Chapter 1
A LOST LETTER FINDS ITS WAY
IT started with a letter. A letter that had been lost a long time, waiting out half a century in a forgotten postal bag in the dim attic of a nondescript house in Bermondsey.
I think about it sometimes, that mailbag: of the hundreds of love letters, grocery bills, birthday cards, notes from children to their parents, that lay together, swelling and sighing as their thwarted messages whispered in the dark.
Waiting, waiting, for someone to realize they were there.
For it is said, you know, that a letter will always seek a reader; that sooner or later, like it or not, words have a way of finding the light, of making their secrets known.
Mum didn’t go on the show, though. The producers contacted her and asked whether there was anything special in her letter that she’d like to share with the nation, but she said no, that it was just an ordinary old clothing order from a shop that had long ago gone out of business.
But that wasn’t the truth. I know this because I was there when the letter arrived.
I saw her reaction to that lost letter and it was anything but ordinary.
It was a morning in late February, winter still had us by the throat, the flower beds were icy, and I’d come over to help with the Sunday roast. I do that sometimes because my parents like it, even though I’m a vegetarian and I know that at some point during the course of the meal my mother will start to look worried, then agonized, until finally she can stand it no longer and statistics about protein and anemia will begin to fly.
I was peeling potatoes in the sink when the letter dropped through the slot in the door.
The mail doesn’t usually come on Sundays so that should have tipped us off, but it didn’t.
For my part, I was too busy wondering how I was going to tell my parents that Jamie and I had broken up.
It had been two months since it happened and I knew I had to say something eventually, but the longer I took to utter the words, the more calcified they became.
And I had my reasons for staying silent: my parents had been suspicious of Jamie from the start, they didn’t take kindly to upsets, and Mum would worry even more than usual if she knew that I was living in the flat alone.
Most of all, though, I was dreading the inevitable, awkward conversation that would follow my announcement.
To see first bewilderment, then alarm, then resignation cross Mum’s face as she realized the maternal code required her to provide some sort of consolation …
But back to the mail. The sound of something dropping softly through the letter box.
“Edie, can you get that?”
This was my mother. (Edie is me; I’m sorry, I should have said so earlier.) She nodded towards the hallway and gestured with the hand that wasn’t stuck up the inside of the chicken.
I put down the potato, wiped my hands on a tea towel, and went to fetch the post. There was only one letter lying on the welcome mat: an official post office envelope declaring the contents to be “redirected mail.” I read the label to Mum as I brought it into the kitchen.
She’d finished stuffing the chicken by then and was drying her own hands.
Frowning a little, from habit rather than any particular expectation, she took the letter from me and plucked her reading glasses from on top of the pineapple in the fruit bowl.
She skimmed the post office notice and with a flicker of her eyebrows began to open the outer envelope.
I’d turned back to the potatoes by now, a task that was arguably more engaging than watching my mum open mail, so I’m sorry to say I didn’t see her face as she fished the smaller envelope from inside, as she registered the frail austerity paper and the old stamp, as she turned the letter over and read the name written on the back.
I’ve imagined it many times since, though, the color draining instantly from her cheeks, her fingers beginning to tremble so that it took minutes before she was able to slit the envelope open.
What I don’t have to imagine is the sound. The horrid, guttural gasp, followed quickly by a series of rasping sobs that swamped the air and made me slip with the peeler so that I cut my finger.
“Mum?” I went to her, draping my arm around her shoulders, careful not to bleed on her dress.
But she didn’t say anything. She couldn’t, she told me later, not then.
She stood rigidly as tears spilled down her cheeks and she clutched the strange little envelope, its paper so thin I could make out the corner of the folded letter inside, hard against her bosom.
Then she disappeared upstairs to her bedroom leaving a fraying wake of instructions about the bird and the oven and the potatoes.
The kitchen settled in a bruised silence around her absence and I stayed very quiet, moved very slowly so as not to disturb it further.
My mother is not a crier, but this moment—her upset and the shock of it—felt oddly familiar, as if we’d been here before.
After fifteen minutes in which I variously peeled potatoes, turned over possibilities as to whom the letter might be from, and wondered how to proceed, I finally knocked on her door and asked whether she’d like a cup of tea.
She’d composed herself by then and we sat opposite one another at the small Formica-covered table in the kitchen.
As I pretended not to notice she’d been crying, she began to talk about the envelope’s contents.
“A letter,” she said, “from someone I used to know a long time ago. When I was just a girl, twelve, thirteen.”
A picture came into my mind, a hazy memory of a photograph that had sat on my gran’s bedside when she was old and dying.
Three children, the youngest of whom was my mum, a girl with short dark hair, perched on something in the foreground.
It was odd; I’d sat with Gran a hundred times or more but I couldn’t bring that girl’s features into focus now.
Perhaps children are never really interested in who their parents were before they were born; not unless something particular happens to shine a light on the past. I sipped my tea, waiting for Mum to continue.
“I don’t know that I’ve told you much about that time, have I?
During the war, the Second World War. It was a terrible time, such confusion, so many things were broken.
It seemed …” She sighed. “Well, it seemed as if the world would never return to normal. As if it had been tipped off its axis and nothing would ever set it to rights.” She cupped her hands around the steaming rim of her mug and stared down at it.
“My family—Mum and Dad, Rita and Ed and I—we all lived in a small house together in Barlow Street, near the Elephant and Castle, and the day after war broke out we were rounded up at school, marched over to the railway station, and put into train carriages. I’ll never forget it, all of us with our tags on and our masks and our packs, and the mothers, who’d had second thoughts because they came running down the road towards the station, shouting at the guard to let their kids off; then shouting at older siblings to look after the little ones, not to let them out of their sight. ”
She sat for a moment, biting her bottom lip as the scene played out in her memory.
“You must’ve been frightened,” I said quietly. We’re not really hand-holders in our family or else I’d have reached out and taken hers.
“I was, at first.” She removed her glasses and rubbed her eyes.
Her face had a vulnerable, unfinished look without her frames, like a small nocturnal animal confused by the daylight.
I was glad when she put them on again and continued.
“I’d never been away from home before, never spent a night apart from my mother.
But I had my older brother and sister with me, and as the trip went on and one of the teachers handed round bars of chocolate, everybody started to cheer up and look upon the experience almost like an adventure.
Can you imagine? War had been declared but we were all singing songs and eating canned pears and looking out of the window playing I Spy.
Children are very resilient, you know; callous in some cases.
“We arrived eventually in a town called Cranbrook, only to be split into groups and loaded onto various coaches.
The one I was on with Ed and Rita took us to the village of Milderhurst, where we were walked in lines to a hall.
A group of local women was waiting for us there, smiles fixed on their faces, lists in hand, and we were made to stand in rows as people milled about, making their selection.
“The little ones went fast, especially the pretty ones. People supposed they’d be less work, I expect, that they’d have less of the whiff of London about them.”
She smiled crookedly. “They soon learned. My brother was picked early. He was a strong boy, tall for his age, and the farmers were desperate for help. Rita went a short while after with her friend from school.”
Well, that was it. I reached out and laid my hand on hers. “Oh, Mum.”
“Never mind.” She pulled free and gave my fingers a tap. “I wasn’t the last to go. There were a few others, a little boy with a terrible skin condition. I don’t know what happened to him, but he was still standing there in that hall when I left.
“You know, for a long time afterwards, years and years, I forced myself to buy bruised fruit if that’s what I picked up first at the greengrocer’s. None of this checking it over and putting it back on the shelf if it didn’t measure up.”
“But you were chosen eventually.”