by Peter Hey
‘Well, we’re still waiting for your DNA results,’ said Jane.
‘Oh, of course, I keep forgetting about those. Was my father a Cuban goatherd or Che Guevara himself? I think we both know which is more likely.’
Alan grinned and sat down opposite Jane. He passed her a cup and sank back in his chair.
‘Actually,’ said Jane, ‘it is possible your mother was reasonably close to Che, or at least close to the revolution. I’ve got some of her letters home. Your aunt gave them to me, for you, obviously.’
‘Oh, yes. You went to Criccieth to see her. How is the old place? I haven’t been there for so many years.’
‘It’s a wonderful house, amazing location, as you know. And, being an artist, Barbara has given it her own touch. I loved it. She sends her regards. Said you’re welcome to visit any time.’
‘That’s kind of her, but… Well, North Wales is a long old drive.’
Alan’s indifference towards his aunt was being clearly signalled, and Jane knew it wasn’t her place to press. Instead, she reached forward and opened the ring file she had put on the coffee table that sat between them. She flicked through until she reached some transparent pockets containing old postcards and handwritten sheets of airmail paper. She rotated the file towards Alan.
‘Your aunt found these when she moved into Criccieth. Your grandparents must have left them there.’
Alan turned the pages until he saw an aerial view of Havana centred on the domed Capitol building. The 1950s printing process had produced sharply unreal colours, with a cityscape of bright pink and yellow roofs and an electric-blue sea in the background. He pulled out the card and flipped it over. He began reading out loud.
‘Tuesday 1st July. Dear Mummy, Daddy and Barbara, I am well. Havana is beautiful and hot. Love to all, Patricia.’ Alan looked back up towards Jane. ‘My mother wasn’t giving a lot away with this one.’
‘Actually, it’s quite revealing,’ replied Jane. ‘You see, there’s a whole sequence of cards which say exactly the same thing, word for word. Your mother was somehow, to some extent, embroiled in the revolution. She told her parents not to write to her, but was sending messages home just to say she was still okay. Their bland nothingness wouldn’t attract any interest if Batista’s secret police chose to read them.’
Alan’s brow furrowed with doubt. ‘Do any of the letters confirm that? I mean, what do they say? Can you sum it up for me?’
Jane took a sip from her coffee before leaning forward, the cup cradled in both hands.
‘I’ll try. Your mother flew to Jamaica initially, on a business trip with her employer. She was his secretary, though your aunt said their relationship was rather more than that. He took her to Havana to watch the 1957 grand prix. That’s when she meets Fangio for the first time. She decides to stay in Cuba, dumps her boss and gets a job in a hotel. One of her friends there is killed by the police, nastily, and that seems to turn her into a full-on revolutionary. In terms of her sympathies, at least. Then we have nearly a year of “Havana is hot and beautiful” – though she later says she met Fangio again… Sorry, did you know he was kidnapped?’
Alan hesitated before answering. ‘Fangio? It does ring vague bells. Remind me.’
‘The next Cuban Grand Prix, in ‘58. Fangio was seized by Castro’s men in Havana. They made their point – Batista was losing control – and released Fangio unharmed and apparently good mates with his abductors. Your mother says she had met “her friend”…’ Jane made a gesture symbolising quotation marks with two fingers of her left hand. ‘...who we assume to be Fangio. In the hotel before he was kidnapped? We don’t know, but there has to be a suggestion that she was, in some tiny way, involved in what happened to him. Maybe. She says something enigmatic like, “It’s not a story for the confines of a card”, or words to that effect. Anyway, Batista decides to pack his bags and run at the very end of that year. A couple of days later, she’s photographed with Che Guevara after he’s taken Havana.’
Jane was still holding her coffee cup in her right hand and pointed it towards the photo frame on the bookcase.
‘So we’re now in January 1959. Your mother writes a proper letter for the first time in nearly 12 months. Talks about meeting Che and says, “We won!” But, again, what her direct involvement was isn’t clear. The last letter from Christmas that year implies she was doing very nicely under the revolution – she’s not at the hotel anymore and has her own apartment – and she’s certainly championing Fidel Castro.’
Jane took another sip from her coffee. Alan remained impassively quiet, so she resumed the story.
‘In that final letter, she’s refusing to come home. It sounds like she wants to stay in Cuba forever. Your grandparents’ relationship with her seems to have got rather fraught. I can’t imagine they were happy about any of her time over there. It must have been very scary for them.’
Jane paused again. Alan still didn’t comment, so she decided to adopt a slightly different tack.
‘The best thing is for you to read through everything yourself, but there are a couple of hints about the possible identity of your father... Sorry, Alan, are you okay with all this?’
‘Yes, yes. I was just trying to take it in. Please carry on.’
‘So,’ said Jane, ‘your mother mentions meeting a boy quite early on and then talks about someone who runs off to join the guerrillas fighting in the mountains. He comes back with Che as a “hero of the revolution”. I think she uses the phrase, “he’s back with me” or “come back to me”. But she also says Che is, quotes, “dreamy” so maybe she did have a fling with him. All in all, your DNA results could be very interesting.’ Jane rocked her head from side to side as she considered the probabilities. ‘Alternatively, they might not give us anything definitive. Don’t get your hopes up too much.’
Alan pursed his lips. ‘You’ve certainly got me intrigued, Jane, but I’ll try to keep my feet on the ground.’
‘Having told you all this stuff about Cuba,’ said Jane, ‘it mainly comes from a set of cards and letters that I’m sure your aunt would have given you at some stage. What you commissioned me to do was to trace your mother’s family tree. That’s all come together quite well. I think you’ll be interested. It’s a lot more colourful than many people’s.’
‘Is it all in here?’ said Alan, distractedly flicking through the pages of the ring folder.
‘Absolutely. If you turn to the front, you’ve got a summary. I thought we’d work through the Shaws first – they certainly got around – and then you’ve got the Oakleys, they made their money as goldbeaters in Portsmouth—'
‘Do you mind if I read it at my leisure?’ interrupted Alan.
‘Of course, but don’t you want me to at least give you an overview?’
‘No, I’m sure you’ve done a good job writing it up. I’ve no doubt it will be very clear, thorough, well researched.’
‘Okay,’ said Jane, confused and deflated.
Alan stared probingly into Jane’s eyes. ‘So, the other thing I asked you to do. Success, I hope?’
Jane suddenly felt uncomfortable. ‘Erm?’
‘Please don’t tell me you’ve forgotten?’ Alan’s voice had become decidedly firm.
Jane glanced at the second photograph on the bookshelf. ‘Cyn, you mean?’
Alan smiled. ‘Yes, Cyn. You had me worried for a minute. All the while I’ve been away, I’ve been looking forward to becoming acquainted with the delightful Cyn.’
‘Well,’ said Jane, gathering her thoughts. ‘As we agreed, it was always going to be difficult. Just a picture and a first name—'
‘But that’s why I hired you, Jane. You’re an ex-policewoman. You’ve got contacts, procedures. Missing person enquiries are right up your street.’
‘Sometimes it’s not—'
‘I just left you to get on with it. Maybe I should been more… involved, insistent. I know I can be a bit intense sometimes, so perhaps I overcompensated and didn’t make it clear that
this really mattered to me.’
Jane had recovered her composure and sat up straight. ‘Okay. Let me tell you how far I got. I spent a lot of time studying the photograph of your mother and Cyn. I’m 99% sure it is London. There’s a Routemaster bus in shot. It’s clearly on a major thoroughfare, and you said your mother worked in or around Euston. I went up and down the Euston Road – on the Internet, I mean – but I couldn’t find the building they’re standing in front of. The trouble is, there’s so much redevelopment that goes on, an awful lot gets knocked down, particularly if it doesn’t have great merit architecturally. And I’d suggest—'.
‘I could have told you it wasn’t on Euston Road,’ broke in Alan. ‘I drove there and looked myself. And, forgive me, I think I know more about architecture than you do.’
Jane nodded to concede the point and continued. ‘There’s the other photograph of Cyn, but it’s taken in an anonymous 1960s office interior and everyone’s listed by their first names. Apart from Miss Brown, and surnames don’t get much more common than Brown. There’s so little to go on.’
Alan was looking stern again. ‘It must be possible to trace which companies people were employed by. Have you at least done that?’
‘Alan, there’s no central database of that kind of thing. And we’re going back 50 years. You said your mother might have worked for the railways. Your aunt said railways as well, but I’m not clear it was British Rail itself. You said your mother was a secretary. Your aunt suggested she was some kind of shop steward. You thought she might have worked in Euston Station, but Cyn and Miss Brown aren’t in a spanking new sixties building. It’s hard to know where to start.’
‘Anything to do with railways at that time must have been British Rail,’ pressed Alan. ’It was all nationalised. Have you been through their archives? They must have archives surely? And how about the electoral register?’
‘The electoral register?’
‘Yes, I was thinking… Maybe my mother and Cyn shared a flat together. You find my mother, and if she’s living with someone called Cynthia then immediately you’ve got her full name, middle initials and everything.’
‘Maybe.’ Jane was starting to question herself. Perhaps she had given up too easily. And had she misunderstood Alan when they first met? What exactly had he said? This was much more important to him than she had realised. He had told his dying mother that he would try to find her old friend, to give her some necklace, or whatever it was, and needed to feel he had done everything in his power to fulfil that promise. The chances of success still seemed close to zero, but if he wanted to pay Jane to go through the motions then she would, though she wasn’t going to be browbeaten into giving him false hopes.
‘Okay, Alan. I hear what you say. But, to be fair, I’ve concentrated my efforts on your mother’s tree. You didn’t make it clear this was such a priority.’
His response was silence and a look that was somewhere between indifference and defiance.
‘I do need to be honest with you,’ said Jane. ‘I still think there’s minimal chance of finding Cyn – Alan, after all this time she’s quite likely to be dead herself – but I can sit down with my business partner and brainstorm any other possible avenues of research. Records that aren’t online can be very time consuming to search through, but we’ll come up with some ideas and I’ll get back to you.’
‘Thank you, Jane.’ Alan’s expression was now one of relief. ‘I’m sorry if it sounded like I was telling you how to do your job, but I should be honest with you as well – I was more than a little disappointed...’
The postboy
Hi Jane
The software fixes at the bank are holding, thanks for asking. Some money was lost and they’re looking for someone to shout at and blame, but fortunately Hayley’s team aren’t in the (literal) firing line.
In a similar vein, I’m glad you do the customer-facing stuff on the genealogy projects. This Alan guy sounds a little unreasonable, not to mention inconsistent. I know I’d have been a bit intimidated when he started getting heavy about being ‘disappointed’. Fortunately, you’re tougher than me. I suppose he’s a businessman who’s not backward about speaking his mind, though I don’t understand why he didn’t do that in the first place.
Maybe it’s because he always knew he was expecting too much and has now, somehow, conveniently forgotten. That said, his suggestion about looking at the electoral registers wasn’t completely stupid. I found a Patricia E Shaw living in north London in 1965. She seems to be sharing a house in Dollis Hill, which is on a tube line that would get her into Euston easily enough. Her housemates don’t include anyone called Cynthia, unfortunately. The registers after 1965 haven’t been digitised, but they are in the London Metropolitan Archives so I could pop in and check that address to see if Cyn moved in later. Needless to say, it’s a long shot, and if Pat was just renting a room there’s no guarantee she stayed put. And if she didn’t, who knows where she moved to? London is a *big* place.
So… then I studied those photographs you sent across. I enlarged and enhanced the interior office picture looking for clues, but it’s too grainy to pick out any precise detail. You see those TV shows where a techie magically blows up an image to 1000X magnification and reads a document reflected in someone’s glasses. In reality, film has finite limitations. As regards the picture taken outside, I agree there’s something about the pose that says, ‘This is where we work’ or at the very least, ‘We have a connection to this place.’ In the days before digital and camera phones, people didn’t just snap away randomly. I did a reverse image search on the Web, but it drew a blank – we can’t see enough of the building for it to stand a chance. You mentioned the partially obscured brass plaque, and I thought about that for a while. We can see two words ending ‘ON’ and ‘SE’. HOUSE seemed a likely candidate for the second, and given that the font and spacing look consistent, the first was likely to be a 5-letter word too. Words of 5 letters ending ‘ON’? SPOON? ONION? How about UNION?
‘Union House’ felt worthy of progressing, especially as you said Alan’s aunt suggested Pat could have been a shop steward of some sort. I searched for buildings with that name in the Euston area and – eureka! – one came up. I got very excited until I looked at it. It just wasn’t right. It was old enough, but Victorian Gothic, nothing like the one in the photograph. It’s the headquarters of the National Rail workers’ Union (NRU) – there’s our railway connection – but it’s also down a relatively quiet side street. The lack of traffic doesn’t match what we can see in the photograph. I was about to give up when I noticed that one of the search results was for some old news footage shot in front of the NRU. It was dated 1987, and when I played it back you could see it was on the Euston Road itself. Unfortunately, the building still didn’t match – it was a characterless modern thing. Eventually, I managed to unravel the story. The NRU had been on the Euston Road from about 1910 to the 1990s, before relocating and taking the name, ‘Union House’, with them. But a decade prior to that, they demolished their original building and put up a new one on the same site. Then, for whatever reason, they decided to move out altogether (and the new owners quickly brought in the bulldozers yet again). I’ve managed to find a solitary image of the first NRU headquarters, taken in the 1920s. It was before Euston Road was widened, but the windows and the doorway are unmistakably the same as those Pat and Cyn are standing in front of 40 years later.
I felt really pleased with myself before realising all we’d really established was where two women were photographed, coupled with a hunch that it might be where they worked. What next? Fortunately, we had a big stroke of luck...
I searched for NRU staff in the 1960s and up popped a Facebook page. On it was the attached colour photograph taken at a Christmas party in 1969. The man who uploaded it, Brian Pointer, is now a retired company director but at the time was working in the mailroom. Brian’s the boy in the red jumper just off centre, but on the extreme right, slightly cropped, is a very attra
ctive girl with short blonde hair. It sure as hell looks like Cyn to me. I can’t see Pat in there, but the older woman at the front appears to be the ‘Miss Brown’ from our office photo.
I’ve messaged Brian and I’ll obviously forward you his reply. It was 50 years ago, of course. I hope he’s got a good memory.
Tommy x
Dear Tommy Ferdinand
Thank you for getting in touch. It’s always a pleasure to think back to the happy days of one’s youth, and some memories are particularly warm. I left school at 15 and working at the old Union House was my very first job. I lived out in the sticks and getting the train into the big city every day seemed very exciting. I was a postboy, delivering mail around the building, and it was all a bit of a lark, without any of the pressures and responsibilities of later life. I got to know all the secretaries and would flirt with the younger girls and let the older ones mother me.
Do I remember Cyn? How could I forget her? I was hopelessly in love with her. I think we all were. She was absolutely beautiful and such a nice lady. She was only a few years older than me, but way out of my league. Her surname was Howard. I remember that because her brother, Colin Howard, worked with us as well. You’re correct – Cyn is on the far right of the photograph I put on Facebook. The fact she’s in it could be one of the reasons I held onto it all these years. We didn’t keep in touch (I wish!), but I seem to remember her boyfriend was a good-looking university grad with a job in British Rail management. I know she got married and left work to start a family.
You also asked about Pat Shaw. I do remember her, though perhaps for different reasons. She and Cyn were really good friends. Pat was a bit older and not unattractive herself. She was rather scary, though. The rumour was that some bloke had given her a hard time and she held it against the entire male sex. I suspect that story was started by some spotty Herbert who was rebuffed after trying it on with her, but you certainly didn’t mess about with Pat. To be fair, she took her job seriously, and I think she was ambitious and wanted to progress from secretarial work. She was very political, as I recall. We would all have been Labour voters, but she was especially passionate about socialism and workers’ rights. She probably thought she could do better than most of the old men she worked for. She might have been right, but it was tough for a woman in those days – the R in NRU still stood for Railwaymen’s, not Railworkers’ back then – and even silly postboys sometimes thought they could order secretaries around.