Free Tying Down The Lion by Joanna Campbell Page A

She even holds my hand for the first time in ages. Sort of awful in public, but all right too.
    “It’s about how things are. And how things were. Miss Whipp says we have to show contrasts,” I explain. “Something with a shadow. She wanted me to do Sandie Shaw.”
    “Well, Berlin is built on sand.”
    Heaven help me. Mind you, shifting sand sounds about right for Berlin. Or quicksand. The entire city might sink without trace before we get there.
    Mum is staring into the distance now, disconnected from our stumbling conversation. She often detaches herself and wanders to the front-room window to watch the women streaming off the bus for the early shift at the mop-and-brush when she’s meant to be giving Victor and me our breakfast. She unhooks the enamel let-down in the kitchen, but I have to set it with bowls and spoons, cut the grapefruit and find Victor’s tie. Once I found her cutting our shredded-wheat in half thinking it was toast. And she’s always watching the women climb onto the bus again when we come in from school, even when she’s meant to be minding one of her beery slab-cakes in the oven.
    “You are still so young for knowing the sad things about Berlin,” she says at last.
    “Fourteen isn’t young anymore. Maybe in your day it was.”
    “It was,” she agrees. “I was happy to still wear dirndls and white socks.”
    Blimey, this won’t be a good moment to ask her for a Berlei Gay Slant. Especially at thirty-two and six.
    I must find a way into the project, even if everything I ask sounds unkind. “How does it feel, Mum, to be treated as foreign?”
    “Not easy, Jacqueline. ‘Oh, I’ve always wanted to meet a German,’ a mother said to me last week at Victor’s school, peering at me as if I have a disease that has left interesting scars, but thankfully not something she would catch.”
    “And do you actually still feel as foreign now as you did the first day you came to England?”
    “I have always felt foreign, Jacqueline.”
    She is staring at nothing again. She isn’t on the Maid-of-Bloody-Kent at all. She is lost somewhere else. I may be listening and writing beside her, but she is absent.
    “Can you tell me about running away, Mum?”
    With my notepad soaking up coffee spills from the table and passengers jogging my arm, I keep writing Mum’s story, leaving out her grammar mistakes.
    At long last we return to the car and merge with the swarm raring to roll down the ramp. We rattle out into the cold dusk of Ostend, which smells, according to Grandma, of rotting fish, with Dad’s feet balanced on the clutch and accelerator as if he’s on a tight-rope fifty thousand feet above the Grand Canyon. While he side-steps the brake, I copy up the heart of Mum’s story, a stranger’s tale, and if I didn’t feel her sadness between the words, I would be made of stone.
    ***
    Contrasts Project
    Bridget (My Mum) in Berlin, November 1938
    Part One - Disorientation
    Friends used to stream into our house every day. Always, always, music would echo through the rooms, following everyone up the central sweep of stairs, even outside into the gardens and further down to the fountain and orchard. My father was a gifted composer and taught me to play the piano when I was still small enough to need three cushions on the stool. My mother was always setting out dishes of silvered almonds and rows of crystal glasses sparkling with champagne.
    In 1932, when I had just turned twelve years old, I was invited to join the waltz for the first time. My rustling gown was the bronze of autumn leaves. Over the next six years, my parents gave me dresses in spring green, poppy red and silver white. I wore out a dozen glittering pairs of dancing shoes.
    But the parties gradually became less frequent as friends with wealth or connections slipped away from Berlin. Overnight, yet another house would fall silent, yet another group of guests would be missing from our gatherings. My home grew darker, as if endless rain was