Warlight(2)

With the departure of our father, our mother’s presence grew larger. The conversations we used to overhear between our parents had always been about adult matters. But now she began telling us stories about herself, about growing up in the Suffolk countryside. We especially loved the tale about “the family on the roof.” Our grandparents had lived in an area of Suffolk called The Saints, where there was little to disturb them, just the sound of the river, or now and then a church bell from a nearby village. But one month a family lived on their roof, throwing things around and yelling to one another, so loudly that the noises percolated down through the ceiling and into her family’s life. There was a bearded man and his three sons. The youngest was the quiet one, mostly he carried the pails of water up the ladder to the ones on the roof. But whenever my mother walked from the house to collect eggs from the henhouse or get into the car, she saw him watching them. They were thatchers, fixing the roof, busy all day. At dinnertime they pulled down their ladders and left. But then one day a powerful wind lifted the youngest son so he was tilted off balance, and fell from the roof, crashing down through the lime bower to land on paving stones by the kitchen. His brothers carried him into the house. The boy, named Marsh, had broken his hip, and the doctor who came sealed his leg in plaster and told them he could not be moved. He would need to stay on a daybed in the back kitchen until the roof work was completed. Our mother’s job—she was eight years old at the time—was to bring him his meals. Now and then she brought him a book, but he was so shy he barely spoke. Those two weeks must have felt like a lifetime to him, she told us. Eventually, their work done, the family gathered up the boy and were gone.

Whenever my sister and I recalled this story, it felt like part of a fairy tale we did not quite understand. Our mother told us about it without drama, the horror of the boy’s fall removed, the way things happen in twice-told tales. We must have asked for more stories about the falling boy, but this was the only incident we were given—that storm-filled afternoon when she heard the thick, wet thud of him on the paving stones, having torn through the twigs and leaves of the lime bower. Just one episode from the obscure rigging of our mother’s life.

The Moth, our third-floor lodger, was absent from the house most of the time, though sometimes he arrived early enough to be there for dinner. He was encouraged now to join us, and only after much waving of his arms in unconvincing protest would he sit down and eat at our table. Most evenings, however, The Moth strolled over to Bigg’s Row to buy a meal. Much of the area had been destroyed during the Blitz, and a few street barrows were temporarily installed there. We were always conscious of his tentative presence, of his alighting here and there. We were never sure if this manner of his was shyness or listlessness. That would change, of course. Sometimes from my bedroom window I’d notice him talking quietly with our mother in the dark garden, or I would find him having tea with her. Before school started she spent quite a bit of time persuading him to tutor me in mathematics, a subject I had consistently failed at school, and would in fact continue to fail again long after The Moth stopped trying to teach me. During those early days the only complexity I saw in our guardian was in the almost three-dimensional drawings he created in order to allow me to go below the surface of a geometry theorem.

If the subject of the war arose, my sister and I attempted to coax a few stories from him about what he had done and where. It was a time of true and false recollections, and Rachel and I were curious. The Moth and my mother referred to people they both were familiar with from those days. It was clear she knew him before he had come to live with us, but his involvement with the war was a surprise, for The Moth was never “war-like” in demeanour. His presence in our house was usually signalled by quiet piano music coming from his radio, and his current profession appeared linked to an organization involving ledgers and salaries. Still, after a few promptings we learned that both of them had worked as “fire watchers” in what they called the Bird’s Nest, located on the roof of the Grosvenor House Hotel. We sat in our pyjamas drinking Horlicks as they reminisced. An anecdote would break the surface, then disappear. One evening, soon before we had to leave for our new schools, my mother was ironing our shirts in a corner of the living room, and The Moth was standing hesitant at the foot of the stairs, about to leave, as if only partially in our company. But then, instead of leaving, he spoke of our mother’s skill during a night drive, when she had delivered men down to the coast through the darkness of the curfew to something called “the Berkshire Unit,” when all that kept her awake “were a few squares of chocolate and cold air from the open windows.” As he continued speaking, my mother listened so carefully to what he described that she held the iron with her right hand in midair so it wouldn’t rest on and burn a collar, giving herself fully to his shadowed story.

I should have known then.

Their talk slipped time intentionally. Once we learned that our mother had intercepted German messages and transmitted data across the English Channel from a place in Bedfordshire called Chicksands Priory, her ears pressed against the intricate frequencies of a radio’s headset, and again from the Bird’s Nest on top of the Grosvenor House Hotel, which by now Rachel and I were beginning to suspect had little to do with the effort of “fire watching.” We were becoming aware that our mother had more skills than we thought. Had her beautiful white arms and delicate fingers shot a man dead with clear intent? I saw an athleticism as she ran gracefully up the stairs. It was not something we had noticed in her before. During the month after our father departed, and until she left at the beginning of our school term, we were discovering a more surprising and then more intimate side to her. And that brief moment with the hot iron poised in her hand in midair as she watched The Moth remembering their earlier days left an indelible perception.