TWO
Ellen
1944–1973
21
15th March 1944
Dear Pamela,
I hope that you will keep this letter after you have read it so that you can read it again because I have some very important things to say to you. You’re very young and you may not quite understand them now. But if you crumple up this letter and throw it on the fire, or make a boat out of it, that’ll be the end of it, and when you’re twelve or sixteen or eighteen you might wish you still had it so that you could go over it and understand it better.
Pamela, do you remember our blackout adventure? You were seven, I think, and we went to Waltham to buy you a pair of shoes. I was silly and disorganized that day so we didn’t get to Waltham until half-past four, and when we came out of Lack’s it was after sunset and the whole town was pitch dark. And we set off carefully over the street towards the bus stop, but when we got to the other side it wasn’t there! Do you remember? The bus stop I’d known all my life, that I thought I could find blindfolded? – Well! We shuffled up and down and round and round, stretching our arms out and peering like a couple of bats. I didn’t tell you at the time, but I didn’t have the faintest idea where we were. And then we saw the nurses – we spotted their white caps in the gloom. They were new to Waltham and they didn’t know our bus stop, but they said they’d just come out of the tea house. I realized we’d gone much further than I thought. So we crept back along the pavement until quite suddenly you said, ‘Ellen!’ and there it was. You’d bumped into the pole, quite gently thank goodness. And the bus came, and we went back to Upton.
Pamela, you and I, we’ve been on a sort of big blackout adventure. The war came, and it set you wandering off your path in life. You lost Mummy in the air raid and you were brought to Upton. Nobody knew who you were and you had no one to look after you. So I took you to my house. I didn’t know you were coming – it was all a huge surprise – and I didn’t quite know what to do with you in the beginning, I must say! But I felt my way along, do you see? And so did you, and we held hands tightly all the while. But now you have found your way again. After all this adventuring you’ve found your father and a whole family of cousins who all love you.
Of course we shall miss each other for a while. Blackout companions become very close. But life will be so much better when peace comes, Pamela, I promise you. You can’t remember what it was like before the war, I don’t suppose. But there’ll be so much to do and enjoy. Games and toys in the shops, and ice cream and bananas, and trips to the seaside. I daresay you’ll find your aunt and uncle and cousins a little strange at first. But remember how quickly you and I got used to each other. In no time at all you’ll be firm friends with them, just like you and I have been, because they love you.
Here is a kiss from me, darling. X.
Ellen
18th March 1944
Dear Mrs Parr,
I’m writing to tell you that Pamela has arrived safely in Ireland. Please be assured she recovered from her great storm of grief at leaving you and her eyes were not only dry by the time she reached London but round and inquisitive. She was the perfect train companion and greeted the nanny, a Mrs Cross, with a polite handshake and the words ‘I do hope you shan’t be’! The voyage was marred by seasickness – the Irish Sea is seldom merciful – and they had another long train journey once in Ireland but when she reached my sister’s house she was only a little travel-stained and very sleepy.
I wish once more to express my gratitude at your kindness to my daughter during this great crisis in her young life. I couldn’t have asked for better ‘foster parents’, if you’ll excuse the term, than yourself and Mr Parr. My pain at not being with her when her mother died is considerably assuaged by the knowledge that you were both offering her such comfort, especially during those dark days at the beginning of the war which tested everyone’s nerves so sorely. She’s a lovely child, rather more solemn than myself or Hester at the same age, but that is wholly to be expected. She is also far better behaved.
In short, I owe you a debt I can never repay. Please take this letter as an acknowledgement of that fact.
Yours sincerely,
Aubrey Lovell
18th March 1944
DEAR ELLEN
I shall NOT call you DEAR. You are NOT DEAR. Why are you telling me this RUBBISH about the blackout? I’m so sad I’ve TORN UP your LETTER.
I HATE YOU AND DADDY AND I HAVE KICKED HIM.
PAMELA
PS The letter is in little bits in the RABBIT’S CAGE. Because it is fit only for RABBIT BEDS.
25th March 1944
Darling girl,
Of course you’re angry. I don’t blame you at all. I can see you in my mind’s eye, glaring at me like you did when you were very small. I wish I could do something to help. Darling, don’t kick your daddy. It’s not his fault that you’re feeling sad. He’s trying to do what is best for you. Why don’t you tell me a little about your new home in Ireland? It seems that your cousins have a rabbit. That’s nice, at least, isn’t it?
Ellen X
31st March 1944
Dear Ellen
Nothing is nice.
Pamela
2nd April 1944
Dear Ellen
When I get into bed at night Aunt Hester gives me a nightdress with a string round the bottom so that I can pull it tight and sleep in a sort of bag. She gave me a little mirror that folded in half but I didn’t want it.
We aren’t in the war here. Instead we’re in the Emergency so there’s hardly any butter or sugar just like at home. But we do have meat. I don’t know why.
I miss you Ellen.
Pamela X
9th April 1944
Dearest Pamela,
I’m so glad to hear that your nightdress is keeping you warm and that you’ve got plenty of meat. You see? I knew there’d be some nice things about Ireland. Perhaps you can tell me a little bit about your cousins?
I miss you too, darling. Of course we miss each other.
But we must put our best feet forward!
Ellen XX
16th April 1944
Dear Ellen
Today I went with my girl cousins out to the sheep-fields to a place where the sheep leave tufty bits of wool on the wire fence, and we pulled it off and collected a bag of it. We’re going to stuff cushions with it. Doll’s cushions I mean.
There. That’s about my cousins.
There’s a map of England and Ireland in Uncle Jack’s study. He gets furious if we go in there but I do it all the same. Because I can see Southampton on the map and I know that if I put my fingertip on Southampton the top of my nail is about on Upton even though it isn’t written there. So at least a tiny bit of my fingernail is in Upton.
Ellen I’ve tried to like it here for WEEKS AND WEEKS. But I don’t. I don’t care about the sheep-fields or the wool or the doll’s cushions. Every day I go to the gate on the lane and I try and see you coming up on the bike, pedalling round and round with your bun coming out in the wind. And you call PAMELA PAMELA MY DARLING. And you say IT’S ALL BEEN A MISTAKE AND I’M COMING TO TAKE YOU HOME. But you never ever come!!
Pamela XXX XXXX XXXXX
1st May 1944
Dear Ellen
Why don’t you write BACK TO ME? Have you FORGOTTEN all about me???
Pamela XXX
4th May 1944
Ellen I don’t think you LOVE ME ANY MORE. If you DID you would WRITE to me telling me you will come and get me and take me HOME. I don’t want to be here and I don’t care if these people are my uncle and aunt and cousins. I don’t know them and I don’t WANT to know them. I don’t even know Daddy. I thought I liked him but then he turned out to be FOUL and CRUEL because he took me away from you.
I thought you LOVED ME.
Pamela XX
11th May 1944
Pamela
I love you above all things. But I can’t come and get you. Firstly, nobody is allowed to com
e to Ireland because of the war. Secondly, even if I could come, it would be wrong. You may not care about your family yet, but you need to be with them now. My sweetheart, hold on. Their house doesn’t feel like home for you now, but I promise you it will. This is your new life, my love.
Ellen XXX
19th May 1944
Dear Mrs Parr,
This isn’t an easy letter to write, but I know that we both want the best for Pamela, so I do feel I’ve really no choice in opening my heart and feelings to you as one woman to another.
I know that my brother has written to you expressing his gratitude for the great care and fondness you showed Pamela during her stay in England following Amelia’s tragic death. I concur absolutely with his sentiments and no one could be gladder than he and I to receive once more into our arms a little girl whose life had been so tenderly … can I say, repaired, if it does not sound too odd, by yourself and your husband. Amelia was not a conventional woman, certainly not one made for marriage. I’m dreadfully sad for my brother, of course, that she made this discovery at his expense, but I don’t entirely blame her. I also have a strong sense, for all Amelia’s waywardness, that she loved Pamela inordinately.
We all love her, you see – Amelia, Aubrey, Jack and myself, and her four cousins.
Now I have to tell you that last week Pamela was found at a bus stop in Kilkenny by the Gardaí who returned her to us completely unscathed but weeping inconsolably. She had taken her Cousin Richie’s bicycle and ridden it off to Waterford where she took the bus for Kilkenny. Apparently she had boarded the bus amid a crowd of children and the driver had not realized that Pamela was in fact travelling alone. Anyway Pamela told the Gardaí she was trying to reach Dublin in order to take the boat from Dún Laoghaire to Fishguard, if you please, and then her plan was to work her way back to Hampshire and to you. Found on her little person was the sum of 21 shillings, being the combination of a present from her father and the pocket money she had saved.
My dear Mrs Parr, we’re not cruel people, my husband Jack and I. We hate to see children unhappy. We weighed it up and decided it would do no harm for her to send a few letters to you in Upton while she got used to us. The alternative, cutting her off from you at a stroke, seemed counterproductive as well as brutal, since it would throw her into such misery as to make it even harder for her to settle in. But here we come to the nub of the matter.
We know that you’re a wise and sensible young woman, Mrs Parr, and it is to that wisdom and sensibleness that we now appeal.
I am wholly unsurprised to learn from your most recent letter to Pamela that you love her above all things. She is a lovable child even when angry and sad. But, as I am sure you will agree, the task – if you like – of loving Pamela now falls to Aubrey, and to me, and to my husband Jack, and our children. As you told her so wisely and tenderly in your letter, Pamela’s life is with us now. And I am sure that you and I both understand how much harder it will be for her to come to terms with that, if she is continually reminded of her former life with you.
So – I know I’ve been long-winded but verbosity is a hazard when speaking from the heart – so it is in her interests, Mrs Parr, that I ask you now to consider that letter you wrote to Pamela as your last. I will keep the letter safe. I will assure Pamela of your love. I shall explain that it is because you love her that you need her to go forward, as you told her yourself, into her new life.
I believe it is time for all of us, not just Pamela, to go forward into our new lives. The war must end next year; it must. I hope that you too will rejoice, Mrs Parr, and I trust that you will reap all you deserve of the fruits of the peace.
Yours most gratefully,
Hester Browne
*
The first days passed. One, then another, then six, a dozen – trippingly, as if rattled off a spool.
Punctuated also by sunrise, sunset, bread. I could only eat scraps of bread. At night I lay on Pamela’s small bed holding the dress which was all I had.
I spent my days with Suky Fitch and Selwyn in the mill. Sometimes I felt faint and had to sit down or even kneel on the floor but the humming of the turbine came into me through my knees. Selwyn spent much time watching the millstones turn, watching grain falling from the hoppers, and I watched him.
A fortnight – Aubrey’s letter arrived, and Pamela’s the next day. I entered a half-life, touching papers she had touched, crying over letters she had cried on. The bluebells came in Pipehouse Wood, and the bird’s-foot trefoil on Beacon Hill. I took her letters to these places and read them over and over. Then Hester wrote, and the axe fell, and she was truly gone. I was glad of the travel ban, really I was; it was an iron fence I could fling myself against. Without it I would have gone to her in Ireland, presented myself crying, screaming, trying to tear her out of the door.
Some time after I received Hester’s letter, Selwyn handed me a small round leather case. Inside was a compass, a lively little thing with snapping lid and a dancing needle. I put it on the table and it settled, true and eager. He told me that when the war was over we could go on a long trip. He said, ‘Why don’t we get out the atlas this evening?’
I wanted to please him, so I said, ‘Yes.’
And it proved to be comforting to run my eyes over maps free of the thick arrows and crosses and hatched zones that were the marks of war. Instead there were rumpled purple mountains, seas grading from turquoise to the deepest indigo, wide ochre plains, all with the barest of boundary lines. I turned only the pages showing the Mediterranean, the Adriatic, the Aegean. The Holy Land. Nowhere closer to home.
The idea came to me as I sat there. I could still write to her. Of course I could. I simply wouldn’t send the letters. I would keep them in a pile in my desk drawer. Tied into a packet with ribbon and inscribed with her name. I would tell her everything that was in my heart, speaking not to the child but to the woman I would never know. Hoping that one day in the years to come the letters might fall into her hands, and she would read them and know that she was not forgotten.
*
7th June 1944
Dear Pamela,
The invasion has happened. The soldiers have gone. Hurling themselves out into the Channel, into a gap between two gales, grabbing their luck and courage in both hands, sending our hearts into our mouths. We knew it was coming by then – barbed wire sprawling and running everywhere, army tents pitched under Jeps Hanger and then under Pipehouse Wood. Even Beacon Hill was out of bounds. Jeeps flashing by, the sun catching the braid on unfamiliar uniforms. And finally, the rumbling. It rose, and swelled, until Selwyn and Suky Fitch and I heard it through the racket in the mill. We ran outside. I looked up but there were no aeroplanes. We hurried to the end of the lane and there they were, lorry after lorry after lorry passing, bound for the sea. Our road alone couldn’t account for the noise. It was coming from all the roads in the South.
Suky and I waved at the soldiers, and Selwyn saluted them.
I wish you’d been there, Pamela, holding my hand. Not just for my sake, but for yours. You’d have been thrilled.
14th March 1945
Dear Pamela,
Dan is dead. He died in Italy. To survive so much and then lose his life like so many others on the Gothic Line. None of us can comprehend it yet. You might remember a brown-haired man with small blue eyes who came to Upton during your first Christmas with us. I think he danced a reel with you in the village hall. Lucy is more distraught than Marcy his wife – I wish you were here, to go to Lucy’s house and eat bread and butter and climb on her apple tree. It would be a comfort to her. Her eyes are always dark but now they seem utterly lightless. The only thing rescuing me from similar grief is my fury that he’s gone, that the war has taken him.
Edward is in Bangalore recuperating from malaria, dysentery and an infected wound to the scalp. He is doing very well, he says. I try and hold him in my mind.
We still have the map you stuck drawing pins in, to trace his journey. We’ve run out of dra
wing pins so I put an ordinary dressmaker’s pin into Bangalore for you.
22nd August 1946
Dear Pamela,
Yesterday I was arranging flowers with Althea Brock, cutting the stems of her dahlias, the stiff red pompoms Sir Michael liked so much in his time: I was standing in the pantry at Upton Hall and pushing the knife down through green stem after green stem when suddenly I couldn’t move. So I was motionless with the knife in my hand until Althea approached with a brimming jug and the words, ‘Ellen, have you turned to stone?’
In this room were cupboards and cupboards of glasses, some Venetian, and porcelain coffee cups, some Chinese. Ranked behind the glass-fronted panes.
I couldn’t move because I saw you in the fluted perfection of that whorled red flower just as I still see you in the green arrowhead on a snowdrop petal, the blue bell of a bluebell, in the freckled gullet of a foxglove. Because they too are perfect, small, untouched; and because the season comes for them to be borne away.
Althea touching my elbow. ‘My dear. Bear up, my dear.’
2nd November 1948
Dear Pamela,
Edward came to Upton. Thin as a rail, brown as a toasted nut. Joyful to see me. His blood is half salt water he says – he learned this in the war. It wasn’t enemy fire that nearly killed him, but trudging through the dust and mud. He stayed with us a fortnight, and he and Selwyn spent a great deal of time in the mill, replacing the bearings in the turbine. He’s back in Singapore now, tentatively – I think – looking for a wife. ‘If any woman in her right mind will have me.’ Despite the old scar he is handsome in a lean, wiry fashion and endearingly doesn’t know it. This is the last bit of boyishness left. In all other respects he’s grown up now.
He told me how sorry he was about Daniel. Then he handed me a page of a letter I had sent to him when he was in Ceylon. You had drawn snails and slugs down the margins, identifying them with arrows and titles. Snail, slug, slug, slug, snail. At the top of each margin was a duck with an open bill. ‘I thought you might like to have this,’ he said, and for a hideous moment it was as if you were dead and this was a relic. But then I took it, and was glad of it. I told him about the war here, how we’d lived. ‘We were mostly preoccupied with bread and potatoes, and coal.’
We Must Be Brave Page 27