Dear Mrs Parr,
This isn’t an easy letter to write, but I know that we both want the best for Pamela, so I do feel I’ve really no choice in opening my heart and feelings to you as one woman to another.
I know that my brother has written to you expressing his gratitude for the great care and fondness you showed Pamela during her stay in England following Amelia’s tragic death. I concur absolutely with his sentiments and no one could be gladder than he and I to receive once more into our arms a little girl whose life had been so tenderly … can I say, repaired, if it does not sound too odd, by yourself and your husband. Amelia was not a conventional woman, certainly not one made for marriage. I’m dreadfully sad for my brother, of course, that she made this discovery at his expense, but I don’t entirely blame her. I also have a strong sense, for all Amelia’s waywardness, that she loved Pamela inordinately.
We all love her, you see – Amelia, Aubrey, Jack and myself, and her four cousins.
Now I have to tell you that last week Pamela was found at a bus stop in Kilkenny by the Gardaí who returned her to us completely unscathed but weeping inconsolably. She had taken her Cousin Richie’s bicycle and ridden it off to Waterford where she took the bus for Kilkenny. Apparently she had boarded the bus amid a crowd of children and the driver had not realized that Pamela was in fact travelling alone. Anyway Pamela told the Gardaí she was trying to reach Dublin in order to take the boat from Dún Laoghaire to Fishguard, if you please, and then her plan was to work her way back to Hampshire and to you. Found on her little person was the sum of 21 shillings, being the combination of a present from her father and the pocket money she had saved.
My dear Mrs Parr, we’re not cruel people, my husband Jack and I. We hate to see children unhappy. We weighed it up and decided it would do no harm for her to send a few letters to you in Upton while she got used to us. The alternative, cutting her off from you at a stroke, seemed counterproductive as well as brutal, since it would throw her into such misery as to make it even harder for her to settle in. But here we come to the nub of the matter.
We know that you’re a wise and sensible young woman, Mrs Parr, and it is to that wisdom and sensibleness that we now appeal.
I am wholly unsurprised to learn from your most recent letter to Pamela that you love her above all things. She is a lovable child even when angry and sad. But, as I am sure you will agree, the task – if you like – of loving Pamela now falls to Aubrey, and to me, and to my husband Jack, and our children. As you told her so wisely and tenderly in your letter, Pamela’s life is with us now. And I am sure that you and I both understand how much harder it will be for her to come to terms with that, if she is continually reminded of her former life with you.
So – I know I’ve been long-winded but verbosity is a hazard when speaking from the heart – so it is in her interests, Mrs Parr, that I ask you now to consider that letter you wrote to Pamela as your last. I will keep the letter safe. I will assure Pamela of your love. I shall explain that it is because you love her that you need her to go forward, as you told her yourself, into her new life.
I believe it is time for all of us, not just Pamela, to go forward into our new lives. The war must end next year; it must. I hope that you too will rejoice, Mrs Parr, and I trust that you will reap all you deserve of the fruits of the peace.
Yours most gratefully,
Hester Browne
*
The first days passed. One, then another, then six, a dozen – trippingly, as if rattled off a spool.
Punctuated also by sunrise, sunset, bread. I could only eat scraps of bread. At night I lay on Pamela’s small bed holding the dress which was all I had.
I spent my days with Suky Fitch and Selwyn in the mill. Sometimes I felt faint and had to sit down or even kneel on the floor but the humming of the turbine came into me through my knees. Selwyn spent much time watching the millstones turn, watching grain falling from the hoppers, and I watched him.
A fortnight – Aubrey’s letter arrived, and Pamela’s the next day. I entered a half-life, touching papers she had touched, crying over letters she had cried on. The bluebells came in Pipehouse Wood, and the bird’s-foot trefoil on Beacon Hill. I took her letters to these places and read them over and over. Then Hester wrote, and the axe fell, and she was truly gone. I was glad of the travel ban, really I was; it was an iron fence I could fling myself against. Without it I would have gone to her in Ireland, presented myself crying, screaming, trying to tear her out of the door.
Some time after I received Hester’s letter, Selwyn handed me a small round leather case. Inside was a compass, a lively little thing with snapping lid and a dancing needle. I put it on the table and it settled, true and eager. He told me that when the war was over we could go on a long trip. He said, ‘Why don’t we get out the atlas this evening?’
I wanted to please him, so I said, ‘Yes.’
And it proved to be comforting to run my eyes over maps free of the thick arrows and crosses and hatched zones that were the marks of war. Instead there were rumpled purple mountains, seas grading from turquoise to the deepest indigo, wide ochre plains, all with the barest of boundary lines. I turned only the pages showing the Mediterranean, the Adriatic, the Aegean. The Holy Land. Nowhere closer to home.
The idea came to me as I sat there. I could still write to her. Of course I could. I simply wouldn’t send the letters. I would keep them in a pile in my desk drawer. Tied into a packet with ribbon and inscribed with her name. I would tell her everything that was in my heart, speaking not to the child but to the woman I would never know. Hoping that one day in the years to come the letters might fall into her hands, and she would read them and know that she was not forgotten.
*
7th June 1944
Dear Pamela,
The invasion has happened. The soldiers have gone. Hurling themselves out into the Channel, into a gap between two gales, grabbing their luck and courage in both hands, sending our hearts into our mouths. We knew it was coming by then – barbed wire sprawling and running everywhere, army tents pitched under Jeps Hanger and then under Pipehouse Wood. Even Beacon Hill was out of bounds. Jeeps flashing by, the sun catching the braid on unfamiliar uniforms. And finally, the rumbling. It rose, and swelled, until Selwyn and Suky Fitch and I heard it through the racket in the mill. We ran outside. I looked up but there were no aeroplanes. We hurried to the end of the lane and there they were, lorry after lorry after lorry passing, bound for the sea. Our road alone couldn’t account for the noise. It was coming from all the roads in the South.
Suky and I waved at the soldiers, and Selwyn saluted them.
I wish you’d been there, Pamela, holding my hand. Not just for my sake, but for yours. You’d have been thrilled.
14th March 1945
Dear Pamela,
Dan is dead. He died in Italy. To survive so much and then lose his life like so many others on the Gothic Line. None of us can comprehend it yet. You might remember a brown-haired man with small blue eyes who came to Upton during your first Christmas with us. I think he danced a reel with you in the village hall. Lucy is more distraught than Marcy his wife – I wish you were here, to go to Lucy’s house and eat bread and butter and climb on her apple tree. It would be a comfort to her. Her eyes are always dark but now they seem utterly lightless. The only thing rescuing me from similar grief is my fury that he’s gone, that the war has taken him.
Edward is in Bangalore recuperating from malaria, dysentery and an infected wound to the scalp. He is doing very well, he says. I try and hold him in my mind.
We still have the map you stuck drawing pins in, to trace his journey. We’ve run out of drawing pins so I put an ordinary dressmaker’s pin into Bangalore for you.
22nd August 1946