A Letter From the Author to the Reader
I have been taught that I must appreciate the origin of a thing before I can truly understand its meaning. This is because my father has a passion for antiques and he is a man obsessed by the written record, the provenance that proves where an item began its life and charts its path through time. For him, provenance does more than add value to a precious object by declaring it to be a genuine relic from some notable moment in history. It ties him to long-gone human lives. It gives him a chance to touch what they have touched and take their stories as his own.
Very well – put in those terms, the provenance of my story is this: I grew up in London and my teenage years were an unspeakable mess of war. I belong to that unheroic generation of girls who were too old to be evacuated with the smaller children but too young to lend my weight to the war effort. While older women were called up to save the nation by building aeroplanes or tilling the land or were generally being terribly useful in the WAAF or as a WREN, I did nothing very useful at all. If anyone has ever wondered who did the mundane work behind shop counters after those brave women went off to be busy elsewhere, the answer is that the ordinary, everyday work was fulfilled by girls like me.
At the age of fourteen I left a life of disrupted lessons in a dingy air-raid shelter for a daily journey to work in Knightsbridge. I watched through dirty bus windows as, day by day, the bold London landmarks that had charted my youth fell prey to the destructive power of the Blitz. And I did nothing.
Now, though, the war is over. The recent past has grown a little brighter; a little clearer. The whine that was once the sirens and dogfights of yesteryear has become, these days, really nothing more sinister than the shriek of black swifts that tumble playfully in summer skies. Although, even their cries have been silenced of late. This is because the little birds left about a week ago to pass onwards on their migration and their departure has been a fitting companion for the decision I made last Saturday. The one where I gave notice to my employer and decided that after two years of peace it was time to stop worrying that childhood had made me a passive witness to conflict. It was time I took my life off its war footing and found what hope this adult life could bring.
Unfortunately, before announcing this grand scheme to my parents, I really ought to have remembered that I am abysmally poor at speaking what I feel under pressure.
I know now what my father suspected. After all, I’ve already mentioned that my father believes that the key to everything lies in understanding the past. So if I’d hoped to get my parents to listen to what I really wanted to do with my future, I should have chosen an easier excuse than my determination to stop living each day like London in peacetime was just the same as war and always stifling.
It probably wouldn’t have made any difference anyway. My parents found it far more digestible to deduce that their young daughter had been made restless by the after-effects of an unfortunate romance. And since I couldn’t entirely refute it, the only compromise we could agree on was the exchange of this urban post-war stagnation for an altogether different kind of peace in the form of a long overdue visit to a spinster cousin in the timeless Cotswolds. My parents saw her as a usefully dithering older relation who would act out the time-worn part of a cautionary tale and save me from tripping into bitter independence. I thought my parents were mistaking me for someone else. My life so far had not exactly been renowned for its brave choices. The fact I’d let them argue me into coming here was proof enough of that, I should have thought.
Anyway, irrespective of all that, I’d have stood a rather greater chance of receiving this cautionary experience had my cousin actually been at home when I arrived.
In fact, by her absence, my cousin is responsible for many things. Had she met me at the bus stop as she had promised, I wouldn’t have been forced to walk the two miles alone with my case to her tiny cottage at the bottom of this dusty valley. If she’d been at home when I finally arrived here, I would have had her company instead of nothing but the mile upon mile of blue sky – a novelty in itself after the smogs of London – and my only neighbour wouldn’t have been the deserted single-storey building that stood just beyond the turn of the track about a hundred yards upstream, firmly dispelling the fantasy of a simple life passed in a rustic hovel. My cousin’s company might also have eased the disorientating sense of loneliness after the important bustle of leaving London, which was only broken by the distant telephone that proceeded to ring on and off for the next three hours.
She certainly might have known who the owners were and decided to do something about it before the sun dipped below the ridgetop behind me. And if she had, when I finally gave in and took it upon myself to labour my way back up that trackway with the view of at least seeing if I could be of any use, I could have either escaped or averted this fresh proof that conflict stalked everywhere, even in peacetime. I certainly wouldn’t have found an old man lying flat out on his garden path beneath peas and feathery carrot-tops, with a wound to his head.
He wasn’t alone. I arrived at the moment that the fellow who had been trying to help him had to rapidly set him down on the crude stone slabs of the path because the old man’s weight had grown too much.
I was beside them before the old man had even stopped falling. Despite my first impression, this was not an act of war. There were no armies here, no great propaganda campaigns to tell us which nations were on the side of right. I had to make up my own mind and all I saw was a poor old man who had lately bashed his head and made it nearly to his own front step before abruptly succumbing to the shock. I remember his face vividly. There was a greyness to it. His skin was creased by age, with fine woolly hair over the top. He was wearing the coarse shirt and heavy brown trousers of the ordinary countryman. His garden path was a narrow line between overcrowded beds and he stirred a little as I reached his side. One side of his face was gritty from his fall. There was a smear of blood on his right hand that spread to my arm as he watched with that blank instinct that comes from partial consciousness while I dropped into a crouch and examined him.
I don’t remember the second man. He remains an infuriatingly formless shape in my memory of that day. The image has been subsequently enhanced by the memory of other encounters in other places at different times, but that day I only saw the way he was tugging ineffectually at the fallen man’s gardening coat in an attempt to make the old man rise and that he surrendered the invalid’s care to me just as soon as I reached his side. He did it with relief, it seemed to me.