35. A GRANDMOTHER'S TALE

Wallace's baby has been born, a daughter called Eloise

Edina Hawkesbury had already occupied a complicated place in Wallace’s life, starting off as an English teacher who first pointed out to him the fact that he rather liked one particular girl to his discovering that she was, in actual fact, the woman who had born him for nine months and then given birth to him before handing him over to her late husband’s brother and his wife for them to bring up.

Few children are actually told who their parents are but grow up, from squalling babyhood to teenage strength and beyond, knowing it. Mum is mum and dad is dad. Until they’re not. And it was all very confusing for Wallace Pratchett when he discovered that his actual parents weren’t who he thought they were.

Eventually he’d accepted the situation, largely because he hadn’t much choice over a matter of provable fact, and here was that birth mother once again in his life. Edina Hawkesbury was holding baby Eloise as if it was her right to coo at her. And, he thought, practical as ever, he supposed it was.

“The hardest thing I ever did, Wallace, was give you up,” she said quietly. “I never cuddled you, never told your I loved you, though I knew in my heart I’d never loved anyone more, I simply, when I was at my weakest and war Was raging all around us, handed you over to the woman who should have been my sister-in-law because I knew you’d get a better life with her.”

“It must have been a terrible choice for you to make,” murmured Maureen, taking her week-old daughter back from Edina because she’d started crying.

“I never even heard you cry afer you were born,” whispered Edina, “not then, a sleeping new-born, and not ever, because you were taken away and I was left in my own, my milk flowing and no babe to suckle it.” And Wallace could see the tears forming in her eyes and for the first time ever he understood something of what she’d been going through over the years. Even that last year or so with the boy she knew was her son in her English class twice a week. That can’t have been easy.

“I’m so sorry,” he mumbled, then added, “mum.”

“I want to tell you all about it, Wallace,” she said quietly, “about me, and what I did.”

“You don’t have to, mum.” This time the mum wasn’t an afterthought.

“But I feel I need to, so here goes. As soon as the war was over and after I’d stopped praying to be bombed out of existence myself, because I did that, you know. I prayed to be killed so that I could rejoin the sweet man I was due to marry… I had to believe in Heaven, the afterlife, that sort of thing back then because it was my only hope, the only point I could see in being alive when he was dead. Anyway, as soon as the war was over I tried to pull myself together.

“With no contact of any kind with my own little boy I had to focus on doing something big, something worthwhile, of creating a life for myself in which I could have a chance of, not forgetting exactly, but blocking out my memories of what might have been, and so after a lot of thought I went to college. I’d already done quite well at school, and I qualified as a teacher because that would put me into a world where there were children, probably subconsciously because I’d lost the only child I was likely to have of my own. I was Miss Hawkesbury and I planned on staying a Miss and never finding a soul-mate who would change me into a Mrs.”

“Maybe you should have looked for a handsome young man?” Suggested Maureen, “I mean, isn’t the world meant for men and women to be together? I don’t know where I’d be and how I’d cope if I didn’t have Wally.”

“I didn’t want to.” Edina was almost defiant as she said those words, “but don’t get me wrong: I’ve never been one of those women who doesn’t want a man around and seeks comfort with another woman. It wasn’t that at all. No, I’d already lost too much and as I saw it if I found another dose of happiness I would be lining myself up for another spate of losses. I’d lost one man, and I loved him dearly, so dearly that I let him, not just let, I encouraged him, to go so far one night that I ended up pregnant. I can still remember the exact moment, it was so perfect in every sense, and we knew that he would be joining his comrades soon enough. It was his leave, you see, he had a few days’ leave, and we couldn’t control ourselves. But he never rejoined his comrades. He was on his way to the train station when the damned bomb dropped, almost a direct hit, it couldn’t have been more direct if the pilot had tried… and he was gone for ever.”

“It must have been awful,” murmured Maureen.

“The baby continued to grow inside me,” sighed Edina, “you, Wallace, and you were all that was left of my lovely man, his seed, his hopes for a better future, he was an eternal optimist! And common sense, misguided maybe, but times were very different back then, hopes were being dashed on a daily basis, the news was never good, we all expected that sooner or later we would have to learn to speak German so that we could understand and obey our new masters… and even if the impossible happened and we won the bloody war, sorry for using that word but it was bloody, there would be the social consequences of me being a single mother with a child born out of wedlock. So I chose, what was it? An easy way out? And gave you to Helen and Jack.”

“It must have been a terrible time,” whispered Maureen, “I was tiny back then, only just at school myself when my Wally was born, but I can still remember the dreadful sirens, the air raid warnings and the all-clear. And the sound of guns. I remember them, too, spitting lead into the skies.”

“Well, the world seems a better place now,” smiled Edina, needing to lighten the mood now that she’d told the bulk of her story, “there’s talk of Europe uniting into one big trading block, and if that happens, as it seems to be then there might be no more big wars like the two that ruined so many lives. It was the nineteen fifties soon enough, I had become a qualified teacher and I found myself teaching my own son without realising it! I should have asked myself if the nice boy sitting next to the pretty girl was my Wallace, and maybe the thought did try to surface in my mind, but something made me push it out until I bumped into Helen in the park one day.”

“And learned all about me,” sighed Wallace.

“Exactly. Now let me hold your little girl one last time before I go. I never got to hold my son, but I’m blowed if I’m going to miss out when it comes to holding my granddaughter!”

Maureen very carefully passed the week old Eloise Pratchett to his grandmother, and the baby opened her eyes … and was that a smile? It might have been.

Edina was sure that it was.

© Peter Rogerson 13.07.19