She waited breathlessly, watching the old man’s face as he studied it. But again, he shook his head and handed the photo back to her.
‘I’m sorry, my dear. It’s so long ago, you see.’
Laura stared out over the lake. The sun was dipping behind the line of black pines, streaking the lake with reds and golds.
‘I’ll tell you what I can do. I’m not promising anything though,’ Arthur said. ‘What happened was that men wrote me accounts under pseudonyms. Most of them didn’t want to reveal their identities. They wanted to remain anonymous, to protect their families from what they had suffered. They were ashamed, a lot of them, strange though it may seem. The accounts were typed up and archived in the Imperial War Museum under the pseudonyms. That’s why you didn’t find his account there. But that’s not to say it isn’t there. I kept a list of who they were and what names they went under. It’s in my old desk at my daughter’s house. She’s coming to visit me tomorrow. I could ask her to dig it out and give you a call if she finds anything.’
‘Oh, would you? That would be fantastic.’
‘I’m not promising that your father’s account will be amongst them. Some of them gave very sketchy ones, and I didn’t keep those. Also, I might not have kept a full record of those who only spoke to me and didn’t write anything down. It all depended on the quality of the material, you see. Was your father an educated man?’
She nodded.
‘Then I would probably have asked him to write it down for me. You’ll have to wait and see. I’ll ask Margaret tomorrow and get her to give you a call.’
30
London was even more drab and grey than he remembered it. As the train chugged in through the East End he could see that whole streets had been flattened here as well. Terraces were blown away, and houses stood with their inside walls exposed, their furniture balanced on sagging floors. Other buildings were boarded up. Rubble was piled high on the streets.
He had sent a cable to his mother and father in Gordon Square from the ship a few days before reaching England. But he hadn’t received a reply.
The ship had docked at Tilbury, and he had then taken a train to Liverpool Street Station. He stared out at the monotonous landscape. The patchwork of grey-green fields was dull compared to the lush colours of the East. Would he ever get used to it again?
At Liverpool Street he took the underground to Russell Square. He looked around at his fellow travellers, bundled up in dark coats and hats. Their pale unhealthy faces looked closed, furtive. Nothing had changed.
Part of Russell Square had been bombed, and there was a gap in the buildings on the north side, but otherwise it was much the same as when he had last seen it in 1938. As he crossed the gardens in the middle of the square he remembered the day he had walked out of his job in the city. He hardly recognised himself in that confused youth who had sat on a bench, eating an ice cream, wondering what to do with his life. He felt immeasurably older now, physically and mentally, as if his experiences had wrought a permanent change in him. He was also much thinner, his skin permanently sallow through years of exposure to the sun, and he walked with a limp.
People gave him strange looks as he passed. They stared and then looked away, shocked and embarrassed as if there was something shameful about his appearance. He wondered if they knew anything about the war in the Far East and about the plight of the prisoners there.
The house in Gordon Square was still standing. It looked exactly the same as he remembered it. The door was painted blue, just as it had always been. With an odd feeling in the pit of his stomach, he walked up the steps and knocked firmly with the brass knocker.
His mother opened the door. He hardly recognised her. She appeared diminished in every way. Her hair was streaked with grey, and her face and body seemed to sag with age.
She peered at him for a moment. Then her face registered astonishment and joy.
‘Tom.’ She stepped forward and flung her arms around his neck.
‘I sent a telegram, Mother. Didn’t you get it?’
‘Yes, but it only arrived yesterday. I guessed you would be almost home so I didn’t send a reply. You look so different, Tom,’ she said as she ushered him into the house. ‘Come on in! Don’t stand out there in the cold.’
He stepped into the hall. There was a bicycle propped against the hat-stand, and several overcoats hung from the hooks.
‘How’s Father? Is he home?’
Her face suddenly wore an anguished expression, and her eyes filled with tears.
‘He died in 1943, Tom. A heart attack. I would have let you know, but I had no way of contacting you. All I had was a postcard from the Volunteers to say you’d been taken prisoner by the Japanese at Singapore.’
‘Oh, Mother.’
He put his arms round her and held her, but he had no words of comfort to offer her. He felt nothing himself. It was as if the shock of Joy’s death had robbed him of the capacity to feel grief.
He followed his mother into the kitchen, where once a cook and scullery maid would have been hard at work preparing the evening meal. It was empty and shabby now. She put a kettle on the gas hob.
She turned around as someone clattered down the stairs behind her and with a shout of ‘See you later, Mrs. E,’ went out, slamming the front door.
‘Times have been very hard, Tom,’ his mother explained. ‘Since
