14. THE WARTIME BOMB

The aftermath of discovery

There was no consoling Wallace.

His life had been a certainty until that day. His widowed mother had been mum and the gravestone in the cemetery marked the last resting place of dad, and to discover, out of the blue, that both hitherto incontrovertible facts were no longer facts at all was enough to send him to his bedroom, force him to lock the door against all intruders, and cry until he was out of tears.

He cried because of the emergence of doubt in his life. He cried for the lies he’d been forced to believe until today of all days when they had suddenly been turned topsy turvy. And when he couldn’t think of anything else to cry about he cried for himself.

He was Wallace Pratchett and he knew why he hated the name. He hated the Wallace part because it made people call him Wally and he hated the Pratchett part because it simply wasn’t true. Or was it? Maybe his false father’s brother was also called Pratchett. Yes, that was it, of course he was.

And his real mother was Miss Hawkesbury. When that got out at school his life wouldn’t be worth living. He’d have to move, not only schools but towns. No, not even towns. He’d have to move counties until he was far enough away from Mickelthwaite Secondary School for any rumour of his ancestry to have no chance of reaching his new school.

He’d have to start his life all over again.

He’d have to find a new home, new friends, a new Penny Ashton if the world could hold more than one so precious a person, new everything.

After a great deal of crying and even more self-pity, he reluctantly crept back out of his bedroom and silently made his slow and hesitant way back down the stairs. There were things he ought to know, important things about himself and where he stood in the world.

He waited for a moment outside the kitchen door. Inside, there was silence. Utter and complete silence, no voices of Miss Hawkesbury talking to mum, to Helen, he couldn’t call her mum any more because that was a lie. Every smidgen of his life was based on lies. As if every moment and thought and deed that had been his were as insubstantial as paper, and someone had set a light to the whole crumpled mess and turned it to ashes.

He edged into the kitchen.

Mum, no Helen, was sitting where she’d been at the kitchen table, tears drying on her cheeks, and close as close could be, next to her sat Miss Hawkesbury holding mum’s hand with such a tenderness that the whole scene looked beautiful.

“I’m going,” he croaked from the door, “I don’t belong here, so I’m going.”

“Where to, darling?” asked the woman he still wanted to call mum.

“Anywhere. A new home. The council place where the bad kids go. Somewhere I might find a new mum,” he muttered, sounding as cruel and stubborn as he felt.

“You’ve already got a mum, Pratchett, and she’s sitting right here, broken hearted because her boy can’t see goodness and love when it’s there in front of him,” said Miss Hawkesbury in the kind of voice she used at school when she caught someone doing something really evil at the back of the class and thought they’d got away with it.

“What did she expect,” he croaked.

“You mean, what did the woman who has vested every bit of her life on you, who has sacrificed her own freedoms so that you can have a happy and decent home, who lost her man and has done nothing about seeking someone else even though she’s as pretty as a picture still and would make many a man a good wife, expect?” asked Edina.

“Shh,” sighed mum.

“She lied to me. She told me that she was my mum,” replied Wallace, his voice showing the very birth of uncertainty.

“That was no lie, boy!” snapped his English teacher, “it was the absolute and undeniable truth. Oh, there was no real biological connection, but when everything’s taken into consideration, what is a mother? Is it the hag who gives birth to a screaming lump of life and never cares one moment for it? Is that what a mother should be? Or is it the woman who, over painful years of deprivation and poverty and rationing, has made sure her boy goes without nothing that’s truly important. And who lavishes a great deal more love on him than he deserves!”

“And what about you?” asked Wallace, “where are you when it comes to all the stuff you just mentioned?”

“I’m selfish, that’s my only defence,” said Edina, “I was deeply in love with a man, my every breath was for him, and he was killed when a random bomb exploded almost on top of him, by chance. He was smashed into pulp, his body wrecked beyond recognition except for the pocket watch he always carried with him and by which he was identified once the smoke and the fires had been cleared.

“Do you know the facts of life, Wallace? Do you know how babies are created and start stirring in a woman’s womb? Are you aware of the depth and intensity of feeling that goes into the love shared for so short a time by one man and one woman together? And when one of them, the man, is so casually destroyed, how much it hurts the woman? And she knows two things: that a life given to her by him is already showing on her waistline and that, for the rest of her life she will be scorned and derided as a woman with a baby but without a husband? No matter that he’s dead, a victim of a terrible war, they’ll call her a harlot, and simply because she wasn’t married to the man when he was slaughtered so casually. So my selfishness was to protect myself and the child from that abuse by giving him up to people who would love and care for him. To maybe tell a few lies along the way, but all for the good, so that the child wouldn’t suffer the agony of believing his mother to be some kind of w***e for conceiving him out of wedlock.”

It was a long speech and it left him speechless. He stared at the teacher then at his mum, then back at his mum, his biological mum, and all he could do was think that he was sorry from the bottom of his heart for not understanding one percent of the truth in life when it contained within it so much pain.

But he didn’t say it, and maybe he should have. He was speechless.

And cousin Maureen chose that moment to walk in like she always did, not knocking, she never did, bright and happy from work at the swimming baths, and when she saw Miss Hawkesbury sitting there and the expression on Helen’s face, she said, “why, hello Auntie Helen and Auntie Edina, is something wrong?”

And Wallace stared at her. She had called his English teacher Auntie Edina.

What did she know? And why had he only just found out?

© Peter Rogerson 10.06.19