commercial. My mother’s porcelain blue eyes, brimming with tears, turned back to me, two points of color standing out on her cheekbones, which were high and smoothly defined. Although her face became a little softer and rounder as she aged, she was beautiful right up to the day she died.
“It’s silly, really,” she said. “I suppose I was just feeling a little homesick.”
“Homesick? You were?”
I was dumbstruck. The thought had never occurred to me that she might wish to be anywhere but where we were. She did have an airmail subscription to the Daily Mail and the Times of London, of course, and she kept a short-wave radio in her bedroom so that she could listen to the BBC. We had a tradition in our house that on December 25, we had to wait until after the Queen’s Christmas message before my mother would come out and join my grandparents and me in opening our gifts around the tree.
But those were just my mother’s strange little quirks. I’d never thought of her as a particularly sentimental person. She almost never spoke of her life before coming to Minnesota. Like most overconfident Americans, I simply assumed that she was thrilled to be here.
As I grew older, though, it dawned on me that her reluctance to revisit the past mightn’t be lack of sentimentality as much as her way of coping. After all, she’d endured terrible losses in those years before I was born—her parents, a fiancé, my father, her home, not to mention God knows how many friends and comrades from her period of war service.
Was it any wonder, then, that the subject of the past would be painful for her.
“Do you miss England, Mum?”
“Sometimes, yes, I suppose I do,” she confessed.
“Are you sorry you left?”
“No, not really. There’d be no point in being sorry, would there? Always remember, Jillian, once you make a decision, you must never look back.”
“You could have stayed there,” I pointed out, intrigued at the idea that I might have had an entirely different life, one in which I went to a school that looked like an old castle and wore a school uniform with a kilt, knee socks and a crested blazer. Mentally, I tried on an English accent, picturing myself as a more gangly, less pretty (obviously) version of Elizabeth Taylor in National Velvet.
But my mother’s head gave a firm shake. “No, darling. Coming here was the best option at the time. Things were terribly difficult at home when the war ended. You were a tiny baby, so you can’t remember what it was like, but I remember it very well, indeed. We were living in one cramped little room in an old house outside London. It was hardly big enough for a bed and a small table. Your cradle was an old bureau drawer. We needed a flat desperately, but there were simply none to be had. So many houses had been bombed by the Germans, and with all the men coming back from the front after 1945, there was a dreadful shortage of housing. Naturally, war veterans were at the top of the waiting list, so there was no telling how long we would have to live like that. It was no way to raise a child.”
“But that’s not fair! You should have been at the top of the list, too. You served in the war. So did my father.”
“Yes, but Daddy was an American, wasn’t he?”
“That shouldn’t have made any difference. We were allies and everybody was fighting for the same side. And what about you? You fought for England behind the lines in France just the same as if you’d been in a uniform. You should have gotten the same treatment as the soldiers coming back.”
“Well, perhaps, in theory. In practice, though, it wasn’t that simple. I’d worked for a very small, very secret part of the government. Even now, you know, Whitehall never publicly acknowledges the special services, even though everyone knows they exist. In any case, dear, we were a very few, and there were so many other needs to fill. They had to establish priorities somehow, and British servicemen and their families simply came first.”
I started to renew my protest against the unfairness of it all, but my mother held up her hand. “It wasn’t only the billeting problem. Food and clothing were in short supply, too. Rationing was still in force. You needed formula, nap-pies and, oh, so many things that just weren’t to be had. Really, darling, when your grandparents wrote and invited us to come and live with them here, I knew it was for the best. As for this…” She waved a neat, manicured hand at the TV screen, where Deborah Kerr had returned, dressed in a simple but elegant little black dress very much like one my mother owned. “…this is just Mummy being very silly, that’s all.”
In my heart of hearts, I was glad she had taken up my grandparents’ offer. They’d been wonderful, loving people, and through their stories and those of so many old friends and neighbors in Havenwood, I grew up feeling linked to a father I’d never known—a father about whom my mother, frankly, could tell me frustratingly little, so short had been their time together before he was killed.
That evening, though, I began to see my mother in a whole new light. To me then, a young girl on the brink of womanhood, there was great melodrama in the notion of this brave young English widow, a war heroine in her own right, clutching a tiny baby to her bosom as she hurried from one government office to another under a relentless English rain, pleading with harried and unsympathetic clerks for lodgings that just weren’t to be had.
“What about now?” I pressed.
“What do you mean?”
“Do you ever think of going back?”
“To England? And leave you here all alone? What an absurd idea!”
“No, I mean we could both go. It’d be neat. I could see where you grew up, and where you met Dad.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that, Jillian. It’s such a long trip, you have no idea.”
“We’d fly over.”
“That would be terribly expensive. And not at all feasible. The school systems are very different and…”
“Not for good. Just for a visit. Summer vacation, maybe. You could see old friends, take me to the white cliffs of Dover. Maybe we could go to France, too, look up those cousins.”
My mother had been born in Dover to an English father and a French mother. It was that combined heritage that had made her such a prize to the British secret service when the war broke out and finally landed her behind the lines in occupied France. But that night in front of the television, she displayed no interest whatsoever in a return visit.
“It would all be very different now, Jillian. So many places were bombed during the war, including the house I grew up in and my father’s print shop. Everything’s been rebuilt and changed, I’m sure. I don’t think I should enjoy seeing that. I’d rather remember it as it was.”
“What about people?”
“People?”
“Family, say? On your father’s side—or your mother’s?”
On her bedroom bureau she had a small, pewter-framed photo of her own mother, whose beauty she’d inherited. British sapper Albert Wickham had met young Sylvie Fournier in Normandy during the First World War and had utterly lost his heart to her. They’d married after the war, but sadly, my grandmother had died in an influenza epidemic when my mother was just a toddler. My mother, like me, had grown up an only child.
“There’s
