We've Come to Take You Home

by Susan Gandar

Did it matter whether Amy did or didn’t walk out in front of her father’s car? It was a small detail that had been important at the time but, perhaps, not now. If she confronted Amy, insisting on the truth, her foster parents would find out that she had tried to kill herself. It would only cause unhappiness.

  It was the big scheme that mattered. Not the detail. Her father was alive and well and coming home to live with Sam and her mother. And Amy and her baby were alive and going home to live with her foster parents.

  She looked up at Mac. He looked back at her.

  ‘Sam?’

  Decision made.

  ‘No. I don’t.’

  They all had a future. Even if that future meant having to change nappies…

  FIFTY-ONE

  April 7th 1918

  THERE WAS A WHISTLE, a belch and the train pulled out of the station. It was difficult to believe that just over six hours ago she had been standing here, on the same platform, cradling her newborn baby in her arms. There were no doctors, no nurses, no stretchers, no moans or screams. The hospital train had vanished along with its cargo.

  She ran down the stairs into the tunnel. The little girl was humming. The yellow bird was singing. The mother was rolling up her blanket. The dog was wagging its tail. And instead of the kicking and the cursing there was chatter and laughter. The station hadn’t taken a direct hit. The people who had spent the night sheltering within its walls were all still alive.

  ‘German attacks fail at all points.’

  Outside, on the station forecourt, a boy was selling newspapers.

  ‘Amiens front stands firm.’

  It was only April but she was sweating inside the itchy cocoon of her ankle-length coat. Jess stopped and raised her face up to the sun. Warmth and light replaced the cold and dark of the night she had been dreading, and which she had never expected to live through.

  Taking Rosemary back to the village, where she had grown up, had been the right thing to do. Her daughter would be safe down there in the country with Martha looking after her. She would have food in her stomach, clean clothes on her back and there would be enough money to buy coal for a fire and medicine if she was sick. But don’t let it be for too long. Because Jess wanted to be there at her daughter’s side, holding her daughter’s hand, as her own mother had held hers, when she took her first step. And there, cradling her on her lap, when she looked up, giggled, and spoke her first word.

  With the Germans now on the run the war could be soon at an end. Tom would come back home to them, she was sure of it, and when he did she and little Rosemary would be waiting for him. Whether they would get married, whether she would ever be his wife, she didn’t know. She could only wish, only hope, that their story, the one they’d started together, would have a happy ending.

  There were two ways back to Eaton Villa. The first was the route the Major had taken the day she arrived in London; down Ebbs Road, left into Honeywell Road, right into Hillier Road and, finally, left into Glebe Road. She’d chosen to walk that way to the station, last night, as the roads were wide and safe. And the houses would have given some shelter if there had been an air raid. It was also the route that she and Ellie used when they went shopping together.

  But if she followed the path along the side of the railway track, back towards the warehouses, and then took the shortcut down the lane, across the common, she would be able to take at least ten minutes off the journey. She would never have used it at night, it was just too dangerous. But it was six in the morning. Last night’s drinking pals, any that were still around, would be too far gone to make themselves a nuisance.

  Ellie would have tidied up her bedroom and cleared all trace of what had happened there the night before. But she had to be back at the house in time to light the range, heat up the water and take up the Major and his wife their morning tea. If she didn’t, they would go upstairs to her room. And find it empty.

  She followed the narrow footpath, squeezed between a wire fence and a high, brick wall, back along the railway tracks in the same direction her train had just come from.

  A low, insistent drumming grew steadily louder and nearer. A dull thump and the ground beneath her feet rocked and heaved. There was another thump. And now the drumming was no longer background, but foreground, drilling its way into every bone and sinew in her body. Up ahead, flying towards her out of the early morning sun, was a plane. A huge ball of fire billowed up into the sky.

  The footpath opened out into a yard between two derelict warehouses. Out here, if the plane dropped a bomb, she would be killed. She had to get inside. She ran towards the nearest warehouse. She pushed on the door. It stayed closed. She threw herself at the door. It refused to move. She tried one more time. Metal clanked down onto concrete. The door opened.

  She was in a hallway. In front of her was a staircase lit by a single window. She would be safer on the ground floor. And she would be safer further inside. To her right was a set of double doors. She pushed. They opened easily. The main storage area of the warehouse was empty but instead of being dark, which was what she had been expecting, it was light.

  The memory she cherished most was the last few moments she and her father had spent together. She had nursed it, keeping it alive inside her head; walking out of the door of the cottage, through the garden and onto the track, climbing up the hill, side by side, her hand in his hand, onto the top of the ridge.

  Her father stepping forward and putting his arms around her and the hoping, the longing, that she would never ever have to step out of them. That they could stay that way, father and daughter, daughter and father, up there on top of the world, together for ever. And then the low, insistent drumming, getting steadily louder and nearer, and there, without any warning, swooping down on them out of the sky, the white plane with black crosses on the underside of its wings.

  And there it was now. Right there directly above her. She could see it through the glass roof of the warehouse: the same white plane with the same black crosses on the underside of its wings.

  FIFTY-TWO

  Eaton Villa, London, SW11

  April 6th, 1934

  Dear Jess

  I’m writing this letter on the day of our daughter’s 16th birthday. I’ve tried before, so often, more times than I can remember, but every time I sat down and started to write the words refused to come. But today feels different. The words are coming, and more than coming – they are writing themselves.

  I’m not sure where to start but I think it has to be with the letter you wrote telling me that you were expecting our child. I did get it. And I was going to write back to you. And to my parents, telling them about the baby, and asking them to look after the both of you until I returned from France and could, as soon as you reached sixteen, make you my wife. I knew it would be a terrible shock to them, my father’s hopes of who I would marry, where I would eventually find my place in society, had always been high, too high, since the loss of my two brothers. But I also knew that they would have done what I was asking of them. But I was never allowed to write that letter because within a day of receiving it I had been taken prisoner.

  When our trench was overrun and my men and I were being marched back away from the battlefield, a shameful joy swept through me. I wasn’t going to die the terrible death I had seen so many other men die. I would be taken to an official prisoner of war camp where I would be formally registered as a POW. Word would be sent back to you and my parents, through the Red Cross, that I was alive and well. And then all I would have to do was keep my head down, keep my mouth closed and wait out the war. And then come back home to you.

  But none of that happened. I was never registered, my name was never given to the Red Cross, and I was never sent to an official POW camp. Instead, I became one of the nameless missing, kept in France and forced to work in a prisoner of war labour company delivering shells and digging trenches just behind the front line. I watched, helpless, as the men around me died. Dying would be easy. It was the staying alive that
was going to be difficult.

  I could have insisted that as an officer, exempt from hard labour by international law, I should be removed from the front line and taken to the safety of a camp. But leaving my men there, almost certainly facing certain death, from being beaten and starved, or blown to pieces by their own country’s guns, was unthinkable. I could not do it.

  We worked twelve sometimes sixteen hours a day, without a break, seven days a week. The building in which we were housed had no roof. There were no beds and no blankets. We wore, week after week, month after month, the same clothes we had been captured in. We never took them off. We were given a single meal each day of a quarter of a loaf of black, lumpy bread, some watery turnip soup and lukewarm coffee made out of barley. The weight dropped off us. We became so weak that the march to the frontline became almost impossible but we had to do it, we didn’t have a choice, because if we didn’t it would mean even less food and even more beatings.

  Civilians, when they saw us, tried to give us food. A woman threw me some bread when we were being marched through her village. We were both punished – I was beaten, she was shot. Another time, it wasn’t the civilian that was shot, but one of my own men.

  It wasn’t hard to hate those who were guarding us – the enemy. And it is so easy to see how this hatred starts, and how that hatred spreads. It is not so easy to forgive. But you must. That is the only way to get through – the only way to survive. The men who were guarding us were not so different. They, too, were sons, brothers and husbands. And they, too, had little enough food themselves. Their families back at home even less.

  There was much talk at the battlefront about the dead coming back to protect the living; angels striding out towards the enemy lines, everyone seemed to have seen one or heard of one. But I always regarded the stories as nothing but superstitious nonsense. But if it gave the men comfort, and they needed comforting given that most of them were going to die out there on the front line, then, it did no harm – who was I to laugh or complain. That’s what I believed – until, one day, I saw my own angel.

  It was April 7th, 1918. The guards had kicked us awake at four in the morning. We’d eaten our crust of bread, drunk our sip of water, and now we were being marched out of camp. It must have been about six o’clock but if the sun was rising we couldn’t see it. Day didn’t exist on the front line, only night. And that’s when the shell hit us.

  One minute I was walking, the next I was laying there, face down, in a sludge of blood and bone. I hurt so much that all I wanted to do was die. And that’s when I saw my angel. And the angel I saw was you – my Jess. You didn’t have wings, and you didn’t have a halo. Nor were you sounding your trumpet. For which I was grateful. You were just standing there, buttoned up in your coat, your hair tied back and your face flushed as if you’d been running. And you looked just like you. But at the same time you didn’t. There was something different; you looked as though you were lit up from inside. You were, quite literally, glowing. And everything that I had always found beautiful, the green of your eyes, the whiteness of your skin, was even more pronounced – and even more beautiful. And you looked so happy.

  I don’t remember saying anything, I don’t think I could, but if I did it was just your name. But that wasn’t important, any other words would have just got in the way, because, in those few seconds, I’ve never felt closer to you. And then, and I’m searching here for the right word, you faded.

  You were gone and I was left lying there, and that’s when I made the decision to stand up and walk rather than lie there and die. And that was exactly what I did, although quite quickly the standing up and walking turned into a very painful and very undignified crawling which lasted through the whole of that day, into the night, and then on into the next day when I finally fell, head first, down into a trench on the Allied lines.

  My next memory is waking up in hospital in France. Two weeks later I was sent back home to England. And you weren’t there. My parents explained that, just before serving dinner, you had complained of feeling unwell. They had offered to send out for a doctor but you had said it was unnecessary; if you could go and get some rest you would be fine in the morning. They ate the dinner that you had prepared for them and then went upstairs to bed. In the morning, when you failed to appear with their tea, they went up to your room. There was no one there.

  When I arrived home you had been reported missing for over two weeks. Nobody cared, nobody was interested and most certainly not the police; you were just another girl, who’d got herself into trouble. Good riddance to bad rubbish.

  It was your friend Ellie, the maid next-door, who told us that you’d given birth to a little girl and that you had left the house around midnight to take her back to your village. And that’s where I found her.

  When Martha described you to me, told me what had happened, the knocking on the door, the baby on the doorstep, I knew that the Jess she described had been you and that the baby was our daughter. Your locket, the one I had given you just before I left for France, fastened round Rosemary’s neck, confirmed that.

  But where were you? I already knew but I was avoiding it. I was still hoping that what I had seen so clearly had been nothing more than a hallucination and that you were alive and well, and that I would, eventually, be able to find you. But, in my heart, I knew I was fooling myself; you had gone to a place where I would never be able to reach you.

  Two months later there was a knock on the door. It was the police. A body of a girl, answering your description, had been found under the bombed out remains of a disused warehouse. The warehouse had taken a direct hit around six o’clock on the morning of April 7th – the time of my hallucination. There was not much to go on – some scraps of clothing, a purse containing a return train ticket to Lewes, and a few strands of hair – but that was enough: enough, at least, to convince someone who already knew.

  Our daughter remained with Martha living down in the country. To split them up would have been too heartbreaking. I go down to see them whenever I can, which is often. And Rosemary comes up here to stay in London. Now that she’s sixteen, I think, I hope, that her visits will be far more frequent.

  My mother and father died two years ago, within two months of each other. You asked me, that first evening down in the kitchen, whether your mother had gone to hell because she had committed suicide. And I said, no, it’s the people left behind, who did nothing to help, who will spend the rest of their lives in hell – a hell, in this present life, of their own making. And that was what happened to both my parents.

  My mother told me, confessed to me, just hours before she died, that when she found out you were pregnant, and that I was the father, instead of helping you she threatened you, saying that if she told my father he would have you thrown out of the house.

  What she didn’t know was that my father already knew what had happened between us. I told him, privately, the morning I left to return to France. To say that he was less than happy would be an understatement. But he promised that whatever happened, whether I did or did not return from France, you would always be looked after. And, for all his faults, my father was a man who always kept his word.

  If my mother had talked to my father, and my father had talked to my mother, there would have been a wedding, rather than a funeral, on my return from France.

  Eaton Villa is far too large for me alone. But it is where we spent the little time we had together, and it is where our daughter was born, so this is where I stay. I can’t imagine living anywhere else. A very capable housekeeper looks after both myself and the house – your friend and companion, Ellie.

  You were fifteen when we met and you were still fifteen when you gave birth to our daughter. And she is, as of today, already older than you. Whenever she walks into the room, and I look up, it is you I see. When she takes my hand it is you who is taking my hand. And when she laughs it is you who is laughing. She is so like you – in every way.

  I know that you won’t, physically, b
e able to read this letter, but in putting these words down I hope that somehow it will bring me nearer to you, that you will be able to hear and feel and understand how much you are missed and how much you were loved – and are still loved. And always will be loved.

  You are and always will be my angel.

  Your loving Tom.

  FIFTY-THREE

  SAM READ TOM’S LETTER not once, not twice but three times, each word again, again and again. There was a sheet of thick, plain paper, folded in half, in the same envelope. She opened it. ‘Jess’ was written below a pencil sketch of a girl. Sam recognised her instantly.

  There was a much smaller box inside the larger, elaborately carved Moroccan one her mother had given her. She slipped off the lid. A purple velvet cushion and, sitting on it, a heart-shaped locket on a chain.

  There was a catch on the side. She pressed it. The locket opened. There were two compartments. The right hand one contained a dried flower, very brittle, very pale, but unmistakably a primrose. What it was doing there, why it was so important, she didn’t know; there had been no mention of a primrose in Tom’s letter. The left hand compartment contained a photograph, head and shoulders only, of a young man in military uniform.

  “You are and always will be my angel.”

  That’s what Tom had written at the end of his letter.

  “You are and always will be my…”

  Angel.

  Sam picked up her jacket. She ran out of her bedroom, along the landing and down the stairs.

  ‘Hello. Yes, she’s here…’

  Her mother held out the phone.

  ‘It’s your dad.’

  ‘Hello, yes, look, Dad, I’ve got to go out…’

  Her mother’s fish stew was simmering, not boiling over, on top of the oven. Apples, bananas and pears were piled high in the blue and white ceramic bowl and lilies, pink ones with orange spots, were sitting in a glass vase on top of the bookcase.