To Katherine a Daughter

By David Pearce

This is my story me, Katherine Fountain, Jon’s wife, Olivia’s mum. Grandparents are involved and Sabre.
Granny Angel told me, “Your daughter talks to horses.”
Olivia was indignant, “Not any old horse, only Sabre.”
Why not me?
The war was over but Jon, Germanophile, fluent in the language and an expert in the field had remained involved in the aftermath. Olivia was ten when he came back to us permanently, a man nursing a wounded soul after his experience of the death camps.
There were good days and bad days but we would nurse him back to health – family therapy would restore his faith in humanity.
But what was Olivia confiding to her beloved horse that she could not share with me? Had she too been exposed to sights she should not have seen? Was Jon making demands on her that I should have borne?
This is a story of love and jealousy, of a vulnerable child and an angelic granny. It is my story of how the aftermath of awful events involves us all.

• Language: English
• Publisher: David Pearce
• Release date: Sep 30, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463438732

David Pearce

Long past my sell-by date but doing all I can to keep fit with daily exercise and a healthy breakfast I spend most of my time writing and listening to the radio with occasional excursions in the local countryside on my electric-assist bike. I live alone in southern France close to the river Rhone and possibly on borrowed time as there is a large nuclear plant close by.

Book preview

To

Katherine

A

Daughter

David R Pearce

Copyright 2019 David R Pearce

Chapter 1 To Katherine a daughter

Chapter 2 Olivia at war

Chapter 3 Katherine forsaken

Chapter 4 The danger of dying

Chapter 5 A quieter man

Chapter 6 Injustice

Chapter 7 Decisions

Chapter 8 Downstairs

Chapter 9 Olivia revolting

Chapter 10 A stitch up in time

Chapter 11 A clumsy intervention

Chapter 12 Breaking free

Epilogue

To Katherine a daughter

I did not expect to like my daughter. I had been so convinced that the baby growing in my womb was a son that when the excited voices, still interested after all the sweating and groaning, unlike me who more than anything wanted to be freshened with a cool towel and allowed to go to sleep, announced that the new arrival was a girl I think I may have permitted myself one last groan before telling them all to go away. Besides which she had hurt, but babies play a trick on you – they hurt but seconds later they are gorgeous – well, this one was.

All is an exaggeration. The midwife was there and my husband. They had managed the operation impeccably and the baby had made her entrance to the world with the minimum of fuss. I was briskly freshened and comforted, the baby spruce and swaddled was delivered to my arms. I cannot imagine what she thought. I cannot imagine at what point thoughts become a feature of the infant landscape. I shall have to ask someone who knows about these things. I have never properly considered it before but for me it was love at first sight, the lightning strike, the coup de foudre. Her eyes were open, dark and solemn. Could they have been focussed? Surely not. Could they have been reciprocating my adoring gaze? The experience of childbirth had clearly interfered with my brain functions.

She was not an ideal baby. She cried from time to time and developed an alarming rash but to my astonishment my husband was close to ideal. I had never been able to understand how he functioned and my attempts to analyse the effect he had on me, that my parents had regarded as catastrophic, foundered in confusion. Had he been a farmer everyone would have understood as he was fully equipped for the role, not the modern office bound computer wielding variety but the working kind, tossing bales improbably high and catching calves with his bare hands. It was the hands that deceived. They were vast knobbly affairs that should have broken things and been hopelessly clumsy. I am not clumsy, except in comparison. My hands are shapely and pampered so why when it comes to delicate, intricate tasks, wiring plugs, for instance, even threading needles, his routinely prove more adept is a mystery. I kept my misgivings to myself. He was so adept at changing the baby, bathing her, drying and buttoning her up that I stood aside and voiced my admiration.

Babies curdle brains. I listened to him as he laid her bare making the silliest sounds known to man. Sometimes I found myself joining in. When grandparents came to admire we formed a gurgling quartet. The baby look dubious. But babies have unforeseen effects, at least this one did. Nothing prior to her arrival could persuade my parents to regard my choice of husband as anything but a disaster; he was too large, with hands like those he would be clumsy and break things; he was quiet which meant that he must be devious; he was obsessed with his work and too thin to be healthy; worse still and to cap it all he was not good enough for their daughter who ought...they could never quite articulate what I ought but whoever the paragon might be who I deserved Jon had fallen short by a nautical mile until Olivia arrived. She changed their attitude so radically that Jon began to find it a trial to share the same room with them. He began to call her Olly convinced that the hideous diminutive would moderate their new-found enthusiasm. They thought it enchanting and began to...he was such a mild tempered man but I believe that from the moment he heard them address her as Olly he began to plot their deaths. It was the sole antidote he could think of. I had to invent reasons for sending them home, on holiday, on a cruise; when they telephoned I found excuses for his absence. I discovered a capacity for invention and imagination and lying that I had not suspected added to diplomatic skills that should have been deployed in the service of my country. I negotiated baby-sitting, the handing over of the still miniscule hostage being accomplished with a brief ceremony during which my husband busied himself with oil and windscreen washer levels, tyre pressures and all those masculine chores that ensure a safe and trouble free journey.

Olivia recovered from her rash. She began to grow teeth and was fretful but no more so than one might expect. I came across a book the other day. It was one of the few that had survived the trips to Oxfam perhaps because it has a library binding and the first of its pages is date stamped indicating that it is years overdue and must have accumulated a king’s ransom in fines or a prison sentence perhaps, to be paid and served by my delinquent daughter. She must have been nine when she borrowed it, beautiful, with shiny teeth and a tendency not to return library books on time, or in this case, at all. If she had studied it, as I am sure she did, she would have been an expert on the breeding and care of rabbits. How much more she would have known about caring for rabbits than I, or my husband, knew about caring for babies. We were not expert in breeding either. Now and again the initial enthusiasm resurfaced but neither of us was keen to try to replicate our success and if we were not expert carers our daughter seemed to have done better than merely survive: she had thrived; she was energetic and healthy and I thought she was beautiful. So did Jon; about this we were in complete agreement. It was only a matter of not spoiling her and attempting to filter her friends.

Why would I, a lady of the land, refer to a nautical mile?..only I suspect the daughter of a naval man who had been at sea for long periods during my childhood and who was convinced that the only suitable husband for the daughter of a naval man was another of the same breed and one with his eyes set on a similar or even superior rank. He boasted that the earliest ancestor of whom he had authenticated evidence had swum ashore when the Viking ship that he captained struck a rock off present day Shoeburyness, Essex. I have examined Shoeburyness for signs of rocks and Viking wreckage without finding the slightest sign of either but I am reluctant to spoil his story. He enjoyed telling it and there is a sewer outlet, dangerous at half tide but of recent construction so that will have to do. The point I am trying to make is that the males on his side of the family appear to have been the backbone of the British navy from the age of the coracle and if one chose to marry a sample then what use is it to complain if the chosen one is absent for long, often in the good old days, very long periods. They would return eager to make up for lost breeding opportunities and count themselves lucky if they had both arms, both legs, face not too hacked about and a healthy pot of prize money. My mother did not complain.

This not a history of the British navy, nor a venture into Forester or O’Brian territory but me trying to understand. There were brief periods when this tall, fair man (so you see he was quite right, he did have Viking genes and things) appeared smartly uniformed and I had a father. Fathers came and went.

Olivia – at war

We had photographs of fathers, some of whom were miles away and never seemed to come home, my best friend Susan told me her mother cried if she saw the photograph that she had of her father because he was dead because of the enemy which I found confusing because I thought the enemy were Germans but I thought she said he was in Italy so how could they have been?..Susan was no help, she was as confused as I was and we both cried because it was awful to think that her father was dead even if I did not know him and she hardly remembered what he was like.

We had Americans for a while all over the place and they were more fun than all the fathers put together. But that isn’t the point; it is attitude I am trying to get at, the difference between my mum’s attitude and mine. In a way the war made no difference. I know that sounds ridiculous but as far as my family was concerned it was true. Her father, my Grandpa Toddy had been enrolled in the navy generations ago. Until I was about eight I thought he had been born in the navy a bit like believing in Father Christmas. He thought in terms of bearings, soundings and nautical miles. He was very fond of my grandmother, he might have been in love with her but the idea that she had first call on his loyalty would have struck him as heresy and this she had understood since those initial manoeuvres as his fingers explored the possibilities of a successful assault on her defences in the grounds of Britannia Royal Naval College, Dartmouth.

We understood except about some things. We knew about enemies and there’s a war on and daddies having to do things because of duty. My best friend’s dad was a submariner. When she was seven and after VE Day and then VJ Day and there wasn’t even a war the turkey had just reached the table and they had just begun pulling crackers so that they would have silly paper hats to wear and her dad had just begun making professional passes with the carving knife along the sharpening thing that only appeared on Christmas Day and the telephone rang, the turkey went back into the oven to keep warm and her dad went upstairs where his kit was ready packed for just this eventuality. He changed out of his smart casuals and the curious thing about my friend’s account is not just that she was not surprised and devastated as you might expect because by this time she was starving because her mum wouldn’t let her eat anything not even fruit or nuts or anything between breakfast and Christmas dinner but she remembers the car arriving at night so she must be confusing it with another time but she says she remembers the headlights and rain and everything being quiet because her dad hated fuss so they all kissed him and hugged him and waved as he was driven off. When he was gone she cried a bit and she said her mum went to the loo because she was going to cry and that evening she heard her mum say bastard and they love it on the telephone.

I didn’t know what she meant at the time and I don’t think she did but we knew later partly by knitting together dribs and drabs of what our mums said and listening to their conversations and partly by psychoanalysing our fathers. You scoff? You are thinking eight, nine, ten year old girls (and boys sometimes) psychoanalysing grown men before they have even heard the word, and long before they can spell it. Bastard was tricky because it is a horrible swear word and if you wanted to say it you had to be careful that there were no grown-ups about, especially teachers, trickier still because she said when her mum said it she didn’t make it sound cross and horrible but she was talking about her husband, Jenny’s dad, who just at that moment was probably walking up the gangplank of his submarine and being saluted and not thinking about making his knife sharp and carving the turkey.

What he loved and now I think they all do was the terrific excitement. By the time the ’phone rang the car would be on its way. The driver would be a subordinate and deferential but he would not expect to be kept waiting. He would not expect to witness emotional farewells. He would keep the engine running. I found later when I began to review men and all their works and psychoanalyze them properly how much of a relief it was for them to abandon wives and daughters and female flummery and set about man tasks. My grandfather read me a poem once. I must look it up because I only remember it was about that and going to sea. Goodness, how some of them love going to sea, or escaping to sea, was that a more accurate description? he said and he gave a funny smile.

Was it a coincidence or might it have been a test, I wonder? Was there someone in the garden watching, waiting for that moment when the knife was poised above the turkey, the children’s eyes riveted on the surgeon? Had he hesitated even for a moment would he have been surreptitiously elbowed overboard, dark night, slippery deck, Admiralty orders? I can’t remember reading accounts of submarine officers lost at sea but that may be because they are loyal to a man and hesitation would not have occurred to a single one of them. My dad was not a submariner so at least he didn’t go off with ghastly weapons and now that I think about it neither did Jenny’s dad because I think he would have retired long before they started slithering about with the truly ghastly ones under the ice-cap and that sort of thing and my dad was not a proper naval officer, in fact I don’t think he was naval at all because I remember mummy telling me that her dad disapproved of my dad because he wasn’t and only started talking to him after I was born because I was so beautiful and gorgeous, then she said I have been going downhill all the way since but she always says something like that because she is afraid I shall become vain.

I know you are beginning to think that I am vague about these matters but he did wear a smart uniform sometimes and children are often not very accurate when it comes to their father’s work especially when the one thing they do know is that it is terrifically top secret. He did disappear sometimes for weeks and we seemed to know lots of naval families so naturally I thought that he was too but I was envious because their fathers often brought back gorgeous presents. I suppose my dad never went to places where they sell gorgeous presents and it may be that he never went on a proper ship in his life. I remember mummy once mumbled something that included the word intelligence after I had badgered her for information.

Mummy, what did daddy do during the war?

Mumble mumble mumble intelligence so I don’t think she had much idea herself and then she told me to go and tidy my room or clean out my rabbits, a diversionary activity to stop me bothering her with questions though I didn’t start thinking of them as diversionary activities until I resorted to them myself when my son started...though now that I come to think of it I must have been far more easily diverted than he is. He is impossible. She only calls me Olly when other people couldn’t hear. My father would be seriously cross if he heard. It was one of the few things that he became seriously cross about but I loved it, I much preferred it to Livvy that everyone else called me, which I hated because it reminds me of liver and liver is atrocious. I think Olly sounds funny and there was a boy at school and everyone called him Olly and nobody objected. Even the teachers called him Olly but they all called me Olivia and mummy did most of the time because she said it is the most beautiful name ever invented and it suited me because I was beautiful and when I said that I thought she didn’t want me to become vain she had to add how I have been going downhill ever since the day I was christened. My dad was never horrible to me like that.

I have just thought of the poem my father read to me. I can only remember two lines and I expect I shall get them wrong so I shall look it up first but now I remember the title. It is called The Harp Song of the Dane Women. When I looked it up I found out that Rudyard Kipling was a horrible anti-Semite. I wish I hadn’t read that bit.

You would expect me to describe my daughter as beautiful; it is a mother’s duty and if it were my opinion alone I would be happy to confess my bias but it was not just