The Child Left Behind (29 page)

She tossed and turned over this dilemma and as the months passed the feeling in her grew stronger
and stronger. Christmas, the second without her mother, she found very hard, and then in January of the following year Yvette suddenly said, ‘Bridgette, is anything troubling you? You have not been yourself for weeks now.’

Bridgette looked at her aunt’s concerned face and the slight frown puckering her brow and she knew that she deserved to be told the truth. ‘Just before Maman died, she wanted to speak to me and I had to lean forward to hear her. Do you remember that?’

Yvette nodded and Bridgette went on, ‘You asked me what she had said and I replied something like it was of no consequence. That wasn’t absolutely true. Maman asked me something specific, which was that I should go and find my father’s family in Ireland. In fact, she made me promise that I would.’

‘You can’t let a deathbed promise like that dictate your life,’ Yvette said. ‘Remember your mother was doped up most of the time.’

‘I know that, and I also know that her mind was crystal clear when she asked me to do that,’ Bridgette said. ‘Until Finn was born, I had no inclination to do as Maman asked,’ she said. ‘But he is linked to them too, through me, and as I intend to tell him everything as soon as he is old enough, I think I owe it to him at least to try to contact them.’

‘Do you know where they live?’ Yvette asked

‘Not really,’ Bridgette said. ‘But, anyway, I thought the best thing to do is write to my father’s friend, Christy Byrne. Maman kept the couple of
letters he sent to her so I have his address. He will know the whole set-up and may advise me how to go about things.’

‘I remember Gabrielle talking of a Christy Byrne,’ Yvette said. ‘And I saw the first letter he wrote to tell Gabrielle after Finn’s death. Fancy her keeping it all these years.’

‘She kept everything in that box I showed you, and she had that hidden in the wardrobe,’ Bridgette said.

‘That man Christy might be dead himself by now.’

‘He might,’ Bridgette agreed. ‘And if he is then it is a sort of closure, but I think I will write anyway and see what happens.’

However, it was the March before Bridgette wrote telling Christy her name was Bridgette Laurent now, and she was the daughter of Gabrielle Jobert, who had married a British soldier called Finn Sullivan in 1916, and that she had been born in August of that same year.

She went on to say her mother had only told her about Finn Sullivan being her father as she lay terminally ill with TB and her dying wish was that she made contact with Finn’s family. Bridgette explained that she was more especially anxious to do this now that she had a son of her own, whom she had called Finn, after his grandfather, and she asked Christy’s advice on how best to introduce herself to the family.

Christy couldn’t ever remember having a letter for years. In fact, the last letter he had received was from Bridgette’s mother advising him to keep the marriage a secret from the family in case it was not legal. He believed Bridgette’s letter to be a genuine one, though, and he remembered Finn before he died asking him to help Gabrielle and the child if he could. This was the first thing he had ever been asked to do and he felt Finn’s daughter had a perfect right to meet her father’s family, especially as she had given a promise to her dying mother. It was a human need to know who you were and where you came from.

He had kept the secret of Finn’s marriage for years and only eventually confided in Tom. The others were probably unaware of her existence at all, so he thought Tom was the one Bridgette should contact first.

He didn’t have Tom’s actual address, though. Tom had surprised everyone when he said that he had decided to sell the farm. It had been a little overshadowed then, though, by the shocking news of Joe Sullivan’s wife, Gloria, who had left him—and for an American, no less—and had sailed to the States leaving her child behind with his father. That had outraged nearly all women in the town and their indignation meant that the story had been kept alive for a long time. Tom’s sale of the farm slipped well into second place as a topic of conversation.

Tom had told him that he had a flat in a place
called Boldmere. He said it wasn’t a very big place and it was part of a market town called Sutton Coldfield, which was outside the city of Birmingham.

He supposed he was still there and so he sent a letter off to Bridgette telling her this and saying Tom’s actual address could probably be got if she wrote to the McEvoys at the post office in Buncrana, for they had been great friends of the Sullivan family.

Christy’s letter was a surprise to Bridgette. Her mother had told her that Finn had thought Tom a born farmer, so why had he left to live elsewhere and where were the others? In her mind’s eye she had seen them all living in that squat whitewashed cottage in rural Ireland and she had nothing to put in its place though the need to go and meet them was stronger than ever.

She toyed with the idea of writing to the people in the post office in Buncrana to get Tom’s address, but rejected it. She had written to Christy because he had met her mother and later communicated with her, but she balked at writing to complete strangers. They probably didn’t know even of her existence, so why would they send Tom’s address to her just because she asked them to?

The mention of Sutton Coldfield. had given her a bit of a jolt because James had told her that he came from there. She remembered the park that he had described. She would love to see it, she thought suddenly, to take his son there
and show him where his father had spent much of his youth.

However, her priority had to be finding Finn’s family first. Boldmere appeared to be a district of some sort and if Sutton Coldfield was only a small town then Boldmere was bound to be smaller still. It was very possibly only the size of St-Omer, where everybody knew everyone else. Surely in such a place it would be relatively easy to find out where Tom Sullivan lived.

She didn’t tell her aunt and uncle that she had no actual address for Tom Sullivan because she knew how they would fuss. She just said that Christy Byrne had given her all the information she needed, but she agreed to stay in Paris for Finn’s first birthday.

The following day Yvette and Henri got a letter from Raoul. Neither he nor Gerard had been able to have any leave in the spring so far and Yvette had been very disappointed, so Bridgette hoped Raoul’s letter would give some indication of when he or his brother would be coming home for a break.

However, his letter did much more than that. Yvette’s face flooded with joy as she read it. She turned to her niece and her husband and her eyes danced with happiness as she cried, ‘He’s engaged. Raoul’s engaged. The girl, Monique, works for the same refuge project as Raoul and Gerard. The headquarters is going to be set up just outside Paris, and so the two of them will be working
there, not that far away at all. In fact,’ she said, looking across the table to Henri, ‘Raoul asks if they might stay here while they are looking around for a place of their own. They plan to marry in the autumn.’

Bridgette was so pleased for Raoul. Yet she knew that though her aunt and uncle would never say or intimate that she might be in the way when Raoul and his fiancée arrived, she would feel it just the same. Yvette and Henri would want time with their elder son and the girl he had chosen to share his life with, and Bridgette intended to make arrangements to leave Paris before they arrived.

Bridgette found that she was a good traveller and not even the ferry crossing the turbulent water of the Channel had made her feel the slightest bit queasy, though Yvette had fussed about that. But then, Bridgette thought, smiling fondly, Yvette fussed about anything. Yet even though she was upset at Bridgette leaving them, she had gone out and bought two beautiful leather suitcases that she had filled with clothes for both her and Finn, and a matching shoulder bag for Bridgette to carry for Finn’s immediate needs.

Henri, who assumed Bridgette had someone waiting for her at New Street Station in Birmingham and a family who knew about her arrival and were waiting to welcome her, could understand Bridgette’s need to find out where she had come from, for her own sake and that of the child. He found out the times of the ferry and the train, booked her tickets, and insisted on driving her to Calais. He had also bought her a beautiful Silver Cross pushchair that
folded up, which he said would make the journey easier for her, and she had been very touched by his and Yvette’s thoughtfulness and generosity.

So here she was, in the afternoon of Saturday 4 May, with Finn in her arms and her luggage around her as the train pulled into New Street Station. Suddenly her heart sank and she wondered for a moment if she had done the right thing, especially when she didn’t even know where they were going to sleep that night.

She had a little money. Henri had been very generous and had given her an allowance from the moment she had arrived from St-Omer, but she had spent very little of it, especially as Yvette insisted on buying so much for the baby. Even so, she knew the money she had wouldn’t last if it took her a long time to find her family.

The train ground to a halt and Bridgette climbed out apprehensively. She lifted her cases out one by one, unfolded the pushchair and seated the compliant Finn into it before she could take stock of where she was. The station was thronged with people, more than she had ever seen in one place, many laughing and talking, children shouting.

Somewhere a woman was speaking through a loudspeaker, though Bridgette couldn’t understand a word she said, and the same could be said of the news-vendor who was advertising his wares in a thin nasal whine. Porters, careering about the platform with trolleys piled high with luggage, were warning people to get out of the way, but it was
like double Dutch to Bridgette. People didn’t speak the same English as she did and sometimes it was hard to understand all that they said.

Over everything was the clattering of the trains with an occasional screech of the hooter as they thundered into the station to draw to a halt with squeals of brakes and hisses of steam. Even when they were stationary they continued panting puffs of grey smoke into the already soot-ladened air like a crazed beast who couldn’t wait to be off again.

The shouts of Finn, tired of being ignored, broke into Bridgette’s thoughts and she gathered up her courage, hung her bag on her shoulder, balanced the two suitcases on the hood of the puschair and followed the mass of people out of the station and into the street. A sour, acrid smell hit the back of her throat, so pungent she could even taste it on her tongue. The streets were teeming with people of all shapes and sizes. Most had serious expressions on their faces and determined strides, as if they were on a mission of some sort.

But, added to the press of people on the pavements, was the traffic on the roads: cars, buses, lorries and vans jostled with the carts and wagons pulled by huge horses with shaggy feet. And then, as Bridgette made her way to the taxi rank, a clanking swaying monster running on rails set into the ground came careering towards her, to turn the corner just in time.

‘It’s a tram,’ one of the taxi drivers said. He
was leaning against the bonnet of his cab and had been watching Bridgette’s nervousness with slight amusement. ‘Ain’t you never seen one before?’

Bridgette got the general gist of what he was saying and said, ‘No, not like that.’ Although she knew Paris had its share of traffic, she had seldom gone into the city centre. The taxi driver, though, had caught the hint of Bridgette’s accent and he said, ‘You Foreign?’

Bridgette nodded. ‘I’m French.’

‘Well, what you doing in Brum?’

‘Brum?’

‘Here,’ the taxi driver said. ‘Birmingham, or Brum or Brummagem—whatever you call it.’

‘Oh,’ Bridgette said, ‘I have only recently found out that I have relatives here. Now the war is over I’ve come to seek them out.’

‘Right,’ the cabbie said, pulling himself upright, ‘you’ll be needing a taxi, no doubt. Where are you making for?’

‘A place called Boldmere.’

‘I know that well enough.’ The taxi driver lifted up the suitcases. ‘If you unstrap the little fellow I’ll have this lot stowed away in no time.’

In minutes Bridgette was being driven through the city centre. ‘You have a lot of bomb damage here,’ she said, looking from one side of the street to the other as the taxi cruised along.

‘New Street took a pounding all right,’ the taxi driver said. ‘The biggest raids of the war were in November 1940. If they had returned the next
night Birmingham would have burned to the ground because three trunk water mains were bust on the Bristol Road. Not that we were told this at the time, like. Bad for morale and all that, but it’s all come out later.’

‘I thought Paris was bad,’ Bridgette said, ‘but this is awful.’

‘That where you’re from, Paris?’

‘Not really though I went to live with an aunt and uncle there when my mother died in the summer of 1944,’ Bridgette said. ‘I am a widow, you see.’

‘Well, I’m sorry about that,’ the taxi driver said. ‘But you have a lovely little boy there.’

‘He is very like his father,’ Bridgette said wistfully. ‘I called him Finn because that was my father’s name.’

‘Funny name that, Finn?’

‘The full name is Finbar, and it means fair-haired, so it doesn’t sit well on my son at all,’ Bridgette said. ‘But I wanted him called for his grandfather, who was killed in the Great War before I was born.’

‘You seemed to have had your share of tragedy.’

‘Many are the same these days,’ Bridgette said. ‘My son is not the only one that will grow up fatherless, but that’s the reason that I would like to find my father’s family. My mother said my father spoke of them often.’

‘And whereabouts do they live in Boldmere?’

‘I’m…I’m not sure.’

‘So where do you want me to drop you off?’

‘I suppose anywhere will do.’

The taxi driver drew in to the pavement, stopped the car, turned around in the seat and said to Bridgette, ‘Do you know exactly where these people live?’

Bridgette shook her head. ‘I understood that it isn’t a big place. I thought if I asked round someone will know them.’

‘I doubt that very much,’ the taxi driver said. ‘It’s more highly populated than that. So where are you intending to sleep tonight?’

‘I thought to find somewhere.’

‘There might be nowhere except some place you wouldn’t want to be in,’ the taxi driver said. ‘Like you just saw, Birmingham has been bombed to bits. People have been living in church halls and basements, and many still are. Good decent lodging houses are full to the brim.’

‘I never thought…’

‘Well, that’s how it is,’ the taxi driver said. ‘And you have that babby to think of as well as yourself.’ He took pity on her and he said, ‘Look, my mother might put you up. God knows, the house is big enough for her now—too bloody big—but she’s lived there years and she don’t want to move. She don’t run a boarding house or owt like that, but she had a bombed-out family living with her since 1941, a woman with two little girls with her husband in the Forces. Anyroad, the man weren’t demobbed five minutes till they gave the family one
of them prefabs. So, at the moment she is on her own and a bit lonely, and I reckon she’ll put you up all right.’

Much of what the taxi driver said was lost on Bridgette, but she did work out that he was offering her a place to stay. ‘Does your mother live in Boldmere?’

‘No, she lives in Orphanage Road, Erdington,’ the taxi driver said. ‘It isn’t far away. Do you know what any of your family look like?’ he asked as he began driving again. ‘Have you ever met any of them?’

Bridgette shook her head helplessly and, as she realised her plight, tears stood out in her eyes. The taxi driver saw them too and he said gently, ‘I think that you are all in. My old mum will sort you out, never fear.’

As the taxi driver began to head towards his mother’s house, however, Bridgette ran through in her head what she had decided to tell her Irish relations when she met up with them. Finn’s family were Catholics, possibly devout Catholics, and she could take bets that any Catholics from Ireland would be as disgusted as those in France if they knew the truth about Finn. They might think her some sort of strumpet, a fallen woman, and probably not the kind of person that they wanted in their family.

In France her aunt had let it be understood that Bridgette was a recent widow, and despite the fact that she wanted there to be no secrets between her
and her son for now, she knew that for respectability for herself and legitimacy for him, the family in Birmingham had to believe the same thing if she and Finn were to have a chance of being accepted.

She had realised she couldn’t say the name of the shop where she worked at all, in case she mentioned Xavier or the family, which meant her story didn’t add up. Her name was Madame Laurent and so James’s name also had to be Laurent and he had to be a soldier in the Free French Army, killed in the invasion. James had left her in mid-July so she would have to tell some fabricated tale of some injury that the fictional James had sustained and that after treatment he had had a few days’ leave at home to recuperate before rejoining his unit.

This was also the tale that she realised she would have to tell to the taxi driver’s mother. The driver had spelled out to her the difficulties of finding any other sort of lodgings in Birmingham at that time, and she couldn’t take the risk that this woman might turn against her because of her unmarried state. What would she do then?

As it happened, Mrs Entwhistle, or Ada, as she insisted on being called, was a motherly soul who looked kindly on most people. She was also, Bridgette was to find, more interested in talking than listening, though she had been enchanted by the baby and so moved by the details that her son told her about Bridgette she readily agreed to take them both in.

‘And glad to do it as well,’ she said. ‘Since Sandra and the nippers went I haven’t known what to do with myself. Of course, when her Syd came back they needed their own place, I could see that.’

‘The house is too big for you, Ma,’ the taxi driver said. ‘How long have we all being telling you that?’

‘Oh, it’s all right for you young ones,’ Ada said with spirit. ‘But I raised the six of you in this house and then nursed your father until he died. All my memories are here and, anyway, now Bridgette and the babby are here it will be fuller, won’t it? And if I know anything, travelling makes a body hungry and a feed just now won’t come amiss, so I’ll get on with that and you, our Bill, get about your business while me and Bridgette get to know one another.’

Bill gave Bridgette a wink as he said, ‘Bossy old cow, ain’t she? Don’t say I didn’t warn you.’

‘What a thing to say about your own mother!’ Ada said, though Bridgette saw the twinkle in her eyes. ‘No respect, that’s your trouble, our Bill. Go and earn an honest crust, or you’ll go home empty-handed to Mavis, and that won’t go down a bundle.’

‘Oh,’ said Bridgette. ‘I owe you money. I’m afraid I have little understanding of it yet.’

‘Have that one on me,’ Bill said. ‘But Ma is right. ’Less I earn more money before I go home tonight, I might have to throw my hat in first.’

Ada was smiling as she shut the door on her son.
‘I suppose that made no sense to you. Throwing your hat in first is like testing the waters, seeing how cross his Mavis is. It’s just an expression. It’s not something he’ll do.’

‘Oh,’ Bridgette said, more confused than ever. She had thought she would be all right in England as she had been speaking English since she had been a child, but it was a different English here.

‘You’ll soon get the hang of the lingo, never fear,’ Ada said, as she made her way to the kitchen. ‘Let’s see what I have in the cupboard that will do to stick to our ribs this evening.’

That same evening, after they had all eaten and Finn put into the bed that Bridgette would share with him later, Ada told Bridgette all about Bill and his two brothers and three sisters, and how that big old house was once full of children and noise and laughter.

‘Then with most of the kids gone, the old man got ill,’ she went on. ‘He’d had rheumatic fever as a nipper and it had damaged his heart. He didn’t know, like, when he was younger, but as he got older it got worse and I nursed him till the day he died.’

‘I nursed my mother too,’ Bridgette said. ‘She had TB and that’s when I learned about my real father,’ and she went on to recount what her mother had told her. ‘I was very sad for a long time when first James and then my mother died. Then, when I had Finn, I suddenly thought it was important
to find the family that Maman wanted me to find, for his sake as well as my own.’

Ada’s eyes when they rested on Bridgette were tender as she realised the depth of the young woman’s suffering and how alone she must have felt. ‘It’s important to know where you have come from, I can see that,’ she said gently. ‘But you say that you don’t know where these people actually live.’

‘Only that it’s around here somewhere,’ Bridgette said. ‘You see, when Christy told me that Boldmere was an area of Sutton Coldfield and that was a small market town just outside Birmingham, I assumed that Boldmere would be smaller even than the town I was born in, where everyone knew everyone else.’

‘Boldmere used to be like that—Erdington too,’ Ada said. ‘Now, though, I’m not too sure. You could try asking in the post office—or are they Catholics, these Sullivans?’

‘Yes,’ Bridgette said. ‘Of course, I should try the churches.’