I'll Be Seeing You by Margaret Mayhew Page B

or two. I used to go to the reunions, but I can’t be bothered any more. There aren’t many of the WAAFs I knew still attending. A lot of the others who go are post-war and don’t know anything about those days, though they try to pretend they do.’
    â€˜If you should happen to come across anyone who knew my mother, would you let me know?’
    â€˜Of course I will. And if I ever remember the name of that place in Suffolk I’ll be sure to tell you.’
    I went up to the studio and tried to get down to the work waiting for me on the trestle table: watercolour illustrations for a children’s book of nursery rhymes. I had been delighted with the commission – the first of its kind for me – and had settled down happily to put new pictures to old favourites from my own childhood. I had a collection of old toys that I often used as models. Some of them were my own, kept from my childhood, and others I had found abandoned in dusty corners of junk shops or charity shops or at jumble sales. Teddies, dolls, golliwogs, dogs, elephants . . . anything that tugged at my heartstrings. I was using a particularly fine old knitted frog dressed in a green tailcoat and yellow waistcoat as a model for ‘A Frog he would A-wooing Go’. I had rescued him from the bottom of an Oxfam bin and now I reassembled water, brushes and paints to continue with the hopeful suitor and his encounters with Mr Rat, Mrs Mousey, a Cat and her Kittens, and the lily-white Duck.
    The work absorbed me for a time. Mark had been right, of course, about small children focusing so intently on the pictures. Certain images, as we discover, can remain fixed somewhere in the mind’s eye for ever, and seeing a favourite illustration again as an adult, years and years later, brings back our childhood like magic. Cosy cuteness is not necessarily a requirement. The bunnies have their place but children can take the rough with the smooth – witches being shoved into ovens, cats pouncing on mice, foxes devouring hens, and, in this particular case, poor Froggy being gobbled up by the lily-white Duck, one webbed foot left sticking forlornly out of the duck’s yellow beak.
    I worked on during the afternoon, mixing colours, rinsing and wiping brushes, putting paint to paper. As it grew darker, I switched on the daylight lamp beside the table. Normally, I would have continued until early evening, but I found myself starting to lose concentration, my mind wandering from the work in hand. I took a break, made a mug of coffee and drank it, standing at the dormer window. It was almost dark, street lamps lit, lights glowing at other windows, the river gleaming blackly through bare trees, here and there white patches of slushy London snow.
    It could destroy your peace of mind
. Drew was right; it was already being destroyed. Since finding the letter, I had gone through shock, disbelief, bewilderment, curiosity, and, right now, I was feeling a bitter resentment – something I had never, ever, felt towards my mother. Death, desertion, betrayal . . . they had all merged into one. She had kept the truth from me; she had gone without saying goodbye; she had deliberately chosen to unburden herself, to purge herself of whatever guilt or regret was involved, at my expense. Why, in God’s name, had she told me?
I want you to know the truth before I die . . . It seems only fair to him now . . . though perhaps it’s not so fair to you?
No, it damn well wasn’t. She had been well aware of the shattering effect the letter would have on me, and yet she had still written it. That was hard to forgive – at least in my present state of mind.
    Your real father was a wonderful man, too
. Still no excuse; no justifiable reason. The Yank belonged to the past, not the present; his memory belonged to
her
, not to me. I might be his daughter, genetically speaking, but Da had been my actual father for all