by Wendy Orr
‘The terrifying thing about these V2s,’ explains an English scientist now working for NASA alongside some of the original developers of the bomb, ‘is that because they travelled faster than the speed of sound, there was absolutely no warning—one heard the boom as one realised that the house next door had disappeared.’
There’d been no emergency farewell flight on Bill’s death, four years earlier. Jane had spent three weeks with her parents in May of that year and had found her father unexpectedly frail and uncharacteristically removed. He’d had a series of ailments through the winter—chronic bronchitis, prostate problems that were not cancer but irritating, a duodenal ulcer, an ingrown toenail that had become infected and refused to heal—and was embarrassed by the misery of what he considered minor, almost hypochondriacal, complaints. It had struck Jane that she mightn’t see him again; the thought had weighed down their easygoing relationship. Bill must have thought it too, but it wasn’t something she could talk about.
Still a shock when it happened, so much sooner than she’d expected: a summer cold tightening its grip, becoming pneumonia; he’d died in July, three months after his seventy-sixth birthday.
‘No point in coming again,’ Ruth had said, and her daughter had been secretly, guiltily, relieved. Her redundancy, or incitement-to-leave-teaching package, so fat and promising on first view, so full of new houses or extensions and renovated kitchens, had shrunk in the end to a new milk vat and her trip home. A second fare in the same year seemed pure indulgence, father’s death or not. In the end, so much of her natural grief had been subsumed by the worry of how her mother would cope that the death itself had never truly been faced.
She’d phoned regularly for a few months, until it was obvious that her mother was managing well and they could settle back to weekly letters.
Jane had never known of the anger, Ruth’s despair at the desertion. Bill’s parents had died in their early eighties, and his beloved Grandpère, dying suddenly soon after VJ day, had been ninety-two and anticipating his first great-grandchild. Despite all evidence to the contrary, Ruth had presumed her unknown genetic heritage to be inferior to his proven one. Ideally she would have believed in Baucis and Philemon, and if she could not be a linden tree to Bill’s oak had never been sure whether she was selfish enough to wish to leave him alone or brave enough to be the one left—for Ruth was clear-eyed about the silent strength she’d leaned on for forty-four years: ‘My ebb is come, his life was my spring tide.’ She was still unsure which fate she’d have chosen if death had let her vote.
One never thought of him as proud, she wrote to Mary, because he had no arrogance. But there’s a certain reverse arrogance in refusing to bother a doctor when one is genuinely ill!
Of course the problem was that he didn’t believe he was genuinely ill, and he was sick to death, the last three words had been crossed out, and then, since it was presumably the most accurate phrase possible, written again, of the doctor’s visits, tests and hospital stays he’d had with all his problems last winter. The toenail demoralised him more than anything; he seemed to find it shameful that a foot that had survived a bullet should be crippled up by its own toenail. (And there was no point whatsoever in pointing out that it’s a common complaint, which might happen to anyone of any age!)
I don’t know if it was part of the old guilt about having had a comparatively safe and injury-free war—as if he’d chosen that bit of luck! I thought he’d left that behind, but maybe one never completely leaves anything behind, because I think at the end he was back to feeling that since so many of his friends had been denied the privilege of ageing, he had no right to complain about the inconveniences that go along with it.
How do you manage, Mary, waking every day with no one to speak to? How am I going to learn it now?
However, in letters to her children, Ruth was quickly her usual independent, acerbic self. Jane was left once again with the unreality of distant death, as she had been for her grandparents, several great-aunts and uncles, even Aunt Louise of lung cancer at only fifty-seven; all dead in that nineteen years between her first visit and second. Nineteen years—a lifetime, a death time—is too long between visits, but it can’t be changed by worrying about it now, and when it came to realities, the three-month gap between seeing her father and it being too late to see him again hadn’t done much to make her understand that he was gone. There was simply no conclusive proof. Her mother was the letter writer, his news came second-hand. On the phone she would hear the surge of pleasure in his voice: ‘I’ll call your mother,’ he’d say, enjoying Ruth’s excitement more than his own, his birthday the only time she could convince him to stay and chat. She’d always known that in some ways she’d never quite believe he was dead until she’d been home and seen his absence for herself.
But she hadn’t expected not to see her mother again and can’t help feeling that losing both was unfair. Careless, as Lady Bracknell said to Algernon. (Jane, who believes she never uses literary quotations, finds them leaping into any contemplation of Ruth.)
This time there will be no denial, no semiacceptance of reality. This time she is the one who must cope, who must do . . . whatever it is that must be done. Her ideas are hazy on exactly what that is. She and Ian had helped his mother when his father died: buried in the Narling Cemetery, the United Church ladies organising sandwiches and cake afterwards. There really hadn’t been much to decide. This was not going to be so simple.
Is this one of those things, like esoteric housekeeping lore, that other people simply know and she’s somehow missed out on?
Her mind flits, from Fred’s funeral to Princess Diana’s, to the Belgian undertaker who had once tried to pick her up, strolling uninvited at her side past the Sunday art on Bayswater Road with earnest explanations, also uninvited, of his funereal studies in London. Before she met Ian. She should have paid attention.
When Jane had travelled through Europe and eventually to Australia, she’d sent home letters with neatly sketched maps of wherever she was. Although they were all marked ‘Mom and Dad’, everyone knew the letters were for her mother, the maps for her father. The shapes and forms of land, the directions of roads and rivers, were indispensable to the tale of her travels and as obvious to her as if marked with compass and surveyor’s pegs. Which was how she and her father seemed to picture topography, whereas her mother, that airier spirit, saw maps simply as a means to an end, preferring to find her own images in the surrounding words.
Megan’s letters, on the other hand, are more concerned with the tenuous threads of synchronicity and fate than hard details of time and place, although she tries to include facts that she thinks will entertain.
Dear Mum and Dad
Vancouver is great; it reminds me a little of Sydney—but I try not to let that prejudice me. Is the universe sending me a message to broaden my horizons from Melbourne? In fact the longer I spend here the more it seems a city you could live in, like Melbourne.
A warning bell jangled in Jane’s mind.
After my last (first) letter I spent a little longer on Vancouver Island. I skipped some of the tourist things that seemed as if you had to be sixty-five and on a ‘see all of North America on a three-week bus trip’ to qualify, but there truly is something about the region that is awesome. Sitting on the beach that first morning, on the west coast of Vancouver Island, I knew that if I projected my mind far enough, I’d be able to see all the way to St Kilda. Nature’s gods seem very close to the surface.
Now I can hear Dad laughing! But I’ve fallen in love with this place.
Did I tell you about this tremendous carving, the first thing you see when you get into Vancouver airport? It was so powerful, like nothing I’ve ever seen, so I asked the Customs guy about it. He said if I was interested I should go to the anthropology museum at the University of British Columbia, where another of the artist’s works is featured (and a few other things too of course!).
Well, you can imagine my reaction to starting off my hol
iday with a university museum! But you know what happens when fate decides something. (You DO know, Dad! You just deny it.)
So I had a day exploring the city—would you believe I even found a Tai Chi class to join in a Chinese garden? And then at the Y that night I was talking to an English girl. She’s been here nearly a month and the one place she thought I should definitely see was—you guessed it.
Anyway, you’d be proud of me because I got a bus map and worked out what buses I had to take and got out there the next day without getting lost once. And it was worth it.
Didn’t Nan say once that Grandad had a, was it Mi’kmaq ancestor? I stood in front of the huge carving of the story of creation for an hour. All the creatures are about to burst out of a clam shell, and though I couldn’t have identified them all without the legend, I could feel the energy flowing from it and I felt such an affinity that I thought I must have some First People’s blood somewhere in me.
Anyway, I’d been staring so long that I was the last person to leave, and a man who works there gave me a lift back to the Y when he saw me waiting for the bus. He wasn’t doing anything for the evening so we had dinner together. I thought he must be part of the anthropology department, but it turns out he’s actually in admin and was just at the museum for something else. But he’s very interested in things, not a business-type nerd.
I told him how much I’d loved Vancouver Island and especially the west coast, and he’s going hiking there next week, in the Pacific Rim National Park. You have to book a place so that the trail doesn’t get too crowded, but he was going with a friend who’s just changed jobs and can’t get leave after all.
I know I’ve just been there, but I didn’t walk much. I’m starting to wonder if I should do that instead of the trip from Banff I was thinking about. Apparently Banff is quite touristy and I do want to experience this country properly—you know how Nan’s always going on about understanding your heritage! I’ll never do that from behind a train window.
I’m meeting him for dinner tonight so I’ll find out a bit more then, but all this synchronicity suggests that it’s something I need to do.
Jane’s warning bells escalated to full-scale air-raid siren.
Bill takes Ruth to her aunt in St John’s Wood to deal with the grim formalities of tragedy. Ruth is white-faced, moves like an automaton but doesn’t cry; by the end of the day she’s swaying as she stands, close to collapse. There’s no question now of hotels; in the evening, the aunt puts her to bed in her daughter Mary’s empty room and Bill is left to talk to another cousin, a pukka RAF type with an unfortunate resemblance to Bill’s wing commander. He has an almost overwhelming desire to rush into Ruth’s room and carry her away to safety—from whom or what he isn’t sure. Briefly, he considers announcing that they have already married. But this is Ruth’s family, he tells himself. She needs to be with them, not a man she barely knows who can’t be trusted to keep his hands to himself.
‘I wanted you so badly,’ Ruth will tell him later, when these things can be said. ‘I lay there in Mary’s bed just aching for you to come and hold me, to lie with your arms around me so I could feel that you were real.’
Bill returns the next morning, meets more relatives and attends the funeral with her before returning to base. Ruth stays with her aunt for a few more days of compassionate leave.
She has been left with the few possessions in her yacht club room: clothing and uniforms, the evening dress and wrap, handbag and shoes, a silver framed photograph of the people who said they were her parents in formal evening dress—it will be years before she can look at it again, but she will be grateful that she’d stopped herself from destroying it in that first agony of impotent rage and grief—and of course the books, ten, from the impulsively packed Peter Pan of childhood (she seems to have become one of the Lost Boys rather than Peter), to the Henry James bought the week before. There is also a will that endows her with a considerable sum of money when she turns thirty and no provision against destitution in the four intervening years, a block of unsaleable land and an abiding sense of rage.
The Townsends might not have been able to will the V2’s flight path directly onto their home, but it had nonetheless been an answer to their prayers. She is convinced that her parents, the people who acted as her parents, would have chosen death in preference to answering her questions.
They have their way; the questions remain unanswered; the trails are all dead ends. At the funeral she shocks the minister by asking to see the baptismal records, abandoning a last grain of hope when she finds she is not on them. Her grandparents had died when she was tiny; she asks aunts and uncles, both sides of the family, but the answer is always the same. In 1920, when her parents were in their forties, they announced to the family that after years of childlessness they now had a two year old daughter. They were not prepared to discuss it. ‘You know your father,’ says her mother’s brother; ‘You know your mother,’ echoes her father’s sister, ‘when she said “no discussion” she meant none at all. Father asked a simple question and they didn’t return to the house again until he was dying.’
They’d been living in Hampstead then, an uncle volunteers, a house right across from the Heath, had moved to the present, now nonexistent house shortly after. He remembers meeting Ruth for the first time at the family gathering in Chelsea on Christmas Eve: a solemn little girl looking slightly lost in the welter of middle-class childhood, grey dappled rocking horse, fragile dolls and the first of her life’s abiding passion—books: John Gilpin, Kate Greenaway’s A Apple Pie, a brightly coloured Jack and Jill, Jack’s brown-paper-wrapped head the only thing that made her smile.
‘Which reminds me,’ the uncle adds, ‘your father loaned me a book last time I saw him; I suppose you’d better have it,’ and Ruth adds Nevil Shute’s Pastoral to her meagre library.
She goes next day to the address in Hampstead, a two-storey grey stone house with a Garden flat to let card in the basement window. Standing outside on the steeply sloping street she cannot tell whether it was the house of her memory, but in the Hampstead Church records she finds ‘Ruth Elizabeth Townsend’, christened 21 November 1920, and for the first time, she cries. She does at least exist.
Born on Armistice Day, christened two years and ten days later . . . but now even her birthday seems doubtful, like a date chosen—a child of about twenty-four months, give it a birthday with some significance, as one might a puppy, perhaps the date it arrived (ten days an appropriate amount of time to arrange a christening?). And if the anniversary of the ending of war seems an unlikely day to give away a child, the chances improve if one looks at it as a public holiday, her father home from the City to take possession.
The child is taken in, christened and transformed into a Townsend, a Ruth—she feels instinctively that any previous name would have been stamped out—the ready-made family move to a new home, new neighbours . . . a unit intact and unquestioned.
That is as far as Ruth can go. Adoption, a clerk at the Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages tells her, hadn’t become a legal procedure until several years later. Short of tracing every female child born in south-east England in November 1918, there is no way of discovering the woman who bore her, or the reasons for abandonment. Still less the man who’d contributed that strong-swimming sperm, a casual gift, an act of love or drunkenness. An advertisement in the papers would be a possibility, but what exactly would one say: Lost, November 1920, two parents? She can’t picture the steps required: the taking of a post office box; walking into newspaper offices to place the advertisement; facing the strangers who might result from it . . .
What did her father mean by sordid?
She studies herself in the mirror for traces of family resemblance. It is not impossible that she is her own father’s daughter, an act of indiscretion forgiven when the marriage’s barren state could no longer be endured or ignored. But there is little to match her to Townsend bloodlines and in the end she returns to the suddenly bleak fantasies of chi
ldhood: a changeling child, a gipsy orphan, though she’s not swarthy enough for Romany and can’t imagine her parents accepting a child with a heritage too distant from their own.
The family are distressed by her questions; it is not, they think, good form to dig up the muck her parents had so tastefully covered. Their voices become distant; the invitations to stay shrivel to nothing: best, they suggest, to get back to work as quickly as possible, as if life is a bolting horse that must be remounted before fear can set in. Cousin Mary will continue to write weekly chatty notes from a farm in Sussex, humorising her life as a land girl, and though at nineteen there is little else she can offer in the way of comfort or advice, Ruth finds this correspondence oddly comforting. They would both, however, have been surprised to know the length and depth it will attain over the succeeding decades.
On an Evelyn’s Pond church stall, Ruth finds a copy of A Apple Pie. She turns the pages, almost expecting to find the corner of ‘R ran for it’ missing, but this book has been less loved than hers and its pages are intact. Her face softens; she holds it to her breast and strokes it like a puppy.