The Scarlet Sisters

by Helen Batten

  And, much as it made her want to scream, Katie did what her mother advised, and just over a year later she had another baby. He was a son, Barry, and he was healthy. Katie never tried again.

  But it wasn’t easy. Just three months after she lost Clifford, Katie had to endure her twin having a healthy boy, when she already had two children. And she had to watch everyone being happy for Bertha and excited about the baby, and she had to pretend to be happy herself, all the time aware that no one ever said anything about her baby, as if he had never existed. She couldn’t bring herself to open the door to that back bedroom where the cradle lay empty, still waiting, and she never gave Bertha those clothes coupons. The bridge card was scrunched up and thrown in the bin as if it was toxic.

  In the evenings, at home with Horace, because they couldn’t talk about Clifford and share their loss, there was nothing left to say.

  And there was no relief during the day. Katie’s baby had been a source of much talk among her neighbours, both to her face and behind her back. All through her pregnancy there was hardly a meeting which didn’t involve some discussion of how she was feeling: the size of her bump, when the baby was due, was it a girl or a boy? Did she want a girl or a boy? What did Horace want? And she’d engaged happily with all of it, revelling in the excitement after all those years of waiting.

  Now she was back, no longer pregnant, but without a baby. Most of her acquaintances had heard about Clifford, and by the time Katie returned it was never mentioned. Which was difficult, but nothing like as difficult as the odd person who hadn’t heard and said cheerfully: ‘Oh, hello, Mrs Smith. How’s the baby?’

  At which point Katie would have to say, ‘He’s passed away.’ And then, in the face of their reaction, she would feel as if she was having to comfort them for her loss with statements like: ‘It’s for the best.’ ‘It wasn’t meant to be.’ ‘We’ve all got our crosses to bear.’ None of which she felt or believed. Never mind the ‘helpful’ platitudes along similar lines that came back, and made her want to spit.

  I met Katie just once, as she went to live in New Zealand where her son, Barry, had married and settled. This was her only visit back to England. Katie and Nanna came to stay with us. It was fascinating to meet this twin of my nanna’s who was so different. Katie seemed quite taken with me. She gave me a beautiful necklace when she left: big, sparkly, paste diamonds, very glamorous for a twelve-year-old, but I’ve worn it on posh nights out since, thinking of her.

  Later, I wondered whether her fondness for me was an unconscious premonition that we were going to have something in common.

  I have also only met her son Barry once, and that’s when I was sent to New Zealand to do some filming. I took some holiday and I took my mum. We stayed with him at his beautiful farm outside Auckland. Katie had died some years before, but Mum was eager to know about her last years.

  ‘It was very upsetting. You know she had dementia?’ Barry said.

  Mum nodded.

  ‘Well, she lived with us, but she became very withdrawn into her own world. And the most distressing thing was that as she got more sick, she seemed to care less about us and all she would talk about was the baby who had died. You know about the baby? A little boy?’

  Mum nodded again.

  ‘She’d never talked about him before, but now he was all she would talk about. It was as if she didn’t care about leaving us, she just wanted to go to him. It was as if she didn’t love me at all.’

  I was haunted by this story, particularly by how upset Barry was. And when I lost Poppy just a couple of years later, it preyed on my mind. I didn’t want to carry that burden of grief so silently, for so many years that in the end it took over. I was fortunate – I had bereavement counselling. I joined a support group. I had friends who were brilliant and put up with long, tear-soaked evenings. I have felt people alongside me in my darkest moments. And that makes all the difference. Even more importantly, I held Poppy, I was able to know her and love her, and then I was able to bury her and mark her grave. To be able to do something, anything, for your child feels so important. I have photos and, best of all, a lock of her beautiful golden curls. I hold that lock of hair sometimes, because more than anything that makes her real. Poppy’s photograph is always close to hand. Actually, these days her photograph has been stolen by the girls and tends to move between their bedrooms. It’s interesting where she is to be found. Who is the keeper of Poppy today?

  Freud wrote about the mourning process and the work of mourning, and that involves experiencing the grief, living it, talking it, feeling it, marking it. If you cannot do that, you are stuck and it’s impossible to move on. His writing on it was first published in 1917 and yet when Clifford died in 1945, Freud’s ideas on bereavement tragically still hadn’t become mainstream, as they are today. Well, that’s the theory, but my experience suggests it’s true.

  Out of everything that happened to the Scarlet Sisters, Katie’s loss is the most difficult for me. Even more than Charlie Junior. It was so hard after Poppy died, but when I think about Katie, what she faced, and how much harder it was for her, it takes my breath away and I wish I could tell her how sorry I am and how much I respect her for simply surviving and going on, when she really was on her own. It’s so difficult that I have to stop and find my breath again outside in the fresh air.

  I’m in Cley in Norfolk and I walk to the old church. They have a prayer tree inside, where you can write a prayer you would like the church to say for you, and pin it to the leaves of the tree. The girls and I come here every summer and we always leave prayers. The church keeps a scrapbook, where they stick each year’s prayers and we look up our old ones and think about them. It’s useful. In the last few years I’ve asked for inspiration, then courage, and last year, healing. This year the girls have given me their prayers. I read them before I write my own. Essentially they all ask for the same thing – help for our family to stick together and be strong. And then it’s obvious what I should ask for. I write:

  Dear God,

  The waters are stormy. It’s difficult, but I know with your help I can find a way through to safety on the shore. Guide me, lend me your hand. Stand at my shoulder and whisper in my ear. Show me the way to be a good mother.

  Because actually, in the greater scheme of things, in terms of the footprint I make on this earth, nothing else is as important. What I do and the way I am has a huge effect on not only my children’s happiness, but on their children’s too, and so on. I don’t want to pass my losses on. I have never felt that as strongly as I do today.

  Just as I am leaving I turn back, and I pick up the pen at the foot of the tree and I write one more prayer:

  Dear God,

  Please look after Charlie Junior, and Clifford, and Poppy. Please can they know that they are much loved, and never forgotten.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The Beginning

  When the announcement came that the war was over, Dianne expected her dad to walk through the door the next day. Unfortunately, he didn’t. It was hard. She couldn’t understand why he didn’t come home. And the missing didn’t lessen. With the war over, it became very urgent.

  One day she was out in the front garden with John and the usual gang of children in their road. They had a beautiful tree, heavy with flowers, known as the Butterfly Tree. That day it was living up to its name and the children were running around with nets trying to catch them. As they laughed and chased the butterflies around the lawn, the telegraph boy stopped outside their house and knocked on the door. Everyone watched as Bertha took the telegram and went inside. Five minutes later the door opened and she came out again and called out, ‘Children, can you go home, please. I need John and Dianne to come inside.’

  Anxious, the two children went into the kitchen, where she beckoned to them to sit down. ‘I’ve just had a telegram. Your father is coming home today.’

  They squealed and hugged each other, and then they sat and waited, eyes pinned on the window where they c
ould see the front gate. About an hour later they were still sitting watching, but William had decided to surprise them and came along the side passage instead. But Bertha saw the top of his army beret and screamed, ‘He’s here! He’s here!’

  Bertha and John ran into the hall, flung open the front door and rushed into his arms. Dianne was left in the kitchen on her own with the baby Nigel, who was in his seat. ‘They’ve forgotten the baby,’ she thought.

  She was aware that William had never seen Nigel before and Nigel hadn’t met his dad. She didn’t quite know what to do and once again had that sensation of time suspended, a time lag, a gap – in the hall the next chapter had started, while she was still in the old one. It seemed like she sat there for ever, and then she knew what she had to do.

  Dianne picked up Nigel and took him into the hall where her dad was standing, in his uniform, skinny but fantastically tanned, with a whiff of the Sahara desert about him. ‘Hello, Dad,’ she said. ‘Look, this is our baby.’ And she walked over to her father and handed Nigel to him.

  Nigel immediately screamed, not having the faintest idea who this stranger was. And that just about sums up William’s homecoming.

  It would be lovely to write ‘And then they all lived happily ever after’, but this is no fairytale and life is so much more complicated than that.

  The problem William faced when he got home was a family who expected, and indeed longed for, everything to go back to how it had been. What they didn’t expect was for William to come back fundamentally changed, and because they were dependent on him, that meant their life changed too.

  ‘It was as if my husband left his ambition behind in the Sahara Desert,’ Bertha used to say. Like a changeling that had been blown in by the wind, he appeared the same (albeit even thinner and darker), but the look behind the eyes was different. The reason for this is completely unknown. William, like many returning soldiers, declined to talk about the war. When he did, it was only ever in passing and to say how much he enjoyed it. Which is curious because all the reports of life fighting Rommel in Egypt, especially in tanks, are horrific. However, William didn’t go to Africa until quite late on, and he claimed he didn’t see actual combat. Apart from one day, when he was sitting in a tank, in the gunner’s seat, in the middle of the desert having his lunch, when he looked up and saw a Messerschmitt about to dive. So, with a sandwich in his left hand, he pressed the trigger with his right and, ‘Blow me down,’ he said, ‘I hit it.’

  Tanks were designed to fight in Europe and William found himself as part of an experimental unit trying to adapt them to fighting in the desert. I can see how messing around with huge vehicles would suit him – he came from a family of engineers after all – and he loved racing them across the sand. All the photos from that time show him and his friends smiling, looking tanned and healthy in shorts and short-sleeve shirts, as if they are at a tennis tournament, except there’s a great big tank in the background.

  What’s obvious is that being in Egypt gave William a taste for sun and adventure, and he couldn’t settle back in his old home town. Grays now looked exactly that – grey – to him, and the thought of living the rest of his life there filled him with gloom. William’s ennui was not helped by the disappearance of his company. His building empire had ceased to exist and his business partner, Sparky, who somehow had managed to avoid having to go off and fight had disappeared, along with the money.

  So, when he arrived back, William sat down with a newspaper and answered advertisements for casual labourers. What frustrated Bertha was that he seemed to be fine with this. She had thought that when he came back he’d start a new business, especially as there were plenty of new houses to be built after the Blitz. But William didn’t, and Bertha started to seethe. She had thought she would be able to give up work and resume her old lifestyle, which used to be comparable to, if not better than, her sisters, Dora and Katie’s.

  But as the days rolled into weeks and then months, it gradually dawned on Bertha that this might be it, and she felt a little acorn of resentment taking root and starting to spread.

  Change is a cheeky fellow who can wear all sorts of disguises. Sometimes he creeps in the back door, but every so often he’s just barefaced and knocks at the door and demands to be let in.

  For Bertha, change came to the doorstep in the form of Mr Jackson at ten o’clock on a Sunday morning in the spring of 1948. There was a loud knock on the door, Bertha went to answer it and ushered the visitor in the sitting room.

  Mr Jackson was the self-appointed head of the residents’ association of the last estate that William had built, and now William faced him with a sense of unease. This impromptu visit could only herald bad news, and he was right.

  ‘We’re still waiting for the road to be built, Mr Kendall. When we bought our houses it was with the proviso that there would be a proper road connecting all the houses. We’ve lived with an unmade road for eight years now. Of course we understand nothing could be done during the war, but the war has been over for nearly two years and there is still no sign of it being built. We need to know – have you any plans?’

  William was an honest man, and had to give a direct answer. ‘No, I haven’t. My business no longer exists. I have no means to finish the road.’

  ‘In which case I’ve a letter to give you. We’ve been to see a solicitor and he’s advised us that you are legally obliged to build this road, whether your business is still in existence or not. Here.’ He handed over the letter and William read it carefully. ‘As it states, if you don’t start work on the road immediately, then we will have no choice but to start legal action. We will have that road even if we have to hire the builders ourselves, Mr Kendall, and you are going to have to pay the bill.’

  Mr Jackson got up to leave. ‘I look forward to hearing from you … or, indeed, your solicitor.’

  They shook hands – William was always polite – and he showed him to the door.

  After he had gone William sat for a long time thinking, until Bertha came to find him: ‘What was all that about?’

  ‘They want me to build the road to the estate.’

  ‘Well, you can’t.’

  ‘I know I can’t.’

  ‘Did you tell him that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And what did he say?’

  ‘You’d better read this.’ William handed over the letter.

  Bertha sat down and read it, and then dropped it. ‘Oh, no! Oh, William, what are you going to do? Surely they can’t make you? There’s a very good reason why that road wasn’t built. It’s called the war. I hope you said that.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No? Why on earth not?’

  ‘Because it doesn’t make any difference.’

  Bertha looked as if she was going to explode into one of her fiery red-head rages. ‘Of course it makes a difference! It’s the reason for practically everything. There’s half-built stuff, half-ruined stuff everywhere! They’ve just got to lump it like everyone else. At least they’ve got houses to live in, unlike some people. Honestly, the nerve of it! Selfish blighters! I’ve got a good mind to tell them myself – “You haven’t got your bleedin’ road because my husband was risking his life running around the desert to keep people like you alive!” The nerve of it! I mean, my children went without their father for all these years, for what? So some miserable, wet bloke can say, “I want my road.”!’ She pulled a face.

  William almost smiled. She was magnificent in her fury, but this wasn’t going to help.

  ‘Bertha, please, calm down. It’s not that I don’t think you’re right but we’ve got to face reality. Legally, they may well be right.’

  ‘Well, the law’s an ass.’

  ‘Yes, but it’s an ass that can get me thrown into prison.’

  That stopped her. ‘You don’t seriously think you could end up in prison? I mean, if you haven’t got the money, you haven’t got the money. It’s not as if you’ve committed a crime or stolen something.’

&nbs
p; ‘Well, in a way I have stolen the road, because I have got the money.’

  ‘Well, where is it?’

  ‘Here,’ he said, and swept his arm around their luxurious sitting room.

  ‘No! You can’t be serious. The house?’

  ‘Yes. There’s enough money in this house to build the road and they probably know that.’

  ‘But your children can’t be left without a roof over their heads, while they’re sitting in their brand new houses – houses that you’ve built! There’s no court in the land that would make you do that, that’s madness!’

  ‘I think it might. Anyway, let’s not get carried away, we wouldn’t be left homeless. We’d probably just be left with a home that’s a bit smaller.’

  ‘I am NOT leaving my home!’

  ‘Well, you might have to. But let’s see. No point in worrying about it yet. The first thing I’ve got to do is find myself a solicitor.’

  ‘No, William, the first thing you’ve got to do is find that crook Sparky and get the money back that he owes you and then you can build their bleedin’ road.’

  ‘I’m not going to find Sparky.’

  ‘Why not? He can’t just have disappeared into thin air. I don’t understand why you aren’t out there scouring the county looking for him. Someone must know where he is. I don’t understand why you’re so … so … limp about it all.’

  William knew why he hadn’t looked for Sparky – he hadn’t looked for him because he didn’t want to find him. He didn’t care about the money: money wasn’t important; in fact, he felt it got in the way. The root of all evil. Stuff just pinned you down. He had no fondness for Bertha’s soft furnishings – it was her vivacity he loved, everything else was a distraction. He didn’t want to start a business again, he didn’t want to go back to his old life. He didn’t want to be there, in that bungalow, in Grays, at all. It’s not that he didn’t want to be with his family, but he wanted them all to be somewhere else, starting out again, together, out in the wild, in the hot sunshine.