by Anne Berry
Yours sincerely,
Valeria Mulholland
Secretary
I HAVE READ the letter in so many frames of mind, analysing every word, every comma, every full stop. What made me sob when I first saw it was not learning that my father was a German prisoner of war, a POW, but that they had concealed this from me all these years.
Henry was a tonic, telling me that deep down he had sensed a tantalising foreign allure in me that he found altogether irresistible. As if in testimony, he made love to me so tenderly and attentively that I began to wonder if he was telling the truth, that my interesting ancestry gave me added sex appeal. The fact of it, far from distressing me, made me timidly curious. Already my mind was preoccupied with this new German father; blond, blue-eyed, I hazarded. And I pictured him in a dark grey trench coat, leaning over the deck rail of a ship (I’m not sure why), his cap at a rakish angle, smiling out at the wide, wide ocean and the broad, broad sky. The problem was not with me. I rather liked the thought of distant relatives across the seas. It was the family, my family. They had known, my adopted parents, my grandparents, my aunt Enid and very probably my cousins too. If as children Frank and Rachel were kept in ignorance of this sooty sheep in their midst with her part Teutonic ancestry, they had certainly been informed later on. The war is all history to me, if not ancient then out of my realm. It was over by the time I arrived. I harbour no hatred, no prejudice. I have no one to grieve. But my mother’s parents were both killed in the great wars, and my aunt Enid’s husband grew ill and died as a result of battle fatigue and a weakened constitution. Even my grandmother had harboured hatred, a dark residue left over from the First World War.
‘So much of it makes sense to me now,’ I tell Henry, as we sit together at the dining table that overlooks the small garden, enjoying our coffees after a sandwich lunch. That’s one of the nice things about working and living on the estate. Henry comes home for lunch and we pool our morning’s events, his of the vagaries of gardening, mine of customers and tourists. ‘She often relayed to me in gory detail the fate of her own parents.’ Henry has heard this before, but repeating it now with my newly acquired knowledge gives it fresh meaning. ‘A mother who had died in a Zeppelin bombing raid in the First World War, and a father who had perished in a car accident during the blackout in the Second World War.’ I shake my head ruefully.
Henry blows on his coffee then sets down his cup. ‘Mmm … your mother, with her dislike and mistrust of anything foreign. Now it all falls into place.’
‘My mother who blamed the wars for depriving her of her parents,’ I contribute.
‘Your mother who believed the Nazis were in league with Lucifer,’ Henry continues my train of thought, the two of us only just starting to grasp the far-reaching effects of my paternal origin. ‘She lived through the Second World War, slept in air-raid shelters, listened to the British propaganda, probably sang the anti-German songs. There must have been more than a few people she was acquainted with who had lost their loved ones.’
I felt suddenly uncomfortable with my mother’s deep-seated prejudice. All around us were the colours of hope, the harlequin green of virgin grass pricking the wakening ground, a tub of pansies, their heads wavering in a tumult of lavender blues, thistle and plum purples, and creamy yellows. The sky was a jubilant shout of blue that made you want to kick off your shoes, throw yourself down on the earth, lock your hands behind your head and let the aerial show hypnotise you. But there was an adjustment to be made in my perception that currently handicapped me, preventing such freedom of expression. Another ghost from the past, my father, had arrived to perplex me. ‘She would have monitored me closely for any indication that the blackness was in me, my German blood. In her twisted way, she would have seen it as inherited evil.’
Henry drinks his coffee and we both contemplate the letter in my lap. ‘It’s the casual, offhand style of writing that bothers me,’ he says when he has finished. ‘It’s as if you were a commodity, a model baby to be viewed and judged as either appealing enough to take home, or a disappointment to window-shopping prospective parents. Actually we wanted one who was a bit more … a bit less … she isn’t really what we … we’d prefer it if she wasn’t so … you can’t help but notice …’ He sighs and strokes his beard sagely.
‘But I was a baby, a living breathing human being. Not a puppy who might have desirable traits bred into me, and who could be bludgeoned into obedience.’ I offer Henry another cup of coffee and he declines.
‘I must get back.’ His tone is apologetic, as if he would like stay the afternoon and tend to me and not his plants. He stoops to kiss my cheek, his whiskers tickling me. ‘You’re not to brood,’ he commands, remembering that I have the afternoon off. ‘Go and work on your painting.’
I nod and rise as if I mean to act on his advice. But as soon as he is gone I sink back down into my rattan sun chair. Some of the weave is unravelling on the arm, and I pick at a strip until it is also at a loose end. I paint. I am an amateur artist. I should like to have been professional, but like so many other things it wasn’t to be. But today had I the skill of Michelangelo all I could manage would be a coat of emulsion on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. I ignore Henry’s appeal and give myself up to a storm of memories.
I was fourteen when I found out that Mum was not my mother, that Dad was not my father, that the genetic imprint in me came from neither of them. I returned home from school one day, and Mother said that she needed to speak to me.
Sit down, Lucilla. I have something to say, she announced. And I did. I sat down at the dining table. She stood opposite me and I stared up at her. I breathed in a rotten sulphurous smell. She had burned the eggs again. She frequently dished up peeled hard-boiled eggs with salad for tea, the whites discoloured to a disconcerting pebble grey or even a witchy green, or burned sausages, which were marginally tastier. Burned sausages with burned chips: a makeshift supper. Or burned toast that was like eating charcoal dust. She was more pyromaniac than cook. And then she told me – just like that, and I forgot about the stink-bomb smell.
‘I’m afraid … I’m afraid that you’re not our little girl. The truth is that you are adopted.’
And what I felt was not shock or grief, but the most enormous sense of relief. This woman was not my mother. At a subconscious level I had always known it. I suppose that was the start of it, the quest for my real mother. All my adoptive mother told me that day was that she was Welsh and very young, that she’d lived on a Welsh farm. Nothing about my father. Well, now I know.
I project my imagination back to those post-war years. A dull room with walls the colour of sand, full of uncomfortable office furniture. Me bundled up in my biological mother’s arms. My adoptive parents sitting side by side on two upright wooden chairs. And someone from the Church Adoption Society, perhaps the secretary, Valeria Mulholland, supervising the prospective parents’ introduction to Lucilla Haverd. There she is, adjusting the baby shawl to show her daughter off to best advantage. I see my adoptive mother scrutinising me critically, my adoptive father nodding ruminatively. But my birth mother’s face is a blank as she wordlessly hands me over. If I did not fit before I was told the truth, afterwards I became the aeroplane missing that vital piece, the steel bird grounded in the hangar for the foreseeable future.
I last left my past in 1984. That was when the endless wondering progressed to an appointment with a social worker in Dorking. My adoptive father had died that year. I didn’t go to his funeral. Mum asked me if I’d like to attend but I said no. I am not a hypocrite. They had moved back to Wales after Dad retired, to Pembrokeshire, something he had always wanted to do. He was full of national pride for his corner of the British Isles. I expect he was overjoyed when the Adoption Society found a baby girl with a Welsh birth mother. I expect all he focused on was the Welsh blood, the Welsh ancestry in the infant. I expect it neutralised the German blight in the otherwise ideal child. Anyway he died in the land he loved. After Dad had gone, Mum said she
was downsizing, moving to the Pembroke Dock Road, that she didn’t have room for Father’s piano in this new, much smaller bungalow she was buying, and would I like it. We spoke on the phone.
At the mention of the piano, my stomach clenched and bile rose at the back of my throat making me gag. I willed that gloomy instrument to the bottom of the ocean, where only ugly mutant fish could fan their fins over its ivory keys. ‘It is very kind of you to think of me, Mum, but I’m afraid I don’t have any room either. You know how tiny our cottage is. And then there’s the transport, the expense. Why don’t you donate it to a youth group?’ I suggested. ‘They might really appreciate the generous gesture.’ I didn’t want it. There were gremlins lurking under its lid, gremlins ready to reach up and seize my hands, to scratch my palms until they burned as if steeped in acid, to wrench my fingers so that the knuckles cracked painfully.
‘It’s a shame, Lucilla. But you’ve made up your mind.’
‘Yes I have, Mum.’
‘Lucilla?’ Whenever she spoke my name it sounded accusatory, more accost than address, a punch to the abdomen.
‘Yes?’
‘There’s something else. It’s about the will. I thought you ought to know that your father wanted it split three ways.’
‘Three ways?’ I rifled my brain for the sisters or brothers I had neglected to notice as I was clawing my way up.
‘Frank and Rachel.’
‘Oh yes, Frank and Rachel. Of course,’ I sang back with a twang of cynicism.
‘Frank’s the executor and trustee of my will. I hope you understand. Ought to be a man left in charge.’
So there it was. I was not blood, not their blood anyway. I was not kith and kin in the true meaning of the words. And they were. Even though Aunt Enid, their mother, hadn’t left me a penny, this was fair – justice packaged and branded specifically for an artificial daughter, the stand-in, the understudy. A few months after that call, the haunting refrain started up again. I’d heard it all my life drifting on the air, background noise. Who are you? it said. I’m Lucilla, I replied. No, who are you really? Who am I really? I was listening to it when I sat down to write the letter to the social worker in the council offices in Dorking. Henry encouraged me. He said it was time for some answers. The jumping-off platform we settled on was my birth certificate, my full birth certificate. ‘If this fish can be landed,’ Henry said, ‘surely one day you might harpoon the whale of your true identity.’ The imagery was original coming from my borrower of Latin wisdom, and I told him so, if not a tad brutal. I was not sure I found the prospect of harpooning my identity attractive. Looking back, perhaps Henry had intuited that it was going to be a bloody business. But I was in the grip of a compulsion that I could no more have shrugged off than my own skin. I reported what scraps I had gleaned so far.
I would greatly appreciate it if you could assist me in attaining my full birth certificate. I enclose a photocopy of the only one that I have in my possession, passed on to me by my adoptive mother, Harriet Pritchard. As you will see, printed in red, it is not much bigger than a theatre ticket. It gives only the scantest of information, my name, my sex, my date of birth.
With an alcoholic’s morning tremble, I’d put a stamp on the envelope. I could have delivered it personally, but it felt as if the wretched thing might explode any second fracturing me further. When the letter came allocating me an appointment with a social worker, Clarice Goss, the alcoholic jitters spread from head to toe. I had some insane notion that my mother, my real mother, my Welsh mother, would suddenly appear, bouncing out of a cupboard in Welsh national costume, black and white checked woollen skirt, crisp white apron, shawl, lace cap and tall black chimney hat. And while I was sipping tea with the social worker, she would keep the pair of us entertained with a reel, or a melancholy Welsh ballad. I had no concept of what kind of a trek I was embarking on, of how treacherous a path the abandoned babes in the wood stumbled along. Gina was seventeen then and studying for her A levels. Like her father she supported me in my voyage to establish where I began. But unlike Henry, I believe she wanted this as much for herself as she did for me. A romantic teenager, she had been intrigued by the idea of more relations – potentially exotic creatures.
‘I have a grandparents somewhere, and perhaps aunts and uncles. Cousins!’ she exclaimed excitedly, springing up and abandoning the piles of books spread over the dining table for the purposes of revision. My Gina, though she tried, had an allergy to sedentary study. She might endure it for short periods, but then she would hare outside slamming the door so hard that Pear Tree Cottage was left behind quaking at her abrupt departure. Like me it was the countryside she adored, and forestry that claimed her restless nature. ‘I expect finding your father will be too difficult if he’s not named anywhere, but your real mother … I’m sure that’s possible.’ She prowled the small room as if pacing out her thought process. ‘I would love to meet her, your mother, my real grandmother. Oh gosh, think of that. I wonder what she looks like. If we stood in a line, us three, my real grandmother, then you, then me, would the resemblance be obvious, the family characteristics stamped on our features? Oh, Mum, you must do it. You must find her.’ Her powder-blue eyes were glowing with a fierce intensity, and the features of her pretty heart-shaped face were arranged in such a positive expression that it suddenly seemed incredibly easy.
Tim was less enthusiastic. Fifteen and in his first GCSE year, it was fast becoming clear that he had a real gift for carpentry. When storms tumbled the trees on the estate and some of the older ones came down, he was there like shot wood combing for branches or segments of the trunks to transform into carvings. ‘We’re all right as we are,’ he said when I told him I was going to write to the social worker. ‘If you start delving you might chance on something … well, not so great. Something that upsets you.’ He was in the kitchen rummaging for food. Are teenage boys ever full up? In my experience thin though Tim is, you could shovel food into his mouth all day and half the night, a bit like coal into the voracious flaming mouth of steam engine, and he would still be the first down for breakfast.
‘Or I might discover something wonderful, that there was a famous person in our family, a musician, or an actor or maybe a scientist?’
He shook his head and gave me hug. ‘Or a serial killer,’ he mumbled lugubriously.
I laughed. ‘This is real life, Tim, my life, not a thriller,’ I said breezily.
‘Our lives actually,’ Tim retorted, speaking with a custard cream crammed in his mouth, and helping himself to another two biscuits. Then, resignedly, still chomping, he added, ‘Well, if you must.’
‘I must,’ I retorted, putting the lid back firmly on the biscuit tin.
Henry was keen to come with me, but it somehow felt right to go alone, and besides it would have meant him taking a day off work. Miss Goss was young and forthright, someone who you knew would scoff at superstition, who would go out of her way to stroll nonchalantly under precarious ladders. She wore a tight black skirt, a cream blouse and a fitted olive-green jacket. Her hair, a rather fetching hazelnut brown, had been drawn back into a French plait. She did not sugar her tea. I took three lumps, which plopped messily into my cup.
‘Well, Mrs Ryan, you will be happy to know I have tracked down your original birth certificate.’ She pushed a brown envelope towards me. The flap wasn’t stuck down. I pulled out the sheet of paper and devoured the information greedily, eyes flicking to right and left. It was registered in Hampstead. It told me in part what I already knew; in part what I did not. I was born to Bethan Modron Haverd, a Welsh farm girl, on 14 January 1948 in New End Hospital, Hampstead. At the time apparently she was residing in a flat with her mother, Seren Haverd, the address Rochester Row, Westminster. Presumably my grandmother, Seren Haverd, and my mother stayed here until I was handed over to the Pritchards. I saw that the birth was registered on the 16 January, two days later. The name of my father was left blank.
It was June and sunlight poured through the open wind
ow, the drone of traffic reaching us like drowsy bees. The air smelled vaguely of mothballs, as if something or someone was being lifted out of the cedar chest they had been preserved in. ‘A lot to think about, I imagine,’ Miss Goss interrupted my reverie. ‘You know you really ought to do a bit of research at Highgate, nose about in the archives. That’s where your mother would have gone to court for the adoption.’ Her bangles, gilt and enamel in a range of contrasting bright shades, chinked as she stroked her graceful neck.
I thanked her and took my leave. I had my full birth certificate, my real birth certificate. But the delight at this achievement was short-lived when, browsing through the papers a short while later, I read a report that there had been a fire at Highgate Archives. It appeared many records had been lost, mine among them. And so I was thrown off the scent, resigning myself to being not quite anyone again for the time being. Another eleven years drifted by before my past confronted me again in the shape of Cousin Frank, reluctantly handing over a second brown envelope. So now I have a father too, a German who had been a soldier, and who lived on my mother’s farm for a few years after the war, which was intriguing in itself.
The air in Pear Tree Cottage throngs with phantom relatives. My Welsh birth mother, my German father, my grandmother, all are becoming steadily more substantial, colliding as they glide about, beckoning me to join them in yesterday’s waltz. I think Henry is attuned to the psychic atmosphere as well. He smokes his pipe in the evenings, and eyes the wreaths of blue-grey smoke warily, as if expecting them to coalesce into identifiable spectres. It’s as though I am in a huge rambling house, running from room to room. As I fling the doors wide, divergent scenes play out before my eyes, different characters, different plots with subtle variations to dramatic swings from the tragic to the comic. But there are constants, and among them is a kind of Romeo and Juliet effect. You see my natural parents are forever young in my mind’s eye. Behind a door in the attic of this gothic house, I spy on them lovemaking. They are in a hayloft, lying on a bed illuminated by rose-tinted light, straw prickling under their bare bottoms. A mouse looks on, upright, frozen, its beaded jet eyes mesmerised by the commotion, its inquisitive whiskers twitching.
