by Leah Fleming
‘Oh?’ he replied, struggling to grasp the gist of this.
‘Marry me!’ she laughed, and stopped his mouth with a kiss.
Three months later, they lit the torches on the path to the church porch on a dark December Saturday afternoon. Bebe was dressed in a green velvet Victorian outfit straight out of her fairy-tale book, with a velvet muff. Bella and Charmaine were matrons of honour, wearing deep burgundy hues. Plum was so excited to be home at long last, drinking in the damp Yorkshire air for the first time in years. Here it had all begun and here it would continue, she smiled. Maddy was taking on a motherless child as she herself had done all those years ago. The two of them would nurture those frightened girls through their labours and dramas. Greg would be the rock that grounded her when things went wrong and tempers flew and Bebe cried for Gloria. She wished them all the luck in the world.
It was enough that her prayers were answered on that wintry afternoon. Maddy had found her true friend, her life’s companion, and she deserved to be happy. Was it fate those two had met once before by the Hepworth sculpture? Greg was learning to make allowances for other people’s mistakes. He was no angel and never would be, but it was never too late to learn that old adage that he who never made a mistake, never made anything. She should know, she’d made plenty herself.
What was lovely about this wedding was that so many friends from other parts of their lives came to wish them well: all the Foxups–Totty and Hugh, Bella and Alex–and the Pinkertons; Charlie Afton, the best man and his family and Brigg’s Garage crowd. Even Raoul Henry caused a stir when he turned up with the tallest blonde anyone had ever seen in Sowerthwaite. There were rumours she must be a man! There was Sid Conley with his new wife, Ava, the only other evacuee present. But the usual line-up of church ladies lined the back pews to give the outfits the once-over.
Maddy looked wonderful, wearing a sleek cream velvet cape edged with swan’s-down round the hood, over a body-skimming shift so simple and luscious against her dark hair. Greg wore tails with aplomb. Was this the same lad with the scuffed knees and scabby elbows, whom Plum had entrusted to find her niece all those years ago? How strange, how wonderful life could be!
February 2000
The simple tree-planting ceremony is over at last. Maddy smiles as they put the finishing touches to the bench made from stumps of the old beech, a place to stop and rest a while for those who come to pay their respects to the fallen heroes.
She recalls how, on the night before their wedding, in the bustle of preparation and visitors arriving, Greg had taken Maddy aside. ‘We need to talk. There’s something I should have told you ages ago and I sort of forgot, or I sort of blanked it out from my mind…I don’t know why.’
She can see them as if it were yesterday, huddled together in the bedroom, cuddled up among packing cases and tissue paper, with her bridal outfit hidden out of sight in the dressing room. They were both tearful, tired and excited, but this was important judging by the look on Greg’s face.
‘On the night Gloria died, she whispered something in my ear,’ he said, ‘I didn’t get it all, but it was for you. I heard your name…“Tell Maddy, under the Victory Tree.” I think that’s what she said. She made me promise to tell you, under the Victory Tree. Do you know what that means?’
‘Oh, yes, I do,’ Maddy wept. At last, the truth with her dying breath; Gloria had given her the baby’s precious burial ground. It was a wedding present no one would ever know but herself. Thank you, she prayed, knowing her new life could begin.
But it had taken over forty years for the old tree to yield up its secret at long last, after all those attempts to dig round its roots until she thought for years Gloria had held out on her once again.
The old beech tree had gathered up her baby and grown it into itself: how strange, how wonderful, and how right now to be putting those tiny remains back in just a simple ceremony; earth to earth; for what is soil but the compost of many plants and lives, chalk, bones, the dust of generations of long dead?
The interviews with the police were a formality. They were not taking any action on the remains. They were examined and tissue samples suggested a male foetus too premature to have survived, probably as a result of a miscarriage or abortion, perhaps around the time of the Hungarian refugees or earlier.
She could have spoken out but some things are best just left unspoken.
All this confessional stuff is all very well today but she was brought up to be discreet, to bear suffering and disappointment with dignity, in silence; one of the stiff-upper-lip generation. Perhaps it was wrong but it served well enough. Silence is golden, went the proverb.
She suggested the baby be reburied under the new tree in the Avenue and there were no objections so old bones will soon return to dust, the circle will be complete, what was lost now found. Who else does it concern?
Why should she have to tell her secrets? Some are just better left unspoken. Only Greg and Plum knew the truth of it and that’s where it ends.
Little Dieter rests in the Avenues of Tears amongst his ancestors: the last of the Belfields.
Try as they might, she’d not produced another child of her own. It was something to do with her cervix being slack and her womb being tilted. Nowadays it wouldn’t be a problem but then, well, some things are just not meant to be. So like Plum she’d been given another woman’s child to nurture and cherish.
Soon Bebe would be arriving from London to start her new life at the Old Vic. In time Gloria and Greg’s child and grandchildren would inherit the house and the Old Vic, and the Avenue of Tears would be ringing to the yells of Bebe’s boys on mountain bikes, later with motor cycles and cars, bringing girls home to meet their mother. That was how it should be in an ever-changing circle of friends and family.
It is enough to know that the little lost baby was put to rest properly. Gloria had put him where only they knew, under the Victory Tree, the repository of all their childish secrets. Why had she not guessed this earlier? Perhaps because it needed time for her to appreciate this instinctive gesture.
Maddy sits on the varnished stump bench looking up at the Brooklyn. Once there were blackout curtains and taped windows, Pleasance and the oldies creaking up the stairs. The house was in darkness for a while. Then there were those wartime Christmas lights and candles, evacuees in crocodiles marching up to the big house for treats and bun fights.
Over the stone portico hangs the storm lantern made by Ernst, their first Hungarian refugee, as a gift for his stay in the refuge. He made the bars at the high windows to stop toddlers falling out in the makeshift nursery when it was a mother and baby home.
Gladly now, young mothers can keep their babies–choices never open to her girls all those years ago–but suddenly in the seventies her services were no longer required.
Brooklyn, she smiles, my refuge, my home, was always a house with attitude. I have been truly blessed.
Maddy rises slowly, looking at the old house. It will go on surviving, reinventing itself, sheltering the next generation from the storms of life, but now it was time for tea. Greg will be hitting the cake tin while she’s not in view.
She walks towards the lamp-lit windows and closes the door.
Acknowledgements
Once again I’ve borrowed the beautiful landscape of the North Craven Dales for the location of Sowerthwaite, Brooklyn Hall and the Old Vic. I was privileged to meet the late Mrs Frances Capstick of Hellifield who, a few years before her death, gave a wonderful account to our local history group of her extraordinary time in charge of the evacuee hostel, Mount Pleasant, near Settle during the war. Her life and stories inspired the beginning of this novel but Aunt Plum and all my evacuees and their adventures are fictitious. Thank you all my local friends who passed on anecdotes about their own experiences of evacuation. I also found Evacuation: The True Story, broadcast by BBC Radio 4 in August 1999 another moving source of information for this book.
Some of the details of the fashion industry in the 1950s were gleaned fro
m Eric Newby’s Something Wholesale: My Life in the Rag Trade, published by Picador, and Ginette Spanier’s It Isn’t All Mink, published by Robert Hale in 1972.
Thank you, Maxine Hitchcock and Keshini Naidoo, for editing my script with such care and making some thoughtful suggestions. Thanks, also to the ‘Flying Ducks’, Northern Chapter of the RNA, always there to encourage and enthuse when the going gets tough.
About the Author
Leah Fleming was born in Lancashire of Scottish parents, and is married with four grown-up children and five grandchildren. She writes full-time from a haunted farmhouse in the Yorkshire Dales and from the slopes of an olive grove in Crete.
Find out more about Leah at www.leahfleming.co.uk and visit www.AuthorTracker.co.uk for exclusive updates on Leah Fleming.
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By the same author:
The Girl From World’s End
The War Widows
Copyright
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
AVON
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Copyright © Leah Fleming 2008
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN-13: 978-1-84756-023-0
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EPub Edition © 2009 ISBN: 9780007335008
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