Amy Alberta Hodgson Collier was born on 6 September 1891. She always hated the name “Hodgson” and never used it, even on official documents. Her family and friends always knew her as “Berta”. Berta had a sister called Hilda, and when they were only two and a half and six months old respectively, their mother Eliza died of appendicitis - in those days a fairly common cause of death. She was only twenty-six.
Their father, Joseph, an Insurance Agent, was unable to care for his two young daughters on his own and so his mother took them into her own home and looked after them.
Berta and Hilda were very happy living with their Grandma Collier, but after about six years, their father remarried. They went to live with their father and new stepmother. They were very excited about having a new “mother”. As they were leaving their Grandma’s house, she started to cry. When Berta asked her why she was crying, she said, “You’ll understand when you’re a big girl.”
Some years later Joseph and his new wife Mary had two children of their own – Jim and Mary.
Life with their father wasn’t as happy as they had hoped it would be and it wasn’t long before they were sent away to boarding school in Scotland. They had quite a hard time there – the discipline was very strict – but they were reasonably happy. Although they had enough to eat, it was very plain and monotonous – when it was teatime they could have bread and butter, or bread and jam, but never butter and jam together.
Their father had started drinking heavily ad whilst at one time he was quite prosperous with a lovely home and servants, he soon found himself with money problems. Consequently he had to sell his house and move to a cheaper property. This happened several times, and each time Berta and Hilda went home for the school holidays, they found that their father had moved to a much smaller house in a poorer district.
When Berta finished a boarding school and returned to live with her father, she became rally worried about his how much he was drinking. It always made him very bad tempered and she was afraid of him. She saw an advertisement in a newspaper for some powder, which, it was claimed, helped stop the craving for alcohol. BBerta bought some and put it in her father’s cups of tea, but it didn’t seem to make any difference.
By this time there wasn’t much money in the family and so Berta had to get a job. She started working at The Refuge Assurance Company in Manchester as a policy writer. She had to sit on a high stool at a high desk, writing all day. This made her hand and arm ache, as well as giving her pins-and-needles in her behind! She would walk around the office with a piece of paper trying to look busy until the numbness subsided. With her beautiful copperplate handwriting, she was good at her job.
It was a short walk to and from the tram which took Berta to work. In those days of horse-drawn transport, the roads were frequently littered with horse droppings. The ladies wore long skirts which were made of rather stiff fabric and were almost always black. The hems used to get very dirty, especially when it was raining. Berta, like most of her female colleagues, kept a stiff brush at the office to remove the dust and dirt from her skirt. Because of the type of material, it wasn’t possible to wash the skirts successfully at home, and they would only be sent to the cleaners perhaps once a year.
Berta’s family owned a large bulldog with the rather incongruous name of Daisy. One day when she took it for a walk in the park, Daisy ran away. As Berta tried to catch it, little did she know that her life was about to change forever.