The Girl from Station X (47 page)

Part 5

Steadily She Walks towards Me

M
y son had observed: ‘Granny is hidden!’ and it was true that for much of her life, and mine, my mother had hidden herself – in
alcohol, compulsive travel, childlike helplessness and her secret love for women. Her diaries were therefore a catalyst for me. In the years after I found them, I learned more and more about her.
Besides reading and typing them on to the computer, I gave myself the task of going through her photograph albums and putting them in order. I ended up feeling grateful that she had produced this
catalogue of our family life – and of
my
life, some of which after all had been happy. Here were our two holidays at Comillas; in one snap me and Raymond are with Nanny Benny, me
touching her hair as though secure with her, despite my father having told us that she was a witch. On the second Comillas holiday, me and Raymond play together, on the beach on all fours like
little dogs, pretending to lap the water in the shallow pools.

Then, North Heath House, 1953, our first spring there, me and Raymond, always together. Me and Raymond with Roger – an older local boy – and a Jersey calf, then me and Raymond on the
lawn with Captain, our brown horse on wheels; I still have him. My children played with him.

Me and Raymond in Trafalgar Square with Father Christmas on 21 December 1953. My mother has captioned it:
THE NIGHT BEFORE NICKY WAS BORN
. Then our first summer holiday in England, at
Hope Cove, in August 1954: me and Raymond, always together, on the beach, Doreen paddling, bending to hold Nicky upright on the edge of the sea, just months before he learns to walk; Kevin, my
grandmother’s new West Highland puppy, sniffs Nicky’s hand, which he holds out to the little dog.

I suddenly realise, as I leaf again through these albums, that I am often looking at people who will die sudden or early deaths. I see Raymond riding Captain on the lawn and know that a few
months later he will be dead. The same applies to that photo of Gig holding Raymond’s hand as they step off the
Queen Mary
in New York Harbour in 1955, Raymond wearing the brown
velvet pixie hood that Gig made for him. She died soon after, of cancer. And what about Nicky, here on the lawn at North Heath, a happy two-year-old in a duffel coat, his feet on the pedals of our
third toy horse, a little dapple-grey Dobbin, made of tin?

My mother once labelled all these photographs so painstakingly.

I return to that much later album with those macabre snaps of her holding a clutch of toy dogs. I had thought it grotesque that the twins, her grandchildren, were placed beside these. However,
now I perceive that in her arms my mother holds
four
dogs – like the four children she once had, who should all still be alive.

I visited Chow’s niece Honor at her cottage near where Aunt Lin had lived in Sussex. Honor and Anne had liked each other. I complained to Honor that my mother had not helped me clear up
Knowle after my grandmother’s death and she replied: ‘Your mother had no fight left in her!’

Honor introduced me to Frank and Elsie’s granddaughter, of my age, who had loved walking with her grandparents in the bluebell woods at Knowle as a little girl. She gave me Frank’s
idiosyncratic and observant memoir of his life in Sussex. Frank wrote of my grandmother: ‘The tragic loss of . . . the boy in the pool before a coming Christmas was a Knock out for us all,
the Blow to last long . . . But this Lady Having taken Knock out blows all her life Rode the tide again . . .’

My mother’s old friend Angela showed me snaps of her and my mother at Loch Choire. Angela admitted that the teenage Anne was indulged by Nah and sometimes by Gig, and that when Angela
caught more fish, Anne wouldn’t speak to her for several days. Angela even went to my grandmother and asked: ‘Shall I go south?’ My grandmother then made her daughter
apologise.

Angela said that my parents were ‘two very unhappy people’ and that she had often felt sorry for me and my two remaining brothers. She had had one to stay, after my father refused to
have his own teenage son in the house. She said that my grandmother, shortly before she died, had begged Angela: ‘Look after Anne.’

The day after that visit, I took my daughter back to school after the long summer holidays. We called on my mother at Camelot first. She had now had Alzheimer’s for
nearly ten years and once my poor daughter had burst out to me that she didn’t want a grandmother who only read ‘Gummy Bears’ books.

Although my daughter didn’t want to go, as she found it upsetting to see a grandmother with whom she had once had a good relationship so deteriorated, she was, as usual, kind to her
grandmother. She sat close to her, holding her hand, and when my mother talked animatedly, although the words came out as gibberish, my daughter said to me: ‘I think she’s going over
and over scenes from the past in her mind, trying to make sense of them.’

I realised that this was what I was trying to do with the diaries, photographs and letters, and my visits, make sense of my mother’s life – and my own.

I wrote a newspaper article about finding Raymond’s things, and in response received three letters from strangers, one of which went:

I am your age and my mother has Alzheimer’s and now lives in a nursing home. These things we have in common
.
I did not lose a sibling however, I lost a
daughter. My two daughters were born 20 months apart, and, like you and your brother, were great friends and inseparable. When my daughters were 10 and 8, the younger one died, not abruptly, but
after 2 years of illness. When she died our baby son was almost 3.

I read your reaction and your family’s reaction to your brother’s death with great sympathy. I have often wondered how our daughter, now 20, feels about the loss of her sister. I
do not know – it is still too painful to talk about.

I have a bedding box in my bedroom full of my dead child’s belongings, school books, favourite cuddly toys, Mother’s Day cards – just as you discovered in your
mother’s house. I have a couple of small photos of my daughter displayed at home – not blown-up portraits – there’s no shrine – but I need them there.

You have made me wonder what my children think. Do they resent my continued love for my daughter? Is my surviving daughter ‘jealous’? My daughter’s death ‘knocked our
family sideways, so that it never recovered.’ I think we have learned to live with what happened, but the scars are deep.

When I had finished your article, I imagined my daughter cleaning my house and delving into the chest of mementoes. I wonder if she will feel as you do. Please do not be too hard on your
mother. I feel for her. With any luck her Alzheimer’s will have dulled or removed the pain.

I love my two children, but the child I lost still shapes the way I am and influences me. If my house caught fire and I could save only one thing it would be her photo. I can’t help
myself for feeling this way.

That last sentence stuck in my mind.

I felt great sympathy for this woman, this mother, whom I had never met. However, I was still not quite able to extend that sympathy towards
my
mother over the death of
her
child, Raymond. I was still a child myself, who resented my mother’s lack of attention.

Doreen also wrote me a kind letter. As a result of my article, I had appeared on
The Esther Show
, presented by Esther Rantzen, talking about Raymond – by chance the day after his
birthday, 8 May. Doreen’s Aunt Eva had seen me on TV and had rung Doreen.

Doreen wrote:

It has always been, and always will be a great heart ache to me, feeling if I hadn’t got crippled up with my back and landed up in hospital all this would never have
happened . . . If ever there was a black hole in one’s life it was mine . . . I always felt a tragedy such as happened, could not possibly pass without leaving its scar, and my heart has been
with you especially ever since, I do think of you so often and wonder how you are, when I go to see your mother I come away feeling simply devastated . . . I hope you won’t mind me sending
this to you, but felt I wanted you to know how I feel. One day it would be nice to see you again. How I loved you all. My love and best wishes. Doreen.

Unfortunately I did not feel as warm as I should have done to Doreen. I had always felt that she had sided with my mother over thinking that Raymond was more important than the rest of us.

It was Jean, my mother’s friend who had been on those trips to Eastern Europe with her in 1937 and 1938, who helped me most in taking a more forgiving attitude towards my mother. Jean came
to my flat and I showed my mother’s old films of them as young women in the Balkans. Jean had taken the good black-and-white photographs in my mother’s albums of those trips, and she
and I talked about their friends from Novi Knezevac who had come to unfortunate ends. Jean tried to piece together what had happened to each of them.

On my mother’s eighty-fourth birthday, Jean wrote me a letter:

You confirm what I have always feared since Raymond’s death, that the surviving members of the family would be left feeling they were perpetually in the shadow of the
deceased. Life so often follows a pattern doesn’t it? When people are unable to compete with a family tragedy this is what happens. In the same way alcoholics follow a pattern. I know they
are impossible, exasperating and appalling to those who have to cope with them – this too is a tragedy from the alcoholics’ point of view. They are not entirely to blame I think. They
inherit genes which give them a craving for alcohol – some rise above it but this must call for help and enormous strength of mind. I think for Anne her tragedy and alcohol were more than she
could survive. I always imagine that when Raymond died she had what used to be known as a ‘nervous breakdown’. Alcohol was her only consolation. Poor Anne . . . Yet it was unforgivable
to take it out on all of you. I think she never understood what she was doing.

There were other positives. I found in a wooden box Aunt K’s handwritten notes about her own life:
Happy childhood. No hatred, full of excitements & adventures. Parents never
quarrelled . . . School in Light Cart . . . death of Mother at 18 . . . Travel with father . . . Marriage 1909. Ten years a widow.
Her cheerful tone made me realise that early or unexpected
death might not be the end of everything. Aunt K had also made enthusiastic notes of her travels with her widowed father – to Russia before the Revolution, to Egypt, Greece, Norway and
Sweden. They had even visited the Empress Eugénie.

In a letter to her daughter at Madame Boni’s, my grandmother had praised K’s ‘
naturalness and kindliness’.
(She had also referred to K’s ‘
strange
friends
’ and commented that K wasn’t very well dressed.)

Aunt K had often visited us and always used to stay for Christmas. She had bad rheumatism and I recalled her horribly swollen ankles. Despite this and despite being a widow with no children,
Aunt K had seemed to enjoy life. But my father, as he could be with those close to my mother, was impatient with Aunt K, and my mother even sometimes implied that her aunt was a burden.

Nicky and I had enjoyed visiting Aunt K in her house off Haverstock Hill, where she had an old Irish cook who would send me karrogeen (seaweed) from Connemara for my bronchitis. Aunt K’s
life was full of friends and cousins; she and her brother had obviously benefited from those loving parents who never quarrelled – and, unlike Anne, they found it easy to show affection. I
was struck by the sweet letter my grandfather wrote to his new mother-in-law from his honeymoon hotel in Paris in 1912, assuring her that he would take the utmost care of her youngest daughter and
that he regarded ‘Moods’ as his second mother. And there were the love letters to him from my grandmother that I had inherited from Knowle, still in the army chest that he had sent back
to her in late 1915, for safekeeping, just before he was killed.

Now, in Aunt K’s papers, I found his letters back. Their letters spanned the twelve months from August 1914, when he was sent to fight, until July 1915, shortly before his death. My
grandmother wrote on 15 January 1915:

Sweetheart,

I was having such a lovely dream this morning. You remember how we said the other day that one saw very few places that one was seized with a desire to live in? Well I
dreamed the most lovely place. A big grey stone house, a bit bigger than this with most lovely gardens and grounds falling away from it. Stone terraces and steps and a huge lake with a sandy bottom
so that the water was quite clear. It was summer and I was having breakfast out on the terrace and the flowers everywhere and the sun. Oh Ninny I nearly cried when I woke up to a bleak winter
morning and a snuffly head and the war. However, I found your letter by my bed and that made things worthwhile again. Our happiness is something worth waiting for isn’t it?

I wondered if she was dreaming of Knowle after the wing was added, the garden landscaped and a lake, part of the water gardens, created in the woods, long after my grandfather
was dead?

In early spring 1915, my grandmother sometimes stayed with her mother at Battle Abbey, and then my grandfather wrote to her there:

Feb 4th 1915.

My own darling Glad,

The post has just come in bringing a letter from Poods but nothing else. I am disappointed darling I do want a letter from you so badly. The postman tells me that they threw some aeroplane
bombs on HAZEBROUKE as he came through he didn’t seem to mind and yesterday they threw some on BAILLEUL, some unfortunate civilian children were killed . . .