An Unconventional Love. Adeline Harris

thing happened.

      School had finished for the holidays and I was sitting looking out of the window when a big black shiny car pulled up outside our gate.

      ‘That’s a Rolls Royce,’ my cousin Margaret said. ‘Who can it be?’

      A chubby man with a round face and hair combed into a centre parting walked up the path and knocked on the door. Mother came rushing through the hall to answer it then shrieked out loud. Dad was in the drawing room decorating the Christmas tree. As he came out to the hall to see what was going on, I crept onto the landing to spy on them. I wasn’t close enough to hear all that was said, but I gathered that the man was an old friend of Mother’s from before she was married and that Dad didn’t seem too pleased to see him. He wasn’t invited in.

      They chatted for a while, then the man said, ‘I’ve got some Christmas presents for your children. They’re in the car.’ As he headed out towards the Rolls Royce, I scurried downstairs and out into the front garden so I could watch as the chauffeur opened the boot. My eyes widened like saucers as he pulled out two huge packages wrapped in brown paper.

      Mother turned to me. ‘What do you say to the kind gentleman?’ she asked, her tone neutral.

      ‘Thank you very much, sir,’ I said with feeling.

      Dad seemed keen to get rid of him though. ‘So at last we meet,’ he said in a crisp voice, and folded his arms.

      The man took the hint. Goodbyes were said, the car pulled away and I clamoured for answers. ‘Who is he? How do you know him? Can we keep the presents? Please say we can!’

      ‘Let’s see what they are first,’ Dad said. He tore off the paper to reveal a bright blue pedal car with a Rolls Royce badge on it, presumably for Harold, and a Silver Cross pram for me. I had a doll who would fit into it perfectly and wanted to start playing with it straight away.

      ‘We’ll put them under the tree till Christmas Day,’ Dad announced, and Mother said nothing. I was disappointed not to be able to play with the pram straight away, but at least I got to keep it.

      For the next couple of days I sat looking at the amazing sight of the tree covered in flickering candles, with our lovely presents waiting underneath, like an unimaginable wonderland. It was only later Mother told me that the man who’d brought the presents was the cotton factory owner from Lancashire to whom she had been engaged for seven years before she met Dad. He heard she had moved to England and came to see her. She laughed as she explained that he wanted to win her back, even though she was married with two children. ‘Poor man!’ she sighed, shaking her head. Anyway, Harold and I got our best Christmas presents ever as a result, so we weren’t complaining.

      January was a grim month of sleet and freezing rain and grey, overcast skies. My grandparents had had enough. They didn’t like the climate, didn’t like the food, didn’t want to stay here, so after three months of an English winter they upped and flew back to Bombay.

      ‘The atmosphere is too damp, Emily. I can’t breathe here,’ her mother said.

      They couldn’t return to their house because it still wasn’t safe, so they gave all their possessions to a convent in Bangalore, in return for which the nuns agreed to take them in and look after them for the rest of their lives.

      ‘Can’t I go too?’ I begged. ‘I could train to be a nun there.’ In my head, I thought Clara could come over and live with me and we would be nuns together. Not a day passed without me missing Clara.

      Dad gave me short shrift. ‘Your school is here. Your parents and your brother are here, and this is where you are going to live. Please try to understand.’

      I didn’t like my school though. If I couldn’t go to Bangalore, I wanted to go to the Ursuline convent in Chester, which had a lovely green and grey uniform, but for some reason Dad wouldn’t let me.

      ‘Let’s see if you pass the Eleven Plus,’ he said. ‘You can go to a different school after that. Be good, sweet maid, and let who can be clever.’

      Eleven sounded ages away when I was only just seven. ‘But I want to be a nun,’ I insisted. ‘I should go to school in a convent so I can learn how they work.’

      ‘You can become a nun after you’ve finished St Mary’s,’ he said. ‘There’s plenty of time for that.’

      I still felt like the outsider at that school. My family did things differently from all the other families. As a case in point, the rest of the class went swimming every Tuesday in the Crewe swimming baths but Mother didn’t want me to swim there. First of all, I would have to show my arms and legs to everyone else, which wouldn’t be modest and proper. Secondly, I might catch something horrible from the water, or be exposed to some awful disease in the changing rooms.

      I was embarrassed to be the only one in the class who wasn’t allowed to swim, so I took my old ruched swimsuit from the summer and an ancient threadbare towel and I put them in a plastic bag, which I dropped out of my bedroom window into the flowerbed outside. On the way to school on Tuesday morning, I picked up that carrier bag and was able to go swimming with my classmates. After school I hid the bag full of wet things in some bushes in the garden. The following Tuesday morning I picked it up again and the costume and towel were all damp and mouldy and smelled so dreadful that no one would stand beside me, but at least I could go swimming with the others. I did this each week, the smell getting worse until the costume and the towel disintegrated.