‘I need to apologise to your mother, actually,’ Morton said with a grimace. ‘I came here the other day and think I might have scared her, taking pictures of the house.’
‘Oh, that was you, was it?’ Tamara laughed. She grinned and lowered her voice. ‘I wouldn’t mention it if I were you—besides which, she probably won’t even remember.’
Right on cue, the old lady that had threatened Morton shuffled into the room. She seemed oblivious to him, staring at her pink slippers as they moved across the floor intent on what was evidently her armchair. She slumped down with a sigh and released the footrest from beneath the chair, which emerged with a lightning jolt. Another sigh, then she faced Morton.
‘Who’s this?’ she asked, scowling at Tamara.
‘He’s come to ask some questions about Laurie and Elsie,’ Tamara answered.
‘Why?’ the old lady demanded.
A bubble of silence in the conversation, which Morton presumed Tamara would fill with the reason for his visit, stretched uncomfortably; Kath’s irritated glances bounced from her daughter to Morton, as she waited for an explanation.
‘I…er…I’m working for someone—doing some genealogical investigations,’ Morton stammered.
‘Can I ask,’ Tamara began, ‘who it is you’re working for, exactly?’
‘Paul and Rose,’ Morton lied.
Tamara grunted and rolled her eyes.
‘So, anything you can tell me about Elsie and her time during the war would be great.’
‘Well, that’s down to Mum,’ Tamara replied. ‘Ask away.’
‘Okay,’ Morton started, turning his attention to Kath, and raising his voice. ‘Do you remember your sister-in-law, Elsie, coming to stay here just after she joined the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force in 1940?’
Kath nodded. ‘Yes, I do. She was based up at Hawkinge—near the aerodrome. She didn’t stay long—a month or two, I should think, then she upped and left.’
Morton made notes on his pad, then asked, ‘Do you know where she went after that?’
Kath thought for a moment. ‘West Kingsdown, I believe. All the WAAF girls went—too dangerous here for the poor things apparently. Never mind us lot living in Hellfire Corner—we managed to carry on alright.’
Morton wrote West Kingsdown on his pad and underlined it. ‘Do you know much about her job in the WAAF?’
Kath pulled a face that seemed a strange mixture of a sneer and a shrug. ‘She was a bit hoity-toity about her work up there. She used to remind us on a daily basis that she’d signed the Official Secrets Act, so she couldn’t tell us what was going on.’
‘Wasn’t it something to do with listening in to German aircraft?’ Tamara questioned.
‘Well, something of that ilk, yes,’ Kath agreed.
‘And then she came back here again, in May 1941?’ Morton asked, catching a quick passing glance between mother and daughter.
‘Oh, I forget when it was, exactly,’ Kath said.
‘But she did come back?’ Morton pushed. ‘To have the baby?’
Another look passed between the two women.
‘Yes,’ Tamara confirmed. ‘The baby wasn’t my Uncle Laurie’s, though, so she had it adopted.’
‘Do you know anything about the real father of the baby?’ Morton said.
Tamara shook her head.
Kath blew out some air, as if it were an effort to think. ‘His name was William Smith, I believe. He was a pilot, killed in the Battle of Britain.’
Morton nodded. ‘Do you know any more about him? Where he came from? What he did before the war? Any brothers or sisters?’
Kath shook her head vehemently. ‘No. Never met him. From what I can gather, it was a one-off mishap. It happened a lot in wartime—people behaved differently back then.’
Morton made more notes on his pad, aware that the two women were waiting for his next question, which he wasn’t sure exactly how to frame. ‘Elsie wasn’t the only pregnant girl here during the war, was she?’ he started cautiously. ‘I’ve done a bit of research and it seems your mother, Agnes, along with another lady, Mrs Potter, set up a kind of refuge here for women in a similar situation.’
The question, as he had expected, had caused a low tremor of disturbance; Kath scowled and twitched and Tamara shifted her weight in the chair.
Finally, after a short pause, it was Tamara who spoke. ‘I don’t think it was quite the refuge you paint it to be. My grandmother just took in one or two women who needed somewhere to stay for a short time—that was all.’
‘That was very good of her,’ Morton said.
Kath raised her shoulders indifferently. ‘As I said, it happened a lot in wartime.’
‘Do you remember Mrs Potter?’ Morton persisted, addressing the question directly to Kath.
She shook her head again. ‘The name rings a bell…but I can’t place her, now.’
‘I think that’s understandable, Mum,’ Tamara said. ‘Sometimes I can’t remember what I did last week, never mind seventy-something years ago.’
‘I’m the same,’ Morton said, smiling. He drank some wine then asked, ‘Do you know what happened to Elsie after she gave birth?’
‘I think she returned to her duties at West Kingsdown,’ Kath recalled. ‘It’s such a long time ago now, I can’t remember rightly.’
‘Then my Uncle Laurie came home from war,’ Tamara added. ‘And life returned to normal in their house in Nutley. Two children came along and-’
‘-Horrible kids they were,’ Kath cut in. ‘Paul and Rose.’
‘Mum!’ Tamara chastised lightly. She tipped her head towards Morton and lowered her voice. ‘We didn’t really see much of them growing up.’
‘Thank goodness,’ Kath chimed in.
Tamara rolled her eyes, sipped her wine and seemed to ponder for a moment. ‘I think the war changed my Uncle Laurie—well, it would, wouldn’t it—being in a prisoner-of-war camp for five years? You just can’t imagine it, can you?’
‘No,’ Morton answered, still mulling over the comment about Paul and Rose. He couldn’t align the idea
