by Winona Kent
• • •
It was a short walk from the tube station to Nana Betty’s little house at the end of the terrace on Harris Road, and, from there, a slightly longer ride in Nick’s van to the cemetery.
Charlie sat at the back of the chapel with Mr. Deeley, listening to a clergyman talk about Nana Betty as though he had known her well, when in fact he had only learned her name and her circumstances the day before.
Charlie’s mum and Nick’s mum had arranged the funeral. And although they meant well, Charlie was of the opinion that Nana Betty would have much preferred a simple remembrance, followed by an even simpler cremation, with none of the ceremonial trappings that were now taking place.
“It is for the comfort of those left behind,” Mr. Deeley whispered, sensing Charlie’s unhappiness.
“I know, Mr. Deeley. I’m just sad. I’m afraid you’re not seeing the best side of me just now.”
She looked at him, and saw that there was sadness in his eyes as well.
“What is it, Mr. Deeley?”
“Would you forgive me if I used these moments to grieve for Jemima? I was not given the opportunity to say goodbye to her in my previous life. And although she chose another over me, there is still a small corner of my heart which cannot dislike her.”
Charlie took his hand. She loved his fingers, which were long and a bit rough—he’d been a groom, after all, lugging feed and hay to Monsieur Duran’s horses, caring for them on a daily basis, and mucking out their stalls.
“I don’t mind at all, Mr. Deeley. And I’m absolutely certain Nana Betty wouldn’t mind either.”
She glanced behind her. They were sitting next to the aisle, and it would be a simple thing for her to quietly slip away.
“I think I need to go outside,” she whispered, excusing herself, avoiding Nick’s questioning look.
It was a glorious afternoon, a crisp October day, misty and overcast, and the cemetery was very quiet. Charlie wandered among the graves, reading the inscriptions absently, not really taking in what had been carved into the stones.
She felt closer to her grandmother out here. It was as if Nana Betty had come out for a breath of fresh air as well, having grown impatient with the goings on inside the chapel. And she was walking beside her, tsking over flowers that had been left untended and wilting on burial plots, admiring a clever sentiment captured in stone, remarking on the simple beauty of some moss.
Charlie stopped in front of a tiny marker under a tree.
She had to read the inscription twice. And then a third time.
In Loving Memory
Thaddeus Oliver Quinn
Aged 34
Killed by enemy action
Balham Underground Station
14th October 1940
Kneeling down, she cleared away some dead leaves and a few random weeds that had sprouted up around the weathered little headstone. And then she glanced up to see Mr. Deeley, standing near the door to the chapel, looking for her. She waved to him, and he joined her in front of the little grave.
“Look,” she said.
Mr. Deeley stared at the tiny marker.
“How can this be?”
“I don’t know. There was only one Thaddeus Oliver Quinn. I searched all the way up to the present. Born in 1816, in Stoneford. And no date of death. This couldn’t be the same man.”
She took out her phone to access her favourite family tree website.
“There is absolutely no record of a Thaddeus Oliver Quinn dying in the UK in October 1940. Or in 1939. Or 1941. Or in any year at all. It has to be a mistake.”
She walked across to a nearby wooden bench and sat down. Mr. Deeley sat next to her.
“Still,” she said, thoughtfully. “It was wartime. All sorts of mix-ups must have happened. Life was completely chaotic. I’ll contact the cemetery’s people when we’re back in Stoneford and ask them if they have any more information.”
“It is very peculiar,” Mr. Deeley said thoughtfully. “But, Mrs. Collins, why must we assume that we are the only two ever to have travelled from one century to the next? Surely there could be other individuals who have done the same?”
“You’re suggesting that Thaddeus might have been a time traveller?”
“If he is my son, why not? Perhaps the ability to travel in time is an inherited talent. Like music. Or writing. Or holding lengthy conversations with horses.”
Charlie smiled. She contemplated the little grave marker again.
“It’s still odd that there was no official record of his death, even in 1940. And especially if he died in that bombing. Don’t you think?”
They sat in silence for a few moments more. And then Mr. Deeley remembered what he’d come to tell Charlie.
“Your grandmother’s casket is being taken to the place where it will be interred, beside your grandfather. Will you go and say goodbye to her?”
“I think I’d rather not, Mr. Deeley. I’d rather just sit here and think about how she was when she was alive. How I remember her. I don’t want my last memory of her to be a box being lowered into the ground.”
“Then I will sit with you as well,” Mr. Deeley decided. “If you are amenable.”
“Nothing would please me more.”
• • •
Nana Betty’s little house in Harris Road had belonged to her parents, Bert and Marjorie Singleton. Bert was a far-sighted greengrocer who’d started out with one small shop in a parade near the tube station. He had grand plans, though, and was eventually able to grow his single business into a small chain of food shops throughout south London.
Nana Betty, being an only child, had never felt a need to live anywhere else. And there was a notorious lack of housing during the war and for years after it ended. So after she’d married Pete Lewis on Christmas Day in 1940, they’d stayed on, occupying the large back bedroom. And then, after the war was over, Bert and Marjorie had moved to Epsom, leaving the house to Betty, and the management of the food shops to Pete.
Charlie’s mum had been born there, and Nick’s mum too. Uncomplicated births, attended by a midwife.
There was a small front garden, separated from the pavement by a brick wall with a green-painted wooden gate, overgrown and in desperate need of some grooming. When Pete was alive, the garden had been his pride and joy. Charlie had seen photographs, mounted in old-fashioned albums with sticky-backed picture corners. But after Pete had died his domain had been allowed to grow wild, almost as an unspoken tribute to him.
Inside the house, Charlie’s mum and Auntie Wendy had planned a reception for Nana Betty. They’d appropriated the tiny kitchen, and were distributing sandwiches, slices of Battenberg, and hot, strong tea to the three dozen people who’d come back from the funeral to reminisce, shed a tear, and catch up on family gossip.
Charlie escaped to the back garden with Mr. Deeley.
“This is where Nana Betty used to spend her mornings, sitting in the sun, drinking tea and reading the papers,” she said.
“This” was a little area with paving stones and large fired clay flowerpots, which in the summer contained pansies and geraniums, a riot of colour and scent. And beyond the paving stones lay a tidy patch of lawn, with two rock-rimmed fishponds and a border of ivy along the two wooden fences. A path made out of more paving stones led to the famous Anderson shelter, half buried in the ground, overgrown with a jumble of ivy.
“It is as I imagined,” Mr. Deeley remarked.
“Come with me,” Charlie said. “I’ll show you the shelter.”
Nana Betty’s shelter, like the one in the museum’s back garden, was made of corrugated steel panels that had been bolted together in six sections and buried three feet down into the ground. A layer of earth had been shovelled on top of its roof, which, since 1939, had been home to successive tangles of ground cover. It was thus neatly camouflaged from view, and those who were not acquainted with Nana Betty’s best-kept horticultural secret often overlooked it completely.
The three-foo
t drop to the shelter’s floor from its entrance meant that you needed to climb down a very rickety ladder in order to gain access. Charlie negotiated this carefully, lowering herself backwards into the hole, acutely aware that heels and a skirt were not the best clothing to be wearing for this activity. Mr. Deeley followed, crouching down in the doorway, then bypassing the ladder altogether and jumping.
It was dark inside, and damp, and it smelled of earth and mildew and age. Charlie flicked on her phone’s torch, illuminating the shelter with a bright white light. The shelter was filled with things left over from the war: an old wooden bunk bed along one wall and a single bed along the other, as well as some homemade shelves, in a very poor state of repair. Over the years, the shelter had been turned into a makeshift garden shed, so it also contained a folding chair, a spade, a rake, several buckets and a lot of clay pots, and a very large red tin watering can.
Charlie unzipped her bag and dug out the piece of shrapnel Mrs. Firth had given her. She unwrapped the piece of sacking.
“How peculiar,” she said. “Feel this, Mr. Deeley. It’s hot.”
Mr. Deeley put his hand on the shrapnel.
There was, suddenly, a very loud WOOMF. The old wooden boards underneath Charlie and Mr. Deeley’s feet seemed to bounce, and the clay flowerpots on the shelves jumped. The light in Charlie’s phone blinked out.
They were plunged into darkness.
“What was that?” Charlie said. “Thunder?”
“I do not think it thunder, Mrs. Collins,” Mr. Deeley replied, sensibly. “In fact, if I did not know better, I would suspect it was the sound made by something exploding.”
“Bloody hell, Mr. Deeley.”
Still holding the piece of shrapnel, Charlie scrambled up the ladder and out into the garden. Mr. Deeley clambered after her.
Now there was the sound of gunfire. Charlie was fairly certain it was some sort of gunfire, anyway, a rapid BANG, BANG-BANG-BANG, BANG, deep and rumbling, from somewhere to the south of where they were.
A solitary plane flew overhead, soaring away to the north, its propellers chopping the air.
And now a young pregnant woman was running out of the kitchen door of Nana Betty’s house.
“Bloody Germans!” she shouted. “Just as I’m having my tea. In! In! Get in with you!”
Charlie and Mr. Deeley ducked back into the shelter. The young woman followed, then switched on the torch she was carrying, illuminating the interior with a dim and eerie glow.
It was not the same interior Charlie and Mr. Deeley had just left.
The beds were now covered with blankets. The homemade shelves looked new and solid, and held half a loaf of bread, a packet of biscuits, a couple of magazines, a bottle of water, a first aid kit, and a wind-up clock.
“That’s the second daylight raid this week,” the young woman complained, sinking onto the bottom bed in the bunk. “Have a seat. Cramped but cosy. And guaranteed to save us from everything except a direct hit, so they say. Sorry for the rude introduction. Have you come from next door?”
Charlie glanced at Mr. Deeley.
“Yes?” she guessed.
“Thought so. Ruby said she’d sent you a letter, but I don’t suppose you got it. Bloody air raids. Disrupting the post, disrupting the trains.”
“We didn’t get her letter,” Charlie confirmed.
“If only she’d sent a text message,” Mr. Deeley added.
Charlie tried not to laugh. “If we’d known, of course we wouldn’t have come,” she added quickly.
The young woman looked puzzled. “What on earth is a text message?”
“It’s Mr. Deeley’s joke,” Charlie said. “He’s been reading a science fiction novel where nobody talks to each other anymore. They just send each other written messages on their phones.”
“Sounds positively dismal. Well, the text of the message I’m to give you is that Ruby’s been called away by her brother in Basingstoke. Some sort of emergency. But she’ll be back Sunday, and if you two did show up, I’m to look after you. I’m Betty Singleton, by the way.”
“Charlotte Duran,” Charlie said, looking at Mr. Deeley. “And this is Shaun Deeley.”
“Very good. And Junior here…” she patted her tummy, “…rum lot, being born into the middle of this, but what can you do. We should have been more careful.”
She placed her torch on the shelf and offered them the packet of biscuits.
“Cadbury’s Teatime,” she said. “My absolute favourite.”
Chapter Six
11 October 1940
“There you are. Best sound in the world.”
Betty poked her head out of the shelter and glanced up at the sky as the All Clear siren began to wail.
“You can see the planes’ vapour trails,” she added. “It always gives me a lovely feeling, knowing they’re up there, chasing down the bombers. I know a bloke who’s posted at Biggin Hill. That might be his Spitfire. Anyway, come inside and have something to eat. I was just about to make supper when bloody Moaning Minnie went off.”
Charlie and Mr. Deeley followed Betty back to the house, past rows of cabbages, potatoes, Brussels sprouts and beets that had taken over the once carefully manicured lawn.
“Why did you take issue with my comment about text messages?” Mr. Deeley asked Charlie curiously.
“Because they don’t have text messaging where we are now,” Charlie said. “No mobiles, no Internet. No television, in fact, because all the technology was diverted to the development of radar. They only had basic telephones, and even that was considered a luxury.”
And it was most peculiar, she thought, entering a house that you knew from the present, and seeing how it now looked in the past. The wallpaper was decidedly different—beige, with a repeating pattern of tiny pink rosebuds on a lattice background. But the fireplace looked exactly the same, faced with deep red glazed terracotta, similar to what was on the outsides of tube stations in Central London. An oval mirror hung over the mantle, and upon the mantle sat a wind-up clock— the same oval mirror and wind-up clock that had always been there.
In front of the garden door, she recognized the same big wooden dining table, with its ornately carved legs, that Nana Betty had inherited from her parents. And the huge walnut sideboard dating from the turn of the century that had always occupied the corner between the fireplace and the table. Charlie remembered investigating its drawers as a child and discovering all manner of curiosities: green stamps and plastic popper beads, needles and thread, tiny bottles that had once held perfume, a tin of pipe tobacco.
Heavy blackout curtains hung in the windows and across the garden door, which Betty had opened to admit the last of the late-afternoon October sun. Paper blast tape criss-crossed the exposed glass, creating an odd, diamond-shaped design.
“You sit there,” Betty said, indicating a familiar pair of wooden chairs that had never quite matched the table. “I’m afraid supper’s only soup and a bit of minced beef. But I think I’ve got enough to stretch it to four. I’ll just go and put the kettle on again.”
“Your rations,” Charlie said. “Of course. This is terribly generous of you.”
“It’s perfectly all right,” Betty replied, going into the little kitchen and carrying on their conversation through an open square hatch cut into the common wall. “Any friends of Ruby’s are most definitely friends of mine. Besides, I get a bit extra because I’m expecting. And Mum and Dad have gone down to Epsom to look after my granny—she’s got bronchitis. So there’s just enough to spare.”
Charlie watched through the hatch as Betty lit the gas stove, placed the kettle on the ring, and then set about making the soup. She diced tiny pieces of mushroom, potato, and onion, sautéed them in the tiniest dollop of butter, then popped them into a pot with water, a teacup of milk, a bit of cornstarch and a sprig of parsley.
“Four…?” Charlie inquired.
“Yes, we’ve got a lodger. Well, I say lodger, but he’s also a bit special to me. He was bombed
out, poor love, so we’ve let him come and stay in our little bedroom over the stairs. He works at my dad’s greengrocers.”
With the pot simmering on the stove, she came back to the dining room.
“Let’s have some music, eh? Take our minds off Jerry and that dreadful murder across the way.”
A walnut-veneered Marconi occupied pride of place on a table on the other side of the fireplace. Another object that was still there, Charlie thought, more than seventy years later, and it still worked, valves and all.
Betty switched the radio on. It took a moment to warm up to a clarinet-driven tune Charlie didn’t recognize at all.
“Frenesi,” Betty provided. “I adore Artie Shaw.”
“Which dreadful murder?” Mr. Deeley inquired.
“Oh yes!” Betty said, with rather more enthusiasm than Charlie expected. “You wouldn’t have heard about it. Mrs. Bailey, from across the road, her eldest daughter, Angela. Found dead on a bomb site just over there.” She nodded in the general direction of the tube station. “Her throat was slashed from ear to ear.”
Charlie looked at Mr. Deeley.
“Do you know any more details?” she asked.
“From what I’ve heard, she disappeared after going out to see her friend from work, last Saturday evening. When she didn’t come back, poor old Mrs. Bailey thought she’d been caught out in an air raid. They assumed the worst… until yesterday, when workers clearing the site found her body. But that house had been bombed on October the 4th, and there weren’t any casualties. They were all sheltering down in the tube station.”
“So her body had been put there by someone else, after the fact.”
“Sometime after this past Saturday, yes. And something else. Poor old Mrs. Bailey said her Angela was wearing a brooch when she went out. Very distinctive, made out of gold, with three small flowers. And whoever killed her had taken it. Such a dreadful thing to happen. Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?”
