by Jane Bailey
‘Vite!’ he said, taking my hand.
‘Where’s the van?’
He motioned up ahead somewhere, but I had heard no sound of a motor. I wasn’t sure what he was intending when he pulled me towards the bike. Then he took the bag off the front, slinging it over his shoulder. He patted the shelf where the bag had been, then put his hands on my waist, attempting to hoist me on to it. As soon as I realized what he was doing, I complied and sat on the rack where he usually kept his post. I put my handbag on my lap, lifted my skirts and we were off. It was all I could do not to give a little whoop.
I didn’t care if we had to go all the way to Orange like this.
We didn’t have to. When we were out of sight of Les Amandiers, Marius sang softly to me, ‘Auprès de ma blonde . . .’, and after a mile or two of dusty roads we turned off down a shaded track where a van was waiting.
We dismounted. Marius greeted his elder brother, who eyed me with approval and said something to his little brother with a smile. Then Marius stood before me, taking something out of his pocket and handing it to me. It was his address.
‘You write,’ he said.
I nodded.
Then he put his hands on my waist, puffed out his chest and said very solemnly, ‘I loave you.’
I didn’t know what to say. He was young, maybe still in his teens, but then I was still only nineteen myself. Somehow I felt older – a lot older. I knew it would shock him to say I was pregnant. At four months I was still barely showing, and even the new maternity dress was covered by my buttoned-up cardigan.
‘I’ll never forget you,’ I said.
And I didn’t.
WASHED UP
47
ARTHUR
I don’t like to think about the rest of that decade, really. There was something . . . dead about it. No, deadening. It seemed to drain the life out of me – bit by bit. Of course there were joys: Felicity was a marvel. I mean, it really was wonderful watching her grow up. She was such a sweet child – nothing like Pippa in temperament at all, although she did have her mother’s beauty. I can’t make any claims of my own there.
Yes. Yes, that was something joyful. Dear, sweet Felicity. I’m not sure what I’d have done without her.
But the rest . . . well, where do I start? I was working myself into the ground. As I said, the jet engine that had helped in my promotion had sprung some difficulties, and this now meant that I faced the possibility of losing my job altogether. Fortunately, I came through it, but only through hard work around the clock on a new jet engine. Pippa wasn’t exactly supportive. Well, not at all, actually. She still just kept on about getting a bigger house. Whatever I did, whatever I achieved, I never felt good enough with her. She always managed to make me feel like a disappointment.
That seemed to be my life for most of the 1950s. However, there were a couple of important things that happened – life-changing things. And there was the coronation, of course. I think that was a bit of a turning point for me too.
The King had died in February of the previous year, and then Queen Elizabeth was crowned at the beginning of June 1953. I remember that because everyone from the street crowded into our house. We were all there, crammed in, with Cynthia and Pippa taking up the best seats on the sofa, and I was answering the door as more people kept on arriving. I don’t think anyone else in our street had a television. It started, and it was amazing. I say that, but I didn’t actually see it until the highlights on the evening news later, but it was very uplifting. I think it raised everyone’s spirits. There was a new optimism, and people could feel it. There was an awful racket outside afterwards because there was a big street party or something. This was the last straw for Cynthia. She sat on the sofa, squashed between cheerful neighbours, enraged at having to share anything. She said things like, ‘Could you possibly move your ridiculous hairdo out of the way? I can’t see the screen in my own house!’ Anyway, it was too much for her, and that was when she decided to move out. She was finally propelled into contacting some old soak on the Mediterranean who invited her to join him in his alcohol-fuelled life. So I always remember the coronation as an uplifting time for me as well as for the nation. Good old Liz! She finally freed me from my mother-in-law.
But I digress.
Two significant events occurred, and the most significant one – Dora turning up at our house – followed directly from the first.
To my utter astonishment, Pippa’s book found a publisher. I don’t mean to sound scathing here, but I genuinely thought her book was an excuse for hobnobbing around certain London circles which intrigued her. But Pippa had found an interest that served several purposes at once. For one thing, it did indeed get her out of the house and mixing with a certain set. In fact, when she wasn’t actually typing, she was never at home. It was usually just me and Felicity and the nanny. It also served as a cover for whatever it was she wanted to get up to, and I shall probably never know for certain what that was. I still don’t think she had an affair with that Dumonnier chap. I think it’s more likely she used him, but I can’t be sure. He was certainly pretty smitten with the idea of Survivor’s Guilt, anyway; enough to guide her through the writing of it and help her find a publisher. That, of course, led to all sorts of meetings and lunches with editors and so forth, and I think she just revelled in all that. But another thing it gave her was the wonderful opportunity to put out her own side of the story. By being the first to write an account of those eight days in the mid-Atlantic, she appeared to give the definitive version. It was almost as if the rest of us had given her permission to tell it her way. At the time, I was only mildly irritated and felt churlish for being so. After all, I hadn’t thought of writing such a thing, and neither had any of the rest of us. And it hit on a nerve for a nation that was, almost to a man, affected by the guilt of being alive after losing someone in the war. It was a publisher’s dream. You might think that, at a time when we were all trying to look forward and enjoy the optimism of a new era, this would be too gloomy for people’s tastes. But, of course, it had a ‘happy ending’. Two of the survivors get married and have a child. That publisher was laughing all the way to the bank.
Well, actually, it didn’t make an awful lot of money for Pippa. She had an advance of two hundred pounds – which was pretty good in those days – but she’d signed up for peanuts from the royalties. It helped me make the decision to move to a larger house at last, which was something Pippa kept on about. We already had enough money to buy a bigger property by then, but only with a fairly tight mortgage, and only if she curbed her increasing demands for more luxuries.
I don’t regret the move. It was to this house. It’s got everything most people would want: a lovely back garden, four good-sized bedrooms, a spacious kitchen. And, of course, it’s detached. You’d think she’d be happy. And she was, at first. That was 1954, the year her book came out in, and she was riding the crest of a wave. Yes, I think she was genuinely happy here for a while.
Did she really think that wave would never break?
48
DORA
I stepped off the Joneses’ bus just yards from our front door. I didn’t have to knock because the door was always open. I went quietly down the passage, cradled already in the familiar smells of floor polish and soot and carbolic soap. I went down the stairs into the parlour. The stairs had the same slightly sticky linoleum that echoed with every step. It was impossible to creep into our house.
Onions, cabbage, soot. Home. Our Mam standing at the parlour door with her arms open. My face buried in her housecoat, the smell of her, the smell of home. I noticed suddenly that she was catching her breath. Our Mam was crying. Our Dad wasn’t in his chair. His cigarettes weren’t on the arm of the chair. His coat was on the back of the parlour door, though. She had held me like this when Siân died. I recognized the hunger in it.
‘Is he gone, Mam?’
‘He is, aye.’
The early June sun had sunk behind the mountain when we stopped cr
ying, and as the parlour window faced east across the valley, the room was filled with shadows. Our Mam bent over the range to shovel more coal on, a hollow rattle so familiar it would have burst open the tear dam again, had my face not ached with crying.
‘When’s it due?’ her back said to me.
‘What?’
‘When’s the baby due?’
I hadn’t been ready to tell her this. I hadn’t told her about the baby in my letter. I hadn’t wanted to bring her any more bad news, and to be honest, I was ashamed. Nice girls didn’t have babies without being married first.
‘How did you—?’
‘No coat, no suitcase . . . unless His Nibs dropped you off outside in a Rolls-Royce, I’d say you left in a hurry.’ I had underestimated Our Mam’s worldly knowledge. She was a miner’s daughter and a miner’s wife. She knew only too well the posh men who courted a pretty face until it threatened their freedom. She’d seen it all before. ‘He never came to meet us, did he? He wanted you to go and live with him in France, but he didn’t do us the courtesy of paying us a visit. Now there’s a man who wants you to live in sin.’
That’s what they called it then: ‘living in sin’. Not that Our Mam cared tuppence for sin, but she knew everybody else did, and especially potential husbands looking to settle down with nice girls.
She stood up by the glow of the fire and I went to her. This time it was different. This time, there was no spectre of Siân or even, for that moment, of my father. There was just my mother and me, two women holding each other in the dusk, one to take comfort and the other to give it. ‘You’ll be all right home yer with me. I’ll look after you both, look.’
And as simply as that, it was settled. She had a small pension from my father and free coal, but she would work part-time until after the baby was born and for the first year or so. Then I could borrow her mother’s wedding ring, go to Newport and find work as a widow whose husband had died in France.
She’d had it all worked out before I arrived home.
Helen was born in September. I called her Helen because she was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, and I gave her Elizabeth as her middle name after our new queen. Nothing had prepared me for motherhood. From the moment I held her in my arms and smelt the searing sweet scent of her head, I was overwhelmed with love. Everything that had troubled me before fell away, and all that concerned me was the comfort and happiness of my child.
I felt an enormous oneness with nature. When spring came, I watched the sheep with their lambs and let tears of empathy stream down my face. The mystery of bleating was unravelled. All my life I had marvelled at how a lamb could tell the difference between one low bellow and another in order to make its way back to the maternal belly, and how those sturdy mutton-brained old clumps of sheep could possibly recognize one little bleat from a mountainside of heart-rending bleats. Now it was all clear to me. I would know my baby’s cry in a sea of babies, and I would know my baby’s smell from a million others, and I felt the most sisterly love for each anxious grey ewe as it behaved exactly like me.
I allowed myself to forget about Ralph. I could see no reason why he would ever want to track me down to South Wales to reclaim his baby, although it had been on my mind all through the pregnancy. Now, with Helen’s arrival, I had never been happier or seen Our Mam happier. She had a new energy, working tirelessly to meet all our needs in those first few months. At first she took in laundry. The kitchen was always full of steam and the parlour full of other people’s vests and sheets. When she wasn’t washing or cooking she was ironing, and my memories of her are mostly of a pink-cheeked woman wrestling with coils of steaming bed sheets or standing at that ironing board turning the vast, damp heaps of cotton into neat folded piles. That was what Our Mam did: she created order out of chaos. I watched her, and tried to learn.
As soon as Helen took her first steps, the ironing board was put away. Our Mam couldn’t bear the thought of an accident with a scalding iron, so she found a job at the Co-op three mornings a week, until I found work. I would push Helen around in our neighbour’s old pram, or read to her by the fire, or watch her draw pictures on the rescued plain paper that the grocer had wrapped around our ham.
It was on one such day – in November of 1954 – when I was making paper chains with Helen, that the most alarming thing happened. Nothing could have prepared me for it.
The fire was crackling in the range, and the wireless was playing the Home Service. Helen, then fourteen months old, was holding up a little row of paper men holding hands, and I was just tugging on the folded paper I had torn to reveal a chain of girls, when something made me stop.
‘. . . and we have with us in the studio the author of a new book, Survivor’s Guilt, described by the Daily Telegraph as “a remarkable account of the psychological effects of survival when loved ones die”. Philippa Fielding, tell us why you decided to write about your harrowing ordeal in the mid-Atlantic . . .’
‘Mama!’ Helen started to prod me and grabbed at the unopened girls. I let her take them.
‘Well, I had been feeling very depressed, and it wasn’t until I spoke to a professional about my feelings that I realized that what I was feeling was guilt – at having survived when so many friends drowned. You see, I was one of the fortunate children to be rescued from the sinking of The City of India in 1940. I was only twelve years old at the time . . .’
Helen was prodding me again and making dissatisfied noises, so I smiled at her and began to fold more paper and tore it carefully. She watched, fascinated. The plummy-voiced male interviewer was clearly riveted by Pippa’s account. I had never heard her called Philippa Fielding before, and the addition of Arthur’s surname filled me with a pitiful kind of rage. But that was nothing compared with what was to come. The interviewer was intrigued by the effects of eight days at sea after food and water had run out: ‘I believe some people even started to hallucinate, didn’t they?’
‘Yes, that’s right. I remember one little girl was especially badly affected. She even thought she saw me hitting someone with an oar – and killing them!’ Here, she hazarded a light chuckle. ‘I mean, it’s extraordinary what dehydration can do to the mind. Heartbreaking, really.’
I stared at the wireless. It sat on a shelf in the alcove beside the chimney breast. It was made of a deep toffee-coloured wood with a square of cloth mesh set in the front. Two black knobs sat on either side of a lit-up tuning panel, which now looked like a wide, oddly toothed mouth. I willed it to say no more, but it carried on speaking, and I could hear the fascination in the man’s voice for the extraordinary woman sitting next to him in the studio; he was fawning, smitten, a helpless wreck before her.
Helen clutched at my hapless offering as soon as I had finished tearing. The paper opened out into a chain of misshapen girls.
One little girl was especially badly affected.
49
ARTHUR
Pippa’s book came out just before Christmas. She wouldn’t let me see the proofs, so I had to wait until it was published. That’s why I was only halfway through it when she did her interview on the wireless.
I sat and listened with Fliss, who was fascinated to hear her mother’s voice coming out of a box.
I have to admit I was proud of her. My wife, on the Home Service! I told everyone at work to listen in, and I know Mum and Dad were tuned in as well. I did find it odd, though, when she talked about a little girl who had hallucinated on the boat adrift in the Atlantic. I can remember one of the lascars having funny turns, and quite a few of us imagined slap-up meals and dreamt of running water. But the only little girl on that boat – apart from Pippa – had been Dora. And Dora said nothing for the entire eight days.
I went to fetch my copy of the book and leafed through it until I found the passage about hallucination: ‘By the time we had been adrift for several days, we were desperate for water. The food rations had run out very early on, but it was the lack of water that really wore us down. Our lips were cracked and
our tongues were sore and swollen. One little girl even hallucinated. She thought she saw me beating a boy to death with an oar! It’s extraordinary what bizarre tricks the mind can play on you when you’re deprived of water.’
That evening, I broached the subject in the kitchen. It was probably not a good time: I had lit a candle and bought in fish and chips to save her having to cook anything, as it was the nanny’s day off, but Pippa thought I should have taken her out to celebrate. She eyed my offering with scorn.
‘You were brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. Just like a real author.’
‘I am a real author.’
‘Yes. Quite.’
‘Guy said I sounded like Princess Margaret.’
‘Guy?’
‘You know – my editor.’
‘Ah. Well you did sound very regal. What was all that stuff about hallucination, though? I can’t remember any of that.’
‘You see? I knew I was right not to let you read the proofs. You’d have wanted to change everything.’
I looked across at her over my battered cod and wished I hadn’t managed to agitate her so easily. I was looking forward to the cod. Nonetheless . . .
‘No, but I was just thinking, the only other little girl on the boat was Dora.’
‘Well done. Dora was the one who thought she saw me killing someone.’
‘But Dora didn’t say anything. She was mute for the entire eight days.’
She began to shake salt furiously over her chips and didn’t seem able to stop.
‘Steady on, old girl. You’ll drown them in salt.’
She flared her nostrils at me and slammed down the salt cellar. ‘It was later. She told me about it later!’ She put a chip on the end of her fork delicately in her mouth. ‘It was when we met up again at the reunion – in the ladies’ cloakroom. You weren’t there. It was in the ladies’ cloakroom, and she said she hadn’t forgotten what I’d done, and I said what, and she said beating a boy to death with an oar, and I knew straight away that she’d been hallucinating. Obviously.’