Diamonds at the Lost and Found

by Sarah Aspinall

  Soon after, my mother started saying we would get out of ‘this bloody town’. She wrote letters to slight acquaintances, wartime friends, people met in a London nightclub, sent to barely legible addresses from the backs of envelopes. There was no plan, but a vague sense that these ‘contacts’ could become points on a map that we only had to join to build a yellow brick road to Oz.

  But my father was not in Oz. Surely he was somewhere here? I had terrible bad dreams about where his body had gone. One I had over and over involved a room with a high window in an internal wall, and another room the other side of the window where he is lying; but the window is too high and there is nothing to stand on, so I can’t look. A rag-and-bone cart arrives in the street, like the one in Steptoe and Son, and some men go to the room and take him away, but I can’t get to him. I run out to see the cart moving off down the street with his broken body thrown on top of a heap of bodies, like plague victims from the Black Death. I try to run after it but I can’t keep up and feel panic and desperation.

  One good memory I had that I would replay in my mind, even though it made me want to howl, was of him peeling grapes for me. They were in a bowl with ice cream, but I hadn’t wanted to eat them as I didn’t like the skin. So he peeled them with his thin weak hands, using his little bit of strength to make me something to eat. I had wanted him to stop and rest. I kept picturing his sad, kind face as he peeled those grapes.

  Some of my mother’s letters to ‘contacts’, which it seemed she may as well have stuffed into bottles and thrown out to sea, had actually begun to drift ashore. Replies came back. Not yet a yellow brick road’s worth, but we at least had a safe first stop: my mother’s godmother, Auntie Sadie, in New York. She had played a large part in the early drama of Audrey’s life and seemed to her a good starting point for a new chapter.

  For me it would mean leaving my father behind. The night after hearing he was dead I had watched the news on television, waiting for them to get to the part about him. When he wasn’t mentioned I wondered if he would appear the next night, or the next.

  By now I felt I would probably hear no more.

  One morning we simply marched our baggage past his bare, still room and down the hall.

  7

  America, 1965

  HOT WIND BLOWS across the tarmac to the sound of dying jet engines, the towers of Manhattan in the distance and the sweltering sidewalks of Jackson Heights. ‘Hot enough to fry an egg on,’ my mother says and I try to picture this and work out if anyone really does it, as we drag our bags along the street. I have heard so many of my mother’s tales of America, that it is like a magic land, and I look around in wonder.

  In Auntie Sadie’s diner there is a counter, and we sit with our bare legs sticking to the hot red leather stools and wait for her to finish pouring someone’s coffee. Neat in her waitress uniform, bustling with excitement at our arrival, telling the whole diner, ‘From England! My god-daughter, Audrey, and her little girl.’

  She hands over keys to the apartment and squeezes me, stroking my pigtails and saying, ‘Just like her mother at this age,’ while telling my mum, ‘You look a million dollars! Mike’s getting off early, he’s so excited. Leave the bags downstairs, he’ll fetch them. I’ll be back to make us dinner. Oh, just look at you!’ Her customers watch us; her regulars, they’ve been hearing of nothing else for weeks.

  My mother says we are just stopping over here while she visits some old haunts: ‘Then we are off to really see the world.’

  Walking up tall stairs we pass so many doors that it feels like a hotel. There is a sweet smell of bubblegum in the hot air. The apartment isn’t as I imagined: like the ones in American movies and TV shows, where Lucille Ball comes into a huge living room, tripping over lots of shopping bags.

  This is much smaller, but it has a cocktail bar in the living room with tall stools around it. Uncle Mike comes home and lifts me onto a bar stool, saying, ‘How about a Shirley Temple?’, a fizzy drink which bursts on my tongue and has a sweet cherry stabbed through with a pretty paper umbrella.

  He keeps repeating, ‘Sadie is just over the moon, over the moon.’

  Mike has a splendid red and purple uniform for his job as a hotel doorman. He shows us a framed photograph on the wall, of him standing just behind Richard Nixon, the president. He says, ‘You meet all kinds of people in my job, but that really was something.’

  Auntie Sadie has tired feet, which she rubs when she gets home and swaps her shoes for little slippers with a marabou pom-pom. She makes dinner with a pudding called Jell-O and my mum picks it up and wobbles it, saying, ‘Well, that has to be Jell-O cos jam don’t shake like that,’ which was a TV advert she saw the last time she visited Sadie before she had me. Then she acts out some other funny adverts, taking Uncle Mike’s hat and putting it on her head to pretend she is strolling along a street, saying, ‘Hey, if you want to get ahead, get a hat!’

  Sadie and Mike laugh a lot, and get all the photos of my mum out of the drawer. They have been carefully put into big albums with floral covers, unlike the jumble in my mother’s box. Many are familiar, but I love hearing the stories again with different details. After dinner, Sadie plays us a little record she has, a recording of my mother aged twenty, being interviewed in New York for a radio show called Queen for a Day. I know this story, but my mother sounded so different on the record, it seems like long ago. She was telling the host that she has come all the way from Liverpool. The host says things like, ‘How about that!’ and ‘That’s quite a journey.’

  ‘Wait,’ says Sadie, holding her hand out, ‘now listen to this, it’s coming up now!’ The host then asks my mother how she’s liking New York and she says, ‘It’s a beautiful city. I’m staying in Jackson Heights with my godmother, Sadie; she sent me the ticket to come to America. It was a birthday gift.’

  Sadie looks around at us, delighted. ‘My name, on the radio!’

  Then the host says, ‘So that makes her a real fairy godmother! Did she give you three wishes too? We hope you are going to tell us what those wishes are because Queen for a Day is all about making princesses’ wishes come true.’ Finally he announces that Queen for a Day is brought to you by Hartz Mountain Cat Yummies on Mutual Radio Network.

  Sadie looks at us again, thrilled. Mike says he’s surprised the record hasn’t worn out, she’s played it that many times! Then it goes on, and my mother tells the host that, if she had three wishes, one would be to visit Clark Gable in Hollywood and the second would be to see all forty-eight states of America. Audrey is about to tell the host what her third wish is when Sadie jumps up and quickly pulls the needle off the record. Mike exchanges a worried look with Sadie, who pats my mother’s knee.

  ‘There, we knew you were a Queen from the very day you were born.’

  I ask what my mother’s third wish was going to be and Sadie hurriedly starts talking about something else.

  I felt that the third wish was to do with something unhappy, another piece of my mother’s story. There were sections of a jigsaw that were beginning to slot together and make a big picture and, if I could just see it all, this whole thing spread out, then a lot of things would make sense.

  In the morning the kitchen is hot and bright, and breakfast is cornflakes with little dried strawberries that puff up when you pour on milk, and Aunt Jemima pancakes with maple syrup. We all sit close together on little stools at the bright yellow Formica table with the sun pouring in and a fan turning to keep us cool.

  Then Sadie and Mike go off to work, and my mother sits with her iced coffee. I ask her, ‘Tell me again about when you first wanted to come to America.’

  ‘It was during the war,’ she begins, and I know that she’s in the right mood and wants to remember.

  ‘We couldn’t believe it, Jean and I, that there were all these Americans in our town; it was so exciting and we longed to outshine the other girls. We would have a Fred Astaire record spinning on the turntable, and we’d push Jean’s bedroom furniture aside to clear a
space for us to dance.’

  My mother jumps up to demonstrate, humming a tune, and then, waiting for the beat, she clicks her fingers. ‘It was suddenly all jive talk like, “OK you kool kat, you a boogieman? Then let’s have a clambake,” which meant let’s have a jive session.’

  I loved her doing the jive talk.

  ‘Here goes – kick, ball, change, walk, walk.’ She swings her hips, knees bent, and sings along as she dances the ‘Shorty George …’ Then you have to get your hips swinging; Jean would be dancing too as I taught her all the moves and I’d say, “Yeah, that’s it, dancin’ lady, you’ve got it!”’

  ‘And why did so many American people come to Southport?’ We only knew one American there now, a lady called Mitzi whose husband made cars and who my mother and Auntie Ava talked about because of her Texan accent and her trouser suits.

  ‘We were lucky. Of course the war was terrible and Liverpool was being badly bombed, but Southport was far enough away from it all, and we had a much easier war than most places. Then, suddenly in 1942, these hundreds of American boys and men arrived, from the South, from Midwest farms, young ones and old ones, though mostly young. The Palace Club was full of them, and so was the town.’

  Mum aged 17.

  Southport’s Palace Hotel, not far from our house, had once been one of the grandest and biggest in Britain. People talked about it having a thousand rooms, billiard halls, croquet on the lawns, stables, evening concerts, orchestral teas and dancing; it even had its own railway station and air landing strip. Then it had been taken over by the American Red Cross and now ‘the Palace Club’ it was one of their largest rest and recreation centres in Britain for bomber crews from the US Air Force. More than fifteen thousand airmen came to recuperate there, or to take a break between their bombing raids over Europe.

  Mum, left, with Sadie, Southport sea front.

  Jean had volunteered as a wireless telegraphist and was now away training all week. Audrey was keen to do something for the war effort, but didn’t want to abandon her mother and her new life in the town. The Palace Club was in urgent need of young lady hostesses to welcome the airmen, serve the teas and chat to them as they sat on the verandah taking the ‘sea air’. Audrey was just seventeen when she signed up for what shifts she could manage, and was soon drawn into a whole new gloriously shiny world.

  At home she and her mother scraped by on rations like everyone else, so she marvelled at the club’s ‘All You Can Eat’ snack bar with Coca-Cola and fresh doughnuts, both highly exotic and unavailable anywhere else in wartime Britain. To Audrey, the American men were just as exotic in their crisp uniforms, so well cut and in a beautiful-quality cloth, utterly unlike the cheap rough serge the British lads were given. They had an immediate glamour as they stood around the pool tables, chewing gum or playing baseball on the lawns outside.

  At the dances, held there three times a week, a live band played swing, bebop and jazz and Audrey was delirious with pleasure as the airmen swung her around the floor to the new American dance music that transported her to another planet. The dark days of the war had drained the colour out of British daily life, but here on her doorstep was a piece of amazing Technicolor America. She was already imagining more than her childhood dreams ever encompassed, and who knew who, or what, would be her ticket to this brilliant future? Above all, she wanted love – epic, sweeping, and passionate, the kind of love that she now lay awake at night aching for. She scanned the faces of the young men at the club, with their eager shining eyes, but they seemed such boys, and she was imagining a manly man, who would sweep her up into this new life.

  Then something happened that was beyond even her more fantastic dreams.

  It is a hot summer’s day in 1943 and Audrey is arriving for her shift when a jeep roars up, passing her on the driveway of the Palace Hotel Red Cross Centre, and out jump two men in air-force uniform. Quickly one of the men holds up a film camera to his eye and is pointing and following every move of his buddy. His buddy is handsome, very handsome, with dark features and a grin that altogether seems oddly familiar. As the news spreads up into the hotel and staff begin running about in a frenzy of excitement, she realizes that this is the long-rumoured visit that no one had ever believed would happen. This is a real-life visit from Hollywood star Clark Gable.

  She had seen him not long before as the reckless adventurer in Gone With the Wind, sweeping Scarlett O’Hara off her feet, and she was a passionate fan, along with millions of other women. Not only was he the biggest star of his day, known as ‘the King’, but he had also made several trips flying in dangerous combat missions over Europe so he was now a hero outside of the screen. The crew was there making Combat America about the American war effort, and to film Gable meeting the convalescing airmen at the Palace Club.

  Audrey pushed her way through the crowd standing on the terrace to watch Gable and his entourage, and she saw that he was chatting to the matron and assembled dignitaries. She stepped forward with a cheeky ‘Hello!’, her hand held out towards Gable, as if she was part of this awkward welcoming committee and the one who was meant to liven things up. The manager and matron were too taken aback by her sudden appearance to stop her.

  Gable shook her hand politely.

  ‘Welcome to Southport, Riviera of the North West!’ she said with a wry smile.

  ‘Well, that’s quite a claim!’ He grinned back at her.

  Mum, 1943.

  ‘I think you’ll find we live up to it. When you’ve seen the Palace here, you should look around the town.’

  ‘And what does it offer the visitor beside fish and chips and warm beer?’ he laughed.

  ‘Well, Napoleon loved it so much he built Paris after it and –’ hardly pausing for breath ‘– then there is the Sea Bathing Lake, the Pleasure Gardens, and the pier’s got its own railway so you can take a train right out to the sea …’ So, there and then, Audrey was invited along to join him and the crew the next day. They were going to be filming a tour of the town as a Hay Ride, complete with pony and trap.

  Despite his success, Gable was in some ways still a boy from the oil fields of Ohio. The next day, as they waited for the crew to set up, he and Audrey chatted and he asked her about her life and talked of where he grew up. Audrey saw him just as he was, and the only sign of Rhett Butler was a big wink he gave her at intervals throughout the day, the white teeth gleaming in his grin. His job complete, they said goodbye and, as he was leaving, Audrey told him, ‘One day I’m going to make it to America,’ and he said the fatal words, ‘Well, be sure to look me up if you do!’

  He had gone, leaving her dizzy with the memory. She had been going home every night with her pockets stuffed full of scraps of paper with scribbled addresses from Idaho to Alabama and pleas from the men to ‘come visit me some day!’ and now, not only had hundreds of young handsome Americans practically fallen for her, but her favourite movie star had just walked into her life too and as good as invited her to visit him in Hollywood. Her fantasies about getting out of the grind of dirty old Bootle to Southport had suddenly been dwarfed by the idea of America.

  So, here we were all these years later. Even the way she said the word, ‘America’, with a thrill in her voice, had made me want to come here too. But now that we were here I realized that this was more than just a visit; it seemed that we were on some kind of quest, or mission. We were at the start of this adventure, but how it related to all these past stories was as yet unknown.

  8

  The Kill Devil Hills

  THE REST OF THE TIME in New York was a blur of wonders. Sadie and Mike swept us off to Coney Island, the World Fair and other places that made America feel like another planet, although their little apartment felt more and more like home. The area around my bed filled with presents and souvenirs. They hugged me all the time and called me ‘angel cake’ and ‘honey bun’. Sadie did my hair in a pretty style called a French pleat, and gave me slides and something called bandeaux in lots of colours to match my clothes. They
didn’t want us to leave. But my mother wanted to ‘get on’, although I didn’t know what we were getting on with, or where we were going.

  Finally, however, we left New York after a few weeks, through a mist of tears: mine and Sadie’s. My mother tried to pretend she was sorry to leave but her excitement at the next adventure was obvious, even if the adventure itself was a mystery to the rest of us. ‘Let’s get this show back on the road!’ was all she’d say. She didn’t like to be asked questions. When I tried her with, ‘What was your third wish when you were Queen for a Day?’ she just didn’t answer. She could have said she didn’t remember or something, but instead she would just ignore me so that I knew not to ask again.

  THE GREYHOUND BUS took a whole long day to reach North Carolina. My mother had said we were going to Kitty Hawk, a name that made you think of desert rocks and hawks and Native American landscapes. She had said it quickly, ‘Kitty Hawk, Kildevil Hills’, which made it sound rather exciting.

  Then Uncle Mike had found it on the map, and showed me that the place was really called Nag’s Head, and it was right by the Kill Devil Hills, between the Alligator River and something known as the Great Dismal Swamp. There wasn’t one single lovely word in there anywhere. My mother promised me that there was a beach, and that she had a job in a nice hotel with a pool where I could play, but somehow, looking out of the bus window, I couldn’t feel anything but fearful.