This Time Next Year We'll Be Laughing

by Jacqueline Winspear

  At the top of the churchyard I stopped by the old oak tree, the one where our class of five-year-olds, Infants 1, would sit and listen to Mrs. Willis tell us a story on a fine summer’s afternoon. I remember the class walking in pairs from the classroom down to the churchyard. Mrs. Willis would bring a chair and once she was settled, the whole class of five-year-olds sat cross-legged on the grass looking up at her, waiting for the story to begin. I remember the shafts of light coming down through the trees, and feeling so gentled by summer’s warmth and the rhythm of her voice. The old Victorian primary school has now been converted to accommodation for seniors, but the oak tree is there and will be there for a long time, I hope. I walked away from my past just in time to see a bride making her way along the flagstone path toward the church, her hand resting on her father’s arm, her bridesmaids following, grinning, fussing with hair and tottering on high heels. I wanted to reach out and touch the silky fabric of her dress, but instead just smiled and said, “You look really lovely.” And she smiled back. It made my day.

  Time is a place and every place has a time, for each one of us. Almost thirty years ago, when I first came to live in California, I exercised horses for owners too busy to ride. One of those horses was kept at a private stable in the Marin Headlands overlooking the San Francisco Bay, so after riding and still clad in my breeches and tall leather boots, I would come down into Sausalito to buy a coffee at a little bakery close to the marina. The owner was originally from Iran—he told me he had been a “refugee from Persia.” As he was making my latte, he asked what kind of horse I rode, and I told him she was a gorgeous Arabian. His eyes lit up, his smile broadened. I think it was what he’d hoped to hear. “My father bred the Turkoman Arab,” he told me, holding his hand against his heart. And thereafter, several times each week as I sipped my coffee at the counter, he would tell me another story of the Arab horses he had grown up with, though he declined my offer to come to the stables—he said it would be too painful a memory.

  I’ve thought about the Iranian man a lot over the years, and of the many people on the move across the globe. I’ve thought of the things that open the gates to that sneaker wave of nostalgia, reminding immigrants—and I am one—of the place of their first belonging. Their first love, I suppose. It could be the fragrance of a flower only grown in their country, or a familiar turn of phrase overheard. Perhaps it’s the way dusk settles across the ocean, or even the image of a horse holding its tail high, nostrils flared as it gallops across headlands near the San Francisco Bay. And here, in California, in my house close to redwood groves and golden hills, I have a small hessian bag of hops, a tiny replica of the pokes our Kentish hops were packed into—sacks taller than a man to be taken to the breweries. Using a blanket stitch of thick string to secure the dried hops inside, my father made that small poke at the end of my first hop-picking season, when I was just six months old. He printed our last name in white chalk along the flank and added the year, as if claiming that season for me forever. I have a photograph of me that very September; I’m in my mother’s arms as she’s laying me down to sleep on a coat atop a mound of spent hop bines. The two dogs—working farm dogs, Bess and her daughter, Lassie—lay beside me, never to leave me, for they were my guardians. No one could entice them to move and no one dare approach me—only my father or mother could touch me. When I first read Of Human Bondage, by W. Somerset Maugham, I smiled when I came across a description of hop gardens in Kent and mothers laying their young down to sleep on mounds of spent hop bines covered by a coat or a blanket. I remember thinking, That was me. And it made me feel special; I felt as if that famous writer had walked by and caught a glimpse of me while I was a baby sleeping.

  The writer Adam Nicolson, who comes from the same area in Kent, writes about the gift of place in his book Sissinghurst: An Unfinished History. Nicolson refers to place as “the roomiest of containers for human meaning.” The land where I grew tall is filled with meaning for me—it’s the land of hop gardens and apple orchards, of farms and fields, of trees to climb and streams flanked by pungent wild garlic and golden sun-reflecting celandines. This deep love of place is part of my family mythology, a delicate web across my heart.

  I love thinking about place, wondering how places change, or don’t, and I like looking at what place does to people and people to place. I’m fascinated by what it means to be held in place, and how place gives our lives meaning and how we assign meaning to a place. I live some six thousand miles away from the land of my growing, and even from such a distance I can feel my roots in that soil. Take me there blindfolded and I would know I had come home. The air’s texture and fragrance, the sounds, the sense of light even though my eyes are closed—I would know I was where I belonged, once. And perhaps it’s truly where I belong now—writing memoir is a way of discovering something about ourselves, so perhaps there’s something to be revealed to me. But time has marched on, and so have I—and if truth be told, even as a child I always felt as if I were on the outside looking in, so it’s comfortable for me to live in a country where I am not expected to be like anyone else, because I come from a different place. Perhaps the early years when my parents were considered outsiders has something to do with it.

  2

  A Wartime Evacuation

  Should we name names, we writers of memoir? Should we tell a tale that exposes another in a poor light, decades after that person has hurt us? No, I won’t name the girl who in primary school would punch me on the shoulder while surrounded by her little coven of fellow tormentors, who would call me “Gypsy, Gypsy, dirty Gypsy.” I was neither a Gypsy nor was I dirty—my mother prided herself on her whites and made sure every stitch of my school uniform and underwear was fresh and laundered. If I was run over by a bus, she wanted the doctors and nurses to gasp in wonder at my sparkling white knickers as they ripped off my clothing to save my life. Years later, when my brother was rushed to the hospital fighting for his life following a burst appendix, one of the nurses commented on his white underwear, and it pleased my mother no end.

  But there was a grain of truth in the bully’s words, because my parents had lived alongside Romany travelers before I was born—and it had been the making of them. And though my grandmother said my father had whisked my mother away to the country so another man wouldn’t make eyes at her—she was a looker, that’s for sure—I have come to believe the truth has much more texture and strength to it. I wonder at how intuitive he was, even at a young age; how instinct informed him that my mother had to get away from the city streets, from the bomb sites and out to the country where they could both let go of what had come to pass in the years of their growing into adulthood. They were twenty-two years of age when they married in 1949, and I believe their dislocation from family gave them the strength, work ethic and initiative that would drive them forward into a life well-lived, hard though it was. But somewhere along the line, my mother had to tell her stories, had to get them out from inside because they were dark, festering and painful. So she told the person who was around her all the time. She told me.

  My mother’s history became my history—probably because I was young when she began telling me about the war, about her father and his drink, and about the different houses they lived in during her childhood. I was a willing listener even as a small child, for my mother was a very good storyteller. She spoke to me as if I were an adult—there was never baby talk in our house—and I hung on her every word. Looking back, her stories—of war, of abuse at the hands of the people to whom she and her sisters had been billeted when evacuated from London, of seeing the dead following a bombing—were probably too graphic for a child. But I liked listening to them. I liked being with her, and I liked the bits about everyone singing in the air-raid shelters, about how she’d saved up to see Gone with the Wind at the cinema and when the air-raid warning sounded, the film kept playing and she was one of the people who refused to leave until it ended. The trouble is, at this point in my life I am haunte
d by her stories. I am haunted by the sad spirits of experience that trailed behind my mother, dictating her every word, every decision, every single thing she took on in life. “Took on” is a good description, because my mother seemed to have her fists balled all the time, ready to do a lot of taking on.

  “Tell us about being down evacuation.” It was another bad weather day away from the farm. Another day in the kitchen, by the Rayburn—a solid fuel stove, a smaller version of the better-known Aga stove—while my mother stopped for a cup of Camp Coffee, a bitter drink with chicory, all they could afford and my mother’s one treat. I’m not sure what task she had paused, because my mother hated housework, hated the dusting and sweeping and everything that went into keeping an old house going without any labor-saving devices. She liked to tell a story, though, and was always ready with a new one. She’d make her coffee, light another cigarette, blow her first smoke ring, and she was off, back into the past.

  My mum was evacuated on September 1, 1939, when she was twelve years of age. Along with her was an older sister, Rene, who would only be evacuated for a short while, until she was fourteen, the school-leaving age—after that you were brought home and sent out to work. There were two younger sisters evacuated, Sylvia and Ruby, and two brothers, Charlie and Joe. Until she was old enough to be evacuated, Rose—the baby of the family—would remain behind with my grandmother, who also had three older children, Ada, Dorothy and Jim, all of whom would soon be in the services. One of my aunts told me that the war was a liberation for my grandmother—her husband was away in the army and almost overnight she relinquished any responsibility for all but one of her kids.

  Perhaps this is where I mention that my grandmother had ten children, seven of whom were girls. A small herd of tall headstrong females. I often think our get-togethers were more like elephant families on the move, with maternal leadership firmly established. The “girls” would line up, six of them—Ada, Dorothy, Rene, Mum, Sylvia and Rose (Ruby had emigrated to Canada)—then they would link arms and high-kick their way across the room, singing, “Sisters, sisters. There never were such devoted sisters.” My uncles would roll their eyes. Uncle Charlie said that his sisters were “formidable.” You didn’t dare argue with them, and while they might argue with each other, woe betide an outsider who went up against one of the siblings, because the whole pack would come down on them.

  “Tell us about when you were down evacuation.” I asked about evacuation as if it were a place, because my mother talked about being “down evacuation” as if she were saying, “We went down the lane.” Evacuation wasn’t just an experience, an escape from the threat of bombing and Nazi invasion—it was a destination, albeit an unwanted one. In that place so many children felt trapped and were abused, while others, the lucky ones, landed at good homes with caring foster parents.

  The evacuation of children from Britain’s cities had been planned since the closing days of World War I, when it was understood that any future conflagration would include an air war and civilians would be targeted. The order to evacuate was given on August 31st, just days prior to Britain’s declaration of war on Germany, on September 3rd, 1939. Almost one million children were evacuated in anticipation of the immediate threat—sent away from home to live with strangers, who received payment for each child fostered. According to my mother, she and her siblings were among hundreds of children shepherded onto a long train bound for the perceived safety of Kent, though at the time they had no idea where they were going. Each child had a label attached to their coat with their name and school. Following a stop-and-start journey—passenger trains were required to pull into a siding to give trains carrying troops right of way—they reached the first of several overnight stops in different places before arriving at a destination outside Westerham in Kent. Following a long walk the youngsters were herded into pens used for cattle and sheep on market day. The town had nowhere else to put so many children, so they waited there in the pens until the locals came along to claim a child or two to take in, many pointing to their choices and saying, “I’ll take that one and that one” or “I only want boys.” Farmers liked boys because they could be put to work. Some only wanted girls. As she saw them off on the train with hundreds of other children, my grandmother told my mother to make sure the family remained together at all costs, but the boys and girls were split up.

  Children were evacuated along with all the pupils in their school, unless the parents had decided that they were keeping their children at home and the whole family would die together when London was bombed. For the evacuees there was a level of continuity and comfort to have friends, siblings and teachers all going to the same place. The irony for the contingent from my mother’s school was that at the supposed safe location, their teachers were assigned classrooms at an empty school—and those rooms had been made available when the local children and their teachers were evacuated to Wales a couple of days earlier. Given the risk presented by being so close to Biggin Hill aerodrome, which was to become one of the most important air stations during the war, the local authorities had decided to err on the side of caution with regard to the safety of their young. My mother said it felt as if the London kids were expendable—though it gave them a bird’s eye view of the Battle of Britain as it raged overhead during the summer of 1940.

  For Mum and her sisters especially, evacuation was hell. The girls were billeted with a man who, they came to know, “interfered” with little girls. I think my older aunt dealt with it by going into denial, into a safe place in her imagination. This is only conjecture on my part—I just know my mother felt her sister Rene didn’t do anything to stop it, whereas my mum, with her fists balled and—let it be said—a bit of a mouth on her, did everything she could to fight for her siblings. That was a grief she held until her dying day—that she could not stop the abuse, despite weaving dressmaking pins into her pajamas and sleeping on the outside of the bed shared by the sisters, so that when the man put his hands under the covers in the dead of night, he would feel that first sharp round of defense nipping into his fingers.

  In her sixties, while she was having an ear exam, the doctor asked Mum what had happened to her, to break her eardrum. “Oh,” she said, “that was when I was evacuated in the war. The man who took us in brought back his hand and hit me around the head, slamming me into the wall when I talked back to him about putting his hands into the bed where my sisters and I were asleep.” She began telling her story to the ear doctor. But she was also suffering from painful trigeminal neuralgia, possibly also caused by the same beating around the head. She recounted the conversation to me later in a telephone call. It was as if she just could not help herself telling the story again, and to a stranger. When I put the receiver down after the call, I remembered reading Aldous Huxley’s novel Island, and the scene where a child makes Will Farnaby tell the story of his wounding time and time again until it doesn’t hurt any more. I wondered if every time my mother told her story, it released some pain. Apparently the ear doctor hemmed and hawed and then referred her to a neurologist for the trigeminal neuralgia.

  My Aunt Ruby says she felt like an orphan until she was ten, due to being evacuated. And the aunts who were there at the time have spoken of Aunt Rose’s terrible screams when she was three and old enough to join her sisters. Uncle Joe, who was eight years old, tried to run away from the abusive farmer with whom he was billeted. He began walking back to London, and because he was thirsty and hungry he took a pint of milk from a doorstep. Joe was caught and sent to a reform school. But we’re a fighting family; you never saw photographs of a prouder man than when, decades later, his grandson graduated from the University of Oxford.

  The memories of her evacuation were something akin to terrorists in my mother’s life. It was as if they held her hostage, and I know every single story. Mum told me of the day she and Auntie Sylvie were so desperate and unhappy that they made a pact to kill each other, a joint suicide using their scarves. They agreed that
they would both pull at the same time and that would be it, their unbearable life would be over. They each stopped pulling when they saw the other go blue. And I know about that summer of 1940, during the Battle of Britain, when they were walking along and saw a Luftwaffe Messerschmitt aircraft coming down after being hit, black smoke and flames pouring from the tail. But the aviator’s trigger finger still worked, because, as he flew low over a field of women and children strawberry-picking, he took aim and fired until he crashed in a neighboring field.

  A platoon of Canadian soldiers had been marching along the lane and had seen everything. Some began running toward the Messerschmitt as others helped the women. My mum and aunt followed the soldiers toward the downed aircraft, just to see what happened. And what happened was, I suppose, the justice of the moment, as women lay wounded in a strawberry field in Kent. The Canadians took the still-alive pilot into the church, where they slipped a rope over a beam and hanged him until he died. I doubt anyone ever knew about it other than those who saw it happen, which amounted to some young Canadians far from home and two evacuee children. Any knowing villagers said nothing. For all intents and purposes, the pilot died when his plane crashed to earth, while a Royal Air Force pilot in a Spitfire high in the sky above did a victory roll.

  During a conversation with Aunt Sylvie at her ninetieth birthday party last year, she recounted her memories of that time. The only point of difference was that my aunt remembered the killing of women working in a strawberry field and the hanging of a Luftwaffe pilot as two distinct events witnessed by the sisters that summer, and that they had taken place on different days. But the wounds my mother took to her grave were very much present in my aunt’s heart—wounds inflicted by bearing witness to war. On the day I left to fly back to California, my aunt said, “I love talking to you, Jackie—you’ve got all your mum’s memories, and it’s as if she’s here with me.”