Holmes Road, London, July 1945
The woman says we’re home. The man calls her Edie, and when I do, too, to ask where home was, she says, “Why don’t you call me Mummy? Or Mother, if you’re so big now.”
“Now, Edith,” the man says.
“Peter, I can’t bear it.”
“Give her time, Edie, darling.”
I’m six and a half. I wonder if I have been adopted and they don’t want to tell me.
The mystery now is where have the others got to? Beryl, Tina, Pamela, and the others. They would be having afternoon quiet time now. I don’t need a nap any longer but I’ve just woken in the borrowed motorcar, hot seat against my cheek and needing the toilet.
We’re driving through a neighborhood but the houses are odd shapes and blacked at the edges. Or flattened. I ask politely, with all the pleases I’m supposed to, but the woman seems upset with me.
“She went away a baby,” she says, her voice high and strange. “We’re almost home, love,” she says to me. “If you can wait just a moment.”
Inside the front door, my case is placed down. The woman takes my coat and opens a door. The cupboard is small and the corridor crowded. The stairs are cramped and the sitting room so tight it could be a doll’s house. Except it’s not a doll’s house.
“You’re home now,” Edie says. She seems to think I’ll guess where the toilet is. She shows me.
Down the corridor, there’s a room with one bed in it. It has a window, but outside there are no woods at all, no hill or trees, no river.
“Your very own room,” Peter says.
They take me around the house and show me the things that are mine: clothes, all new. Some toys. There’s a soft bear with black bead eyes. “You won’t have to share with anyone,” the woman says.
I gather the bear into my arms. It’s the right thing to do, I can tell. The man Peter and the woman Edie leave. The room, so small, is suddenly too big and too quiet and everything in it is strange. Not mine. None of it is mine.
I wish for Beryl and Tina and Pamela, Mrs. Arbuthnot and the boys, and then I’m thinking of the big white house and the nurses and Mr. Scaldwell and the china cup of water on the stairs, and all the people who are mine instead of these ones. The Mother and The Father—like out of storybooks. In a story, sometimes the child is fattened up for eating in a cage, but I’m not sure which story this is. Is it the one with the wolf?
The Mother and The Father, like cut-out paper dolls ready to get dressed. I must be The Girl. The Daughter. And the clothes in the cupboard fit to me, flat.
Around me, the room is white and yellow and it has only one bed and for now I will play pretend. I will pretend it is mine and that I am me.