When I Was Young Read online

  Contents

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Mary Fitzgerald

  Title Page

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Historical Note

  Copyright

  About the Book

  ‘When I was young the war started. When I was young my father was a soldier. When I was young I lived in town. When I was young my grandparents died; when I was young I moved to the country. When I was young I went to France and fell in love’

  1950

  Eleanor is sixteen when she goes to the Loire Valley on a French Exchange. But the beauty of her surroundings is at odds with the family who live there. It is a family torn apart by the memories of the German occupation, and buckling under the burden of the dark secrets they keep.

  Etienne, the dark and brooding owner is friendly, but his wife Mathilde’s malicious behaviour overshadows Eleanor’s days.

  As the secrets reveal themselves one by one, Eleanor begins to understand the terrible legacy of war, and when death comes to the vineyard, she learns the redemptive power of love.

  About the Author

  Mary Fitzgerald was born and brought up in Chester. At eighteen she left home to start nursing training. She ended up as an operating theatre sister in a large London hospital and there met her husband. Ten years and four children later the family settled for a while in Canada and later the USA. For several years they lived in West Wales, northern Scotland and finally southern Ireland until they settled again near Chester. Mary had long given up nursing and gone into business, first a children’s clothes shop, then a book shop and finally an internet clothes enterprise.

  Mary now lives in a small village in north Shropshire close to the Montgomery canal and with a view of both the Welsh and the Shropshire hills.

  Also available by Mary Fitzgerald

  The Fishing Pool

  Mist

  Knight on the Potomac

  Traitor’s Gate

  Richard Wilde

  When I Was Young

  Mary Fitzgerald

  Chapter 1

  “Quand j’étais jeune”

  “When I was young,” Miss Baxter would say. “Quand j’étais jeune. An example of the Imperfect Tense, girls. Now, in the next few minutes make five sentences starting with that phrase, if you please.”

  When I was young the war started. When I was young my father was a soldier. When I was young I lived in town. When I was young my grandparents died; when I was young I moved to the country. These five sentences, full of utilitarian experiences, could be done in a flash and looking back they tell of all the important things that happened to me before I was sixteen. At least to a stranger.

  Suzy would lean towards me begging the French word for theatre or for rocking horse “Tell me how to say ‘my great aunt gave me a beautiful gold and pearl necklace,” she whispered.

  “No,” I breathed back. “Miss Baxter is looking.” In the end, though, I always gave in. And Miss Baxter always knew.

  My ability to speak French was a strange talent which came from nowhere. Certainly not from Mother and neither, as far as I knew, from Dada. It was like a person being immediately able to pick out a tune on a piano and then go on, with tuition, to play a concerto. I was like that natural pianist. I quickly absorbed French vocabulary and with tuition became almost bilingual. And then, when I went to France, nothing sounded strange. Listening to Étienne and Grandmère seemed more normal than listening to Mother shouting in the yard or Dada’s rare muttered words.

  These nights I dream about those first weeks in France more and more. They’re strange, lucid dreams. Events pass at breakneck speed like an uncontrolled slide show where each picture flashes by, all slightly out of focus until, shockingly, the machine is switched off.

  I awake shaking, half of me still in the dream and my head full of vivid green trees and the dusty yellow of the hay in the barn. Sometimes I can even smell the hot sludgy stench of the river and hear Étienne calling a greeting from the bridge.

  And no matter how long I lie in bed, eyes squeezed shut, hoping for the dream to continue, it never does. The images disperse like early mist on the hills, evaporating in the crystal sharp glitter of morning sunlight. That life I dream about happened more than fifty years ago and even then was only lived for one summer. One glorious summer when I was young.

  The odd thing is that in this dream, like those other dreams where you find yourself entering rooms full of unrecognised but useful furniture, new aspects of that life are revealed to me. I see it estranged by the experience of age and catch nuances and inferences that in reality passed me by. In my dream, I’m a watcher, not a participant. Someone there but not there.

  Perhaps that reflects something I want to feel about the time I really was there. A girl, naïve, untried, unsure of what was said and more importantly, what was meant. I know now that I was used. A pawn in a larger game.

  It is a comforting thought that I was used and that it wasn’t my fault but it’s not entirely true, of course. I was a participant. A reluctant one at first perhaps, nervous like someone suddenly transported to an alien planet where life is different. The plain, the ordinary existence of my childhood, vanished overnight and was replaced by an enticing world which grabbed me and held me a willing prisoner. And, as the days and weeks went by, the replacement existence became so absorbing, so precious that I was prepared to do anything to have it continue.

  A sixth example for Miss Baxter. When I was young I fell in love. And love at sixteen is a dangerous thing.

  I went to France three days after my sixteenth birthday in July 1950. I was on a school exchange programme, one of the first to be organised after the war.

  “Remember, you represent your country!” shouted Miss Baxter, straining to be heard above the noise and bustle of the railway station platform. She was our form teacher and head of French at the grammar school to which I had won a scholarship.

  “You represent your country!” These were her words as we lined up at the station in our Northern town, fifteen girls dressed in school uniform, chattering and excited. I stood with my best friend Suzy Franklin, who, surprisingly, admired my pigskin suitcase but only after demanding admiration for her new set of luggage. Her set, which all the other girls had exclaimed over enviously, consisted of two black crocodile skin cases and a matching vanity case. It stood out, looking altogether too Hollywood, amongst the grime and post war austerity which surrounded us.

  “D’you like it?” asked Suzy snapping open the catch on the vanity case and displaying the interior where she had put illicit make-up inside a bundle of lace edged handkerchiefs. She moved the hankies aside and I could see little glass jars held in broad elastic bands snug against the pink sateen lining.

  “Yes,” I nodded, very impressed. “What’s in the jars?”

  “Nothing yet. I’m going to buy scent. It’s very cheap over there and if I put it in these bottles I won’t have trouble getting through customs. It was Mummy’s idea.”

  I nodded again. “Your cases are very stylish.”

 
“Aren’t they.” Suzy smiled proudly, showing her perfect white teeth. “Daddy got the set for me as a surprise. He said good luggage lasts a lifetime.”

  Mr Franklin was a solicitor and on the few occasions I’d met him, seemed to me a nice person. Suzy’s mother, Phyllis, was different. Less friendly and always on her way out of their house to go shopping or play bridge or anything away from the family home. She wasn’t exactly beautiful but was glamorous in a film star sort of way with styled blonde hair and bright red lipstick and a wardrobe of clothes that patently didn’t depend on the availability of coupons. I saw her picture often in the local paper because she was on committees, the sort that organised balls and charity dinners.

  “You have to do something,” she said once when I mentioned that I’d seen her picture in the newspaper. “Life has been unutterably boring since the war ended.” And she’d taken a quick elegant puff on her cigarette before waggling her fingers in a brief farewell. She had come to the station with Mr Franklin though, to see Suzy off and even now was standing by the kiosk chatting to some of the other parents, although not mine. Mother had dropped me off at the station entrance and gone straight home.

  “Your suitcase is smart too,” Suzy said, kindly. She barely concealed her surprise. “Pigskin, isn’t it?”

  “I think so.” I was unsure. I knew it was leather and heavy before I’d put anything into it. Fortunately I didn’t have much to pack. Clothes were at a premium in those days, unless you were Suzy and her mother, so my couple of dresses and two pairs of shorts and Aertex tops and one pair of sandals didn’t take up much room. I had put three books in as well, hidden under my underwear so that my mother, coming into my room the night before the journey couldn’t make her usual sarcastic remarks and throw them out.

  “Where did you get it from? It must have cost a fortune.” Suzy was still intrigued with the pigskin case.

  “Mother found it in the loft. It belongs to my father, I think.”

  “Oh.”

  That put an end to the conversation as anything to do with my father invariably did.

  “Be careful girls. Step away from the edge.” Miss Baxter’s screeching voice was nearly lost in the roar and steam as the London train pulled in. I got a smut in my eye then that stayed with me all the way to the Gard du Nord. Even the wind and rain on the cross channel ferry couldn’t dislodge it but suddenly, stepping down onto the platform in Paris, it melted away and I could see clearly. Was it an omen? I think so.

  The French Exchange had been first talked about in the middle of the Spring Term. I remember going home on the bus reading and re-reading all the details about it from the information leaflet Miss Baxter had handed round.

  Each girl who applied and paid the thirty pounds fee would be assigned to a family in France. She would stay with the family for three weeks and at the end of that time the child of the French family would return with her and enjoy a three week stay with the English host. It was essentially a language improvement course with a taste of Entente Cordiale thrown in.

  “I think you, Eleanor, particularly, would get a lot out of this.” Miss Baxter handed me the paper.

  “I want to go,” said Suzy, straight away. “What about you?”

  “I don’t know.” I pretended to be doubtful. Of course I did know really. I couldn’t think of anything I wanted more, but the thirty pounds would be impossible to raise. Besides, how could I possibly bring a French girl back to my house?

  “Remember, I need an answer within a week and a deposit of five pounds,” called Miss Baxter as we trooped out of our form room.

  On the bus home I looked again at the leaflet. A deposit of five pounds was to be paid within a week and the rest when the exchange family had been found. Added to that, was a suggestion that one would need spending money and buy a small gift for the host family. My heart sank. Mother couldn’t find that sort of money, even if she wanted to. And she wouldn’t want to. She would think that the whole idea was ‘silly nonsense’ and certainly not for the likes of us. Any spare cash in our house went to improve the stock on our farm. Apart from food and soap we never bought anything and my Mother must have had the biggest supply of clothing coupons in the county. The only time they were used was for my school uniform and shoes. And even then I had to demonstrate that my blouse buttons wouldn’t close over my burgeoning breasts or that my school skirts were half way up my thigh and not the regulation knee length, before she’d bother to go to the shops. Getting clothes for the weekend was another and constant battle.

  I had four pounds and ten shillings saved in Post Office stamps but that wasn’t enough. It would do for the spending money and probably for the small gift, but the rest..? I stuffed the leaflet into my satchel. It was simply another experience I wasn’t going to have.

  “Nearly there, Eleanor.” Fred Gates, the bus driver, looked at me in the driving mirror. I was the last passenger on the bus as I was every afternoon. Our home was a bleak farm on the Pennines and almost the highest place on the bus route before it wound down again to the villages that bordered the town.

  I looked out of the bus window. It was February and cold. Horizontal rain swept across the hillside, flattening the few wild daffodils which had bravely flowered early. I could see groups of sheep huddling against the stone walls which bordered our land, the pregnant ewes heavy and patient with vacant eyes and slowly moving jaws. Beyond them, on a flattened patch of hillside, our house stood out, the largest of a collection of grey stone buildings. It was built of the same stone as the outcrops in the fields and looked as ancient as the land that surrounded it, like a thing placed by nature not built by man. I hated it.

  The bus stopped and I slung my satchel over my shoulder and went to the exit.

  “Ta ra,” mumbled Fred Gates. He was re-lighting his Woodbine as he did at every stop. “See you in the morning.”

  “Bye.”

  The driveway up to our house was rutted and pot-holed. It must have been better once but in my memory had never been anything but a mud and puddle ridden mess. On her one visit to our house, Suzy had examined it for a moment and then looked down at her light shoes.

  “Sorry,” I muttered, embarrassed. “I’m afraid it’s the only way in.”

  “Oh well. Here goes.” She set out carefully stepping from one dry spot to another, her pretty mouth turned down in distaste but all the time proclaiming loudly that this was an ‘adventure.’ Afterwards she told me that she couldn’t live like I did and that I was a heroine. I laughed, but I was grateful to her for saying that. Whatever faults Suzy had, snobbery and easy judgement weren’t among them.

  She lived close to town. In an avenue with neighbours and parked cars. Her house was brick with painted white woodwork and surrounded by lawns and flower beds. They had a garage which housed Mr Franklin’s Wolseley and the lawn mower. The only stones in their garden were the ones surrounding the pond in the middle of their lawn. And every time I went there I wanted to stay forever.

  Now I did the hop-scotch down the drive, easier for me because I did it every day and knew the higher patches amongst the mud, where the ground was firmer. Even so, I could feel the puddle water seeping into my shoes and knew that they would have to spend the evening stuffed with newspaper in front of the range.

  The rain was coming down harder and I couldn’t wait to get inside. I was cold and hungry and wanted tea and a jam sandwich or something to keep me going until supper time.

  My plans were destined to be curtailed however because I could see Mother in the field above the big barn. She was cutting the twine which bound a large hay bale and as I watched, she hefted the loosened hay into her arms and started spreading it in a line across the field.

  I knew I would have to help her move the sheep into that field as soon as I’d changed out of my uniform. Belle, the dog, would help us but it would still take ages and leave me no time before supper to do my homework. The book I’d got out of the library and was so looking forward to, would have to wait.
>
  “Oh hell,” I muttered as I walked into the yard. Why couldn’t my life be easier?

  Dada was sheltering by the open door of the big barn, leaning his long shambling body against the wooden frame. I called ‘hello’ to him as I walked past. He didn’t reply and quickly ducked his head away but I knew that as soon as I’d gone he would lift his eyes and follow me. I’d seen him do that with other people. When I looked back he was watching me and I smiled but as I’d expected, got no answer.

  Suzy had immediately tried her bright conversation on him when she came to visit but he bolted into the farm buildings and stayed there until she’d left.

  “Goodness!” she said. “What’s up with him?”

  My face must have been scarlet. It was the first time I realised I should be ashamed of my family. Mother, angry and contemptuous about everything and Dada…well, Dada being himself. They let me down.

  Later, at supper I showed Mother the leaflet about the French exchange. We were eating mince and potatoes, which was our evening meal three times a week. The mince was pale brown and tasted of fat and Bisto and I loathed it. We served ourselves from the saucepans on the stove and I always put as little as possible on my plate, covering the tiny amount with a helping of potatoes and watery cabbage. If she noticed, Mother said nothing. Food was of no interest to her.

  “What’s this?” She held the leaflet up to the weak overhead light. We had electricity but Mother always bought low voltage bulbs as an economy measure.

  “It’s from school. About a French Exchange visit. Miss Baxter said it would be good for me to go but…” I left it there. Once Mother read it, the leaflet would go on the back of the fire.

  I got up and took my plate to the sink. Any moment there would an explosion of scorn and I steadied myself by washing up my plate and then going to the dresser and picking up the cheese plate. Mother only made a pudding on Sunday, an apple pie which we ate until it was finished, usually Tuesday. After that it was cheese or stewed apple and custard.