by D J Wiseman
‘My dear Father and Mother, All going well here, some good chaps in my section. We are all a little green but getting the rough edges knocked off! Love to V when you see her.
Your affectionate son, Henry’
Lydia turned a page and there she was, Verity. V was Verity. Now, at last Lydia had something to work on and she cursed herself for missing the detail that had been hidden there. Henry Myers, son of Mr and Mrs J D Myers, at RAF flying school in October 1942, possibly aged around twenty to twenty-five, so born in maybe 1917 to 1922. Quickly turning the page, Lydia found Henry again, standing by his plane at Waterbeach in 1943, a base which her research had shown to have been home to squadrons 99 and 514. Was it an association of ideas or did all those young men look younger in their uniforms than they really were? Maybe he was aged twenty to thirty. And, oh yes, there was that Essex link again, that Braintree link. Lydia stopped. But the Essex link, the Braintree link, that was surely all about the ‘A’ album, or the Longlands album, as she had come to think of it. So maybe she had been right in her working assumption that all the contents of the dusty box were linked.
Having at last found a way into her puzzle, Lydia was keen to start. She gathered her pads and pencils, readied her meticulous list of information and considered the right course to take. It would not take too long to look through the index of births for say 1912 to 1922 and list all the candidates for Henry, prioritising those with a Braintree or Essex registration. As a second line of enquiry, it seemed probable that Henry’s father, Mr J D Myers, would be present on the 1901 census. A third way in would be to look for a marriage entry for him sometime in the ten years prior to the best option found for Henry’s birth date. A death record was yet another route to information, and sadly, it was all the more likely in wartime. Somewhere in the recesses of her mind Lydia had an idea that the survival rate for bomber crews was lowest of all the forces, but the detail escaped her.
An hour or so later she had made a new list of all the Henry Myers registered 1912 to 1922. It did not fill her with enthusiasm. It contained thirty-two entries starting with Henry A in the September quarter of 1912, born to a mother whose maiden name was Wilson, registered in Newcastle. The last entry was Henry in the September quarter 1922, mother’s maiden name Greenough, registered in Birkenhead. The ones in between were no less encouraging. The nearest to something worth pursuing were a couple of entries for Hackney and Bethnal Green, both bordering on Essex but not what she had hoped for. Almost grudgingly she made them her ‘most likely’, but without conviction. Again she studied Henry’s face. Surely he could not be past thirty? But, to be thorough, she widened the search dates and scanned the index for 1910 and 1911. At the other end of the range she went for 1923 to 1925. This added another seven equally unlikely entries.
After studying the list for a few minutes and still finding nothing to make any one of the Henrys stand out, Lydia tried her second line of attack, which was to look for Mr J D Myers in the 1901 Essex census. Seventeen Myers with the initial J were shown, but nearly all were in West Ham, hardly the rural location she sought. Two other entries were possible. One in Grays and the other in Theydon Bois. The Grays resident was age fifty and had only his wife in the household. Her name was Isabel, which formed the most tentative of links to Lydia’s Longlands album. To follow anything down that road on such a flimsy connection would be foolish indeed. Nonetheless, Lydia noted down all the details. In Theydon Bois there was also a son aged six. Yes, this family were certainly a possibility, but it did not feel right. Despite her methodical ways, her weighing of probabilities, Lydia had always found that it was important to her that such things should feel right. For her, establishing whether they were really right often came afterwards. All of which, she thought, made her third line of enquiry somewhat redundant. She could make a list of J Myers whose marriages were registered between, say, 1900 and 1924, but to what purpose? The result would be no more meaningful than her list of births from Newcastle to Birkenhead.
Perhaps Henry Myers had fallen in battle. That at least should be something she could establish. The research tools available to her were excellent and there was no better place to start than with the Commonwealth War Graves. Dozens of Myers with their graves and commemorations from Yokohama to Reichswald, but not a single Henry amongst them. If he did not fall in war then a search for Henry Myers in the national death index would provide nothing more than another even larger list to go with those of the births and marriages. Lydia examined the album again. If she had missed something so obvious as a name and address then perhaps she had missed something else. With diminishing hope at the turn of each page she checked every photograph again, checked that her recording was accurate, checked that not a ring finger or cap badge had been overlooked. It was all there. She was left gazing at the same postcard that had so energised her earlier. For all her work and excitement, progress amounted to knowing Henry’s parents address in 1942 and his father’s initials.
Lunch at her brother’s house in Banbury was always an awkward and infrequent affair. He and his mawkish little wife Joan inhabited a different world to Lydia. It seemed to her that theirs was one of utter conformity. They had the regulation two children, Lydia’s nieces Rachel and Samantha, they took regulation holidays in Norfolk or Cornwall, and drove a regulation Ford Focus. Brian was a regulation English teacher, while Joan maintained their regulation semi-detached house in an avenue of such houses. Brian and Joan never came to see her and Lydia felt sure that their rare invitations were offered purely out of a sense of pity and duty.
‘Hello Brian, how are you?’
‘Hello sister dear, nice to see you. It’s been a long time.’ Brian always addressed his sister in this way, always inserted an unnecessary element of formality. He had rarely used her name and when he did it was abbreviated it to Lyd, which continued to grate on her as it had done since childhood.
Lunch was a regulation Sunday lunch, roast lamb with standard accompaniments. Joan had prepared it ready to be served at precisely one o’clock; at precisely one o’clock they sat to eat it. It had been so since Lydia could remember.
‘There’s nothing quite like a good Sunday roast, don’t you think Lyd?’
‘It’s lovely,’ smiled Lydia, and unable to resist the temptation, added, ‘It always is.’
‘Do you do a little roast for yourself on Sundays, Lydia?’ the little mouse-faced Joan enquired.
‘No I don’t usually bother, not for one.’ Lydia did not like the implied criticism of her single status and threw it back openly.
‘No, I can understand that,’ said Joan with no attempt to disguise the pity in her voice.
It was always like this and Lydia supposed that they did not really enjoy her company any more than she enjoyed theirs. She and Brian had never been close, even when her world of married life had been more closely aligned with his. When he and mouse-face had children and Lydia did not, their differences were underlined. With Lydia’s divorce had come a further distancing. The tentative closeness that had promised to grow between Lydia and her nieces was cut off, as if Brian and mouse-face feared that their regulation daughters might in some way be infected. It amused Lydia to think that if they did but know it, divorce was quite the regulation thing now.
‘Lyd, I meant to ask, do you still have all those papers you got from Uncle Bill?’
‘Yes, somewhere, I haven’t looked at them for ages. Why do you ask, it’s not something you’d usually be interested in, is it?’
‘I’m developing a project at school about wartime memories and diaries and that kind of thing. Thought there might be something you had along those lines. Wasn’t there a journal or something that he wrote?’
‘Yes there is, he did it for the last two years he was at sea. Would you like me to find it for you?’
‘You do love your old books and papers, don’t you?’ Her moment of enthusiasm was seized on by mouse-face.
Lydia had inherited all the books and papers of their uncle
, not by instruction but by default. She was the only member of the family likely to find any pleasure or see any value in them. Her aunt, Joyce, had assembled them in little bundles for her, all tied together with black ribbons.
‘Lydia, I’m sure that your Uncle Bill would have wanted you to have his books and all his notes from his graveyard tours. If you would like to have them.’
Indeed she would like to have them, if for no other reason than that they would always remind her of those excellent times she had spent in his company. It was he who had sparked her interest in their family’s history, long before the instant access that the internet now provided. He would spend much of his time on those ‘graveyard tours’ meticulously noting down in his perfect pencil handwriting all the details of possible value. When he worked on his discoveries in his study of an evening, he would carefully record them onto index cards and cross-reference and colour code his findings. He was as calm and considered as his gently sloping and always consistent writing suggested. Even now, although Lydia’s dislike of cigarettes was intense, she was nostalgic for the scent of sweet pipe smoke in which he seemed permanently enveloped.
The greater part of the family history she had developed over the years was based on all the careful work her uncle had done so long before. How he would have marvelled at the magnificent array of tools that she had at her disposal, the ease with which such a world of records could be accessed. She knew too he would still have wanted to tour the countryside and towns of his forbears, finding the churches where they married, the houses where they lived, the roads and byways they would have travelled. He had imparted some sense of that to Lydia, and she had no doubt that on her own travels to Cornwall she would have trodden not only in the steps of her ancestors but also those of her dear Uncle Bill.
Perhaps it was with a sense of passing something down to future generations that Bill had written the journals of his sea service in the closing years of the war. Lydia had not known of their existence until after his death and had wondered if there had ever been others that he’d kept from earlier years. But all she had in the neatly tied bundles were the two books for 1944 and 1945. Much of it covered the daily routine of the kind that few people bother to record, such as a ship’s log would contain, but laced into to it here and there were his own comments on the incidents he recorded. Most vividly she recalled his thoughts on the loss of a fellow seaman, not through enemy action but as a result of a simple accident. How it had made him wonder at the sheer chance of who lived and who died. She was glad that Brian had reminded her of this treasure, which had lain unseen for several years among all their uncle’s other papers. She read it through again in the week following her brother’s enquiry and hesitated at the thought of putting it into his hands. Instead she decided to send him a photocopy which she would carefully make using the office copier.
As she slid it into her bag in readiness, some association formed in her mind. Wasn’t there another book like this, brown covered, with old-fashioned foolscap sized pages? In another instant she remembered the pair of ledgers in her cardboard box from the auction. The one with the diary, the one she had shut out of her mind for fear of intruding on private moments, surely that was the same shape, had the same feel to it. Another thought occurred. What if the diary and all the other albums really were of the same family, just as she had proposed? What if this diary was written by one of her anonymous faces? Might not some clue that would help solve her mystery lie within?
Conscious still of her previous mistake regarding Henry Myers, Lydia first examined the whole book, turning each blank page, being sure that there was nothing on them and even holding them up to the light to see if any impression of some mark or writing remained. A few shreds of white paper fluttered down as she did this, but that aside there was nothing apart from the writing on the last twenty or so pages. In her preferred way, she simply turned these over slowly, absorbing the handwriting, the colours of the ink, the odd entry in pencil, the change in appearance, until she came to the last page. She read once more what she took to be the opening lines, written in a slightly scrawling hand but legible enough. Again the sense of intrusion was upon her; again images of her grandfather and his private intimate thoughts came to her. It occurred to her that what she now had before her might not be true at all, but instead be a fiction, the workings and jottings for some unfinished novel. She read from the beginning again.
It has taken forever to get these first words out of my head onto this page in the old copy book. I have struggled so long and now they are written but none of the words are about what I need to write about. They are written now like this because a woman who I see once a week, an old woman, a volunteer at our local centre, has listened to me breaking into pieces over the last few weeks and the idea of writing out my demons has come up again today. I think she writes some stuff for a local paper and she has said that to start I should just write words, any words, any thoughts that come into my head. I have so many words swirling around they won’t stay still long enough to be written. So this is an exercise, think of it as a piano player warming up before a performance she said. Are there scales for this, should I copy out lines from a book like a schoolboy in detention? Maybe a word list of love and hate and death and destruction, sights and sounds and a word I read the other day, sepulchral, which has a very good form in the mouth when I speak it. Conjunction feeble effortless timeless wisdom anxious westerly brand noxious gases bullet poison envelope powder dimension bread rabbit.
I will start again. I have to get some of this stuff out of my head and on to paper, maybe that way there will be some resolution, some means to an end whatever that may be. Writers tell of the cathartic effects of committing their thoughts to paper don’t they? It is a start, the first words are out there, the rest will surely gush. But the real start, where was that? Was it way back in the mists of my other life, my other times, or, more prosaically, at the clichéd first sight from the window onto the wet footpath beyond the steps up to the house? Yes, it was that moment that sealed the future and all it has brought.
Her figure was trim but not exactly skinny. Short dark hair round a sharp face with a wide mouth. She struggled in the rain to unload her cardboard boxes from the little blue hatchback and lug them up the steps and into the house. Delivering for a friend perhaps, a new tenant? It did not matter, it would never matter, all that mattered was that that glance out the window, that fixed moment in time, had happened. The rest was decided, sealed, locked into the guidance system of life for eternity.
SDI entered my life at that moment and has been right there ever since. She should not have been, she should never have been, but she is. For how much longer I cannot now say because there is an end to this by some means.
Lydia did not know what to make of it. A novel? Notes for a novel? A diary, and if not, then what? Why the almost coded reference? Why not Shirley or Sheilagh? A shorthand perhaps, surely not a nickname. It was written by someone who was used to writing, to dealing with words and that person had a feeling, a passion even, for his subject. On balance, Lydia felt inclined to her notes-for-a-novel idea. She read on for a while until on the third or fourth page it became difficult to read and it seemed that someone else had taken over the writing. She put the book aside and gave what she had read a little more thought. It did not seem likely that it would contain anything of value, and yet she was attracted to it in a way that was hard to justify. Perhaps she would work through the rest of it. It had been written backwards, starting on the last page in the book, and that alone seemed a strange way to make notes for a novel, or to write anything else. In some places so much pressure had been applied that the writing was impressed into the page. Even on closer examination there were passages that she could hardly make out at all. The writing became more and more illegible as it progressed, so to read it all she would need to become very familiar with the writer, the context, and feel for the words as much as read them. All that would take time, a lot of time. There were more p
ages than she’d first realised, perhaps thirty or forty. She did not like the thought of having two projects at the same time and for all she knew she had three or four already, all of which stubbornly refused to give up their secrets. So she did what she knew she would do, put the book away in its box and let the questions slip to the back of her mind until a resolution appeared.
Even if the book should turn out to be a cuckoo in the nest of albums there was nothing to be lost by deciphering it. If in doing so some connection emerged then that would be a bonus. Besides which, the albums were hardly a full time occupation, Lydia had done nothing of substance on them for weeks. She set to work typing out the words from the journal. The going was easy enough for the first few pages, as she knew it would be, but the content of what she was transcribing began to disturb her. Like her grandfather’s letters, it brought unsettling thoughts and images to her mind. Of particular worry were the last few lines of the journal, which, being written in the same clear writing of the first few pages, she’d read before starting her task.