Mothers and Daughters

by Fleming, Leah

  Those were dark months, holding on to just a hope until one day, six months later, she found herself sitting in a comfortable room with a box of tissues on the coffee table, facing a beautiful woman of mixed race called Marilyn, who gently explained the purpose of these counselling sessions and how they were necessary to prepare Connie for some future contact with her daughter, if she was agreeable.

  She was now in the departure lounge waiting for boarding. The journey had really begun but there was no certainty that the plane would ever take off.

  They talked through all her past, her hopes, nothing was left out, even the truth about Lorne and Marty. This was a room where the walls wept with all the sadnesses confessed, mistakes, uncertainties explored, all the tears shed.

  Nothing was promised but listening and support, until one morning Marilyn came in with a beam on her face. ‘We’ve made contact with your daughter and she is willing to proceed further. That’s all I can say, but she wishes you to know her name is Joanna, Joanna May.’

  Connie sped through the Manchester streets with wings on her feet. I have a daughter called Joanna and she’s willing to write to me.

  She found herself close to the cathedral and stepped inside. I have to thank someone for this, she prayed, lighting a candle, barely able to stop grinning. Joanna … so close to the name she’d always called her, Anna.

  Joanna … what a beautiful name. Who are you? What do you look like? Will you write to me? Will we ever meet?

  It has been a long and ardent courtship of letters, cards, emails, phone calls, photographs exchanges, tentative reachings out on both sides to understand why things had happened the way they did. There were tears and recriminations, misunderstandings and silences at times, but Marilyn was there, holding their hands each step of the way, guiding them ever closer to this first meeting.

  ‘Fifty things you don’t know about me!’ Joanna sent a questionnaire for her birth mother to devour and Connie replied with a special scrapbook compiled by the Silkies. ‘Fifty things you’ll need to know about Connie.’ It was full of old photos and quotes, her likes and dislikes, her outrageous clothes and gardening mania, even stuff Connie had long forgotten.

  Life histories winged their way through the post and email. Joanna was married to Mike Kenyon with two boys, Harry and Freddie. She lived near Hebden Bridge, close to Sylvia Plath’s grave. She taught modern languages at a further education college and supported Burnley football team. She had lived most of her life close to Bradford.

  Then, when they felt ready, this plan was hatched, this holiday, this private honeymoon of sorts, away from prying eyes. Where better than Crete to share time?

  Now is the moment of truth. Connie shakes as she stands at the barrier watching the first dribble of pale-faced passengers pushing trolleys out into the foyer. Where is she?

  And then she sees Joanna, tall, sandy-haired, beautiful, just like her photo, just like the portrait of Freddie on the piano. They lock eyes in recognition and move towards each other in a gentle, tentative hug for all those missed years.

  My daughter … you’re here, my firstborn at long last!

  There are no words, only tears. One journey has ended and another wonderful journey is beginning. There’s no certainties, only hope, but that is enough for now, Connie smiles as she guides her daughter into the sunlight.

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  Read on for an exclusive extract from Leah

  Fleming’s new novel, Remembrance Day, coming in

  autumn 2009 …

  Prologue

  The ceremony is about to begin, the shuffling feet and coughing settle as the dignitaries line up in uniforms, cassocks and mayoral chains. A silence descends over the crowds on this most solemn of mornings.

  We stand before the new war memorial while a scuffle of film crews jockey for position. There is a chill Martinmas wind from the north but I am well wrapped with quilt and cushions in my wheelchair.

  At last after all these years justice has been done, the dead are honoured; all of them by name. These cobblestones once heavy with old sorrows, damp with tears and bloodshed now sparkle with hope and pride. I never thought to see this day in my lifetime.

  No more arguing about stuff that can’t be altered, no more dissention in the village about planning permissions. This rock says it all with the names of the dead, etched on marble tablets.

  That I have made the effort to witness this moment is miracle enough at my great age. My eyes are dimming, my hands tremble and my limbs disobey commands. Old age comes not alone, they say, but my heart leaps to see such a crowd of supporters. I hope our men folk would be proud that we’ve settled things at last.

  We wait in patience in the chill air, all the West Sharland faithful and their far-flung relatives, all the families represented where possible, prosperous in thick overcoats and stylish black hats with grandchildren, tall as saplings, and great grandchildren on their knees bemused by the pageantry unfolding.

  There are faces I don’t recognise but in their features are echoes of village folk long buried. There is new life and fresh growth here and that is good.

  The clouds part as a ray of weak sun beams down for a second, haloing all the hand-held wreaths and circlets. Blood red poppies flash on lapels like medals. The golden light glides across the green fells and stone walls above us, across the slate rooftops of familiar old buildings and my eye turns to the Smithy but it is long gone.

  They have put me in the front as one of the honoured guests, alongside the great and the good of the district; just another old matriarch, an ‘ancient of days’ waiting to pay her respects. There are plans to interview me later but I have other ideas.

  In my fancy I see sepia faces hidden in the shadows, a crowd of ghosts watching, waiting with us, faces of the long dead from the war who knew only suffering, sacrifice and shame. What would they make of all this now?

  My granddaughter stands upright, breasted like a plump capon. I am so proud of the ornery spirit she has showed in fighting our corner. By her side her son, spitten of his great grandfather, built like a tree trunk, the wind and sun etched on his bronzed brow.

  There is no one left to recognise me, a few may guess a little of my history. I am just one of the many and want no fuss. I have been absent so many years but this place is a very part of my being.

  Nothing has changed but everything is changed, the familiar Yorkshire air is sweet after the dryness of the Arizona desert, the rooks caw in the churchyard ash trees even into my fading ears. I had forgotten how raucous and noisy they are.

  The cars parked right through the village, the houses expanded into barns and outbuildings, speak of a prosperity and comfort we could only dream of as children.

  My mind is flooding with memories. I have rounded a circle in coming back to West Sharland, fulfilling a promise, honouring those closest to me but it is hard to contain the ache still in my heart for their undeserved sufferings.

  What has driven me back here one last time is a strange yearning, a sense of the wanderer returning to this now sacred space for peace before my long sleep. My days are leaching away but no matter.

  To live long is not enough and it is a wise soul who knows his beginning and his end and makes some answer for the life given him. Over the years I have thought it fitting to set my own story on paper, to turn over the pages in my mind and wonder what I would do if what was done long ago could be undone. This task has been a close companion in my widowhood. They would not let me fly back so in my cabin suite on the Atlantic crossing, I re read the chapters, relived those parts of my life that brought me from the West Riding to the new world and back.

  This journal will be left among the archives of West Sharland when I’m gone but not before. Perhaps someone will turn its pages with interest and profit from what I write. For make no mistake, there are secrets within that belong to this village alone, secrets that explain the real reason why no war memorial was ever erected in our village until now.

  But enough
, the age old ceremony begins. The silver band is marching down the hill, gathering a crowd just as it did all those years ago in the late summer of 1914. How trusting, how ignorant, how innocent we were then. Little did any of us know what heartache lay ahead …

  1

  August 1913

  It was just another Yorkshire afternoon in high summer with nothing to mark it out as a day that would change their lives forever. The young Bartley brood had done their Saturday chores in the morning heat, watered the horses waiting to be shod under the shade of a clump of elderberry trees in the paddock behind the Forge. Newton and Frankland, their broad shoulders tanned like leather were helping Father by pumping water from the well into the slate tank at the back of the yard for his wash in the zinc tub. It was time for his Bible class preparation. Asa Bartley never liked to touch the holy book with blacksmith’s rusty fingers.

  Selma, his young daughter made her usual rounds of the village shops with mother’s wicker basket; off cuts for stew from Stan, the butcher, soda crystals for Monday’s wash tub from Mrs Marshbank at the Co op, stopping to chat with neighbours taking advantage of the end of their shift at the cotton mill and picking up a second-hand copy of the local Gazette left for Mother to read in the afternoon heat.

  There was a spot under one of the apple trees in the croft where Essie could put her feet up for a few precious minutes out of sight. It was one of the hottest afternoons in the whole summer. Doors were wide open onto the street with strips of beaded rope pinned over the lintels, waving in the breeze to discourage the flies, windows propped up with bedding hanging out to bleach in the sunshine, stools set outside in the shade to catch passers by for crumbs of gossip. Dogs panted in the shade and the Smithy cat, Jezebel was curled up under a hedge.

  The rooks were silent for once high up in the ash trees of St Wilfred’s, West Sharland as Selma scuttled through the short cut ginnel between the Main Street and the Forge, her striped cotton shirt clinging to her liberty bodice, her long skirt and petticoats sticking to her thin legs. She was boiling hot and dying for a swim.

  ‘I’m going down to the Foss,’ she announced when she brought in the errands, the paper and the change. Essie was laying down the best rug for the Sabbath, tidying away the bread, cheese and pickle dinner. It was too hot for a full meal. There was a pot jug of lemonade on the dresser covered with a beaded cloth ready to be put back on the slate shelf under the stairs; the coolest cupboard in the cottage.

  ‘Not on your own, you’re not,’ she replied. ‘You’ll wait while Frank and Newt do their chores. You know I don’t like you going down there alone. It’s private land. I don’t want her ladyship on my doorstep again and her with such a down on chapel goers.’

  The Cantrells owned everything in Sharland. They didn’t mix in the village being more gentry folk than farmers. The Colonel was serving in the army and his boys were away at school. They were churchers not chapellers and lived at Waterloo House with their sons, servants and a carriage. Lady Hester was queen of the district but Father said she was above herself. Selma had never seen her sons except far down the field in the annual cricket match between the hall and the village.

  ‘Mam, I’m boiling in all these clothes and they’ll be ages yet!’ Selma protested. If only she could strip off like her brothers who jumped in the water in their undershorts or better still with no clothes at all. As the youngest and the only girl she had to tag along with them to school, to chapel. Her best friends, Sybil and Annie, lived on scattered farms and it was over a two-mile walk up hill to play with them.

  The path from the village to the Foss was well trodden by village children. It was a secret cavern, a hideaway, where the beck cascaded over silver stone shelves, falling headlong into a deep pool overhung with trees and bracken, a hiding place for salmon and trout and the slabs were cool to bare feet. There was always lots of splashing and fooling about but the water was cold and shallow in parts and fathoms deep in others. You had to know where to jump in. It was supposed to be haunted by a highwayman who fell to his death when chased by the Squire’s men in the good old days.

  Half an hour later, Selma trudged behind her brothers as usual. They could hear squeals of laughter ahead echoing across the rocks. There would be the usual gang of village lads all vying for a good jumping-off point with silly girls giggling, eyeing them up. Selma shivered by the cool shade of the trees. She thought all that romancing was silly and embarrassing. She never knew where to look when the boys took off their shorts. Their willies all shrivelled up with the chill of the water.

  Now there were strangers in their pool, picnicking across the bank, boys she’d never seen before dressed in proper one-piece swimming costumes with a basket of food on a rug. They stared across at the intruders, nodded but said nothing.

  ‘It must be them twinnies of Cantrells, alike as two peas,’ whispered Newt with a respectful nod in their direction. Selma eyed them up with interest. They were tall and gangly about fifteen or so, fair haired and slender as willows not rugged and leathered like her brothers. She’d never seen a proper bathing suit before on a lad.

  Newt and Frank stripped off their workday shirts and britches to splash in the water. None of the Bartleys were strong swimmers but they were good at diving under water, turning circles and coming up somewhere distant to where they’d gone in. Selma dipped her toes in the water and screamed. It was freezing.

  Not to be outdone, the two boys on the far bank started shouting and pointing. ‘Fancy a diving match?’ One of them turned and shouted. ‘Come on let’s show these bumpkins how to dive!’ The other brother hung back, watching as first Newt and then Frank intent on their own fun, ignored the jibe by jumping off the ledge midway. Selma edged herself into the water embarrassed to take her clothes off now there was an audience. Better to paddle and not show off Monday’s washing to strangers.

  One of the boys swam across the beck and climbed up onto the slate ledge jutting out above where Newt had jumped in. Selma gawped up as the boy postured on the edge and made a perfect dive into the pool. He rose to the surface grinning and that was the first time she clapped eyes on Master Guy Cantrell. The other twin was already clambering up even higher to the topmost shelf that none of them had dared use before

  Frank shook his head. ‘I wouldn’t go that high, chum. It’s not safe.’

  ‘I’m not your chum,’ the boy pouted.

  ‘Don’t be a fool, Angus. Do what the young man says,’ yelled his brother.

  ‘Come on, Newt, can’t let them toffs show us up!’ Frank shouted in defiance.

  ‘Come on Guy, I never took you for a coward!’ yelled his twin brother from his rocky perch.

  It was then that Selma knew that something awful was about to happen and she couldn’t stop it. ‘Don’t jump, please, Frank, on our Mam’s life. Showing off ’s not worth it!’ Selma screamed. Frank hovered, shocked at her outburst and backed off just as Angus Cantrell took a flying leap from the highest ledge, plunging down into the dark abyss, down and down and not bobbing up again.

  Everyone was in the water, sensing something was wrong. Guy was splashing about unsure of his bearings now. Selma pulled off her skirts diving deep, opening her eyes to get her bearings. Newt was already down there, coming up for air, gasping before diving again. It was Frank who spotted the boy on the rock floor curled up. Selma and Newt dived in to grab him but he was wedged.

  ‘Over here!’ she screamed to Guy who dived with them to rescue his brother, pulling and pulling to set the boy free. They dragged him to the surface with a gash on the side of his head. He was not breathing. It was then that Guy took over turning him on his stomach, lifting his arms to raise his chest. ‘Come on Gus! Someone go and get help! Give me a hand,’ he ordered Selma while Frank ran off for help. It felt like hours not minutes before the boy coughed and spluttered but made no other sounds and went back to sleep.

  Selma swam across the beck and waded back with the picnic rug over her head to cover his cold body. ‘He’s alive!�
� said the boy with the ink blue eyes glinting with fear and relief as he looked up at them with gratitude.

  ‘What a daft thing to do!’ Newt said and Selma wanted to kick him.

  ‘Shut yer gob! Let’s get some warmth into his limbs. He’s so cold. Pile all our clothes on him.’ She felt so helpless waiting for help. They must keep him warm and dry. That was what you did with a sick horse.

  It was an age before the servants from the Hall arrived with a flurry of blankets and Angus was lifted from arm to arm until he could be placed on a dog cart. He made no movement.

  ‘Hells bells! Mama will kill us for this,’ sighed Guy who looked close to tears. Selma resisted the urge to reach her arm out to him. It wouldn’t be proper. ‘Praise God, he’s alive and that’s all that matters,’ she whispered.

  ‘Thanks only to you and your brothers. My mother will be so grateful. What a frightful thing to happen and I don’t even know your names,’ he said reaching out to shake their hands. His fingers were like ice, his lips were trembling with shock and chill.

  ‘We’re Bartleys from the Forge, Newton and Frankland, my two brothers and I’m Selima but everyone calls me Selma for short. Sorry we were trespassing on your land.’

  ‘Thank God you were and from now on feel free to enjoy this cursed place. I don’t think I’ll ever dare come here again. We’ll be gated by Mama when she hears about this. What unusual names you have … I’m just Guy Cantrell, by the way, but you must call me Guy. How can we ever thank you?’