The box was easy to find and she opened it eagerly, but besides nursing certificates, an old identity card and medical card there was no sign of Connie’s own papers, just a cutting of her name in the paper for winning the scholarship.
Her birth certificate wasn’t there and with a sinking heart Connie realised that she would have to ask Mama.
Perhaps if this was left to the last minute and she kept up the payments no one would be any the wiser for a few weeks? Evenings rolled by with Connie tracing this foreign journey on the map and planning a list of all her outfits and toiletries.
They all compared notes together, Connie, Tonia and Jane, whose parents had paid up in one lump sum.
Then it was the dreaded exam revision and heads down until all the papers were finished in June. By then Connie’s funds had run out and she was three weeks behind on her dues.
Selling the olive oil lotion had not brought in as much as they’d hoped. It was a wet summer and nobody was in the mood for suntanning. Jane complained that when she put it on that it had stained her best top. ‘I smelled like a fish-and-chip shop.’ Connie had had to give her the money back as they were going to share a room.
‘I’m going to take Nivea Crème,’ Jane said, ‘not this rubbish. Tell Rosa Santini to check her recipe next time.’
Two weeks before the trip Miss Kent asked to see Connie, demanding all the proper documents. ‘You’re holding up the passport, Connie. I need them by tomorrow and your final payment too. You still owe forty pounds. Shall I contact your mother?’
‘No, no. I’ll bring it tomorrow,’ she croaked, heart thumping, knowing her plan was unravelling fast. Surely Mama would see sense, but every time she had badgered Mama, there was always the same reply: ‘Not now, Connie. Can’t you see I’m busy?’
Tonight, though, she was going to have to face them with the truth, but she was sure Mama would not let her down.
She waited until Dr Friedmann left the dining room and went to his study and Auntie Su and Joy were in the kitchen. Mama was glancing through the Guardian and listening to the wireless while she was putting away the spare cutlery, clearing the table for her swotting-up.
‘Mama, I have to tell you something and it won’t wait,’ Connie said, turning the knob of the radio to off.
Mama looked up curious.
‘I need forty pounds and my birth certificate,’ Connie said all in one breath.
‘You need what?’ Mama replied, putting down the paper and looking up at her with amazement.
‘It’s for the school trip. I’ve got to have all the money in by tomorrow,’ she confessed quickly, hoping to disguise her rising panic.
‘But we’ve not decided,’ said Mama.
‘I know, so I’ve been paying bits up until now. I’ve no savings left. Please, you promised,’ she begged.
‘I did no such thing. I said we would talk about it with the others. It slipped my mind.’ Mama shook her head. ‘I thought you’d forgotten about it, and just as well.’
‘I didn’t pester you. You want me to go, don’t you, or did you deliberately forget? It’s all arranged now. I can’t let them down, it’ll spoil it for everyone. It’s all been carefully costed out and they need my balance.’ Mama was shaking her head. ‘We never saw any forms, any details …’
‘I filled them in for you. I know how you hate forms,’ she lied. ‘I’ve been searching everywhere for my birth certificate but it’s not in the box. Where is it? I need it for tomorrow.’
‘Never mind where it is … You are too young to have it,’ shouted Mama, standing up.
‘I’ll soon be old enough to leave school and get married and get into trouble. You’ve no right to hide it from me!’ The words were spitting themselves out of her mouth. ‘School just need to check my identity for the group passport, that’s all.’
Mama was pacing around the room like a trapped tiger in a cage muttering to herself in Greek. ‘You’ve no right to be going behind my back. You’ve brought all this on yourself, you silly girl. I never said you could go. I promised nothing and now you demand forty pounds out of the blue as if I can just take it out of my purse. You are a wicked girl. No! I don’t give my consent,’ she said, banging the table, so Connie picked up a willow-pattern dinner plate and hurled it at the wall in frustration.
‘I hate you! I hate you! You spoil everything. You are so mean,’ she screamed, throwing another plate on the floor.
‘You can pay for those, young madam!’ shouted Mama as Dr Friedmann flew down the stairs to see what the racket was.
‘What is this?’ he asked, as they both screamed at him and he held his hands up. ‘One at a time!’
‘Why did she not bring this to you sooner?’ he was whispering to Mama after she told him the tale and had buried her face in her striped cotton apron.
Looking up, he smiled at Connie. ‘Your mother only wants to protect you. She has always looked out for you. It is not easy for her to talk about past things,’ he replied.
How dare he take her side in this? Connie fumed. He was no relation, or was there something going on she didn’t know about?
‘What has this got to do with Mama? It is my holiday, my school trip. I have saved and saved, and put down all my money as a deposit. She wouldn’t even let me get a Saturday job. I shall ask Granny Esme, if you won’t help me,’ she yelled, storming to the door.
‘Wait, Connie. Your mama has something to tell you, something which explains everything. You will understand then,’ said Dr Friedmann, beckoning her back from the vestibule to sit down.
‘Go on then,’ she said, trying to play the grown-up. ‘If my father was alive he would pay for me to go on this trip.’ It was a mean jibe but she couldn’t help herself. They were holding her fate in the palm of their hands.
‘Ana, go and get the papers. Better it is settled. The child has a right to see them now,’ he ordered.
‘No!’ Mama was shaking her head but she scuttled into the hall and ferreted in the back of the sideboard, which stood by the hatstand. Why hadn’t she thought to look there, Connie wondered.
‘Your mother is doing what is best for everyone, Connie. Don’t be angry with her,’ said Jacob Friedmann, as she returned and threw a pile of tattered papers contained in a shabby wallet onto the table.
‘There, are you satisfied now? Take your papers, for all the good they’ll do you! You won’t get onto the Continent with them as they are,’ she snapped, and Connie could see she was shaking. She’d never seen Mama like this before, even when she and Susan had set-tos in the kitchen.
The battered documents were well thumbed and handwritten in Greek, hard to decipher. There were official stamps and military papers. Even with Connie’s knowledge of Classical Greek, they made no sense to her at all.
‘What does it say?’ Connie asked with hands trembling, trying to pretend she was not scared.
Mama lifted them up. ‘I met your father in Athens at the end of the war. Then you were born and there was nothing official,’ she replied with a shaking voice.
‘Did Freddie marry you after I was born then?’ Connie said with relief knowing that when girls got into trouble this sometimes happened. They ‘had’ to get married. Was that what all this was about? A question of timing?
‘There was no marriage. He was killed. There were complications. It was better to say nothing. Everyone assumed I was a war widow.’ Mama was looking at her with graveyard eyes while Dr Friedmann put his arms around both their shoulders as if to soften this news.
‘So I’m not a real Winstanley. I’m illegitimate. Who was my father then? Somebody from Crete? A Yank, like Melanie Allport in the Lower Sixth?’ Connie was trying to pretend she didn’t care but her legs were trembling under the table.
‘You know who your father is. I met Freddie Winstanley in Athens on shore leave. We were very friendly. I didn’t know then about Auntie Susan in Burma. It was a wartime romance. It was not meant to happen like this.’ Mama’s voice faltered.
‘Like what? You tell me I was not meant to happen? That I am a bastard, an accident? And what has Auntie Susan got to do with this?’
Nobody spoke for a second and then the awful knowledge flashed like a bulb before her eyes. ‘Oh, no! Not Joy as well … Was she some accident too? You both … with my father. It’s disgusting! All these years, you’ve lied to us. Joy and I are half-sisters and nobody said anything to us? Granny wouldn’t lie about all that stuff about Cedric,’ she sneered.
‘It was Esme who thought up the whole story to protect you both. She took us in when she could have turned her back on us,’ Mama said. ‘She didn’t want you to be pointed at in the street.’
Connie could hardly breathe for shock and anger. To be fobbed off with a pack of lies when all the time the Winstanleys kept their grubby little secret, making up fictitious characters like out of Charles Dickens.
‘I don’t believe you. She lied to protect the good name of Winstanley, more like. What is my real name then?’
‘Konstandina Papadaki … See, you are registered here but you will need a special visa to visit another country. It’s too late for all that now. I didn’t want the school to know our business.’ Mama was not looking her in the face. ‘I’m sorry but you brought this on yourself.’
‘I don’t really exist, do I?’ Connie shouted. ‘Does Joy know she’s a bastard?’
‘No, and don’t you go blabbing your mouth off to her. She has been through a bad time. It is not our business to tell her, and Susan may never want to. She has a British passport, as does her mother,’ said Mama.
‘But it’s not fair. She got all that fuss when she was ill. Please let me go!’
‘Connie, I’m tired, my back aches, change the record. It is too late. You are half-Greek, be proud of that.’
‘You’re not or you’d not be so quick to let them change my name to Constance Winstanley!’
‘You are named after your grandmother, Constance Esme, your father’s mother. It is tradition. Joy must wait until Auntie Susan chooses to reveal her story. If she ever does.’
‘On her wedding day most likely … Oh, by the way, did you know your bridesmaid is your sister? It is my business if she is my half-sister. How dare you not tell me? Why have you waited so long?’ Connie cried out, wanting to run away to her room and hide.
‘That’s enough! Let your mother rest. This is hard for her too. She is only trying to shield you. She means for the best,’ said Dr Friedmann, and Connie turned on him.
‘I don’t need your opinion. You’re not my father. All this baloney about doing well at school … What, so you can show me off to pay back the Winstanleys for taking you in? “Look, we have made a clever daughter for you.”’ She was pointing her fingers at them both like daggers.
‘Your mother has had a bad day without all this, Connie. She’ll do what she can.’ But ears were closed to his plea.
‘I suppose Auntie Lee knows, and Uncle Levi, and no wonder Ivy never liked us. Does Neville know? It will be all round Grimbleton if he finds out my mother and auntie are sluts, camp followers to the British Army!’
‘God in heaven! Stop that at once! Don’t dare talk to your mother like that!’ Dr Friedmann yelled.
‘I speak as I find. She goes with soldiers and gets pregnant.’ Connie was weeping with frustration.
‘You have no idea how it was then, and I hope to God you never will. I was young and hungry, and the soldiers were kind and gave us food. They were lonely and we were exhausted. Freddie was handsome and charming and we went dancing and we did all the things you take for granted now. Those freedoms were bought with the blood of young men and women like him. We were fighting in the mountains at an age when you were sitting in your room playing music. The war was over, the Germans were defeated and everyone wanted to go home. Don’t you tell me what I should or shouldn’t’ve done then. Don’t judge when you have no idea what we went through for victory. I have fought dogs for crusts of bread …’ She shivered. ‘I can say no more. I will never talk of that time.’ Mama was sobbing now and Dr Friedmann held her hand.
‘She’s right. She brought you here to be safe and to have a future. She has done well for you and now you have good family, yes?’ he said.
‘They are not my family. It is all lies,’ Connie said, running out into the hallway. Where should she go? To Rosa in town? To Sutter’s Fold and Granny Esme … who was really Joy’s gran as much as hers? They were all Winstanleys but she didn’t feel like one of them any more.
Suddenly the school trip crumbled before her eyes, all that scrimping and saving for nothing. Someone on the waiting list would jump into the place and share a room with Jane, and they would become best friends and come back into the new school year all pally.
Connie had no legs to run away, but sat on the bottom step of the stairs and cried until she thought her heart would burst with anger. Then the door opened and Dr Friedmann came to sit down beside her.
‘I know you are disappointed but I promise you there will be other trips,’ he whispered.
She turned her back on him. ‘How do you know?’ she sniffed, snot running down her lips. ‘I hate her. I hate you all!’
‘I know you do now but your mama loves you. Give her a chance to make amends. One day when you are a mother you will understand what it is to do the best for your child. One day perhaps you will go to Greece and see it for yourself through her eyes. You will see the world we grown-ups have made a mess of. We will sort out your documents. We will make it right for you somehow. You have my word,’ he said, leaning over to put his arm on her shoulder.
Of course she knew he would honour the promise but she was too angry to give him any quarter.
‘She has ruined my life,’ she snapped at him.
‘She is your mother and she gave you life,’ he retorted. ‘It is not the end of the world. You have life and a family that love you. I have no family of my own. The Nazis saw to that in the death camps. They never got a chance of life. I have been blessed with good friends here. Don’t be angry with your mother or Esme. They thought they were doing the best by hiding the truth, but the truth has a way of coming out all on its own at the wrong time.’
‘But I wanted to go on the school trip, that’s all. I didn’t want all this. Why didn’t she tell me?’ Connie said, standing up and running up the stairs.
Dr Friedmann stood in the stairwell patiently, his voice echoing into her room. ‘Perhaps just for this very reason – that when you knew, you would be ashamed of her. Have you never done something like that? Forged a signature … made promises you can’t keep? Your mama is human and run down. We all make mistakes. Think about it.’
She burrowed under the eiderdown, not wanting to hear him. Tomorrow she was going to have to tell the world that she didn’t exist. Tomorrow she would have to let her teachers down and there was only one person to blame. How could she ever trust Mama again?
Yet, if she were honest, somewhere hidden in the secret drawer of her mind the news had come as no surprise. She’d sensed the mystery surrounding their coming to Grimbleton, but to be taken in under such circumstances … How many times had Granny Esme patted her curls and sighed?
Joy was in for a big shock, that was for sure.
Next morning on the bus she whispered the news to Nev and swore him to secrecy. He hardly raised his eyebrow.
‘Honestly, Connie, you’re such a simpleton. Did you never wonder why my mother hasn’t a good word for the Olive Oil Club?’ He paused and then whispered, ‘My theory is she once fancied Uncle Freddie herself.’
‘Never! Has she spilled the beans to anyone?’
‘What do you think? My mother has a mouth as big as the Mersey Tunnel but she’s too frightened what others will think to let slip a family secret. We might not get the Winstanley millions,’ he hooted.
‘You knew about Joy too?’
‘Of course,’ Nev winked.
‘So who was Uncle Cedric?’
Neville pursed his lips. ‘Th
at was Auntie Su’s nice touch, don’t you think, to explain away her presence: just another war widow in the district.’
‘But for us to be sisters like this?’ Connie shook her head. ‘I just can’t take it in.’
‘Don’t worry my lips are sealed. I won’t breathe a word. I’m in enough trouble as it is. Mother thinks I’ll fail my exams and she’s threatening coaching again. She has such big ideas for my small brain.’
‘You’ll get the shop when Uncle Levi retires. You’re made up.’
‘But I don’t want to spend my life dishing out powders and corn plasters, growing fat like him. They sleep in separate rooms, Mum and Dad, you know. Have done for years. I think my dad has a girlfriend on the sly … “The flighty piece from the stocking bar,” Mum calls her.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Connie offered.
‘Don’t be. She’s no angel either, if truth be told. There’s rumours that the Betterware salesman lingers ere long over her dusters of a morning. I just let them get on with it. Anyhow, enough of all that. I’ve got another idea for the Silkies. I saw the Kaye sisters on TV, the ones who had a hit with “Paper Roses”. Let’s get a proper act together like them again. I’ve got some good contacts in Manchester who’ll help us.’
‘How did you manage that?’ Connie was all ears despite her misery.
‘Never you mind. Let’s just say, your cousin is getting himself well connected, if you catch my drift.’ Neville winked again.
She didn’t, but was too polite to say. She was glad he was distracting her from all the doom and gloom ahead. Poor Joy was living in joyful ignorance but it would be cruel to blurt the truth out now.
Connie smiled at her cousin. There was more to him than a mop of curls and flash clothes. It was something to do with taking himself off to Manchester on Saturdays with another dressy lad from the Lawns called Basil Philpot, poor sod. Where they went to he’d never say, just that he’d made some mates at a jazz club who were very theatrical. She’d asked if she might come along but he’d given her a funny look. ‘I don’t think so, Connie, not your scene at all.’
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