by Wendy Orr
‘You’ve got lots of time,’ Ian said, as they’d said ever since Megan had decided that she couldn’t wait any longer to discover what she was going to be and had begun reading careers handbooks as intently as if she were leaving school in weeks rather than years.
‘You’ll have to find out more before you make up your mind,’ Jane added, because that was the sort of advice a good mother should give. She knew as well as Megan that the decision had been made.
Jane herself had to wait till she was fifty-two to have a dream that could not be explained by either analysis or sifting the day’s trivia. It must have been a month or two ago, June or July, because she’d woken cold before putting another blanket on the bed and crawling back in beside Ian’s warmth to listen enviously to his steady breathing. Breathing, she thought. Don’t think, just breathe; the deep relaxation breathing she’d learned in antenatal classes twenty-five years ago and been nagged by the product of those classes to practise more regularly: ‘Meditation would be good for you, Mother!’
Which Jane didn’t disbelieve, although as she couldn’t quite justify the time she compromised by practising when she woke early, those small hours when she’d had just enough sleep to think of problems and calculate how long left till the five o’clock alarm.
Now she was surprised to find herself dreaming because she hadn’t thought she was asleep yet, but she must be because she was flying, moving rapidly and rigidly through the air, face down to study the ground below. She’d never had a flying dream before and the unexpected lack of birdlike freedom was frightening until she thought, I must be in a plane with Mom or Dad. Which seemed logical, and she relaxed.
The view was so clear and precise that she felt she not only ought to be able to identify it, but also, if she’d known more about flying, would have known at exactly what height the plane was travelling. She woke wanting to check an atlas; refused to let herself, but did tell Ian. ‘It was over a river or a channel; I was coming in from the left and couldn’t see if the channel continued or led into something else. The land was quite flat, very green, and the fields neatly fenced right down to the river—unless the lines were small irrigation channels? It was all very tidy.’
‘That rules out Australia,’ Ian had said lightly, and she could see him hoping that she wasn’t going to continue any weirdness.
It had ruled out Nova Scotia too; far too smooth and flat for a Bay of Fundy shoreline. She wondered about Holland but was unable to think why she could have dreamed of it; she wondered if all her dreams were this clear and were simply not remembered. And finally tucked it away.
Until now, because after the funeral, when she’s rambled around the garden with galumphing Barney and prim Daisy, has had another cup of tea and some biscuits with cheese, she finds herself sitting in Mary’s other guest room with Ruth’s suitcase and collection of purchases. On the top is a book, Britain By Air, and she chooses to read it rather than rifle through the pile, sorting and discarding in the dreary finalities of mourning; it seems a gentler, less emotional link to her mother’s life. Was there one particular photograph that had meant something, that brought back a clear sky and the exhilaration of a twenty-four year old pilot? Or a general feeling: yes, this is what it was like, this is what I saw?
On the last page Jane’s stomach clenches so tightly that her hands snap the book shut in sympathy and she has to open it again to find the landscape of her dream, as clear as Megan’s cat in the Weekly Times. The banks of the river—for it is a river, the Hamble—are perhaps more natural than she had dreamed them, not quite as smooth, but that is the only quibble; and the unknown ending is the sea, Southampton Water. The town is also called Hamble, and she is quite sure she has not only never been there but never heard of it.
She waits till she can speak about it naturally before taking the book back downstairs; she can’t imagine discussing any sort of psychic phenomenon with down-to-earth, practical Mary. ‘Did Mom mention this book to you?’
‘She showed it to me when she came back from visiting the airfield—she was certainly very pleased to have found it.’
No hope then that it had been brought from home, that Jane has seen and forgotten. But she didn’t know about the airfield visit either.
‘White Waltham, near Reading. She was based there during the war, and went to see it just the day before. She had a wonderful day! It may be in the letter.’
Because the letter Ruth wrote the afternoon of her death is after all to Jane, who will read it soon she promises herself, though she hasn’t managed it yet. She opens the book. ‘This is pretty; do you know if she ever went there?’
‘Hamble? She was based there too; more than once, I think; the ATA moved them around a fair bit. One would think, with the way that I hero-worshipped her, I’d remember where she lived when her parents were killed. I can still see her face at the funeral, and of course I remember meeting your father . . . Southampton! I’m sure she took the Southampton train home, so she’d have been at Hamble. Of course it’ll be in the letters.’
Either Jane is more jet-lagged than she’d realised, or her dead mother has written to her about sixty year old train timetables. She is beginning to feel like Alice, as that same dead mother would have said.
‘Didn’t I tell you? I’ve saved every letter your mother wrote to me from the time I joined the Land Army; I think she knew I might feel rather lost and lonely. She was older than me and always so elegant, but she was the first person in the family to treat me as an adult . . . you know what that is, when one is eighteen.’ For a moment her eyes brim with tears.
‘Sherry?’ she asks briskly.
Alcohol sounds infinitely appealing. ‘We always had sherry on the terrace before dinner when I stayed with you before; it made me feel very adult and sophisticated.’
‘A significant time in your life . . . I always remember that I met Ian before your parents did, and wrote to tell them that he seemed really quite respectable . . . One heard such terrible things about Australian men then.’
‘Good old Barry Mackenzie!’
‘They were supposed to treat women badly,’ says Mary, who had managed to live through the seventies without encountering the barfing archetype of Australian manhood. ‘But Ian didn’t strike one as a male chauvinist. I liked him.’
‘I still do,’ Jane says, with what seems wit to her benumbed brain.
‘A bit mean with money, and liked his own way . . .’
Jane had forgotten about Mary’s sometimes uncomfortable honesty.
‘ . . . but I’ve noticed that compromise is something young men take their time in learning. I wasn’t worried; I knew that any daughter of Ruth’s would be strong enough to work things out.’
Jane is silent, but Mary, lost in her own thoughts, doesn’t notice.
‘Petty, the things one takes pleasure from at times,’ she continues and Jane understands. Husband-and-childless, Mary had enjoyed being able to vet her admired cousin’s new son-in-law and is now burdened by shame at this smugness, Ruth being unable to ever vet anything again.
After a generous sherry, the letter—several pages in her mother’s rushed copperplate, grown less familiar with the years of email—is not only unavoidable but welcome.
White Cottage
16 August 1998
My dear Jane
I’m sitting under a tree in Mary’s lovely garden, on an English summer’s day hot enough to seek the shade. I am thoroughly enjoying this time with Mary, and am looking forward to the next few days. I’d been a trifle worried that ten days might be too long a visit for two old women who hadn’t met for half a century—and, in fact, who hadn’t known each other terribly well then. The age difference seemed considerable when we were children, and even as young women, although perhaps it has appeared again; Mary seems to recuperate more quickly than I. We go out for a walk each morning, and afterwards I’m quite glad to sit and read with a cup of tea, while Mary rushes about doing something or preparing our next excursion. The
indulgence of being a guest!
I told myself that I wouldn’t mention again my disappointment that you couldn’t have met me here; I know it was even more disappointing for you as you haven’t had a holiday since the last time you came home. I also suspect that no matter how much I tried to avoid it—because I was also suffering from some guilt, wishing that I could have afforded to simply send you the ticket—you’ve probably felt a little guilty at sending your aged P off on her own. (If you haven’t, please disregard the last sentence!)
Well, my dear, wonderful as it would have been to have travelled with you, I’ve realised over the last few days that this part of the trip would have been quite different if you’d been here. Not better or worse, but different in what I’ve enjoyed and what it’s meant to me.
By the way, I won’t bore you with trip details now but I have kept a journal of the actual tour and will write up some sort of enthralling travelogue when I return to send to each of you. I’m never sure how interested the boys are in doings such as these, but they can read it or not as they choose.
What has been special about this past week is some discoveries I’ve made about myself and where I come from. No, not the ‘sordid Darwinian details’ as my Papa once called them—I’ve long resigned myself to their remaining a mystery. This is a vaguer thing, and something that I suspect you have dealt with much better than I ever have: the realisation that no matter how much I love my home—and there is absolutely no doubt that the Valley is my home now; this trip to some extent has defined that even more clearly—but England, both her ‘green and pleasant land’ and ‘dark satanic mills’, is the place that formed me and will always, has always, been part of me. I’m not sure now why I’ve denied it for so long.
Of course the latter is not completely true; I do know that it’s because of my anger at my parents, but prefer to profess ignorance rather than admit that any rational, reasonably intelligent woman could let rage deny her of a significant part of her identity for more than half a century. I’m not saying it wasn’t a justifiable or understandable rage; I just wish I’d dropped it a little sooner.
Looking back, I feel desperately sorry for that young woman suddenly deprived of identity; loss of identity, for whatever reason, is I think one of the most fundamental griefs—and a terribly difficult one for anyone else to assist with. When Rick lost his job, before he moved to Toronto, I felt quite helpless in the face of his depression, largely because I could do nothing about it but also because I identified with it so strongly. Your father managed much better; perhaps because of all the practice I’d given him! (I’m still quite amazed that he insisted on falling in love with such a confused young woman, although I’m very grateful that he did.)
Perhaps you’re not quite old enough, tears are streaming liberally down Jane’s face, but she smiles in spite of herself, muttering, ‘I’m fifty-two, Mom!’ to be able to look back at a younger self and see a separate person from the one you are now.
However I, as I said, look back and see that young Ruth as so separate from me that I can empathise without any sense of self-pity. The benefit of hindsight, or old age, also lets me feel some compassion for her parents—not for their deaths so much as for the people they were. Whether I am my father’s natural child or no relation at all, they loved and cherished me as much as any parents could; it seems a pity that they were not secure enough to let me have the facts which would have given me a story of my own. I mightn’t have liked the story—there is, after all, no chance whatsoever that it was a happy one—but I would have liked the chance to decide for myself how I felt about it, and perhaps even embroider it into a more respectable shape, as one does with uncomfortable tales.
Your father used to tell me that since few of us remember the period before our third birthdays, I had my own story just as much as anyone else, but although he meant it sincerely as well as kindly, he was mistaken. You don’t remember your babyhood, but you do know the story of your snowstorm birth and all the other details that make up your personal history.
The absence of those early tales has been far worse for me than any query about genetics and family health—although you cannot imagine the relief with which I saw that all my children resembled your father’s side of the family and were presumably unlikely to have inherited any congenital weakness from my unknown ancestors.
This is a very rambly letter, my dear, but since this paper comes without cut and paste or delete keys, I’m afraid you’ll have to read it as it is.
The converse of accepting my love for my birthplace is the realisation of how my adopted country has become my own. There’s no other way to explain my emotion at seeing General Wolfe’s house in Bath, where he recuperated—assiduously taking the waters, no doubt—after capturing Louisbourg from the French, and from which he left again to capture Quebec. One can’t help wondering how different history might have been if he’d stayed on somewhat longer to enjoy the delights of the Pump Room. Alter Canada’s history and it must, in the end, affect our own; alter one ancestor’s fate and Bill—and you children—would never have been.
As you can see, the tour turned out to be much more than literary pilgrimage, but I must admit it’s been a joy to visit quietly with Mary since it ended: our reminiscent sightseeing has been well interspersed with peaceful strolls and chats.
The highlight, however, was an outing I did on my own. Yesterday morning Mary drove me to White Waltham Airfield, and left me there for a blissful though somewhat emotional day. This airfield used to be the ATA headquarters and base for initial flying training and several of the subsequent upgradings, so I was there for quite some time at different periods—and in fact finished the war there (which was wonderful as it was much more convenient to your father in Oxfordshire than Hamble, where I was based when we met and for a brief period again when we married, on VE day).
Hamble again, Jane thinks. No wonder it was significant to her. Except that it was Jane who had the dream, and she realises that there simply will never be an explanation for that. It is not an easy thing to accept.
I’d read about the ATA reunion a few years ago, so I knew the airfield still existed and possibly had some reminder of the service, a polite plaque or some such. I was sure the flag would still be in the chapel and would have been content to have seen that, if nothing else. I’d always felt the ATA, not being officially part of the air force, was rather discounted after the war, and presumed it had been completely forgotten.
Even I can sometimes be glad to be wrong.
Returning somewhere after a gap of fifty years, one is braced for the shock of change, but I wasn’t at all prepared for what I found. Much of the airfield is exactly as it was when I flew from it; the runways are still grass—I thought there’d probably have been regulations making all runways tarmac by now! I can’t describe how I felt to see the clubhouse, which is quite unaltered from its days as the ATA mess, right down to the old wicker RAF chairs.
I’d like to think that the charming man I happened to meet as I arrived had recognised me from my photograph (a subtle way of slipping in your mother’s entry in a hall of fame)—one wall is full of pictures of ATA pilots beside their planes, mostly Lancasters and Wellingtons (Very Big Bombers to you). I didn’t ever fly one of those, but I’m in one of the pictures anyway, heaven knows why.
Because you were gorgeous! Jane thinks, remembering her father’s description and their few wedding photos.
However, it’s more likely that eighty year old women don’t commonly wander around airfields and no doubt he was worried I’d step in front of a plane and break it, or my hip. At any rate, he was so pleasant that I explained why I’d come, greatly doubting that he would have ever heard of the ATA.
That was the point at which I was taken into the clubroom, shown the photo wall etc, and then (feeling rather like minor royalty by this stage!) one of the hangars, also unchanged since the war, which had several Tiger Moths and other aircraft whose names would mean nothing to you but which bro
ught back floods of memories to me.
By now I was feeling quite sated and would have been more than content to have had a quiet cup of tea and call a taxi to the train. My cup, however, was about to run over. This wonderful man intended, he said, to take his Cessna up for a short flight—would I care to go with him?
My dear, can you imagine how you’d feel if, not having been on a horse for over half your lifetime—and leaving aside the problems of stiff joints and unaccustomed muscles—you were offered a ride on an exquisitely trained, beautifully mannered thoroughbred? Double that joy and you’ll have some idea of how I felt at the thought of being in the air again.
The reality surpassed it. I think I’d have been happy in anything that managed to leave the ground, but this was a lovely little machine and, perhaps not surprisingly, considerably more advanced than the last plane I flew. It responded so beautifully—yes, he let me fly for a short spell when we were up, but in fact I was content to simply be there. The luck of it was that it was such a lovely day—we’ve had many drizzly times since I’ve been here, but yesterday, as today, was perfect. The clouds appeared to have been placed there purely for scenic value, although even this tiny plane came with enough instruments that clouds would not have been a worry. I would have almost liked to have flown through one simply to experience it without the sheer terror that I associate with being surrounded by white mist. However, I’m certainly not complaining about the wonderful visibility and seeing the countryside in the way that I still always picture it, from a height of two thousand feet.
I’ll try not to wax too lyrical, but we soared and swooped with all the freedom of the air that first made me fall in love with flying. Aircraft may change and landmarks alter, but that extraordinary feeling stays the same.
(The difference, by the way, between flying as a passenger on a DC 10 or 747 and flying a small plane solo is that of being a passenger on a school bus and driving a sports car. The former does not, believe me, count as flying.)