The Secret of Orchard Cottage

by Alex Brown

  ‘Oh please, Aunty … I’ll be fine. Please, please don’t worry about me,’ April just about managed, her bottom lip quivering with the effort not to cry, as she couldn’t bear to think of her aunt worrying about such stuff. And she felt so touched by Edie’s compassion, even though April had neglected her aunt for far too long. ‘It’s my time to look after you … and Orchard Cottage.’ She paused, and then decided to go for it. ‘And I thought I’d see about getting some help—’

  ‘Help?’ Edie asked, alarmed.

  ‘Yes, with the garden.’ Silence followed and seemed to go on for ages, broken only by the intermittent sound of an owl terwit-terwooing in the distance, while Edie appeared to be mulling it all over until she eventually mumbled:

  ‘As you like, dear.’ April took this as her aunt’s acceptance of help, but figured it best to build up to the topic of a cleaner.

  The two women carried on playing rummy, sipping snowballs, popping glacé cherries into their mouths and enjoying each other’s company for a while without the need for words – just as with any longstanding, loving relationship … until Great Aunt Edie won the last game.

  After gathering up all the cards, she said, ‘I know the last few years have been tremendously tough for you …’ Edie’s voice broke off and the two women sat in silence some more. ‘And that’s why I haven’t mentioned Gray – I didn’t want to add to the obvious burden you were carrying when you arrived here with your shoulders laden down with woe. And I’m sorry for going “doolally” …’ Oh dear, she hadn’t been dozing at that point in the conversation after all. Poor Edie, I hope she isn’t offended. ‘I get forgetful and muddled sometimes. Brain fog I call it. The doctor wanted to give me pills – thyroid problem he said, but I’ve never been one for all that stuff. They make it in factories you know! Mix it up with all sorts of ingredients that nobody has ever heard of.’

  Edie shook her head as if to gain some clarity and April wondered if her aunt’s impaired thyroid function could be contributing to her tiredness – falling asleep in the oven for example, and brain fog and confusion could very well be down to untreated hypothyroidism and not dementia at all. April really did need to have a word with the village GP or, better still, see if she could arrange a house visit for her aunt as she may be reluctant to take a trip to the surgery given her suspicion of modern medicine. Yes, Edie would be more relaxed seeing the doctor in her own home.

  ‘It’s tricky to know some mornings where my mind is at. It could be this month … or any month for that matter, it can be quite problematic you know. I started writing my Christmas cards a few weeks ago. That was before I checked the date on the wall calendar in the kitchen and saw that we were still in summertime … now that is very doolally!’ Edie did a small chuckle and April instantly felt full of admiration for her aunt that she was able to laugh at her own predicament. It reminded her of Gray; he had found comfort in humour too, sometimes in the darkest moments of his demise, like when he was no longer able to go to the toilet by himself … he had made every joke in the book about having his arse wiped for him!

  ‘It’s OK, Aunty. Please don’t apologise – getting ahead with your Christmas cards is no bad thing, not when you have a list of people to send one to as long as yours. And besides, I’m here now to help out and we can “muddle through” together,’ April smiled.

  ‘Thank you, my dear. Having you around the place is such a tonic. And the cottage really could do with some … er, maintenance.’ Edie glanced away, and April knew it wasn’t easy for her aunt to acknowledge the need for some help. ‘It’s such a wonderful home, a special place. Like I said, it will heal you …’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ April contemplated. ‘It healed me once before … do you remember that summer?’ she asked with a faraway look in her eye.

  ‘Yes dear. I remember. Your parents. Terrible business that was. They didn’t stand a chance when their car rolled on that wet, windy night.’ Edie shook her head, her face folding in concern at the memory.

  ‘It was a long time ago,’ April muttered, remembering that it was the end of the half-term holiday, Halloween, when her parents were on their way to collect her from Orchard Cottage. And April had been devastated, but Aunt Edie had looked after her here for a few months until it was decided she’d live with her mum’s parents who were devastated at having lost their daughter. You’ve lost your only child, your daughter, it’s the least I can do … April remembered being here in the sitting room, overhearing her aunt, through the hatch, talking in a hushed voice with all the other grown-ups in the kitchen. And as an adult, she realised now how selfless, but incredibly hard, it must have been for her aunt to let April go, meaning she’d be all on her own with a yearning to be a mother. Feeling a sudden rush of affection for her aunt, April got out of her chair and went to give Edie a cuddle.

  ‘What’s this for?’ Edie’s watery blue eyes sought out April’s as she looked up.

  ‘Because I love you. And I’m going to take care of you, do my best by you … just as you did for me.’ April rubbed her hand across her elderly aunt’s back, breathing in the familiar scent of lavender, fully intending to hold on to this moment for always like a permanent picture inside her head to cherish long after Edie was gone. Pictures were one thing, but scents and moments were what really lasted for ever. And April was under no illusion that just being here with her aunt, talking about old times was a true tonic for her too. Her elderly great aunt was continuing to look after her, look out for her as well, if not in a physical sense, but certainly in an emotional sense, providing an anchor of familiarity, family, belonging – a perfect recipe to make April feel steadfast and strong again.

  ‘I love you too,’ Edie said and more silence followed until she added, ‘And I need to ask you something,’ in a soft, but quite serious voice.

  April, back in her seat now, looked at her aunt, and her heart went out to her – the mature lucidity that Edie had displayed only moments earlier had been replaced with an almost childlike vulnerability.

  ‘What is it, Aunty?’

  ‘Will you help me, please?’

  ‘Of course I will,’ April assured her. ‘I’m staying here with you … if that’s OK?’ Edie blinked as if taking it all in. ‘And, there will be someone coming to help sort out the hedgerow and the garden … and I thought a cleaner would be …’ April stopped talking. Her aunt’s eyes were pooled with tears.

  ‘Thank you,’ Aunt Edie managed as a solitary tear trickled down the side of her wrinkled nose. She quickly pulled a hanky from her sleeve and dabbed it away while April averted her eyes, pretending to be busy drinking the last of her snowball; instinct told her Edie would prefer it that way – she came from a generation where emotion was kept contained, and crying could be perceived as a weakness of character. ‘But what I meant was …’ Edie ploughed on, having swiftly pulled herself together, ‘please will you help me find out what happened to my sister Winnie? I need to know where she is.’

  ‘Yes,’ April immediately promised. ‘Yes, of course, I certainly will. I want to meet her too,’ she added, knowing that, while not impossible, it was highly unlikely that Winnie was still alive; however, Edie was upset enough as it was, so April thought it best to go along with things for now.

  ‘Oh but you can’t!’ Edie said, sounding panicked all of a sudden.

  ‘Why not?’ April’s forehead creased in concern. The change in her aunt’s demeanour was quite startling, as if she had somehow regressed to another time in her life and was now not fully present. It was quite extraordinary. Even the blue colour of her eyes had an altered hue.

  ‘You’ll be ashamed.’ Edie stared at the hanky still in her hand.

  ‘Why is that, Aunty?’

  ‘Because she ran off with a married man!’ The elderly woman’s voice dropped almost to a childlike whisper. ‘And had his baby … that’s what they all said in the village. Shocking it was. I think she started courting when she was in the Land Army, she was a driver for the big wigs, you
know. My big sister was the woman who went off to do her bit for the war effort and wrecked a marriage instead.’ Edie shook her head. ‘We are a close-knit community here in Tindledale and there’s a lot to be said for that, but the villagers do love to dissect other people’s business … seeing Winnie with an older man in uniform would be enough to set the tongues wagging,’ she explained, sounding more like her mature self again now. ‘And it’s so unlike Winnie to have been carrying on … she was always the sensible one. And my parents never said anything about the rumours, but I heard the girls in the village talking about it.’

  Silence followed as April digested this information, wondering if it was true because if so then it would have been an enormous scandal back then. A secret the family may have wanted to hide from the rest of the community. And most likely why Edie had commented, in the midst of her confusion at the tea dance, that April would want to send Winnie away … but things were different nowadays. April vowed to get to the bottom of this, because surely, if Winnie had indeed run off with a married man and had his baby, wouldn’t she have heard about this somehow? Yes, family stuff got skewed and indeed lost over the course of time, but wouldn’t her dad have known? Had some kind of inkling … surely? April thought it sounded very odd indeed.

  ‘But what about the FANY? Deedee mentioned that Bill remembers delivering the special letter to Winnie …’ April ventured, unsure if she was going over old ground that Edie may not want to discuss, or worse still might feel offended by if she thought people had been gossiping again.

  ‘FANY?’ Edie said vaguely, and April’s heart sank … her aunt was fading again.

  ‘Yes, that’s what Bill remembers,’ April persevered, figuring it had to be worth at least trying to prompt Edie for more information.

  ‘Yes dear, but she didn’t come back home … stopped sending letters.’ Edie rallied, fixing her watery cobalt-blue eyes on to April and then added, ‘I think Mum wrote to the War Office after my father died, but it’s all so vague.’ Edie shook her head, getting more and more agitated as she twisted the hanky around her fingers, over and over. ‘But Winnie could have told me … if there was a man and a baby. I would have kept the secret. And I still have the letters that she sent during the war so you can see for yourself – lovely letters from the start of the war when she was in the Land Army, but then later, when she went away, there is hardly any mention of what she was doing at the FANY training place, very formal they were and not at all warm and friendly like her letters at the start. It could have been for security reasons of course, there was a war on after all! But then the letters stopped coming and I can’t remember what happened … and then Dad died, and well, it’s just all so hazy. Blasted memory!’ Aunt Edie closed her eyes tightly, as if inwardly chastising herself.

  ‘You have letters?’ April’s heart lifted at this unexpected piece of information.

  ‘Oh yes, dear. They’re in the biscuit tin on top of the wardrobe in her bedroom – it was my bedroom after she left … and now it’s yours, the room you’re sleeping in while you’re here.’

  ‘Ooh, I didn’t notice. I could get them now and we can read through them together if you like? Maybe we can see if there are some clues as to what actually happened to Winnie.’ April went to stand up, eager to get started as quickly as possible, keen to find a way to put her aunt’s mind at rest. It seemed that not knowing for sure was causing the most distress.

  ‘Right you are, dear.’ Edie managed a smile. ‘Although my eyesight isn’t what it used to be so you may need to read them aloud.’

  ‘I can do that. No problem!’

  ‘Good girl. You see, I really need to know why she never told me about the man, or indeed the baby. If it is true then I understand that she would have felt ashamed, but there could be a person, a relative, a niece or nephew that I’ve never met! Wouldn’t that be marvellous?’ April nodded, enthused by her aunt’s seemingly open heart – there was no judgement there. Just concern and love for a sister who went off a very long time ago to do her bit for the war effort and didn’t come home.

  ‘And there are records we can check, Aunty – you know, it’s all online now these days – birth certificates, marriages and deaths, it’s all there,’ April said.

  ‘Fancy that! But if she died, then where is she? Why can’t I visit her grave? Sidney died and there’s a plaque in the graveyard next to the church in the village.’

  ‘Sidney?’

  ‘My brother. Killed in action over Cologne in December 1941, I remember it so clearly as it was the week before Christmas. He was an air gunner in the RAF,’ Edie said, with crystal-clear clarity.

  ‘Oh dear. That must have been so very sad for you all.’

  ‘It was. My mother was never the same after that. But what about Winnie? Why don’t I know? Why did nobody tell me?’ Edie said, the break in her voice palpable, and sounding much younger, like a young girl. It was as if the distress of not knowing for sure, of not having tangible evidence, a gravestone, an official letter or some such thing, was making her regress back to the girl she had been when Winnie left and never came home again. Poor Edie.

  ‘I don’t know, Aunty. But I’m sure we can find out,’ April assured, wondering how hard could it be to see if a person had died … and then she had a thought. ‘When was Winnie’s birthday? Can you remember?’ She got up and gestured for her aunt to move on to the settee where it might be more comfortable for her. They had been sitting in the hardback chairs at the card table for quite some time now and April’s back was getting stiff … and she was less than half Edie’s age. Once settled, Aunt Edie looked deep in thought before figuring it out.

  ‘1920! Winnie was twenty years old when she went off on the bus. The seventh of July was her birthday and she left in June. It was a hot, sunny day and I went swimming in the stream after waving her off.’

  ‘Wonderful.’ April did a quick sum in her head to calculate that Winnie would be ninety-five now, if by some miracle she was still alive. April thought it highly unlikely, but surely the family would know if she had died? Weren’t the next of kin informed? Especially during wartime! And even if, years later, a person was estranged from their family – say the rumours in the village were true and Winnie had run off to have a secret love child with a married man and then died – surely the coroner, a friend, someone, would have tracked down the relatives. April had watched a TV programme about something similar. Awfully sad it was: a man died all alone in his flat and the people from the council who were called to sort everything out found photos of him in a uniform, with relatives at the seaside, a wedding picture – he had a life, the whole lot – and they then managed to track down a distant nephew living in Canada who came right away to organise the funeral. It had made April cry. Gray had put an arm around April to comfort her, making a wry joke about being ‘blooming grateful I’m not that poor bugger’, before resolutely pointing the remote at the TV to flick over to ‘something more cheerful’.

  But perhaps Aunt Edie had forgotten what actually happened to Winnie, blocked it from her mind perhaps? It was entirely possible given her deteriorating mental health. Either way, even if Winnie was still alive, neither sister was getting any younger … so time really was of the essence. April needed to start researching right away if she was to find out the truth. She really wanted to, her curiosity was piqued and it was important to do this for her aunt before it was too late.

  ‘I’m going to write it all down and then I’ll get the letters, Aunty. No time like the present for us to get started on taking action.’ April smiled, and after giving her aunt’s arm a reassuring pat, she quickly popped next door into the kitchen to make them each another snowball, and to retrieve her pad and pen.

  Minutes later, April handed her aunt her snowball and then sat down next to her, thinking about how she could get online and search stuff, ancestry sites, etc. – she could sit in The Spotted Pig café on her mobile if it came to it, just to access the free Wi-Fi. And there might even be a special
FANY database that she could contact for help. Anything was worth a go. Maybe Facebook! And then a thought occurred to her.

  ‘Aunty, do you have any more photos of Winnie?’ April thought she could post a selection of pictures online, see if anyone recognised Winnie, old friends perhaps. Obviously, if she was actually still alive, she’d look completely different now, but somebody might remember her. Or if there ever really was a baby, he or she would be an adult, older than April, and there might be a family resemblance. April’s head was buzzing with all the possibilities, especially if she could create a Facebook post that could be shared over and over to help widen the search. And for the first time in a very long time, she felt focused, alert and alive and thinking and caring about something other than Gray’s demise.

  ‘Yes dear, only a few pictures, mind you, they’re in the tin with the letters. Plus those two of course.’ Edie pointed to the woman in the uniform and the tea dress. ‘It wasn’t like it is now with all the cameras and pictures people have on their phones. Back when I was a young girl, a photo was what you held inside your head …’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘And there’s one of when she qualified as a St John’s Ambulance cadet. They ran a course in the village hall and Winnie signed up right away – she was only a schoolgirl, but already knew then that she wanted to be a nurse, to look after others … a bit like you, dear.’ April smiled as she wrote all the details down, already loving the parallels between her and her great aunt Winnie.

  ‘Why didn’t she become a nurse?’ April asked.

  ‘Well, when she finished school at fourteen, she had to help out in the orchards for a few harvests. She had filled in all the paperwork and persuaded our parents to let her go to London to start her nurse training, but then when the rumours of war started, and well … my mother got extremely anxious about the bombs dropping. So that put paid to that!’