by Anne Bennett
‘Oh, I couldn’t impose like that.’
‘Course you could,’ Kevin said. ‘I can always bunk in with Ben for a bit, can’t I, Uncle Joe?’
‘But will you mind doing that?’ Bridgette asked Kevin.
But before he was able to make any sort of reply, Joe said, ‘Mind? I’ll say not. The two of them are as thick of thieves. And yes, Kevin, that will be no trouble. Anyway,’ he went on, turning back to Bridgette, ‘I think we have told you enough about us. It’s time we learned something about you now.’
‘I’d be interested in hearing,’ Aggie said. ‘In my years away from the family I often thought of Finn, for I loved him dearly and I didn’t think he would forget me so easily. I was very upset when I heard that he had been killed in the Great War and I’m so glad that he found someone he loved as much as your mother and that you were the result of that love. That is very comforting.’
Bridgette was moved by the emotion in Aggie’s voice, but she said, ‘I hope you are not disappointed for there is little interesting to say about me, and as for my father, I only know what Maman told me, though he did write her many letters that you can read. I read them all and he became more real to me because of it.’
They all sat around the room, and Kevin and Ben made tea for everyone as Bridgette told them all she knew of her mother’s courtship with Finn, the love they had so evidently shared, and showed them the locket with Finn’s lock of hair inside, which she still wore around her neck, and the ring she wore on her right hand that her mother said they had used as a wedding ring.
They were interested in all that, but they also wanted to know something about the person she was now, but she knew she had to be cautious in what she said. So she told them just that she had had a troubled upbringing with Legrand, who had pretended to be her natural father, and his bullying son, Georges, and said it was one of the reasons she had left the bakery and gone to work in the dress shop. ‘I married James and he enlisted as soon as war was declared,’ she said. ‘And later was rescued from the beaches of Dunkirk.’
It had hurt Bridgette to say that, when Xavier’s body might still lie there hidden under the sand, and she bit her lip to try and prevent the tears from falling.
But the family saw her distress and Tom said, ‘Please don’t upset yourself, Bridgette. These memories are still painful for you and we don’t need to know any more.’
However Bridgette knew it was better to go on now she had started, get all the lies out together and get the story established in her head, and so she said, ‘No. It’s all right. James made it to Britain and I found out later that he had joined the Free French Army under General de Gaulle. But in St-Omer times were hard after the occupation and I took up bar work.’ Here again she kept the details very vague.
‘James was involved in the invasion, when he injured his arm quite badly. When they patched him up he came home for a couple of days’ leave to rest it properly before rejoining his unit.’
‘I had been living back at the bakery since April, when Legrand fetched me to nurse my mother and by the time James was ready to leave in mid-July she had become very ill indeed. I sent a telegram to my aunt and uncle in Paris. They arrived the day I received news that James was dead.’
‘Oh, my dear girl,’ Aggie said. ‘What a terrible thing to happen, and for your mother to be so ill too.’
Bridgette nodded. ‘It was a very sad time. I remember feeling that I was filled up with sorrow. Maman died a fortnight later, the very day the American soldiers reached the town, and she made me promise on her deathbed that I would come and see Finn’s family, and so here I am.’
‘And it has been a delight to meet you,’ Aggie said.
‘Hear hear,’ Tom said heartily. ‘Welcome to the family, my dear.’
TWENTY-EIGHT
The family went out of their way to make Bridgette feel welcome, and within a couple of days a strong bond had grown between her and Molly. The babies got on well together most of the time and any spats were few and far between and easily resolved.
Initially, Bridgette had felt bad about leaving Ada, but when she went to see her to collect her suitcases and arrange for Mark to collect the other larger items, the older woman was all smiles.
‘Don’t you worry about me, ducks,’ she said. ‘You’ve done me a favour. All that searching you did for your family made me realise what’s important in this life and so I am doing what the kids want and putting my house on the market and moving to somewhere much smaller nearer to them. Should have done it years ago.’
‘What about all your memories tied up in the house?’ Bridgette asked.
‘Memories don’t rely on bricks and mortar,’ Ada said. ‘Memories are locked in your heart.’ She patted Bridgette’s arm and went on, ‘You stay with your family, my duck. It’s what you come to find and where you belong, and don’t you give me another thought.’
‘You’re a very special lady,’ Bridgette said. ‘I only hope that your family appreciates you.’
Ada gave a chuckle and said, ‘I’ll probably irritate the life out of them, but that’s family, ain’t it? You accept each other, warts and all.’
Bridgette returned home in a reflective mood. She knew essentially that Ada was right and she felt bad to be living a lie with her own people. The longer it went on, the more entrenched it would become, and yet she could see no way out of it.
When she got home, Molly said, ‘If tomorrow is a nice day, how d’you fancy a trip to Sutton Park?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Bridgette, remembering how she wanted to go there and take James’s son to the place his father had such happy memories of and her voice had a breathless note to it as she said, ‘I’d love to go. Is it far?’
‘As I said before the boundary of Sutton Coldfield is no distance at all,’ Molly said. ‘The park though is further and we’ll go by train. That will please the children anyway, and your lovely big pushchair will accommodate both of them with ease. As long as we have the weather we’ll make a day of it and take a picnic.’ Molly added. ‘What d’you say?’
‘I say that sounds a very good idea,’ Bridgette said, and when she went to bed that night she prayed for good weather for the morning.
The day was fine and dry and promised to be warm. They set off for the station in high spirits and Molly was right: the children did love the train. As it chugged its way through the countryside Molly said, ‘I bet you have seen nothing like this park. It’s massive and there are roads running through it.’
Bridgette remembered James telling her that the park had five large lakes and that it was given to Sutton Coldfield by Henry the Eighth. Before she could stop herself, she blurted that out and Molly looked at her in amazement. ‘How on earth do you know that?’
Bridgette was annoyed with herself. Whatever had possessed her to come out with something like that? She could hardly tell Molly the truth and so she said, ‘I don’t know. It just popped into my head.’
‘Well, that’s just uncanny,’ Molly said, ‘because you’re right. It’s a really special park and those who don’t live in Sutton have to pay to get in. Through the war a lot of it was out of bounds because soldiers trained here and I heard that they had a POW camp there too. People say that farmers whose men had been called up and wouldn’t have land girls often opted for prisoners of war to work on their farms.’
‘Were they not afraid they would escape?’
‘Where to?’ Molly said. ‘Britain is an island, don’t forget. Anyway, very few tried to escape. They knew when they were well off, I suppose. It will be nice now to see the park in peacetime.’
And it was a wonderful park, just as Molly had said. They went in what she said was the main entrance, Town Gate. Just the other side of it was a children’s playground where a boy was pushing his younger sister on one of the swings, and there again there was the memory of James saying that he always seemed to spend a long time pushing his sister, Dolly, on one of the swings in that park.
Apart from
the boy and his sister, they had the playground to themselves but Molly said at the weekend it was swarming with children and the park was popular with courting couples too, especially on Sundays.
‘So,’ she said with a grin to Bridgette, ‘if you stay in Birmingham and fall in love with someone, you’ll know where to take him.’
‘That will never happen to me,’ Bridgette said. ‘It isn’t worth the heartache. The only man I will love is little Finn.’
‘That’s a sad and very final decision to make,’ Molly said. ‘Someone once said that it was better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.’
‘Then I would say that person has never loved deeply and lost the person they cared for so that they only feel half a person afterwards,’ Bridgette said. ‘It is like you British say, that person was talking through the top of their head.’
‘You mean top of their hat?’ Molly corrected.
Bridgette gave a definite nod. ‘Yes, and that too.’ Then she caught Molly’s eye and the two women burst out laughing. Bridgette realised that it was the first time in ages that she had laughed like that.
After that the day could only be a magical one. They walked by the edge of one of the large lakes and as Molly led the way into the wood at the lake’s edge she pointed out the rivulets that weaved through the trees to feed the lake. ‘Little streams like that are all over the park,’ Molly said.
Bridgette just nodded as she took a deep breath in and smelled the fragrant blossom on many of the trees and saw the clusters of pink and white peeping out amongst the bright green leaves and the dappled sun shining down on them through their semi-canopy of foliage. The children were clamouring to be let out of the pushchair and walk, and so Molly and Bridgette unstrapped them and let them explore the woods too. They showed them the roughness of the tree bark and how to kick their feet through the decaying leaves from autumn still littering the ground, which made them both giggle. They shared in their excitement when they uncovered a pine cone or found petals from the blossom that had floated to the ground.
‘Doesn’t having a small child make you look at the world in a different way?’ Molly said.
Bridgette nodded. ‘Everything is new to them, so the mundane becomes exciting, and if you can catch a bit of that it makes you realise what a wonderful world it really is.’
‘Maybe more people will see that now that the fighting has stopped,’ Molly said.
Suddenly Bridgette burst out, ‘Oh, look at the cows.’
The trees had thinned and Bridgette had spotted cows on the lush pastureland in front of them. They watched the people approach with large doe-like eyes. ‘Oh,’ exclaimed Molly in delight, ‘it’s nice to see them back! Mark told me all about those cows. When this park was given to the people of Sutton Coldfield, certain farmers were given permission for their cows to graze in the park. That was suspended during the war and this is a sort of sign that things are returning to normal.’
‘I know exactly what you mean,’ Bridgette said, as they walked past the field with the cows, onto a grassy hillock. ‘It’s lovely to see everything returning to a more peaceful time.’
‘Shall we stay here a while?’ Molly said. ‘It’s a good spot for a picnic. I don’t know about you, but I am suddenly very hungry, and I bet Finn and Nuala won’t say no to a bit of grub either.’
‘I’m all for that,’ Bridgette said as she took the blanket from the back of the pushchair and laid it on the ground. Soon a sizeable hole was made in the food and drink they had bought with them and Bridgette lay back on the grass, gazing at the pale blue sky, the white fluffy clouds scudding across it, and felt contentment seeping all through her as if at last she was in the right place.
She said none of this to Molly, but Molly had deduced a lot by the look on Bridgette’s face and she gave her a gentle poke in the ribs and said, ‘What d’you say to us peeling off our stockings and giving the babies the chance to paddle in one of the streams?’
Molly wanted to take Bridgette into Birmingham town centre and show her a place called the Bull Ring.
‘Do they sell bulls?’ Bridgette asked.
‘No,’ said Molly with a smile, ‘though they probably did once. But there are stalls that sell just about anything else. I haven’t been there since the war ended, to tell you the truth. I went during the war a few times once I had Kevin living with me because they used to sell rabbit, offal and horse meat, and it was off ration. Isobel and Aggie are falling over themselves to look after the babies, so we won’t have to take them with us and we can go in on the tram.’
The tram stopped at a place called Steel House Lane, so called, Molly said, as they alighted, because of the police station across the road.
‘And what is the other grim building on this side?’ Bridgette asked.
‘That’s the General Hospital now,’ Molly said. ‘Mark’s mother told me that once it had been built as a work house and you’re right, it is rather grim from the outside. Come on,’ she went on, linking her arm through Bridgette’s, ‘I’ll take you up Colmore Row and show you first what used to be our Jewellery Quarter.’
As they were coming up to a road on the right she said. ‘This is Whittall Street and if you look up as we pass there you will see the Catholic Cathedral of Birmingham called St Chad’s at the end.’
‘It has two blue spires.’ Bridgette said in surprise as she caught sight of it.
‘Yes and it’s very grand,’ Molly said. ‘But not big for a city Cathedral. Not that it’s much smaller than the Anglican St Phillips that we will pass in a moment.’
‘I attended a Cathedral in St-Omer,’ Bridgette said, ‘It was called Notre Dame and that wasn’t all that big either, but very beautiful inside.’
‘We’re coming up to Colmore Row now,’ Molly said. ‘What can you see behind the façade of Snow Hill Station?’
‘Just a sea of rubble,’ Bridgette answered.
‘That was our Jewellery Quarter,’ Molly said. ‘Such a lot of it was burned out in the war. It was before I arrived in Birmingham but I was told that the fires were so intense the tar melted and slid into the gutters and, of course, buckled the tramlines and the railway tracks too.’
‘It sounds dreadful,’ said Bridgette, and she remembered that James had said his wife, Sarah, had worked there.
‘It must have been,’ Molly said. ‘St Phillip’s, the Anglican cathedral, was bombed too and they must have been semi expecting that because they removed all the stained-glass windows to a place of safety before the war.’
‘It does look a bit battered,’ Bridget said, looking across the road to the church. ‘But I like the clock tower and the blue dome above it, and the gardens around it are lovely,’
‘I suppose,’ Molly said. ‘I was born and bred here and that means that I probably don’t appreciate things as much as you do seeing them for the first time. I mean we have a pretty impressive Town Hall, at the end of this road based on a Roman temple and I have never really looked at it.’
Bridgette looked at it though and used as she had become to the historical sites of Paris, she was impressed by the grandeur of the place before they turned into New Street. ‘I saw all this destruction and devastation and massive holes from the taxi the night I arrived,’ Bridgette said, ‘but somehow it affects you more when you are actually walking past it.’
Molly nodded. ‘We’re just so used to it, we hardly notice any more.’
‘And where is the Bull Ring?’
‘Not far now,’ Molly said. ‘It’s just along here.’ And then she added, ‘Before the war you could buy anything in the Bull Ring and Saturday night was party night. I only saw it a few times but I’ll never forget it. All the stalls were lit like fairy land, and there were stilt walkers and a man tied up in chains, and another with hardly any clothes on lying on a bed of nails. There was a boxing booth too, but my parents never let me see that. And there might be someone giving a sermon. Then after a while all these men would be along with their accordions.
First they would play all the jigs and reels from Ireland to get people in the mood, and then they’d do all the music-hall songs and everyone would be singing. It was always a smashing night. Anyway, we’re here now and you can see the place for yourself.’
They began to walk down the cobbled incline, passing mounds of rubble. ‘There used to be shops all along here as well as you can probably see.’ Molly said. ‘There were at least two tailors that could make up a suit for you for thirty shillings, or two guineas if you wanted a waistcoat. Dad took me in one day when he was being measured for one. And before the war there were a lot more flower sellers around too. Course, all the available land was dug up in the Dig for Victory campaign.’
Bridgette thought parts of the Bull Ring were not unlike the market in St-Omer. Barrows piled high with produce of every description swept down along the cobbled incline to a church at the bottom, which was ringed by trees. The cries of the vendors mixed with the voices of those bartering with customers and the general crush of people, and through this cacophony one strident voice could be plainly heard: an old lady standing in front of Woolworths. She was blind and had a card around her neck saying so, and cried out incessantly, ‘Carriers. Handy Carriers.’
‘We’ll take a look around Woolworths later, if you like,’ said Molly. ‘It’s called the Sixpenny Store because nothing cost more than that in there.’
‘I’m only just getting to grips with your money.’ Bridgette said. ‘But sixpence isn’t much is it?’
‘No,’ Molly said, pulling one from her purse. ‘It’s also called a tanner. Come on, let’s go and have a shufty in Peacocks first. It used to be great before the war because there were toys of every description. I used to love the dolls and what a variety they had then. There were dolls’ houses too, with miniature furniture. I never had anything so fine. There just wasn’t the money about. My dolls’ house was a shoe box and my dolls more the battered variety. But Mum used to say no one could charge you for having a look. Did you have many toys?’
