Rosie wrote a letter the next day. Within the fortnight, she received an offer of a shorthand-typing course and digs. Mother Ignatius agreed that Rosie would be allowed to visit Alex on a Sunday afternoon for three hours, but such visits were not to commence for one month, giving both parties time to adjust. Rosie was to use this time to reflect upon her sinful nature and come to gratefully accept the chance to redeem her child’s soul by signing the adoption papers.
The long battle Rosie’d fought within the walls of Nazareth House had blocked out much of the war going on in the world. She knew little of the horrors of the Russian Front, or of the concentration camps where her father’s people, as well as millions of Jews, were put to death. She’d glimpsed headlines, listened to snatches of radio broadcasts, almost ceased wanting to know because she wasn’t expected to understand such things.
But she did know soldiers would be coming home and, remembering Da’s views about good news keeping quiet while bad news always got through, ‘If ye divvent hear they’re dead, they’re alive,’ she still believed Philip could be among them.
PART FOUR
Memoirs of a Child Migrant, 2006
Whenever I picture nuns they’re always having tea and biscuits. Chocolate-covered biscuits of the sort they ate in front of us, but we never got. Was it the fat, goofy nun Frankie said told us about Australia? Was she the one who changed my name and date of birth?
‘You’ll appreciate, none better than yourself, the effects of the war on female frailty? So many debauched and unrepentant, I say unrepentant young women coming into our care; so many babies – I fear we forgot to register the birth.’
And I see the registrar nodding, eyes gleaming through his bifocals. ‘Of course, Sister, of course. I don’t know how you manage so well at Nazareth House – all those naughty young women and their little bastards. Now then. What was the date of birth?’
A stroke of the pen and I’m a year older.
‘Utterly unrepentant.’ I see her nodding and sighing, accepting another biscuit. ‘May God have mercy, I say, may God have mercy on her. Have I given you the little fellow’s name?’
And my surname changes, from Seymour to Mullen. Perhaps she couldn’t think up anything more original on the spot – or perhaps she did have a shred of conscience after all, for Mullen was my mother’s name. My mother, though, was alive at the time I was put on the boat.
‘Father unknown, I suppose?’
Another nod, a miserable little chink as cup is set on saucer. ‘Sad indeed, but God willing, this young man will have a better future without such parents.’ The small business of changing my identity concluded, she bites down on her nice chockie bikkie.
The nun’s long dead but I know what she’d say if I pulled her out of the grave: she’d say I should be grateful for her doing me such a good turn, including me in on the ‘great opportunity’. She’d probably repeat all that stuff about riding kangaroos and eating ice cream by the bucket. If she really knew what we were in for, it just boggles the mind. I guess I’d prefer to think it was the usual human mess. Misguided-but-not-altogether-bad intentions bumping into the mongrel bastards who called themselves Christian Brothers.
26
London, June 1945
No hero’s welcome awaited Philip. His long journey home via France, Spain and Egypt finally ended in a hot office in London, tangled up in bloody paperwork. Though the war in Europe had officially ended, the military still fingered its way slowly through its files, ticked its interminable boxes. Until his debriefing was complete, Philip was told he would have to stay put. No, he would not be allowed out. They even went so far as to lock him in at night.
Jimmy Burns came to his rescue, shouting up to him one evening from the street below. With the aid of a long rope he’d procured from somewhere – ‘Where the hell do you get a rope in London?’ – helped Philip escape from his first floor prison and took him out for a night on the town, starting in a busy pub just off the Strand.
They grinned stupidly at each other over their pints, Philip raising his voice over the din, ‘Well tell me, then! Where are they all? Tucker?’
‘Home in Maidstone. Thinned down a bit after three years a POW.’
‘Weren’t you a POW too?’
‘Yes. Ashamed to say I was quite comfortable, though.’ Burns patted his stomach. ‘Officer’s rations.’
‘Ross?’
‘Ross! Captured, escaped, captured again, escaped. Got out of Colditz you know… Crawled through a drain or some such thing; ended up getting across the Swiss border.’
‘Might have guessed he’d do something like that!’
‘But you, Seymour – sorry, should get out the military habit – Philip, that was one hell of a walk! A medal in it, surely. Here’s to you!’ They clashed glasses, slopping beer.
‘It’s the people who helped deserve the medals.’
‘I suppose you’ve been in touch with your family?’
‘Yes. Permitted one telephone call.’ Philip set down his empty glass. ‘Father died three months ago. I feel sick, you know, that I didn’t make it back in time. Mother seems well. Of course I’ll be going down to see her as soon as they let me. What are you having?’
‘Come off it, man, tonight’s on me. How about moving on? The Savoy?’
After they had found a table, Jimmy disappeared for a while. Philip watched the elegant couples dancing. The bare-armed girls in their sleek dresses, the lounge lizards in their dinner jackets, a few other soldiers, looking out of place. It seemed as if London had sloughed off its wartime skin and slipped back to the 1930s, all its class attitudes intact; everything they’d gone through discarded and forgotten.
It sickened him. It wasn’t even as though the war really had been won. He remembered Spain. The Bar de Centro. Come to think of it, he’d rather be there now, getting drunk with Juan and Dafydd, the communist from Cardiff, who’d fought in the civil war, married a Spanish girl, never gone home. ‘A los Ingleses!’ But it appeared the English weren’t going to help them, after all. They were too busy dancing.
Jimmy returned, bearing aloft a bottle of champagne and two glasses.
‘You make my war seem pretty insignificant.’ Jimmy topped up Philip’s glass. ‘One big bang and it was all over for me. You’ve seen so much more. Do you feel changed?’
‘I killed a few people and that has to change you.’ He looked around. ‘I suppose in my more optimistic moments I thought wiping out a few could be justified if the many benefited. Not much proof of that here, is there?’
‘Here, yes, I know, with all the dickie bows and the lovely gowns, it looks as if the war changed nothing, but you’ll find it has. You’ll like it more, too. It is, or it will be, more egalitarian.’
Philip wasn’t convinced. A woman came over, sad-eyed, beautiful. Jimmy took her off to dance. Philip wondered if he didn’t rather fancy finding a girl himself, but the persistent sense of dislocation prevented him from doing anything about it. He drank steadily. Jimmy came back, looking troubled.
‘Lovely looking woman.’
‘Yes, devastating, isn’t she? But afflicted with much grief; not a straightforward business, I’m afraid. What about your girl in Falmouth? That pretty little dark thing?’
‘Why do you call her a little thing? You wouldn’t call your lovelorn lady a little thing would you?’
‘Well, she’s rather tall…’
‘No.’ Philip’s jaw clenched. ‘That’s not it. It’s what I said earlier; it all comes down to class. The place is still riddled with it – you’re riddled with it. Nothing has changed. I bloody hate it.’
They sat without speaking, the music suddenly loud in their ears. Then Jimmy put his hands on the table. ‘All right, all right. Perhaps you’ve got a point. I’m sorry if I caused offence, let’s not ruin the evening.’ He poured the last of the champagne. ‘Cheers.’
Philip raised his glass. ‘Cheers.’
‘I was meaning to ask, have you heard from that lovely g
irl in Falmouth?’
Champagne sprayed out of both mouths, the frowns of disapproval from the middle-aged couple on the next table making them laugh even more. When he had wiped his eyes, Philip sighed and said, ‘I didn’t get a reply to my letters.’
‘Long time, I suppose. People get scattered.’
‘It is a long time, and that’s the thing – you wonder how significant it really was. It felt significant, but perhaps that was just the war.’ He leaned forward. ‘You’ve felt it, haven’t you, now all the excitement’s gone? Everything seems so bloody mundane.’
Jimmy nodded slowly. ‘That way lies madness, though. What do you want to be, a hired assassin?’ He ordered more champagne, but the brief moment of hilarity could not be recaptured, and their mood became increasingly morose. ‘The worst thing is,’ said Jimmy, ‘nobody seems to think we were successful. I’ve lost count of the times people have said, “Oh St Nazaire. Wasn’t that a bit of a cock-up?”’
‘Well it was, in some ways.’
‘Yes, all right, we tried to do too much, we lost too many men, but we blew the bugger up, didn’t we? Put it out of action completely. You have to believe the sacrifice was worth it.’
‘But look around you. All the self-satisfied ignorant fools in here enjoying life while Murray and Strang…’ There was no need to finish the sentence.
They staggered back to Philip’s prison and spent a long time looking up at the first floor window and the rope before deciding there was no alternative but the front door and the inevitable row. Rather a spectacular one, too. Nearly came to blows. Seemed to have its effect, though, because the next day the authorities signed Philip out into the world for a fortnight’s leave, and with a sense of guilt towards his poor dead dad and his waiting mother, he found himself taking a train down to Cornwall, wondering, as it coiled through Plymouth on its way west, what he really felt for Rosie after nearly three years?
After a couple of hours, the train came to a sudden halt, dislodging a few items of baggage from the racks, including a suitcase that struck a man on the head. He turned out to be a Falmouth bank manager, and not much hurt, but the event thrilled the occupants of the carriage, so that its cause (a cow on the line was the favourite theory) and its result (the outrageous injury to this upstanding citizen) was discussed non-stop thereafter. Another soldier sat silently on the other side of the carriage. He and Philip exchanged a glance of shared contempt. God, people were so bloody ignorant. Indifferent, too. Have you ever seen a chap disembowelled, madam? A boy burning in oil, sir?
The town looked smaller than he remembered, different too, its wartime defences dismantled. But once he started into the little maze of streets that led back to his old digs he found himself walking faster, then breaking into a run, as though this place, not London at all, marked the end of his long journey, and the finishing tape and his prize were just ahead. He thought at first he had been too eager, had run too fast, because he mistook the gate – not that one, he’d missed it; number 61, this one. But the house was different, a hasty wartime infill with flat windows and pebble-dashed walls. Not the same house at all.
The neighbours told him. Terrible thing. Poor Mr Scott and that salesman, Roger, dead. The niece? Oh yes! Such a pretty girl. No. She wasn’t here. Joined up before then; the WAF I think, or was it the Wrens? He spent the afternoon asking questions. Nobody knew.
A silly rhyme ran through Philip’s head later as the train trundled eastwards around the south coast. Love grows when nobody knows. Silly but true. Rosie’s disappearing act had reinvigorated his determination to find her. Before that, though, he must go home.
It meant another train, followed by the familiar ferry across the Solent. He hitched a lift on a lorry from Ryde, the driver dropping him at the Sun Inn to walk through the village in the afternoon sun. He expected every face to be familiar, but the first he saw, on a young woman pushing a pram, belonged to a stranger. The next person was Bert Harvey, in his garden, weeding around his sweet peas. Four years had bent Bert, thinned his hair and obviously dulled his hearing; he did not turn at the click of the gate or Philip’s footsteps on the path.
‘Hello, Mr Harvey.’
The voice cracked open the sleepy afternoon. Bert turned, frowned, then, dusting the earth from his huge brown hand, stretched it out to clasp the younger man’s. ‘Philip.’ It was an intense moment, relieved by the insertion of the speckled nose of a Springer spaniel – one of Tressell’s descendants, demanding his share of the celebration.
‘We were so glad to hear you’d come through,’ said Bert. ‘Let me call May. She’ll want to see you for herself.’ Mrs Harvey came out in her flowery apron, smaller than Philip remembered her, a little faded, but still with the same shy smile. ‘Well here you are at last, then,’ she said.
Bert laughed. ‘Takes a while, on Shanks’s pony, doesn’t it, Phil?’
Philip scanned their faces for signs of grief, then ventured, ‘Your boys?’
‘In good health, all three. Will’s on his way back from North Africa. We’ve been lucky, as a family.’ Bert ran swiftly through an inventory of village lads, many of whom Philip did not know, but it seemed there were only a couple of names to add to the war memorial, one of them Abel, dead at Dunkirk. ‘But I suppose you knew?’
‘No. I hadn’t heard.’ It shocked, the idea of Abel, that childhood threat, snuffed out. There was a pause.
‘I got the atlas out the other day,’ said Bert, ‘to look at your route. Two thousand miles, I made it.’
‘Not quite. One thousand, eight hundred and seventy three.’
‘Well!’
‘And three-quarters…’
‘We felt proud to know you.’
‘I know it sounds incredible, but you know it was just a walk. A never-ending walk. Most of the time, all you think about is the state of your feet – and your stomach, of course.’
‘Are you hungry now?’ said May. ‘Can I get you something? There’s tea in the pot.’
And bread? And some of that delicious jam? ‘That’s very kind, but I’d better be going. Mother’s expecting me.’
‘Of course. She’ll be thrilled to see you.’ There was another pause while each struggled to picture his mother, thrilled.
‘We were both very sorry about your father,’ said Bert.
‘Thanks. It made me feel, you know, if only I could have got back a few months earlier.’
‘He had a good send off anyway, didn’t he, May? She went over to the funeral. He was a good man, your dad.’
‘Yes. He thought you were, too.’
‘What? An old heathen like me?’ But the idea gave Bert pleasure, turned a hairy ear pink. ‘How long have you got?’
‘They’ve given me two weeks. Then it’s back to London. After that, I hope to get down for longer. There’s a lot to do, mother says. She has to be out of the rectory by September. I’ll need to be here to help.’
‘So, we’ll be seeing you again,’ Bert said, putting out his hand.
Philip clasped it. ‘Yes. You will. I’d like to talk to you about something, actually.’
‘Oh, yes?’
He felt a little embarrassed, but ploughed on. ‘Politics. People always said you were a communist.’
‘Hmm. Well, perhaps I am.’
‘Well that’s what I’d like to talk to you about.’
‘I’ll look forward to that.’ He had his arms folded, his head on one side, smiling.
‘Bye, then.’
The Harveys stood at the gate to watch Philip cross the green and start down the drive. He walked slowly, slightly self-conscious, and reluctant, now it came to it, to go home. But when at last he turned the bend in the drive and saw the rectory, the familiar lineaments of the house surprised him by their beauty. Inside its brick façade, behind its honest sash windows should be a jolly red-faced rector of the 1790s, surrounded by his many children and cheerful servants. Perhaps it would be different this time. If his mother greeted him affectionately, he must try
to respond and if her usual self, then he must accept her, not be angry.
But it was Mary Edwards who responded to his tug on the bell rope, her quivering mousey face so unexpectedly touching that he swept up her old bag of bones in a bear hug. She squeaked and burst into tears, helpfully masking any emotional deficit on his mother’s part when she stepped forward to claim a kiss on the cheek. ‘You look well, I must say. Now Mrs Edwards, calm down… Shall we have tea? In the drawing room, I think.’
The pleasure he’d experienced in seeing the house extended to a delight in all the old familiar things. Philip rediscovered the trolley with its one wayward wheel, fingered the ancient silver teaspoons, bent down to touch the worn patch on the carpet where his father had so often stood to fill his pipe and look out over the garden.
‘Yes,’ said his mother, ‘still no money forthcoming from the diocese for a new carpet.’
‘Tell me about Dad,’ Philip said, straightening. He wanted to hear kind words about his father from the mouth of his mother, to be reassured he had not suffered, but she could only speak about the domestic difficulties his illness had caused her. He listened patiently to her complaints before asking, ‘Did Dad ever talk about me after he became ill?’
‘Hardly at all. His mind had completely gone, you know. Ridiculous noises he made. Unbearable to listen to.’
As you are, he thought, the scone in his mouth turning to sawdust. Her bitterness soured every experience, tarnished every lovely piece of silverware. Divided him from her, there was no help for it. He listened as she raged against the Church, which had not lifted a finger, had behaved shabbily towards her throughout her ordeal and now had the nerve to demand she quit the rectory within six months.
‘But that’s not so unreasonable, is it, Mother? I suppose Dad hadn’t performed services for two years.’
The War Before Mine Page 23