Apple Blossom Time (30 page)

Your loving son

Edwin

I sat with the yellowing sheet of paper in my hand for a long time. The nib had been scratchy. It had blotted several times. And my father’s hand had not been steady. Whatever the doctor had given him, however he tried to comfort his mother by pretending an unnatural calm, his writing told me that he had been terribly afraid. You see, I knew it so well by now. I’d seen it in messy schoolboy’s letters, in cocky young subaltern’s letters, in the letters of a man dazed by shellfire and exhausted. I could recognize the difference.

The last letter.

Of all that pile in the trunk in the attic at Ansty House, this was the last and nothing that I had learned so far had prepared me for it. I had read them all and it had been like listening to a voice, a voice that had become very dear to me. Now that voice would be silent for ever. I knew, of course, that I would reach the end of the cache of letters, but not like this.

I folded the sheet of paper and slipped it back into its place in the bundle. I didn’t need to read it again. I felt as though I could recite every word and that, if I never saw it again, I’d still be able to repeat every word of it on my own dying day.

What you know, you can’t un-know. What you’ve learned, can’t be un-learned, no matter how hard you try.

There was a king who visited an alchemist who could turn base metal into gold. ‘It’s quite simple,’ said the alchemist. ‘Anyone can do it. Just follow this formula. The most important thing to remember is that while you are making the gold you must never, ever think of a hippopotamus.’ And, of course, the king never made gold, because every time he tried, he couldn’t get the hippopotamus out of his mind. I felt like that.

I couldn’t think of anything else. It was like saying goodbye. It was like taking a long journey with an old friend and reaching a crossroads where your ways parted. It was finding out that everyone you have trusted, everyone you have respected and loved for as long as you can remember, has been cheating all the time. It was a shock.

And yet … of course … it wasn’t. It all made a dreadful sense.

*   *   *

Asking … telling … my mother was the cruellest thing I have ever done in my life.

I understand now why men and women go absent without leave. Something happens that is so momentous that they feel they can’t cope with everyday service life any longer. A husband or wife dies, a child is in hospital, a lover writes that cruel, final letter – and suddenly the life of kit inspections and parades and petty tyranny can’t be suffered any longer. They could ask for help, but they don’t believe they’ll get it. So they just push off and the Redcaps follow and drag them back and then everything is worse than it was before.

I nearly did that. I lay in my comfortable billet in Brussels, listening to the sounds of husband and wife making love in the next room and I thought: that’s enough, I can’t stand it any longer, I have to know and I’m going home.

I wanted to. But I didn’t, of course. There’s such a thing as self-discipline and responsibility and all the other high-sounding qualities they try to drum into you on promotion courses (but if you haven’t got them already, they’ll never teach you). And when something has been kept secret for more than twenty-five years, it can keep for a day or two longer. Certainly until I managed to wangle a spot of leave.

So I went home and I told her about my father’s letters, about the anonymous envelopes, the photograph of the grave, everything. My mother looked as though I’d said something utterly indecent, as though I’d stood in her kitchen and opened up at the top of my voice with every disgusting word the army had taught me. She cradled the newly warmed teapot against her chest. The kettle lid began to rattle as the water reached the boil.

‘Laura! Whatever made you think…’

‘I don’t think. I know,’ I snapped. ‘And I want to know why.’

‘I don’t know…’

‘I don’t believe you. I want to know why. I need to know.’

Water spurted from the kettle spout and bounced like silver beads across the hot surface of the range.

‘I don’t know…’

I felt such rage. Dear God. I could have shaken the truth out of her. ‘You must know. He was your husband. You were carrying his child. Me. Didn’t you care?’

‘Oh, Laura. How could you ask that?’ Her eyes filled. She was thin and worn down and the hands that clutched the teapot were swollen and painful looking. The freezing weather had split her skin and the cracks had become infected. ‘You don’t understand. I was very ill. I thought I was going to lose you. I’d already lost Edwin, but I made up my mind that I was going to hang on to his child. And your grandmother…’

‘Ah, yes. Grandmother. She wrapped him up in tissue paper and locked him in a trunk.’

‘She what…?’ The kettle lid blew off and boiling water deluged over the stove. There was a tremendous cloud of steam. Mother turned and grabbed at the handle without waiting to pick up a cloth. She screamed as water spat up.

‘Mother! For heaven’s sake…’ I plunged her scalded hand into the bowl of cold water that held peeled potatoes on the draining board. ‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry…’

‘It’s all right, darling.’ She leaned against me, trembling with pain and shock. ‘I know you didn’t mean it.’

That evening, I watched my mother knitting a jersey for Tom. It had to be a striped one, because the wool had been unravelled from several old things and there wasn’t enough of one colour. The wool was squiggly and wouldn’t run smoothly, but she plain-and-purled stubbornly on, her bandaged right hand getting in the way of every stitch.

I could see that her hand hurt. Her lips were compressed, as though she was afraid that, if she relaxed, she might cry out. Burns or secrets. She was very good at keeping her mouth shut.

I felt so ashamed. I had done that. She would never have scalded herself if it hadn’t been for me. She’d have made that pot of tea, as she’d made thousands, probably, before that. I might as well have picked up the kettle and poured the boiling water over my mother’s hand in an attempt to force her to speak. That’s what the Gestapo would have done. Was I any better than that?

I got up and stood behind her chair and put my arms around her shoulders and kissed her cheek. ‘I’m sorry, Mother,’ I whispered.

She secured her knitting carefully, then reached up with her good hand and patted mine.

‘What’s that?’ asked Tom, looking up suddenly and catching us. ‘What’s that? Girls’ secrets?’

In the morning, my brief leave was up and I had to go back to Brussels and my billet with the middle-aged couple who treated me like a daughter, back to walks in the parks and coffee in tiny cafés and Christmas dinner in the Bon Marché department store, a special ‘Liberation’ Christmas party put on in thanks by the Belgians.

I had achieved absolutely nothing at home, except to scald my mother. And I thought how absolutely impossible it is to force someone you love to do anything at all.

But, before I left, she wrote to me. She must have written that night, because I found the envelope slipped under my door in the morning. Can you believe it? We were talking about the man who was the link between our two lives and she couldn’t bear to face me and talk. I was her daughter and she couldn’t tell me about my father.

My darling Laura

We’ve always been such good friends, you and I. We’ve always been able to talk, haven’t we, about anything. Not many mothers and daughters can say that. No matter what, we’ve been able to talk it through and appreciate, if not agree with, each other’s viewpoint, the way friends ought to do. You have always been and are very dear to me. I love you very much.

I want you to try to remember that as you read the rest of this letter.

This time, I can’t talk to you. I don’t have the courage to face you. I have tried, but I’m just not brave enough.

I wish you didn’t have to know. There’s never a right time to be hurt and there’s no way to make the truth easier for you. The letters are true. I don’t know who sent them or why they were written – malice, envy, grief, who knows. It doesn’t matter really. Not now.

Your father was executed by firing squad in 1918. That’s really all there is to say. I don’t know why. Court-martial records are secret, even now, and will be so until I am long dead. They can legally only be shown to the accused – who is dead. How bizarre, how cynical. Not even your grandfather, with all his influence, was able to find out what happened. So now that I’ve told you that one, horrible fact, you know as much as I do.

We didn’t mean to keep secrets from you. We just thought, your grandparents and I, that you didn’t need to know. What good would it have done? I had to live with the knowledge, but you were only a child and I couldn’t bear to burden you with this horror. Losing your father was bad enough.

There wasn’t any more to say – then. As you grew older, you had a right to be told, but it just got harder and harder to talk. I still can’t.

I wish I didn’t have to tell you now. Please, please, please … don’t try to ask me about it. I don’t know any more. Maybe I don’t want to. I can’t face the thought of opening such cruel, old wounds and Tom, I know, would be so distressed to have it all out in the open again. He and your father were such good friends and went through such awful times together.

Tom mustn’t be upset and I can’t allow you to do it. He couldn’t cope. I will protect him against anything and anyone – even if that means you, Laura.

Don’t let this change your thoughts of your father. He was quiet and kind and strong and very brave – no matter what they say – and he would have adored you. Let that be enough.

Forgive me.

But I owed it to the boy who had been my father to find out why he had died.

1945

I sat, one of a long row of women on wobbly benches in a freezing Nissen hut. Under our greatcoats, we were all naked except for our khaki knickers. Under each chair was a little jar of urine. What a waste of time. Heaven knows what it would take to test the urine of every demobbed servicewoman. I was pretty certain the country didn’t have resources on that scale. And why do it, anyway? Still, if that was what it took to get into civvie street …

When my turn came, I accidentally kicked the jar as I stood.

‘Oh, blast, now they’ll never let me go.’

‘Here, have some of mine, love,’ offered the woman next to me, tipping some from her full jar into my empty one. ‘Plenty more where that came from!’

A weary doctor listened to my chest, tested my reflexes, peeped into my knickers (and I
still
hadn’t found out what they were looking for) and passed me as fit.

In a chattering line, shrill as parrots, we filed into the clothing stores and handed in our kit. The stiff serge tunics were a bit more woman shaped than they had been when they were issued, the caps squashed into an amazing variety of non-regulation shapes. All along the long counter, women were dipping into the pockets and taking out nipped-off cigarettes, old bus tickets, cinema stubs, washbasin plugs (very desirable possessions), kirby grips, lighters made from polished brass ammunition cases, odd earrings. We were allowed to keep a pair of shoes. Useful, that, with so much still on coupons.

And that was that. Feeling oddly naked in a Utility frock, a hand-knitted cardigan and no hat, I hefted up my cardboard suitcase, collected my last ever railway warrant plus £12/10 and fifty-six coupons for civilian clothes (no baggy demob suit for us, thank goodness – but with a tailored costume costing £4/15, shoes around 25 shillings and a pair of stockings at ten bob, that wasn’t going to go far) and walked out of the gates. In my bag was a 14-day ration card and two weeks’ worth of sweets. I had fifty-six days’ leave to look forward to, plus an extra day for every month spent abroad.

I could go wherever I wanted for the first time in five years.

*   *   *

‘Well, darling,’ asked Grandmother after I’d been home for a few days. ‘And what are you going to do with yourself now?’

‘Do?’ I echoed, dully.

‘I hope you’re going to be sensible and stay at home. You’ve done quite enough gadding around lately.’

‘You sound as though I’d just spent a winter sunning myself on the Riviera.’

‘There’s no need for that! It hasn’t exactly been fun at home, while you’ve been globe-trotting,’ she remarked, acidly. ‘I suppose you have looked at your mother – actually looked? Five years of make-do-and-mend and growing vegetables have worn her out. She’s done night fire watch twice a week on top of the church tower. Every Thursday she’s pushed a trolley of tea and sandwiches for servicemen round Salisbury station. She’s organized village salvage drives, raised money for Spitfires, fed the pigs and chickens, cleaned her house, done her laundry – and mine – and kept a drunken husband out of trouble. Now … what are
you
going to do?’

Grandmother handed me the soap cage with a nearly threatening gesture and click-clacked on her neat little shoes out of the kitchen. I whisked the handled wire cage with its distasteful little bits of soap around in the washing-up water. The water went cloudy. It didn’t look as though it was going to shift much grease, but washing soda was like gold dust.

Grandmother certainly hadn’t changed. If anything, she seemed younger. She looked ravishing in slacks and, from behind, she could easily have been mistaken for a woman on the right side of forty, rather than nearly seventy. In many ways, she looked younger than her daughter-in-law.

She was right. In an odd sort of way, I’d had an easy war. I had to admit it. Cairo had been like the promised land. Good weather. Good food. Lights. Music. Dancing. Behind the lines, Normandy had been no worse than a wet Guide camp. The kindness and hospitality I’d enjoyed in Brussels had been delightful. And if digs at Mrs Granby’s hadn’t been exactly palatial, at least I’d had the consolation of knowing that I was doing interesting and important work. Not that salvage and fire-watching and canteen work weren’t important, of course. I mean … oh, dear, what did I mean?