The Girl from Station X by Elisa Segrave Page B

won’t go wrong
–
don’t forget you have the name of a very old family of which
you may well be proud but don’t be merely proud remember that it carries its responsibilities and to belong to an old family carries the responsibility of never staining its escutcheon.
Others will judge you by your own estimate, so it will be well to have plenty of self-respect
–
but above all avoid being proud with nothing to be proud about. Let your motto be
‘Play the game and make life for others happier by your presence.’
    Goodnight and kiss your mother. I miss and love her very much for she went through a lot to give you to me.
    Your affectionate father.
    That was the only letter he ever wrote to her. Five weeks later, he was in action in France on his way to Dunkirk, when the soldier driving him drove into a farm cart. The soldier survived, but
my grandfather, due home on leave for the birth of his son, died shortly afterwards.
    My mother never talked to me directly about her father’s death, nor had she shown me that letter. I did not even know where he was buried. But, just before my fortieth birthday, my
daughter, then eight, had opened the drawer beside my bed and brought out an exercise book. It must have come to me from Knowle after my grandmother died, and was full of newspaper cuttings about
the death of her husband. During the collision, one of the cart’s shafts pierced my grandfather’s ribs. He regained consciousness for two hours on the way to the hospital. His only son,
named Raymond after him, was born five days later.
    I look through the old photograph albums which also came to me from Knowle. On 15 July 1915, a fortnight after my mother’s first birthday, two snaps taken in the garden at Knowle. My
mother has written under them, much later, in her adult handwriting:
My Father’s Last Leave.
    Everyone is sitting on the grass, including a white bull terrier. There is my grandmother, bare-headed, supporting Anne, a baby of twelve months, in a white dress and cardigan. My grandfather,
in his soldier’s uniform, is looking down at his little daughter. In the second photograph, the baby Anne is standing, in the same white dress and cardigan, but this time her father has one
hand up (probably shielding his eyes from the sun) so that his face is hidden, turned away. He will never again be part of that little family.
    In the next photograph, taken a year later, my grandmother, a young widow, is sitting with her two small children under a tree at Knowle. She is all in black, except for her white sun bonnet.
Its ribbons hang charmingly down each side of her pretty face. My mother, now a little girl, also in a sun bonnet, is standing behind, her hands on her mother’s shoulders, and there, on my
grandmother’s knee, is my mother’s little brother, lying on his back, his puny legs bent in an odd position, a sort of rictus grin on his face. What was wrong with him? Everyone’s
dead who might have known. I remember again Nah saying that he never sat up, and I know that he died aged three. How pretty my grandmother is! But when I look closely, I see that her smile is
fixed, like that of her disabled son. She is still mourning her beloved husband, and must be horribly aware that her son, who bears his name, and was born a few days after his father was killed, is
not quite right. How much does my mother, nearly three, understand about all this? In this photograph she looks such a robust, happy little girl. Please let her go on being happy! I find myself
wishing.
    In earlier albums are photographs of Knowle, taken before my mother was born. There is my mother’s father’s sister, (Aunt Kathleen), with her high cheekbones and pear-shaped face,
hands in a fur muff, standing with a distinguished-looking old man with thick white hair, outside what was once the front door. That old man must be Aunt K’s father, my great-grandfather
Sheffield Grace.
    A wing was added to Knowle after Colonel Joseph Benskin