As we packed our things to leave Connecticut, I flat-out refused to go anywhere near London.
Granny said there would be no reason to. It was a wreck, anyway.
Ever, I said.
And she said if I never wanted to see London again, I didn’t have to.
We sailed on a ship as big as a city, or so it seemed to me. And when we docked in Southampton, Gramps was there to meet us with his car.
He asked me how the crossing was. I told him it was fine compared to our departure when U-boats were trying to bomb us. He started to tear up when I said this and I worried that Granny hadn’t told him how scary our first crossing had been. That wasn’t it. He knew how terrible it was. He just had never heard my voice before.
I actually didn’t like the way my voice sounded when I started to talk again. I had been going to school with American kids and hearing them talk, and even though I hadn’t been doing much talking myself, their funny way of speaking had slithered into my head and mixed itself in with the way I talked five years before. What came out of my mouth when I started communicating verbally again was a weird half-British, half-American mush that made me sound like a psycho.
It does not make you sound like a psycho, Granny had said. Where did you hear that word?
I sound strange.
You just sound like all the other British children who were evacuated to America, Julia. That’s what happens when you’re immersed in another culture.
You don’t sound like them, I said.
That’s because I am fifty years older than you. You are young. It will come back, Julia. The way you talked before will come back.
And I guess it did. Mostly.
Granny was so happy to be back in England in her pretty house and with Gramps and all the friends she left behind when she evacuated with me to Connecticut.
And I guess I liked the house, too. You would like it, Em. There’s a big garden in the back and rows and rows of raspberry bushes. I had my own room, the one that had been my father’s. Granny still had a few of his toys in there and loads of pictures of him from when he was a baby and a schoolboy and when he started to do plays.
It made Granny sad to talk about Neville but she did it anyway. I think she has always been afraid that I would forget him because I was so young when he left Mum. But there are things you don’t forget even if you are young.
She doesn’t know I only ever called him Neville. Even all these years later, she doesn’t know. She thinks I called him Daddy.
Do you know why I called him Neville?
Because you did.
I was afraid if I started calling him Daddy, then you would call him Daddy. And I didn’t want to share him with you, Emmy.
I would now, of course. I would share anything I have with you.
Julia