by Sophie King
‘Only things I can’t have,’ she replied softly.
‘Want to tell me about them?’ asked the girl gently.
Rebecca shook her head. ‘Not really dear. But I will tell you about the very first birthday present I remember. Might come in useful for that thesis of yours.’ She leaned back and closed her eyes in order to concentrate. ‘Now let me see. I was born in 1911 so it must have been in 1916. That’s right. I was five years old and my father had just received his papers...’
It was his smell she remembered. Coal tar soap her mother called it, in a voice that pretended she didn’t like it but that couldn’t be true because her parents had just had a big hug.
‘I’ll be back soon, my little princess,’ said her father in that lovely deep voice which told her stories every night. Wonderful magical stories about a boy called Peter Pan who could fly, just like Papa was going to fly big planes to teach the Germans a lesson.
Then he handed her a small brown parcel tied up with string, with her name on it, clearly printed in capital letters – something she still couldn’t get right at school because her ‘bs’ just wouldn’t behave themselves! ‘Don’t open it yet,’ he said gently, watching her fingers itching to undo the string. ‘It’s for your birthday, just in case I’m not back in time.’
But her birthday wasn’t until nearly Christmas! ‘It might take me a long time to get home.’ Papa’s voice was strong and certain just like it was when he told her to hold his arm when they crossed the road in case one of those ‘new-fangled’ motorcars ran them over. Then her mother began to cough as though she had a fly in her throat again. Papa gave Mama another hug, although he didn’t give her a present which was probably why she looked so upset as he walked down the garden path, waving goodbye with that lovely cheery smile that always made her feel better if she fell over or couldn’t get those horrid ‘bs’ right.
‘Don’t worry, Mama,’ she said worriedly because the fly was still there. ‘You can share my birthday present if you like.’ Then her mother had wrapped her arms around her and they’d stood there for a few minutes until the clock on the mantelpiece chimed nine times and Mama suggested that she might like to do her piano practice while she had a little ‘lie down’.
That’s when it had happened. Even now, Rebecca shivered when she thought about it! She’d placed the birthday present that couldn’t be opened on top of the piano but as soon as she heard her mother going up the stairs, she stopped playing and picked up the brown paper parcel. First she shook it but rather disappointingly, there was no sound. Then she smelt it but all she could get was a sort of woody fragrance. Then finally, with trembling fingers, she untied the string to have a little peep. As she did so, a sharp thrill shot through her and she gasped out loud.
‘Rebecca!’ called out her mother from upstairs.’‘You’re not looking at your birthday present, are you?’
Her mouth went dry and her heart began to thump. ‘No, Mama. Of course not.’ But she had! It was the music box from Mrs Moore’s frosty shop window.
‘Are you sure?’ Mama’s voice floated down the stairs. ‘Because it’s bad luck to do it early!’
Another shiver shot through her; colder than the last. Bad luck? What did that mean? Five weeks later, the postman knocked with a telegram and then Rebecca knew, beyond doubt, exactly what bad luck meant. If she hadn’t unwrapped the parcel early, the Germans wouldn’t have knocked Papa’s plane out of the sky. And after that, or so it seemed, birthday presents never brought anything else but trouble.
You are warmly invited to attend a special birthday tea party...Bex read and re-read the invitation which had dropped onto her mother’s beige hall carpet, together with a brown envelope and the words ‘Final Reminder’ peeping through the see-through window on the front. A special tea party! That meant that Gran, even though she’d sworn never to call her that again, must be a hundred! Had all that time really gone past since she’d seen her last? Part of Bex felt wobbly with regret, and the other part was still hurt and angry.
‘You ought to go,’ said her mother, glancing at the invitation. ‘Dad might be there and it would mean a lot to Gran. She can’t have long to go now.’
‘That’s blackmail, Mum! And I’ve told you. After what she did, I’m not going to any stupid family gathering.’ Bex could feel herself getting crosser and crosser inside just as she had done when Dad had left. ‘Besides, I don’t trust people who put ‘no presents please’. Isn’t that the whole point about birthdays?’
Only three weeks to go now until her party! ‘Are you getting excited?’ asked the pretty silver nose-ringed girl as she sat down beside her, to steady the coffee cup. Rebecca put her head to one side as she had done when Norman had asked her to marry him on her eighteenth birthday. ‘Yes and no,’ she said, which was exactly what she had said to him then. It was 1929 and they’d just returned from visiting a waxwork museum which had opened up the year before, called Madame Tussauds. She’d been wearing a pretty blue and white spotted dress, a hand-me-down from a cousin, and even now she could remember the satisfying swish of the silk above her ankles which, Norman confessed rather daringly, were the first thing he’d noticed when they’d met at her coming out dance.
‘Yes and no!’ he’d repeated, a slow smile spreading over his face. ‘That’s what I love about you, Rebecca. You’re not like any other girl.’
‘Just as long as you realise that!’ Over the years, Rebecca had built up an invisible armour as protection from the dreadful secret that she had hugged to herself; the certain knowledge that she’d been responsible for her father’s death.
‘While you decide whether you will marry me or not, you might care to open your birthday present!’ His eyes twinkled as he brought out a small parcel from his jacket pocket. Rebecca’s blood froze as it always did when someone gave her a gift. Not that there had been that many. After Papa had died, money had been tight and she and mother had relied on their uncle for support. ‘You open it for me,’ she said. ‘Please. My hands are too cold to undo that pretty ribbon.’
‘Very well!’ He chucked her playfully under the chin. ‘There we are. What do you think of that?’
Entranced, she stared at the diamond stone glinting in its box. It was beautiful! Really beautiful! At that moment, the door opened and her mother came into the room. She took one look at the ring and gave a little gasp. ‘Darling! Your father would have been so pleased!’
And then somehow, almost without Rebecca knowing how it happened, she found herself walking down the aisle with Norman some six months later, promising to love him for better or worse.
‘Changed your mind yet?’ Bex’s mother asked, nearly three weeks before the party was due to take place.
Bex looked up from the cooker where she was stirring a cheese sauce. She and mum took it in turns and tonight it was macaroni cheese. Nutritious and inexpensive. Her mother, who was looking a lot younger now she had started her new job and had begun wearing make up again, gave her a knowing glance. ‘You know perfectly well!’ Pulling up a chair, she sat down next to her. ‘You must miss her. You two were so close until...’
‘Please Mum.’ Bex gave the cheese sauce a vigorous stir so that it slopped over the side and hissed on the gas flame. ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’
And then the phone rang...
She was lucky, Rebecca told herself, examining the acceptances that were beginning to trickle in. She and Norman had been well-suited. In those days you worked hard at marriage, not like today.
‘Sounds like another story,’ prompted the girl with the silver nose earring.
You could say that again! Life wasn’t easy at that time. England was in a depression which had nothing to do with the weather girl on television. But they were ‘all right’, Norman had assured her. The bank would never go under. It was a big name. Secure. Not like the others. Mind you, he had added, they might not be able to afford the big family they’d always wanted. Just one baby perhaps. Yet somehow, even one wasn’t happen
ing. ‘It will happen when it’s ready,’ said her mother with a slight frown on her face.
Rebecca began to dread each birthday. Twenty four years of age and still she wasn’t expecting!
‘Perhaps we ought to see the doctor,’ suggested her husband after presenting her with a bottle of perfume and a pretty card. But they never got that far. The following month, when the ‘safe’ bank collapsed like all the others, her husband failed to come home. They said he had fallen out of a window at work but Rebecca wasn’t fooled. Norman was a good man but proud. Carefully, she placed the perfume bottle at the back of a drawer along with the matinee jackets she’d been secretly knitting and decided it was time she went out to work.
‘You can’t do that!’ her mother had gasped. ‘We don’t come from that kind of family.’
‘Actually,’ replied Rebecca airily, ‘I’ve already secured a situation and I start on Monday. Don’t look like that, Mama. Times have changed!’ Indeed they had. A great big boat called the Queen Mary had just been launched and you could also travel on a train called The Flying Scotsman which went at a staggering 100 miles an hour! The world was moving on and Rebecca was going with it!
Like so many girls of that era, Rebecca started off as a typist. Her boss was a kindly man who ran a fashion design business in the east end of London and spotted that his new girl had a flair for clothes and an eye for a needle. That had come from mother who was always saying, ‘necessity is the mother of invention’. So when the war began – who would have thought that she’d see two in her lifetime? – he installed her as his ‘second hand man’ until he came back.
When he didn’t, his widow suggested that Rebecca took over. It wasn’t easy, even after the war, because materials were in such short supply but Rebecca, with her insistence that nothing was impossible (a trait she’d apparently inherited from Papa), would scour jumble sales and markets so that she built up enough to hire George with his tall, dark good looks as her chief salesman. George was everything that Norman hadn’t been and her mother hated him on sight. ‘So brash,’ she had shuddered. ‘Talks too much about himself.’
On Rebecca’s thirty-seventh birthday, just after the beautiful Princess Elizabeth walked down the aisle with her handsome groom, George gave her a box of chocolates and suggested that she might like to share them and the rest of her life with him. ‘Chocolates?’ her mother had gasped. ‘Couldn’t he think of something more original?’ But Rebecca was lonely and the ‘single’ American soldier whom she’d met in a bar during the war, suddenly had a wife to go home to. If she didn’t get married again soon, she might never have that baby she wanted so badly.
George, it turned out, was one of those husbands who didn’t ‘do’ birthdays unless it was his own. Over the next few years, as the business expanded, Rebecca found herself buying him a silver tie pin, a gramophone and even a little Morris Minor now petrol rationing was finally over. By the time the young Elizabeth walked down Westminster Abbey again, this time as their new Queen, George and his roving eye had left for good. But not before he’d finally given her a birthday present. A secret one that she couldn’t tell anyone else about, apart of course, from mother.
Together they decided to move to the country where no one would know them. With the money from the sale of her business, Rebecca bought a little fashion shop in a small town in Buckinghamshire and informed her new neighbours that she was a widow. Little Henry, named after her father, went to the local school and her mother cared for him while she was at the shop. It wasn’t easy but when Henry flew into her arms after work, Rebecca was filled with such love and thanks that her heart ached with happiness. ‘You’re a natural,’ her own mother would nod approvingly.
The years went by and so did the birthdays. As Rebecca’s business expanded through sheer hard work, she was able to afford some wonderful parties for her son. Shortly after a group called The Beatles shot to fame, she even hired a conjurer! Meanwhile, Rebecca was not short of admirers. Peter gave her a silver hand mirror and took her to the film of West Side Story in 1961. Steve took her and little Henry, who wasn’t so little by now, to see England win the World Cup at Wembley five years later. William gave her a jewellery box (although she graciously declined the ring inside) in 1971 when they were all getting used to the ‘new money’. How would they manage without shillings and pence!
It was hard when her mother died, just before Elvis Presley. Very hard. She gained some comfort from her latest admirer Jeremy who bought her a memorial rose tree which she planted in her little garden. Now that showed thought! It wasn’t that Rebecca was a materialistic woman but she had learned, over the years, that a birthday present could tell you a thing or two about a person.
‘You’re not going to marry that man, are you?’ her son Henry had demanded. By then, he had grown into a good-looking man with his father’s charming smile and Rebecca, who couldn’t bear the thought of doing anything that her beloved son disapproved of, reluctantly turned Jeremy down. Besides, as Henry said, wasn’t she too old at sixty-six to get married again? So instead, she sold her business and started a degree course in psychology because she’d always been interested in the way that people tick. ‘I might be a pensioner,’ she told the local reporter when he did a piece on the oldest graduate of the year, ‘but I like to keep active!’
Instead, it was Henry who announced his impending nuptials just as Prince Charles announced his engagement to Lady Diana Spencer! Rebecca was thrilled. She had grown to love Cathy whom Henry had met at university and when they had their first child during the week they started building the Channel Tunnel, she wept with joy. Bex, named after her, adored her gran and was often found curled up on the sofa with her watching television or playing chess.
But then, for her eightieth birthday, a year after Nelson Mandela was released, her son gave her an unexpected birthday present. Stocks and shares which, he admitted freely, he’d bought from her own money which he ‘looked after’ for her. Too late she heard the warning bells so she wasn’t too surprised when, on the eve on the Millennium, just after her ninetieth, Henry announced he was leaving his wife and child and that, by the way, those investments were now worth next to nothing.
Enough lies had been told. It was time to come clean. ‘I don’t mind being poor again but there’s something I need to tell you all,’ she’d announced to the three of them. And that’s when it had all gone wrong.
‘Your guests are arriving now,’ said the girl with the silver nose stud gently. Secretly she hoped the old lady wouldn’t be too cross with her. If she hadn’t happened to find Rebecca Wright’s address book by her bed, she might not have been so bold. But she couldn’t bear the idea of this dear old lady celebrating her centenary without the people she loved best in the world.
Then a pretty young woman came into the room, wearing a blue and white spotted dress – she was a fashion designer apparently, whose designs, it was rumoured, were often worn by a friend of a guest at a recent Royal Wedding! Behind was a man with roving eyes who, despite being sixty-odd, was giving her the ‘once over’. That fitted the stories too!
With bated breath, she watched the pair making their way over to the old lady’s chair where she sat in her pretty pink chiffon dress with her thin fine grey hair neatly permed. She couldn’t hear what they were saying but she could imagine. Hadn’t old Mrs Wright told her exactly what had happened before she’d had her stroke three weeks ago?
‘George, my second husband, had had a relationship with a young girl who worked for us,’ she’d said with a far away look in her eye. ‘The girl was going to have the baby adopted but I persuaded her to give the baby to me instead. You could do that in those days. It didn’t save my marriage but I did have the child I’d yearned for until I told my son the truth. Should have done so years ago but somehow I was too scared in case he rejected me. Of course, that’s what he did, along with Bex who realised I wasn’t her real granny after all.’
If only Mrs Wright could talk right now! Then again,
it didn’t look as though she needed to, from the way her granddaughter was sitting next to her, holding her hand while her son held the other. Perhaps she’d been right to ring them after all! To explain that they really needed to be here.
‘I’ve missed you,’ Bex was saying, stroking her hands so they felt warm again just as they had when she’d worn mother’s knitted gloves. ‘It doesn’t matter that you’re not really my gran. You feel as though you are and Mum says that’s what really matters.’
‘I’ve been a fool,’ said Henry who was, thank goodness, holding Bex’s hand too which suggested they’d made up. His eyes were wet and she could tell he meant it this time. ‘I know I’ve lost all your money, Mother, but I couldn’t bear it if I lost your love too.’ He glanced at his daughter. ‘Or yours.’
Rebecca’s eyes tried to speak because after the stroke, her words wouldn’t come out of her lips. Parents never stop loving their children, she wanted to tell them both. Just as children never stop loving their parents even when they’ve been dead for years and years like her own.
Then her granddaughter placed a small brown parcel with string on her lap. ‘I know you said ‘No presents’ but this doesn’t really count because it was yours anyway. Shall I untie it for you?’
There was a flash of wood. And then a carved flower. And then a key. Rebecca could hardly believe her eyes. It was the same music box that her father had given her, all those years ago, and which she had passed down to little Bex. It had stopped working (through over-winding) some years later but now the tinny sound of ‘Happy Birthday’ was filling the room and all her guests stopped chattering and stood quietly to listen just as they had done in old Mrs Moore’s shop.
‘I had it mended,’ said Bex. ‘It was Dad’s idea.’ And then Rebecca’s heart filled with something that ached and yet also made her feel floaty with joy and relief. They knew now, her son and granddaughter. They knew something she had learned long ago. That when you got to her age, there was only one present that really mattered. A gift that couldn’t be bought. Or wrapped up. Or hidden away. Or opened too soon. A present called love. A deep, warm, forgiving, family love that went on for ever and ever, even after you’d gone, leaving future generations to do their loving – and make their mistakes – for you.