‘Oh, you’re beautiful!’ cried Dorothy to the baby, enchanted. She hastily removed her cardigan and wrapped it around the baby, and placed the little boy in his mother’s arms. She drew up the mercifully large tarpaulin over the mother and child, and she repositioned her coat over Nina’s shoulders. It was as warm as she could make them. It was enough, she reasoned. It would have to be. The baby, cries soon subsiding, lay quiet and calm, and Nina leaned back on the straw, exhausted, eyes closed as though asleep.
‘He’s truly perfect, Nina,’ said Dorothy.
Nina made no reply.
Dorothy, sitting back, breathless, stared at the scene before her. Thoughts fired through her like a speeded-up newsreel. Nina was a mother. She had a baby, red-faced, angry, vigorous. Living. Very much living.
She noticed the girls’ packed lunches and Thermos flasks.
‘Nina, love, I’ll get you some tea in a moment. Come on, sit up a bit, that’s it. I need to cut the cord.’
Dorothy pulled the tarpaulin up over Nina’s legs. She had no means of cutting the umbilical cord. She looked around the barn, but nothing was to be found. Yet it must be cut; it was bloody, and dirty, and bad luck, she thought, if not cut free of the baby soon. Could it even be dangerous? The thought sickened her, for a moment, and she wanted to cut the cord now before … before … even though this baby was free. Free of his mother’s body, safely. The cord now simply trailed between mother and son like a question mark. She had to be calm. She must look after Nina. If the afterbirth would only come away, all would be well, probably. She pressed down on Nina’s belly as hard as she dared, and the afterbirth gushed out in a bloody pool. Leaving it lying in the straw between Nina’s legs, she pulled the tarpaulin back over the girl and her baby, poured tea from one of the flasks she had made up for the girls only that morning – a mere few hours ago, fresh then from her intimate encounter with the squadron leader, blissful in the short-lived afterglow of a momentous night.
Nina sipped tea, her hand trembling so much that Dorothy had to hold the cup for her. Piling up more straw behind the new mother, Dorothy helped her to sit up, lifted up her jumper and helped her to undo her shirt and bra so she could feed her baby. He suckled immediately, eyes closed, a picture of peace and joy. Nina stared down at him, half in horror, half in wonder. Dorothy wrapped her coat more firmly around Nina’s shoulders, covering the baby as much as she could, tied the sleeves of her cardigan together so the baby was swaddled, and finally helped herself to a cup of tea. She realised she was trembling almost as much as Nina.
The barn door creaked open and Aggie, drenched in snow, entered, alone. She closed the door, headed towards Nina and Dorothy and stopped dead.
‘What the blazes—?’
‘Nina had a baby. She was in labour. It’s a little boy,’ said Dorothy, and she could feel a wide and stupid grin slicing her face in two.
‘A baby?’
‘Yes.’
‘A real baby?’
‘Shut up, you bloody idiot,’ said Nina. ‘Can’t you see it’s a real baby?’
‘But … but you’re not … I mean, you weren’t pregnant.’
‘Oh yes, she was,’ said Dorothy. She refilled the cup from the Thermos and handed it to Aggie.
Aggie took it, staring at Nina and her baby. ‘You kept it a secret, Nina?’ she said, breathless.
‘I didn’t bloody know, did I?’ said Nina.
‘How could you not know?’ said Aggie.
‘Aggie, she claims not to have realised. It can happen sometimes. It’s not unheard of. Nina’s not regular like you. It can happen.’
‘I can’t believe it,’ said Aggie, shaking her head.
‘Did you suspect?’ said Dorothy.
‘No.’
‘No more did I. It happens.’
‘Let’s have a look at him, then,’ said Aggie, leaning over her friend to see the baby, who had ceased feeding and was asleep, swaddled tight in Dorothy’s gorgeous – and ruined – pink cardigan.
‘Oh, Nina. He’s beautiful …’ and Aggie cried, softly.
The cows shuffled their hooves, and Dorothy sat before them all, surveying this holy tableau. Nina, perennially unmoved, shrugged. The girl was pale, exhausted and in shock.
Dorothy recovered her senses. ‘Where’s Dr Soames, Aggie? Mrs Compton?’
‘I tried both their houses, but nobody was in. Boxing Day, isn’t it? They must be visiting.’
‘I see.’ She said this with a surge of something that felt oddly like relief. ‘Look, we need to get Nina and this little chap home and in bed. How on earth are we to do that?’
‘The tractor? I can hitch it up to the trailer and they can sit on the back. But shouldn’t they go to hospital?’
‘What?’
‘Shouldn’t they go to hospital?’
‘No,’ said Nina quietly. ‘I’m not going nowhere. Get me back home, that’s all I want. No one is to know, all right?’
‘No one is to know?’ echoed Aggie.
‘Of course not. I’m nineteen, I’m not married. I’ve just had a baby. I don’t hardly know who the father is.’
‘Since when do you care about that sort of thing? Mary Knibbs had a baby, don’t you remember? When she was only sixteen?’
‘I do bloody remember. And her mum and dad booted her out and she went to a home for unmarried mothers. Don’t you remember? And everyone called her a tart. And all her friends dropped her just like that, including you and me.’
Aggie looked down at her feet, sobered. Dorothy listened intently.
‘Nobody is to know!’ hissed Nina. ‘Nobody.’
‘We could ask Mrs Compton?’ said Dorothy, wanting to be helpful. She felt she ought to be solicitous.
‘That old gossip? Good job she wasn’t in,’ said Nina.
‘But you might need medical help,’ protested Aggie.
‘No. I won’t need help. Tell people I’m ill. That’s it. I’m ill. I can’t work for a few days. That’s all.’
‘But what about the baby?’ said Aggie, wringing her hands.
Her anguish, Dorothy thought, was understandable.
‘Dot will take care of him. You’ll take him to the adoption people, won’t you, Dot? Nuns? Somewhere?’
‘Of course I’ll help you, Nina,’ said Dorothy. That feeling again – was it exhilaration?
‘I can’t keep it,’ said Nina.
Aggie looked from woman to woman.
‘I need to cut the cord,’ Dorothy told her. ‘Do you have a knife?’
She did. Dorothy held the cord and sawed at it with the knife, and at last it slipped apart, jelly-like, a strangely lifeless amputated limb.
‘Aggie, go and get the tractor ready, will you? Aggie? Go on, it’s nearly dark now. It must be done. We need to get these two in the warm, in bed.’
‘I don’t like this. Promise me, when we get back, promise me we’ll send for Mrs Compton? If nobody else?’
‘First things first,’ said Dorothy.
‘If she dies or the baby dies, how are you going to feel then?’
‘Neither Nina nor her baby are about to die, what a silly notion. You’re being melodramatic. He’s as vigorous as hell and so is she, despite appearances. But they need to get warm. I’ll talk to you later, tomorrow. But now we must act. Please, Aggie.’
Aggie shook her head and left the barn without another word. She returned with the trailer hooked on to the tractor, the cold engine of which grumbled and whined like a child suddenly awakened from a deep sleep. She and Dorothy helped the exhausted new mother on to the trailer, hushing her cries of pain when she stood up, Dorothy murmuring to her that, yes, everything ‘down there’ would feel bruised, battered, tender, for a few days. But not to worry, soon you will be in bed, and warm, and safe. Dorothy handed the tiny baby to Nina, covered them both in coats and the tarpaulin, gathered up the afterbirth and cord and scattered the bloodied straw around the barn. She climbed up beside the mother and child, placing the detritus of birth at t
he far end of the trailer. She would hide it under the hedge later.
Aggie drove them home, stealthily and slowly. And God Almighty, Dorothy was cold, perished, she realised, in just her skirt and blouse. But what could be done but get everybody home? Aggie drove on – no headlamps, of course, but the eerie light given off by the snow showed them the way – across fields, down the track, across the Long Acre and back to the cottage. Dorothy took the baby from Nina, and Aggie helped her to clamber down from the trailer. The party made their way gingerly and silently along the frozen back path to the kitchen door, Dorothy and Nina looking around furtively in this strange evening, snow everywhere.
In the dark, empty kitchen Dorothy switched on the electric light. ‘Sod the blackout,’ she said, but she instructed Aggie to make sure all the curtains in the house were drawn tightly. She lit candles, ready for when she would turn out the light, settled Nina on the settee with her baby, tucked them up in blankets and lit the range in the kitchen.
Aggie returned the tractor and trailer to the yard. Still Dorothy could not believe it: Nina, expecting all that time, and nobody had known? Nina hadn’t known? It seemed impossible – but, of course, there was a new baby boy to prove it.
Nina was a mother!
Dorothy shuddered.
Nina was not a mother. But she would learn, she would have to learn. Nobody is a mother until they have a baby, are they? she reasoned. That little boy, small and helpless, lying against his mother’s breast, so peaceful, so oblivious.
Lighting fires, making tea, Dorothy’s head pounded with fear, with shock, with unquestionable but baffling delight. She was feverish in her work, and this long night was only just beginning, she knew.
22
26th December 1940
Dear, darling Jan,
Oh, my love, life sparkles today! You have been gone for three hours now. It feels like three decades. I hope you are enjoying a safe journey and are not stuck in the snow somewhere between here and Kent. I miss you already. I missed you before you left, before you got out of bed this morning. I even missed you while I slept alongside you last night. I shall never forget. I shall miss you always, while you are not here with me. This cottage felt like a home until you left this morning. I long to share my home with you, to share my life with you, to be all that my womanhood will allow. And dear man, I do not pray, as you know, but if I did I would pray each and every day for you, for God to return you safely to me. And I would pray that I could be here for you and be the woman you deserve. And I would pray for this war to end soon. Darling, I feel alive. Do you remember when I said that falling in love was like touching fingertips? It has happened, for me, and I hope, for you too. I am the most fortunate of women. Please write, and soon.
Yours forever,
Dorothy
Jan drove through the white landscape, faster than he should. He was very cold but he ignored that. It was so early and dark on this ‘Boxing Day’, as Dorothy called it. She was a beautiful woman, Dorothy Sinclair. Strangely girlish and ripe, and not young. Dorothea. Maybe, he dared to hope, Mrs Dorothea Pietrykowski, because he knew already, he had decided long ago, that she would be his wife – a feeling as immutable as the moon. There was no alternative for them. And she felt it too, he thought. Only a catastrophe could keep them apart. She could do no wrong. And so, he would not return to Poland. He would not, even if he could, which was impossible to foresee. He would stay here in England, this austere country, where people laughed, like his own people, where they had a strong sense of humour, despite all that was threatening them. He liked it here. He could speak the language well enough. And, he thought, this country would owe him after the war. The Polish squadrons were contributing so much at last, it would not be forgotten by this country that did so much ‘by the book’. And the Allies would win this war … of that, now, he was certain. Hitler was a fool, and fools do not prevail. And Churchill was obviously not a fool. The war would be won. Somehow.
Driving away from Dorothy, he felt more alone with each rotation of the wheels. She was so warm. And he had felt so light and fluid, lucid, in her arms, with her legs wrapped around him, and he longed to be back in her bed. It had cost him so much to get up that morning, to stumble out into the freezing dark morning air, to wash and dress, eat her breakfast. Watching her as she so carefully sewed the buttons back on to his shirt, such a patient woman, how his love had risen for her then, her honey-brown hair shining in the candlelight. He realised she was certainly damaging her eyes while sewing in such dim light in the dark morning. But that was who she was, this most selfless of women.
Would she write to him? A proper letter at last? This time, he thought – he knew – she would write to him freely, with love and abandon. He could not wait.
23
We did Whernside today, Ingleborough tomorrow. Went to Bolton Abbey on Monday. So far weather is sunny and warm, aren’t we lucky? We hope to do Penyghent if weather lasts, on Friday. Everything is comfortingly the same up here, just what we all love about it.
(A postcard of Hawes in Wensleydale. Sent to ‘Mum and Dad’ and signed by their daughter Abigail. This was found inside a 1946 copy of Jane Eyre published by the Zodiac Press, and a very good copy, priced at £12 and placed on the hardback fiction shelves in the back room. I was tempted to keep the book, as I had kept the postcard, but it sold quickly.)
It’s a scourging late October day, that day in autumn where you finally understand that summer really is over. The wind is blowing hard, a cold rain is drifting across the churchyard. It’s the sort of rain that seeks to slap your face and blind you.
I am standing at my father’s grave. It’s at the bottom of the churchyard, by the wall, where there had once been stinging nettles and a compost heap. I tiptoe through the graves, some of them familiar from childhood. Mary Sarah Wight, beloved daughter, sister, niece, wife, aunt, mother, grandmother, great-grandmother and friend, 1868 to 1967. That was always my favourite. I always thought, what an amazing life Mary Sarah Wight must have led. To be all those things, to all those people, for all that time.
I stand now, alone in this bleak churchyard, and I feel so small. It frightens me. I had not spoken to my dad about … certain things … and now we can never speak again. He died a fortnight ago. The decline was sudden and swift. The breathing problem returned, only much worse. He was rushed to hospital. And there he stayed for four days, begging all the while to be allowed home to die. I backed him up, and finally I took him home. A kindly nurse called Lisa came to Dad’s house and brought oxygen, showing me how to help him use it. She administered morphine and other drugs. They, all of them – Dr Moore, Lisa, a couple of Dad’s friends – wanted him in the hospice, it was ‘the best place for him’. But when I discussed it with Dad, while he could still reason and say what he wanted, he refused. So I refused too. And between us, somehow, Lisa the nurse and I looked after Dad. And how strange it was. I became familiar with my father’s body, his bodily functions. I washed him, brushed his teeth, combed his hair, washed the bedlinen when it was soiled, dressed him, undressed him. I had to be like a wife to him. Lisa and I were with him when he died. It was swift, in the end, and merciful. Lisa said she had witnessed far worse deaths.
I felt no shock, at first not even any sadness. Then, that night after his death, trying to sleep, I realised I had not phoned anybody to tell them the news. There were a few friends, a few former work colleagues, from his days at Pietrykowski and Wallace, but I would gather myself and ring them in the morning. In fact, I would email most people, which was so much easier and safer. My voice would not hold out, I feared, over the telephone. They were all the sort of people who would not mind my crying, they would come to the funeral and say nice things about my father, and it would be truthfully meant, and it would even be comforting.
There is one other person to tell, of course. I think, I wonder if … I know I should … tell Babunia that her only son has died. We have never told her about his illness. Dad and I discussed it after he
first told me he had it, years ago. We would not worry her; the chances were that she would die before he did. But she is still alive, and Dad is not. And it will take some thought, and sensitivity, and I seriously doubt I am up to the job. I have put it off so far. The time needs to be right. I need to feel strong first. And right now I feel as weak as a soaked tissue.
I’ve been going through my father’s things and I have found his birth certificate, neatly folded and stored in a Manila envelope along with his decree absolute. And my Polish grandfather was alive, according to the birth certificate, on the day that my grandmother registered my father’s birth, which was 13th January 1941. I can only assume my father knew this, as he must have read his own birth certificate. And she was already calling herself Dorothea Pietrykowski, which I think must have been an outright lie – the deed that Suzanne showed me wasn’t drawn up until March 1941. Were my father and grandmother in cahoots? Did Dad know the full story? I wish I had pushed him, and got some answers. Because, of course, now, as I feared, it is too late, another piece of the jigsaw is missing and I may never build up the whole picture. Do I want to, though? I don’t really know what I want any more. I seem to have become bereft of all my energy, as well as bereft of my father.
I miss him. I loved him so much. He was my friend as well as my father.
And if I expect anybody, anyone at all, to pull up in his car and find me standing alone at my father’s grave in this whipping-whispering rain, to stroll over in a nonchalant yet purposeful way, to put his arm around me in friendship, as a colleague might do, and tell me how sorry he is, and offer to buy cakes, and make a sweet, hearty mug of tea, and make me laugh with a pithy and sardonic comment about the inexplicable nature of death, or grief, or of life, I am to be disappointed.
Why do I feel this need to be rescued? I have lived alone, essentially alone, for sixteen years. By alone I suppose I mean without a long-term partner. By alone I suppose I mean without children. For most of my life, I have been without my mother. Now I feel tears blooming, I cannot stop them, and I know I am feeling sorry for myself, that most despicable of emotions. And I need a friend, I know this, I want a friend so badly. And by friend I mean lover, confidant, trusted individual, significant other. Maybe I even mean husband. Maybe all this distils down to that. I have denied myself all of this. I stand still, looking at the sky, the church, feeling the rain mingle with the tears on my face, and I cannot look into my future. I stand alone – for hours, it seems – and finally I recall myself, and I walk back to my car. I climb in, and I am so cold I cannot get the key into the ignition for several pained minutes.
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