager, she left school and learned to assemble wireless sets. She was a girl who mixed bashfulness and flirtation in apt proportions for the provocation of teasing, which caused her to blush prettily. When she was twenty she met Fred at a dance. He was Irish, but had come to London as a boy. He was the only son of an ex-regular Army sergeant, and like his four sisters had been born in India. Gloria and Fred Wall were married in 1939, just before the war.

Then he became ill with renal tuberculosis and was in hospital on and off throughout the war. No children were conceived, he was sterile. They quarrelled a lot, and she remembered her mother's warning “God help you if you marry that Fred!” After each quarrel she would run back to the little house where she was born, to be consoled by her mother. This was about half a mile away, in a terrace which faced a cemetery, though the graves were shielded from view by a high brick wall. Gloria was the seventh child in a family of ten, and she felt that no-one took much notice of her as a child, partly because she was not as pretty as her older sisters. Her father liked a drink, and quarrelled with her mother. When he died, he was buried at the cemetery opposite. Her mother socialized amongst convivial friends once her husband and ten children were off her hands.

Mrs Wall's first depressive breakdown came after fifteen years of marriage. She complained to the psychiatrist that her husband didn't acknowledge her sacrifices for him, that he was an extravagant gambler, that he was unfaithful, although he denied it and accused her of being a flirt. In a mental hospital for three months, she submitted to electric shock therapy, until her husband became ill again with tuberculosis and sent for her. He now added to his accusations that she was mad, a hospital case. He developed tubercular abscesses under the skin, and was admitted to hospital, where she visited him every day.

He recovered and they continued