Secrets of a Charmed Life (27 page)

But Mum didn’t tell me Granny had written to her. I was at Aunt Charlotte’s, thinking Neville was still in India when he was already dead. And we spent all those weeks away and I never knew I had grandparents who wanted to see me.

When I asked Granny why Mum did that, she said I shouldn’t ponder things I could only guess about. She said maybe Mum needed time to get used to the idea that I even had grandparents and that Neville was dead, and that before she got used to either one, the Germans started bombing London.

Why didn’t Neville tell me I had grandparents?

Granny said she had to do the same thing as me: not ponder too hard things she could only guess about. She told me my grandfather and Neville didn’t see eye to eye on anything. Gramps wanted Neville to go to Oxford and get a proper education, settle down, and have a respectable career. Neville didn’t want any of that. He wanted to be in theater. So maybe he didn’t tell them he had a daughter because he knew he hadn’t become a father in the proper way, and he figured that would matter to Gramps.

I think Neville might have also wanted to keep me from his parents because he was afraid if I was around them, I would grow to be
like
them—unimpressed with who he was. I didn’t come to this conclusion until I was much older. Because even though Granny told me not to ponder it, I did.

I pondered a lot of things.

You’re probably wondering how I came to be with Granny.

First, you need to know that Neville was in a horrific car accident in Dublin. That’s where he was, Emmy. Not India. He was living with a woman who owned a little theater. He was starting to direct plays and skits, and he was out one night after a performance that he had starred in and directed. He’d had too much to drink and he crashed the car he was driving into another car. The crash didn’t kill him, but he was so badly hurt and he barely had any money for the hospital. No surprise there, right? The woman he was living with was afraid he would die if he didn’t get the medical care he needed, so she looked up his parents and rang them. Gramps and Granny came out to see if they could transfer him to a hospital in Oxford. But his injuries were too severe. Right before he died, Neville told his parents about me. Told them where I lived and what Mum’s name was. Granny said it was as if he knew he was dying and he wanted to give them something precious and beautiful in place of all the heartache.

And that’s just what he did,
Granny said.

She told me all of this before I was talking again, probably sometime in the second year we were in Connecticut. I remember I had already had my eighth birthday. I still didn’t know about Mum. And I didn’t know where you were. I’ve never known where you were.

It hurt to hear Neville had died long before, and worse still to be told a few weeks later that Mum was also dead, and had been dead for months and months. Both times I felt myself folding in like I was spinning a cocoon.

Granny knew what happened to Mum because Gramps discovered it and told her. Granny never really had Mum’s permission to take me to America, but it wasn’t like she could wait around to get it with the Germans bombing London every five minutes and Mum nowhere in sight. But I guess Gramps had
been insisting all along that they
had
to find out where Mum had disappeared to. Gramps didn’t feel right about Granny whisking me off without Mum’s permission, even though I was now far from the war. Granny finally gave in and told him to see what he could find, though I know now that she was terribly afraid Mum was in turn looking for me and would want me back. Gramps hired someone to look for Mum and that person found out Mum had died in the bombings. Her name was on a list.

When Granny finally told me Mum was in heaven, I said three words. The first in who knows how long.

What about Emmy?

And Granny said,
Who is Emmy?

My sister,
I said.

A sister? Was she Neville’s daughter, too?
Granny asked, and she looked like she was about to have a heart attack thinking Neville had two little girls in London and she had rescued only one of them.

I shook my head.

From another daddy?
Granny asked.

And I nodded.

I don’t know where she is,
Granny said.
But I can try to find her. Would you like me to?

I was done with words for another few years. I just nodded my head.

But Granny never did find you. Sometimes I wonder how hard she looked. And I know it wasn’t easy during the war to find out where someone was.

And then sometimes I wonder if she did find out and she just couldn’t tell me.

Even now, when I could ask her, should ask her, I can’t.

I have done my own searching. I’ve looked in every telephone directory I can find for an Emmeline Downtree. In my braver moments I’ve checked cemeteries and fatality reports
from the war. I’ve even checked every bridal magazine, every design house, every wedding dress shop in London, and it’s because I can’t find you in that little universe that I fear you must be dead.

If I could have one wish, it would be that I hadn’t switched out the brides box with my fairy tale book that night we left Aunt Charlotte’s.

I would, Emmy. Even if it meant it was the only wish I could have.

I’ve looked for your brides everywhere. Every time I see a woman in a wedding dress, I look to see if she is wearing one of your gowns.

But how could she?

You don’t have any of your designs.

I took them from you.

I’m so desperately sorry, Emmy.

If I could remember Aunt Charlotte’s last name or the house where she lived or the town where the house was, I would see if the brides box was still there and I would spend the rest of my life looking for you so that I could give it back to you. But I can’t remember where that house was or Charlotte’s last name. When I tried to find out, I learned that the building where the East End evacuations records were kept was destroyed by a V-I flying bomb in 1944.

I can’t make it right.

I wish I could take back what I did. I wish it all the time.

This is not helping me.

This is not helping.

Julia

June 12, 1958

Dear Emmy,

I told Dr. Diamant today that the journal idea is not working. She wanted to know why. I told her that I didn’t feel better after writing to you. I actually felt worse. She said sometimes on the road to healing, you must reopen an old wound. It will hurt again, maybe as much as or more than it did when it was first inflicted, but as you reconnect with and embrace the healing process, it will begin to hurt less. Sometimes a broken bone does not heal properly and there is unrelenting pain because bones that aren’t supposed to touch are rubbing up against each other. The only way to fix it is to break the bone again and reset it. That’s the only way it can heal properly. You have to break the bone again.

That was her way of explaining that as I write to you, I might feel worse before I feel better.

I suppose that makes sense.

But I didn’t know what else to say to you. Dr. Diamant asked if I would feel okay if she read what I had written so far. I let her read it.

Dr. Diamant said she was very proud of me for being so honest with you and that I should keep going.
Keep going how?
I said.

She suggested that I start at the beginning where you and I left off because if I were to see you again, that’s what I would want to hear from you. I’d want to know what happened to you after we were parted.

I admit I’m afraid to go back to that day, Emmy. I’ve placed it so far in the back of my mind. I worry that by dragging it up from that dark place where it’s been sleeping, I will relive it. And if I relive it, then I will again become that silent girl who can’t sleep at night. Dr. Diamant told me that little girl has grown up. I can speak to that seven-year-old inside me and tell her she survived this. I don’t need to be afraid of looking back to the place where she was because that place is just a memory, and memories have no power but what I allow them.

I will try very hard to keep that in mind as I write.

Simon is sitting here next to me. He doesn’t know everything about what happened the day my life changed, but he knows how hard this is for me. I told him I would let him read this journal when I am done so that he will know what he’s dealing with. That seems only fair. In the meantime, we are sitting side by side at my kitchen table with only a teapot between us. He is reading while I write these words to you. And every so often he gently rubs my back and refills my teacup.

So here we go. Back to the beginning.

I awoke to the sound of sirens.

At first I thought you had not left the flat because it seemed you had only just been at my side a second earlier, fluffing the sofa pillows and telling me to stay where I was and that Mum would be home soon.

I called for you as the sirens wailed but you did not answer. I heard popping sounds, the far-off echoes of the antiaircraft guns, and thundering booms that seemed to come from up underneath the earth. You did not tell me what to do if the sirens went off. So I stayed on the sofa and covered my ears with the throw pillows. I screamed for you—and for Mum—even though I knew I was alone.

Then I heard the whistles of the bombs, some far away and some near, and I began to hear the explosions as they landed, despite the pillows over my ears. I felt them in my chest, in the very depths of me. This wasn’t a drill. This was real. The Germans were bombing London.

Instinctively I knew I should run for cover but you told me to stay in the flat. Mum was coming. I scrambled to the corner with the sofa pillows and crouched there. I remember crying and how my wails sounded like the sirens outside.

But then a bright flash and a thunderous whack shook the flat. The front window shattered. Confetti-like glass blew into the room and fell on my hair and in my lap. Everywhere.

I screamed for you.

I screamed for Mum.

I tossed the pillows and sprang for the front door. When I opened it, I could see that the row of flats across the street was wrapped in a fog of powdered debris. A gaping hole stretched across where front doors and upper floors had been. The air was thick with smoke and fire and the buzzing of giant insects, which were the planes that I could not see. It was as if I had been transported to hell.

All I could do was stand there and scream for you.

Then there were arms around me. I heard a voice say my name. At first I thought it was an angel, come to pluck me out of hell. And then I thought it was you, Emmy, waking me from a nightmare. I fell into those arms and I felt myself being lifted.

I opened my eyes to tell you I was afraid and I saw that I was not dreaming. You were not holding me there on the sofa while I pulled myself out of a tormented sleep. I was in Thea’s arms.

Where’s your mum? Where’s Emmy?
she shouted as she carried me toward her house.

I could not answer her.

A boom split the air as another bomb fell not far away. Thea stumbled and then caught her balance against the door frame. She dashed with me through her front room and I remember all of her furniture was covered in white sheets. Then we were on her back step and I saw what Thea had been up to when the sirens went off. Her two cats and the four kittens, much larger now than they had been when we left for the countryside, were laid out on her back steps. They were lying so strangely still in the midst of all that chaos. I knew they were dead. She had gassed them with ether, Emmy. So that they wouldn’t starve on the streets as she and her mother evacuated to a relative’s home in Wales. I didn’t know that many London pet owners euthanized beloved pets that they couldn’t take with them when they fled the city. Thea and her mother were leaving London the next day. Her mother was already at a hotel near Paddington station. Thea had come back to the flat to take care of the cats so that her mother wouldn’t have to see. She had just finished her dreadful chore when the sirens began to scream and so did I.

I learned all of this from Granny much later. All I knew then as Thea ran with me to her Andy was that the kittens I had loved and played with and called special names were dead.

It was dark and clammy inside the shelter. Every time a bomb shook the earth, the Andy’s walls rumbled. Thea held me
in her arms on a cot on the floor, rocking me back and forth while she sang Christmas carols. I don’t know why she did that. Granny said later it was because she didn’t have to concentrate on the words; they were just right there. Or maybe it was because Christmas carols made us think of presents, Father Christmas, peppermint, and Baby Jesus. Things that make us feel safe and loved and happy.

I don’t know how long the raid lasted. I just remember there being a moment when the bombs stopped and the booms outside were replaced with the wail of emergency-response vehicles. When we crawled out of the shelter, we saw that the world around us had become colorless except for the orange hue of hundreds of fires. Ash and dust swirled.

Thea steered me past the cats. Their lifeless bodies were peppered with bits of roofing tile.

She led me back to our flat, calling Mum’s name:
Annie.

Julia, did your mum bring you back here from Gloucestershire?
she asked as we stood in the living room.

I shook my head no.

How did you get back, sweetie? Did Emmy come with you?

I had no voice to tell her.

What are your foster parents’ names? Do you know where they live?

I thought of the idyllic world we had left just hours before, where everything was perfect except that Mum wasn’t there. I wanted to go back. I wanted to go back in time to that happy place before you left me. Before the bombs came. Before the dead cats.

Charlotte,
I said. It was the only word I said for a long time.

Charlotte?
Thea said.
What’s her last name?

I couldn’t remember.

Sweetheart, where does Charlotte live?

I couldn’t remember where she lived, Emmy. I still can’t.

Thea took me by the hand into the kitchen.

Did you and Emmy write to your mum?
she asked.

I might have nodded as Thea looked through Mum’s recent mail for a letter from us.

Does your mum keep important papers in a special place? Do you know where she’d put your billeting card?

I said nothing. A blanket of numbness was replacing the fear.

We went upstairs, crunching on glass that had been blown onto the steps. Thea went into Mum’s bedroom and opened her top bureau drawer. She looked inside and pulled out an envelope. Granny told me much later that Thea had thought she’d found a letter from us because she didn’t recognize the return address.

But it wasn’t a letter from you and me.

It was the letter Granny had written to Mum after Neville died. Thea read it while I leaned against her leg.

That was how I came to be with Gramps and Granny, Emmy.

Thea couldn’t find our billeting papers that had Charlotte’s name and address.

She didn’t know where Mum was. She didn’t know where you were.

And she was leaving for Wales the next day.

Thea took the letter and we left our demolished neighborhood. We had to walk a little bit before she was able to hail a taxi that could take us to her hotel.

The air raid sirens started again as we were getting out of the taxi cab. I think we spent the night in the hotel basement. That part is a bit foggy.

In the morning, Thea called Gramps and Granny. They talked for a little while, Thea in hushed tones. Then she called the widow Mum worked for, and I heard her ask if she could please try to get word to Mum that I would be at my grandparents’ house. The next thing I remember, I was on a train with
Thea and her mother. They took me to the Oxford railway station on their way to Wales, and Gramps and Granny met us there.

I recall Thea telling Granny that Mum worked for a widow named Mrs. Billingsley whom Thea had called that morning. The widow’s butler would try to locate Mum and let her know where I was.

When Thea knelt to say good-bye, I flung my arms around her neck and held tight.

Your grandparents will take good care of you,
she said.
They are your family, Julia. They will help you find your mum.

I tightened my grip around Thea’s neck.

She had to pry me loose.

I crumpled to the pavement as Thea, crying into her handkerchief, walked away. Gramps lifted me into his arms.

I really don’t remember anything else of that day, just Thea—the last link I had to the life I knew—growing smaller and smaller in my field of vision until she was gone.

My hand hurts, Emmy.

Everything hurts.

I must stop for now.