Little Lost Girl

by Graham Wilson

  The final memory from that time, and a happy one, was when Mummy had decided to teach her and Alexander to sing as they all worked together. Mostly her Mum sung the verses and they sung the chorus, but sometimes they had sung all together. One day they were learning a new harmony and her Mum said, “We all have to try really hard to make this beautiful, because then Daddy will hear this in his heart, no matter how far away he is, and it will bring him back. And it had!

  Suddenly Rachel awoke from her reverie. She must have sat there, lost in remembering, for over half an hour because now her tea was cold.

  She rang the bell and Maggie came, that’s what she called her, though Margaret was her proper name. “I need to go across and see Sarah. Would you ring her, to make sure she is in, and then take me over. You needn’t stay but perhaps you could come again to help me home after lunch.”

  As she got up to leave, all those old memories from Smith Street came back again, with a clarity that almost took her breath away, all flooding into her mind together. Today was their day, they must all be told.

  She shook her head to clear it then went to the dresser drawer to take out a small bunch of old photos and letters. These would help prompt her memory, so little to show for 80 years of living and all that had passed. But it was what she had and it would have to do.

  Maggie offered to drive her in the car, but no, she would prefer to walk. It gave her time to collect her thoughts and hold them all together in one place before the wind blew them away, like sheets of paper caught in a wind gust, scattered all over the ground. Together they made a coherent whole, but each piece of paper by itself meant so little. As she walked more and more memories of other times came flooding back.

  There, across the harbour, was Millers Point, where a windmill had once stood. Now a huge ocean liner stood in front of it and behind it rose all the skyscrapers of the city. They said that they had built one that was over fifty stories tall, imagine that!

  Out on the harbour a grand sail boat came sweeping past. That brought to mind her days of sailing with her Dad, and then with her beloved David, both long gone. How she had loved those times, wind in her face and her hair blowing out behind, ‘like a golden cloud’, her David said. If he could only see it now, so grey and thin.

  The only pity of it was that Maria would not sail with them, she never said why, but smiled brightly when asked and said, “I leave that for others.” Perhaps it had to do with when the news came of that terrible storm and of Granny and Grandpa with their boat broken on the rocks. Rachel could just remember how a man came to the door with a telegram. Even though her Mum felt it before, then it was in writing, like being hit in the face.

  Her Mum had taken the telegram with a shaking hand and passed it to her Dad, then stood in the passage and cried. Her Dad put his arms around her Mum and said soft words. Rachel had come up to them and asked them what was the matter?

  Her Dad had pulled her in against them and said. “This is saying that Grandma and Grandpa are dead and the boat is wrecked. We are all very sad. So now we must hold a happy memory of them.” After she hadn’t really been sad because she knew they were somewhere good together.

  She felt flooding into her mind a picture of Gran Alison and Grandpa Charles, young and beautiful on their wedding day, perhaps it was an old photograph, but where did the colour and that red gold light in her Gran’s hair come from? She could only remember her with soft gray hair. They did not take coloured pictures at her Gran’s wedding, just funny old black and white things. But still it was a real picture, she knew it was.

  It came to her as almost an afterthought. All at once she wished Gran had outlived Sophie, they were like shared souls. If anyone knew where to look for Sophie it would have been her Gran. Oh, if only she could know too!

  She had arrived, she was standing at the front gate of the little cottage, still with all the beautiful roses, some were there from long before, some she had planted, and now some more that Sarah had planted.

  Her daughter was an artiste; that was how she called it. She painted beautiful pictures of the city and harbour and of the old houses and people of Balmain. She sold them at the Balmain and Rozelle markets. That brought to mind her own pictures of the harbour bridge. The bridge was not there when she was little but she remembered them building it in the bad years of the Depression and how a man she knew from Millers Point had fallen off and died. She had done a series of pictures to tell that story, beginning with its unoccupied space. She had watched it grow from the two ends as she walked home with her children from Nicholson St School,

  Pity Sarah had no children; she missed sounds of their feet and chatter in a house. Then she thought, Sarah’s children would be grown up by now, but then, perhaps, they would have had some children of their own.

  Right now she must stop her thinking from rambling away and hold her thoughts together for one last time as she told her daughter the story.

  Her daughter, Sarah, welcomed her with a happy smile and kiss on the cheek. Rachel realised that she was a pretty one, even the other side of fifty, though her hair was a bit too red, it must be that extra bottle colour, and her breasts were sagging. That’s what comes of not wearing a bra.

  She said “Dearest, I have come to tell you a story before it is too late.” She handed Sarah the letters and photos and said, “I have brought these. You must use them to help me remember, if I get muddled.”

  They sat in front of the fire, two chairs side by side, with the photos on her lap as she told it; the story that needed to be said, some from her own remembering and some as told by Maria on that last day.

  When she had finished Sarah offered her tea, but Rachel said “No, walk me home please. I am finished all I set out to do. Pray God it is enough.”

  As she walked home she felt Sophie smiling at her, saying “Thank you my little sister. Soon, together, we will see the pictures of our childhood again, but they will be completely real this time.”

  Then her thoughts turned to this house to which she came; they were such wonderful thoughts; such happy thoughts. How, a week after her Dad had returned, they had come here and it seemed like a fairy castle.

  On the day they left the other house she had taken out the perfume bottle, from where her Mum had hidden it, for one last time to say goodbye. It was warm again and she knew that Sophie was safe with Gran Alison. But still there had been pain and missing when she thought of her sister. She had spent her whole life until today trying to block it out. At last no more!

  More thoughts flowed of her Dad and Mum and all five of them, children in the house, playing and singing together and sailing, then of her David and her with baby Sarah and of three year old Tom holding Sarah so proudly. It was good and it was enough.

  Two days later Maggie rang Sarah. She said Rachel had died in her sleep. She seemed to be smiling and was holding two pictures. One was of her and David on a boat, the other of a family outside a different house, which had written on the back, ‘Sophie’s 5th birthday 1905’.

  Chapter 22 - Sarah

  Sarah had never felt the passage of time until that day her mother had come to visit and told her the story of her family. Now her need to pass this story on vexed her and made her feel anxious. It had been there since that day but had not diminished over time, not even after she painted the story which that day had given her. Instead, year on year it grew inexorably stronger as she felt the sands of her life slipping through rheumy fingers.

  She always thought she would have children of her own, but somehow it had never happened. Perhaps, if she had found that special man; maybe then it would have been something that they both got organised about and made occur, a love child. Now that time had passed.

  She remembered with fondness some men in her life, happy memories; wild, funny, joyous, passionate memories. There were parts where she was a bit too stoned to remember clearly, a psychedelic blur. While not a child of the sixties she was definitely a young woman of that era and had enjoyed the artistic li
beration along with all the others.

  What parties they had in this house, often there were half a dozen of them as loosely arranged couples, with their own bedrooms for some intimate coupling when wanted, but mostly sitting around in the living room, sprawled on bean bags, rugs and half broken chairs, discussing art, politics and how they would save the world.

  Her art had been the one abiding passion of her life. It had come from her Mum, a love of pictures and paintings, not that she had understood the place it had first come from until her Mum had at the very last told her about little Sophie, of her reading stories to Rachel as a child. Now she understood the source, it was her own legacy from Sophie. It took the form of a burning desire to capture images as they flowed through her mind, create them and bring them alive on canvass.

  She had wonderful memories, a child in the garden with her mother, paint and easel set up. Rachel painted, often laboriously, capturing images that passed before her eyes, boats sweeping across the harbour, dawn lit silhouettes of the city, the sky, perfect flowers that grew in spring and that series of amazing pictures of the making of the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

  Before long she started helping her mother; holding brushes, passing paint, even adding her own little touches. Soon Rachel had taken to setting up a second easel nearby for Sarah to work alongside her.

  From the earliest she knew she had the flair. Soon she surpassed her mother in technical ability and artistry. And her ability to paint had been much developed. She had gone to art school and worked alongside famous painters. Not only did she paint beautiful scenery, but much else besides. At times, when the mood took her, she would paint with photographic detail. Other times she wanted to evoke primeval forces and her paintings were combinations of light and dark, blurred shapes and overpowering colours, bordering on grotesque.

  People recognised and applauded her talent, awards and paintings hung in major galleries. Still her fondest pleasures were in the quick book-sized pictures she made and sold immediately in the markets, done in the moment and of anything that took her fancy.

  But her mother had something too.

  Of all the favourite paintings that she owned, and there were many, it was one her Mum had done, painted one spring when Sarah, herself, was a teenager, that remained most special.

  It was like a view from this house, but not quite real. It looked down on people having a picnic in the park below, distant boats on the harbour and, at the edge of the park was a boat tied to the jetty, facing out to sea, a blue hull and tiny red writing on the stern – too small to actually read, but looking like three words joined together. People at the picnic were celebrating, you could tell from the way they stood, the way they moved and looked at each other and out across the view. You knew it was a special happy occasion.

  Towards the centre were two women talking together, clearly mother and daughter, the small to medium sized bodies, neat full figures wearing brightly coloured dresses, seen from the side. The one woman with a cloud of brown golden hair, with red highlights where the sun caught it; the other with hair much the same, but washed with grey. She knew, watching as her mother painted, and without being told, that they were her grandmother, Maria, and her great grandmother, Alison.

  But it was not so much the colour and the light that set the picture apart. It was the vital life force that flowed between these two central figures. She knew that, with all her ability and success, here was something well beyond anything she had ever painted, it was better than her best.

  At last, a year after her mother gave her the story, she knew what she would do. Perhaps it would be as good. She would paint them as she could now see them in her mind, that same day but now each half turned to face forwards, facing towards each other, but gazing out to a place of shared memories over a distant horizon. In the centre of their memories sat a long lost girl, dark haired girl, lost in a sky where she was barely a shadow. But she was there, buried within memory was her story, seeking to live again

  She set to work and in five days the painting was done. She knew, as she walked away from it, to put away her brushes, that this was, to her at least, her best work. It had transformed their memories into her memory. Now a life force of together shared imagination would live on, an old story retold, brought alive by the words her mother had spoken on that last day.

  There was a space next to her mother’s picture, high on the timber living room wall. It had been waiting all these years for something to fill it. That was where this picture belonged.

  As she moved into her later life many people would come to visit and sit with her, side by side, in a chair next to the fire. As they lifted their gaze these two paintings would capture their eyes. Many asked their story. She would tell about the one her mother painted, but of hers she would shrug and say, “That’s just some old thing I found, but before you ask it’s not for sale as I rather like it.”

  Now remembering back to Rachel’s story she was glad to know where all her family had come from and what they all knew about this girl, Sophie. She, who would have been her aunt, had she lived. Instead she was caught forever in a glass frame. This figure needed to be given a chance to move to a life in a place beyond a picture, no longer the small girl in the communion dress, held forever young.

  Even though she had looked at Sophie’s picture a hundred times on the mantel in her Gran’s big house, it was like the picture on the front of a book that was closed. If she could pass her story to another then perhaps that image would be enough, but there was no other to tell. She knew that now the book had to be opened and fully read before it could be closed and put away. She must do something yet for this to happen.

  She understood what was needed and that was why she was troubled. The story had come to her, like a mixture of sunlight and shadow, much of it told of happiness but a dark space sat at the centre. When she was little she had heard of Sophie, but not really known about her. Her great-aunt Heather had told her the simple story, but at the end the question remained.

  Sometimes, before that day, she had asked her Mum for more, but her Mum would not answer, she did not want to say. So that door of pain stayed locked tight, until almost the end. With all her being, she wanted to unlock that door. But how to do it and what would be found?

  It was like an unfinished painting; it sat there and troubled her. Brush strokes and colour and people across part of the canvass, but at its centre a place that sat empty, where nothing dwelt but a shadow. She needed to take up her brush again and finish that part of the picture. But first she needed to see, in her own mind, a real image to paint there.

  She must find and know for herself the real Sophie, the person who was alive beyond this photo. That way she could create in her mind her own real picture, a thing she could turn into paint on canvas. Doing that would let her remake and bring back to life Sophie as a finished, complete person.

  It would be her final picture, one in which Sophie’s and her own life both reached places of understanding, closure on behalf of all who had known and grieved for this girl, trapped in glass for over a hundred years.

  Chapter 23 - Closing the Circle

  I have this riddle teasing at the edges of my mind. It draws me forever on.

  We found out about a little missing girl, Sophie. She lived in our house a century ago. We saw her picture; we held the perfume bottle she might have owned. As we touched these things with our hands, Sophie seemed to reach out and touch us back. It was as if a part of her lived on.

  In the months that followed I set out to find out more about her. I found out a few things; her full name, the name of the friend she went missing with. It seemed neither of these children was ever found. I needed other clues.

  As I was busy I knew I should let it go. Sophie was nothing to do with me, so why bother? She was just a child who lived in our house a long time ago.

  But, as the weeks and months pass, her face in the photo still jumps into my mind, often at unexpected times. I try to say to her, “Leave me in pe
ace!”

  It seems she does not agree; this resurgent Sophie Williams. Whenever she enters my mind it is as if she is speaking to me, trying to say an important thing. Slowly this mind image turns into a realisation.

  She is determined that her story be known, it is incomplete. My role is to gain and pass on knowledge of what happened, where she went. That way a part of her can come back to life and bring her story to its end, let it finish.

  So I persist in my search of what happened to this little lost girl, Sophie. Gradually I find more clues; a title search shows the land on which our house stands was first subdivided and sold to Michael Williams in 1872. When he bought this land his occupation was listed as a builder’s labourer. Our house was next sold to Robert McNeil in 1927, sold to Gordon Brown 1938 and after that to a succession of others, until it came to us.

  I seem to recall the McNeil name. I realise that Mathew McNeil was the name of the ten year old boy who went missing with Sophie, as listed in the newspaper. Perhaps another clue, although it is not obvious what it means and why Mr Williams, if alive in 1927, would sell his house to Mr McNeil. But, at least, I am getting some names to follow.

  About a month after I get this clue I locate a birth certificate for Sophie Williams, born on the tenth of June 1900, to a Mr James Williams and Mrs Maria Williams (born Maria Buller). So I have a mother and father to follow. Maria and James are listed as born in Balmain, with ages and occupations; James was a labourer, Maria was a shopkeeper. Both were born after the house was first built so I suspect that James was Michael’s son.

  Going back further is more difficult, records are harder to find. In due course I am confident I will find James and Maria’s birth certificates. For now I want to know much more of the world in which they lived, the many things happening at the time, to place them in their society.