They Left Us Everything (22 page)

Written on hand-stitched paper, it details his many escapes, recaptures, and the distances he walked between prisons. We turn it over in our hands—amazed to think we’re touching something that George once touched in 1805. He was condemned to death but pardoned by Napoleon in 1813, and we find his handwritten safe-conduct passport, signed and stamped by Napoleon’s Minister of War.

But even more intriguing are the documents we find relating to George’s son, William—about whom I had known nothing. William eventually became a sea captain, like his father. On a voyage from Liverpool to Cape Town, in 1842, he disappeared off the coast of South Africa when he was only twenty-two years old. Official accounts claim he was “lost at sea,” but it’s a mysterious tale, and we find scores of original documents that cast doubt. We take a batch out to the verandah and read through them. There are copies of records from Lloyd’s Shipping Register, insurance claims, cargo lists, and, more importantly, family letters and eyewitness accounts.

On a foggy morning in March, 1843, a local eyewitness, walking along the beach on Saldanha Bay near Cape Town,
spots the 242-ton ship,
The Conservative,
foundering offshore with all its sails set. Two of its three rowboats—in good condition and “with not a drop of water in them”—have washed ashore. Suspiciously, however, the ropes on one of the boats appear to have been intentionally cut and … the third boat is missing. The eyewitness organizes a search party, but once on board ship, the party finds it curiously empty. There is no sign of a struggle, no dead bodies, no baggage, and no provisions except for “a piece of cold meat in the pantry and the men’s hammocks hanging forw’d.” They also find a woman’s petticoat.

A woman’s petticoat?

William is unmarried … I love this part!

Over the next three months a search party hunts for any bodies washed ashore along the coast, but none is ever found and eventually the whole crew is presumed lost at sea.

It seems odd to us now, in our age of fast travel and instant communication, that a family wouldn’t investigate further, but it appears from his letters that George accepted the disappearance of his son with resignation and despair. My imagination goes into overdrive and I find myself wondering. What if William was kidnapped? What if he was sold into slavery? What if we have Arabian cousins in Timbuktu? This is a slice of family history the grandchildren will love, and I put the letters aside to scan. I have a special file for these stories—anything that smacks of romance or mystery is going to be turned into another treasure book.

Chris shoulders through the screen door, his arms full of white plastic grocery bags.

“Where’d you find those?” asks Victor.

“In the back of the trunk room!”

As he dumps them on the wicker chair, fat beige envelopes and small blue airmail letters sift out onto the yellow cushion in the fading afternoon light.

“What are they?”

“Letters Mum and Dad wrote to each other … hundreds of them!”

The plastic bags are in the final stages of decomposition; they fragment into filmy confetti as we grab for their contents. The tiny white polka dots stick to our fingertips and cling with static to our clothes.

Robin flaps open a letter postmarked
NEW YORK CITY,
1942
.

“Here’s one that Mother wrote to Grandmother, telling how she met Father when the war started.”

Dearest Mum, I know you probably think I’ve lost my mind, but it’s only my heart!

“She writes that she’d been out dancing every night and was already in her nightclothes, but this British officer needed a blind date, so she and her roommate flipped a coin and Mother had to go.”

Alec came to the door in his Navy Lieutenant’s uniform and you know what he did? He handed me his cap! Can you beat that? So I threw it on the floor and said, What do you think I am—a hat rack?

We all burst out laughing—it sounded so like Mum.

Robin points to the sheet in his hand. “Yes, and here she writes that Father ‘looked so surprised!’”

“Wait a minute,” I say, “go back … she actually writes ‘Alec’ and not ‘Alex’?”

“Uh-huh.”

“That’s so funny. She got his name wrong from the beginning!”

“May I continue? This is a twenty-six-year-old American working girl falling for a British naval officer.”

“Confiding to her mother,” I point out with a twinge of envy.

We spent the weekend together and on Wednesday he asked me to marry him!

“Whoa … wait a minute …” Victor says. “Mum and Dad only knew each other for one week before they decided to get married?

Chris laughs. “That explains a lot!”

“Like why she hoped the American Red Cross would send her to England,” I say.

Robin continues reading:
These last 10 days have been worth anything that may happen in the future …

“That’s a good thing,” I say, wondering if all war brides felt that way.

From 1942 to 1946, Mum and Dad wrote to each other almost every day, and Mum wrote to her mother every week. Miraculously, hundreds of these letters got saved. Some are ten pages long. We’ve each got our laps full of airmail paper, trying to read and listen at the same time, interrupting each other—so typical.

Chris says, “Here’s one when Mum was stationed in Devon at Knightshayes Court, in the converted manor house of Lord and Lady Amory. She’s writing to Dad in Sumatra.”

I picture Mum in a grand hall with a marble fireplace and gilt-edged mirrors, now converted into a Rest Home for convalescing American Air Force pilots. Mum was in charge of entertainment.

“It’s typed on American Red Cross letterhead.”

“She took her typewriter to war?” I say.

“Along with her fur coat, high heels, and hot water bottle,” says Robin. “I remember she told me that.”

“I thought they were supposed to pack light … and take only what they could carry!”

“Uh-huh, those were the rules, but since when did Mother follow rules? She figured a troop ship would be full of men tripping over themselves to carry her luggage, and she was right—that’s exactly what happened. Especially since she was the only one wearing high heels!”

My darling Lackee: Ambo Sayo Baye Beenee! … Lord & Lady Amory were over last nite & I asked them WHY the British have such a custom of segregating the males & females at dinner parties? Women leave, while the men drink Port till they’re wheeled off unconscious to bed by their butlers. They’re known as “1, 2, or 3-bottle men” depending on their capacity …

“Hold that sentence!” says Robin. “I need more bourbon.” He heads indoors, tinkling ice cubes in his empty glass.

“I’ll be the two-bottle man!” I say, and follow him into the pantry for a new bottle of Pinot Grigio. When we return, Chris has flipped his page over.

“Mum’s back to the Battle of Britain now—she’s describing Germany’s invasion.”

Sir John said he went grouse shooting in Scotland & complained about the German strafing because they had to quit hunting for half an hour. He glanced at the newspaper headlines: “129 Shot Down!” & calmly remarked, “Hmmm—a bit more than we got grouse!”

“I reckon Mother was having a bit more fun than Father,” says Robin. “This one says Knightshayes Court even had its own golf course on the front lawn.”

“Here’s a nice, loving ending,” says Chris.

It is now late evening—peaceful & still—with only the singing of the birds & bleating of sheep to break the silence—and of course my longing for you which seems to reverberate from every distant hilltop.

“They were married by then—right?” asks Victor.

“Yep, but they didn’t really know each other.”

“Go back a page,” says Victor, “and reread that bit for Plum about Mum writing a book.”

“Mum wrote a book?”

“Not exactly …” Chris looks at me with a raised eyebrow. “She was delegating again—she gave Dad the title and told him to write it!”

Now that we’ve found all these letters, not to mention the bins and boxes of loose photographs, the task of clearing out the house feels much more daunting. There’s much more at stake—our whole family’s history. There’s no time to read them all. We’ve got to put them into some kind of order.

Robin and I buy hundreds of acid-free plastic sleeves, and over the next ten days he sleeves Dad’s historic documents in the playroom while I sleeve Mum’s letters in the dining room, sorting them into piles chronologically. We don’t separate the pages of letters; we slip the whole letter, plus the envelope if there is one (to preserve the postmark), into one sleeve. We’re focused and committed, working methodically in our separate rooms. Occasionally I hear Robin grunt, or slam a file drawer, but it feels like we’re working on an assembly line in a factory.

Each afternoon we take a break for a glass of wine on the verandah. I have a cigarette and Robin has a thin cigarillo. The smoke hangs in the hot humid air like a halo over my head and fights to escape the tangle of Robin’s grey beard. Then it drifts out over the railings into the garden as we reminisce about our childhood.

We both dress for dinner, as Mum and Dad would have done on special occasions. Well, not exactly … it’s more like we’re putting on plays in the basement fifty years ago. Instead of Dad’s tuxedo, Robin wears his short Scottish argyle jacket in Lovat blue that matches his eyes, his plaid kilt with its sporran, and his ivory-coloured kilt hose, cuffed at the knee with a fountain pen stuck in it. “The pen is mightier than the sword!” says Robin when I ask him what his pen is doing there.

Instead of Mum’s pale green satin evening dress, I wear Dad’s freshly cleaned British naval officer’s uniform—black, with gold braided stripes on the sleeves of the double-breasted jacket. It fits me perfectly. Dad was only twenty-eight years old when he last wore this.

We lay the table with care. Even though I’m using the thrift-store silverware, I remember Dad’s attention to detail: the proper number of forks and knives depending on what we’re serving; dessert spoons at the top facing left, forks underneath facing right unless our guest is left-handed (in which case they’re reversed); condiments in small glass bowls, each with a proper curved-handled spoon. The only things missing are the crested silver napkin rings—they’ve been locked away.

After dinner, Robin takes one of Dad’s gnarled wooden walking sticks, puts on his Scottish Glengarry cap with its ribbons hanging down the back, and we go for our evening hike. We walk with a bounce in our step—the “Family Stride”— as we march west along the lakefront, north on Navy Street, and back along the main street, inspecting Oakville as we used to do all those years ago with Dad. I can’t help looking for litter; the only difference now is that I don’t pick it up. But I still hear Dad’s voice: “Pick that up! Treat this town like your living room!”

One evening, as we’re walking onto the pier, three teenage girls in black puffy jackets, black tights, and Uggs on their feet pass us, stop, turn around, and run back.

“Excuse me,” they say to Robin, “but aren’t you somebody famous?”

“I might be!” he says as he bows courteously and tips his cap to them.

We walk on as they giggle and run away. I overhear words like “Gandalf!” and “the actor in
Harry Potter
!”

Robin shrugs. “I get this all the time, but in Canada it’s usually Farley Mowat.”

The next day, back in the dining room, I’ve finally finished sorting Mum’s letters. They fill twenty-three binders, bulging with airmail paper. Her life is literally laid out in front of me— the most valuable things in the house to me now—but I can’t start reading yet. There’s too much else to do.

Robin has found, amongst Dad’s letters, a collection of small pocket diaries. They’re bound in golden brown calfskin and each has a tiny pencil slotted into the spine. In one diary, 1946—the year I was born—I see Dad has scrawled across my birthdate,
Received cable—eldest daughter born!
I always thought he wanted only sons, but here is my first hint that he expected more daughters. When he recorded my birth in this diary he was on a ship in the South Pacific. Mum was in Virginia, preparing to join him in Hong Kong. I turned out to be his only daughter, but he called me “First Daughter” the rest of his life. In the Far East, this is a sign of respect.

From the post-war years in the Far East, I find a pocket dictionary published by
The China Mail
in Hong Kong titled
Useful Cantonese Words and Phrases for the Visitor and the Resident.
Thumbing through its pages, I’m shocked by phrases like

“This bathroom is not clean!” and “Who broke this plate?” and “You always tell lies to cheat me!” Given the context, even innocuous phrases like “What are you looking at?” take on a more sinister interpretation. Mum couldn’t have used it with our
amahs
—could she?

And then suddenly, as if fate has guided my hand, I find evidence of my first
amah,
Ah Kan. Tucked inside Mum’s 1952 passport is a letter and a photo. All my life I’ve been searching for details of her, and here she is.

My full name is Leung Kan Hoi, aged 32, native of Nan Hoi, Kwangtung. I first came to H.K. in 1938. I am very glad to hear that you, Master and the children …

It seems Ah Kan was missing me, too, and wanted my parents to sponsor her to Canada. She must have been twentynine years old when I was wrenched from her arms at dockside, and by now would be almost ninety, probably dead. But I’m thrilled to find this. I think again about the writing on the lake stones. Can we reach that far back?

Thank goodness people wrote letters. When I recently taught a university English course, I discovered that none of my students under the age of twenty-five had ever received one; two remembered receiving a postcard; and one thought he’d seen his father’s handwriting—on a cheque. They could hardly recognize a full sentence; all my students textmessage. What’s going to happen to all our histories if computers crash? What happens when software formats change? Storing things is one thing, retrieving them a whole other matter—a lesson we learned with Dad’s Alzheimer’s. These days I take more photos than ever before … but they’re stored on my hard drive, so who sees them? I’m certain my great-grandchildren won’t. All the so-called letters my son and
I have exchanged from abroad have been emails—which I can no longer access now that I’ve upgraded to new hardware. With computers, the more we think we’ve preserved, the more we may have lost.