by Rosie Thomas
Julia had eyed the ensemble, knowing that she should probably disapprove of it. But the effect was much too reminiscent of her own and Mattie’s early Juliette Greco phase. In fact, Julia reflected, with her pale face and black eye make-up Lily probably didn’t look much more outlandish than she had done herself twenty years ago.
She felt a moment of sharp, sweet nostalgia for the Rocket, and her own girlhood. ‘What does Alexander say about your clothes?’ she asked.
Wordlessly, Lily had rolled her eyes and bared her teeth. They had both laughed.
‘You’re okay, Mum,’ Lily had added. ‘Lots of people’s mums would go spare.’
‘I remember,’ Julia murmured.
Julia put her hand up to touch Lily’s now. The chains round Lily’s wrist rattled merrily. ‘I’d like it if you would help me. We’re looking for your grandmother, too.’
Lily stood with her head on one side, twisting one of the red-tipped points of hair. ‘Don’t do it for me, Julia. Do it for yourself.’ She smiled, a sudden pretty smile that was entirely at odds with her fierce maquillage. ‘Besides, I’ve got three grandmothers already.’
Julia put her hands on the warm, satiny wood of George’s box and sighed. ‘Where do we start? “Colchester, Essex” isn’t very much to go on.’
‘Granny Smith will know the name of the adoption agency. If the agency still exists, they should have kept your file.’
Julia was impressed. ‘How did you know all this?’
But Lily only shrugged. ‘I know all kinds of things.’
I’m sure you do, Julia thought. Only don’t tell me all of them. I don’t think I’m ready for that. I trust you, Lily. Is that enough?
So it was, with Lily’s encouragement, that Julia embarked on the search for Margaret Ann Hall. The provisions of the 1975 Children’s Act were in her favour.
They began by visiting Betty at Fairmile Road, and sat drinking tea at the blue Formica table while the television boomed from the living room. Julia tried to assure her that even if the search was successful, finding her real mother would make no difference to her feelings for Betty.
Betty pursed her lips and glanced at Lily. And Lily, who had toned down her appearance for Granny Smith’s sake, nodded slightly. At once, the lines of anxiety in Betty’s face eased a little, and her eyes stopped darting nervously around the room. Watching, Julia remembered that she had always been surprised by Betty and Lily’s fondness for one another. Surprised, and faintly resentful, in her heart. But now, it seemed both natural and thoroughly pleasing. Getting older, she reflected, was like seeing baffling and frustrating pieces of some vast puzzle beginning to fit smoothly together, to make a recognisable picture.
Betty found a sheet of paper and wrote something down for them. It was the address of a private adoption agency in Southwark. Julia noticed that she remembered the address perfectly. Over the years, it must often have been in her head.
The adoption agency had vanished without trace from the Southwark address. The site had been redeveloped, and was occupied by a new supermarket. They were deeply disheartened, until Julia hit on the idea of contacting the borough Social Services. She clung to the telephone, being transferred from department to department, until at last she was put through to the right social worker. Betty’s agency had been amalgamated with another, larger concern. The business had been transferred, along with all its records, to Guildford. Julia wrote down another address.
She made a second, lengthy telephone call, and this time she was successful. She had found the right place, and the records of her adoption were indeed available.
She was advised that she would have to attend for counselling before any further details could be released to her.
When she replaced the receiver her hands were shaking. She seemed close enough to her mother to be able to reach out and touch her.
‘Yippee,’ shouted Lily, her eyes sparkling with the excitement of the hunt. ‘I know we can do it.’
The hunt took a little time, but it was a short and unmysterious trail.
Julia went to see a social worker for the obligatory counselling session. The woman faced her across a desk, on which lay a file with a faded blue cover. Julia could hardly take her eyes off it. Inside it, written on those slips of yellow-edged paper, was her mother’s story. The old, romantic dreams and fantasies seemed a long way off. All she could think of now was how she would find her, an ordinary woman and a stranger, yet as close to her as she was to Lily. She had to force herself to listen to and answer the counsellor’s questions.
At last the woman nodded. She told Julia that she seemed to have thought out her reasons for searching for her mother very clearly. Julia felt dimly surprised. She wasn’t aware of anything as cogent as reasons, only of a pull that grew more intense the closer she came, and which she knew must be satisfied.
Her counsellor put her hand on the blue file, opened it and sighed. ‘I’m afraid we can’t give you very much to go on.’
Julia looked down at the fragments of her history.
The first document was a fuller version of the birth certificate that Betty had kept hidden amongst her underwear. Julia saw that Valerie Hall had been born at St Benet’s Home for Unmarried Mothers in Goodmayes Road, Colchester. She had been Valerie, there was no mistake. The date of birth was her own. Her mother was Margaret Ann Hall, of 11 Partington Street, Ilford, Essex.
Julia stared in amazement. Her real mother had lived only a few miles from Fairmile Road and her date of birth was given as 17 January 1923. She had been sixteen when she had given birth to her daughter in St Benet’s Home. She would now be only fifty-four. Almost twenty years younger than Betty Smith.
Julia lifted her eyes from the certificate. The counsellor was watching her with sympathy, but the sympathy seemed almost an intrusion in this moment of revelation. ‘She was very young,’ Julia said softly.
In the space for the father’s details the words Father not known had been written. Whoever he had been, he had left Margaret Ann Hall to go through her ordeal alone. Julia put the certificate aside. Underneath it was the letter that Betty had written to the agency, asking for herself and Vernon to be considered as prospective adoptive parents. A note clipped to it stated Accepted.
Next was a copy of the certificate of adoption, on which the baby girl’s name was given as Julia Smith. And from the last document in the little pile, Julia learned that she had been fostered for the first six weeks of her life by a couple in Colchester. She had been collected from their house by an employee of the adoption agency, and taken to Fairmile Road.
There were tears in Julia’s eyes. She felt no pity for the six-week-old baby who had been handed over to Betty and Vernon and a safe life of dull security. Her sadness was all for sixteen-year-old Margaret, in the bleak-sounding church home, who had been forced to give up her child. She must have wanted to keep me, Julia thought. But how could she? Sixteen was the age she herself had been when she found her way with Mattie to Jessie and Felix. They had been barely able to take care of themselves, let alone a baby. How could Margaret Ann Hall have done anything different?
Julia sniffed hard and rubbed her face with the palm of her hand. There was one item left in her file. It was a folded sheet of writing paper, the cheap grey kind with ruled lines. She picked it up, feeling a tightness in her chest.
The counsellor said, ‘It’s not much, but I think it gives you your best chance of finding her. St Benet’s closed down years ago.’
Julia read the letter.
It was written from another address in Ilford, and dated August 1942. Margaret Ann Hall had become Margaret Rennyshaw, and she was writing to the adoption agency to ask for some news of Valerie. The short sentences were hastily scrawled, with words misspelt or missed out altogether, but the urgency of the plea was clear and painful to read.
Me and Derek have got our own little lad now, but I still think all the time about what happened to my Valerie.
On my birthday, Julia thought
. At Christmas, and New Year, and all the other times.
I no that I did wrong, but I just want to no that she is alright now. Derek is in the Navy. He doesn’t no nothing about Valerie. If I could just see her the once, Id be happy.
There was no copy of any answer to Margaret’s letter in the file. Julia looked up again. Her mother had wanted to see her. She had a mother, and a half-brother, and while she had been growing up in Fairmile Road they had been so close to her.
‘What would have happened?’ she asked the counsellor.
The woman pursed her lips. ‘Nothing very enlightened, I’m afraid, in those days. I’ve seen similar cases. I imagine the copy of the reply to your mother isn’t in the file because it wasn’t something to be proud of. She would have been reminded, rather brusquely, exactly what adoption meant. She would have been told that she could not hope to see or hear from you ever again.’
There was a brief silence in the bare cubicle of a room.
‘But now she will,’ Julia murmured.
‘If you are certain that it’s best for you, and for her.’ The counsellor was kindly, but only doing her job.
Julia was reminded suddenly of Montebellate, and Sister Maria’s calm face. She smiled. ‘Only one thing in life is certain. But I must find her. I know that.’
The counsellor held out her hand. ‘Good luck, then. I’m here if you need me.’ The interview was over. Julia pointed to the letter.
‘May I keep this?’
‘Of course. It’s yours.’
Lily was waiting in a café across the road. To pass the time she had been shopping. Another ripped and zipped black garment protruded from the carrier bag at her feet.
‘Well?’ she demanded cheerfully. Julia sank down on a mushroom stool. She took out the sheet of greyish paper and handed it to Lily. When they looked at each other again their faces were sombre.
‘She’s real,’ Lily breathed. ‘Until right now, I’d only thought of her as the prize in a treasure hunt. Granny Smith was your mother. But this Mrs Rennyshaw is a person. You were her Valerie.’
‘She was sixteen years old. A few months younger than you are now.’
‘It’s sad.’ Lily reached across the table to Julia. She seized her hand in both of hers. Underneath the black warpaint her face had crumpled like an anxious child’s. ‘Julia, you won’t go and leave me, will you? Will you always be here?’
Julia smiled again. Not everything had changed. She was still mother, as well as daughter. Lily was still her child, as well as her friend. ‘I’m thirty-eight, and you’re nearly seventeen. We’ve done our leaving and our coming back to each other. We’re here now because we like each other, not because we owe each other things. I’ll always be here.’
Lily nodded, ‘I’m glad. I’m glad for everything.’
They were still holding on to one another across the greasy table.
‘So am I,’ Julia said.
‘What are we waiting for, then?’ Lily demanded. ‘Let’s go,’ she glanced down at the letter, ‘to seventy-six, Forrester Terrace, Ilford, Essex.’
It was Julia who wanted to hold back, now that they had come closer still. She wanted to give herself some time, but she was afraid that she didn’t have very much to spare. She thought guiltily that she ought to be back in her gardens, working with Tomaso to make them ready for the summer. She was in London, where she could no longer really afford to live, and she was holding up the work on Felix’s flat. It was almost the end of the Easter holidays, and Lily would have to go back to Ladyhill, and to school.
It was years since Julia had felt herself to be making a crossing, observing the distances between one life and another. Anxiety, and a timid desire for the certainty of Montebellate, gripped her again.
But in the face of everything else, Julia knew that she was in London for Mattie’s sake, and that she would do her best to stay until she was sure that Mattie didn’t need her any longer.
It wasn’t easy to know what Mattie did need. She had retreated to Coppins, and had politely refused to let anyone come to stay with her. She insisted that Mrs Hopper would look after her, and that she would soon, in any case, be going back to work. Two weeks after Mitch’s funeral she had agreed to do a television commercial.
‘It’s for knickers, or deodorant, or something,’ she told Julia on the telephone.
‘Don’t you know which?’
‘Does it matter which?’ Mattie’s voice sounded blurred. She had admitted that she was sleeping badly.
‘Are you all right?’ Julia asked, impotently. ‘Can’t I come down and keep you company?’
After a little pause Mattie said, ‘I’m not all right. But I’m trying hard, you know. I’m better on my own, just now. Mitch loved this house.’
Julia pressed her. ‘Have you got this number written down? Will you promise to ring if you want anything? Even if it’s in the middle of the night?’
‘What? Oh, yes.’ Mattie was vague, as if in her mind she had already hung up and immersed herself again in Coppins and its memories.
‘Please, Mattie.’
‘Oh Julia,’ Mattie whispered. ‘If only he wasn’t dead. If only he was still here. But there’s nothing you can do. Even you. You can’t bring him back, can you?’
So Julia stayed on in the half grandeur and half desolation of Felix’s flat, and Lily kept her company. And one afternoon they went out to Ilford together.
They quickly discovered what they could equally well have found out without leaving the Kensington flat. The even-numbered side of Forrester Terrace had suffered a direct hit from a wartime bomb, and what was left of it had been cleared in the post-war years. A line of early Fifties council houses stood in its place, facing the odd-numbered houses that had survived. The terrace showed signs of gentrification, with brightly painted front doors and plants in tubs beside the doorsteps. The houses would be mostly owned by young couples, who would spend their weekends cleaning the layers of distemper out of the cornices in the cramped Victorian front rooms. Julia had no hope that anyone now living in them would remember Margaret and Derek Rennyshaw and their baby son.
‘What if she was bombed?’ Lily asked.
‘If she was, she didn’t die,’ Julia answered. ‘I’m sure of that.’
They walked the mile and a half to Partington Street, to what must have been Margaret’s family home. My grandparents, Julia thought, without much conviction. Her apprehensive eagerness was almost entirely fixed on Margaret herself.
Partington Street was intact, but it was less prosperous-looking than the good half of Forrester Terrace. There was a run-down newsagent’s at one end, and a bare pub with empty crisp packets blowing about on the pavement at the other. Number eleven was four houses down from the pub.
Julia and Lily glanced at each other, took a breath, and marched up the cracked path. There was no bell. Julia’s knock was answered, after a very long time, by an Asian woman in a sari. She held a baby with shiny brown eyes against her chest. She spoke almost no English, but it took very few words to convince Julia and Lily that the present occupants of number eleven had never heard of Mr and Mrs Hall from 1939, nor of Margaret and Derek Rennyshaw. ‘Let’s try next door,’ Lily insisted.
There was no one at home at number nine. The door of number thirteen was opened by a glowering skinhead. He had swastikas tattooed on his pallid forearms, and a studded dog-collar around his neck. He ignored Julia, but eyed Lily with a degree of approval.
‘Ain’t no one livin’ in this street now but fuckin’ Pakis,’ he told her. ‘You from the Social, or what?’
‘Just looking for some friends,’ Lily said hastily as they retreated.
‘’Ere,’ he yelled after them. ‘You can come back any time you fancy. Don’t bother bringing yer friend, though.’
Julia and Lily were too disappointed even to catch each other’s eye. They turned the corner by the pub and gazed down another, identical, littered street. Julia wondered if it had always been so ugly here, and if
so why she had never noticed it before. But she was sure that violence like the boy’s was new, and it chilled her. ‘What now?’ Lily asked.
‘I don’t know,’ she said sadly. ‘I don’t know where to go from here. There must be millions of Halls. But Rennyshaw isn’t a common name, is it?’
‘Isn’t there some sort of list of all the people living in a place? That they would be on if they still live in the area?’
Julia’s head jerked up. ‘Of course. The electoral roll. I should have thought of that.’ They went to the Town Hall and asked to see a copy of the roll. And they found her at once.
There were three Rennyshaws listed, and the third was Mrs Margaret A. Rennyshaw, of 60 Denebank.
Margaret Ann was alive, still living in Ilford. Now that the search was over, Julia realised how slim their chances had been, and their great luck that the trail had been such a short one. She felt a retrospective despondency that had never touched her while they were still searching. It made her legs weak and heavy and she sat down suddenly on a bench in the busy hallway. One or two of the passers-by eyed her curiously.