The House at Evelyn's Pond

by Wendy Orr

  The coroner has heard worse tales; his face does not register surprise until he comes to ‘Occupation when employed?’ and Jane answers, ‘Pilot.’

  ‘Just during the war,’ she adds quickly. ‘She was a housewife after that.’ Although aware that her mother would have shuddered at the term.

  The coroner is Jane’s age or a few years younger; he has obviously not heard of the Air Transport Auxiliary and equally obviously is beginning to wonder if the woman in front of him is deluded as well as jet-lagged. ‘The Royal Air Force,’ he says gently, ‘did not use female pilots in World War II, which I presume is the war you’re referring to.’

  Jane’s case is not helped by her brain’s refusal to remember either the Falklands or Gulf Wars, which might have clarified the last remark, or any details about the ATA. It takes a few moments to persuade him and he offers, by way of apology, the comment that it’s a shame to wait too long to discover one’s parents’ history, and that she should be pleased to know so much of her mother’s—which he admits is ironic, given that so much of it is a mystery.

  Jane suspects that he has waited until too late himself, but does not like to ask.

  Home from arranging for Ruth’s body to be released into the care of the recommended-by-Mary’s-friend funeral director, Jane sits on her bed to change clothes and goes to sleep. Eighteen hours later, still fully clothed but blanketed, she wakes to the sound of kitchen clattering and thinks she ought to appear before Mary wonders if history has repeated itself—though is rather shocked at her mind’s flippancy.

  ‘I thought you might like a proper breakfast this morning,’ Mary says, shooing dogs and ushering Jane to a chair like an invalid. ‘You didn’t have supper last night and you’ll need your strength today.’

  Jane sits obediently for eggs and sausages; between Megan’s lectures about additives and the bathroom scales’ reminder of fat, she hasn’t eaten sausages for years but is hungry enough now to wonder why. She finishes with toast and marmalade, and is glad that Ian isn’t here to see the dogs cleaning up the frying pan.

  After a second cup of tea she’s ready to think about why she’ll need her strength. Looming like a vulture over the straightforward though grim bureaucracy of phone calls and appointments—the Registrar for deaths with the Coroner’s pink form—is the approaching afternoon. She doesn’t want to see her dead mother, to see her mother dead, but she’s flown more than halfway around the world to do so and it would be cowardly not to now she’s here. It’s reluctance to invade her mother’s privacy, she tells herself, not a fear of death—which is more than half true for although Ruth is trapped in the greatest privacy of all, she is unable to enjoy or guard it.

  Ruth’s Canada rises out of the ocean on 22 December 1945. At eight months pregnant she feels roughly the same size and shape as the boat that has carried her from the last sight of Southampton’s graveyard of masts, across the grey Atlantic to the fogs of Halifax harbour. A ship full of war brides, many pregnant, some with babies, a few with children; most feel bridelike only in the sense of facing the unknown, and perhaps, despite seasickness, in the honeymoon atmosphere of luxury and leisure: real eggs and bacon, orange juice and bananas, with nothing to do except look after themselves. And wait, and wonder.

  For ten days Ruth has shared a cabin with three other women and two tiny babies. Gladys is Welsh, the other two from northern England; their accents are thick, their backgrounds poor and in prewar England Ruth would have been unlikely to have exchanged more than a request for services with any of them. They are shy of Ruth, her accent, her bearing, her history. Ruth is wary of their banter, their quick understanding; their ease with handling the tiny fragile creatures. She watches surreptitiously.

  ‘Come on then, you’re dying to hold him, aren’t you?’

  The three of them watch Ruth juggle the baby tensely on her arm.

  ‘He’s not a puppet, love; tuck him up against your shoulder!’

  The baby, an amenable child, settles. Ruth smiles nervously.

  ‘Have you never held a baby before?’

  ‘No,’ she admits.

  ‘And you’ve got how long to go? Three months?’

  ‘Two,’ says Ruth, feeling as ashamed as if she’d landed a Walrus at a Spitfire base.

  ‘Tall ones always carry well,’ one confides to another.

  But the baby’s mother has realised the crux of the matter. ‘Are there nannies in Canada?’

  If there are, Ruth’s baby will not be having one.

  One of the most terrible things, Bill wrote after an ambulance flight from Cherbourg, was hearing a young officer crying out for his nanny. I guess it doesn’t make any difference what they say in that terrible time when no one can help them and they no longer know who or where they are, but it somehow seemed even worse to me that when another boy would have called out for his mother, this poor guy wanted someone who wasn’t even his own flesh and blood.

  It had been too early, and too unlucky given the context, to discuss their own possible future children but Ruth, who if moved to call on anyone in extremity would never have chosen her parents, understood what Bill hadn’t even realised he was discussing. She hadn’t really considered children before, hadn’t considered having to live up to someone else’s ideals of motherhood. She had never told him how terrifying she found the prospect.

  ‘We won’t have a nanny,’ she says now, and the bond is formed, close and instant. The women’s fears and doubts are much the same, but Ruth’s inadequacies have presented them with an immediate challenge. Before the first whalespout is spotted through the portholes, Ruth is fully competent to pick up a baby, feed it a bottle, pat its back afterwards and change its nappy, which none of them have yet learned to call a diaper.

  Now they are pulling in to the docks, all straining for the first sight of their new country, although the two with babies, once through customs, will be boarding a train and heading into the endless west. But for Ruth and Glad, this is the capital and the entrance to the province.

  There are husbands waving from the quay but Bill is not one of them. He is in India, repatriating other ex-soldiers, having perhaps helped return some of those very men swaying now with grins on faces and wives in arms. But Ruth has no need of the helpful Red Cross ladies or the immigration officer with cups of tea and Fig Newton cookies, which nourish Glad till she can be put on the train to wherever she is going. Ruth has been recognised from the wedding photograph, exclaimed over and hugged—taken to the bosom, she thinks as she stiffens slightly from it, of her new family.

  She can see Bill in his mother. Myrtle is strong and nearly as tall as Ruth, her ruddy blondness only just beginning to grey. Louise, who Jane will resemble, is more like her father and his Breton ancestors: stocky, small and dark—uncanny because, apart from the accent, George’s voice could be Bill’s. Like Bill, he seems a quiet man with a glint of humour, but shyer and more awkward; he shakes hands diffidently, although that may have been partly because of missing digits and mangled palm.

  They have all got up early, organised the farm for a day’s absence and driven the long road to Halifax, just to meet her. They are her new family; her future is now entwined with theirs; the baby bulging the front of her coat carries their history.

  ‘Did you think we’d let you take the train all that way on your own?’ Myrtle demands. ‘Bad enough that the air force hasn’t sent Bill home yet—the least we can do is welcome you properly!’

  She has tears in her eyes. So does Ruth. This has been, for her, the most surprising effect of pregnancy—tears glistening at the least emotion. She has already cried twice this morning—once at the sight of land and again at saying goodbye to Glad and the other women. She hopes it’s not a permanent change.

  Adding to what would later be called culture shock as Ruth is thrown into this new life, is the feeling that bulky as she is, she is still an empty vessel into which her mother-in-law is determined to pour not just wisdom of farm life, because much of that is so b
asic that Myrtle never does understand how little Ruth knows, but all the background lore of family: who speaks to whom or why not. There’ll be no formal family gathering, not with Ruth the shape she is and Bill not yet home, but closer uncles and more curious aunts come in for afternoon tea or invite them all for Sunday dinner. Patchwork history, scraps hurriedly shaped as an unannounced cousin appears at the door, or more leisurely formed as vegetables are peeled in the kitchen, to be reconciled and stitched together with the snippets Bill has told her already.

  Myrtle’s own story is one that fills a long hour of potato peeling and chopping for rappie pie. ‘We’re a big family,’ she begins, ‘and we’ve been farming here since the first Leighton came up after the Revolution. I don’t know much about that but my oldest sister has some interest in it, if you want to know. In my family we were the three older girls, then the two boys, Donald and William, and then me. By the time the Great War began the other girls were all married, and the boys were all fired up to go for the adventure.

  ‘That’s not quite true,’ she interrupts herself, ‘and since you’re family you might as well know it all. Donald wanted to go; he was the oldest but he’d never been as fond of the farm as William. William was a born farmer, had the gentlest hand with animals and a way with oxen like you’d never see again; they’d haul anything for him and with never a blow.

  ‘Well, the farm needed him, our father was getting older and farming was tough then, without the machinery and electricity and all we have now, and he’d have been happy enough to stay. It was a long time before we knew what changed his mind, and you have to understand that in that war it was even worse than this one as far as the young men thinking it was glory and adventure and a chance to see the world. They were afraid of nothing except that it would all be over before they got there, poor fools. So everyone thought that William had just got swallowed up by this too. I could never quite fathom it because we were close, us two, and I’d never known him to want to leave the farm at all, but I didn’t guess at the truth.

  ‘He’d been seeing a girl from further down the mountain, towards the springs—Ada Black, she was then—but she’d dropped him when he didn’t join up. He was a quiet boy, didn’t say much, and it hurt him worse than we knew. Well, she wasn’t content with breaking his heart, and it seems that she sent him a white feather. No note, just the feather, but he knew who it was from and so he joined up, not long after Donald in the end. They both left for England at the start of October ’14.

  ‘They didn’t like England much, either of them,’ she adds apologetically. ‘They were camped on a field at a place called Salisbury, if you’ve heard of it; they said it was the bleakest, muddiest winter they’d ever lived through.’

  Ruth visualises Salisbury Plain from the air, the way that she will see most English landscapes for the rest of her life: the spire of the cathedral, the shadow of the old Roman roads still visible below the grass and the more ancient dolmens of Stonehenge.

  ‘Donald took an interest in the place; he went off to see a big circle of stones that people said were there before Christ, whether that’s true or not . . . But William, I think he was homesick and George thinks he knew he was going to die. At any rate, he and George met up at the camp; George is from the French shore, and it was the opposite story for him—he’d been wild to join up and his parents were against it so he’d gone off without their blessing, which hurt him some. So I think the two boys were a bit miserable and homesick together, and in a funny way that cheered them up and mattered more than the language, because George’s English wasn’t so good back then.

  ‘It seems William showed George the feather, and the story behind it. He’d carried it with him, all that time, and an envelope with Ada’s address. He said if he was killed, before he died he’d dip that feather in his own blood and stick it back in the envelope to go right back to her. George tried to tell him he wouldn’t be killed but he just said maybe not, but if he was, that’s what he was going to do.’

  Myrtle hasn’t told this story many times before; she stumbles a little over the difficult parts and although she smiles now, her eyes well with tears. So do Ruth’s.

  ‘He was a quiet man, William, but a good hater when he set his mind to it. Well, they left England in February, and I guess they must have soon wished they were back there if not home. All George has ever said about Ypres was the mud, and watching the yellow gas roll over the land like a fog . . . But with all you’ve been through, my dear, and in your condition, you don’t want to think about it, it won’t bring all those men back to life now. But the three of them survived, right through till summer.

  ‘William used to get spring fever worse than any of us—not real crazy, just silly-happy; he loved the spring. Any road, that was the last one; he died at a place in France called Givenchy, in June ’15.

  ‘George says he died fast, without feeling any pain, and I’ve always tried to believe him. Anyway, George gathered up his things because they’d made a pact to do that and Donald was at some other end of the place, and there was the feather in its envelope. George says he was that mad, he did what William wanted: dipped the feather in blood and stuck it into the envelope. And the next day he had his hand blown off—you might have noticed there’s a couple of fingers missing—and so they decided to send him home, but the envelope went off first, from the field hospital.

  ‘We got the telegram here in June and then about six months later George came to see us. He brought the little things that William had wanted saved, and it was such a comfort to talk to someone who had known him over there. It’s hard to imagine that it could be true, when they’re killed so far away and you can’t even imagine the place at all. So it was hard, because it made it truer, and it was better too.

  ‘You know, the French shore seemed further away those days than it does now, with cars and all, and it seemed only right that he should stay for a few days when he’d brought us this news. By the end of that time I knew he was the man I was going to marry.

  ‘My family could nearly overlook his being French on account of being William’s friend and wounded in the war, but he didn’t have a cent to his name. They were always proud that we had the biggest farm and the best house in Evelyn’s Pond. I guess it’s natural that they wanted me to marry someone who could give me an easier life. And his family wasn’t going to forgive him for marrying outside the faith, so there was no help there! In the end it was decided that he would stay and work on the farm until Donald came back, because it was more work than a girl and an old man could manage. I have an idea that my father thought I wouldn’t marry George once he was the hired man, but seeing him every day only made me more determined—and they never actually said no, so we got married. Then poor Donald was killed in Belgium, right at the very end of the war. It was a terrible shock; he’d made it through all those battles that you hear about and then when they’d just about won, he died.

  ‘Well, by then my father was used to George and he could see George was used to the farm, so when he died the farm went to us. My sisters had a bit to say about it, but by then George had worked it for eight years, mostly on his own . . . Father just seemed to lose heart when Donald died, and after my mother took a stroke he hardly left the house at all.

  ‘You can see that we had to name our first son William,’ she adds, ‘but I always wanted him called Bill. I worried that it might bring him bad luck when this war started, but in the end the name didn’t matter.’

  Ruth has to ask. ‘What about the feather?’

  ‘Well, George worried about that for years. He said once he stopped being angry he felt right sick to think how that girl would feel, and he couldn’t believe he’d done such a thing. But it never seemed to bother her. She married after the war. Ada White she is now, would you believe it? It was years before I could bring myself to speak to her, and now, well, it’s not something you can ask, is it?’

  The baby is due on 12 February and Bill three days later. ‘But he’ll be here
well before it’s born,’ Myrtle assures her. ‘It’s a rare first baby that isn’t late.’

  Ruth has visited the family doctor, seen the hospital and is still healthy, though uncomfortable and occasionally breathless in these last weeks of pregnancy. She is aware that both mother-in-law and doctor are anxious about her narrow hips and general leanness, but thankfully unaware that they have also factored in her temperament: what they see as nerviness and the unwomanly behaviour of having done a man’s job. Myrtle is secretly proud of this oddity, but does not feel it bodes well for the ordeal of childbirth. She tries to prepare Ruth, gently but honestly, for what lies ahead, having always wished that someone had done the same for her twenty-eight years earlier.

  So when Ruth’s indigestion, which had lessened during the past fortnight as the baby removed its head from her diaphragm and settled into her groin, starts sharply on the morning of the second, she does not think it worth complaining about. And when the snow begins later that day, whiteness whirling soft against the windows, frosting the fir trees in the woods like painted Christmas cards, she remembers Switzerland, a lifetime ago, and is entranced. Just before noon the pain becomes stronger and more regular, and she has just decided to mention it to Myrtle when it disappears.

  They spent much of yesterday afternoon making tourtiere: ‘Bill’s favourite,’ said Myrtle, ‘no reason just to have it at New Year,’ and Ruth was keen to learn. She ground the meat in the big grinder clamped to the kitchen table, a fat pork shoulder that had given her a cramplike stitch as it was transformed into a pile of greasy mince.