Bea walked stiffly through the arrivals hall of Jersey airport, scanning the crowds. Her son Jimmy and two granddaughters walked behind her, hauling what felt like an excessively large amount of luggage for a few days.
“Would madam like a wheelchair?” asked a young man in a high vis jacket.
“No, madam would not. She’s got two perfectly good legs she intends to keep using,” she snapped.
“Mum,” said Jimmy, “that was a bit uncalled for.”
But Bea didn’t reply. She was nervous. She always was when she returned to Jersey, as she did each year on Liberation Day. She and Grace had made a pact to celebrate Liberation Day together every year since 1946, on the basis that they hadn’t shared the first one. It had become an annual event that was set in stone, with the exception of the ones missed when Grace and Red went off on their travels.
Each year Bea had joked it would be her last, and yet here she was in 2015—96 years old! How had that happened?
“Bea,” called a voice. Time slowed. A face emerged from the crowd and Bea felt emotion choke her.
“Grace.” The two women fell into each other’s arms as their families looked on, smiling indulgently.
“How do you do it, Bea?” Grace marveled, drawing back. “You look so good. Will your hair never go gray?”
“Not as long as I’ve hair dye in my cupboard and breath in my lungs,” Bea remarked, tucking her arm through Grace’s. “Come on now. We heading back to yours? My stomach think’s my throat’s been cut. And we need to crack this open.” She showed Grace the expensive bottle of champagne she’d picked up at Gatwick Airport.
Every year they toasted their survival with champagne, because why not?
“We’re not so bad for a couple of old biddies, are we?” Bea joked.
“I certainly never thought I’d make such old bones,” Grace agreed.
“Neither of us did,” Bea mused, remembering the explosive crack of a gun, blood seeping over the stones. In the ensuing 72 years, not a single day had passed when Bea had not thought of that moment.
They reached the carpark, where the island bus was waiting.
“Not many 96-year-olds who can say they’ve done prison time,” Bea said, lowering her voice, as she slowly boarded the bus.
“Bea,” began Grace in a tone Bea knew all too well.
“Please, Grace, not now.”
Three hours later, Grace’s granddaughter Poppy had driven them to an idyllic picnic spot on the west coast of the island. Poppy, Jimmy and Bea’s granddaughters headed down a narrow cliff path to the beach for a swim before lunch, leaving the old friends alone, perched on picnic chairs with rugs and flutes of champagne.
A beautiful butterfly, its vivid orange wings scattered with white, like droplets of water on a mirror, settled on a patch of purple heather nearby.
“That’s very rare, you know,” Grace remarked. “It’s called a Large Checkered Skipper. Not seen since the Occupation, would you believe. It’s made a return.”
“How strange,” Bea said.
“A sign of hope and renewal? Or that the past is always there, nudging us?”
Bea could feel Grace’s green eyes boring into her.
“Look at this, Grace,” she tutted, pointing to the picnic spread. Scotch eggs sweating in little plastic coats, sliced carrots in yet more plastic, something orange and fizzy in individual bottles.
“So much waste. Why don’t they just wrap stuff up in paper like in our day? I can’t bear to see food go to waste. Do you know, the other day I fished a perfectly good sandwich out of the bin, that one of my old biddy helpers threw out!”
“I see what you’re doing, Bea, and it won’t wash,” Grace said shrewdly.
She took a sip of her champagne, her eyes twinkling.
“And I see what you’re doing,” Bea replied.
Grace laughed and reached her glass out, softly clinking it against Bea’s.
“Do you know how much I love you, how much I treasure our time together at Liberation?”
“Of course I do. It’s the same for me too.”
“But the seventieth anniversary, it’s got me thinking. It’s later than you think.”
A silence, in which they could hear the boom of the ocean battering the black rock below, the distant squeal of children’s laughter. Every so often groups drifted past them down to the beach, clutching dripping ice creams, kites and buckets.
“This year, they’re focusing less on the fortifications and more on the human stories,” Grace persisted. “Examining how the need to share is overcoming the desire to forget.”
“Oh, Grace, I know what you’re getting at, but I’m not like you. Apart from with you, I never talk about the Occupation. It’s ancient history.”
Grace reached over and held Bea’s hand.
“I spent so long forging a new identity in London that I buried the old me. I needed to, just to survive.”
It was true. Once she and Nancy had arrived in England, her persona had changed. She became a war widow, left alone to care for her young son. No one stopped to question. She was utterly unremarkable. Just the way she wanted it. They’d all moved into a little bomb-shattered street in Whitechapel where everyone was so busy looking forward that no one stopped to examine the past. She had the right props to make her story believable. The wedding ring, the haunted look.
Bea had got a job in the postal service, with her auntie caring for Jimmy by day. That’s where she’d met a postman called Eric Muckle. He was a kind and unassuming man. Older than her by some years. He’d been a civil defense worker in the war and had seen enough to ask no questions about the Occupation. He’d taken baby Jimmy on as his own, loving him without reservation. Jimmy had been joined by twin brothers two years later. Eric had died over ten years ago now. At his funeral, Jimmy wept bitter tears for the only father he’d ever known.
“Tell him, Bea. He deserves to know the truth.”
As far as Jimmy was concerned, Bea had evacuated before the Occupation and lived out the war in London. They only returned each year on Liberation for the sake of childhood nostalgia and to keep her old friend company. Tragically, neither of Grace’s parents had made old bones, dying not long after war ended. Personally, Bea felt the Occupation and their grief over the murder of their son had contributed to that. It did mean that Jimmy had no memory of their visits to the old farmhouse in St. Ouen’s, so after meeting Eric, the lie over his real father had been easy to perpetuate.
They gazed at Jimmy, who had walked back from the beach alone. He had paused at a viewing platform and was gazing moodily out to sea, shoulders hunched.
“He’s a troubled soul, Grace. He’s enough of his own problems.”
“Have you heard about the notion of inheritance of memories?” Grace replied. “That you will have communicated your pain and trauma over the Occupation to him. From his very first existence in the womb, when we all lived on adrenaline and terror, all that will have passed down to him.”
Bea pulled her hand away. “What rot. I’ve never talked about it.”
“Exactly.”
Bea felt tears gather and she pushed them back angrily.
“Go and tell that lovely man who his real father is,” Grace urged. “After all, if he doesn’t know his roots, how is he to stand straight in the wind?”
Now Bea’s tears began to fall freely and she felt a great knot of pain and fear dislodge somewhere deep inside. The premature death of Jimmy, that sadness which had never ever left her, sat inside her chest like a little caged bird. Time had healed, but memories clung to her like a muddy blanket.
“Open yourself up. Speak your truth.”
Bea laughed through her tears. “Now you’re sounding like one of those ghastly reality TV programs. This isn’t who we are. All that stuff, it’s self-indulgent.” She dashed her tears away and took a large swig of champagne.
“Come on now,” Grace chided. “You dared to be different once. Where’s fearless wartime Bea, cycling down the hill, forcing Germans off the road? Remember our three adjectives game? Fierce. Flamboyant. Frank.”
“Yeah, well now I’m more crotchety, cranky and creaky.”
Grace gently poked her. “Chump.”
“Besides,” Bea added, “you sure this isn’t you wanting to claim auntie status?”
Grace laughed.
“Maybe a little, but more than anything, that lovely son of yours must know his real identity. Then he can make of it what he will.”
In that moment the wind dipped and a blanket of silence seemed to drape the cliff top. Bea could picture Jimmy’s face so vividly. The beautiful young man who’d never got to know his son. The butterfly took flight.
“The past is a place we must visit frequently, in order to make sense of our future,” Grace continued. “You need to do it my love, before…”
“I pop my clogs?”
They fell into silence as Jimmy wandered back up the path toward them, hands thrust in his pockets, his city white face buffeted by the island breeze.
“Apparently there’s a German bunker near here,” he called out. “I’d love to see it.”
“What’s with the fascination for bunkers and fortifications?” Grace said. “You know, Jimmy, there is much more to the Occupation than concrete and machine-gun posts. Bricks and mortars tell stories of course, but human-lived experience, now that’s different.”
Bea could feel the weight of her gaze. She slipped a battered tin ring out of her pocket.
“Jimmy,” she said as casually as she could, “I need to leave this ring at Devil’s Hole. Would you drive us? It’s rather an important place to me, you see. Well, to us both actually.”
“Course, Mum,” he said, anxiety flitting over his face. “What’s Devil’s Hole?”
Grace looked at her, gave her a reassuring nod.
“Don’t look so smug,” she said, causing Grace’s face to split open in a huge smile.
“I’ll explain all, but first I need you to take me back to St. Helier. I’m going to need your help in returning something. A long time ago, I took something that didn’t belong to me.”
Bending down, she reached for her tote bag and pulled out a bundle of old, thin parchment letters. Thank goodness she’d had the good sense not to burn these. The smell hit them all first, dust and mildew. Then the awful swastika symbol punched on the front of the envelope.
Grace’s smile slipped.
“Bea, are those what I think they are?”
“Engelbert Bergmann, Feldpost, Kanalinseln,” Jimmy read out loud from the envelope on the top.
She nodded. “They’re history, I suppose.”
“Mum, why do you have German letters?”
“Beatrice Gold!” Grace exclaimed. “You wily old fox. I always suspected you—”
Bea shrugged. “I’m not proud of taking these. They’ve been hidden in my sewing kit at home all these years, but maybe you’re right, Grace. I have a confession to make and I think it’s finally time to come clean, in the spirit of reconciliation. I need to see if they’ll help me return them to their rightful owners. It’s probably too late, but you don’t know until you try.”
She turned to her son. “Then we’ll talk, my love. There is so much to say.”
She drained her champagne and then heaved herself up out of the picnic chair.
“Where are you going?” Grace puzzled.
“Why, the library of course. Are you coming?”