His accent was so thick, I imagined you could slice it and put butter on it. He had a funny habit of twisting his cap between his fingers as he spoke, as if he were wringing out a dishcloth. As I watched him do this, I noticed his hands were enormous. I tried not to stare because I knew it was poor manners, but I stared anyway as Mummy chattered on beside me.
“It’s strange to be back in Yorkshire, Arthur. I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed it. There’s something in the air, something that gets to you. You know?” She patted her chest, and Uncle Arthur nodded to indicate that he understood. “For all the time we’ve been in Cape Town, now that I’m back it’s like I’ve never been away. I can’t wait to see our Polly! How’s she keeping?”
And with that, Mummy burst into tears. I stood awkwardly at her side, wishing she would stop. I’d seen her cry only once before—the previous day when we’d said good-bye to Daddy. It was as if by finally arriving in Yorkshire, all the emotion of our journey had to somehow escape from her, like a kettle singing on the stove. Except it wasn’t steam coming out of Mummy. It was great fat tears that only came faster when Uncle Arthur put his hand on her shoulder to comfort her.
“Now, now, Annie. We’ll have none of that. Can’t have you arriving at your sister’s all red-eyed and rotten-looking. She’ll have you put straight to bed with a dose of castor oil.” He took a striped handkerchief from his pocket and passed it to her before busying himself with our luggage. “Polly hasn’t sat down since we got the telegram yesterday evening to say you’d landed in Plymouth. Never seen the house so clean.” He peered over the top of the car. “Don’t tell her I said that!”
Mummy laughed through her tears and promised she wouldn’t.
“Don’t mind me, Frances,” she said, noticing my discomfort. “I’m just relieved to be here. I’ll be right after a cup of tea.”
I hoped so. I wasn’t sure how long I could keep being brave if Mummy kept bursting into tears like that.
The wind tugged impatiently at my skirts and the hem of my coat, and I was glad when Uncle Arthur suggested I jump into the car and Mummy tucked a warm blanket over my knees. I placed Rosebud and my books on top of the blanket, turning the pages of Princess Mary’s Gift Book, lingering over the illustrations that accompanied my favorite poem, “A Spell for a Fairy,” and whispering the familiar lines of verse. “‘There shall be no veil between them, Though her head be old and wise. You shall know that she has seen them, / By the glory in her eyes.’”
After a few minutes of huffing and puffing and what sounded like Yorkshire cursing, Uncle Arthur climbed into the driver’s seat. He rubbed his hands together briskly, blowing on them for warmth as he declared himself nithered. When I asked what nithered meant, Mummy laughed and explained that nithered was a Yorkshire way of saying you were really cold. I tucked Rosebud beneath the blankets to stop her being nithered too.
“We’ll have you back at the house in no time, Frances, love. You’ll be better after a bit o’ scran. Your Aunt Polly has stew and suet dumplings ready.” Uncle Arthur had to shout to make himself heard above the noise of the engine. “Hope you’re hungry. She’s made enough to feed Kitchener’s Army!” I thought of the mottled gray snow outside the station and hoped that Aunt Polly’s suet dumplings would look more appetizing. “And our Elsie’ll just be home from work,” he continued. “She’s all talk of her cousin from South Africa. Says she can hardly remember you. She’s not a bad lass, our Elsie. Daft as a brush, mind, but not a bad lass.”
He chuckled in a funny way that made me smile.
I didn’t remember Cousin Elsie and was intrigued to meet her. Mummy had talked about her all the way here during the long sea crossing. It had been Cousin Elsie this and Cousin Elsie that. I imagined her to look like Alice from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and that being sixteen—a full seven years older than me—she would tell me lots of clever things. I worried she wouldn’t like sharing her bedroom with me, let alone her bed, but that was to be the arrangement. I’d worried about it all the way from Cape Town and worried about it now while Uncle Arthur crunched the gears as the motorcar struggled up the steep, narrow streets.
While Mummy and Uncle Arthur talked about boring grown-up things, I pressed my nose to the window, following the threads of smoke that wound their way from chimney pots on gray houses. Despite the gathering gloom, no light shone from the windows, and the street lamps stood lifeless, like fire irons. It had been the same in Plymouth. “Blackout,” Daddy had explained. “So the enemy can’t find us with their zeppelins.” I didn’t like to think about the enemy. War had felt far away in South Africa. Now it felt dangerously close. I thought about Daddy’s portrait tucked inside the pages of my book and prayed for his safety.
After a short distance, the smoky gray town gave way to the dip and rise of valleys and rolling hills, field after field crisscrossed with undulating lines of low stone walls that stretched all the way to the horizon. Bracken and gorse covered the landscape, silvered by moonlight.
“God’s own country,” Uncle Arthur announced as the car struggled up another steep incline. “That’s what Yorkshire folk call Yorkshire.”
I said I could understand why, what with it being so high up and so close to heaven. Mummy turned to me and said I was a good girl and why didn’t I shut my eyes now and try to sleep.
The motion of the car and the steady hum of the engine soon conspired to lull me into a travel-weary sleep. With my arms wrapped around Rosebud, I dreamed of heather-topped hills and sleepy valleys and a pretty woodland stream where dragonflies danced across the water as I sat down among the ferns and the meadowsweet, waiting for the summer to find me.
Two
Ireland. Present day.
Afraid the pages would be blown away by the wind, Olivia tied the ribbon around them and returned the document to her backpack to continue reading later. As she did, a gust of wind snatched Pappy’s letter from her hand, sending it tumbling away among the scree and rocks.