But nothing sounded familiar to me. I must have started to look a little overwhelmed. Simon said to never mind, that I was brilliant because I had just narrowed the search considerably. He mapped out a day trip for us for this Saturday, using Fairford as our starting point since it’s one of the first places we will pass coming up from London.
I know Fairford isn’t right. Somehow I know it’s not. But we have to begin somewhere. I am both eager and hesitant to look for the brides box, Emmy.
It seems like the honorable thing to do. I hope God in heaven will look down on me and favor me with success. It seems such a little thing to request of him.
Simon asked me if I am going to tell Granny what I am doing. I don’t think I will. All of this happened between you and me before I knew her. She can’t help. And if I told her and then failed, she would know I tried and I would see my failure in her eyes every time we visited and she asked me how I was.
This is between you and me.
Julia
July 5, 1958
Dear Emmy,
Simon and I are back from our first trip out to look for Aunt Charlotte’s house. He is heating up soup for us to eat as I write to you. We are cold and soaked to the skin. The day dawned with sprinkles and then switched to rain just as we arrived in Fairford and began our first inquiries.
It didn’t occur to us until we were under way that we could expect no help from city officials in these towns because it was Saturday. No city offices would be open. But Simon said not to worry. City officials might have been hesitant anyway to speak to two strangers asking about sisters whose last name they didn’t even know.
The Fairford train station didn’t look anything like what I remembered. We didn’t even get out of the car.
We drove on to Kempsford where we got thoroughly drenched finding out there was no railway station there. We tried Lechlade, and then Burford because it was nearby, even though it’s in Oxfordshire, not Gloucestershire. And then back in the car to Bourton-on-the-Water, a beautiful little place. I was so taken with it that Simon suggested we should ask about the sisters in the druggist’s and the beauty shop and at the park. I’d decided that when I asked about Charlotte, I would say only that I wished to find my foster mother and thank her for taking my sister and me in, all those many years ago. Don’t you think other evacuees have done this, Emmy? Gone back to the homes and mothers and fathers and siblings who sheltered them during the war years? I think they do. And this seemed to me a very polite and respectable reason for snooping about and asking strangers to tell me whether a Charlotte and a Rose live—or lived—nearby.
So that is what I did. I asked people, mostly older folks, if they knew of two sisters named Charlotte and Rose, because I had spent nearly three months with them at the start of the war, before my mother died.
There are a great many souls in Bourton-on-the-Water and the surrounding little towns that took in evacuees, Emmy. But no one remembers a pair of gray-haired sisters named Charlotte and Rose. We also tried at Upper and Little Rissington—tiny little villages brimming with houses made of Cotswold stone—because they are within a manageable walking distance of Bourton.
I remember that you and I walked from Charlotte’s house to a train station the morning we returned to London. It was a long walk and you carried me part of the way. It was dark. And I was tired. Simon thinks it can’t have been more than six or so miles that we walked because I was too young to walk farther than that in the middle of the night. And I was too heavy for you to carry the entire way.
But we found no one in these towns who knew the sisters.
Still, we drove down some of the lanes, looking at the houses, mostly all made of the same stone, and reminding me very much of Charlotte’s house.
We didn’t find it.
But I am strangely encouraged.
The sense of the familiar was too strong, Emmy.
Julia
July 12, 1958
Dear Emmy,
We went out again today. This time we made our way to Chipping Camden, which didn’t look familiar at all when we first drove into town, and I had to remind myself that nearly twenty years have passed since the day you and I arrived in Gloucestershire. But as we neared the city center, I began to think perhaps we were to be lucky today. The railway station and the lay of the streets and the city hall—it addled my brain how familiar and yet not familiar they were. Again we asked about in the shops and the library and the bank if anyone knew of the sisters. We received mostly kind and compassionate responses. A few people looked askance at us or simply shook their heads with a wordless no when we asked. We had tea at a lovely café to refresh us and Simon noted on the map how many villages were within walking distance. And we went to them all, Emmy. Aston Subedge, Broad Marston, several others.
Every place looked like it could have been where you and I were. And yet no one knew of the sisters. We even strolled the cemeteries, looking for their names.
On the way home I was feeling tremendously discouraged. I wondered aloud if perhaps Thea had been wrong about where Mum told her we were. Maybe she assumed it was Gloucestershire. Or maybe Thea said we had been in Oxfordshire and Granny heard Gloucestershire, because there are Cotswold villages in Oxfordshire as well.
Simon just said, rather confidently,Well, then we’ll look in every village in Oxfordshire, too.
The way he said this gave me pause. I couldn’t see his face clearly because night had fallen and the only light on his features was from the headlamps of a few passing cars. But in the shadows I saw a determined look that surprised me. It did not matter to him that the search may have now widened to include another county. It only mattered that we pressed on, like a wise accountant would do to find the error in the ledger and adjust it. It was as if he was determined to find the house to fixme, which is different than the reason I want to find it. He wanted to find the house so that I could at last climb out of my regrets and marry him. I am not interested in fixing me. I want to fix what I broke.
It’s completely different.
When I said nothing, he took my silence for anxiety that now we have even more towns to search and that he might lose interest in me because of it. He said not to worry, because I was the only thing that mattered to him. He reached for my hand.
