Ever, I said.
And she said if I never wanted to see London again, I didn’t have to.
We sailed on a ship as big as a city, or so it seemed to me. And when we docked in Southampton, Gramps was there to meet us with his car.
He asked me how the crossing was. I told him it was fine compared to our departure when U-boats were trying to bomb us. He started to tear up when I said this and I worried that Granny hadn’t told him how scary our first crossing had been. That wasn’t it. He knew how terrible it was. He just had never heard my voice before.
I actually didn’t like the way my voice sounded when I started to talk again. I had been going to school with American kids and hearing them talk, and even though I hadn’t been doing much talking myself, their funny way of speaking had slithered into my head and mixed itself in with the way I talked five years before. What came out of my mouth when I started communicating verbally again was a weird half-British, half-American mush that made me sound like a psycho.
It does not make you sound like a psycho,Granny had said.Where did you hear that word?
I sound strange.
You just sound like all the other British children who were evacuated to America, Julia. That’s what happens when you’re immersed in another culture.
You don’t sound like them,I said.
That’s because I am fifty years older than you. You are young. It will come back, Julia. The way you talked before will come back.
And I guess it did. Mostly.
Granny was so happy to be back in England in her pretty house and with Gramps and all the friends she left behind when she evacuated with me to Connecticut.
And I guess I liked the house, too. You would like it, Em. There’s a big garden in the back and rows and rows of raspberry bushes. I had my own room, the one that had been my father’s. Granny still had a few of his toys in there and loads of pictures of him from when he was a baby and a schoolboy and when he started to do plays.
It made Granny sad to talk about Neville but she did it anyway. I think she has always been afraid that I would forget him because I was so young when he left Mum. But there are things you don’t forget even if you are young.
She doesn’t know I only ever called him Neville. Even all these years later, she doesn’t know. She thinks I called him Daddy.
Do you know why I called him Neville?
Because you did.
I was afraid if I started calling him Daddy, then you would call him Daddy. And I didn’t want to share him with you, Emmy.
I would now, of course. I would share anything I have with you.
Julia
June 11, 1958
Dear Emmy,
Today Simon and I tried to find the street where you and I and Mum lived in Whitechapel. It all looks so different now. I couldn’tfind it. I can’t remember what the actual street was named and nothing looks familiar. Nothing at all. I know we lived close to Saint Paul’s and that we were also near a Tube station. But even though we walked down street after street, I couldn’t find it.
Part of me was relieved because I’m not completely sure I’m ready to see our flat again. And part of me was annoyed because what if seeing it would’ve brought me one step closer to being at peace with everything? You know?
Simon had done some checking and he knew the area east of Saint Paul’s had been heavily bombed, not just the day I last saw you, but many other times after that. He said it might be that I couldn’t find our flat because it had been destroyed and something new had been built in its place. There are so many new buildings in the East End. It’s as if everything that made it ours is gone, Emmy. Saint Paul’s is there, of course, but nothing else that I can remember.
When that search proved useless, we went looking for Mum’s grave. She was buried in a plot of earth with a hundred other paupers on September 12, 1940. They didn’t know what date to put for her date of birth, Emmy. It just says her name and the date she died. The day after you and I came back to London.
Do you know she’s dead, Emmy? If I were to see you again, this would be hard for me to say, to tell you she’s dead. She was in the basement of a hotel on that night. A bomb obliterated the building and sent it in pieces hurtling onto the basement, crushing the twenty or so other people who were sheltered there when the air raids started. I don’t know why she was there. The tiny headstone doesn’t say that. Granny said maybe she had been outside on the sidewalk and ran into the shelter when the sirens began to wail.
Granny didn’t tell me right away that Mum had been killed because she was afraid I would disappear into myself and never emerge again. Neither did she tell me that Neville had died before Mum did, even before you and I were evacuated. It’s true.He was gone before we left London for Aunt Charlotte’s. Mum didn’t tell me, though. And Mum didn’t tell me I had grandparents, either, which I still don’t understand. Granny had offered to take us, Emmy. Before we went to Charlotte’s. She wrote to Mum after Neville died and told her she would take us away from the war. We could have come together to America, you and I. Well, she didn’t exactly offer to take you in that letter she wrote because she didn’t know about you. But a long time later, she told me if she had known I had an older sister, she would have offered to take us both to America.
But Mum didn’t tell me Granny had written to her. I was at Aunt Charlotte’s, thinking Neville was still in India when he was already dead. And we spent all those weeks away and I never knew I had grandparents who wanted to see me.
When I asked Granny why Mum did that, she said I shouldn’t ponder things I could only guess about. She said maybe Mum needed time to get used to the idea that I even had grandparents and that Neville was dead, and that before she got used to either one, the Germans started bombing London.
