by Connie Monk
‘I’m going to visit Beth’s old home on Saturday.’
‘That woman! Not fit to care for a dog, let alone a child. Mr Bruce has talked to me about it. He’s really fond of that child – well, how can you help it? Breaks your heart to think when peace comes she’ll be sent back. Bad enough for the poor mite when she’d seen no other way of living, but how can she slot back now after all this time in a home with love?’
‘That’s why I’m going. She belongs here with all of us. Bruce is coming with me. We shall be home on Sunday.’ Her words seemed to fill the room and she waited, unsure of what Nanny would read into them.
‘Ah. Well, my dear, you won’t need a ration book for a night’s lodging, but just in case you get asked for your identity card it’s best you pop little Elspeth’s in your bag. We don’t want to throw a spanner in the works just when you hope to be able to take Beth as your own.’
For Kathie it was one of those moments that would stay with her. Her eyes stung with tears, not of sadness but of a nameless emotion that prompted her to take the elderly hand and carry it to her lips.
‘Nanny, I truly love him . . .’
‘I know that, my dear, or I’d not give you my little one’s card. And he loves you too. I don’t need telling. How long are you willing to live as you do now?’
‘Divorce, you mean. He will never do that. Even if she can’t know, he would never do it. And I wouldn’t want him to. She’s more than a duty to him – but I don’t have to tell you that. He once told me that sitting with her, knowing her contentment, he finds peace.’
‘Well, if ever a man deserved it, it’s him.’ Then turning to Elspeth, she said, ‘Now then, duckie, I’m going to get you your tea. How about a nice toasted muffin with some honey? She likes that, bless her, she always did even as a child. I’ll just run and get that card for you.’
To Kathie, London was another world. She hated to feel out of her depth with any challenge, but she admitted to herself that she was glad Bruce was with her and seemed to understand the routes of the tube trains. Just as she was glad he was with her as she confronted Tilly, who wasn’t a bit what she had expected. She had imagined a young woman, over made-up, smelling of cheap perfume, dressed in a way that advertised her profession. In fact she was older than Kathie, with teeth stained yellow from cigarettes, with badly kept nails where one coat of varnish had covered the last probably for years. Overweight, wearing clothes that were too tight and with laddered stockings, it was hard to imagine any man paying for her favours. The only odour that came from her was from her unwashed body.
Please God, don’t make Beth have to come home to this! Kathie’s glance locked with Bruce’s and she knew his thought was the same as hers.
Tilly listened to all they had to say.
‘Well,’ she observed thoughtfully, ‘tell the honest to God truth I’d as good as forgotten the kid. More likely tried not to remember. Funny kid she was too. And you want to hang on to her? Bugger me, that’s a turn up for the books. Here, have a fag.’ She pushed the half empty packet across the table.
‘Kind of you,’ Bruce answered, ‘but they’re hard enough to come by without handing them around. I am not Mrs Hawthorne’s husband, I am headmaster of a neighbouring school and have really come to give you reassurance. At Westways, where Beth is living, she is well cared for, loved and extremely happy. When this war ends there will be many children who’ve been away from home so long that they will find difficulty in adjusting. I foresee a lot of unhappy homes as a consequence. If you are prepared to let Beth stay where she has settled you would be doing her a great kindness. To look back to 1939 is like looking to another world.’
‘Ah, buggered if it isn’t. And when this lot ends and the blokes go home, what’s to become of poor sods like me. Ain’t getting any younger. Some of us, the young ones with a bit of the Hollywood look about them, they make a good living. But not everyone can pay their prices. But like I’ve always said, you don’t look at the mantelpiece when you poke the fire.’
‘So what do you say about Beth,’ Kathie prompted, expecting that Tilly was softening her up for a financial arrangement.
‘Never wanted the kid, well of course I didn’t. And she was a funny one, like I said before. If you know how to set about getting it all legal, then I say good luck to you. I don’t expect she remembers much about me and, like I said, I’d as good as forgotten her. I don’t wish the child no harm, but bugger me, the last thing I want is some prissy miss coming back ’ere.’
So with not a penny exchanged, the wheels were set in motion. Of course there were formalities and a visit from a representative from the department responsible, a prim and humourless woman.
‘You say you are in charge of this market garden?’
‘Before the war my husband and I ran it together. But he was in the Territorial Army so, of course, as soon as the war started he had to go. Since then I’ve coped. It was hard going at first, but I’m lucky and everyone who works here seems part of one team. Right from her first day Beth wanted to help. She and Jess, my daughter, were the same age. They looked after feeding the chickens and collecting the eggs.’ Looking back and picturing the scene Kathie had walked straight into the unforeseen trap.
‘Were? Were the same age? Where is your daughter now?’ Officialdom smelt a rat.
‘Jess was killed in a road accident.’ Kathie wished she had never mentioned her; she hated discussing her with this unsmiling creature.
‘How sad,’ and a note was made on her pad. ‘Well, I think that will be all, Mrs Hawthorne. I’ve seen for myself that the child is well cared for here. You will be hearing.’
It was a month before the official papers came with confirmation of the adoption. Brockleigh had already broken up for the long summer vacation but Oliver had been allowed to stay for the holiday.
‘After all, he’s heir apparent to Sedgewood so he might as well get used to the miserable great morgue of a place when it’s not full of noisy boys,’ Claudia had said laughingly to Den. The arrangement suited him perfectly. Den sometimes wished that Kathie could see how well he was doing. Their rented bungalow was convenient, he could move about independently. And outside he and Claudia had transformed yet another wilderness.
On the morning the official document arrived the post lady was late and Beth had already gone to school. Bruce and Oliver walked down at about ten o’clock prepared for a day’s work and at twelve years old the boy had become an asset to Westways. Bruce would never make a natural gardener, but no job was beneath him. On that day Bert Delbridge was home on seven days’ leave and by that time even Kathie – blind to everyone’s affairs but her own, as Den would have said – knew who it was attracted him. It was two months since his last forty-eight-hour pass, the weekend when he and Sarah had gone shopping for an engagement ring. Yes, the workers in the field at Westways had much to be grateful for on that July morning, not least for Steven who staggered after his mother waving his seaside spade.
Kathie and Bruce said nothing about the document which had arrived that morning, but he walked to the village to see what it had to offer by way of making a teatime celebration. The best he could find was lemonade, biscuits (for which he passed up his ration book to have the points taken) and one bottle (no more allowed to any one customer) of British Type Port. The trays were prepared in the kitchen and the table put to the middle of the grass in readiness.
‘Hello, Aunt Kathie, I’m home,’ Beth called as she slammed the garden gate, then not seeing Kathie in the garden she went into the house.
‘Gosh, what’s all this?’ she asked seeing the laid up trays. ‘Hello, Uncle Bruce. It looks like party time.’
‘You could say that,’ he answered. ‘Can you go and fetch everyone over to the grass and I’ll carry the trays out. Kathie’s just finishing cutting some cucumber sandwiches.’
‘Is it someone’s birthday?’
‘Even better. Round them all up – oh and here come Nanny and Elspeth. Bring them too
. Don’t take Elspeth walking till after party time.’
It was quite a gathering: Kathie, Bruce, Beth, Sally, little Steven, Oliver, Sarah, Bert, Nanny and Elspeth.
‘I wish we had champagne, for if ever there was an occasion to merit it, this is it.’ Bruce said as he poured a not-quite-as-full-as-they-should-be British Type Port into six glasses for the adults, then three glasses of lemonade for Elspeth and the children. Steven hadn’t reached the age for lemonade so he had milk in a feeder cup. ‘We want you to drink to Beth and the wonderful news that arrived this morning. She is now officially Kathie’s daughter, chosen and adopted. To Beth.’
In the clamour of excitement Beth could do no more than look at Kathie in wonder. Chosen and adopted, never to have to go back to the place she only half remembered.
‘Chink!’ Oliver tapped her glass with his. They looked at each other, neither knowing quite what to say on such an occasion yet feeling the excitement of the moment. Later she would be alone with Kathie, she might find the words to tell her how much it meant. But when Oliver took both her hands and pulled her away from the group, by one accord they started to do a ‘twister’. Round and round they went, faster and faster until at last they fell to the ground in peels of laughter.
‘I had a letter this morning too,’ he told her when they got their breath back and still lay sprawled on the grass. ‘From my father. He said as soon as the war finishes he is coming to see me. We’ll have so much to talk about. I’d told him I’ve decided what I want to do when I leave school. Bother the silly exams; I don’t care about those. I’m going to be an actor. I’m going to be just like him – except I’d rather be on the stage than work in a film studio. But imagine, Beth, taking a part, getting to feel how another person feels, saying their words, being that person.’
‘I expect you’ll be splendid, Ollie. But I wouldn’t like that sort of work.’
It was towards the end of that year that when Beth collected the morning paper from the letterbox she looked at the front page in horror.
‘Aunt Kathie, look what it says.’ She passed the paper to Kathie. They had become used to the broadsheets being no more than four pages, but on that morning the top half of the front carried a banner headline: SUDDEN DEATH OF RICHARD MARLEY and below that a picture of him with an account of how he had collapsed and died on the set of his latest film. ‘Aunt Kathie, what about poor Ollie? It’s not fair. His mum never bothered about him, now he’s got no one.’
But of course his life would go on unaltered; he had them, he had Bruce and he had most of his father’s not insignificant wealth held in trust for when he was twenty-one and would become master of Sedgewood Hall. In the meantime the rent paid by Brockleigh School would add to his fortune. Nothing detracted him from his certain intent; the name Marley was already held in esteem in the acting fraternity and Oliver meant to raise it to further heights.
There had never been any doubt that Beth would win a scholarship to the Grammar School. Sitting with Bruce in Deremouth Town Hall, Kathie wondered what Den would make of her waif if he could see her on her first speech day called to the platform to receive one prize after another. Oliver made no such trips at Brockleigh and was determined to leave as soon as he had taken his School Certificate and attend drama school. He never wavered in the path he meant to follow.
Like communities up and down the country in May of 1945 Sedgewood village gave a street party for the local children to celebrate the end of the war. Locals were the only children there by that time, for as the country had become safer the evacuees had gone home. The local policeman closed the road and there were games and races. Beth was too old to join in the fun but she held the rope at the finishing line and took the name of each winner. Then came tea, every household having dug deep to contribute something. The evening was for the adults, dancing in the street to the strains of an amateur band from Deremouth.
‘They’re growing up, Kathie, our young people,’ Bruce said as he led Kathie into a waltz and nodded his head in the direction of where Oliver was dancing with Beth.
Kathie nodded, remembering Den’s warning that as the others changed so the spirit of Jess she ‘imagined’ spoke to her would be left behind, too young to understand an adult world. With her head on Bruce’s shoulder she longed to hear that voice, to know that Jess was still with her. She heard nothing, nothing but the clamour of happy people enjoying themselves. Bruce held her closer and whispered, ‘She’ll always be there for you, Kathie.’ But how had he known where her thoughts had taken her? ‘When you’re old and grey, she will know and understand because she speaks to your heart.’
‘How did you guess what I was thinking?’
His serious moment had gone and holding her away he looked at her with a teasing smile, ‘Be warned, woman, you can have no secrets from me.’
‘So you know what I’m thinking now?’
‘The same as I am. Yes, we’ll go back to school but not until later, later when the world is asleep.’
There was nothing in Sally’s countenance to hint that each morning she watched for the post lady, but then over the last years she had learnt not to wear her heart on her sleeve. The fighting in Europe was over, but Clive hadn’t been in Europe. ‘The atom is split’ read the newspaper sellers’ placards and, only half understanding, the nation waited in anticipation. Days later on the 16th August the final peace treaty was signed. Even then the full horror of what had happened in the Far East wasn’t known. Still no letter came from Clive.
‘Sally, quick Sally, there’s a phone call for you,’ Beth shouted. ‘I’ll stay with Steve.’
It was a long distance call and it was brief. When Sally came out of the house her vision was blurred by tears she had held back for so long.
‘What is it, love? Who was it?’ Kathie was waiting, frightened to hear the answer.
‘It was him, Clive. He’s home. He’s had malaria, that’s why he couldn’t write. Came home on a hospital ship. He’s home. Soon as he’s fit to travel he’s coming to get Steve and me.’ She had never known such aching joy – yet she couldn’t stop crying.
Before that summer was over the day came when removal vans were at Sedgewood Hall and finally the convoy left. Removal lorries, coach loads of boys and staff, then a private saloon with Bruce in front at the wheel and behind him Nanny Giles holding Elspeth’s hand. They were going home.
1954
Ten
Replacing the telephone receiver Kathie looked around her at the tidy room. The weekends were precious; she lived through each week waiting for Saturday teatime. Usually Bruce arrived around five o’clock, leaving London-based Brockleigh as soon as Saturday morning classes finished, the day students went home and the boarders filed in for their lunch. He stayed just long enough to say a quick grace and then he headed westward. When she’d paid Bert and his two young helpers and wished them all a good weekend that’s exactly what she had anticipated for herself. Each evening Bruce phoned her and she had known that Elspeth had a chesty cold, even that she had trouble breathing, but neither of them had thought it was anything serious.
‘Nanny fetched me to her in the night,’ he’d just told her. ‘I called the doctor out; she could hardly breathe. He’s brought in a nurse to stay with her but she’s so frightened. Poor Nanny seems to have gone to pieces. She’s been up all night of course, poor old dear. Kathie, I can’t leave Elspeth, not like this. She always smiles, you know she does. But today she’s crying, she sounds like a hurt animal.’
From his voice, Kathie could tell how upset he was. ‘Of course you can’t.’ And she had meant it, for she wouldn’t have him any different. ‘Is she in pain?’
‘How can one tell? The doctor says it’s pneumonia and now pleurisy. It must hurt her to try to breathe. I feel utterly helpless. Nanny’s holding her hand while I talk to you, then I’ll take over. Can’t believe it. Never seen her so . . . so . . . alone. She’s always happy, contented. Now she seems lost. She whimpers, she fights for breath, she looks l
ike a trapped animal. A chesty cold, a nasty cough, that’s all it was. She still smiled. Now suddenly . . . it’s like seeing a child suffer. Oh God, if only it could be me not her. She doesn’t understand.’
‘Go back to her, darling. She won’t be frightened if you are with her.’
After the call ended she looked around her and shivered not so much with cold as with an uncharacteristic fear of the unknown.
‘Pull yourself together,’ she chided herself, speaking aloud, the sound of her own voice making her feel even more alone. As she climbed the narrow flight of stairs, without warning the memory of Den pushing himself up one stair at a time came into her mind. According to what Oliver told her fairly recently after making a brief visit to the bungalow in Hampshire, Claudia had brought alive his enthusiasm for living and achieving. Together they ran a small business crafting leather goods, handbags, purses, wallets. Imagining them Kathie smiled with satisfaction. If Den could pick himself up to that extent, then who was she to worry about one disappointing weekend? Like a child, Elspeth wouldn’t need time to convalesce; once she felt better her illness would be forgotten.
But Kathie was wrong. Late that same evening Bruce phone again.
‘It’s all over, Kathie. Her breathing got worse, just an unearthly rattling noise while she stared at nothing. She didn’t cry anymore. It was as if she’d already left us. Then her breathing stopped. She’d gone.’
‘Bruce . . .’ But what could she say? ‘Are you all right?’
‘Better than I was when I spoke to you earlier. I worried about Nanny, but she is remarkable. Elspeth was her life. She loved her with a sort of completeness. Now she says she is thankful. What were her words? “My darling child, now she is herself again.” I felt humble.’
On the Sunday morning he phoned again, and late that night too. Between those two calls something happened to change the shape of all their futures.
‘Morning, Aunt Kathie.’ Immediately she recognized Oliver’s voice and threw down her hoe. ‘Working on a Sunday? All on your own?’
