I go back to the road and decide to walk up the track through the field to the right of the church that must lead up to where Woodton Hall once stood. There's no sign saying Private. It even looks a bit like a footpath. Great drifts of snowdrops everywhere to my left and right. Tractor wheels have made deep ruts which have filled with brown puddles, each one iced over.
But, when I get close up to what must have been the old garden wall, I stop because I realise there's a proper house - newish, or at least newly done-up - beyond and also a lawnmower of some kind propped by the wall. Someone must live here.
I stand and listen for a moment. Nothing. Complete silence. Now I'm closer I can see that someone's been rebuilding the wall. A painstaking operation. A pile of the original old orange-and-pink bricks stacked in a corner, ready to be inserted back into the old puzzle, the wall.
A noise behind me and I turn around sharply. I don't know what I'm expecting to see. A fifteen-year-old girl in a dark bonnet and paisley shawl, gathering snowdrops? But there's nothing there, no one. Just the drip of water - snow thawing in the trees. And the dog next door who's started barking again.
Even though we tell him to go, our child comes back. First he comes back using his own front-door key, the key it never crossed our mind to take from him. When we ask him to leave, he says OK, he'll go, but we can't stop him - he'll be right back whenever he wants.
That afternoon, we get a locksmith round and change the locks. New keys for everyone. I stand and watch them being cut in the smoky shop full of beat-up shoes waiting to be reheeled.
Break-in? says the man, cigarette in mouth, turning the key.
I nod and try to smile.
Too bad. Still, you want to be safe, don't you?
The second time our child comes back, he comes in a haze of pure fury, discovering the door is locked to him, threatening to destroy the whole house if we don't let him in. He wants money. He goes away but says he'll be back. It's become quite normal for him to sleep all day and stay up all night, so it's all too easy for him to drop by exactly when we're vulnerable. Middle of the night, 4 a.m., dawn. Keeping his hand pressed hard on the bell and then, when we disable it, banging on the door, kicking it, shouting threats. When this doesn't work, he takes my large pots of geraniums and hurls them, one by one, at the door.
Three pots smashed. A grey light struggling into the dawn sky. We try to talk to him through the window.
When you'll accept help with drugs, we say softly, when you'll agree to behave like a member of this family, we'll let you in. But not until then. We love you very much, we'll always love you, but we just can't help you until you let us.
He tells us we're cunts. He says as far as he's concerned we can fuck right off Then he takes another pot in his hands.
He'll go in a minute, his father whispers, ashen-faced, give him one more minute. I'm sure he'll go. He knows this is pointless.
One more pot, I tell my boy through the letter box, and we call the police.
Smash.
His father stands there in his dressing gown and dials. I see that his hands are shaking. To have to call the police about his own son. Dismay all over his face.
They arrive impressively quickly and seem (to our surprise) completely unsurprised, as if it's entirely normal for seventeen-year-old boys to be locked out of their homes and threatening criminal damage at dawn.
We're so sorry to trouble you, we both say.
Not at all, sir, it's fine, not a problem. Hope we can help.
The police ask us what we want. Do we want to press any charges? Oh no, no, definitely not.
A warning then? Just to send him on his way?
Thanks so much, we say, a warning would be great. We're so sorry about all this.
It is about 7 a.m. All this time, I've been very calm. I haven't cried at all up to now. So it's funny that it's actually this moment - the very moment when the friendly and sensitive neighbourhood police are talking firmly to our boy, the moment when, standing there on the pavement next to our house, our home, his home, his shoulders crumple and he suddenly looks so very tired and starts at last to move off - when I start to weep.
Maybe it's those words. Send him on his way. What way? Where? Isn't his way our way? Ever since we brought him home from the hospital on that sleepy, newborn afternoon. Home. I blot my eyes with the edge of my dressing gown.
We watch through the window as the police say one more thing to our boy. He seems to listen and say something back and then he shrugs and - starts at last to walk away. My heart bursts.
The next moment unrolls fast.
Shall I run after him? I ask his father, assuming the answer will be no way, but eyeing my coat and getting ready to go all the same. I'm grabbing at kitchen roll to dry my tears, stuffing my feet into trainers.
He hesitates. Well, may be we could give him some breakfast or something?
And that's all I need. I love him for that. For his unsteadiness, his inconsistency. For giving in.
It's good that the police van has gone by the time I pull the coat on over my pyjamas and run down the street. Looking left and right, looking for my boy. The air is freezing. He's sitting alone at the bus stop, head bent.
Oh, is all he says, when I sit down next to him.
Sweetheart -
Go away. (Bottom lip jutting.)
Come home and let me cook you some breakfast. Go on, darling. You look hungry. Dad and I just want to talk to you calmly.
He regards me without anger. He blinks. His pupils are tiny.
You think calling the police on your own son is a calm thing to do?
A bus shudders past.
We won't tolerate you attacking and damaging the house, I tell him, you know that.
He says nothing. I try to smile.
Look at me - I'm sitting here on the Walworth Road in my pyjamas. Come on. Come and have some breakfast. Please?
The please is a mistake. His father would tell me not to beg.
I'm tired. I've been up all night. Got to go and find somewhere to crash out, he mutters.
Where? Where will you sleep? Where are you staying?
Dunno.
Then come and have some breakfast and let's at least talk about it. You can sleep at home, I add, knowing that this too is a mistake.
I don't know if! feel like eating, he says and I feel myself relax as a crack seems to open up.
I'll make you eggs. Any sort of eggs.
He says nothing. A bus draws up and my heart contracts. But it's not his bus.
French toast?
He stands up slowly.
My bus, he says.
No it isn't -
You don't know where I'm going.
He turns his solemn gaze on me - I can't imagine what my face looks like - and then he gets on the bus, turning back for a quick second to say: Thanks anyway, Mum.
And then he's gone.
I make my way back down the road. Holding my coat collar closed and treading very carefully, as If the ground could explode at any moment.
His father opens the door and I feel him check my face for tears.
He wouldn't come?
I shake my head.
Hey, well done. It was worth a try.
Like two extremely old people, we climb the stairs and go back to bed.
Like I said, you are the ninth child. Ninth of ten. You aren't the baby. The baby is Ellen.
Ellen Margaret Yelloly, born four years after you, littlest sister of a numerous and united family, does not seem to have left any works of art behind her. Nothing of hers has been bought at auction and passed around Mayfair. But she has something you never had, something far more precious: almost twenty-two years more life.
Ellen. When you die in that room in Ipswich, Ellen is just seventeen years old, on the edge, about to tip from girl into woman. What's she like? Plump or slender? Funny or serious? Does she look up to you, or does she annoy you? Is she your confidante, or you hers? Does your death make her lonely? Y
ou die of shock. She never even gets to say goodbye to you. Does it break her heart, the way I think it would break mine?
You never see her again and, because you fall out of the story at this point, you have no idea what happens next. But I know. I'll tell you what happens.
In 1845, seven years after your death, Ellen catches measles and recovers - but slowly. Then, just as she's getting better, just as she's regaining her balance in life, the family foe strikes, knocking her back down. Consumption. It strikes just as it struck you and Sophy and Nick. Consumption. How your mother must have come to loathe that word.
But in January 1850, your mother thanks God in her pocket almanac for
raising my beloved child up from her most dangerous illness and blessing us with means to give her sea air. Oh bring me safely through all my anxieties and bless all my dear children!
My beloved child.
Her prayers are answered, partly anyway, because that same My year Ellen recovers sufficiently to marry your cousin Captain John Tyssen, thirty-eight, son of your Uncle Samuel Tyssen of Narborough Hall. Your mother adores her brother Sam. That marriage must delight her.
There are other cousins too. Sophia, Charles, William, Henry, Honora and John. You must have played together. Gone on visits to Narborough Hall to see them. There's a painting of Narborough in your album, so you must have known it well.
Ellen and John are married at Cavendish in Suffolk and they have three sons, none of whom live. All die within days or weeks or a year of birth. But on 8 May 1856, she finally gives birth to a healthy daughter, Honora. Another daughter, Eleanor, follows in spring 1860.
But by then your sister is severely ill and she dies a week later. She is just forty. Your cousin Captain John is left alone to cope with two little girls. And, with Ellen's death, your mother has just lost yet another child, her baby. First Nick, then you and Jane, then Sophy and now Ellen. How does she bear it?
Dear Narborough Local History Society I wonder if you can help me. I'm an author currently writing a book about a girl called Mary Yelloly whose uncle (Samuel Tyssen) lived at Narborough in the eighteenth century. Is there anything you can tell me about Narborough Hall beyond what's on your website? I'm hoping to visit soon-also is the Hall ever open to the public? Are you by any chance able to put me in touch with its owner?Any help you can give me would be hugely appreciated.
Very best wishes and thanks,
Julie Myerson
Dear Julie,
Just back from holiday and replying to emails. The present owners of the Hall are Robert and Joanne Sandelson. They are good friends of mine and I am sure would help. The gallery in the Hall is open on Sundays in the summer, also the grounds, and there is a fair at the end of May. I can check the dates and let you know. Last year The Book if Narborough was published by Halsgrove Community History series, which I edited. Information on the Tyssen family is included and I am happy for you to use any information of interest to you. I have several original letters relating to the disputes between the Tyssens and the local vicar, details of the Tyssen collection of coins and medals, and a few other bits and pieces about Samuel Tyssen, his son (also Samuel) and Charles Tyssen. You are most welcome to visit to see if anything is of use. I have been trying to think where I have heard the name Yelloly before. Best wishes, David Turner, Chairman Narborough History Society
David Turner is waiting for me as he said he would be at the low wooden gate which is the entrance to the Narborough Hall estate. It's a shrill and windy late-March day - mauve sky with flashes of sun, clouds scudding. On the distant lawn, a small white dog bouncing.
I'll hop in with you, if you don't mind, he says.
I apologise to him for the smell of dog.
Oh goodness, I'm used to it.
As we crunch up the drive to the Hall, he tells me that he was born right here, in the Gatehouse. His mother and father met at the Hall in the 1920S, when his father was the gardener and his mother was in service as a maid. Every summer the Critchley-Martins, who owned the place back then, went away and the Turners would move into the Hall for the whole six weeks and look after it.
We'd have the place entirely to ourselves - we kids would spend the whole summer running wild around the house and grounds.
I look at him.
That must have been amazing.
Oh, certainly it was, it was. But my sisters were much older, you know, so it was mostly just me on my own.
I ask him if he still lives there in the Gatehouse now.
Oh no, no, I live in the new part of the village. Sadly.
* * *
We park by the side of the house. Beyond the gravel area is an enticing glimpse of a well-tended walled kitchen garden. Old walls dappled with chilly spring sun. The same crumbly orange brick I saw at Woodton. Your grandfather's house. Is this what you would have seen, hanging out of the windows as the Yelloly carriage cantered up the drive?
We walk round to the front of the house.
Ah, and there she is! says David and he points proudly to a small, dark-haired woman in a lilac fleece and wellingtons who's bent over the flowerbeds.
Joanne Sandelson pulls off one gardening glove and shakes my hand. Sun flashes across the garden and she shades her eyes with her other hand. The little white dog - who turns out to be a retriever puppy - is still jumping up and down at her feet. In front of her looms the house, elegant, ancient and enormous. Beyond, acres and acres of formal garden giving way to misty grey-green parkland, stretching away as far as I can see.
This is the most incredible place, I say, and she smiles.
It is an incredible place. Your grandfather Samuel Tyssen buys it while in the throes of grief, inconsolable after the death of your young grandmother, Sarah.
Your grandmother is an heiress who, according to Florence Suckling, comes with a handsome dot and she and your grandfather are married with some pomp in Hackney in 1782. There were a couple of miniature paintings which Florence must have seen. She describes your grandmother as having frank and innocent blue eyes but a slightly peevish mouth. Your grandfather's face was refined and intelligent but his eyes were merry.
The refined and intelligent man and the girl with the frank blue eyes live at Felix Hall in Essex, where they quickly have five children. But only two of them, Sarah (your mother) and Samuel, survive. By the time the fifth baby dies, your grandmother is very ill indeed - yes, the family foe again - and all she wants in the world is to be back home with her mother. So her husband takes her back to Hackney, where she dies and is buried with her ancestors. She is thirty-five.
And your grandfather is so heartbroken at losing his wife that he can no longer bear the sight of Felix Hall. Too many memories. Too much loss. That's when he sells it and instead buys Narborough, where he lives with his son, your Uncle Sam, while five-year-old Sarah, your mother, remains with her grandmother in Hackney.
Ten years later, your grandfather dies without making a will, and the trustees sell of fall of the Narborough treasures at auction, letting out the old Hall itself Sam is away at school and your mother finds herself under the legal care of guardians but otherwise completely alone in the world. She is fifteen.
It is your cousin Charles Tyssen - older brother of Ellen's husband Captain John - who finally inherits Narborough in 1845. He extends the existing watermill and adds a small cottage at the back, but in 1850 he sells the whole estate to a wealthy linen draper from Norwich. It is sold on to at least two more owners before it becomes the property of the Critchley-Martins, who employ the yet-to-be-born David Turner's parents.
We drink tea out of Cath Kidston cups in the homely kitchen at Narborough Hall. Cream floors and squishy sofas and, glimpsed through the back door, children's brightly coloured tricycles flung down on the patio. David tells me that, back in his childhood, this used to be the gun room.
Really? You actually remember it as the gun room? Joanne asks him and he nods vigorously.
Oh yes, yes.
It's clear, when
I explain to Joanne why I'm interested in the Hall, that she doesn't know a single thing about the Tyssens. But then, I think, why would she? For her this place is about the future, not the past. She's brought her own young family here. She's not interested in making a museum. She's doing the garden. She's making a home.
On the wall are striking black-and-white photos of beautiful dark-haired children, their faces daubed with mud. They look like warriors - ferocious and androgynous, huge dark timeless eyes.
Your kids?
Joanne nods.
Those pictures were taken in the earthworks over there. You should get David to tell you about it. It must have been there in your Yelloly girl's time.
David explains that there's an old Iron Age fort just across the garden beyond the lake. About an acre wide. Trees, mud, a clearing. He played there as a child and Joanne's kids now play there too.
I expect children have played there for centuries, he says.
It's ideal, Joanne agrees. The kids love it. Perfect for creeping up on people and shooting arrows, that sort of thing.
After tea, Joanne takes me on a tour of the house and David follows. She explains that they've only been here three years and, once they'd bought the house, there really wasn't any money left over for furniture.
I mean, if you're wondering why the rooms are so bare, she laughs.
I ask her how she found the house.
Would you believe, it was just advertised in the back of a glossy magazine? We knew we couldn't afford it but we just had to see it anyway. It sounds crazy, I know. We wanted to live around here but we never set out to buy something like this. Some days I still can't quite believe we did it, that we really live here.
We cross a dim, wide stone-flagged hall, and go into a very grand drawing room, vast, high-ceilinged. Joanne tells me this was the Chinese room and that right up until the 1920S or '30S it had the most amazing mauve-and-green silk wallpaper, which was almost certainly original - dating from the first Samuel Tyssen's time, perhaps? The bay window looks straight down the drive and lawns. Joanne points out that the plaster ceiling rose is decorated with dragons. I tip my head back to look at it and, rather wonderfully, see about fifty yellow balloons also nestling up there.
The Lost Child Page 5