Free A Woman on the Edge of Time by Jeremy; Gavron Page B

grandmother took Hannah on the trolley bus to her new school. When it snowed, she ‘played boisterously in the deep snow with two friendly Alsatian dogs’. In May, the Germans attacked the Maginot Line, and three weeks later the family watched the flotilla of boats sail for Dunkirk.
    By summer they had moved again — into a farmhouse near Twyford, in Berkshire, with my grandfather’s publisher, Fred Warburg, and his wife. Warburg introduced my grandfather to George Orwell, who was a frequent visitor, and the three of them came up with the idea of the Searchlight series of books on war aims — my grandfather’s book on race, The Malady and the Vision , would be one; Orwell’s The Lion and the Unicorn , another.
    Hannah, now nearly four, and the only child in the house, was ‘the little queen of the place’. My grandfather wrote of ‘Fred Warburg, that haughty publisher, lying on his back in the grass and holding her high in the air’ and ‘Orwell, stretched out on the grass, reading Hauff’s fairy tales to her’.
    She was already on her fourth educational establishment, a few miles away in Sonning, to which she travelled on her own by Green Line coach. Returning one afternoon, my grandfather recalled, ‘she asked for the stop too late, and the coach overshot the stop where I was waiting by three-quarters of a mile. Hurrying in that direction, I came upon the tiny figure running towards me along the Great West Road with a tear-stained face, nearer, nearer, and into my arms.’
    The arrangement at Scarlett’s Farm was not to last either, though, and by the following summer my grandparents and Hannah had moved again, this time more permanently, to the cottage outside Amersham.
    My grandfather was in England for another couple of years, but he was working for the BBC, and later the Foreign Office, in London, and there is no mention of life in Amersham in any of his writings from that period. In 1943, he was finally taken into the army as a psychological warfare officer and he sailed for Algiers. His years in the army were good times for him, and his memoirs record his travels through north Africa and Italy, where he interrogated prisoners at Monte Cassino. But from the story of Hannah’s life his voice now fades, at least for a few years.
    ON A COLD late autumn day, I drive out to Amersham. Susie has told me that the cottage was on London Road and was called Evescot, but the name must have been changed, for the only reference I can find online to Evescot, London Road, is a notice from 1942 of my grandfather’s anglicising of the spelling of his surname from the original Feiwel to Fyvel, in his efforts to get into the army.
    Susie told me it was one of a row of a dozen-or-so cottages, and with her directions I find the cottages without too much difficulty. I had always understood that Hannah lived on the edge of town, but it is a mile outside Amersham here, cars speeding past, and fields climbing hills on both sides of the road.
    Susie was four when they moved away, and the only clues she could give me is that Evescot was towards the southern end of the row; that ‘Clarkie’, or Mrs Clark, the housekeeper Hannah locked in the chicken shed, lived next door; and that there was a cherry tree outside the front door.
    I walk along the row, examining the cottages. A couple have cherry trees out front, and I pick one of these and ring the bell on the door behind it. A middle-aged man eventually comes to the door. He has been here for twenty years, he says, but none of the cottages was ever called Evescot, as far as he knows, and he doesn’t remember any Clarks living here. No one else has been here as long as he has. I explain my interest, peer past him hopefully. This could be the cottage where my mother lived. But he does not take the hint, does not invite me in.
    I drive up to the local library, but there is no information there. I call Sonia, but she