Dear Miss Robins,
I hope you will forgive the liberty I take in writing to you. It was the wish of my son, Frederick, that, should anything befall him, I would send you the enclosed items.
Though we did not meet, he had spoken much of you to me. Of your courage, your strength, your unfailing determination to bring about justice for yourself and others, no matter how high the cost.
I think he believed that I would disapprove of your actions, and, indeed, I do dislike destruction in whatever form it comes, but dislike and condemnation are two different things. We Quakers began our fight in much the same way as the suffragettes. For the sake of our beliefs our forerunners bellowed, argued, battled, were imprisoned and mocked, and it is only now, centuries later, that such as I may worship in quietness and tranquillity because of those brave souls who sacrificed themselves for a future they would not know. So I honour you, Miss Robins, just as I honour my beloved son.
As I understand, Frederick was lost in a trench explosion some way from his unit, caused by a shell igniting a stock of ammunition. (He was working as a stretcher-bearer near the town of Arras.) His body was not recovered. His commanding officer wrote most movingly of Frederick’s devotion to duty and courage under fire, of his wit, humour and kindness to others, “And all this, despite his deeply held conviction that war was wrong. It takes courage to fight for a cause one believes in. It takes supreme courage to fight for one that one does not.”
I trust and pray that this may be of some comfort to you in these dark days, and that you will always remember my son with affection and pride, as do I. May God bless and keep you.
Edward Thorpe
Inside the packet were two folded pieces of newspaper and an envelope. I opened one and there was the photo of me that first time I was released from Holloway. The other was of me at the Manchester meeting, my head held high. ‘NO LONGER NOTHING’. They were yellow with age, crumpled, streaked with a fine red mud. I thought, is this the mud Fred died in? Is this his blood mixed in with it? I rubbed it with my finger. The paper tore.
Inside the envelope was a postcard of our elephant, her great body rocklike, unmoveable, her trunk lifted high like a trumpet, looking upwards over the bars, up to where freedom waited. I turned it over. There, in Fred’s scribbly writing that he never could keep straight, were some copied lines of poetry. I have learnt them for they are all I have of him and yet what more could he have given me? For in those lines are all the words we never spoke and all the love we might have shared. What more could I have asked?
When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;
And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.
I still love books. The more I read, I see how little I knew, but there is great joy in gaining new knowledge, even if some of it shocks and frightens me, and I know I must go on, stretching away into the future, the past, the present to find out why.
‘Why what?’ Sylvia teases me.
‘Just “why?”’
Freda is with me on this. She never ceases with her questions. ‘Why? How? Who? What?’ Sometimes I am hard put to answer her, then I remember Fred, and how he studied each night to keep ahead of his pupils. And how he thought it was worth it.
I am as happy as I can be. Particularly today for today the church bells are ringing, ringing for life and hope and victory. The war is ended and when the men return they will find a different world from the one they left behind.
Their battle is won and so is ours. Strange that it should take a war in France to end the one at home. But when the men were gone and there was no one left to keep the country going but the women, it finally dawned on those grey felt-filled brains in Parliament that maybe we were not so close to rabbits as the Asquith liked to suppose.
And so, quietly and with hardly a snort or whimper, the vote was granted. To women aged thirty and over. Tucked in amidst a dozen new laws as though it was nothing more than a detail that scarce deserved the mentioning. A detail.
Is that what we were? I was? I am? A detail in history’s long march? Maybe. Maybe a thousand years from now it will make no difference, just as what people did a thousand years back is all but lost or forgotten. Or perhaps we shall all be saints like Joan of Arc. What does it matter? Today is what counts. And tomorrow. If you have a life you must live it.
Yes, today I am happy. Freda and I are at The Mascot, invited down while Freda gets over the chicken pox. She has made a great friend of Mrs Cliffe, who quite spoils her. The two of them spent the morning making flour paste animals which Mrs Cliffe then cooked so that the pie was half an hour late going in and Mr Pethick Lawrence pretended to cry for hunger, delighting my hard-hearted daughter!
And here she comes. Little fat legs thudding across the grass to where I sit, wrapped in my coat in the cool autumn sun, looking at the lake, which does not change.
‘Ma.’
‘Yes, lovey.’
‘Come quick. There’s a man. He’s got a pot.’
‘Well, tell Mrs Cliffe. She’s in charge of the pots.’
Feet stamping like a little wild bull.
‘A pot. A pot like mine.’ She waves her arm at me.
‘Your spots have gone now, Freda. You’re better.’
‘This pot. My pot.’ The tiny little strawberry under her wrist.
My heart begins a somersault. ‘Did he tell you his name, Freda? Did he say what he was called?’
‘Limpy.’
‘Limpy?’
‘He’s got a funny leg.’
‘Did he have another name?
‘Yes, but I have to guess and I can’t. He said you would know. Auntie Sylvia sent him. And here.’ She hands me a screwed up piece of paper. It says, ‘Be glad today and sing.’
And now I am running.
He is standing in the hallway. No sun, no light behind him. Only the shadows of a winter’s afternoon. But the dark has no fears for me now.
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About the Author
SARAH GRAZEBROOK exchanged a career as a television actress for one as a writer following the birth of her second child. Her first novel, Not Waving, won the Cosmopolitan Fiction Prize and she has written six others. She wrote a monthly column, ‘Notes from the Garret’, for Kent Life for four and a half years and contributes to a variety of satirical radio programmes. Sarah has wide experience of teaching creative writing for the Arvon Foundation and at Macon in France. She now lives in Deal, Kent.
Also by Sarah Grazebrook
Mountain Pique
Foreign Parts
Page Two
A Cameo Role
The Circle Dance
Not Waving
Copyright
Allison & Busby Limited
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First published in Great Britain by Allison & Busby in 2007.
This ebook edition published by Allison & Busby in 2013.
Copyright © 2007 by SARAH GRAZEBROOK
The
moral right of the author is hereby asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
‘When You Are Old’ in the Postscript by William Butler Yeats, in W.B. Yeats: Selected Poems edited by Timothy Webb (Penguin Classics, 1991), used by kind permission of AP Watt Ltd on behalf of Gráinne Yeats, Executrix of the Estate of Michael Butler Yeats.
All characters and events in this publication other than those clearly in the public domain are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent buyer.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978–0–7490–1556–5
Crooked Pieces Page 36
