Return to Fourwinds (44 page)

Alice had been half drowsing again in the warmth. She murmured and opened her eyes. ‘Is she here?'

He shook his head.

Tom's granddaughter, Melissa Gardiner, had got in touch with Ralph out of the blue. Could she come and visit? She was travelling on a gap year and had decided to drop by and check them out. When she'd suggested visiting on the day of the performance Ralph had
immediately said yes, come then, not wanting to put her off in case she didn't manage to come at all.

‘And there's something I have to give you,' she'd said on the phone. ‘Something from Aunt Charlotte.'

They were clearing away the soup bowls and the remains of the bread from the lunch tables that had been set out on the flagstones in front of the house when Alice put down a water jug and tapped Ralph's arm. He looked up. Nicky was walking across the lawn, a rucksack on one shoulder. By his side was a girl with the same shade of auburn hair, the same lean build, both of them talking eagerly. Ralph and Alice exchanged a glance.

Melissa wanted to know everything about everyone. Ralph felt her eyes reading his face as they chatted, and watched her studying the children for clues of belonging when Agnes and Ben insisted on taking her hands and leading their prize on a tour of the plywood Noah's ark.

Alice made sure the girl had some lunch and then Melissa sat turning the pages of the photo album that Ralph had fetched from the study, pictures of Max in Valencia, Ralph as a boy. Melissa was thrilled, full of questions; she hadn't seen any pictures of her great-grandfather from those years.

‘Oh yes, and I've brought something to give to you,' she said. It took a while to find it somewhere in her rucksack. Triumphant, she handed Ralph a slim, black box like a stubby jewellery case. Inside was a medal on a red twill ribbon: Max's OBE.

‘Tom wanted you to have it. It says so there, in the note inside. When I said I was coming to see you Aunt Charlotte went and found it somewhere in her desk. She said to tell you she was sorry she'd hung on to it for so long.'

Ralph nodded. He couldn't speak for a moment. The idea of Tom writing the note, intending the medal to reach him, made him feel intensely grateful and close to Tom, who would realise what holding the medal represented to him. He now understood how valuable Max's work had been, the lives Max and Lily had saved.

Ralph took it from its box and laid it on his hand.

‘What is it?' asked Ben. ‘Is that a soldier's medal?'

‘In a way. It shows that your great-grandfather did some very brave things. I'll tell you all about it, but later.'

The director was calling for everyone to get ready, checking off names on his clipboard. Sarah took the children to get into their costumes. There were some last-minute instructions for Ben because he was playing the mugs, an instrument devised by Britten. Hung in a row from a wooden frame, the mugs made just the right earthy, ringing notes for raindrops when tapped lightly with a drumstick.

A roll of the kettledrums and the performance was beginning, the children hidden away behind the barn now, waiting for their cue; the choir's penitent and mournful refrain beginning to rise and sink with the solemn heaviness of the sea; Noah arguing with God; then the fun of the ark being assembled. Mrs Noah, drunk and rolling, refused to get into the ark and had to be carried in, Ben tapping out the first drops of rain as the storm began to rise and the kettledrums crashed.

And suddenly here they were, the children, dressed in their animal masks and costumes, transformed into birds and gazelles and lions, running two by two into the ark with their fluting calls of ‘Kyrie kyrie, kyrie eleison'. And with them the ecstatic, mad brass band of resurrection trumpets and drums and cornets.

Alice leaned across to Peter. ‘You know, this would be a nice sendoff for a funeral. A rather good ending.'

Peter squeezed her hand. ‘An ending and a beginning.'

She blinked twice. ‘And a beginning.'

The animals all gathered in, Noah's beard now a bit lopsided as he raised his staff, a final roll of drums, and everyone stood up to sing the old sailor's hymn ‘Eternal Father, Strong to Save'.

Afterwards, the ark safe on dry land, and all of them eating sausages and burgers from paper plates, Melissa delighted by everything and everyone, they watched enormous flowers of light exploding in the night sky.

Alice said to Ralph, ‘You'll keep on doing this, won't you, holding the festival here? Next year?'

He looked up from his plate, his face caught in the exploding light and he didn't move for a while, his hand spearing a sausage and said, ‘Yes. Yes, I will.'

And later she lay down on the picnic rug in the darkness, suspended on the earth's flank among the wealth of stars. Agnes lay down along her side and Ben came and rested his head on her arm, and she felt the weight of those small bodies pressing her in place for a little while longer.

‘You know, the sky isn't flat,' she told them. ‘If you look carefully you'll see it's deep, made of layers and layers of stars, like frogspawn. Beautiful frogspawn.' Then Ralph lowered himself down next to them with an ‘Oof' and they lay and looked up at those stars, so huge and white and, surely, so very, very close.

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to Jenny Hewson at the RCW agency for bringing this book to publication and also to the wonderful editors Anna Hogarty, Maddie West and Sara O'Keeffe at Corvus.

In researching the work of British refugee intelligence in the Second World War, I read Duff Hart-Davis's book
Man of War: the Secret Life of Captain Alan Hillgarth
, and Donald Caskie's
The Tartan Pimpernel
. Thanks also to the National Archives in Kew through which I was able to read the correspondence between the Madrid embassy and London from 1940, information that had been classified until recently. Thanks to Patricia Martinez de Vincente whose discovery of her father's diaries from Madrid in 1940–41 alerted me to the incredible work of those in and around the Madrid British Embassy in saving many lives. Her father's story, not included in this book, is told in
La Clave Embassy
. Very many thanks to the Embassy Café in Madrid who warmly welcomed us and shared photographs of the café from the Second World War years.

It was due to the research for this book that I uncovered a surprising family link to a smuggling ring that helped some 20,000 Jewish refugees and many Allied prisoners of war escape from Occupied France through Spain. After France fell in 1940, there was no longer a viable Swiss route out of Europe for Jewish refugees, so Churchill
quietly asked the British Embassy in Madrid to do all it could to set up an escape route through Spain. They came up with an audacious secret operation that was carried on under the noses of the pro-Nazi regime. There was no extra manpower available in terms of secret agents, so it was operated by the employees and expatriates around the British Embassy community, helped by the sort of Spanish upper class you would never suspect of acting against Franco's policies. But act they did – to save a lot of lives. Many people were involved and yet all kept the operation secret, and because the same Franco's regime continued in Spain until the end of the seventies, no one spoke about it even when the war ended. It was very moving to uncover the bravery of people like my husband's grandparents, William and Louisa Gentry, who carried the details of their exploits to the grave – apart from a cryptic comment or two that only make sense in retrospect. So I would like to dedicate this book to all of the people around the British Embassy in Madrid in 1940–1945 who did so much to help save so many lives at a time when most routes out of occupied Europe were closed to Jewish refugees and escaping prisoners of war.

I was greatly helped in developing the book by Deborah Cohen's book
Family Secrets: Living with Shame from the Victorians to the Present Day
; also Brené Brown's book
Daring Greatly.

Many thanks to the tutors on the Oxford Creative Writing diploma, especially Antonia Logue-Bose, Kate Clanchy, Jane Draycott, Frank Egerton, Clare Morgan and Tim Pears. Very many thanks to fellow writers on the course: Marianne Allen, Neville Beal, Alastair Beck, Sarah-Jane de Brito Martin, Sue Cox, Stephanie van Driel, Suellen Dainty, Pauline Fiennes, Nick Harries, Brian Harrison, James McDermott, Karen Pomerantz, Margaret Keeping, Peter Saxby, Nageena Shaheen and Fred Volans.

I would like to thank the tutors on the Royal Holloway University of London Creative Writing MA: Susanna Jones, Jo Shapcott and
Andrew Motion, and the wonderful tutor group: Emma Chapman, Tom Feltham, Carolina Gonzalez Carvajal, Kat Gordon, Lucy Hounsom, Liza Klaussmann and Rebecca Lloyd Jones.

All characters in this book are fictional, but are set in carefully researched times and places referencing the last century. A huge thank you to my parents Frank and Joan whose stories and anecdotes informed the fabric of the war years narrative, and also to Hazel and Douglas, especially to Hazel who was such a wonderful archivist of how it felt to live through those years. Endless thanks and love to Josh, Hugh, Kirsty and George for all their encouragement and support during the years when this book was evolving.

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Q&A with Elisabeth Gifford

1.  What compelled you to write
Return to Fourwinds
?

The generation that lived through the Second World War wanted to look forward to a better world for the sake of their children, so their wartime experiences were played down or hardly spoken about in the family. In their seventies and eighties, my parents and many in their generation became more interested in handing down diaries and letters, and it was amazing and rather wonderful to be able to see what they had experienced. For me, this led to a more general interest in the nature of secret keeping between family members – what sort of secrets we keep and why. I read Deborah Cohen's book
Family Secrets
on how the types of secrets families feel compelled to keep has changed over the past century, as has the notion of what we consider shameful. I also looked at how some secrets are kept through a desire to protect others, and what the personal cost of that may be.

It was only through researching this book that we finally found out why my husband's grandfather was given the OBE during the Second World War. He was involved in activities in wartime Madrid that had to be kept secret in order to protect lives and national security. I took my husband – his grandson – to see places in Madrid such as the Embassy Café where his grandfather had been part of a ring of
people who smuggled Jewish refugees and stranded servicemen out through Spain after France fell in 1940. An equal impulse in writing the book was to record something of the character of that wonderful wartime generation for the next generation.

2.  There are a lot of deep themes in the book. What do you hope readers will take away from the story?

The linking theme is having the courage to risk showing who we really are to those we love. While writing the book I came across Brene Brown's books and TED talks on wholeheartedness. They were a great help in clarifying why I was writing
Return to Fourwinds
. For various reasons, several of the characters in the book hide themselves through fear of rejection. Their situations in the story may be more extreme than many we experience in daily life, but we all still experience the burn of social shame and want to put on a ‘good face'. We may not be as hung up on class issues as Alice is in
Return to Fourwinds
, but we still have pressures from magazines, TV and school exams to be and live a certain way, and push our children to achieve and conform to certain ideals. Risking being honest and open about who you are and respecting the difference in others is the basis for a loving and intimate relationship.

3.  How did writing
Return to Fourwinds
differ from your experience with
Secrets of the Sea House
?