Separation, The (38 page)
Authors: Dinah Jefferies
Everyone watched as he bent to pick up the child.
The little boy hugged him, and beamed at Lydia.
‘Mem, my mother said never to tell. This is my papa.’
Fleur gulped and Emma put a comforting hand on her shoulder. Veronica unlocked the front door.
‘I think I’ve heard enough,’ she said, in a stiff voice. ‘I suggest we all go inside. I don’t pretend to understand any of this, but it’s clear there’s quite some explaining to do.’
Three years I lived without my mother. Now, when we talk about the lost years, we put on brave faces, and say at least it made us stronger.
Mum watches us constantly, can’t allow a moment’s inattention. In a locket round her neck, she has a photo of me and one of Fleur, never takes it off, except in the bath. When I look at my picture, I see a kid with an observant face, a lopsided grin, and a smear on the end of her nose. Hard to remember who I was then, but sometimes I feel I can stare myself back into the past, make it live again. And there we’d be, Mum, Fleur and me, and it would still be only 1955, and none of this would ever have happened.
When we went into Dad’s house that first day Mum got back, I’d never seen her so angry. In front of us all, she threatened Dad with the police: for crimes of fraud and abduction, she said. Fleur burst into tears and Veronica, white-faced, managed to calm her down. Dad said she had no evidence, but Mum refused to let us stay the night with him. I think he was bluffing about the evidence thing, because in return for Mum not going to the police, he let us go to a hotel with her. Fleur took some persuading, mainly by Veronica, but the boy and I were excited. Mum has permanent custody of Fleur and me, and Maz chose to live with us. The truth is, Mum’s heart wasn’t in a police investigation. We’ve been through enough, she told me afterwards, and it would be awful for Fleur if our father went to prison.
We don’t let Fleur or Maz see the anger we both still feel when they go to stay with Dad some weekends. I can’t forgive Dad for
what he did, and neither can Mum. She is coldly polite with him when he drops Fleur and Maz back. I get the feeling he wants to talk, but she doesn’t. The saddest thing is Veronica left the day we all got back together. It’s been three months and nobody has seen her since. Perhaps Maz was the final straw? Anyway, Dad’s lonely, and maybe that’s punishment enough.
After Mum met her own mother for the first time, she came back to the hotel with red-rimmed eyes, but also with a big smile and the keys to Kingsland in her hand.
I watch her lay the fire in my grandmother’s big sitting room, twisting the newspaper, adding the pinecones and the kindling. She’s still beautiful, in a way more so, but less shiny, and her hair, held up in a large tortoiseshell clip, no longer tumbles down. It’s already May, but Mum’s cold.
She gets up from kneeling by the fire, her cheeks red, and sees us waiting there.
‘Mum, this is Billy. You saw him at Dad’s.’
‘I remember. Hello, Billy. I won’t shake hands.’ She wipes her dirty hands on a rag.
‘Billy’s group is playing at the Mecca Ballroom, in Birmingham. On Saturday.’
‘Oh?’
‘We’re only a support but it’s a great opportunity,’ Billy says.
‘I’m sure.’
‘Anyway, Mum, thing is, Billy’s asked me to go with him.’
‘Not on the motorbike, Mrs Cartwright. She’ll come in the van with me.’
‘Oh, I don’t think so,’ Mum says, and starts towards the kitchen, where Fleur’s baking a cake. ‘She’s far too young.’
‘Mum!’
‘Emma?’
We stare at each other motionless. This isn’t the first time she’s forgotten. I pull a face. ‘Mum, I’m
fifteen
.’
She looks at me with expressionless eyes, as if she’s trying to
remember something, then nods her head and her eyes grow damp. ‘So you are.’
‘So can I go?’
‘Well, even fifteen is quite young.’
‘My dad’s driving the van if that helps,’ Billy adds.
‘Okay, I give in. As long as she’s not back too late.’
Billy and I grin at each other, as Mum goes to help Fleur. I’m so excited I jump up and down like a child of ten.
‘I thought you were
fifteen
,’ he says, imitating my tone of voice, and looking me straight in the face.
I thump him.
Nothing can lessen these days of hope. It’s great to be young, to be going to the Mecca Ballroom with Billy, and to have my mother back. The invisible thread, one end attached to my mother’s heart, and the other to mine, never did break. I always knew it wouldn’t. And more than anything, more than the discovery of my grandmother, more than living at Kingsland Hall, that’s what’s precious.
Only if I lie spread-eagled on the floor do I travel back to when I was eleven. I close my eyes and I’m lying on my tummy again, counting the holes in the floorboards of our bedroom in Malacca. Malaya is such a long time ago and so far away, but I’ll always remember the clouds that looked like puffs of sherbet lemon, and the ribbons of scent that wound round the trees at the bottom of the garden.
No matter where life will take me, and even if one day I no longer hear the sounds, deep down Malaya will always be there, beating at the heart of me. It was where I was a child, before I knew that life could go so badly wrong. And it’s where the smell of lemongrass will stay with me for ever, that and the sound of my mum singing in the morning, a bird of paradise flower clashing with her auburn hair.
The Separation
is a work of fiction, set against the background of the Emergency that took place in Malaya during the 1950s. While the characters are imaginary, and no resemblance to any person living or dead is intended, there are resonances and echoes from my own childhood spent in Malaya at that time.
Parts of the novel were inspired by family stories; I did, for example, stumble into a waxworks museum as my character Emma does, and I saw exactly what she sees, and my mother did indeed sing at a hotel in Singapore. Among other memories, I recall swimming in a natural plunge pool on a rubber plantation in the Johore area, guns piled high on the hall table when the rubber planters came into town for a party, and the colour and noise of Chinatown where I was taken by my Chinese amah, Ah Moi. I remember the houses on stilts, the lizards that left their tails behind, and so much more of the smells, sounds and sights of Malaya.
My mother’s memories, her memoirs, and her wonderful photograph albums were the inspiration for many of the locations in the book, particularly Jack’s plantation, Harriet Parrott’s house, Cicely’s house and the Mental Hospital. YouTube provided brilliant footage of old colonial interiors, useful details of daily life on a plantation, and also gave me insight into domestic life in Singapore and Malacca. The Colonial Film catalogue produced a wealth of moving images about the British Empire.
My father worked in the development and restoration of postal systems and we moved eight times in as many years. He didn’t talk much about his work, but he loved Malaya and his memories left me with a lasting impression of his life there, and were partly responsible for the way I formed my picture of the jungle, the Malay villages and the resettlement camps.
As well as the Internet, Amazon and Google gave me access to a world of books, blogs and memoirs. I am grateful to them all for so many facts about the country that was Malaya, and in particular Malacca, where I was born. I feel lucky to have been born in such an extraordinary place, and at such an extraordinary time. I’m certain its influence remains with me. Much of Malacca, as it is in the novel, was based on memory, so any errors are down to my own hazy version of the past. I felt I wanted to keep that quality as I described it, and resisted visiting modern-day Melaka for that reason. I have kept the spellings of places in Malaya as they were during the 1950s.
The story of Lydia, Alec, Emma and Fleur is not, however, my own family’s story. We were never separated, but all came back to England together on the kind of ship Emma sails on, though our journey was in 1957, when the Suez Canal was still blocked. The ship scene is based very much on my own memories of finding my sea legs in a storm during that journey.
The ghost stories and tales that Emma remembers were inspired partly by stories I found on the Internet, and partly from the following books:
- Malay Magic
by Walter Skeat (Macmillan, London, 1900). - Shaman, Saiva and Sufi
by R. O. Winstedt (first published in Singapore, 1925; reprinted by Forgotten Books, 2007). - The Book of Chinese Beliefs
by Frena Bloomfield (Arrow Books, London, 1983).
For Lydia, facing what she has to, I drew on my own experience of being a parent coping with the death of a child. It is something that never really goes away. So finally, I’d like to include a poem here, written by my then brother-in-law. Of all the wonderfully kind cards and letters I received at the time, these words still have the power to bring a lump to my throat. I hope that some of the words in this novel might do the same.
Next time we see you coming,
like a one-legged man,
we shall all be looking
for the limb that is not there.
With our smiles
half-way to his laughter,
next time we see you coming
we shall be watching for his grin.
But when we hear you talking –
proud, like a one-legged man,
refusing to stumble –
it is we who shall limp with your pain,
and there will be only peace
when we notice
quietly gathering round your chair –
our one-legged man –
ready to catch you
when, as you must, you fall,
there will be only peace
when we notice
quietly gathering round your chair
the fourteen shadows
of the sunlight of his years.
Dick Holdsworth, 1985
I’d like very much to thank the following people whose help has been invaluable in bringing this book to publication. My old friend, the author Gillian White, for her generous encouragement right from the start. Vanessa Neuling for reading the first drafts and for her perceptive and clever feedback. My agent, Caroline Hardman of Hardman & Swainson, for taking the book on with such enthusiasm and commitment, and for her expert advice. To all the team at Viking/Penguin, especially publishing director Venetia Butterfield, and my editor Elspeth Sinclair, who have both been fantastic. Nicole Wotherspoon for sharing her memories of living in Malaya in the 1950s, and for her recollections of life in an English boarding school. Sophie Endersby for information about inheritance law at that time, and for what to do about death certificates when the bodies are missing. My mother for her memories and photograph albums. And my lovely supportive family, young and old, especially my long-suffering husband, Richard, who always believed in the book and who enjoyed helping me with the research. Thank you all.
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