Dangling by a Thread

by Lea Wait

  “That’s horrible! No one did anything about it?”

  Sarah shook her head. “If anyone knew, they didn’t interfere. My dad left that place when he was seventeen. But he never really escaped. He did marry my mother, and for a while, I was told, he was happy. But she died—breast cancer, it was—when I was still in nappies. My dad got very depressed, and drank too much—I guess he’d always done that. When I was two he hung himself.” Sarah’s voice was steady, but her hands were shaking.

  I sat, listening in horror. Should I hug Sarah, or scream? “That’s awful,” I said, knowing words were totally inadequate. “What happened to you?”

  “I was lucky,” she said. “My mum’s mother, my grandmum, took me in and raised me. She’s the one taught me needlepoint.” She pointed at a framed needlepoint map of Australia hung over her television. “She gave that to me on my eighteenth birthday. Told me I should be proud to be an Aussie. Taught me about her side of my family. They’d left Ireland during the potato famine in the 1840s, and opened a small used clothing and furniture store in Australia. More than a hundred years later, Grandmum was still running the family business, but it had changed over the years. She was an antiques dealer. I grew up learning how to value what our ancestors had treasured in the past, doing my sums in back of the counter, and learning how to be polite to customers.”

  No wonder Sarah now ran a small antiques business here in Haven Harbor.

  “When I was six, in 1987, the whole story broke. Dad had died before then, of course. I grew up knowing at least a little about the scandal.”

  “The scandal?”

  “Between 1938 and 1970 social welfare people in the UK sent about ten thousand children abroad. The foster system in the UK was overburdened, and the children were sent to former British colonies like Canada and Rhodesia and New Zealand—and Australia. The idea was that those countries could use cheap labor, and, some said, wanted to increase their white populations. Some of the children—they called them the child migrants—had been abandoned in Britain. Some had been born out of wedlock. Many had one or even two parents who couldn’t care for them temporarily. Some were as young as three; most, like my dad, were between the ages of seven and ten. Still young enough not to remember a lot, or to question that they were orphans. But most of them had living relatives.”

  “Didn’t those relatives ask questions?”

  “That’s one of the saddest parts. They were told their children had died in foster care.”

  I put my needlepoint down and took a sip of beer. “That’s awful! And no one knew?”

  “Not until several child migrants who’d been sent to Australia went back to Britain as adults to try to find out who they were. In 1987 Margaret Humphries, a social worker in Nottinghamshire, met with them and started putting the pieces together. Her search ended up as an international investigation.”

  “She was able to prove what happened?”

  “She was. I was still a child when it all broke, but Grandmum, bless her, knew it was important. She registered me as the child of one of the migrants. The idea was to try to connect the children, now grown, of course, or their children, with family members who might still be alive in the UK. A trust was set up to help make that happen. A few years ago the British government finally apologized for the program.”

  “A little late for that,” I pointed out. “So what did you do?”

  “When I was growing up I knew my dad had been one of the child migrants, but I didn’t think much about it, and I didn’t want Grandmum to think I didn’t appreciate her bringing me up. I was happy, helping her with the store. Then when I was twenty-five Grandmum died.”

  I shuddered. What would my life be like without Gram? I didn’t want to think about it.

  “I decided I wanted to know about my father’s background. Find out whether I had family in the UK. So I applied to the Family Restoration Fund.” She paused. “It took two years before they were able to help me.”

  “And did they find your family?”

  Sarah nodded. “They found Dad’s mum. Of course, she was an old woman by that time. Grandmum had left me a little money, and I sold her store and its contents, so I could afford to do whatever I needed to do. The Fund helped me get to England to see my other grandmother.”

  We’d stopped drinking or eating. I focused on Sarah.

  What if I’d been separated from Gram? She’d raised me after Mama disappeared, the way Sarah’s grandmum had raised her. But what if there’d been another woman I’d been related to? A woman in another country? Would I have traveled around the world to find her?

  Sarah’s voice was taut. “Meeting my English grandmother wasn’t easy. She was almost ninety, and she’d had a hard life. Her sight and hearing were going. She was living in a home for the destitute elderly. At first she didn’t understand who I was. After all, she’d been told her son had died years and years before.” Sarah picked up her beer and took several swallows. “She had a picture of him, though. He was with her at a park, on a swing. Dad would have treasured that. He didn’t have any pictures of his mother, or of himself as a child.” Sarah got up. “Would you like to see it?”

  “I’d love to.”

  When she returned from her bedroom she handed me a small framed black and white photograph. It was out of focus, but the smiles on the little boy and his mother were clear.

  “I couldn’t change my grandmother’s life, but I wanted to know more about her, and about how my dad ended up in the foster system.”

  “It must have been very hard. Being in a new country, talking to an old woman about events seventy years ago.”

  “I kept thinking my dad would have wanted me to be there, with his mom. Getting to know her a little.”

  “Did she tell you what happened?”

  “She told me she’d been a teenager during the Second World War. Poor. She’d met an American soldier stationed near London. He was an artist, working with the British Army, sketching, documenting the war in England.”

  “Sounds like a romantic movie.”

  “It does. And, at least at first, they were happy. The times were awful, but they shared them. He even asked her to marry him. But then she found out he was already engaged to a woman back in the states, and she broke off the relationship.”

  “So no happy ending.”

  “No. And by that time she was pregnant.”

  “Did she tell him?”

  Sarah nodded. “He even sent money for a few years. Money for his son. But post-war England was hard for an uneducated woman with a child but no husband. She told me that when her son was five she was desperate. She’d lost her waitressing job and couldn’t pay for her flat. Her little boy was hungry, so she gave him to the social services ladies. They promised it would be a temporary placement. Her son would be cared for while she saved enough to start over.”

  “Did she ever see him again?”

  “Once or twice. Then one day when she arrived at the children’s home where he’d been living he was gone. They told her there’d been a measles epidemic. They were sorry. He’d died.”

  “How awful for both of them! And she never married?”

  “No. She wrote to Bob—that’s what she called him—and told him their son was dead.”

  Sarah’s hands were clenched. “She wouldn’t tell me what she did after that. I don’t think she had a good life. At the nursing home they said she’d been a charwoman until she was too old and weak to work anymore.”

  “So sad.”

  “I was furious,” Sarah said, getting up and striding from one side of the room to the other as though she’d like to hit someone. “This poor woman—my grandmother!—had lived a horrible life, and even lost her son, all because she’d fallen in love. If only I’d known sooner, I might have been able to make her last years a little easier. But I hadn’t known.” She turned to me. “She died a month after I met her.”

  “At least she died knowing she had a granddaughter.”

  “Y
es.”

  “And she gave you the picture.”

  “Her nurse did, after she died. I’d been my grandmother’s only visitor. She gave me the photo, and several letters my grandmother had kept.”

  “Letters?” I leaned forward.

  “They were crumpled and faded and hard to read. But they were from a man named Bob. She’d kept them all those years. They were postmarked ‘Haven Harbor, Maine’.”

  “Did she know her Bob had become rich and famous?”

  “All she knew was he was an artist,” Sarah said. “When she knew him, that’s what he was. An aspiring artist. That’s all I knew about him then, too. But after she’d died and I’d seen the letters I decided to go to Haven Harbor. I knew he’d been here in the early nineteen fifties. He could have left long ago. But it was a clue. After all, I’d already traveled from Australia to England. Flying across the pond was simple. I wanted to find my grandfather, wherever he was, and tell him what had happened to my grandmother and to his son.” Sarah paused. “Tell him he had a granddaughter.”

  “That’s why you came here.”

  Sarah nodded. “I got here about five years ago, checked into one of the B&Bs, and asked my hostess if she’d heard of a Bob Lawrence. She laughed—said everyone knew who Robert Lawrence was. But I’d missed him. He’d died fifteen years before.”

  “You must have been so disappointed.”

  “I went to the library and looked up his biography. Dozens of books and magazine articles had been written about him and his art. I read everything I could find, but none of them mentioned my grandmother, or anything about that period in his life except that he’d served in the armed forces in England during World War II. After he came home he married and he and his wife—probably the American fiancé—had a son, Theodore. Ted. By the late 1960s his paintings had become famous.”

  “Did you tell Ted Lawrence who you were?”

  “I couldn’t just walk in and announce that I was the daughter of his father’s illegitimate son born at the end of World War II. The only proof I had was the picture of my father. And a story. And the letters, of course. But I’d found out what I wanted to know: who my father was, and where he’d come from.” She smiled. “And I’d fallen in love with this town, and its people. I’d cut my ties to Australia. I kept thinking that Haven Harbor was where my family was from. I didn’t think it was important that Ted Lawrence knew I was his niece. What was important was that I knew who my family was. Who I was.”

  I nodded slowly. “I think I understand.”

  “Then I met your Gram at church. I knew I wanted to stay here, but I didn’t know how I could support myself and become part of the community. I told Charlotte about my grandmum and her business, and she encouraged me to use what I knew about antiques and the money I had left to start my own business. Antiques are popular in Maine. And when she expanded the Mainely Needlepointers I was one of the first to volunteer to help. Doing needlepoint made me feel closer to my grandmum in Australia. Somehow it brought the two threads of my family together. I was—content.”

  “How did Ted Lawrence find out who you were, then?”

  “That’s the next part of the story,” said Sarah. “Maybe the strangest part. Shall I put together the other pizza?”