Lesley Winifred Barnard Childhood

LESLEY WINIFRED BARNARD

Early Years

My mother was born on November 15, 1908 in London, England.    She was the second child in a family of seven children,   Her sister, Naomi was 2 1/2 years older.  Lesley was a pretty baby, with black hair and dark blue eyes.     She was allergic to various formula given to her as a baby and cried a lot.    At one point the English neighbors called the authorities as they thought the children were being abused.

At the time of her birth the family was living in a rental since their principal residence was on the island of St. Lucia in the (British) West Indies, where Lesley's father, George Ernest Beausire Barnard, owned several coconut and banana plantations and also had an interest in his father's import/shipping company, Barnard & Sons.   Shortly after Lesley's birth they returned to St. Lucia.

I don't have a clear idea of my mother's daily life, growing up in the tropics in the care of poorly educated servants. Her father was irritable from working long hours in the tropical sun and her mother, Florence Winifred Barnard was often pregnant and debilitated by the heat.   In those days Western women wore long dresses with long sleeves and high necks and the heat must have been unbearable.   After Hugh de Beausire Barnard's birth (nicknamed Boy) on June 6, 1910, Florence bore 4 more children, Joan Katherine, 1912, and three more boys, David, Noel, (born on Christmas Day 1916 ?) and Donald Barnard.

On the island they had several homes, which they occupied at various times depending on where George needed to work.   There was Rosemount, on Barnard Hill (earlier Barnardsville and named after the family), overlooking Castries Harbor.  While staying there the children attended a local school.  Their Uncle Arthur also lived on the hill, at one point with his wife, Hilda (until they separated). In another house known as Sans Souci, was their grandfather, Samuel (until his death) and grandmother, Isabella Beausire Barnard,  but Lesley avoided her as she was rather ill tempered.  One day she had a cherry tree cut down when Joan, Lesley's little sister, ate a lot of the fruit.   Each house had numerous outbuildings, plus storage areas for any equipment needed. 

 

The largest house was on Park Estates, known as Park and I believe this is where they lived most of the time, as Lesley spoke of it more often.   She was not allowed to roam far though and never knew there was a gorge on the property.  Nor did she know that some of the younger servants were half siblings from a previous relationship her father had.   This did not come to light until Lesley was in her 90's !

Park had beautiful mahogany and glass swinging doors to let in any stray breeze The glass was etched and there was beading between the glass.  The windows were small and louvered and with the louvers set at a certain angle, this also helped to keep the temperature down.  The house servants lived in the basement.   There was a cook and a head parlor maid who supervised the other servants.     The upper front room of the house was the ‘birthing room’ where any of the children not born in England first saw the light of day.   A balcony went around most of the outside, which made a safe place for the children to play.   They were shut out there every afternoon with a servant in attendance.  The bathroom was at the back of the house.   The dining room opened onto the balcony.  After dinner parties, which were given occasionally, Lesley would go into the empty dining room and drink the leftover coffee, very black and sweet !!   The kitchen table was sometimes used for minor operations since George had many talents and was able to help in some medical emergencies.

There were steps down to the servants’ quarters in the basement and to the kitchen.   Lesley slept in a small room at the back of the house on the middle floor.   As soon as he could, George purchased a motor car and liked to take the family for drives.  I believe this was a Jaguar. The car would often stall and roll back on the precipitous narrow roads and the children would scream in terror.   Prior to the car there were trips in a horse and buggy and on one occasion the buggy went off the embankment and almost capsized.   George managed to control the horse and get everyone safely back on the road, however Winifred and the children got out and refused to get back in.   The children all spoke the local patois fluently and even after living in England for some years in their early teens Lesley and Hugh used the patois to converse secretly and also for amusement.

 

Another house, "The Bungalow" was near the town of Choiseul by the beach. It was much smaller and there is a photo of my mother with some of the other children, in a horse and cart. Each house had its own small farm with fruit trees, produce, chickens and pigs, all tended by servants.   The children learned the singsong local patois which was a mixture of French and West Indian.   A small island, Rat Island, was part of one of the estates.  There were stables with horses but the children were not allowed to go near them as the horses were bad tempered from the heat and flies.  This is the only surviving house as the others burned over the years.

Numerous servants attended to the household's needs:  a cook, house servants, and various nursemaids.  The main nursemaid was Da, which means nurse in patois and she was very much loved by all the children.  Occasionally governesses were brought out from England, but they did not usually stay long.  When a new teacher arrived Lesley would show them the switch with which the children were whipped.  Lesley and her brother, Hugh, were also horsewhipped by their father on more than one occasion.  For the rest of her life Lesley had scars on her back from the whip.   They both feared and hated him for this treatment and Lesley rarely spoke to him when they were together in her adult years.  I believe he mellowed when he was older and treated the younger children less harshly.

I don't think Lesley was an easy child.   She could be stubborn and resentful.   Since the children were left mostly to the care of the servants and Lesley always liked attention she may have misbehaved to get it and probably led Hugh astray also.  She would be sent to her room by her mother to wait for punishment on her father's return from a long day of work, so Florence was equally at fault.   In the early days George rode about the plantations on horseback and even when a car was purchased there were no proper roads and the land was steep and hard to negotiate.   There is a photo of him with the car stuck in mud and a woman next to him who is most likely my grandmother.

The only punishment my mother mentioned to me in detail was being whipped after she was accused of causing one of the female servants to have a miscarriage.    At the time she was very small and liked to hold the hands of various workers and then walk up their legs, as children of that age will do, if allowed.  After doing this one girl had a miscarriage and my mother was taken to her father's study, blamed and beaten for it.  Barbaric and cruel.

One story that my mother enjoyed telling was of an afternoon on the shady terrace, watched by a servant while their mother napped.    A huge spider ran across the tiles and the servant hit it with a broom, splitting it in two.    One half ran one way and the other half the other way, with screaming children in all directions.    My mother also mentioned an expensive china doll she received one year for a Christmas gift.    It was beautifully dressed and had been sent out by ship specially for the occasion.    About half an hour later she dropped it on the floor and it shattered into hundreds of pieces !   She also had a pet sea horse at one point, though I doubt it lived very long !    She did tell me of the hundreds of mosquito bites on her legs, in spite of the mosquito netting over the beds.    She got malaria several times, but her last attack was in her twenties, even though the medical profession says that you never recover.

I will quote from an email in January 2009, from a cousin, Craig Barnard, upon hearing of my mother's death:

"The children and I go from time to time to Park House where your Mum grew up, although only the ruins of the house now remain.*  I can think of her as a little girl running barefoot around the house and down to the river.   Nannies in uniform and father on the horse.   I grew up the same way, although in her time of course the life was even more rural and the world was less crowded.  She would have known the smell of a sugar factory in cane cutting season and the perfumed smell of the tropics after a downpour of rain.  The experience of a steamer across the Atlantic is almost lost to us.  She grew up at an idyllic time really and her passing is so sad."   *(Park House burned down in the 1990's?)

George developed cataract early in life, probably from the tropical sun.   At one point he and Winifred sailed to Canada to consult an eye specialist and Lesley was left with her Uncle Walter Barnard and his wife, Ida.   They had six boys - 3 from Ida's prior marriage and 3 with Walter.   Ida was delighted to have a little girl and spoke openly of adopting Lesley, but Lesley was terrified by the idea as the boys teased her continually.  In the hope of changing their minds, she began to behave badly.  One day there was a parade and fair at the local botanical gardens.   The convertible car, with the top down, was decorated with brightly colored tropical flowers including bougainvillea and Lesley was dressed in white with angel wings, seated in the back with the boys.  She spent the time in tears as the boys kept pinching her, but afraid to complain, while her aunt was happy and oblivious in the front seat.     While she was visiting she was sexually molested by a servant and Lesley overheard her aunt telling friends about this, so was terribly humiliated.   Fortunately the idea of adoption was dropped. She commented that her older cousin, Cyril, was very kind to her and would read her stories at night.

Lesley's early childhood included occasional trips to England, since her mother, Florence Winifred (nee Hendy) was born there and besides the trauma of the tropical heat she missed English life and especially all the shops in England.   They traveled by steamship, sometimes on the Queen Mary, but those visits ended in 1914 at the outbreak of World War I and did not begin again until after the War ended, when George accompanied Lesley and her younger brother, Hugh de Beausire Barnard to England, to enroll them in boarding school.  It was 1919 and Lesley was almost 11 but small for her age, and Hugh only 9.  My mother was stressed by the voyage as one of the stewards kept trying to get her alone and she spent a great deal of time avoiding him, with no one to confide in.   My mother was molested twice by servants when she was a small child, so was especially alert for trouble.    

 

The change in lifestyle must have been really shocking once they arrived as their last visit was when Lesley was about 5 years of age.  She also hated Oakdene, the boarding school, since it was very restrictive and she was made to wear a vest, a liberty bodice and then a very plain dark uniform.   (Letter from Pamela June 1975 "I was most amused by the cutting about the girls from Oakdene.  What would Miss Watts and Miss Mary have said!"   This comment made me wonder if Pamela also attended that school, though my mother never mentioned it.)  Soon after her arrival the headmistress produced a very ugly dress for my mother to wear for a special occasion.   This was thrown to the floor and stamped on.  At first she was quite a favorite of the headmistress who was amused by her antics, but after a while that changed.    Her older sister, Naomi, known as Nibs, had been attending the same school since the age of 6, so was well settled in and a bit resentful of this younger sister she hadn't seen for many years.  My mother did make some friends, one being Ruth English, nicknamed "Wuffus" for some reason.   She was related to G.K. Chesterton, the famous author, and sometimes he would drive over in his motor car with his wife and take both girls out to lunch.

I heard a few details of her life at the school.    One was after lights out in the dormitory, when my mother was supposed to be in bed but had got up to get a glass of water.   She heard the matron coming and ran across the room, slipped and cut her palm severely on the broken glass, severing the tendon.   The other incident was when she became very ill and lost a lot of weight,    The doctor ordered thick cream for her cereal each morning, which my mother loved.  She was very upset once this was stopped and ever after had a fondness for cream.   Then there were the orthodontist visits which were traumatic.  After the initial install he would come every few months to tighten them.   This was tight enough to last till the next visit and gum boils would erupt in her mouth and then burst.   The pain must have been terrible. 

 

At home in the West Indies, my mother had helped care for her small brothers.   The servants did not have much idea of keeping them safe and would often allow behavior that caused my mother to intervene.   One was giving them fruit with a very slippery seed that they could have choked on.   She was naturally caring and loved babies, so as she approached school leaving age she decided to train as a children's nanny, and enrolled in the world famous Norland School for Nannies.   

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(c) Elizabeth Donnell September 22, 2010