The Lost Soldier (13 page)

“Ah, but it was a different world then,” Gran reminded her. “Nice girls didn’t get pregnant. She may have been only the daughter of a small farmer, but my mother had been very strictly brought up. I was her child of shame. To begin with I think they tried to pretend my mother had been married and widowed almost immediately, but the truth came out after the war, and though they stuck to the story for a while, no one believed them and of course there was no marriage certificate to wave in the faces of the gossip-mongers.”

“Oh Gran, how awful,” cried Rachel. “Your poor mother, and poor you.”

“It’s why we moved into the town,” Gran said. “I must have been about five or six when we left. My mother worked in a pub as a barmaid and a room went with the job. They let her bring me, but I was expected to help with the chores as soon as I was able.”

“What, at five years old?” exclaimed Rachel.

“I could dust and polish brasses, and I learnt to iron very early on.” She smiled, “Stood me in good stead when I wanted to leave home later. I managed to get work in a big house as an under-housemaid.”

“But what happened to your mother?”

Gran’s face hardened. “She got ill and died. No one would tell me what happened and I still don’t know for sure. In retrospect I imagine part of her job was being nice to the landlord, you know? I hated him and I was afraid of him too. He was fat and greasy and smelly. I hated him near me. He used to poke his finger at me. It was just like a grubby sausage.”

Rachel had an instant visual image of the landlord and it made her shudder.

“I was very young,” Gran went on, “but I shall never forget his hands… fat pudgy hands with black round the fingernails. The memory still makes me shudder.” For a moment she paused, her eyes resting in the middle distance, then she smiled at Rachel. “Anyway, one evening my mother came upstairs groaning. We only had one bed, which we shared, and I was already in it, but she lay down beside me. I remember I was very scared, but she said she’d be all right soon. Of course she wasn’t, and I realised there was blood seeping into the bed covers. I started to scream and eventually the landlord’s wife came in to tell me to shut up. When she saw my mother and the blood and the mess, she started shrieking and fetched her husband. They carried me out of the room and I never saw my mother again. Nobody ever told me what had happened to her, all I knew was that she was dead. I can only assume she’d been to a back-street abortionist.”

Rachel reached out her hands to take her grandmother’s, her plate pushed away, unfinished, forgotten. “And you went back to your grandparents again?”

“My grandmother came and fetched me,” Gran said. “I know she didn’t want me in the first place, but this latest must have been an added scandal. My mother was buried in the churchyard at Charlton, and after that she was never mentioned again.”

“Gran, how awful!” Rachel was horrified. “Their own daughter!”

“I think they had long ceased to think of her as that,” Gran said quietly. “They took me in and fed me until I was old enough to go into service, and that’s what I did, without a backward glance.”

“Where?” asked Rachel. “Where did you work?”

“In Belstone St Mary,” said Gran, “at The Grange. It was a relief to get away, particularly from my grandfather… and I expect they were relieved to see me go.”

“Why from your grandfather?” asked Rachel, but even as she asked she realised she already knew the answer. “He didn’t…?”

“Not in the way you mean,” Gran replied. “Nothing specific, just touching and, well, I was always uncomfortable when I was left alone with him, and so I tried not to be.”

“Did your grandmother know? Surely she knew. Didn’t she realise what was going on?”

Gran smiled ruefully. “I’m sure she did, but she turned a blind eye. Things like that were never admitted, you know. Certainly not in a respectable household. Most men were masters in their own homes, and their wives seldom went against them.” She sighed. “I’ve often wondered if that was really why my mother moved away again; whether he had abused her as well. Perhaps she was afraid for me. It’s only a guess, we shall never know. Suffice it to say that I was delighted to escape into service in the relative safety of The Grange.”

“Dear, dear Gran. How awful for you.” Rachel felt the tears in her eyes. How different from the way Gran had taken her in; had loved her and made her feel precious. Gran had tried in every way to be father and mother to Rachel. She had encouraged her in everything she did, in school and out. She had run side lines on cold winter afternoons watching Rachel play hockey, turned out for parents’ evenings, sat through school plays and concerts and she had continued to work for long after she should have retired so that Rachel could go to university. What a contrast, Rachel thought to the grudging home provided for Gran by
her
grandparents.

“But Gran, why are you telling me all this now, after all this time? I mean, well what’s brought all this on?”

Gran shrugged. “I don’t know, really,” she said. “Maybe your article.”

“My article? About Charlton Ambrose? Why?”

“Well, reading all about the village and its problems made me look back.” She smiled ruefully: “When you get to my age there’s nowhere much else to look. Anyway, your article decided me. There’s something I’ve been considering giving you for quite a while, and I think perhaps now is the time for you to have it. I want to give it to you myself, not leave it for you to find after I’m dead, because I want you to understand where it comes from. If you go into my bedroom you’ll find an old biscuit tin in the cupboard by my bed. Please could you get it for me?”

Rachel went to fetch the tin, thinking as she went of Cecily and her biscuit tin, and smiling, wondered if all old ladies kept their treasures in biscuit tins. She found the tin, tied up carefully with tape, and carrying it back into the sitting room, put it in Gran’s lap. Gran’s arthritic fingers struggled for a moment with the tape and then she passed it back to Rachel. “You open it,” she said.

“These knots are tight,” said Rachel, struggling as well. “When did you last have this open?”

“I don’t know, about fifty years ago, I suppose.”

“Fifty years!” Rachel echoed, amazed. She had been about to suggest that they cut the tape, but now decided to persevere with the knots. Eventually she began to work them loose and at last the tape fell away and she could open the tin. Before she did so, she looked across at her grandmother and asked quietly, “What’s in here, Gran?”

“Letters and a diary. I used to think that when I was gone and you were another generation away from those concerned, you could publish them as a book. Telling people how it really was, but I think perhaps they will be more use to you now, while you’re trying to save the Ashgrove.”

“The Ashgrove?” Rachel was intrigued.

“I don’t know. Have a look. I may be quite wrong. I haven’t read everything in there, none of the letters. I felt they were too private, but I did read the diary, that didn’t seem so much of an intrusion.”

“But won’t I be intruding too?”

“Perhaps, and if you feel you are, then you can stop, but I think you may well find the answer to the Ashgrove in them, and saving it may be a justification for the intrusion.”

Rachel opened the old tin and carefully lifted out the contents. There were several packets of letters and an old exercise book bound with hard covers. She opened the book and looked at the first page. There in faded pencil it said,
This is the diary of Molly Day. Extremely Private.

Rachel closed it again and looked at the letters. Each packet was tied up with the same sort of tape that had secured the tin. The letter on the top of the first packet was addressed to
Miss Molly Day
at a convent in France, and the one on the top of a second packet to
Pte Thomas Carter
.

“Was Molly Day your mother?”

Gran nodded

“But how did you get these, Gran?” Rachel asked. “I mean, if your mother was disowned…?”

“I found them when my grandmother died, during the second war. I was the only one left and I went down to clear the house. My grandfather had been dead for years and the farm gone long since, but my grandmother lived in a cottage on the estate and it had to be cleared immediately when she died. This tin was in the attic. She must have found it after my mother died and kept it hidden, her last link with her daughter.” Gran gave a sad little laugh. “I nearly threw it away unopened,” she said, “there was so much junk up in that attic, but something made me look inside. When I realised what was there, I just closed the tin up again and took it home with me. It was days before I could bring myself to open it again.”

“But why?” Rachel was fascinated. “Didn’t you want to find out about your mother and father? I mean I assume Private Tom Carter was your father.”

“I wasn’t sure,” admitted Gran. “I had my own life by then. I’d changed my name when I went into service, broken with my past life, and I wasn’t at all sure I wanted to look back again.” She sighed. “I knew there was something wrong about my parents, but I didn’t know what. I was twenty-six, newly married, and at last somewhat established in the world. I had struggled for all those twenty-six years in one way or another, and I was afraid that these voices from the past would rock the boat. I didn’t tell John about them. I was so afraid there might be something that would make him think less of me. He’d already taken the bold step of marrying a girl who was illegitimate, a brave thing to do even in 1941.”

“So, if you couldn’t tell Grandpa about finding the tin, what did you do with it?”

“I hid it as well. When he went away to sea, and I was left on my own in London, I finally got it out again, and that’s when I read the diary.”

Rachel picked up the exercise book again and looked at it. The writing inside was rather childish, a pencilled scrawl.

“Don’t read it now,” Gran said quickly. “You need to take your time.”

Rachel replaced the diary in the box. “And the letters? Did you never read them… any of them?”

“No. They were not mine to read.”

“And are they mine?” Rachel scanned her grandmother’s face to try and discover her true thoughts about the letters, knowing if the choice had been hers she would probably have been consumed by curiosity and read them.

“That’s for you to decide. They are your inheritance, part of your history. For me they were too close, even though I’d never known my father and scarcely remembered my mother, but for you, eighty years on… well, they are a piece of social history. Feel free to read them, there’s no one who’ll be hurt by them now, whatever they say.”

Rachel said, “I’ll think about it.” She placed everything back in the tin and carefully re-tying the tape set it aside.

“The rector of Charlton Ambrose lent me a book yesterday,” Rachel went on, “a history of the parish, by another rector, called Henry Smalley. He seems to have been rector for quite some time. Do you remember him?”

Her grandmother thought for a moment and said, “Well, there certainly was a rector, he could have been called Smalley. I don’t remember going to church much, until after my mother died. After that I had to go every week with Grandma. I remember the rector always seemed a very sad man, but he was always kind to me, he probably was to all the children. I don’t think he had any of his own. Sorry, Rachel, but I really can’t remember his name.

“Probably the same man,” Rachel said. “He wrote the book in about 1930, so I assume he was still there then. It doesn’t matter, I just wondered, that’s all.”

When she left Cotswold Court later that afternoon, Rachel went straight home, poured herself a proper drink and curled up on the sofa. The biscuit tin sat on the table, still tied with tape, waiting for her. Even as she reached for it, her mobile buzzed beside her to announce the arrival of a text message. She flicked the switch.
Hope you gave the grandmother my love.

Rachel stared. A message from Nick. How on earth had he got her mobile number? She had switched her phone off while she was at Gran’s, she usually did, and only put it back on again when she reached home. However, she had too much seething in her brain to think about Nick Potter now, so she ignored the message and switched the phone off again, tossing it back into her bag. Then she took hold of the waiting biscuit tin and untied the tape.

This is the diary of Molly Day

Monday 4th October 1915

Today we set off on our adventure, Miss Sarah and me and I have decided to keep a journal of how we go on, to tell our adventures to the village when we get home. Squire came with us to the station and as we left he put a guinea in my hand… a whole guinea… and he said, “Look after Miss Sarah for me, Molly, and make sure she doesn’t get into mischief.” And I said, “Lord, sir, I can’t tell Miss Sarah what to do!” And he smiled and said, “No, nor can anyone, but look after her all the same.”

We went by train to London. It was a cold day, and London was very big and dirty. When we were on the train it was as if we were in London long before we got to Paddington station. I’ve never seen nothing like London with all its traffic. There were motors everywhere as well as trams, and people, hundreds of people. Some officers helped us find a cab, and we went to Carver Square near the British Museum where Miss Sarah’s auntie, Squire’s sister lives. There’s trees there in a sort of garden in the middle. I didn’t know there’d be trees in London, I thought it was just houses. We are to stay here for a few days before we go to France. Her auntie, Lady Horner is a very nice lady. They’ve given me a room to myself on the servants’ floor, and I eat in the servants’ hall. There’s lots of food and it is very good. They talk different here, even the servants, so I am going to try to talk posh like them so’s not to disgrace Miss Sarah. I have nothing to do but look after Miss Sarah, and at present that takes no time at all. We were very tired so we went to bed early, but it took me ages to get to sleep I was that excited to be here. That’s when I wrote this, about the first day of my adventure.