Chapter 15
Dear Tom
Autumn is being chased away by winter now; there’s a sharp sting in the mornings and mist lying lower than ever and it’s hard to believe a month ago I was swimming at Brighouse.
It was a good long summer, Tom, plenty of rabbits to catch and trout to be had and I managed to bag a pheasant or two a few weeks ago – don’t tell young Murray – and I’m awfully burned on the neck and arms from the sun working outside.
I’ve taken a job painting and odd jobs on the estate, just to get me out of the house, and it turns out I’m rather good at it.
You know I love the sun and suffer in winter, whereas you’re perhaps like your mother, who loved the freezing cold, the ice and the chill.
The last of autumn lingers up in the hills, where the heather is the deepest purple, turning to copper, and the water seems a little darker now, not so turquoise as it was in summer.
We have had such fine days till now I’m thankful.
When we first came here, you and I, it was January, seven months after we were left alone.
I never really talked to you about it, how we came to live here.
Lately I have thought how little you know and how it’s best that way sometimes but there are some facts I should like you to know now that you are so far from me and the opportunity to pass them on might not arise when we meet, which will be one day I know.
I grew up in Cumbria and you know I hold the Lakes to be the most beautiful place in the world but that day I realized I’d been trounced.
Go north, between the Pennines and the Lakes and turn left into Galloway …
the place where there’s the sea and the pine trees and the hills – the bay that’s a whole other land when the tide’s out.
I’d rarely seen beaches, you understand. One-day trip here and there.
Coming out of fighter-pilot training … leaving Glasgow and the factories and the sense of impending doom and them men and women with faces tightly knitted together, and pitching up in this corner of paradise.
Anemones like jewels in the rocks, whelks everywhere, coves and beaches and little islands and those hills, always in the background.
Sandy had brought sandwiches, I’d brought beer, and we sat on the shore and shared our pack-up and talked about what we’d do after the war.
It seemed so distant, war, then, that was before all of it.
Sandy died in the Battle of Britain, shot down off the coast of Kent a few months later.
Most of my friends were gone the following year, Tom.
So I remembered the day well. It was the last really pure day, in a way.
Later . This letter is longer than I realized it would be.
What would have happened if your mother hadn’t got in that plane?
If she’d said to the colonel, no, I can’t come today, I have to go for a picnic with my husband and son.
I have to go and walk in the woods. I have to lie on a rug and hold my baby up in the air.
It would have been unthinkable to do such a thing, and yet if she had –!
I wonder what we would all be like. If we would simply be very happy all the time.
If I would be in a job in London, working hard and barely seeing you, and she would be at home, organizing – the house, her siblings, her surroundings.
She was an organizer, Irene Caldicott. She organized me into marrying her and thank God I did.
She organized you into arriving when I wasn’t sure about it, not at all.
And on that last day, in her last moments, she must have been so terrified.
She must have cried out for you, and me – oh dear, Tom, sometimes the thought of it overwhelms me. Darling boy, she loved you so much.
She believed in service, getting things done.
She had an infinite capacity for understanding and forgiveness, as I know all too well.
She had limitless patience with you when you cried and would not settle, and I was always, always in awe of her, darling girl.
When your mother died you were a year old.
I didn’t know what to do for a while. I hadn’t considered the possibility of losing her.
What a simpleton: now I see disaster everywhere, only now it’s too late, of course.
We were living at a flat in Kensington. An old friend of mine from 87 Squadron, who’d been posted elsewhere, lent it to me.
I was looking after you very badly. London was not the place for me, quite the opposite of what Kitch sang about.
It was a tired city, we were all tired, there was nothing there, no hope, and I didn’t care for it enough to overlook its scars and wounds.
I realized I had to get away and bring you up somewhere new, somewhere where there were no memories of her.
They were not happy with this decision, but Jenny was not well – we were all not well, after the war.
The plan had been that we would stay in Montpelier Crescent and you would grow up a London boy.
I can’t explain why but I had to get away.
I will try, one day. And then one morning I saw an advertisement in The Times for a woodsman job at the Murray Estate accommodation included – I had some money from my parents, and, as my eyes fell on the advert, I remembered that day at the beach with poor Sandy.
I knew we would go. I made a pact with Jenny, you see, that was the only way to go.
I promised you would have an English public school education, the envy of the world, something I could never give you.
And I packed us up, our meagre possessions and very few mementoes of Irene – she was not a sentimental woman.
We were in Scotland the following week. We drove up – the petrol nearly finished me off, and that’s when the leg of the bed was lost. You sat in your carrycot beside me in the front of the van fastened in with a seat belt and sometimes you grabbed my finger.
We walked to the beach at Skyreburn Bay and I set you down on the sand and you started crawling, then and there, on the muddy estuary, in the middle of winter!
You had never crawled before. I watched you, like a crab scuttling towards the sea.
I thought to myself, this boy wants to go places, he wants to roam, he wants to see the world.
I had you for nine years. All to myself.
So when I miss you terribly, so much my stomach hurts and my eyes cloud over with black smog, I tell myself it’s for the best, for in those nine years we were two halves of a whole, and it had to end, dear Tom.
Perhaps here life was too small for you, for all its vastness.
All my love, Tom
Dad
November 1956
Dearest Tom
Another letter from your old man. It’s been almost a year and a half since you wrote now, old thing. Can you scribble me just a line or so? I’d love to hear from you.
I wonder if you open them or simply throw them away.
No matter, I write anyway in case. Making amends?
We had Guy Fawkes, a big bonfire up at the Murray Arms last week, it’s a new thing, a lot of fun.
All of the village and the other surrounding villages.
I miss you most days all day but especially when I see the children who were your schoolmates and see how they’ve grown.
I miss your hair, which grows in thick thatches that go in random directions and at different rates. All manner of things.
It is very odd, when one thinks of what your mother and I hoped for the future, when we were married and starting out, and now it is just me, on my own, having bid farewell to the best people in my life.
I was so intimately involved in your life: what you did, where you slept, when your toenails needed cutting.
It really was just us, wasn’t it? And I know nothing of you now.
How is school? Your letter said you weren’t enjoying English – I know you will one day, just give it time.
Spelling doesn’t matter, Tom, it’s not what makes character.
Spelling comes out just right in the end.
I know you don’t want to write back but know that, at the other end of the country, your old man does miss you most dreadfully. Forgive the self-pity. Another letter soon, with tales of more cheerful deeds!
Dad xx
March 1957
Dear Tom
I’m sending you, a little early, a five bob note for your birthday.
Are you all right, old man? It’s utterly wonderful to think of you as an eleven-year-old.
But I do wish I could hear from you, whether you’ve finished the secret picture you alluded to, though that was well over a year ago. Two. Two years since you left.
I didn’t want to break off communications, my boy, that’s not ever what I wanted. Do please write back – if you want. The money is from a recent commission at the Cally Palace; they are pleased with my work and I find myself with some money to spare for once!
All my love to you, Tom dear boy,
I miss you most fearfully – try and drop me a postcard, even if just to show me what your handwriting is like now.
Dad xx
September 1957
Dear Edward,
I am returning your letters to Tom enclosed herewith.
Please don’t carry on writing to him. He does not open them; he finds any mention of you too distressing.
He is happy now, and has entirely stopped missing Scotland.
He has a full and busy life, is excelling at school, and making suitable young friends.
His teachers say his progress is remarkable.
We said we would take care of him now and that we will do. There is no need to write again.
When I saw you, you asked if I could ever forgive you. The answer is no, Edward.
Yours,
Jenny