Letters From the Past
Page 1
Dedication
For Edward and Samuel, and Ally, Mr T and the newest recruit to the family, my granddaugther.
Letters From the Past
Erica James
Contents
Dedication
Letters From the Past
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-One
Chapter Fifty-Two
Chapter Fifty-Three
Chapter Fifty-Four
Chapter Fifty-Five
Chapter Fifty-Six
Chapter Fifty-Seven
Chapter Fifty-Eight
Chapter Fifty-Nine
Chapter Sixty
Chapter Sixty-One
Chapter Sixty-Two
Chapter Sixty-Three
Chapter Sixty-Four
Chapter Sixty-Five
Chapter Sixty-Six
Chapter Sixty-Seven
Chapter Sixty-Eight
Chapter Sixty-Nine
Chapter Seventy
Chapter Seventy-One
Chapter Seventy-Two
Chapter Seventy-Three
Chapter Seventy-Four
Chapter Seventy-Five
Chapter Seventy-Six
Chapter Seventy-Seven
Chapter Seventy-Eight
Chapter Seventy-Nine
Chapter Eighty
Chapter Eighty-One
Chapter Eighty-Two
Chapter Eighty-Three
Chapter Eighty-Four
Chapter Eighty-Five
Chapter Eighty-Six
Chapter Eighty-Seven
Chapter Eighty-Eight
Acknowledgements
Also by Erica James
About the Author
Copyright
Chapter One
Meadow Lodge, Melstead St Mary
October 1962
Evelyn
Out in the garden Evelyn Devereux could hear ringing from inside the house. With an energetic step, she dashed up the lawn, assuming it was one of the children calling to say which train they would be on. But by the time she lunged for the telephone on the hall table, she was too late.
Oh well, if it was Pip or Em, they would probably try again. Meanwhile, she would make a drink for everybody; they had certainly earned it. Noticing there had been a second delivery of post, she picked up the letter from the doormat and went through to the kitchen.
She filled the kettle and put it on the gas stove. From the kitchen window she watched her husband, Kit, carrying some chairs across the lawn towards the marquee which was still in the process of being erected. Alongside him was her brother, Edmund; he too was carrying chairs. They were both laughing about something and clearly enjoying themselves. Particularly Kit. And nobody deserved to be happy more than he did. Not after everything he had suffered.
Back in 1939 and desperate to do his bit for King and country, and with the RAF unable to train pilots fast enough at the start of the war, Kit had taken matters into his own hands by going to Canada to learn to fly. Evelyn knew that his desire to go had been fuelled partly by his need to impress her. Oh, how she wished he hadn’t been so impetuous!
Returning home the following year, he’d been on board the Arcadia and while crossing the Atlantic the ship had been torpedoed by a German U-boat. When news of the sinking had reached them in the village, they had all believed Kit was dead. They had even held a memorial service for him. But miraculously he’d survived. Appallingly burned from when the Arcadia had been hit, he’d been in the most awful pain when he’d finally made it home to Melstead St Mary, mental as well as physical pain. To this day he couldn’t fully remember what had happened to him, only what he’d been told, that a passing American merchant ship had rescued him. He was transported to a hospital where he was treated not just for his injuries, but for amnesia. It was weeks before his memory returned, and partially at that.
It had taken him a long time to recover and he’d bravely endured countless excruciating operations to repair his scarred flesh, vowing after each visit to the hospital that he’d never go through it again. But somehow he’d found the strength to do so, and gradually he’d regained some of his old self which had been buried beneath the layers of pain and horror of what he’d gone through.
Evelyn liked to think she’d played her part in his recovery, but really it was his stepmother, Romily, who helped the most by encouraging Kit to join her in the Air Transport Auxiliary. He refused on the grounds that he wasn’t fit enough, but Romily wouldn’t accept no for an answer and kept on at him. ‘Good God, Kit,’ she exclaimed, ‘we have pilots with missing limbs and Lord knows what else, poor devils! Of course you’re fit enough!’
In the end, as he still liked to joke, he waved a white flag of surrender and agreed to give it a try. Never did Evelyn consider that it had been easy for Kit to fly again, but being useful gave a much-needed boost to his self-esteem.
There had been an assumption, once Kit was safely home in Suffolk, that he and Evelyn would marry, but they didn’t. Instead, Evelyn went to do her bit for the war effort, which meant she was no longer living in the village. But the real reason Kit wouldn’t propose to her was because he flatly refused to believe that anybody, least of all Evelyn, would want to marry a gruesome wreck like him. He just couldn’t believe that any woman could love him when he was so badly disfigured.
But in October 1942 they married and the following June Evelyn gave birth to twins, Philip and Emily. It didn’t seem possible that those babies were now nineteen and enjoying (maybe a little too much!) student life at Cambridge University. What a joy they had been for both her and Kit. He adored them, there wasn’t anything he wouldn’t do for his Pip and Em. He was so very proud of them. And of Evelyn, he never tired of telling her. Which was why he had insisted on throwing a lavish party to celebrate their twentieth wedding anniversary.
One or two very quiet well-behaved children might have suited Hope, but a rowdy houseful would have been torture for her. Evelyn had long since come to the conclusion that while Hope, a prolific children’s author, wrote so imaginatively for her audience, almost as though she were a child herself and inhabited the world she created for them on the page, she didn’t enjoy their company very much. She found them exhausting to be around, always preferring to escape to her study where she could pour her energy into her work.
Evelyn meant no criticism of her sister-in-law in believing this, it was merely an observation. Hope was also Kit’s sister and they had been friends since they were children themselves, so there wasn’t much they didn’t know about each other. Their being married to each other’s siblings had a satisfying sense of symmetry to it, and perhaps a sense of rightness, of how it was always meant to be.
She went over to the fridge for a bottle of milk and after filling a jug, her eye caught on that day’s copy of The Times on the kitchen table. Neatly folded, it was where she had left it at breakfast that morning, the cryptic crossword only half completed. Time was she would have done it in the blink of an eye. It was her ability to do this, coupled with her love of mathematics, which was what she had studied at Oxford, that led her to do the work she had during the war.
Nobody in the family, or her current circle of friends, had ever known exactly what she did, and because she had signed the Official Secrets Act, it had to stay that way. She told people then, and even now, that it was clerical work for the Ministry of Defence she had been assigned to do, that it was all a bit hush-hush. ‘I was nothing but a glorified paper-pusher,’ she would explain to anyone who asked what she did. ‘Utterly boring, but it was essential to keep the wheels running for the war effort.’
Like many of those she worked with at Bletchley Park, her recruitment had come by way of an old college tutor. Out of the blue she had received an invitation from Dr Goulding to meet up for a drink and a chat. Several days after seeing him in Oxford, she received a letter requesting her to attend an interview in London. She was happy enough teaching at the village school, but sensing an opportunity to be free of the drudgery of looking after her ungrateful and ill-tempered mother, and to give Kit time to adjust to the direction in which his own life had gone, she leapt at the chance to escape. Within the week, and leaving her furious mother in the capable hands of a nurse, she arrived at Bletchley Park and started work as a decoder in Hut 5. It was the most satisfying work she had ever done, the most exhausting as well.
She had a feeling that Romily had guessed that she was doing a lot more than mere clerical work, because she once asked if Evelyn had ever come across an old chum of hers called Max Blythe-Jones. In fact, Evelyn knew Max well, but all she said to Romily was that the name rang a bell. As for everyone else, they took her at her word, that it was tedious filing she mostly did.
She still missed those days at Bletchley. She missed the camaraderie and the knowledge that she was doing something vital. Marriage and motherhood, and a return to teaching, had been life-changing and rewarding, but it wasn’t the same as being part of a close-knit team put together to decode ciphers and save lives. Nothing else she had done before or since could compare.
Had she not married Kit, she would have continued working at Bletchley Park. Her old tutor had even contacted her again in 1949, hoping she might like to join in with what he referred to as ‘the fight against the USSR’. Despite the temptation to be a part of something important and potentially exhilarating, she had to decline: she was a wife and mother by then. The Cold War would have to be fought without her assistance.
The whistling of the kettle on the gas ring roused her from her reverie. She made the tea in the largest pot they had, and mentally counted how many mugs she needed for the workforce in the garden. She then added the biscuit tin from the pantry, recalling all those years of rationing when the humble biscuit had been such a treat.
She was about to take the tray outside when she remembered the post. It probably wasn’t anything important, but she might as well open the letter before Pip and Em arrived and it was lost in the melee of party preparations.
Taking a knife, she slit the envelope open and took out the piece of paper. She frowned at the sight of the glued-on letters cut from a newspaper. Was it a prank of some kind?
But when she read the words she knew it wasn’t a joke. It was deadly serious.
you’re a harlot! what would your
husband say if he knew he wasn’t
the father of your children?
Chapter Two
Island House, Melstead St Mary
October 1962
Hope
Hope had lost track of the time. Something her husband, Edmund, frequently complained that she did. It infuriated him, especially if she forgot they were going somewhere, or had guests coming for dinner.
She never used to be like this, but her busy work schedule meant that every minute of her day was devoted to the children for whom she wrote. If she wasn’t writing her books for them, she was replying to the hundreds of letters she received from all around the world.
Her various publishers and agent applauded her for her prodigious output, but it was the children’s applause that mattered most to her. When she received a letter from a young child thousands of miles away in Nairobi, she knew then that she had done her job.
She hadn’t always been a children’s author. In what felt like another life, she had been an illustrator after going to art school. Her early work had included illustrating wildlife books for children. It was during the war that she had changed direction and commenced writing the series of books which was to make her name. Based on Stanley, their young evacuee billeted at Island House, and his devoted dog, Bobby, she had created Freddie and his faithful mutt, Ragsy.
Of course, in the end Freddie had to grow up and she had to find new characters with which to amuse her readers. Her agent urged her to be more like Enid Blyton and feature a group of friends who together solve mysteries. She went along with the suggestion, but on the understanding that she would include two girls within the storyline who would show just as much pluck and intelligence as the boys, if not more. After all, hadn’t women shown their mettle during the war just as much as their male counterparts, women such as Hope’s sister-in-law, Evelyn, and her stepmother, Romily? While they had been away doing their bit, Hope had had the job of maintaining order at Island House and writing her books. For some of her storylines she rifled her own childhood for inspiration – ghastly Nanny Finch; the mother Hope had never really known; the distant father who was always away and the siblings who found it so difficult to get on. Although thankfully she and Kit had never fallen out with each other.
As well as this hugely successful series of books, Hope also wrote for much younger children, featuring imaginary woodland folk who inhabited Sweet Meadow Wood. These shorter and much simpler stories were influenced by the imaginary world into which she had escaped as a child, and they soon became as popular as her other books. Next she devised a range of board games and jigsaws based on Sweet Meadow Wood, and in recent years she had created a new series of Tales from Pepper Brook Farm.
Everything she had written had been an attempt to entertain and brighten the lives of the children for whom she wrote. It had been to lighten the darkness they had endured during the war, and long after it wa
s over. The relief that the fighting had stopped had soon given way to another battle, that of the country rebuilding itself while still making do with rations. The thorough drabness of it all had worn people down. Maybe not so much for the Romilys and Evelyns of this world who always seemed to bounce along with whatever was thrown at them. But for someone like Hope, who didn’t have the same resilience, it was a bleak and depressing time.
She could remember in the harsh winter of 1947 sitting at her desk, and wrapped in so many layers she resembled a barrage balloon, feeling unutterably miserable. Through the window, and listening to their happy laughter, she had watched Edmund playing in the snow with Annelise and envied his ability to enjoy life in a way she found so difficult. Sometimes she wondered if she’d been cursed by being given the name Hope, she seemed to have so little of it.
Removing the completed page from her faithful old Corona typewriter, she placed it in the box file along with the rest of the chapters she had already written. If the coming days weren’t going to be so busy, she would be able to complete this latest Pepper Brook Farm book and send it off to her agent, but it would have to wait for now.
Reluctantly she stood up and looked out of the window at the garden and the large pond and recently rebuilt boathouse. She was a middle-aged woman in her late forties, but when she looked at the garden of her childhood home, and despite the changes Romily had made to it during her ownership, Hope was a girl again remembering how she and Kit used to hide in the bushes from their older brother, Arthur. How he used to love to torment them. What sport he made of exploiting their weaknesses for his own sick pleasure. She had never forgotten what he’d done to her pet canary. He never admitted it, but she knew that he had crushed the little bird and left it for her to find.
Undoubtedly his wanton cruelty played its part in shaping Hope as she grew up, but essentially, she had already been marked out as being destined always to think and fear the worst. Losing her mother at a very young age could have been the start of her problems, and certainly her widowed father had been ill-equipped to cope with three small children, but then why did her younger brother, Kit, not suffer in the way that she did? Yes, he lacked confidence at times, but invariably he was the most positive and cheerful person she knew.