Secrets My Mother Kept (35 page)

‘I’ve got some news,’ she blurted out. Sheila was ten years younger than me, but despite that we got on very well.

‘What news?’

‘Vicky and I have been to Valence Library,’ she said, barely able to contain her excitement, ‘and we’ve found Nan.’

‘What do you mean you’ve “found her’’?’ I asked.

‘We went there to see if we could find out about Nan going to prison for bigamy. We thought if we could find the date then we could see if it would help us trace which children’s home Dad was in and for how long.

‘Well we found her in the
Dagenham Post
all right, but not when we expected to. The date of the articles we found is years later.

I started to pay attention. ‘How many years later?’

‘Hold on,’ she said, ‘I’ll read it to you.’

Waitress appears on £458 fraud charge

A 41-year-old waitress, Florence Catherine Stevens of Valence Avenue, Dagenham, appeared at Stratford Court on Wednesday charged with obtaining credit over £298 from Mr A F— by false pretence or by means of fraud other than false pretence. She was also accused of similar offences of obtaining £135 and £25 by false pretence with intent to defraud. All the money was from Mr A F—.

Stevens was remanded on bail until 19th September.

‘What year was it?’ I asked slowly, guessing the answer.

‘1956,’ Sheila replied.

I held the phone in my hand and said almost to myself, ‘the year Margaret was born . . . the September after the letters from Thomas stopped.’

‘Yes that’s right, but there’s more,’ she continued.

‘Go on.’

‘Well, there’s another article from the same newspaper. Listen to this one . . .’

Mother of ten gets 18 months for fraud

Mrs Florence Catherine Stevens, 41, mother of ten children, of Valence Avenue, Dagenham, was sentenced to 18 months imprisonment at Essex Quarter sessions Appeal Court on Thursday for obtaining credit by fraud and money by false pretences.

‘This is one of the most extraordinary instances of gullibility it is possible to imagine,’ said Miss Nina Collins, prosecuting.

The charges related to groceries and money, totalling £433, which had been obtained from a Dagenham grocer Mr A F— of whom Mrs Stevens had been a customer.

Disguised Voice

Miss Collins said that Mrs Stevens assumed a series of poses, disguised her voice over the telephone, and led the grocer to believe she was a highly paid member of the Walt Disney Film Corporation.

She assumed various identities over the phone at varying times such as Mrs Roy Disney, Roy Disney himself, and attorney to the Walt Disney Corporation.

She persuaded the grocer that he was going to get a contract to supply groceries to the corporation and in that belief he supplied her with groceries and about £122 in money.

At the time she was friendly with an executive of the Walt Disney Corporation and she led Mr F— to believe she was to receive a substantial sum under a will.

Wild Extravagance

Miss Collins said that in that belief the grocer indulged in wild extravagances including the purchase of houses and a car. Evidence was given that Mrs Stevens at the time of her arrest was receiving national assistance and family allowances. Mrs Stevens’ legal representative said she was trying hard and loyally to look after her family and temptation came her way. He added, ‘She saw this opportunity of getting something for her children and having started the snowball continued. What she did was out of need and necessity.’

I was stunned, but it made perfect sense.

‘It was Thomas!’ I said. ‘He was the Walt Disney executive – don’t you see? It all fits, the Disney emblem on one of the envelopes, the different places the letters were posted from, the cheques that he was always sending her, the money she had probably grown to rely on . . .’

‘Yes, but why?’ Sheila broke in, ‘If Thomas was giving her money, why did she need to steal it?’

‘Because he stopped! Something happened that made him break off contact with her, stop the letters, the money, disappear from her life, something that we don’t know about yet. And because she was desperate, I suppose, because she saw the opportunity, like the solicitor said, and it just snowballed.’

We both stood at our phones, silent for a moment now, our minds teeming.

‘There is another one; this time it says much the same things except it also refers to her “two previous convictions”, one for bigamy, and one . . .’ Sheila paused. ‘One for trying to kill herself.’

This time I let the silence grow and lengthen. Maybe some secrets were best left untold.

57

Fragments of a Memory

I arrived at Margaret’s house and Tony opened the door.

‘Marion’s not here yet,’ he said, ‘but Sheila is out in the garden with Margaret having a coffee, do you want one?’

I nodded my thanks and wandered outside. Sheila and Margaret were deep in conversation as I approached to join them.

‘Hello you two,’ I said. ‘Whew it’s hot out here.’

‘We can go inside if you’d rather,’ offered Margaret, but I sat myself down at the patio table with them, making sure I positioned my chair in the shade. I still got migraines, and the sun was one of my triggers.

‘I’ve brought the letters round, so we can have another look, just to see if they give up any clues as to what happened.’ I placed the black folder on the table and sighed at the same time.

‘What’s wrong?’ asked Sheila concerned.

‘Oh I don’t know, I suppose I’m just tired of it all. We seem to get so far but then every time we think we’re getting close to cracking it, it peters out, another dead end.’

Margaret sipped her coffee and said, ‘Look, this newspaper stuff is really helpful. We can write to the home office now we have a date; they might be able to give us details of her previous convictions and get exact dates for them.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but how is that going to help us find out if Thomas was our father? I think we’re just going round in circles.’

Marion suddenly appeared at the doorway carrying a tray with two cups of coffee. She was wearing a bright yellow T-shirt which was attracting tiny black thrips.

‘Tony made me bring these out,’ she joked. ‘He said he didn’t want to interrupt the witches’ coven!’ and then she stopped abruptly as she picked up on the air of despondency that had settled over us. For once, no one laughed.‘What’s up?’ she asked, setting the tray down on the table, and brushing at the flies.

‘Sometimes I just wonder why we bother,’ I said flatly, slumping back in the chair and watching the swifts swoop in circles.

‘Marion caught me watching them. ‘They never stop, you know,’ she said. ‘They never rest, they fly round and round apparently in circles, gathering up the insects they need to survive, and that’s how it’s got to be with us – we’ve got to keep going, keep looking, keep gathering.’.

Now I laughed out loud, ‘You’re beginning to sound a bit preachy,’ I said good-naturedly, and reached for my coffee. At that moment there was a loud clap of thunder and the heavens opened. We all jumped up and ran for the door, screaming and laughing as the rain thrashed down ferociously. I grabbed the folder of letters and held it close, and Sheila clasped the newspaper photocopies that she had brought with her and we went inside to go through it all over again.

‘OK so, we know that Mum had been in prison,’ Marion said, ‘but I found something else out last week when we went to see Pat and Josie. Pat had taken the dogs for a walk so I managed to corner Josie on her own.’

We all turned towards her in expectation.

‘Mum had electric shock treatment, the first time she was in. I think it was quite commonly used for people with depression.’

‘Depression?’ I asked.

‘Why do you think she had depression?’

‘Josie told me that she tried to kill herself, but she wasn’t sure when, she thinks it was either when she was arrested for bigamy, or maybe before that during the split with Ron Coates.’

‘Does Josie think she really was depressed?’

We all knew that Mum had fantasised about a range of illnesses over the years, to manipulate sympathy, and also to try to get money on some occasions.

‘Yes, I think she does, and then when I was talking on the phone to Marge in Australia about it last night, she told me something else.’

She stopped for a moment. It was so quiet we could hear the soft murmur of the children playing upstairs.

I broke the silence, ‘What did she tell you?’ There was something stirring in my memory, fragments of forgotten moments, a frightening, half-remembered day from long ago.

‘She wasn’t sure if she should tell you, but I told her you had the right to know. She told me about the time it happened again,’ Marion continued ‘when she and Josie came back and found . . . the time when you and Margaret were still only little.’

Margaret and I looked at each other and there was a sudden shock of realisation.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I think I remember.’

Margaret started to cry. ‘I thought it was a dream, a horrible, scary dream,’ she sobbed.

Sheila put her arm around her. ‘Don’t cry Marg,’ she comforted. ‘She must have been desperate if she was prepared to leave you two’.

‘No, you don’t understand,’ I said. ‘She wasn’t going to leave us, she was taking us with her.’

No one spoke, and Margaret carried on crying, more quietly now. It wasn’t that we had forgotten that day many years before, just that we had chosen not to remember it. Sheila looked more shocked than I had ever seen her, as the colour bled from her face. There was a look of disbelief and horror in her eyes that made me feel ashamed.

‘She was ill, she must have been,’ Sheila said now, trying to justify the unjustifiable.

I nodded, the one thing that was becoming clearer the more we found out, the more we remembered, was that Mum must have been very ill indeed, not physically, but mentally.

We sat quietly for a few minutes and then Marion pulled an A4 writing pad from her bag. ‘I’ve started to make a timeline,’ she said, ‘of all the things we know, and I have put question marks where we don’t.’

We pored over her work, the four of us, making a few changes here and there as we all chipped in with what we remembered. It took us a few hours, but what we had in front of us for the first time ever, was a sequence of events and information that we hoped would help us to make sense of what we already knew, and help us see what questions we still needed to find the answers to. Whether we would ever be able to do that remained to be seen.

58

A Double Death

As the new millennium approached, I stood next to my husband and daughter on Parliament Hill in Hampstead, surrounded by an eruption of colour and noise.

‘I wonder where Sam is now?’ I shouted to Colin, trying to be heard above the chaos of celebration. ‘Do you think he’s all right?’There was a little bit of me that was worried, desperately hoping he was somewhere safe with his friends. At the same time I knew that I had to learn to let go, after all he was nearly nineteen!

‘He’s probably having a great time. Don’t worry!’

By the time we got back home from Sherry’s the next day, my teenaged son was lying fast asleep in bed. It was a relief to know that the world hadn’t ended with the old century; Sam and Jo were safe and sound and life suddenly felt full of new beginnings.

I was teaching at a local infant school at the time, and enjoying every minute. It was Marion who had first introduced me to the head teacher, and she had initially offered me a temporary job-share. It wasn’t long since my Mum’s death and the blackest period of my depression, and I was still feeling very vulnerable.

‘Come on Kath,’ Marion encouraged me. ‘It will be good for you, and it’s only two days a week.’ I had been persuaded to accept because everyone told me it would help, and they were right. The temporary part-time job had now become permanent and full time. It wouldn’t be too great an exaggeration to say that the children at that school helped save my life, and I loved working there. Everyone was so friendly and supportive that before long the term that I had originally signed up for became a year, and then another, and before I noticed it I had been at the school for almost ten years and become the deputy head teacher!

Perhaps Mum was right about the devil, or else our run of luck had just been too good to last. First Colin’s feisty, independent mum took a turn for the worse. And then I got a call from Pat.

‘Oh Kath . . .’ she started, clearly very distressed.

‘What is it?’ I asked, ‘What’s happened? Are you all right?’

There was a brief moment of silence until she gathered herself together and was able to continue.

‘It’s . . . Well first I had a phone call from Sarah, our sister Sheila’s daughter in the Isle of Man. Sheila’s died.’

I gave a sharp intake of breath. I had never met Sheila. The correspondence that we had exchanged many years before had petered out once I had started to ask questions that she didn’t want to answer. Now I’d lost a sister I never really knew.