Shhh! Scribbler at Work

Mistaken Identity

(prompt: 'replace' 23/3/18)

"Emma Winifred Moyle?" The clerk peered over his glasses at the waiting faces – a mixture of hopeful, anxious, bored, irritated. All had been queuing for some time.

An elderly woman stepped forward, raising her hand and eyebrows – "Uhhm-m... yes and no," she said.

The clerk frowned. "Well? Which is it?"

Clearing her throat, my 80 year old mother said, "You've made a mistake, dear. My names are the wrong way around. It's Winifred Emma. Has been all my life." And she gave him her most patient and understanding smile.

The clerk drew himself up pompously. "Madam! The Office of Births, Deaths and Marriages does NOT make mistakes... OR 'get names the wrong way around' as you say." He quivered with indignation as he took the document back from her, glanced at it once again, and shoved it back to her side of the glass partition. "THIS is how your birth was registered and THIS is who you are!", and his finger stabbed at the signature at the bottom of her birth certificate.

Mum looked in disbelief at her father's deliberate and careful signature. She hadn't seen it in many decades – not since she was a teenager – but she'd never forgotten the flourish at the end... almost a complete circle around the whole name, with a lonely dot out to one side. There was no denying the name her father had registered.

Later, puzzling over this bizarre discovery, came an unexpected epiphany. "Ohh-h-h, I know... I do... I really do!" She shocked herself by speaking out loud to nobody there.

Her father had loved the name Emma, while her mother preferred Winifred. Once again, Mum could hear her mother's voice telling of her firm instructions to her husband about registering the birth – from her hospital bed, within an hour or so of Mum's entrance into the world.

Incredibly, the replaced name was never questioned for eight decades of her life; would not have been discovered until her death, had she not required a birth certificate copy to get her passport.

All her years she had never needed this physical proof of birth and lived with her mistaken identity. Many legal documents bore that 'incorrect' signature – including her marriage certificate. What an ironic situation for this most honest of women, totally dedicated to 'doing the right thing'. Yet another extraordinary event in what my mother called a perfectly 'ordinary' life.

As the middle child of thirteen (a normal 'family' back then, when so many babes didn't survive), her beginnings were certainly ordinary. An indelible image she would carry until the end of her days was of a baby sister who died early in her life - of a tiny coffin glimpsed through the neighbor's paling fence as it was carried from the house. From a small child, Mum's role was to support and comfort and sometimes discipline her younger siblings whenever her mother was not able to 'be there, do everything'.

Her proud and loving parents lived in a working-class area, and my grandmother's philosophy, expressed often, was – "God wouldn't give me babies, without also giving me the means to feed them." Overly optimistic... and yet she was right. Never any luxuries, especially after my grandfather died as the result of an accident at the age of 44, but none of her precious family ever went hungry or cold despite my grandmother accepting charity from no-one.

The meanings of the two names are -

Emma - universal, and Winifred - blessed peacemaker.

And whichever order you read them, she was.