Firstborn

Alfred Edward Housman, the first child of Edward Housman and his wife Sarah Jane Williams, did not make a totally uncomplicated entry to this life. The local doctor, alarmed by unusual pains and no doubt regarding Sarah Jane, then thirty-one, as a rather elderly prima gravida, wanted to call in a specialist from Birmingham. Sarah Jane took command and insisted that the Williams’ family doctor, who had known her all her life and, as she put it, ‘knew me’, should be sent for to take charge of the birth. Some husbands might have played safe and backed the doctor's recommendation. There is no indication that Edward did so. Sarah Jane prevailed, the first indication that she would be the leader in the family, Edward the led; her own doctor was summoned and Alfred was born soon after on 26 March 1859.

Sarah Jane had conceived at the first possible moment. After Alfred's birth, three more children – Robert, Clemence and Katharine (generally known as Kate) – followed at annual intervals, a tribute to their parents’ fertility and uninhibited lovemaking. Her fifth child, Basil, was born two years later; her sixth, Laurence, a year after that; her seventh and last child, George (generally known as Herbert), three years later in July 1868. Seven children in nine years proved her Victorian capacity for stoical childbearing and Christian duty.

Loses his mother on his twelfth birthday

About a year after the birth of her final child Sarah Jane was diagnosed with breast cancer and died in 1871 at the shockingly early age of forty-two. Had the adult Housman been asked by a psychologist to which of his parents he had been closer, he would undoubtedly have replied, ‘my mother’. The profound and traumatic effect of her death cannot be overestimated. It was the first great circumstantial shock that shaped his life. He, the eldest of her sons, closest to her in every sense, lost her on his twelfth birthday. Moreover, he had been so distressed at seeing her in the late stages of her illness that he had been persuaded to leave home and go some forty miles south to his godmother's family home, Woodchester House, near Stroud in Gloucestershire. None of the hopeful and optimistic forecasts of the grown-ups were borne out.