Free The Girl from Station X by Elisa Segrave

overwhelmed by the tasks
ahead. My brother had not come when we arranged, and I spent another day sorting, Mrs Anderson and Molly on one floor and me on another. In the late afternoon, as I was about to leave, Mrs Anderson
and Molly came down from the attic with a large box. I opened it to find that it contained over thirty exercise books. My mother’s handwritten diaries.
    I placed them, with the bag of Luftwaffe passports, in the boot of my car and drove away.
    Then an offer was made for my mother’s house, by the first viewers. That night I had a dream – I was springing over snow at my childhood home, several yards high in the air. I
bounced upright over fields and streams. I was leaving all that sludge behind me. That picturesque house, with its undercurrent of unhappiness, had had, for many years, an atmosphere of emptiness,
of nothing much happening – and also a kind of brooding quality, something unpleasant waiting: my father’s illness, his alarmingly quick death, Nicky’s going downhill, my
mother’s drunkenly falling and breaking her limbs, her incoherent phone calls to me, her aggressive dogs – the last basset bit Mr Anderson in the arm, resulting in eighteen
stitches.
    But the house was full of books, most of which I had enjoyed at a young age – volumes of Proust, my father’s Evelyn Waughs, Jessica Mitford’s sophisticated memoir
Hons and
Rebels
, Diana Holman-Hunt’s charming and funny autobiography
My Grandmothers and I
.
    However, a kind of disorientation persisted under the veneer of civilisation offered by these, and by other objects in the house – my mother’s Spanish bulls, her palomino china
horses, her watercolours of Venice. There was her wardrobe of elegant clothes: suits from the exclusive boutique Lachasse, two fur coats, evening dresses, one of peacock blue. There was her
dressing table with lipsticks, scents and powder compacts (although my mother, in later years, wore little make-up) and the silver ashtrays, candlesticks and cigarette boxes in our cold blue dining
room. My mother had a lovely garden, with ancient walls, an old moat with two little towers, yew hedges, lavender, white and red roses, peonies and delphiniums. It was even used in a
children’s TV film,
Tom’s Midnight Garden
, and I’m sure many envied it. But inside the house, the piss-stained carpets and the endless supply of alcohol were indications
of my mother’s despair.
    Now, at last, that place where she spent so much time drunk and unhappy was sold. And I had her diaries.

Chapter 6
    July 1st 1914 I was born, 1915, my father was killed, during the war we were in London, Mum working in a canteen and in a hospital, all I remember is in the night
being taken out of bed and carried down to the kitchen where I slept on the table. Mum feeding the dogs with biscuits but they refused to eat, sitting shivering with fright . . . me seeing a huge
silvery grey shining object in the sky and being told it was a zeppelin.
    Armistice Day. Buckingham Palace, the pram was squashed in two by the crowd. I sat on a man’s shoulder. I remember the Royal Family on the balcony, and thinking that Princess
Mary was waving to me especially, I remember the streets lined with flags, when the man put me down Mum asked me why I hadn’t said thank you and I replied: ‘I have not been introduced
to him.’! My age was then 4.
    The thrill of reading this almost gives me vertigo. Suddenly I’m looking down a magic kaleidoscope, I’m tasting the sweet centre of a honeycomb. This, at last, is
my mother’s life that I never knew. I did not remember her ever recounting these memories; perhaps she forgot them later. I felt privileged to read them.
    The scraps, which she wrote aged sixteen, just after starting at Madame Boni’s finishing school in October 1930, last for three pages and, as often with such very early memories, are not
totally chronological. The little girl seems to have lived for a while with her Aunt Lin