by Juno Dawson
The diary is on my pillow.
Chapter 30
I hold my breath in case I accidentally blow it away. I’m not hallucinating. The diary is on my pillow and clearly Margot put it there. I approach it with extreme caution and sit gingerly on the edge of my bed. I pick the book up and inhale deeply, reminding myself of its antiquey aroma.
I hardly dare hope, but flick through to where the story ran out.
I gasp.
There are new entries.
I check I’m not mistaken. Nope, they’re definitely new. The handwriting is the same although a little scrawlier, less regimented. It’s also now in blue biro instead of black ink.
My eyes sting again but I blink back tears. I’m so bored of crying I like actually feel a bit soggy. What’s Margot doing? She’s finished her story. For me? I take a moment to let that sink in. She wants me to know – she must do. She’s sharing the rest of the story.
And she’s right, I can feel it. My heart feels like it’s swelling. I guess she must trust me, even if it’s just a little bit. I’m gobsmacked but weirdly touched.
It’s something. From Margot, I’ll take anything I can get.
I turn to the first new entry.
For Felicity
A note on memory: some memories, even from my childhood, are crystal clear. I remember the jaguars at London Zoo in the snow and the night the bombs rained down on Llanmarion, the smoke at the back of my throat. I remember Glynis’s blackberry jam for goodness sake, but others, even my wedding day, are as faded as the photographs in the albums.
I took my memories of that time and locked them very firmly away. As such, I honestly can’t say what is a real memory and what’s a narrative I’ve since constructed. It’s true that we take what’s real and turn it into a story.
And now a note on stories: I think storytelling is a vital part of human communication – we share and trade our stories. So many languages but we all speak ‘story’. From those first cave paintings all the way up to your Internet journals we’re all reaching out for anyone who’ll listen: telling our stories, exchanging little pieces of ourselves. Perhaps this diary can help you and I to understand each other better.
I’ll do my best, but I’m not promising anything. As you would expect, precise dates elude me, but I’ll write it as I remember it.
These chapters of my life are painful, but your mother is right, Felicity. If it’s to be just you and me, we have to know each other. You already know more than most.
I’ve looked back over what I wrote with great amusement at times. I remember the period well, but scarcely recall keeping a diary. How readily I left it behind. What a pompous young woman I was! Pompous, but spirited, certainly. In fact, I rather remind myself of you.
I can’t decide if that’s a an insult or not. I guess as I like 1940s Margot, I’ll take it as a compliment.
So, Felicity, for you, I will try to tell you the rest of the story. I suppose I shall start back where I left off. Let’s see, shall we?
Summer, 1941
When I could conceal my pregnancy no longer – and bear in mind our clothes were honestly made from parachutes – I told Glynis one evening as she pruned the rose bushes. I showed her my bump and she dropped her secateurs.
I tearfully begged her not to tell my mother and father, but that was too great an ask. ‘Oh, Margot,’ she said, ‘I can’t keep this to myself, you know I can’t.’
‘Why not? I’m offering to give you the baby. You and Ivor can raise it as yours.’
I remember her sad, pitying eyes. ‘I would do anything for you and Peter and Jane, but this isn’t right,’ she told me. ‘You’ll feel very differently when there’s a little baby in your arms.’
‘I won’t,’ I told her defiantly. ‘I tell you I won’t.’ You see, I was so angry at Rick by that point. Angry he’d gone away and left me with this unwanted souvenir. Angry that he was blissfully unaware, somewhere far away from Llanmarion with his real girlfriend. I went to sleep each night haunted by their imagined laughter; Rick Sawyer and the ‘sweet, simple’ girl living the life that should have been mine. I never told him about the child – how could I? I had no way of reaching him.
Let’s get one thing clear right from the onset. I never saw Rick Sawyer ever again. If you’re hoping for the heartfelt reunion in the pouring rain, you’ll be bitterly disappointed. Join the club, as they say. That’s not to say I didn’t think of him. Some loves leave permanent marks across the heart, and he was certainly one of those. To this day, if I see yellow rapeseed or a copy of Wuthering Heights, I wonder if he’s still alive and, more keenly, if he still sometimes thinks about me.
‘Margot. I’m sorry, but we must tell your mother,’ Glynis said, and that was what we did. Together we drafted a carefully worded letter explaining what had happened. I remember never once feeling judged by Glynis. My predicament didn’t discolour me in the least, not in her eyes.
The letter was sent and precisely five days later, a stern black car, not unlike a hearse, bumped and rocked down the track to the farm. I’d been warned it was coming of course.
With the same sad suitcase I’d arrived with, I left the farm. Bess, Andrew and Doreen came to see me off. If they knew the real reason for my exile, they were polite enough to keep it among themselves. The official line – preparing me wonderfully for an illustrious career in the press – was that my mother was sick and I was returning to London to care for her.
‘I’m going to write to you every single day,’ Bess said, hugging me tight. ‘Llanmarion simply won’t be the same without you.’
I noticed how she’d started to sound like me. ‘Well, not every day,’ I replied with a smile. ‘But once a week at least. Keep me abreast of all the village news.’ On the spur of the moment I leaned in more closely and whispered through her hair, ‘Reg is on Anglesey. Rhodri has an address. There isn’t time to explain how I know.’
If she was cross I’d kept it from her, she didn’t let on. She just hugged me even tighter. ‘Oh, Margot, thank you. I love you and I’ll miss you.’
‘I’ll miss you too. Terribly.’
I hugged Doreen before Andrew stepped in. His eyes were watery. ‘I can’t believe you’re going back to civilisation and leaving me here.’
‘Oh, it isn’t so very awful, is it? And what’s the alternative?’ We both knew that there was every possibility he’d be off to fight if the war was still going in two years’ time.
‘Thank you, Margot. For everything.’ No further words were required. I knew exactly what he meant.
I crouched to say goodbye to Jane and Peter. ‘Now, you two will behave for Ivor and Glynis, won’t you? And, Peter, there’s no reason on earth that you can’t read Jane a bedtime story.’
‘But I want you to do it,’ Jane protested.
‘Peter will do a wonderful job, won’t you?’
‘I promise.’
‘Good boy.’
I rose to embrace Glynis. ‘We’re always here,’ she breathed into my ear. ‘Always. If you need us …’
‘I know.’
Ivor pulled me into a bear hug. He let me go and gave me a wink. ‘Shame, ain’t it? Best farmhand I ever had.’
It was with great sadness that I climbed into the back of that car. As we rolled down the drive, I closed my eyes so I couldn’t see their faces in the mirror.
I arrived back in Kensington by dead of night and this was no coincidence. Mrs Watson, the fussy little housekeeper, met me at the car and bundled me inside with great haste. Mother waited in the hall. Everything was almost as I remembered it, except darker, more claustrophobic: the mosaic tiles, the wood panels, the foreboding oil paintings. The grandfather clock tutted out Mother’s disapproving silence.
‘We shall talk in the morning when your father is here,’ she said, pointedly avoiding my gaze. Her hair was pulled back in a severe chignon, her lips berry red. See what I mean about the strange details your memory retains?
‘Father’s coming home?�
�� I asked, my heart sinking. Apparently a pregnant seventeen year-old daughter out of wedlock was deemed of more pressing concern than a world at war.
‘Go to bed, Margot.’
As I passed her, suitcase in hand, she made no move to kiss my cheek. I climbed the stairs feeling very alone and very scared for whatever the morning would bring.
The next morning I was shown to my prison. I was moved into the back bedroom, overlooking the garden, where neighbours and people from the street wouldn’t see the scarlet letter. It could not have been made clearer that I was casting a terrible cloud of shame over the Stanford name, although very few words were spoken.
That first morning back home, Dr MacDonald came to examine me. I’d never liked that man – thin and bald like a boiled ferret. He had spidery little fingers and I hated feeling them on my skin. ‘I’d say she’s about four months along,’ he said, telling me nothing I didn’t already know.
Mother, apparently unwilling to believe it until a doctor confirmed the diagnosis, clutched a handkerchief and wept silently. Father simply glared. ‘No one is to know. Is that understood?’
‘Of course, Admiral Stanford. Our discretion is guaranteed. I shall have to brief a nurse and midwife. No one need know beyond that.’
‘You see, Margot,’ said Mother, ‘it’ll be all right. We shall all move on and soon forget all about it.’
No one seemed to be able to say the word ‘baby’, so I thought I better had. ‘What will happen to the baby?’
‘It’s all taken care of,’ said Dr MacDonald, snapping his case shut. He said no more. I couldn’t help but imagine him tossing the infant into the Thames as they had done in Victorian times.
Like something from an H. G. Wells story, I could feel the life inside me growing, taking shape every day. But I couldn’t think of it as a child, only as what Rick had done to me. All that love, that sweet nectar, had turned to glass and nails in my abdomen. I knew I was monstrous, but I wanted rid of it. Nowadays, of course, that wouldn’t have been an issue; I would have had a choice.
I was permitted to walk down the landing to the bathroom, but that bedroom, those four ivory walls, a ceiling and a bay window, became my entire world. Of the house staff, only Mrs Watson knew of my condition and ferried three meals a day to the bedroom on a tray. It was August, but I wasn’t even allowed in the back garden in case someone were to see over the wall through the willows. I was allowed to read and knit and embroider. The back room had a window seat that captured the sun between two in the afternoon and about six at night, so I would spend the afternoons reading or just staring out at the world beyond.
I watched as the sycamore leaves turned yellow and their keys spiralled to the ground. The leaf litter turned brown and the branches bare. At the same time I ripened, bigger and bigger every day. The body can do the most incredible things. I was so lonely up in that room. Father went back to Dover, and Mother could hardly stand to look at me.
In the absence of company, I started to talk to the bump. I knew instinctively that the baby was a boy. I sensed it. I gave him a running commentary of the lives of the foxes that lived in the shrubs at the bottom of the garden and the heron who troubled the fish pond. I read to him. Just because his father was a despicable rogue didn’t mean he deserved to be deprived of good literature.
But it so reminded me of reading to Rick by the lake. I was so sad, waterlogged by it.
Christmas came and went, demarcated only with some turkey and a piece of figgy pudding. The lawn became silver and frozen and it was too cold to sit by the window without a blanket around my shoulders.
I spent many hours wondering if I was being punished. The isolation, the starvation of conversation soon turned inwards. It wasn’t that my parents were being cruel; it was that I deserved it because of what I had done with Rick. I know now that that’s not true, but at the time I convinced myself it was.
By the time January came, I firmly believed I was a sinner who had given into the devil’s desires and was now reaping my just deserts.
January, 1942
It’s quite clear to me now that, had it not been for the baby, I would have gone stark-raving mad up in my Rapunzel tower. Of course, without the baby I wouldn’t have been in there in the first place, but I’ve never been a fan of circular logic.
The baby was due any day, by Dr MacDonald’s estimations. I’d grown used to the sensations coming from within. Perhaps the beating of his little heart compensated for my broken one. I knew he would be taken from me, but as the weeks ticked by I started to wonder if I could keep him. If need be, perhaps we could pass him off as my little brother until I could move away with him.
I was bigger than an elephant, too hefty to lower myself onto my window seat any longer. Instead I took to a rocking chair, watching fat flakes fall from grey skies.
It was now a year since I’d made the train journey to Llanmarion.
During my exile I came to think things would not ping back to normal as soon as the baby came, whatever Mother said. How could they? What’s more, I wasn’t sure I wanted them to. The war rumbled on, my old friends were scattered around the country and my new ones were in Wales. Perhaps I would return to the farm after all. I doubted anyone in Llanmarion would care one jot if I returned with a baby in tow.
I awoke in the early hours of January 18th, a terrible cramp seizing my whole body. I knew at once I was in labour. The contractions weren’t painful at first; rather it felt like my spine and stomach were in spasm.
I called Mrs Watson and she alerted Mother and Dr MacDonald. The midwife was called Trudy Mayhew, a pretty platinum blonde, not too many years older than I. She arrived in a starched uniform. ‘Hello, Margot,’ she said. ‘Let’s have a look at you.’
She lifted my nightdress and I felt her poking around. There’s nothing like birthing live young to put you on an equal playing field with farm animals, it has to be said. Any delusions of humans being more somehow more evolved or refined went smartly out of the window once the pain kicked in. ‘Oh, I don’t think we’ll be waiting all that long,’ she said with perhaps too much cheer. ‘Off we go!’
It was long, painful and difficult. At first I panicked. I felt an almighty burst of adrenaline surge through my body and it took me back to the night the bombs fell – the desperation, the urge to fight. Suddenly I couldn’t get him out of my body fast enough, I truly thought I would die if I didn’t. And then the pain kicked in. Truthfully it felt as if my torso was being ripped in two. It was all I could think about – I no longer cared what I sounded like, what I looked like: I was panting and naked and screaming, writhing on the bed like an animal. Mother left the room.
Only then did I sink into it. Either the pain eased or I went numb, because my body and my baby seemed to find a rhythm. I worked with the contractions to push him free.
He was real! Such a silly thing to think, but all of a sudden he was a real, live baby and not just a shameful secret. So very real. I heard a gooey gurgle followed by a gasp and a squeal. He was alive and so was I. All the fight went out of me and I fell back into my own blood and filth.
Trudy held him in her bloody hands. He was tiny and curled up, gleaming and pink. He howled and howled, apparently dissatisfied at his arrival. ‘There you go, Margot. Well done. It’s all over. Would you like to hold him?’
God help me, but I did. The thing that had been growing inside me was flesh and blood and so, so small. We’d got through the ordeal together and now it seemed like the most obvious thing in the world to hold him. I reached out for him.
‘I don’t think that’s a good idea.’ Mother reappeared at my bedside.
‘We have a wet nurse waiting.’ Dr MacDonald reached out to take the baby.
‘Please …’ I said, exhausted, hardly able to hold my head up.
‘Margot, darling,’ Mother said. ‘It’s not your baby. It’ll be easier this way.’
Dr MacDonald swaddled him in terrycloth blankets. ‘He seems to be in fine health. All is well
.’
‘Wonderful …’ Mother escorted him, and my child, out of the room.
Trudy silently began to clean me up. She carried a washbowl and flannels to my bedside and diligently worked. ‘You poor little girl,’ she whispered. ‘But don’t you worry. He’s going to a good home, I promise. Nice folks with money.’
I couldn’t speak, but nodded. I think I must have been crying, because Trudy wiped my tears away.
‘Did you have a name for him?’ she asked.
The strangest thing is, I did. Some subconscious part of my brain been telling me stories, stories of some parallel existence where Rick and I had raised him as our son.
I would have called him Christopher.
Chapter 31
I think I’m all cried out. I now feel barren, hollowed out like a Halloween pumpkin. Oh God … that’s … horrific. Poor Margot. I obviously don’t want a baby until I’m at least thirty-six, or maybe ever after reading that, but I can’t even imagine what it’d be like to see only a glimpse of your own child before it was swept away.
Wow. My great-grandmother was a piece of work. And I thought Margot was hardcore.
I glance at my clock. It’s ten thirty-five and I should be asleep really. That’s where the writing finishes, although Margot has left a note at the end:
So there you have it. That’s what happened after I left Llanmarion. I never saw Christopher again. I don’t even know what they called him. I shall answer your questions, Felicity. I suppose once you start unravelling a ball of wool, there’s no point in stopping.
I am happy – for want of a better word – to talk about Christopher, but please respect that your mother doesn’t know she ever had a half-brother and I don’t think now is the time to tell her. Alternatively, if you would rather communicate through the diary, you can list your questions here and leave the book somewhere I shall find it.