Long hours went by as we travelled, and I couldn’t even read my book as it made me feel sick on the swaying bus.
I begged my mother to tell me a story, one I’d never heard before, and she sighed.
‘Well, OK, here is one. When I was growing up there was a girl who lived near us called Mary, a sweet-faced little thing who we always felt sorry for because she came from such a big, rough family. Auntie Sadie was fond of her, and when Mary’s sixteenth birthday came round, Sadie offered to take her to the big department store in Liverpool where Sadie worked as a waitress, and to buy Mary a fancy tea there.’
‘At Lewis’s?’ I knew the store.
‘Yes, that’s right.’ She carried on:
‘Then, after Sadie and Mary had eaten their tea, and said their goodbyes, Mary suddenly realized that she had left her bag behind and had to go back into the store all alone.
‘The staff sent her up to the Lost and Found desk, and when Mary arrived there she found a smartly dressed older gentleman talking to the girl who worked at the desk; so the girl then went off to look for the package that the man had lost.
‘While the girl was away, the man, perhaps thinking he was alone, gave a deep sigh, but then he turned to notice Mary waiting behind him. He began to chat to her, and, discovering that it was her birthday, he warmly wished her many happy returns.
‘After a while the girl who worked there came back with his lost package and handed it to him. He looked at it rather wistfully, then turned to Mary, holding out the parcel. “My dear, I’d like you to accept this small gift from me, along with my wishes for many more happy birthdays. I imagine you are a more worthy recipient than the lady it was intended for, and hope that life treats you kindly in the years to come.”
‘With that he rushed away, before Mary even had a chance to speak or thank him, and she stood there holding the package in astonishment.’
My mother paused.
‘What was it?’ I asked eagerly, and she smiled.
‘Mary unwrapped the paper and inside was a box which she opened. Inside that, on a velvet cushion, glittered a small heart-shaped brooch.
‘The girl who worked there took it from her and read the label. “That’s a proper diamond there, that is!” she said jealously.
‘Mary gazed at the gift; it was so much more beautiful than anything she had ever imagined owning. She kept the brooch all her life and wore it on her wedding day, and it always made her feel special.’
I smiled. ‘That was a nice story. Wasn’t she lucky?’
‘I suppose she was,’ sighed my mother, ‘but you can’t wait for Lady Luck to just appear. You could wait an awfully long time at the Lost and Found desk without any diamonds turning up, don’t you think?’
After that she closed her eyes, and I wondered if she was asleep.
At last we arrived in Nag’s Head. The air outside the bus was sweltering and there were no taxis, only a very grumpy man who said he would have to go a long way out of his way to drive us to where we were going.
My mother had this idea that asking people to help you was actually an act of kindness in itself, as it made them feel good about themselves. Ideally you found a really bad-tempered, unhelpful person to help you, then you praised them lavishly, telling them how generous and wonderful they were; this would make them feel suddenly happier and more inclined to help someone else in future. So her theory went, but it had already let us down once or twice.
I was relieved to see that this time it had worked and, after struggling with all our bags in the heat, the man cheered up under the warm glow of her thanks and her enormous interest in his truck, and we all made our way to the Kitty Hawk Motel, which was near the Kitty Hawk Museum of Aviation, but felt like it wasn’t really anywhere at all.
The town we were in was hardly a town, just a big road in an America which I had begun to realize had miles and miles of big roads and towns that hardly anyone visits. This one had a petrol station and a hardware store with a bench for coffee and drinks.
Along the highway was the motel and diner, owned by a lady called Diane Johnson; my mother had met her one weekend and kept her address for nearly twenty years. Diane was very suntanned, wore tight trousers and sunglasses and looked tired. She acted pleased to see us but didn’t talk to me very much. She admitted that not many people came here. A handful came to visit the museum, which was at the place from where the Wright Brothers flew the first aeroplane. We climbed up the steep hill one morning through the hot thick air only to find that it was hardly a museum at all, more of a monument and rest area with a few outdoor plaques. It wasn’t surprising that visitors here were usually on the way to somewhere else, and there wasn’t much reason to overnight except being too exhausted to get to the next place.
So why were we here?
‘Three questions,’ my mother would say, holding up those three fingers, but I only got an answer if they were silly things, about things that didn’t really matter.
‘Why are we in this dull place?’ That would have been the first.
The second would be ‘And why were you here once before?’ – for my mother had been before to this place, and even this very motel. This made it more unforgivable that she’d brought us here and made it sound so much better. Even the promised swimming pool at the motel was very small and hot and in a car park. The first time I swam my shoulders were so pink and burnt I didn’t go in again.
The third question would be ‘When can we leave?’
But I was beginning to learn that this would never get an answer and that our moving on had an entirely secret logic that would never be explained.
The only thing that broke up the appalling boredom was a chambermaid called Fay whom I adored, with lovely skin and a purring way of talking. Fay would let me ‘help’ her make motel beds and clean rooms and tell me about her boyfriend and her jealous sister who was a little on the ‘heavy’ side and didn’t go to work. But even Fay didn’t seem to feel she would be stuck there much longer and talked about moving to the city. When Fay clocked off the rest of the day yawned terrifyingly empty. The motel had nowhere to explore and everything had the same bubblegum smell of America; outside was too hot to bear. My mother helped in reception, handing out keys to the occasional visitor and writing letters to people. When they weren’t working she and Diane sat at a table talking quietly.
It was here that I became frightened for the first time, frightened that we could get stuck somewhere that didn’t even quite seem to exist.
There was a road that led down to a beach and sand dunes, but it was so stifling that nobody went down there. The beach had a pier, but it didn’t have the things that Southport pier had, like amusement arcades and a miniature railway. This was just a long wooden deck. We walked along it once when the intense daytime heat had given way to a damp evening heat that still made dribbles of sweat run down your face. There were two men fishing at the end.
We then walked along the boardwalk, past the sand dunes to a shabby building on the beach with a big sign saying NAG’S HEAD CASINO and some faded posters for entertainers who were performing there. My mother had been here before. She said it had felt quite different then. She had visited the place once ‘with some people I was working with’.
It was closed now, and we had just started to walk back along the beach when my mother began crying and couldn’t stop. We sat by the dunes, and the sand was still baking although the sun had gone down. Question Three: ‘Why are you so sad?’ She cried and cried, but I knew she wouldn’t tell me what the matter was. In the end I was weeping too, because she wouldn’t tell me. I had no sense of what could have brought her to this place long before I was born.
A FEW DAYS LATER we met someone called George who drove out to see us. He was one of my mother’s conquests from the Palace Club. Back then he was a romantic figure bravely dealing with painful injuries suffered when his plane had crashed over France. George now had a farm miles away, and his wife had died recently. My mother had learn
t this from the Christmas cards they had exchanged each year since their brief wartime meeting. She told me that George had been left with a son named Danny, and his wife’s mother had moved in to cook and help them. He took Audrey out to a restaurant somewhere for a meal, then he dropped her back, and the visit seemed to have gone well. As he left a plan was made that we would go to stay with him the following week.
George c.1943.
After he’d gone she seemed happy and sang me all the songs from a musical called Oklahoma!, and taught me how to dance at a hoedown, telling me all about square dances and what fun they were and how we would probably go to one.
On his next visit George drove us out to his house for a weekend. It took hours and my mother was nervous, fidgeting and talking about all kind of things as George became quieter and quieter. When we finally got there I met George’s son, Danny, who was fourteen and seemed shy, and we all had a dinner that my mother said was ‘real American home cooking’. Danny showed me how to put the corncob holders into the ends of the corn and brush the melted butter on before we ate it. I liked him, and the comfortable farmhouse kitchen though I somehow could feel that my mother was terribly disappointed in it all.
The weekend felt too long. Danny and I watched TV in the living room and played with his dog. At last it was time to drive us back to Kitty Hawk. George said even less this time, and my mother had never been so quiet, for she must have told him every one of her thousand and one stories already. After George dropped us back she stood outside in the terrible heat and looked bleakly out at the freeway and the billboards and the huge fields beyond them and said, ‘I think we’d better go.’ Was that why we were here? Had she thought she might love George and then found that she didn’t?
‘Was George why we came here?’
‘No, it was all about something that happened a long time ago, before you were born.’
When she looked at me I knew that she wished I wasn’t a child, that she wanted me to just get on with growing up.
Of course, I knew more than she thought. She tried to keep her secrets, and to protect me from the adult world, but she was a helpless storyteller, and, like all children, I was a brilliant secret listener, hovering by open doorways or, even if I was right beside her, adept at appearing to be deep in my book, while actually absorbing every detail of what was being said. So it was unlikely that any stories involving ‘Love’, this being my particular study, would slip by me unnoticed.
I already knew, therefore, that in that same year, and in the same spot that she had shaken the hand of Clark Gable, something had happened that changed everything. All her dreams had evaporated. She had fallen in love for the first time. I had heard her tell the story.
9
True Love
JAMES LEADSOM was in RAF uniform that day, when he came to visit a friend of his who was convalescing at the Palace Club. Audrey always remembered her first sight of him walking towards her down a corridor. Love just comes calling, and it isn’t a war hero or a film star, she now discovered. It is just a boy. And time – and she said that she always remembered this curious effect – really did stop dead still. Now it hit, and all the clichés she had heard about were suddenly true. Everything around her really did seem to melt away, as if she were in a tunnel where everything was invisible except for this boyishly handsome face, with its floppy blond hair falling across his deep blue eyes. She went in search of him, then found him at his friend’s bedside and introduced herself.
That night she lay in bed, terrified to think that these feelings might vanish, that it might have all been an illusion. What if she met James again and those feelings were not there? Then Sunday, the fateful day, came and they were to meet at the station. He’d be wearing his ‘civvies’ to take her to tea, and all the girls had talked about the moment they saw their men out of uniform and found that the magic had gone. For Audrey, though, as she walked towards him, she knew immediately that the feelings were stronger than ever. His willowy grace and long legs made him look just as good in his slouchy well-worn cords and baggy sweater, and he was strong and sweet, as excited about life as she was, and she was crazy about him.
James Leadsom.
It was the shock that would turn everything upside down for my mother. Her drive to escape the darkness of that life in Liverpool had been fuelled by a fantasy – but of what exactly? Where was this magical kingdom she was heading for, and who was this man who would take her there? It was still a small girl’s dream of a prince, not a pauper.
Now she was faced with the reality, that love comes to find you, whether you like it or not, and it may be in the shape of a young man with modest ambitions, offering you a cosy home, a family, just one plain and simple dream rather than the myriad that might be fluttering around in your head. None of this had ever occurred to her.
James had one simple plan: to work at his father’s business and to raise a family in the village of nearby Formby where he himself had spent his own happy childhood. James, as madly in love with Audrey as she was with him, was quick to propose marriage. Peace was now in the air and there was an expectation that the war would be over soon. James was to leave the RAF and start work, and they would be married. She of course said yes; before his leave ended she was already wearing an engagement ring. What happened next was a big missing piece of her story, but she had stopped here.
‘I’ll tell you about it all one day,’ she now promised.
‘So it was Auntie Sadie who went to America then, wasn’t it?’ I asked, drawing her out.
‘Yes, we all thought Sadie wouldn’t marry. All the girls were falling for the Americans, and Sadie had lots of suitors but never went for anyone. Then Mike came along, “a determined Yankee” as he called himself. I liked him straight away, I like those fast-talking New Yorkers, and he had an easy laugh and a big heart. That Christmas he got some leave and headed back to claim her as his bride.’
I knew the photograph that had been taken outside the Registry Office on Lord Street showing an odd group. Mike stands in his uniform, looking proud, with one arm around his bride, Sadie, who looks anxious, and the other arm around my nana, Rebecca, who looks faded and tired. The other women wear serviceable wartime coats, and only Audrey has a huge fur hat and matching muff, and is grinning away as if it was her own wedding.
Then the war had ended, and in May 1945 Audrey and Nana gathered with the crowds on Lord Street to hear the King’s speech for VE Day in London. Hundreds of servicemen and women paraded by to a marching band as the crowd, swathed in Union Jacks, cheered. But I knew that all Audrey could think of, night and day, was James. They were planning to go to London as soon as he was demobbed, and she decided to go there to wait for him. She hated to desert her mother, but knew that she and James would have a freedom in the big city that they wouldn’t have at home.
She found the post-war life of Southport deadly, as the airmen all left the town and the local shops shut at five o’clock. She always loved what she called ‘night life’, and dreaded Sundays and the time when everything closed, declaring it was all ‘Dead! Dead! Dead!’ and she was ‘Bored! Bored! Bored!’ So now she took a train to London, found a job in a dry cleaner’s and rented a bedsit in Maida Vale on a corner by Warwick Road tube station.
She had pointed it out to me. ‘There, my little room was just in that corner. I just had a little gas ring where I lived on powdered eggs and a one-bar electric fire to dry my nylons on. That’s where I lost my virginity.’ So it all passed into legend, and decades later my own daughter, Molly, aged four, who had overhead the whispers, told an elderly gentleman who we were giving a lift to, ‘That’s where Nana lost her ginity.’
After the glow of victory had faded, London was revealed as grim, war-torn and desperate. When James was demobbed they spent those few months together exploring the battered city. Rationing was at its worst; there was little food or coal. They cuddled up by the fire in cosy pubs to keep warm, cooking over the gas ring in the bedsit, and making love.
One night she and James had managed to get tickets up in the gods for a show that had been sold out for months, the musical Oklahoma! at Drury Lane. After the grey drabness and cold of post-war London the curtain came up on a set blazing with orange and yellow, bringing the British a dazzling vision of the sun of the Great Plains and the vast wheatfields of America. The exuberance of the dancing and upbeat innocence of songs like ‘Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’’ contained all the sunshine and energy of a British fantasy of American life. At the end the audience wouldn’t let the cast go home, and the actors all came down into the auditorium and sang every single song again, with the crowd swaying and dancing in the aisles. Audrey never stopped singing the songs, or remembering that night. America was still for her, more than ever, the Promised Land. But she had no possibility of ever getting there, and anyway she was about to become Mrs James Leadsom in only a few months’ time.
That Christmas the Formby pinewoods along the beach had a light sprinkling of snow, as James and Audrey walked hand in hand talking about their future. They were home visiting Southport to see the New Year in with family, and were planning to marry in the spring. They had driven out to Formby, where James’s parents lived, to look at houses that they might be able to afford. Life as a housewife, with children and a domestic routine, was not something Audrey could easily imagine. It was very different from the fantasies that had filled her head before she met James; now she was so besotted that she simply accepted it all and wandered through the days in a trance.
She returned home to her mother’s to say goodbye, just before she and James set off back to London. She found Sadie there in a terrible state of anxiety. Because of the war Sadie had seen nothing of her husband Mike for almost a year, and now she had just heard that he had been sent back to New York. She was clutching his letter, and said that he was asking for her to come to join him in America. In a couple of weeks she was to go and board the buses from Liverpool, with the other war brides, to be taken down to the Southampton docks to set sail. Audrey promised that she would travel down from London to meet Sadie at Southampton and see her off to this new life.
Diamonds at the Lost and Found Page 7
