Last Telegram (31 page)

“Mum was ill and at first it took all my energy to nurse her. When she died, I fell into a black hole for a while. Eventually I pulled myself together and went to a counselor. Cath and I met in the waiting room—she had this crazy idea she could be cured of women. Hah.” Gwen laughs in that familiar stagey way. “We soon put paid to that. The therapist was rubbish, but Cath soon healed my depression.”

She pauses and smiles at the memories. “As time went by, I thought about you less and less, and after a while realized that I had forgiven you, after all. And now all I remember is how much I loved you.”

Her words fill the silent room and wrap themselves around me like a balm. My shoulders relax, and the pains in my legs are easing. After a bit, she squeezes my hand and the spell is broken. Before long, we are cackling like a couple of crazy old witches over some long forgotten joke when the others come back from the garden.

“So who's this handsome young fellow?” Gwen says, peering up at him.

“The ninth generation of Verners,” I say. “Don't you recognize the Huguenot genes?”

“Simon Merrison,” he says, bending to shake her birdlike hand in his great paw. “Lily's son. Very pleased to meet you.” He sits down beside her in the pool of sunshine filtering through the dusty panes of the French windows.

“And this is my granddaughter, Emily Merrison,” I say.

Gwen looks at her with that intense gaze I remember so well. “What a beautiful girl. The image of your gran when she was your age, Emily.”

Emily blushes at the compliment, just as I used to.

“I recall a Merrison,” Gwen says, turning a quizzical gaze to me. “Michael, wasn't it? Yarn merchant from the Midlands somewhere. The one with the curly hair. You married him in the end?”

I nod, tears pricking the back of my eyes as I recall the photos in the funeral slide show of that tall, confident young man with the almost violet eyes, who loved Battenberg cake.

“Good-looking boy, I always thought. Didn't he go to Syria or someplace and send us back that troublesome yarn?” she says.

“He came to Westbury a few weeks after VE day and we got married in 1947,” I say, ignoring her mention of troublesome yarn. “We were married for nearly fifty-three years—very happily.”

“My grandpa,” Emily says fondly. “He was a lovely man.”

“The kindest man on earth,” I say. “Absolutely the best husband anyone could have wished for.”

“I take it from the past tense that he's not alive?”

“He died earlier this year,” I say. “But my son and his wife and their two wonderful children have moved in with me to The Chestnuts. I'm a lucky woman.”

“Ah, The Chestnuts,” she sighs. “I lived there too, you know, for a short time,” she says to Emily and Simon. “Such a fine house. Those wonderful Constable views.”

“The views haven't changed,” he says. “The house has central heating and a few other mod cons, but otherwise it's much as it was.”

“The tennis court?”

“That's gone, I'm afraid. We needed space for more car parking.”

“And the kitchen garden? The smell of gooseberries warmed in the sun always takes me back.”

“Sorry, that too.”

She sighs wearily, and turns to me. “And did brave brother John come home safely?”

“Yes, he did, but thin and looking terribly aged,” I say. “He and Vera finally got married just before Christmas '45, which perked him up a bit, and he worked at the mill for a while. But he couldn't bear it. After all those years of being cooped up, he was desperate for wide-open spaces. He started volunteering for the local nature reserve, then got a full-time job as a warden. Badly paid, but he loved it. Stayed there till he retired.”

“Is John still alive?” Gwen asks.

“No, he died five years ago. And Vera got dementia, sadly, spent her last few years in a home. I couldn't manage looking after her myself.”

“By God, old age is not for the faint-hearted,” she says, and we laugh in mutual sympathy.

“So you ended up running the mill single-handed, after all?”

“You always said I had management potential.”

Gwen smiles. “You remembered.”

“Mum was an excellent managing director,” Simon says. “Highly respected by everyone in the business.”

“You didn't believe me at first, did you?” she says drily. “But you proved my point in the end.”

I take the photograph album out of my bag and we hand it around, exclaiming happily at shared memories. It is still hard to believe that somehow, wonderfully, I can face them without flinching, even welcome them. The ghosts have been outed, as Emily said the other day about a corrupt politician. It seems appropriate; they're better out than in.

“How's business?” Gwen asks, handing back the album.

Simon tells her about the ups and downs of the past few decades: rapier machines that have done away with shuttles and weave at twenty times the speed, the opening up of Chinese raw silk supplies, the decline of the tie and menswear trade, the royal wedding dresses they have woven. And the success of a new business: the silk furnishings trade, reintegrated into the firm in 1980 after splitting away in a Verner brothers' feud a century ago.

She listens intently, but I can see the effort of fighting the pain is draining the animation from her face. We will have to leave soon and it is unbearable to contemplate. I know that I will never see her again.

Then Emily says, “We forgot the book, Gran. It's in the car, I'll go and get it.”

She comes back and helps Gwen unwrap the parcel. On the book jacket is a black-and-white photograph of Father, standing proudly with one of the new power looms they had just installed in the late '20s, with Jim Williams beside him.

“How wonderful, I'd forgotten about Harold's book. How did you get it published?”

“Simon and I, we finished writing it together,” I say. “Emily typed it into the computer and scanned all the photographs so we could get it printed as part of Verners' two hundred and fiftieth anniversary celebrations.”

She's turning the pages, looking at the photographs, touching the small samples of silk pasted into the index. But she has missed the frontispiece. I lean over to open it, and she reads out loud what I have written there: “To Gwen, who taught me about warp and weft, and helped me through the dark times. See page 122.” She turns to the page, and there is the photo of the two of us standing outside the double doors at the front of Old Mill, squinting into the sunshine. The caption reads: “Verners' wartime management team, Lily Verner and Gwen Collins, in 1943.”

“I don't remember that being taken. What a pair of scruffs,” she says, laughing, showing it to Cath. “Whatever was I doing in those dreadful turn-ups?” She closes the book and turns to me, more seriously. “But we did the business, didn't we?”

“We definitely did the business. Thanks largely to you, we held it together and did the business.”

As we start to leave, Cath helps her to her feet and I totter over to embrace her. I feel the bones beneath her skin, the frail arms that weakly hug me. When I put my lips to it, her cheek feels like parchment, but is warm with life.

She whispers, “I'm so glad you came. Of course I forgive you. I just hope you can forgive yourself.”

Because my throat is clogged with sadness, I just say, “I love you.”

The girl pulls over a plastic chair and sits down, tucking her long legs under the hospital bed. The old woman's hands, brown mottled skin draped loosely over visible bones, are neatly arranged across her chest. As the girl takes one into her own hand, she is surprised by its warmth. She looks intently into the inert gray face, its closed eyes, the slack lips moving with each shallow breath.

“Gran? Can you hear me? I've got two very important things to tell you. Are you listening?”

There is no response from the bed, but she carries on.

“First of all, you know Stefan's Hay Camp note you gave me? Dad took it to get it valued and it's worth thousands! Amazing. He says I should pay for Uni with it, but I'm going to keep it with the rings to remember him by, like you said. And pass it on to my grandchildren. Now, this is the really important thing, so listen carefully.”

With her other hand the girl unfolds the heavy cream bond, with its neat print and official crest, and reads out loud:

Dear Miss Merrison,

Your enquiry about the deaths of Sgt. Stephen Holmes and his colleagues on or about 15th May 1944 has been passed to me by the Office for Information.

I can confirm that Sgt. Holmes, formerly of Royal Pioneer Corps, joined the Special Operations Executive in January 1944, and after a period of training, was one of twelve men selected for a mission to be parachuted into France as part of advance operations in preparation for the D-Day landings.

Regarding the accidents that killed Sgt. Holmes and the other men that night, there is no evidence of what caused them. One possibility is that the plane's altimeter was faulty, causing the pilot to fly too low at the drop points. This could have resulted in a miscalculation in timing for pulling the rip-cords, and thus landing too fast.

However, I can tell you that the parachutes used by paratroops such as the SOE operatives in 1944 were almost certainly not made of silk. By this point in the war, silk canopies were used only where cockpit space was very limited, i.e., for fighter pilots, but for all other purposes such as dropping paratroops, equipment, and supplies, parachutes of cotton and/or nylon had been in general use for some months.

I hope this information is of some use in your research.

The girl puts the letter down and looks into her grandmother's skeletal face. The eyes are still closed, sunk deep and purple in their sockets.

“You see? I was right. It
wasn't
your silk. Not your fault,” she whispers. “Please, Gran? Please tell me you can hear me.”

The room is silent except for the sigh of the old woman's breathing, the hum of the heating pipes, and the squeak of shoes on the linoleum outside.

And then the girl feels something. She cannot see them moving, but the bony fingers press almost imperceptibly into her own.

Is she imagining it?

No, she dismisses the thought.

She is sure of it.

The Last Telegram
probably never would have been written without the encouragement, thoughtful reading, and robust feedback of my tutor, Harriett Gilbert, on the MA in Creative Writing at City University in London and my fellow students, who continue to be a great support network. Simon Edge wisely encouraged me to write about my family background in silk weaving, and my great friend Anne Sherer Broom was a constant source of inspiration, not to mention her knowledge of all things Jewish, and her brilliant suggestion that I should read Arthur Miller's play,
All
My
Sons
.

Although the plot and all of the characters are entirely fictional, parts of the story are based on real events, and for this, I owe a great debt to the memories of three remarkable men. From my father, the late Peter Walters, I learned how they kept the mill going during the Second World War, when most others closed, by weaving parachute silk. The family had become increasingly concerned about the plight of their many Jewish friends and business colleagues in Europe, which prompted them to sponsor five German boys to travel to England and work at the mill. One of them, Roger Lynton, fell in love with a local girl and, after internment in Australia and fighting for the Allies in North Africa, returned to work at the mill, married, had a family, and lived a long and happy life. I also am indebted to the late Anthony Gaddum, formerly Upper Bailiff of the Worshipful Company of Weavers, who told me about the extraordinary mission undertaken by his father, Peter, to source vital silk supplies from the Middle East at the height of the war.

I am grateful to David and Julius Walters for hosting a memorable tea party for former parachute weavers at the mill, and to Freda Baker for organizing it. The memories I recorded that afternoon provided rich material. Richard Humphries, with his love of all things historic, marvelously produced an original wartime parachute burst testing machine, and Andy Cowley, Engineering Manager of Airborne Systems Ltd., provided invaluable technical information about wartime parachute manufacture.

My daughters Becky and Polly and my friend Mel Billowes read early drafts and gave helpful feedback, and other good friends and family members have provided unwavering encouragement, especially my husband, David, who has been consistently positive in believing that the book would, eventually, find a publisher.

Finally, huge thanks to the tireless work of Caroline Hardman, who recognized the early potential of the book and guided me toward developing it into a fully formed novel, and to Shana Drehs of Sourcebooks, who has turned that dream of publication into a reality.

1. Apart from Lily, did you have a favorite character? Which one? Why did that particular character appeal to you? What was it about that particular story line that drew you in?

2. To start with, Lily has little ambition or interest in silk but ends up managing a factory. How unusual do you think this was for a British woman in the first half of the twentieth century?

3. How does the character development of Lily tell us about the impact of war on attitudes to women working outside the home? Would this differ between the UK and the USA?

4. What does the novel tell us about the nature of grief and how we grieve?

5. Why do you think that Britain was initially reluctant to accept Jewish refugees when they already knew that they were being persecuted?

6. And why, having accepted the Kindertransport children, were they later treated so badly and deported as “enemy aliens”?

7. Discuss how you might have responded, in 1938 Britain, had you been working in a war supplies industry and discovered the boss's daughter was having an affair with a German fellow-worker.

8. Is Robbie a sympathetic villain? What made him the way he was? Identify the moments when we—and Lily—are able to feel sympathy for him. By the end of the book, can we find it in our hearts to forgive him?

9. What do the experiences of Stefan and other events in the book tell us about the wider impact on society of religious or racial persecution, and the refugee experience through the ages?

10. What does the novel tell us about the psychological corrosiveness of guilt? If you have read or seen the play
All
My
Sons
, what does
The
Last
Telegram
owe to Arthur Miller's exploration of this topic?

11. What difference does it make to Lily—and to the rest of the story—when Gwen admits that she is gay?

12. Even though Lily and her problems with the silk are entirely fictional, the author's inspiration was firmly rooted in real people and real events. What problems or difficulties can you imagine that this approach might create for an author?

13. Lily never really explains to herself why she lied to Robbie about the faulty silk, but can you identify the circumstances and reasons which led to that fateful lie?

14. Can a lie ever be considered morally defensible?

15. Whose fault was it that the silk was not up to the required standards? Michael? Bert? Gwen? Lily?

16. How are the present and past tense used in the novel? How does this contribute to your ease of reading and/or understanding?

17. The novel includes a lot of technical detail about silk weaving and parachutes. Did this add to your pleasure when reading it?

18. In the final scene, does Lily understand what her granddaughter tells her?