While I Was Waiting. Georgia Hill
Hetty readied herself. She re-filled her pen with indigo ink, took a sip of tea and grimaced. It had cooled since she’d sat down at the little table in the window and had become distracted by the view, as always. She gave herself a mental shake and began. If she didn’t start this now, in her seventieth year, it would be too late. She forced herself back into the past, the distant past, and began to write.
I was a young girl when I went to Delamere House. Now, I am an old lady seeing in a year I may not see out and surrounded by the detritus of a long life lived in many parts. I live in this cottage, with a blue clematis growing around the front door and am bothered by few. It is how I like it. For too long I have been at the mercy of others. I now intend to see out my days in a pure and blissful selfishness. The big house has long since been sold. The family has not, after all, managed to keep it. Perhaps if I’d had children? But I digress. I jump forward when really I should start at the beginning. The beginning of my life. I began to be who I am when I went to the big house for the first time.
It’s been over sixty years. Hard to believe that all those years have passed, but I can remember it better than yesterday. It was a fine spring day in 1903.
Papa delivered me, thrust a package at me and then, almost immediately, went away again. As a small child I never did hold the same fascination as his spiders and insects.
I was to stay with my very distant relatives Aunts Hester and Leonora whilst he travelled on an expedition with the then Royal National Geographic and Scientific Institute. I loved Aunt Hester from the very beginning. She was all lavender scent and soft skirts. I detested Aunt Leonora almost as quickly. And I believe the feeling was entirely mutual. She never failed to point out my lack of manners and decorum. I asked for cake before sandwiches once and it was never forgotten or forgiven.
There were two boys in their charge, motherless as was I. Edward tall and slightly pompous, but kind also, and Richard. Ah, Richard! As handsome as the day, with the cheek of the devil. He got me into many a scrape as a child. And I was only too willing to follow his mischievous lead. Wicked, charming, irresistible Richard.
On that first day, I failed to notice the decrepit nature of the house, the gentility that papered over the lack of income.
As Richard often teased me, the hope of all was for me to marry Edward and therefore save the great house with my money. It did not quite work out that way.
Rachel woke with a start to find herself still on the sofa. She looked down at the biscuit tin in her lap and smiled. She could still hear the woman’s voice in her head. Slightly priggish and as imperious as her handwriting. She must have been a handful when she was a little girl. Rachel caught sight of the clock and groaned. Two o’clock in the morning and she had to go to London tomorrow.
‘No, Henrietta, no matter how fascinating you are, I have to go to bed.’ With a yawn, Rachel tucked the pages into their tin, replaced it on the shelf and went upstairs, smiling as she did so, her head still full of an Edwardian childhood.
June 1963, Clematis Cottage
Hetty sat in her usual place by the window in the sitting room and looked out at the view. An unseasonal rain fell and, with it, she sank into a gloom. Old age loomed on the horizon; she even had to push her bicycle up the track to the cottage nowadays.
She laid her elbows on the small table she used as a desk – it had been Hester’s from her dressing room at Delamere – and cupped her chin in her hand. She thought back to the tea parties, the dances – before it all changed so horribly, horrifically, and not just for those at the Front. Hetty frowned. Could she do justice to this task? There were too many gaps, too many lost memories. Too many regrets. She watched, amused, as a blackbird flew down into the garden and began to groom his damp feathers. Straightening her shoulders, she reminded herself that she had never undertaken a challenge without facing it square-on. After all she had lived through this really ought to be easy. She picked up her pen, dipped it into the ink and with it dipped into the past.
The bond between Richard and I was quick to form, thrown as we were into each other’s company. We had few other companions to dilute our friendship. I quickly regarded him as my best friend, although he irritated me more like a teasing brother.
It was a glorious summer afternoon in July 1907. I had been at Delamere for nearly four years and considered it my home. Richard was on holiday from school and had been taunting me from the door of the schoolroom while I did my lessons. In exasperation, Miss Taylor dismissed me. We found ourselves in the summer house again. It had quickly become our sanctuary, the place we came to when we wanted to escape the adults. Not that the aunts paid us a great deal of attention. As long as we did not cause any obvious mischief, they left us alone.
But we were no longer small children. We were growing up. A strange tension sprang up between us, making us unsure as to how to behave with each other. It was all terribly confusing.
Richard was in a strange mood that day. He often was. His mood would change in mercurial fashion from petulance to wild enthusiasm to an almost cruel delight in practical jokes. He had so much energy. He was easily bored and his mind danced like quicksilver onto the next enthusiasm before I had barely begun to grasp what it was. It was as if Delamere was too constricting, too limiting for him and he was bursting for more than anyone could offer. Today, he was almost febrile.
He sat me down on the flaking wooden seat and then looked about him furtively. There was no need. I’d spied the gardener over in the kitchen garden picking peas. I hoped they would appear at supper and my stomach rumbled in anticipation. Food, however, was all forgotten, when I saw what Richard drew from his pocket.
‘Look what I have!’ His eyes were enormous. ‘Isn’t it spiffing?’
‘A knife! Richard, wherever did you get it?’
I regarded it, in its leather scabbard, with fascination. We were barred from the kitchens, so my experience of such items was limited. Richard held it out to me and allowed me to take it. My hands shook with excitement. I repeated, ‘Where did it come from?’
Richard merely shook his head. ‘It doesn’t matter.’ He took it from me and slid the blade out of the scabbard. He held it up to the light and we watched in awe as it caught the hot sun and cascaded light around the shabby summer house. It made the place magical.
‘I have an idea,’ he said. ‘Would you like to be bound to Delamere and Edward and me forever?’
I nodded. Of course I would. After a dull childhood spent in a small villa in Kent, the Trenchard-Lewises seemed impossibly glamorous.
Richard’s eyes shone. ‘Then we can be bound together.’
‘How?’
He slid closer. ‘We can be blood brothers!’
I laughed. ‘But I am a girl, Richard! How can I be your brother?’
He looked affronted at my pedantry. ‘Blood brother and sister, then.’ He held up the knife again. The light caught the edge of the blade and it looked brutal.
I gasped. ‘Do you mean to cut me?’
Richard nodded. ‘It won’t hurt, Hetty, the knife is sharp. It will go through your skin like butter.’
‘No!’ I shrank back. ‘I do not like it.’
‘Are you scared?’
I nodded.
‘Feel the tip, Hetty. It’s sharp.’
I was terribly afraid, but Richard, even then, had a way of making me do things. He made me feel so dull, so unadventurous when I demurred. I reached out a shaking finger to the blade and tapped it, ever so slightly, on the tip. ‘Ow!’ I snatched my hand back.
He grinned. ‘Shall I go first?’
I