Astounded at what she is suggesting I am able to do for her, I hesitate a moment before responding. “If I’m going to write this paper the way you’d like, I need to know why you’ve waited until now. You’ve had more than fifty years to come clean about who you are.”
“I’m not the historian you are. All these years I’ve failed to see what you historians already know. I’m an old woman and I have a grand opportunity with you, so I’d best take advantage of it.”
“What do you mean, ‘what historians already know’?”
“Surely you’ve not forgotten what you said about history when you first walked into this room, Kendra?” She is half grinning at me, half frowning.
I think back to when I had arrived a few hours ago and Isabel and I were talking about the value of recording the past. I had asked her what was the good in remembering an event if you didn’t remember how it made you feel. How it impacted others. How it made them feel. You would learn nothing.
“You want to pass on what you have learned, don’t you?” I say.
“Well, aside from the fact that it seems a good thing to do, I think Mum would want me to. I think she would be proud of me if I did.”
I let her answer settle over me for a moment. “This is just one article in one newspaper. I’m afraid you will be disappointed.”
“A great many movements have begun from one article in one newspaper. I am only responsible for my own choices. I am choosing to tell my story, Kendra. Who listens to it is not my burden. Telling it is.”
We hear a knock at the door and then Beryl pokes her head inside. “Everyone’s here. It’s time for the party, Auntie.”
“We’ll be right out, Beryl.” Isabel turns to me. “You will stay, won’t you? There are people you need to meet.”
“I would like that very much.”
She rises a bit unsteadily and I move quickly to help her. Isabel thanks me when she is firm on her feet, and then draws a manicured hand gently across her brow to brush away a stray strand of hair. “How do I look for a ninety-three-year-old?”
“I’d say you don’t look a day over ninety.”
Isabel tips her head back and laughs. “Julia would have liked you, Kendra. Oh my. Yes, she would have.”
“I would’ve liked her, too.”
Her laugh ebbs away but her grin remains. “I’ve been a coward most of my life, you know.”
At first I say nothing. Sages of the past would say we are—all of us—just imperfect people on a flawed planet who are trying to hold on to what is good and lovely and right.
“On the contrary,” I finally reply, “I think history will prove that Emmeline Downtree was actually very brave, considering all that she had to endure.”
Isabel regards me thoughtfully, then crinkles an eyebrow in contemplation before reaching for my arm. “Shall we?”
We make our way down the hall, into the kitchen, and through the laundry room, where the garden door is ajar and sounds of celebration are skipping on the breeze. On the threshold, the eyes of those who have been waiting for the guest of honor turn expectantly toward us. Among the many faces, I see Professor Briswell, standing a few feet away from a woman who looks very much like a younger version of Isabel, as well as more than a dozen happy children who’ve not a clue what war is like.
As we pass the open door’s window, a bit of lace curtain lifts on a ribbon of air, caresses the back of Isabel’s neck, and then falls away like a discarded bridal veil.
We step out onto the terrace and the people, young and old, begin to sing.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NO work of historical fiction can be written without the assistance and expertise of others, and this has never been truer for me than with this book.
Thank you, Tim and Joyce Norris of Stow-on-the-Wold, for your friendship, for arranging all those interviews at the British Legion, for the many e-mails sent and received, and for answering my relentless questions. Next time the tapas are on me.
Thank you, Tom and Judy Hyde, for your sweet hospitality: for the fish and chips; for letting me meet your mates, share a pint with them, play a game of dice, and talk about what it was like to be a child in a time of war. And, Penny Culliford, thank you for the many helps with this and that, and for the lovely cabaret show at Battersea.
Many thanks to my amazingly gifted editor, Ellen Edwards, for your insights into what affirms life and satisfies the soul, and for knowing when I needed to dig deeper into the hearts of these characters.
Thank you, Professor Margaret Dyson of the University of California, San Diego, for helping me understand the basics of child psychology in the early 1940s, and to British author and historian Julie Summers, thank you for sharing with me your expertise on the evacuation of London’s children.
To my mother, friend, and proofreader extraordinaire, Judy Horning, thank you for accompanying me on an unforgettable research trip to Gloucestershire; for poring over the research materials at the Imperial War Museum in London; for trudging in the rain, cheerfully jumping onto countless trains, and, of course, reading the raw manuscript.
The following works opened to me the world of London at war and I am grateful: Amy Helen Bell’s London Was Ours, Ben Wicks’s No Time to Wave Goodbye, Julie Summers’s When the Children Came Home, Lynne Olson’s Citizens of London; Peter Stansky’s The First Day of the Blitz, Mark Bernstein and Alex Lubertozzi’s World War II on the Air, Philip Ziegler’s London at War, Jessica Mann’s Out of Harm’s Way; Stanley Cloud and Lynne Olson’s The Murrow Boys: Pioneers on the Front Lines of Broadcast Journalism.
And to those Britons who shared your war stories with me, I know how timeless some of those memories are to you, even all these many years later. I saw it in your eyes. Grateful thanks are extended especially to Jean Ashton, Eddie Warren, Ron Bockhart, Maj. Gen. Clive Beckett, Dorothy Donald, Faith Jaggard, Colin Mayes, and Roy Holloway.