Letters from Skye (4 page)

Please be careful. Last week, we had planes overhead. One dropped five bombs and more than a hundred incendiaries around Craigmillar Castle. Nothing on the city, thank God, but the planes go right above us. Two nights, crouched down in the neighbourhood shelter in my dressing gown, hearing the air-raid sirens and the growling engines and the rattle of the anti-aircraft guns, but not really knowing what was happening. It’s wearing on me. All I want is my Margaret by my side.

Please don’t make any decisions you’ll regret later. Please
don’t give away your heart without realizing it, because, my sweet girl, you may never get it back.

   Love,

   Mother

Plymouth

Friday, 5 July 1940

Mother,

You always told me to reach out and grab happiness with both hands. Other mums pushed their daughters towards university or factory work or pouring tea in a NAAFI canteen. You didn’t. You knew I’d be miserable. Instead, you found for me children needing an escort out to the country. I could escape the city just when it started to become crowded with pillboxes and Anderson shelters and home-guard exercises in the park. Those tromps in the Borders or the Highlands are pure happiness.

I never said that I accepted Paul’s offer. I told him I had to think on it. See? I’m not as rash as all that. But I’m
happy
, Mother. Just the way you always wish for me to be. I’ll be home soon.

   Love and kisses,

   Margaret

Edinburgh

9 July 1940

Dear Margaret,

Thinking is good. It’s what separates humans from cockroaches.

   Mother

Plymouth

Saturday, 13 July 1940

Dear Mother,

You’ll be happy to know, Paul is all patched and rested and back to serve Fair Britannia on the morrow. I’ll be starting to work my way north then, though I can’t promise to the efficiency of the rails these days.

   Love and kisses,

   Margaret

Edinburgh

Thursday, 18 July 1940

Paul,

Mother is furious at us. Well, at me, really. It’s preposterous! It’s not as if we did anything shocking. It’s just a ring, after all. A ring and a promise.

We’ve had a terrible row over it, though, so I’m up here on
the roof with this letter and no idea how to apologise. She said I was ridiculous for saying “yes” to the first boy who asked me. But then she said that, in war, happiness was hard to find. I told her
she
was the ridiculous one and she should make up her mind. What if the first boy to ask me
was
the one who made me happiest? Then she threw a spoon at me and said she just doesn’t have all the answers.

So I crawled onto the roof to stew. She finally leaned out of her bedroom window and said that the war unsettled her. She’d already been through one, but this war came with the constant edge of fear, the nights when the air-raid sirens sounded, and the nights when they didn’t. “War is impulsive,” she said. “Don’t spend the rest of your life looking for ghosts.”

I asked what on earth she meant, but she turned away and wouldn’t say a word. “You’re talking about my da, aren’t you?”

“I’ve told you before, there’s nothing you need to know about him.”

“And why not? He’s my da.”

You know it all, Paul. You’ve heard me rant and rant how she’s never said a word about my father. How she always deflects my questions and says the past is past. And I understand what she means. I do. She raised me alone; she wants me to be satisfied with that. To treasure the time we have together. But to not know where I came from or how I came to be … you know all the questions I have.

While she hovered in the bedroom window, I said all of this. She tried to pass it by with a joke. “The first volume of my life is out of print,” she’s fond of saying.

But this time I didn’t let her. I pushed back. Regrets? Ghosts?
She’s never talked like that before. “Why won’t you talk about him?” I asked. “What about him is so horrible that it makes you write him from your memory?”

I thought she’d pace and wring her hands, but she stood very still. “I have
never
forgotten him,” she finally said. “But I’ll remember for the both of us.” Her eyes shone as she left.

I can hear her rummaging around in the kitchen now. Attempting to cook is (unfortunately) her form of apology. Whatever she’s doing, it smells dreadful. I don’t even want to think about which vegetable she’s ruining right now.

I really should go in and tell her I’m sorry for calling her ridiculous. For even starting an argument at all. I should apologise for pushing her to tell me about my father, about the regrets, about the ghosts. I know she means well and is tired and just misses having me around. She’s doing her best. I do treasure our time together.

Maybe I can convince her to go for a walk. Still a couple of hours until sunset. We can walk down to Holyrood Park, climb amongst the gorse. Blether about nothing in particular. Or maybe she’ll be willing to talk now. I truly wonder …

Oh, goodness, Paul, I don’t even know what I meant to write there. I can hardly believe what’s happened. I heard the planes and just had time to tuck my notebook into my blouse before a bomb hit. Mother had written to me about all the recent air raids and the planes overhead, but I couldn’t imagine it. I know life is different for you; you’ve had far too many nights broken by planes and sirens. But for me … A bomb? On the street where I used to skip as a child?

I saw it fall.… It spun straight onto the pavement, right out
on the street. I ducked behind the dormer just in time. Rock and dirt kicked up everywhere. The cobbles were there one moment and the next were a smoking crater. I have no idea how I kept my balance, how I didn’t fall off the roof with the blast. There wasn’t even a siren.

I remembered Mother. The bedroom window had shattered, everything silent inside. I called her. I didn’t know how to get into the room, with all the jagged glass around the window. Inside, all was shambles. The bed had skidded right up against the far wall, the night table on its side. A paving stone, flung through the window with perfect trajectory, had torn through a section of wainscoting. Papers fluttered white in the sunset-drenched room.

I called again and then I saw her shadow in the doorway. She stepped in slowly, her blue satin slippers toeing away the papers. But she didn’t come all the way to the window. She just stood, staring at the splintered wainscoting and the snowfall of paper.

I reached through and yanked down one of the blackout curtains. I wrapped my hand and knocked out the glass around the windowsill so I could climb in.

Mother still didn’t say a word. She dropped to the floor and pulled armfuls of paper onto her lap. I bent and picked one up. A letter, yellowed and creased, addressed to someone named Sue. And, because it sounds so much like you, Paul, I copy it here.

Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A.

October 31, 1915

Dear Sue,

I know you’re angry; please don’t be. Talk of “duty” and “patriotism” aside, how could you really expect me to pass up on this, the ultimate adventure?

My mother’s been floating around the house, red-eyed and sniffling. My father still isn’t speaking to me. And yet I feel as if I’m doing something right. I messed up in college. I messed up at work. Hell, I even messed up with Lara. I was beginning to think there was no place in the world for a guy whose highest achievement included a sack full of squirrels. Nobody seemed to want my bravado and impulsivity before. You know this is right for me, Sue. You of all people, who seem to know things about me before I myself do. You know this is right.

I’m leaving tomorrow for New York and have to trust my mother to mail this letter. When you read it, I’ll be on a ship somewhere in the Atlantic. Even though we get a reduction on our fares if we sail the French Line, Harry and I are bound for England. He has Minna over there waiting for him. And I … I have you. Like knights of old, neither of us can head off to fight without a token from our love to tuck into our sleeve.

I’ll be landing in Southampton sometime in the middle of November and will be going up to London. Sue, say that you’ll meet me this time. I know it’s easy for me to ask, far easier than it is for you to leave your sanctuary up
on Skye. Don’t let me go off to the front without having touched you for the first time, without having heard your voice say my name. Don’t let me go off to the front without a memory of you in my heart.

   Yours … always and forever,

   Davey

“These are mine.” Mother grabbed at other letters fluttering around. “You have no right to read them.”

I asked what they were, who Sue was, but she didn’t answer. She sat there with wet eyes, fumbling hands piling up the yellowing paper. Outside the windows, the air-raid sirens finally started.

“Go,” she said finally, holding the envelopes tight. “Just go.”

With the sounds of the sirens and the ack-ack guns, I stumbled from the house towards the air-raid shelter. I knew I had to finish the letter to you, that there was no one else I could tell about this evening. About how none of it seemed real.

I’ve never kept secrets from my mother. You know that, Paul. But as I hunkered down in that shelter, with my notebook still tucked in my blouse and the letter in my hand, I wondered what she’d kept from me.

   Margaret

Chapter Five
 
Elspeth

Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A.

June 17, 1913

Dear Sue,

I am finished!

I’m sorry it took me so long to respond, but I was waiting to be able to tell you that I’m completely and utterly done. Ah, what a luxury to sit down to write to you without a stack of books glaring at me from my desk! Instead, I’m sitting in my parents’ house, window open, warm summer breeze puffing out the lace curtains, with nothing more malevolent glaring at me than the
Chicago Tribune
. Just to lean back, sip some cool lemonade, and write to you—extravagance itself!

You’ll be quite proud of me, I think. I came clean with my father. You may wonder how I worked up the courage to tell him. By barely scraping by in my classes! He took one look at
my grades and sniffed. “How do you expect to get into medical school with grades like this?” he asked. “I don’t expect to,” I said. “I don’t expect to nor do I care.” He nearly choked on his morning coffee. “What do you mean, you don’t care?” “Exactly that, Father. I’ve never wanted to go to medical school. And it’s too late now to convince me otherwise.” He left the table with a thud of his chair and hasn’t spoken to me since. I think it’s only through my mother’s good graces that he hasn’t thrown me out on my ear.

My sister is here staying at my parents’ for a time this summer, making it easier to handle my father’s sulks, and I’m able to spend more time getting to know my niece, Florence. There’s a spot in the sitting room in the back of the house where the sunlight falls through the window just so in the afternoon. Florence and I will sit in that circle of sunlight and watch each other. When she gets tired of staring at me with those great blue eyes of hers, she’ll crawl onto my lap, tug on my suspenders, and beg, “Unc’ Day! P’ease, story?” And how can I resist such a plea? I tell her a fairy story and watch her eyes grow large at the frightening parts and turn up in the corners when she is laughing. It is marvelous to see the raw play of emotions on the face of a child. No trying to conceal any feeling or disguise one emotion as something else. We are going to be great friends, my niece and I, I can already tell.

Another bit of news: I have a girl I’ve started stepping out with. Lara. She’s a real nice girl, in college studying German literature. We met at a party, one of those socially tedious events one is expected to attend on occasion. I went to please my mother. Lara and I met and, after talking, realized that she
“knew” my parents. One of those convoluted acquaintances—you know, where her mother plays bridge with my mother’s best friend’s aunt Vivian, or some such nonsense. Whatever the acquaintance, it means my mother approves of her.

So, see, life is going wonderfully for me right now. Two girls in my life, a room all to myself, and NO MORE EXAMS!

Oh, the night I dropped the squirrels in the Women’s Building was a classic! Can you think of a much better combination than a perilous climb, a gang of displaced squirrels, and shrieking women in various states of undress? I must say, though, these escapades don’t often end in hospital visits. But it’s the possibility they
could
that makes the pranks so tempting to me.

That’s really where my nickname came from. The guys, they call me “Mort,” morbidly convinced that my antics will lead me straight to the mortuary one day. Splendid fellows, aren’t they?

How are things on Skye for you, Sue? You must be happier with the snow gone. I can already picture you cheerfully tromping all over the hills in your trousers and hat, notebook tucked under one arm, pencil stuck behind an ear. Ah, summer!

By the way, you didn’t guess my age correctly. I’m already twenty-one! Now you can see why I strove to grow that mustache.…

   Relaxed, relaxing,