June 11, 1958
Dear Emmy,
Today Simon and I tried to find the street where you and I and Mum lived in Whitechapel. It all looks so different now. I couldn’t find it. I can’t remember what the actual street was named and nothing looks familiar. Nothing at all. I know we lived close to Saint Paul’s and that we were also near a Tube station. But even though we walked down street after street, I couldn’t find it.
Part of me was relieved because I’m not completely sure I’m ready to see our flat again. And part of me was annoyed because what if seeing it would’ve brought me one step closer to being at peace with everything? You know?
Simon had done some checking and he knew the area east of Saint Paul’s had been heavily bombed, not just the day I last saw you, but many other times after that. He said it might be that I couldn’t find our flat because it had been destroyed and something new had been built in its place. There are so many new buildings in the East End. It’s as if everything that made it ours is gone, Emmy. Saint Paul’s is there, of course, but nothing else that I can remember.
When that search proved useless, we went looking for Mum’s grave. She was buried in a plot of earth with a hundred other paupers on September 12, 1940. They didn’t know what date to put for her date of birth, Emmy. It just says her name and the date she died. The day after you and I came back to London.
Do you know she’s dead, Emmy? If I were to see you again, this would be hard for me to say, to tell you she’s dead. She was in the basement of a hotel on that night. A bomb obliterated the building and sent it in pieces hurtling onto the basement, crushing the twenty or so other people who were sheltered there when the air raids started. I don’t know why she was there. The tiny headstone doesn’t say that. Granny said maybe she had been outside on the sidewalk and ran into the shelter when the sirens began to wail.
Granny didn’t tell me right away that Mum had been killed because she was afraid I would disappear into myself and never emerge again. Neither did she tell me that Neville had died before Mum did, even before you and I were evacuated. It’s true. He was gone before we left London for Aunt Charlotte’s. Mum didn’t tell me, though. And Mum didn’t tell me I had grandparents, either, which I still don’t understand. Granny had offered to take us, Emmy. Before we went to Charlotte’s. She wrote to Mum after Neville died and told her she would take us away from the war. We could have come together to America, you and I. Well, she didn’t exactly offer to take you in that letter she wrote because she didn’t know about you. But a long time later, she told me if she had known I had an older sister, she would have offered to take us both to America.
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