rest of the caravans into view. Several long-running planning disputes were wending their way towards the High Court while villagers seethed, watching house prices stagnate, then fall.
‘Mum’s father, my grandfather, was in a concentration camp at Terezin in Bohemia before the war; we were active, you see – politically. We’d got out of Hungary when it was obvious what was coming – but Czechoslovakia was worse. The Nazis started with the Roma, a fact that’s sometimes forgotten. A million died in the camps before ’45. Mother got out in ’38; they sold everything they had for her train ticket.’
Dryden laughed, unable to comprehend the sacrifice.
‘My grandmother died within a few months. They say heartbroken, don’t they, and I never believe that, but she was only fifty.’
Dryden thought what an extraordinary looking woman she was – perhaps six foot, in her late thirties, with large long bones and a broad face out of which the skull seemed to press, the cheekbones stretching the leathery skin. She’d moved easily but with a slight effort, as if her body was a burden to her, but now, seated, she seemed to relish the stillness.
‘Mum was always very careful to say that it was the family decision for her to leave – that she didn’t flee, or seek refuge. The idea that the Nazis had succeeded in forcing her out of her home, even if it was a caravan, made her very angry, but of course it was the truth. She stayed with an uncle in the suburbs – Croydon – but they got bombed out when they attacked the airport in the Blitz, so they moved out to Harlow in Essex. It was just villages then, of course. That’s where she met Dad, he was a farmer, although I think that’s actually a bit grand. A smallholder perhaps, with pigs. I always think that was so important for Mum – that he was of the land, as it were, something she’d never had. He belonged, didn’t he? In a way she never could. Jacob, my brother, was born in the farmhouse – a cottage really, but very idyllic.’
She stopped herself, suddenly worried. ‘You can’t have something that’s just a bit idyllic, can you?’
‘I guess not.’
She patted her knee. ‘So. Idyllic then. But Dad died in 1970 after a long illness, which was not the kindest of deaths.’
Dryden wondered how much suffering was salted away in that casual phrase. A breeze blew open the door of the mobile library and they could see that the rain was falling steadily now, the playground deserted.
‘No one will come now,’ she said. ‘Would you like a coffee?’ There was an automatic cuppa-machine behind the counter and Humph accepted one too, retreating with it to the cab.
She sat eventually, one of her large hands almost encircling the plastic cup, and looked Dryden flatly in the eye.
‘I was there when they found the skeleton – she was a slight woman, your mother?’ said Dryden.
Ruth laughed. ‘I take after my father, Mr Dryden – the Hollingsworths are all country stock, big boned. Although I’m relying on mother’s descriptions and the photographs of course. I was born at the Ferry six months after he died. We never met – like Posthumous in the Greek story.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Dryden, trying to think of something else to say.
‘So am I,’ she said, smiling and tilting her chin. Dryden could see how strong she was, how she never used the past as an excuse for weakness.
‘Mother,’ she said with emphasis, ‘was petite by comparison. She was also very depressed about losing her home again. Such an irony, to be driven out by the fascists, then the Luftwaffe, and then the MoD. She was quite calm about it, quite accepting, and devastated in a way. She’d found a place for herself at the Ferry. People liked her – well, most people liked her. And she hadn’t compromised much at all. My mother was a flamboyant character, Mr Dryden, not a trait much prized in the Fens. But we were certainly part of the community – Jake and I. So I think that after all that anguish – the flight to England, the bombing, Dad’s death – she had this notion that she’d found a place that belonged to her. And then they took it away. It was profoundly depressing for her and I think the idea of starting again really frightened her. After all, she didn’t want us around, she wanted us to use our educations and get on. But what was she to do?’
‘Do you mind if I quote you in the paper? I don’t have to,’ asked Dryden, unsettled by her frankness.
‘It’s kind of you to ask but it’s OK. The library service sent me on a course, on how to deal with the press. So I know that if I don’t want it in the paper I should just not say it. But I’m proud of Mum, what she achieved, and what she left behind.’
Dryden tilted his chin by way of a question, sipping the gritty coffee.
‘The diary,’ she said, something like arrogance in the square set of her shoulders. ‘When Dad died she took the store at Jude’s Ferry. Grief led to depression even then and she needed something to focus on, something that wasn’t inside her. I think what she really wanted was to go back on the road, to take the comfort of motion, which I can really understand,’ she added, looking fondly around the mobile library. ‘The comfort of just being on the way somewhere, without the disappointment of ever arriving. But she stayed for us. Have you heard of an organization called Mass-Observation, Mr Dryden?’
Thunder rolled out on the Fen and the rain came in gusts, rocking the suspension under them and clattering on the metal roof.
‘Sort of. Wasn’t that during the war – people kept diaries of everyday life and then sent them in to a government department as part of a sort of national chronicle? Morale, crime, sex, families, grief, all of human life.’
‘Indeed. Well, it wasn’t a government department actually. It’s all held at the University of Surrey now and they started again in the eighties. Mum applied to be a correspondent and they accepted her. She wrote well, with a real eye for detail. So every day she chronicled village life – no names, just initials for all the characters. They insist on that because they want the entries to be as candid as possible. Then she’d make a copy and send it in.’
Dryden finished the coffee, crunched the cup and checked his watch.
‘Have you read the diary?’
‘Bits of it. In fact, I’m working my way through the whole thing right now. The police asked if I would read it and see if there might be anything which would help explain what happened in the cellar.’
She waited for him to ask. ‘And is there?’
