Born to REPLACE my dead sister
By Tanith Carey
AS SHE played hide-and-seek, Maria Lawson, then five, came across a box of new toys hidden at the back of her mother’s wardrobe. Inside was a wooden train painted bright red and yellow and a striped spinning top, almost as pristine as the day they were bought.
As much as she would have loved to play with them, the little girl instinctively put them back.
‘I already knew who the toys belonged to — the “other Maria” — my namesake and older sister who was burnt to death before I was born,’ she says. ‘She’d been given them at Christmas, a few days before she died at the age of four. A spark from the fire in our front room set her nightdress aflame. I was born to be her substitute.’
Today, Maria is a stylish, gregarious woman of 56, who runs her own interior design company in Rishworth, West Yorkshire. But her life has been defined — and certainly overshadowed — by that single spark that fatefully landed on her sister’s nightdress three years before she was born in 1955.
Maria was born as a ‘ replacement child’ — the term used by psychologists for those conceived by their parents to fill the void left when an elder child dies. As if she could seamlessly slip into the shoes of her lost sister, Maria was even given the same name.
But instead of being a salve for the suffering of her mother Nina — who was advised by her GP to have another baby to console herself — the new Maria’s existence instead seemed to be a daily torment.
In turn, it has left Maria with profound feelings of worthlessness that have blighted her life ever since — and resulted in two shattered marriages and a difficult relationship with her twin sons, Rick and Nicholas, 36.
Maria says: ‘ While I shared the same name as Maria, it was made very clear to me early on that I could not live up to my sister, who was an angel in every way.
‘My mother would tell me she was the perfect child with blonde ringlets, who was brave and fearless, but who always did exactly as she was told.
‘I was the dark one — with brown eyes and dark hair — a quiet, reclusive child. Yet I can still hear my mother saying to me when she told me off: “God has taken away my angel and given me a demon in her place.” ’
Looking back, such cruelty seems unforgivable. But as Maria acknowledges, the tragedy happened in a very different era.
Post-war Britain was a country where many had suffered loss — and the expectation was that everyone ‘just got on with it’.
Over the years, Maria has had therapy and come to recognise the reasons her mother Nina never recovered from the tragedy — and acted in the way she did.
In retrospect, Maria believes the seeds were sown when Italian-born Nina met Cyril, a sailor in the British Navy, when his ship docked at the port near her southern Italian home shortly before the end of the war.
It was a whirlwind courtship. A s mitten Cyril pursued Nina relentlessly, wooed her family and begged her to marry him and come to live in Britain.
However, Nina was later to claim she had been lured here by promises of a grand mansion with ‘ swans swimming on the lake’.
Instead she arrived to find her new home was Cyril’s aunt’s comfortable, but unaristocratic, home in Didsbury, Manchester.
FEELING trapped in the marriage by her strict Catholic faith — and unable t o bear t he stigma of returning to her family — Nina stayed, but made no secret of her resentment at her reduced circumstances.
Soon after the end of the war, she gave birth to twins Elsa and Margaret, followed by the first Maria two years later in 1948.
An introspective and intense woman, Nina made few friends in her new country — and never completely mastered English.
The year Maria died, the family were living in a house in Sale and Nina had just given birth to her fourth child, a son called John.
Much of what the surviving Maria knows about that cold January morning has been gleaned through fragmented conversations over the years. The details of the accident itself were rarely discussed by the family.
Even today, she says her twin sisters, now 65, still cry as they describe how they l ooked on helplessly as their sister burned. ‘Dad had lit the fire in the front room before he went to work as there was no central heating in those days,’ says Maria.
‘My mother was upstairs feeding the newborn baby while the girls played with their Christmas toys.
‘Maria was in between Elsa and Margaret and there was no fireguard. A spark spat out and landed on Maria’s nightdress. In those days nighties weren’t fire-retardant and it went up in flames in seconds.
‘My sisters were in shock and didn’t know what to do. When they started screaming for my mother to come downstairs, she didn’t believe them.
‘Maria managed to crawl in flames to the bottom of the stairs. When my mother finally came down, she found her blackened, unconscious body on the bottom step. There was no pink skin left.’
THIS was long before telephones were readily available, so it took an hour for the ambulance to arrive, by which time Nina was banging her head against the wall in frustration.
Suffering 95 per cent burns, Maria died two weeks later in hospital — and so began a lifetime of blame and recrimination.
Nina was so traumatised that the twins were sent away f or two months. Every day for the first few months after the funeral, the grief- stricken mother would go to the cemetery and sit by the grave rocking her son’s pram until closing time.
‘My mother blamed everyone but herself: my father for not putting the fireguard in place and my sisters for not doing enough to save Maria, even though they were only six,’ says Maria.
In those days, it was common practice for doctors to tell families who had lost children to have another baby to take their minds off their loss. When Nina went to her GP, she took his advice and became pregnant.
Maria believes her mother’s guilt that she could not save her little girl tortured her so much that ‘ attack was her only form of defence’.
‘We never knew why she gave me the same name. I didn’t question it. She was strict and not the sort of person you’d ask. Rather than cherishing me, my mother ignored me,’ she says.
‘I can remember getting a cake for my birthday at the age of six, but other than that I can recall only one or two hugs throughout my childhood.
‘Being Italian, my mother put my brother John on a pedestal because he was the son of the family. I seemed to bear the brunt of her anger.’
As is t he pattern f or many replacement children, Maria did not resent her sister’s memory. She idolised her.
‘If anything, I felt proud to be called Maria after her. She was supposed to be a lovely little girl. It made me feel closer to her.’
As the years passed, the only distraction for Nina seemed to be
her successful dress - making business. She was a tireless worker and determined businesswoman who opened two shops.
Instead, it was her father Cyril who looked after Maria, waking her up for school in the morning, making her breakfast and washing her school uniform for the morning.
‘My dad was my lifeline,’ says Maria. ‘But he was hen-pecked. He never spoke about what happened. The rows in the house were constant. My mother continually blamed him.’
Her older sister Margaret agrees that Maria was treated the worst by their mother. ‘It was a very quiet and sad household. We were never allowed to have any music after the first Maria died. My father was quite a jovial person, but my mother seemed to prevent him from being normal. I felt sorry for him.
‘As children, we were kept washed and clean, but not much more than that. There were few terms of endearment.
‘My twin sister Elsa and I had each other, but Maria didn’t have that. My mother did not seem to bother with her. If you don’t have a happy mother, you can’t be a happy child — and that was certainly true for Maria.’
Every Sunday, Maria would be taken on the bus by her mother to the cemetery to lay fresh flowers on her sister’s grave. Nina had fought and won a battle with the authorities to have the last picture of her daughter set into the tombstone in the Italian style.
Bewildered, Maria would stand back and watch as her usually cold mother knelt down and sobbed at a grave marked with her own name. She would gaze on the photograph of the smiling little girl she couldn’t replace.
‘Maria always stayed as perfect as that picture. Because she was four when she died, my sister never had the chance to become a fully formed person who made mistakes. I had plenty of opportunities not to be perfect because I grew up.’ When she got into trouble with the police for bunking off class at 15 — she left school soon after — Maria says Nina told the officers that they could keep her.
Her only saving grace, says Maria, were her good looks, which made her stand out at school and gave her a passport out of her unhappy home. By 19, she had married. Soon after, she gave birth to her twin sons.
But just like Nina, she had difficulties bonding with them. With no model for a loving, affectionate family, she admits she found it hard to express her love.
Her lack of self-worth with men also meant her first marriage was the first of many failed relationships. ‘I was shy and insecure, and had no self- esteem. Because I felt so unloved as a child, I couldn’t believe in love. I had no confidence with men. As a form of self-protection, I closed myself off. I found it very hard to deal with rejection, so I wouldn’t let anyone get too close.
‘I split from my sons’ father when they were eight and they went to live with him.
‘I am still not as close to them as I would like to be — and I have apologised. But I think they are coming closer to understanding the reasons why I was the way I was.’
Consultant psychologist Dr Pat Frankish has a special interest in parents’ reactions to the loss of a child and says difficulties forming relationships are common in replacement children.
‘There can be serious interference in the development of their identity,’ she says.
‘If replacement children have been brought up as substitutes, that stops them establishing a sense of themselves as valued people. In turn, that makes it hard to enter into equal relationships.
‘The feelings of poor self-worth are made worse by the fact that the dead child is often elevated to a state of perfection by the parents as a way to cushion themselves from the reality of death.
‘While in the Fifties, parents were expected to get over the loss of a child, it’s now accepted that parents don’t ever fully recover.’
It seems likely that Nina was suffering post- traumatic stress syndrome, made worse by her utter helplessness as she waited so long for an ambulance to come.
NINA had a condition that needed to be addressed at the time with counselling, says Dr Frankish, but which instead appears to have become deeply embedded. Indeed, even at 92 and suffering from Alzheimer’s, she still weeps over her lost daughter — but remembers little else about her former life.
‘There is room for more bodies in Maria’s burial plot, yet to the end, she refused to let my father, who died from cancer three years ago, be buried there,’ says her daughter.
‘But she still constantly says she is looking forward to joining Maria there and meeting her angel in heaven.’
As she watches her mother deteriorate, the surviving Maria says she is closer to forgiveness.
‘It’s taken me all my life to get over the fact my mother did not love me for who I was — that I was born because someone else died.
‘I think if she’d had therapy at the time, we all would have stood a better chance. It was such a brutal, brutal thing she suffered.
‘By giving me Maria’s name, she was trying to deny it had ever happened. Having been a mother myself, I understand she’d had a baby just a few days before the accident, her hormones were raging, she had no family support or anyone she could talk to. The tragedy is that by losing a sister I never knew, I lost my mother as well.’