We've Come to Take You Home (20 page)

FIFTY-TWO

Eaton Villa, London, SW11

April 6th, 1934

Dear Jess

I'm writing this letter on the day of our daughter's 16
^th
birthday. I've tried before, so often, more times than I can remember, but every time I sat down and started to write the words refused to come. But today feels different. The words are coming, and more than coming – they are writing themselves.

I'm not sure where to start but I think it has to be with the letter you wrote telling me that you were expecting our child. I did get it. And I was going to write back to you. And to my parents, telling them about the baby, and asking them to look after the both of you until I returned from France and could, as soon as you reached sixteen, make you my wife. I knew it would be a terrible shock to them, my father's hopes of who I would marry, where I would eventually find my place in society, had always been high, too high, since the loss of my two brothers. But I also knew that they would have done what I was asking of them. But I was never allowed to write that letter because within a day of receiving it I had been taken prisoner.

When our trench was overrun and my men and I were being marched back away from the battlefield, a shameful joy swept through me. I wasn't going to die the terrible death I had seen so many other men die. I would be taken to
an official prisoner of war camp where I would be formally registered as a POW. Word would be sent back to you and my parents, through the Red Cross, that I was alive and well. And then all I would have to do was keep my head down, keep my mouth closed and wait out the war. And then come back home to you.

But none of that happened. I was never registered, my name was never given to the Red Cross, and I was never sent to an official POW camp. Instead, I became one of the nameless missing, kept in France and forced to work in a prisoner of war labour company delivering shells and digging trenches just behind the front line. I watched, helpless, as the men around me died. Dying would be easy. It was the staying alive that was going to be difficult.

I could have insisted that as an officer, exempt from hard labour by international law, I should be removed from the front line and taken to the safety of a camp. But leaving my men there, almost certainly facing certain death, from being beaten and starved, or blown to pieces by their own country's guns, was unthinkable. I could not do it.

We worked twelve sometimes sixteen hours a day, without a break, seven days a week. The building in which we were housed had no roof. There were no beds and no blankets. We wore, week after week, month after month, the same clothes we had been captured in. We never took them off. We were given a single meal each day of a quarter of a loaf of black, lumpy bread, some watery turnip soup and lukewarm coffee made out of barley. The weight dropped off us. We became so weak that the march to the frontline became almost impossible but we had to do it, we didn't have a choice, because if we didn't it would mean even less food and even more beatings.

Civilians, when they saw us, tried to give us food. A woman threw me some bread when we were being marched
through her village. We were both punished – I was beaten, she was shot. Another time, it wasn't the civilian that was shot, but one of my own men.

It wasn't hard to hate those who were guarding us – the enemy. And it is so easy to see how this hatred starts, and how that hatred spreads. It is not so easy to forgive. But you must. That is the only way to get through – the only way to survive. The men who were guarding us were not so different. They, too, were sons, brothers and husbands. And they, too, had little enough food themselves. Their families back at home even less.

There was much talk at the battlefront about the dead coming back to protect the living; angels striding out towards the enemy lines, everyone seemed to have seen one or heard of one. But I always regarded the stories as nothing but superstitious nonsense. But if it gave the men comfort, and they needed comforting given that most of them were going to die out there on the front line, then, it did no harm – who was I to laugh or complain. That's what I believed – until, one day, I saw my own angel.

It was April 7th, 1918. The guards had kicked us awake at four in the morning. We'd eaten our crust of bread, drunk our sip of water, and now we were being marched out of camp. It must have been about six o'clock but if the sun was rising we couldn't see it. Day didn't exist on the front line, only night. And that's when the shell hit us.

One minute I was walking, the next I was laying there, face down, in a sludge of blood and bone. I hurt so much that all I wanted to do was die. And that's when I saw my angel. And the angel I saw was you – my Jess. You didn't have wings, and you didn't have a halo. Nor were you sounding your trumpet. For which I was grateful. You were just standing there, buttoned up in your coat, your hair tied back and your face flushed as if you'd been running. And
you looked just like you. But at the same time you didn't. There was something different; you looked as though you were lit up from inside. You were, quite literally, glowing. And everything that I had always found beautiful, the green of your eyes, the whiteness of your skin, was even more pronounced – and even more beautiful. And you looked so happy.

I don't remember saying anything, I don't think I could, but if I did it was just your name. But that wasn't important, any other words would have just got in the way, because, in those few seconds, I've never felt closer to you. And then, and I'm searching here for the right word, you faded.

You were gone and I was left lying there, and that's when I made the decision to stand up and walk rather than lie there and die. And that was exactly what I did, although quite quickly the standing up and walking turned into a very painful and very undignified crawling which lasted through the whole of that day, into the night, and then on into the next day when I finally fell, head first, down into a trench on the Allied lines.

My next memory is waking up in hospital in France. Two weeks later I was sent back home to England. And you weren't there. My parents explained that, just before serving dinner, you had complained of feeling unwell. They had offered to send out for a doctor but you had said it was unnecessary; if you could go and get some rest you would be fine in the morning. They ate the dinner that you had prepared for them and then went upstairs to bed. In the morning, when you failed to appear with their tea, they went up to your room. There was no one there.

When I arrived home you had been reported missing for over two weeks. Nobody cared, nobody was interested and most certainly not the police; you were just another girl, who'd got herself into trouble. Good riddance to bad rubbish.

It was your friend Ellie, the maid next-door, who told us that you'd given birth to a little girl and that you had left the house around midnight to take her back to your village. And that's where I found her.

When Martha described you to me, told me what had happened, the knocking on the door, the baby on the doorstep, I knew that the Jess she described had been you and that the baby was our daughter. Your locket, the one I had given you just before I left for France, fastened round Rosemary's neck, confirmed that.

But where were you? I already knew but I was avoiding it. I was still hoping that what I had seen so clearly had been nothing more than a hallucination and that you were alive and well, and that I would, eventually, be able to find you. But, in my heart, I knew I was fooling myself; you had gone to a place where I would never be able to reach you.

Two months later there was a knock on the door. It was the police. A body of a girl, answering your description, had been found under the bombed out remains of a disused warehouse. The warehouse had taken a direct hit around six o'clock on the morning of April 7
^th
– the time of my hallucination. There was not much to go on – some scraps of clothing, a purse containing a return train ticket to Lewes, and a few strands of hair – but that was enough: enough, at least, to convince someone who already knew.

Our daughter remained with Martha living down in the country. To split them up would have been too heartbreaking. I go down to see them whenever I can, which is often. And Rosemary comes up here to stay in London. Now that she's sixteen, I think, I hope, that her visits will be far more frequent.

My mother and father died two years ago, within two months of each other. You asked me, that first evening down in the kitchen, whether your mother had gone to hell
because she had committed suicide. And I said, no, it's the people left behind, who did nothing to help, who will spend the rest of their lives in hell – a hell, in this present life, of their own making. And that was what happened to both my parents.

My mother told me, confessed to me, just hours before she died, that when she found out you were pregnant, and that I was the father, instead of helping you she threatened you, saying that if she told my father he would have you thrown out of the house.

What she didn't know was that my father already knew what had happened between us. I told him, privately, the morning I left to return to France. To say that he was less than happy would be an understatement. But he promised that whatever happened, whether I did or did not return from France, you would always be looked after. And, for all his faults, my father was a man who always kept his word.

If my mother had talked to my father, and my father had talked to my mother, there would have been a wedding, rather than a funeral, on my return from France.

Eaton Villa is far too large for me alone. But it is where we spent the little time we had together, and it is where our daughter was born, so this is where I stay. I can't imagine living anywhere else. A very capable housekeeper looks after both myself and the house – your friend and companion, Ellie.

You were fifteen when we met and you were still fifteen when you gave birth to our daughter. And she is, as of today, already older than you. Whenever she walks into the room, and I look up, it is you I see. When she takes my hand it is you who is taking my hand. And when she laughs it is you who is laughing. She is so like you – in every way.

I know that you won't, physically, be able to read this letter, but in putting these words down I hope that somehow
it will bring me nearer to you, that you will be able to hear and feel and understand how much you are missed and how much you were loved – and are still loved. And always will be loved.

You are and always will be my angel.

Your loving Tom.

FIFTY-THREE

S
AM READ
T
OM'S LETTER
not once, not twice but three times, each word again, again and again. There was a sheet of thick, plain paper, folded in half, in the same envelope. She opened it. ‘Jess' was written below a pencil sketch of a girl. Sam recognised her instantly.

There was a much smaller box inside the larger, elaborately carved Moroccan one her mother had given her. She slipped off the lid. A purple velvet cushion and, sitting on it, a heart-shaped locket on a chain.

There was a catch on the side. She pressed it. The locket opened. There were two compartments. The right hand one contained a dried flower, very brittle, very pale, but unmistakably a primrose. What it was doing there, why it was so important, she didn't know; there had been no mention of a primrose in Tom's letter. The left hand compartment contained a photograph, head and shoulders only, of a young man in military uniform.

“You are and always will be my angel.”

That's what Tom had written at the end of his letter.

“You are and always will be my…”

Angel.

Sam picked up her jacket. She ran out of her bedroom, along the landing and down the stairs.

‘Hello. Yes, she's here…'

Her mother held out the phone.

‘It's your dad.'

‘Hello, yes, look, Dad, I've got to go out…'

Her mother's fish stew was simmering, not boiling over, on top of the oven. Apples, bananas and pears were piled high in the blue and white ceramic bowl and lilies, pink ones with orange spots, were sitting in a glass vase on top of the bookcase.

‘Yes, I've read it, yes, the letter. Look, Dad, can I call you later, when I get back? Yes, I promise…'

She held out the mobile.

‘Sam, what's the matter? Is something wrong?'

The box, the letter, the photographs inside the locket, Jess and Tom, it was all too complicated to explain. And her mother would never believe her.

‘Supper will be ready soon.'

‘I won't be long.'

‘But where are you going?'

‘To see some friends…'

Sam ran out of the kitchen into the hallway.

‘Hello, yes. I don't know. Some friends. Yes, that's what she said. The girls I expect, Katie, Lou and Shelly. It is her birthday…'

She pulled open the front door and ran down the hill, across the road and onto the promenade. The moon rode high in the night sky. A seagull shrieked overhead.

Poppy wreaths were laid out in rows, in front of a plaque, just above the base of the angel statue.

“Our loved ones have departed and we ne'er shall see them more
,

Till we meet before the pure and crystal sea

Till we clasp the hands we loved so well upon the golden shore

What a meeting, what a meeting that will be!”

For a moment, the waves rolling off into the far distance seemed to solidify, their peaks and troughs changing into the ridges and hollows of a sea of mud rather than of a sea of water.
Almost instantly the sea transformed itself back, the mud once again reverting to water.

‘May I introduce you…'

He had been standing underneath the statue exactly a week ago. He had turned and smiled as she walked past on her way home from the fairground.

“To the Angel of Peace.”

The young man, dressed in khaki breeches, knee-high leather boots, a wide belt with a strap going over his right shoulder, gestured to the statue. Wings outstretched against the sky, right hand clutching an olive branch, it towered above them.

‘Out in France, I thought my men were crazy. They were always talking about angels, but then I saw one. She didn't have wings nor was she carrying an olive branch…'

‘Not that olive branches work…'

Sam twirled round. Ankle-length coat, lace-up boots: it was Jess.

‘That statue was put there in 1912. Six years later, nineteen million people had died in the so-called war to end all wars…'

‘I can see you. I can hear you. You and Tom…'

The clock striking five o'clock in a house where there was no such clock. The fair, being on the ghost train, going through those doors and instead of sitting in the cab next to Leo, she was standing on a platform, of a station, watching stretchers being unloaded off a train. Standing out on the balcony, waiting for the fireworks to start, the flash of white light and then seeing the sea of mud. The deep boom reverberating up towards the sky, the air shuddering, and then the road, the houses, the cars, all disappearing, just as if a bomb had fallen out of the sky.

‘But why, why did you show me all those things…'

‘Only you, Sam, nobody else, not even me and Tom, could follow your father and bring him back.'

‘But you were there, in the plane, you opened the door. You helped me…'

‘Only when you asked…'

They were standing on either side of her. Jess on her left. Tom on her right.

‘But, first you had to do what Jess and I have had to do…'

A memory was nudging at her. It was years ago. It was night and she was lying curled up under the duvet, eyes tight shut, alone in her room, listening to the very large, very angry giants rumbling up and down overhead. There were solid walls above, underneath and all around her. But that wouldn't stop them. Nothing could stop them, not even her parents, if the giants wanted to come and get her.

‘Sam.'

A voice whispered her name.

‘Come out now, don't be afraid.'

The duvet was tugged back. She opened her eyes. The young woman took her left hand. The young man took her right hand. They led her, across the room, over to the window. The man lifted her up onto a stool. The woman pushed back the curtains. Lightning forked, thunder rolled, wind howled and rain lashed. But there were no giants.

‘You had to face your fear.'

‘It was you – you and Tom – you were my invisible friends. And when mum made us move, to this house, you went away…'

‘If you want Jess and I to go–'

‘No.'

Sam pulled the locket out of her jacket pocket.

‘I want you to stay.'

Jess' fingers were soft. Her breathe was warm. She fastened the locket around Sam's neck.

‘Happy birthday, Sam.'

Sunshine flooded into the cottage through the open door. Lambs skipped and jumped on the Downs, starlings were nesting in the thatch below the chimney and bumblebees were buzzing in and out of the blackthorn. Soon it would be warm enough to eat outside. Along paths, up lanes and over hills, wherever they ended up, sitting on top of Highdown Hill, her father telling her stories about the people who had lived there thousands of years before, or on Burrow Head watching the peregrine falcons circling over the white chalk cliffs, or in one of the valleys, the deans, hidden away below the Downs, he would always find a perfect place for a picnic.

But the memory she cherished most was the last few moments she and her father had spent together. She had nursed it, keeping it alive inside her head; walking out of the door of the cottage, through the garden and onto the track, climbing up the hill, side by side, her hand in his hand, and then stopping there on the ridge.

Her father stepping forward and putting his arms around her and the hoping, the longing, that she would never ever have to step out of them. That they could stay that way, father and daughter, daughter and father, up there on top of the world, together for ever. And then the low, insistent drumming, getting steadily louder and nearer. And there, without any warning, swooping down on them out of the sky: the white plane with black crosses on the underside of its wings.

And there it was now, right there, directly above her. She could see it through the glass roof of the warehouse; the same white plane with the same black crosses.

‘Jess?'

It was her father's voice. She instantly recognised it and then just as instantly denied it. How could it be? He was dead. But there he was, exactly the way she remembered him. And standing behind him, cradling her baby brother in her arms, both of them plump-cheeked and laughing, was her mother.

He stepped forward and put his arms around her. She buried herself in his familiar warmth.

‘We've come to take you home.'