by Plum Johnson
Adult orphans.
Who were our parents? They are in everything we see around us, everything we touch, but did we really know them? Can we get to know them better by sifting through what they left behind, like forensic archaeologists? What does it all mean? It feels like we’re wading through a pile of puzzle pieces, with no finished picture–guide on the lid of the box. I still want to know more—to turn the clock back to before our lives began, to who our parents were before. I’ve just found a home movie taken when they were in Curacao, on a holiday without us … and they’re holding hands!
We’re about to tackle the one room upstairs I’ve been dreading: the trunk room. The cedar rafters of the steeply pitched ceiling give it the dry aroma of a sauna, and a small window at the back, shrouded in a spidery embrace, lets in a sliver of light. We have to crawl on our hands and knees to reach the corners. It’s going to be a lengthy archaeological dig.
The room is stacked with yet more steamer trunks and wooden crates dating back generations. Scattered around them is the usual debris of a family—layered in circles, like the growth rings of a tree. The top layer reveals our most recent chapter: Dad’s old metal walker and rubber-tipped walking canes, bags of Mum’s oxygen tubing, a metal bedpan.
But underneath there are boxes of Halloween masks, bags of broken Christmas lights, old paintings, bunches of plastic flowers, chairs with missing rungs, shoeboxes of unsorted toys, sets of hard luggage, and—deep in the farthest corner— dozens of white plastic grocery bags, bulging and knotted.
I’ve been too afraid of spiders to reach into the deepest corners, so Chris drags everything out into the light and piles it in the upstairs hall. He finds a shoebox of assorted papers and brings it down onto the verandah. He sits on the top step in the sun, scans through the pile, and then hands the whole box back to me.
“Here,” he says. “You can trash all this.”
Irritated that he seems to be motoring through tasks in such a casual manner while I’m drowning in detail, I shake one of the envelopes. Out falls a letter on Buckingham Palace stationery written by Princess Elizabeth to Grandmother in 1950. She’s writing to thank her for a contribution to one of her charities.
I wave it victoriously. “See?”
“Omigod.”
“You almost threw it away!” Then I listen to myself—it doesn’t take much for me to revert to childhood, the bossy older sister. Later in the afternoon, Chris brings down an old black-and-white photograph in an easel frame.
“Ever seen this?”
It is the figure of a young girl wearing a checkered shirt and bib-front overalls with white ankle socks and tennis shoes. Her dark, wavy hair is held back from her face with a hair band. She’s sitting on a chintz-covered sofa, head tilted, with an impudent smile on her face. One elbow is on her knee, her hand cupping her chin; the other hand is clutching a stuffed canvas sailor’s bag between her legs. She seems to be saying, “You’re not leaving me behind!” She looks about ten years old.
“She looks so … familiar,” I say, “Is it Mum?”
“No, I think it’s you!” says Chris.
I study the photo. Wouldn’t I know? The sofa looks like the same one we still have here, but there are shuttered windows in the background and it’s the wrong era; the clothes are from the thirties. I place the photo on the table in the downstairs hall, and every time I walk by I think, “I know you … but who are you?” I send a copy to every relative I can think of: “Do you know who this is? Is this your mother, your roommate, your cousin?” Nobody knows.
Chris brings down more stuff, including a small wooden jewellery box with a painting of Rokeby on the lid.
“Remember this?” he says.
“Aunt Mickey painted those for everybody!” I open it and find an old postcard from the motel we used to stop at in Trout Run, Pennsylvania—the halfway point.
During the summer holidays, when school got out, we didn’t explore Canada the way our friends did. We didn’t have a cottage in Muskoka or Georgian Bay. The landscapes of the Group of Seven—droopy pines, choppy lakes, barren, windswept rocks—were unfamiliar to us. In the summer we always drove south.
We packed up the station wagon and drove to Virginia— to my mother’s clan, a place of cattle farms and racehorses, stately white-columned mansions, rolling green hills, and the scent of box bushes and honeysuckle. It took two days to drive down Route 15 in ninety-degree heat, with no air conditioning. Our luggage was strapped to the roof rack and we took turns sitting shotgun in the rear. I listened to the boys playing I Spy or reading the alternate Burma Shave signs erected every few miles alongside the highway (SHE PUT A BULLET ... THRU HIS HAT ... BUT HE’S HAD CLOSER ... SHAVES THAN THAT ... BURMA SHAVE) and crying that they had to pee. Dad would never stop.
When we passed the roadside shop that sold confederate flags and GUNS! GUNS! GUNS! (“Stop, Daddy! Stop … Awwwwww”), I knew we were nearly there. As the smells of pungent cow manure and freshly cut hay began to drift through the open windows and the high-pitched whine of cicadas sounded like electrical wires humming in the heat, I knew we had arrived.
Rokeby was the 350-acre estate outside Fredericksburg where Mum and her seven siblings had spent their own childhood summers. Mum’s brother George and his artistic wife, Mickey, ran the farm after Granny died and, despite having four little children of their own, they generously opened their arms to us. The grand, Federal-style antebellum house, with its white-columned portico and wide screened-in verandah, sat high on a hill, commanding views of the surrounding Rappahannock Valley. Nestled in amongst the magnolia and dogwood trees were acres of daffodils and narcissus, a boxwood maze, and a two-room children’s playhouse. Wild asparagus grew around the tennis court and plump figs could be plucked from the tree outside the kitchen door near the swimming pool.
A self-contained oasis, Rokeby had its own gas pump and water tower and a whole dusty barnyard to investigate—with chickens and cows and tractors and hay wagons—and a tool shed that smelled of sawdust and oil, filled with every imaginable spare part. There were horses to ride and a pony named Stonewall that we hitched to the wagon to trot down the halfmile back entrance to the Comorn Post Office. On any given day there could be a slew of aunts and uncles sitting in wicker rockers and a dozen children to play with, most of us first cousins, more or less the same age.
The high-ceilinged kitchen was always hot and steamy, with the aroma of juicy tomatoes baking in brown sugar or sizzling with cornbread and bacon. Each morning the cook left breakfast in silver chafing dishes on the mahogany sideboard in the dining room and cousins would drift in from farm work or tennis or swimming, dragging dust across the wide plank floors.
On hot summer nights, while the adults sat on the verandah discussing world events, tinkling the ice of their mint juleps in frosted silver cups, the children moved onto the sleeping porch. In this screened-in dormitory above the portico, older cousins, in a row of metal beds, told ghost stories until we all fell asleep. We clutched Mason jars full of lightning bugs and listened to the mantel clock snoring at the top of the back staircase.
Each Sunday the whole family piled into the woodpanelled station wagon and bounced down rutted dirt roads to the small country church, where mothers in straw hats and flowered dresses cooled themselves with cardboard fans that had Bible verses printed on the front and ads for funeral parlours on the back.
The South was a culture steeped in history. I learned what it meant to be American—the “can-do” spirit of inventiveness and ingenuity—and tried to crack the particular code of diplomacy spoken by our Virginia cousins. Mum was a renegade, and before she was twenty she’d escaped north to Bennington College in Vermont—a hotbed of feminism and liberalism. I was used to my mother speaking her mind, but in Virginia few women were forthright: they were unfailingly polite and well mannered, so I never knew what they were thinking.
I look more closely at the painting of Rokeby on the lid of the box. Wouldn’t Aunt Mickey love to know
we still treasured this?
“There’s more!” says Chris, and he unwraps a framed watercolour, painted by Dad. We’d forgotten he had this artistic talent, since his was always overshadowed by Mum’s. It’s a lake scene with loons, painted at his cottage on Lake Kashwakamak in eastern Ontario. When the youngest boys were teenagers and we’d stopped driving to Virginia every summer, they helped Dad erect a small cottage on the property, later adding a spider-infested bunkie. The cottage was Dad’s getaway, where he learned to truly relax, but Mum never liked to go. She called it “a godforsaken place.”
In another one of the trunks, we find that Mum has carefully saved a number of magazines. I knew she hadn’t saved the 1952 issue of McCall’s because of its article on new kitchen colour schemes; it was more likely the article titled “How Much Does Your Husband Annoy You?” There’s also a 1948 issue of Business Week with her brother Langbourne on the cover.
Dad, meanwhile, has saved the Illustrated London News, complete editions of The Globe and Mail with headlines like BRITONS CONQUER EVEREST and CHURCHILL DEAD, and forty years’ worth of National Geographic—enough to insulate the greatcoats of the entire British navy.
What do we do with all these historical primary sources? Not even the library wants them. I decide to stack them throughout the house, on bedside tables and coffee tables, for visiting guests to peruse over the summer, but I know I’m only postponing the inevitable. The next afternoon I hear Robin yell from the playroom—“Yahoo!”—and I run in to see what new treasure he’s unearthed.
For decades, sitting on top of Dad’s grey metal filing cabinet in his library there’s been what we’ve always referred to as “the old tin trunk.” A watertight, black metal sailor’s box, about twenty inches square with a hinged lid, it has our great-grandfather’s name stencilled in gold paint on the front.
Robin holds out a flimsy brown notebook. Scrawled on the front are the words “Kolek Tomdjoeng Sederhana Sasak 50.82 KM. 17.93T.”
“What is it?” I don’t even recognize the language. Dutch? Javanese?
“The original logbook of the Sederhana Djohanis … the fishing boat Dad commandeered in Padang, when he escaped from the Japanese!”
We flip through the pages in amazement. The first few pages are recorded in an unknown hand of her original native crew, documenting routine trips up and down the coast of Sumatra, picking up cargo. It’s all in Dutch, each page signed by a port master and officially stamped. But ten pages in, I recognize Dad’s handwriting.
On March 5, 1942, he’s commandeered the boat and begins to meticulously record their escape voyage, day by day. He lists the names of all the men on board with him, and we see that one of the officers is Major Geoffrey Rowley-Conwy— Lord Langford from Wales—the man Mum telephoned just before she died. Dad has recorded each man’s duties and what his intentions are (“to avoid capture by Japanese; to proceed up coast using land breezes until latitude of N.E. Monsoon, with which we could cross Indian Ocean to Ceylon”). When Dad wrote all these words in pencil, he was only twenty-six years old and had no way of knowing what a harrowing thirty-seven days at sea he was about to endure— surviving Japanese strafing, high seas, limited rations, and little water—nor that fate was guiding him across the Atlantic Ocean to New York City, where he would, by chance, meet Mum. Even more miraculously, photos exist of Dad and other officers on board the Sederhana. Dad has a beard and looks half-starved, more like Errol Flynn than Cary Grant— but who thought to bring a camera … plus film … in the rush to escape?
I scan the pages and send the whole file off to an online site called Treasure-Book, in Vancouver. Two weeks later, four replicas of the Sederhana logbook are returned in the mail— we all want a copy.
While Chris continues to excavate the trunk room, Robin, Victor, and I dig into the old tin trunk—the careful repository of Dad’s family history.
We’d heard stories about Dad’s great-great-grandfather George, born in 1792 in England. He was captured at sea by the French during the Napoleonic Wars when he was only thirteen. For the next eight years—until he was twenty-one— he remained in various French prisons, carving the ship out of wood and bone that Mum bequeathed to Robin in her will. During our lifetime this ship always sat on the tall dresser in the upstairs hall. George kept a diary and that’s here, too, tucked into his original leather wallet.
Written on hand-stitched paper, it details his many escapes, recaptures, and the distances he walked between prisons. We turn it over in our hands—amazed to think we’re touching something that George once touched in 1805. He was condemned to death but pardoned by Napoleon in 1813, and we find his handwritten safe-conduct passport, signed and stamped by Napoleon’s Minister of War.
But even more intriguing are the documents we find relating to George’s son, William—about whom I had known nothing. William eventually became a sea captain, like his father. On a voyage from Liverpool to Cape Town, in 1842, he disappeared off the coast of South Africa when he was only twenty-two years old. Official accounts claim he was “lost at sea,” but it’s a mysterious tale, and we find scores of original documents that cast doubt. We take a batch out to the verandah and read through them. There are copies of records from Lloyd’s Shipping Register, insurance claims, cargo lists, and, more importantly, family letters and eyewitness accounts.
On a foggy morning in March, 1843, a local eyewitness, walking along the beach on Saldanha Bay near Cape Town, spots the 242-ton ship, The Conservative, foundering offshore with all its sails set. Two of its three rowboats—in good condition and “with not a drop of water in them”—have washed ashore. Suspiciously, however, the ropes on one of the boats appear to have been intentionally cut and … the third boat is missing. The eyewitness organizes a search party, but once on board ship, the party finds it curiously empty. There is no sign of a struggle, no dead bodies, no baggage, and no provisions except for “a piece of cold meat in the pantry and the men’s hammocks hanging forw’d.” They also find a woman’s petticoat.
A woman’s petticoat?
William is unmarried … I love this part!
Over the next three months a search party hunts for any bodies washed ashore along the coast, but none is ever found and eventually the whole crew is presumed lost at sea.
It seems odd to us now, in our age of fast travel and instant communication, that a family wouldn’t investigate further, but it appears from his letters that George accepted the disappearance of his son with resignation and despair. My imagination goes into overdrive and I find myself wondering. What if William was kidnapped? What if he was sold into slavery? What if we have Arabian cousins in Timbuktu? This is a slice of family history the grandchildren will love, and I put the letters aside to scan. I have a special file for these stories—anything that smacks of romance or mystery is going to be turned into another treasure book.
Chris shoulders through the screen door, his arms full of white plastic grocery bags.
“Where’d you find those?” asks Victor.
“In the back of the trunk room!”
As he dumps them on the wicker chair, fat beige envelopes and small blue airmail letters sift out onto the yellow cushion in the fading afternoon light.
“What are they?”
“Letters Mum and Dad wrote to each other … hundreds of them!”
The plastic bags are in the final stages of decomposition; they fragment into filmy confetti as we grab for their contents. The tiny white polka dots stick to our fingertips and cling with static to our clothes.
Robin flaps open a letter postmarked NEW YORK CITY, 1942.
“Here’s one that Mother wrote to Grandmother, telling how she met Father when the war started.”
Dearest Mum, I know you probably think I’ve lost my mind, but it’s only my heart!
“She writes that she’d been out dancing every night and was already in her nightclothes, but this British officer needed a blind date, so she and her roommate flipped a coin and Mother had to go.”
Alec came to the door in his Navy Lieutenant’s uniform and you know what he did? He handed me his cap! Can you beat that? So I threw it on the floor and said, What do you think I am—a hat rack?
We all burst out laughing—it sounded so like Mum.
Robin points to the sheet in his hand. “Yes, and here she writes that Father ‘looked so surprised!’”
“Wait a minute,” I say, “go back … she actually writes ‘Alec’ and not ‘Alex’?”
“Uh-huh.”
“That’s so funny. She got his name wrong from the beginning!”
“May I continue? This is a twenty-six-year-old American working girl falling for a British naval officer.”
“Confiding to her mother,” I point out with a twinge of envy.
We spent the weekend together and on Wednesday he asked me to marry him!
“Whoa … wait a minute …” Victor says. “Mum and Dad only knew each other for one week before they decided to get married?
Chris laughs. “That explains a lot!”
“Like why she hoped the American Red Cross would send her to England,” I say.
Robin continues reading: These last 10 days have been worth anything that may happen in the future …
“That’s a good thing,” I say, wondering if all war brides felt that way.
From 1942 to 1946, Mum and Dad wrote to each other almost every day, and Mum wrote to her mother every week. Miraculously, hundreds of these letters got saved. Some are ten pages long. We’ve each got our laps full of airmail paper, trying to read and listen at the same time, interrupting each other—so typical.
Chris says, “Here’s one when Mum was stationed in Devon at Knightshayes Court, in the converted manor house of Lord and Lady Amory. She’s writing to Dad in Sumatra.”
I picture Mum in a grand hall with a marble fireplace and gilt-edged mirrors, now converted into a Rest Home for convalescing American Air Force pilots. Mum was in charge of entertainment.