I watched her as she yawned, shifted in her seat, and drifted back to sleep. She looked different since we’d arrived in England, changed by the long journey across the ocean, travel-crumpled and gray-faced; colorless, almost. All the lovely color of our life had started to fade away when we’d said good-bye to Daddy in Plymouth. Even the drab khaki of his British Army uniform was reduced to shades of black and white in the portrait he’d had taken on the promenade and pressed into my hands before heading off to join his battalion and “do his bit.”
I took the photograph from my pocket as the locomotive rattled along. I didn’t like photographs, didn’t trust the darkrooms and the mystical procedures required to make them, and I especially didn’t like the photograph of Daddy. He was so much more than the serious-looking man staring back at me from the posed portrait. Daddy was loud and boisterous. His laughter boomed like cannon fire. His chin was bristly when he kissed me good-night. His arms comforted me like nothing else could. It made me anxious to look at him so stiff and still, like a corpse. I placed the photograph inside my book for safekeeping as the train slowed, creaked alongside a platform, and shuddered to a halt.
Mummy sat up with a start. “Why have we stopped? Where are we, Frances?”
I rubbed at the misted glass with my coat sleeve and read the station sign. “Bingley.” My heart lurched. After weeks of traveling, we had reached our destination. All I wanted to do was turn around and go straight back.
“Bingley! That’s our stop!” Mummy jumped up, retrieving our discarded hats and gloves and chivying me to do the same, quickly, as quickly as I could. “Have you got everything, Frances? Hold the door, please! Your hat? Rosebud? Your case?”
I said I had. It didn’t take long to gather up two books and my rag doll. There hadn’t been time to bring much more.
A round-faced woman reached up to the luggage rack to lift down my small traveling case. When I thanked her she looked at me as if she’d seen a ghost.
“Well, you’re certainly not from ’round here. Where you from then? Australia?”
“South Africa.”
“You’re a long way from home. At least you won’t be bothered by lions in Bingley, eh. Although I’d tek lions over some Yorkshire folk any day o’t week.”
The woman laughed at this and I said thank you again, hardly able to understand what she’d said at all.
Half a dozen people alighted at Bingley. One by one we stepped reluctantly out of the cozy carriage onto the cold station platform, where a ruddy-cheeked porter with saggy jowls rushed about, looking important. He spoke with the same accent as the woman on the train, and said something about being nithered as he helped sleep-dazed passengers with their luggage. I thought it clever of Daddy to have sent on our heavy portmanteau from Plymouth. I was weary enough of my small case as it was, and could tell from the violet shadows beneath Mummy’s eyes that she, too, was exhausted from our long journey, although she would never admit it and hadn’t complained once all the way from Cape Town. Mummy didn’t like to complain. “There’s always a silver lining,” she said. “If you look hard enough.” As I traipsed along behind, following her out of the smoke-filled station into dark, unfriendly streets, I doubted there was a silver lining in Bingley, no matter how hard I might look.
“Uncle Arthur’ll be here soon to collect us,” Mummy said, clapping her hands together and stamping her feet. “He’ll be driving one of Mr. Briggs’s fancy motorcars, no doubt.”
“Who is Mr. Briggs?”
“The boss. Your Uncle Arthur works for him at Cottingley Manor, looking after his motorcars. Wealthiest man in Cottingley. You’re to mind your manners when you’re introduced to him.”
I assured her I would and stared numbly at the narrow street of terraced houses in front of me. Blackened windows obscured any sign of life inside. The street lamps also stood black and lightless. It was all so unwelcoming. Nothing about it said Welcome to Yorkshire, Frances. Nothing about it said home.
I don’t know what I’d expected of Yorkshire, but somehow I wasn’t surprised that my first reaction was one of enormous disappointment. The air was bitterly cold, the streets were dull and dark, and the people spoke in accents I couldn’t understand. Yorkshire had none of the color I’d known in Cape Town—the vivid pinks and purples of the freesias and arum lilies in the flower sellers’ baskets. Yorkshire had none of the fragrant floral perfume, or the tang of salt in the air from the ocean. My greatest disappointment was discovering the true identity of the dirty gray lumps heaped up beside the station walls.
Mummy laughed when I asked her what they were. “It’s snow, Frances! Mucky old Yorkshire snow. What did you think it was? Suet dumplings?”
I didn’t know what suet dumplings were and had only seen the pure white snow of my picture books. What I saw in front of me wasn’t like that. This was dirty snow. Old snow. Disappointing gray Yorkshire snow to match the gray Yorkshire sky and gray Yorkshire walls and gray Yorkshire stone on gray Yorkshire houses. I bent down to scrape a ball of the snow into my hands and threw it immediately down again. It was so cold it burned.
“I don’t like Yorkshire snow,” I said, kicking crossly at it with the toe of my boot. “And I don’t like Yorkshire.” I folded my arms across my chest, crumpled my face into a furious scowl, and didn’t even try to stop my bottom lip from sticking out, even though I knew Mummy didn’t like to see me sulk.
She placed her hands on her hips and raised an eyebrow. “I see. Well, that’s as may be, Frances Mary Griffiths, but you’ll have to learn to like Yorkshire—snow and all—because this is where we live now. This is our home, and the sooner you get used to the idea, the better.”
There was a sharpness to her voice that I didn’t care for. A sharpness caused by the exhaustion and emotion of the long journey from Cape Town, by the worry of watching a dear husband and father go off to fight in a dreadful war that had already robbed hundreds of thousands of wives and children of their loved ones. Hot tears pricked my eyes, but I refused to let them fall. I muttered an apology and stared hard at my boots, shoving my hands deep into my pockets, glad of the heavy wool coat Mummy had made especially for the inclement weather she knew would await us in England. We stood in silence. The mist of our breaths mingled with the ribbons of smoke that crept from tall chimney pots on the houses across the road.