Patrick’s sister, Betty – who was the same age as Poppy, born in 1924 – was also a FANY. Though just as young, she proved an expert decoder and was moved to Grendon Hall in Buckinghamshire, not far from Bletchley Park. Forty women, Betty among the youngest of them, worked as decoders at the high-security transmitting and receiving station there. The implications of a mistake didn’t deter Patrick’s sister; with a steadier disposition, she became one of the most proficient of that small cohort. On a recent visit to England, many years after both Patrick and Poppy were dead, I took this aunt, then in her late eighties, out for an early dinner in the town where she lives near London. When we arrived at the restaurant, we were the only diners and the Italian waiter paid us extravagant attention. On a hunch, I asked her the question I never asked Poppy.
‘Did she fall for any of them?’ I asked.
‘Oh,’ my aunt said, turning a little pink. ‘Oh, no, I wouldn’t think so.’
But when I pressed, she said, ‘Well, there may have been one. Just a little.’
‘What was he like?’
‘Oh, he was terribly handsome. They used to run races in the garden, and he’d let Poppy win and then carry her back to the house. I never told Patrick.’
Over a second glass of wine that sent her even pinker, I heard for the first time that she was in Germany four days after the Armistice, part of a Special Operations Executive contingent stationed in Cologne. From there she drove east to the Displaced Persons camps, where many of the agents she’d tracked from Grendon Hall were trapped with no papers. The task was to find and identify them. The Official Secrets Act casts a long shadow, and even the charming Italian waiter couldn’t get more from her than that, or how many they rescued, but he did coax her into describing the bomb damage that had flattened Cologne, the acres of rubble surrounding what was left of the building in which they were billeted. It was a ghost town, she said, until at night the flickers of light from lamps and fires revealed the city’s population living beneath the ruins.
‘Did the one Poppy liked survive?’ I asked.
‘I don’t think so.’ She shook her head, and I saw the shadow pass over her.
‘And you? Did you fall for anyone?’
‘We were very young,’ she said, and the shutters came down.
It was time to take her home.
Poppy’s friend Gillian, whose sister had been a FANY, told the story of the dog Poppy managed to keep with her, despite a stern sergeant and a litter of puppies, right through the war. The big shaggy dog was there in the cottage in Shropshire where Poppy and my father lived when they were first married and I was a baby. There was no electricity, and only a pony and trap to get into town. Poppy, at twenty-two years old, embraced this as further liberation from her father. She’d rather a remote cottage and the slow clop into town with me in a basket beside her than all the cars in London, Gillian said.
Patrick never said much about Poppy’s time as a FANY, again the Official Secrets Act perhaps, or a lingering reluctance to speak of the war that had kept them apart; besides, I think he was jealous of those photos. Handsome chaps, he’d said when we’d looked at them on a visit to Jane. But when I sat beside him at the end, he’d return to that Shropshire cottage, and how Poppy would sing in the kitchen and how pretty she was; he’d turn the pearl necklace between his fingers and small snatches of memory would come to him: the carrots they grew, an apple tree, meeting Gertie and Ted at the station with the pony and trap. When I pushed the story forward to the dark years of her ‘nervous breakdown’ and the doctor at the hospital, he handed the necklace back to me. His eyelids became heavy and he slipped into another dream zone, until Betsy came bustling in at the end of her movie.
Martha has the pearls now, and she too wears them often. I gave them to her when she was engaged to be married. When she broke off the engagement in an act of great courage given that the date had been set and the venue booked, she offered to give them back. I refused. It wasn’t a reward for ‘achieving marriage’, as her great-aunt had put it in her letter of congratulation. The necklace was a gift from me to her, and through me a gift from her grandmother Poppy, who would have been right behind her in this refusal of a marriage she came to realise would be a mistake. By then I’d learned that those tiny pearls grow naturally in freshwater mussels or saltwater oysters when a grain of sand gets into their soft interior and the creature encases it in a smooth substance that hardens into pearl. It’s a protection against an irritant, a remaking of a grain of sand into an object of beauty. Seed pearls, coming into being as they do by chance and processes of nature, need a lot of work to prepare them for use in jewellery, and they are often imperfect, without the uniformity of larger cultured pearls. This imperfection pleases me, and it pleases Martha.
It was in the summer of 2005 that Martha didn’t marry. It was also the summer of the London tube bombings. Amy was working as a producer for the London bureau of Tokyo Broadcasting System TV (she is fluent in Japanese) and on 7 July she spent much of the day and most of the night with a camera crew outside Edgware Road tube station, not knowing until late in the evening that Martha’s close friend Laura was thought to have been on the train that had been bombed; she was, though it took days before she could be identified. Of all the people in London, that Laura should be in the same carriage as that bomber. The shock of it. And Sophie, my Sophie (who had a daughter at primary school by then), was on a bus in front of the bus with the bomb that went off in Tavistock Square. Why? Why Laura? Why that summer? What if it’d been Sophie? The harsh answer is why should it not? Why should it not be any of us? It was a tough reminder – that we in the safe West can forget – that private life and public history are always contingent, as Poppy had learned in the war. Were you born in England, or in Poland? We forget this, and it is a dangerous forgetting. Not because we might get blown up, which we might, but because we live in the same world as the bombers, as the angry young men and women who strap on the explosives that will kill them as well as us. We are part of a world – just a part, but not apart, though we’d like to deny it – that produces their hardened hearts, as well as those we love, who are doing nothing more exceptional than catching the tube or the bus on their way to work on a regular London morning.
That summer we went as a family to Italy. Jane had found a villa near Padua, and had booked it as an after-wedding holiday. It had changed its mood by the time we were there, Martha with us, pale and quiet, lying in the garden, face down, breathing into the grass. We lived around her, one of us sitting quietly beside her, taking her food, coaxing her to eat when she didn’t want to join us. When she did come to the table under the awning (buffalo mozzarella, fat soft tomatoes), it was Tom she wanted beside her; a quiet brotherly presence that didn’t require words when there were none. I knew what it was to be brought so low that the ground is the only place for you: the smell of grass, the sounds of the sky that you can’t yet turn to face. I knew that it was better for her to be there with us around her than to suffer it alone, but I saw my sister’s sorrow watching a daughter no longer the child she could pick up and kiss better. I felt it too, and it surprised me, this fierce insistence, the instinct that says, Why her, why not us, we’re older, we should take the bullet.
Three years later, when Amy’s first baby was born, another English summer to welcome this first child of a new generation, the man Martha was then living with woke one morning with a blurry eye. A blurry eye, that’s all, though it wasn’t, and a few weeks later the eye was removed along with the melanoma growing across its retina. You couldn’t write it in a novel, I thought, when the phone rang in Sydney with this news; an editor would say it was too much, too coincidental, piling all that onto the same character. But Martha is not a character and life can, and does, deliver blow after blow to the same person, even if she is a middle-class English girl who’s never had a parking fine. Martha had a lot to square up to, and she did. She began her own journey in a quiet room with the woman who took the therapist’s ch
air opposite her. And as she did, she wore the pearls that had come from her grandmother. She was barely six when Poppy died, yet she remembers her, snatches of memory, a presence that lived in her through those dark times. When she was ready, Martha strapped on her boots and came here, to Sydney, to stay with me. Back and forth, she flew, needing another view of the sky, other ground to practise her tread upon, until she came for a year, giving up her job at a tough school on the outskirts of Leeds, where for eight years, through all that grief, she’d taught drama to students, some of whom had never been outside the county, or to a theatre. Not for the likes of us, Miss. For Martha, Poppy’s granddaughter, the challenge was not only to show them that a theatre like the West Yorkshire Playhouse was theirs to enter, but that they could make theatre, give voice to the drama of their own lives.
One of the books I sent to Martha was Maggie MacKellar’s When It Rains, a memoir of two deaths that came dizzyingly close together: first her husband and then her mother. It was published exactly as Martha’s relationship with the man with the melanoma ended; I sent it because it takes us deep into grief and lets us return; no misery memoir this, no easy salvation, no saving romance. (That came later.) And I sent it because I knew Maggie and I could say to Martha, Here is a young woman only a few years older than you who was also knocked to the ground, and as well as the testimony of her book, I’m here to tell you that I watched her regain her footing. It was tough, but she did it, and you will too. I had worked with Maggie on her earlier book, Core of My Heart, My Country, about women settlers on the frontier in Canada and Australia. I’d first met her within months of her husband’s death that left her with a baby son and a small daughter. Less than two years later, when Core of My Heart was published in 2004, Maggie’s mother was dying; at the launch she was wearing an elegant turban to conceal the effect of chemotherapy. In the midst of the chatter and clink, she and I had a brief conversation in which she asked me to look out for the side of Maggie that she always knew could write. There was a clarified quality to her, as if there was no time for the extraneous or the unnecessary. I liked her, I liked her directness, and in that short exchange before she was swept back into the crowd, I felt as if I were looking also at Poppy, or that she was looking at the part of me that carries the traces of Poppy.
Reading Maggie’s first tentative drafts of When It Rains, watching her find the confidence to write it boldly, made me think not only of Martha, but of my younger self. Books don’t solve grief, or erase it, but they can, and do, give shape and language to experience that at the time leaves us inchoate, literally without words. For the writer and for the reader. So of course I sent Martha that book. She read it at once, and then turned back to the first page, read it again, and when she finished it the second time, she rang me in the middle of her night when she couldn’t sleep but I was awake in Sydney’s daylight. The first time she flew out in a state of grief, we drove to Orange to see Maggie on the family farm where she’d moved after her mother’s death. That week, as I watched these two young women walk across the paddocks, Maggie’s children on their ponies ahead of them, talking, talking as they strode the dry ground, I knew that Martha would come through – as Maggie had, as I had, as Poppy had. I’ve watched them in the years since, as Martha’s tread has firmed, and their friendship; through them, with them, I have learned the pleasure of living long enough to see the movement of change as the generations shift forward.
Where would we have been, Martha and Maggie and me, fifty years ago, or a hundred, when a stumble, a fall, could force a woman further into the margins – no room of her own, no voice to be heard – with extreme consequences. Emily Dickinson had a niece called Martha, who recalled visiting her aunt in her corner bedroom in the house at Amherst. ‘She made as if to lock the door with an imaginary key, turned and said, “Matty: here’s freedom.”’28
Another piece of information that Patrick’s sister Betty was reticent about was the story of their aunt, Gertie’s sister Muriel, who went into an asylum in Manchester before the First World War and never came out. Presumably it was Cheadle Royal Hospital, which was then called the Manchester Royal Lunatic Asylum. I knew about this great-aunt in a vague and shadowy way from stories of Gertie taking Patrick and his sisters to Manchester when they were young, and them waiting while she visited Muriel in a tall, imposing building: a minor mention in a minor story that was about the annual train-ride there, the biscuits they ate, and playing among the trees outside. There was a sort of bleakness to these stories, Manchester. When I was in England last year, at a part-family gathering at this aunt’s house, Martha and I were looking at old photos, and there in one – just one – was a square-faced girl, Muriel, standing beside the young Gertie. What happened? we asked. It was her nerves, Betty said. Nerves? How can a young woman go into an asylum for the whole of the rest of her life from nerves? She’d died there, sometime in the 1950s, Betty said. What happened? Do you know? My aged aunt went vague again, another closing down, a stoic refusal she’d used all her life. Things not to be talked of.
Virginia Woolf was admitted to psychiatric hospitals several times, first in 1895, after her mother died, next in 1904, after her father died, then another three times, until she filled her pockets with stones and sank into the river rather than face it again. The ‘rest cure’ she was subjected to required the opposite of talk. No books, no conversation, no stimulation. Rest in the context of a rest cure meant no activity beyond careful walks: no reading, no stimulation, certainly no writing. ‘You can’t conceive how I want intelligent conversation,’ Woolf wrote to her sister, Vanessa Bell, in 1910. ‘Rest’ was to be supplemented by sedative drugs – chloral, bromide, digitalis, veronal – and rich food, including half a pint of milk every two hours. ‘I have never spent such a wretched 8 months in my life,’ she wrote during an earlier incarceration. ‘Really, a doctor is worse than a husband.’ Her biographer Hermione Lee has ‘no doubt’ that the development of Woolf’s political position, ‘her intellectual resistance to tyranny and conventionality, derived to a great extent from her experiences as a woman patient’.29
Similarly, when I think of the work Poppy went on to do after Patrick left her, I have little doubt that this also came, at least in part, from her experience as a woman patient in the 1950s. A generation after Woolf, Poppy was taken to hospital in 1959, the start of a long absence from us, her children, to cure her of the ‘nervous breakdown’ that had reduced her to inconsolable weeping. She was treated with insulin and ECT. It did nothing to restore her, as the doctor had assured Patrick, to ‘the lovely wife and mother she’s always been’. The social cure failed. There was no one to whom she could talk of the confusion of feeling, the burden of being, and not being, that happy and contented wife and mother. She returned home – if home is the word for it – wounded, unhappy, with the words she hadn’t been able to say, the reckoning she hadn’t been able to make, pushed down into her, bowing her with age though she was still in her thirties, until something would rise up in her, a burst of words and energy, a torrent of tears, an incomprehensible language to those of us who stood back, aghast. An open-mouthed gasp. It was not until after Patrick left, when she was forty-four, that she found the psychoanalyst in a house in South London where she went several times a week, and the words could begin to be said.
When she started that move towards an unanticipated freedom, she had only fifteen years to live, not much time to turn that accumulation of sand into a pearl – but she did. In the short time left to her, she went back to study, passed her ‘A’ levels, and enrolled in a social work degree at Southampton University. As Patrick grew more conservative, Poppy grew more radical. He continued to read The Times; she read the Guardian. The work she chose was as a probation officer, ‘at the coalface’ of the court system, she’d say. Understanding the limitations of a system that did little more than monitor those recently out of jail, who slouched into her office once a week, or month, she made her case for an alternative and took on the authorities until
she got the resources – meagre but enough – to open one of England’s first day centres for young offenders. Most of them were men, overgrown boys who’d had none of the education or possibilities she’d made sure her daughters got; she knew that punishing these young men, monitoring them, would solve nothing if there was no reparation for the absences, the lack, the inequalities that had brought them to jail in the first place.
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