The Truth Against the World (9 page)

“Enjoy your stay in England,” she said.

Gee Gee raised her eyebrows. I stifled a laugh, knowing what was coming next.

“We'll be in Wales, my dear,” Gee Gee told her with a tight smile. “And we Welsh may be many things, but one thing we are
not
is English. Not in our blood, not in our language, and not in our hearts!”

“I see,” the employee said. She rubbed her temples for a moment, then looked up again. “In that case, enjoy your stay in Wales.”

“We will.” Gee Gee's voice was gracious now. “
Diolch yn fawr
. Thank you.”

I smirked. Her epic takedown was definitely going on my blog.

After we went through the security line, I followed my family down endless hallways crowded with sleepy travelers bearing takeout coffee and plastic bags from the newsstand. Dad pushed the wheelchair, and Mom was pulling along the rest of our carry-on bags. We passed gate after gate before finally reaching G16. Boarding wasn't for another hour, so I sank down into one of the black vinyl chairs in an empty row.

“Gee Gee, take this aisle seat—I'll sit by you,” I offered. My mom sat down on my right and pulled out a magazine; Dad sat next to her and started fiddling with his phone.

An hour. An hour to learn as much as I could before we were crammed together on a flight with a couple hundred of our closest eavesdropping friends. I looked around crossly: occupied seats everywhere. This wasn't any more private than the flight would be. Still, even if I couldn't ask about the dream, I could find out
something
.

I leaned closer. “Gee Gee, I had a dream last night that, uh, reminded me of your stories about the village.” I paused. “It had to be scary living there during World War II.”

With a bit of effort, she turned to face me, her small hands gripping the armrests. “Yes, of course it was,
blodyn
. So many people lost their lives in the blitz, you see, even in Wales. We were luckier than many, the folk of Cwm Tawel.”

I could sense my mom listening in, but I tried to ignore her. She might be interested, but for me, so much more was at stake.

“What was it like? I want to hear the real story. Good and bad.” I gave her a tentative smile. “I want to know all about it before we get there. It's … our history.”

“Our history.” She sighed, a faraway look in her eyes. “Oh, well, life was hard then, wasn't it. Dad … well, Dad, out of all of us, didn't take it well. He worked in a factory that made bomb shelters until they let some people go and he went on the dole. After that, he didn't know what to do with himself. Moping about the house. Too old to enlist, they said. So the minute the Home Guard formed up for the villages, he pulled his dad's old tin helmet from the Great War out of the trunk and announced he was joining up.”

“Heavens,” my mom said. “It's like an old movie.”

Gee Gee nodded slowly. “Movie indeed. He and Mum had a big dramatic row. She yelled at him, ‘What do you intend me to do on my own, with so many people in the house?' Because of the evacuated children that we took in, you see, and only myself and my older brother Daniel's wife Myfanwy to help. Extra mouths to feed, extra work to do. Three more children, besides me and my young brothers. Everyone had to do it, though. They came in from the cities, some of them without even their mothers.”

“That's awful,” I said, making a show of jotting down a few notes in my journal, but my hand was trembling. It was my dream, all right—the children with battered suitcases and gas masks, spilling off the train at the countryside depot. If I were a more skeptical person, I might have remembered all the World War II movies I'd seen and wondered if some of the images had gotten stuck in my head somehow. But that didn't explain the other dream scenes—the ones that had Gee Gee in them.

I sat up straight. The evacuated children. Could one of
them
have been Olwen?

“May I have some water, please, dear?” Gee Gee gave a short, dry cough.

“Let your great-grandmother rest now,” Mom said, rummaging in her tote bag for the bottled water. “If you have to sleep, Rhiannon, go right ahead. We'll wake you up when they start boarding.” Mom smiled, but as she handed Gee Gee the water, I could see the worry in her eyes.

“I'm quite all right,” Gee Gee said, but she did look tired, even though we'd only been up and about for five hours or so. I wanted to know everything she had to tell me, wanted to know who those children in my dream were, but I didn't want to wear her out, either.

“It's okay,” I said quickly. Shame welled up inside me, battling with my need to know. “We can talk more later.” I stared at my hands, twisting them around in my lap, as Gee Gee sipped at her water and then put it down, closing her eyes.

After a minute, I sighed and pulled out my printout of Mom's uber-organized trip plan. Eleven hours on the plane. We'd arrive in London around eight in the morning, and since we already had our rail passes, we'd just take the subway to Paddington Station and get right on a train for the port town of Llanelli. From there, we'd take a scenic bus ride to Cwm Tawel, arriving mid-afternoon. It was all on the spreadsheet, organized and under control.

It was kind of the only thing we
could
control. I felt a surge of compassion toward my mom, how she tried to make everything run smoothly, and I leaned my head against her shoulder for a moment. None of us really knew what to do, but we were all trying.

Sooner than I expected, I heard the shrilling of the intercom. As we got into the pre-boarding line with Gee Gee, I felt like I was going to throw up. I was excited, but I was terrified. And I was sad. The reason for the trip constantly nagged at the edges of my mind.

While we waited, I could just hear my great-grandmother humming a familiar tune under her breath—my favorite lullaby again. I smiled briefly despite myself.

Then we were handing our passes to the gate agent at the entrance to the boarding tunnel. The tunnel curved so that I couldn't see its end or the door to the plane, and I shivered. The whole journey would be like that—one step at a time, with no way of knowing what lay around the next bend in the path.

The plane's engines roared to life with a subsonic rumble and I double-checked the seat pocket: book, journal, iPod. The flight attendant was doing her perky little demo about what to do in case of catastrophe. She dangled an oxygen mask from one hand, which made me think about my dream again. Those poor children with their gas masks … and had Gee Gee really snuck out during an air raid? I wanted to ask her.

But first there was the stomach-dropping thrill of the airplane taking off, rising higher and higher into the atmosphere until San Francisco looked like a collection of tiny Monopoly houses next to the blue expanse of the bay. Dad, sitting across the aisle, fussed over Gee Gee for at least ten minutes, asking “are you comfortable?” and “do you need another blanket?” until I thought I might go nuts. I plugged my earbuds into the armrest and found a sitcom rerun to block it out.

Finally, Mom leaned back with a crime novel and Dad put on his headset.

Now
, I said to myself. I turned to Gee Gee. But she had fallen asleep, breathing heavily and deeply with her head propped up on two of the little airline pillows. She looked so frail, her skin slack and dry and her eyelids fluttering gently. I leaned my seat back and listened to Welsh podcasts on my iPod until I dozed off.

I woke up some time later, neck cramped, when the flight attendants came by with meals on little trays. I wolfed mine down, but Gee Gee only managed a few bites of pasta before pushing it away tiredly. Across the aisle, Mom and Dad exchanged a worried look. The fact that they didn't say anything made the knot in my stomach tighten even more.

I checked the flight tracker on my video monitor and sighed: still six hours to go. I couldn't wait to get off the plane and walk on solid ground, eat some real food: Shepherd's pie, or maybe fish and chips. And tea, real English tea.

I looked over at my parents. They were asleep now. But Gee Gee was stirring, and I immediately snapped to attention.

“Would you help me to the toilet, please?” she asked.
T
Å·
bach
, I thought to myself; a very useful word. I kept her arm tucked in mine as we walked the short distance through first-class to the front of the plane. Through the windows, I glimpsed a breathtaking view of jagged, snowy peaks and valleys—Canada, or maybe Greenland.

After helping Gee Gee into the lavatory, I hovered anxiously outside until she came back out. And as we made our way back down the aisle, I seized my chance.

“I still want to hear more about what Cwm Tawel used to be like when you were my age,” I began, hoping for more specific information this time. Information about
her
. “Did you do anything exciting? You know, like … go to dances? Or sneak out?”

She turned back to me for a moment, but I didn't meet her eyes. I was afraid she'd be able to see everything just from the look on my face.

“So curious!” She smiled, but there was a fleeting expression on her face that I couldn't read. Then the moment passed and she began to weave a story, speaking softly over the dull thundering of the engines. “Of course, things were very different when I was your age, weren't they. As children we didn't have the kind of freedoms that young people have now, and we didn't have many opportunities, living as we did in a small village.”

The rhythms of her voice began to carry me beyond the confines of the airplane cabin until they were all I could hear. “The young men usually became farmers, if they grew up on one of the farms. The rest mostly became coal miners in the valleys, or went north to work in the quarries or the slate mines. Local girls would be expected to get married and have a family, run the household. Or you could become a teacher or a nurse in those days.”

“But you were at home still,” I said, helping her into her seat.

Gee Gee peered at me for a moment over the tops of her glasses. Then her eyes grew less focused, more faraway. “Yes, but wasn't it nice to be a child in Cwm Tawel, with the sea only a few miles away, and the green hills all round.” Those were the kinds of stories she'd always told me when I was growing up—about school in Welsh, about singing in Sunday chapel and growing up on the farm. But now I knew there was more.

I looked at her expectantly. Her expression had grown unreadable again. I listened hard, searching for something—anything—that would help me understand.

“The war made everyone grow up more quickly, you see. Miners were called off to the forces … coal was hard to come by. There were ration coupons for our food and our clothes, though with our gardens and the farms around, we weren't as poorly off as some. And when the evacuees arrived, everyone's lives changed … even at Awel-y-Môr. That was the name of our house. Sea Breeze.”

I twisted in my seat to face her. Heart racing, I asked, “What was that like? Who were the evacuees?” I didn't want to press her in case she retreated again, but I crossed my fingers. Maybe now I'd find out about that little girl.

“Dear me now, let's see … it was 1940, in the dead of winter, when they came. I was nearly thirteen years old. The rain was beating down and the wind was whistling, and in came my mum with three of them. All soaked to the skin and shivering.”

I held my breath, hoping for a revelation.

“There was a brother and sister from London, Christopher and Susan. They were eleven and ten years old, the same age as my brothers. The poor things had already lost their father.” She thought for a moment. “Then there was the youngest, Peter, who came alone from Coventry, only eight years old … both his parents killed by a bomb that fell in their neighborhood. It was very sad, wasn't it. Christopher and Susan lived with us for almost two years until their mum sent for them; after Cardiff and Swansea were attacked, she felt it was safer back in London! Petey stayed in Cwm Tawel. He lived in our house until he was old enough to move onto the farm, and then he went off to the village of Brynamman to work. He was like a younger brother to me. I did miss him when your great-grandfather and I moved to the States.”

I tried to hide my disappointment. I'd been so sure one of the evacuated children would be the girl, Olwen. But then I did a little math, and realized that it couldn't have been possible anyway. Gareth had said the other Olwen lived between 1944 and 1950, and that was years too late to be an evacuee.

So who was she?

“You never mentioned any of this before,” I said, trying to find a connection.

“Oh, Olwen
fach
, those stories were so sad, much too sad for a happy little girl like you.” Gee Gee's eyes were clouded and half-closed, her voice weary. I sat silently, listening as her breathing grew slow and even as her eyes closed again. If she missed Petey and her life in Wales so much, why had she left at all? After all, once the war ended, things had to have gotten better there. It didn't add up.

I needed Gareth. And I needed whatever information he'd managed to find. I just hoped he'd found something, because, so far, all I'd found were more mysteries.

“Flight attendants, prepare the cabin for landing.”

My ears popped as the plane descended slowly through the cloud cover. I caught a brief, tantalizing glimpse of houses and green fields as the plane banked and turned, sinking lower and lower toward England. I was more than ready to soak it all in.

I followed my parents and Gee Gee off the plane, into the busy airport, and through the customs line. The most gorgeous English-accented voices were everywhere, as well as a din of other languages: French, German, Chinese, Hindi, and plenty I didn't even recognize.