Seven Maids with Seven Mops - Evelyn Chadwick

'Seven maids with seven mops' from Lewis Carroll's 'Alice in Wonderland' represent seven successive generations of mothers and daughters. They challenge you to discover if they are getting any wiser, better, liberated, as the decades whizz by. Do they differ, transform themselves, 'clean up their acts'? Where is the path to contentment? All of them are first-born - apart from the first, a seventh child. There is little mention of fathers; no more eclipsing perpetually breeding females, caught in nature's trap! Yet, inevitably some fathers' tales add colour to those of wives or daughters. Daughters' lives are intertwined with those of mothers, some more, some less. From a tiny village in Slovenia in 1880 a trail-finding adventure explores gradual change, gradual British-ness, from mothers and daughters, as two World Wars engulf them. Mingling of DNA from Pomerania in Northern Germany to Austria (Slovenia), as well as Lebanese and Welsh input culminates in mothers and daughters currently living in Great Britain. This true story will take you through a brush with Napoleon, dramatic events of murder/suicide, near-asphyxiation of a newborn in the snow, life under Colonial Rule on the Gold Coast, then anticlimax of reduced circumstances as political prisoners in South Africa. There will be SS intervention, a Terror raid, flight from invading Russians across the mined Baltic, also unusual contact with the British Military Occupation in Germany, as events are re-lived by both mother and daughter, in different ways. The story focuses on the 'Pomeranian peasant', with troubled relationships and determination to build a career. There are disparate existences in seven foreign lands, revealing how one changes, adapts and lives with the mistakes one has made. The compelling decade of Hippy-dom, is written by the 5th generation, daughter of the author.