Preface

In 2013, when I was going through my mother’s affairs after her death, I discovered a small box marked ‘Mick’s Treasures’. It contained two letters written in the early 1950s. There were no other letters in that special box. They had been sent to my father by a man who had served with him during the Second World War and referred to an event that took place on the banks of the River Orne in France. I also found my mother’s diaries kept from 1944 to 1947 and here, suddenly, were the stories of three people who would probably never have met were it not for the catastrophic upheaval of global conflict. They came from entirely different English backgrounds, but their lives were inextricably intertwined during what poet Paul Celan called the thousand darknesses.

Drawing on regimental records, diaries and books, help from their families, genealogical records, and other contemporaneous accounts, I was able to shed light on the youth and experiences of Tom, Michael, and Betty. Their story bookends and includes the lacerating events of a time when youth was electrified and maturity landed too soon: the terror of the London Blitz, the D-Day beaches of Normandy, the chaos of war-torn Europe, and life in Britain during the decade after the war. As I dug deeper into the mystery of the two letters, the biography of my parents that I had been working on became as much an attempt to rescue the past from oblivion as an adventure, an exploration of intimacy in conflict, and a search for answers to the questions I never asked when I had the chance.

I suppose it is a truism that history is an amalgam of memories, some true, some false, most distorted by trauma and personal editing, and naturally blurred with age. In writing this story, I was at the mercy of censorship, interpretation, and, sometimes, my own imagination. However, I have done my best to accurately report the past and contextualize the cultural milieu of the time while trying not to mythologize or use the anodyne language occasionally found in the canon of wartime literature. As a child growing up in Portsmouth, on the south coast of England, during the optimistic 1950s, I was mostly protected from the reality of the previous decade. I knew little about the Second World War and particularly the part played by my parents. We children vaguely recognized it as a time of upheaval and occasionally saw the stains of anguish and loss. But men in wheelchairs, rolling down our street from the British Limbless Ex-Service Men’s Association home round the corner, were regarded with aversion rather than compassion, especially the tragic double amputee who once exposed himself to my friend and me, two little girls playing out in the road. Everything about the war was condensed into action-packed films and comics where the good guys always won, and we were happy playing in the bombed-out ruin of the house at the end of the road and fashioning bits of wood into weapons. We seldom asked questions.

Was I right to share long-ago intimacies of conjoined lives? Should I have left the letters and diaries to wrinkle, fade, and eventually moulder in some murky landfill, stories lost forever? My parents had dropped hints, a few crumbs, something that perhaps they hoped would engage us for a moment and encourage us to ask them to elaborate — ‘I was in Germany at the end of the war’, for example, or ‘I could see the eyes of the pilot flying low beside me, firing as he went’ — but we were busy growing up, and with the scorn of teenage superiority, we left those tales dangling. So the secrets and stories remained hidden and untold. My hope is that this account will redress that loss and ease the yearning for a better appreciation of the experiences of three young people who never spoke of what they went through.

Palo Alto, California May 2022

Introduction

Southsea, England. June 2013.

I was just back from a late afternoon swim and, with a cup of tea beside me, I turned to the last task of winding up my mother’s affairs. The bliss of floating in that cold ocean water at the end of a sunny, windless day quickly dissipated as I sat at the kitchen table and looked at the two boxes. Closing the French doors against a sudden cool breeze, I put on my blue cotton cardigan and poured some more tea. I couldn’t put this off any longer. I had always known of the existence of the bigger box, there at the back of her bedroom cupboard. It contained letters written to my mother during her six-week trifecta of grief nearly 40 years earlier. Knowing that reading those letters would bring back painful memories, I could have just thrown the box out — an act she apparently never considered. But the letters would tell me more about that time, and I wanted to understand how my mother had coped with the anguish of my flight from the altar, her mother’s demise, and the circumstances of my father’s sudden death.

Taking a deep breath, I straightened my back and untied the string of the larger of the two boxes, a thin, floppy, Viyella shirt box. Inside, the cards, letters, and records of phone calls and flowers were neatly sorted and alphabetized. I smiled at some of the things people had written. They went into detail of their own medical problems or tried to cheer my mother up with stories of bad hairdressers, fallen delphiniums, and contempt at the managers of privatized public transport. Mostly, though, I cried. Reading about what my mother had had to endure, and so soon (relatively) after the tragic deaths of the war, was heartbreaking. ‘We never thought life could be so sad again,’ wrote one old friend. I read and transcribed all 390 letters onto my laptop, taking a last glance at the blue notepaper and distinct handwriting of each one before refolding and returning them one by one to their thick envelopes with their carefully placed stamps in the top right-hand corner. They were ready for oblivion. No one wanted any more old boxes clogging up their attics.

It was dark by the time I turned to the small, corrugated cardboard box, also tied with string, flimsy with age, and labelled in my mother’s distinctive handwriting, ‘Mick’s Treasures’. I had never seen it before. I wondered how my father’s ‘Treasures’ could fit into such a small box.

The box smelled of must and age. There wasn’t much in it — my father had kept a few important wartime and professional documents, folded tightly to fit the box and now faded along the creases, a copy of a lecture he had delivered on atrial fibrillation, his ration book, his World War Two ‘Mentioned in Despatches’ oak leaves, awarded for ‘gallant or meritorious action in the face of an enemy’, and a little brown canvas trifold containing tiny tweezers, scissors, a scalpel, a clamp, and several dried-up syrettes of morphine.

There were also two letters in small, light-blue envelopes. I knew from the writing on the outside that the letters weren’t from my mother or anyone in the family. With one in each hand, I flipped them front to back, looking for a clue. There was no return address, no hint of who they had come from. The envelopes were postmarked Manchester, one dated 7th July 1953 at 7pm and the other 27th May 1954 at 5:30pm. I imagined the sender cycling to the post office to buy the red rectangu- lar stamps depicting the new Queen Elizabeth. I envisioned a summer evening, a stranger in grey walking down the street to a red mailbox, anxious to catch the last post. I couldn’t immediately tell if the careful, somewhat elaborate, but hesitant handwriting was that of a man or a woman.

Why did my father keep these two letters with his ‘Treasures’? I couldn’t help wondering if he, or my mother, had wanted them to be found one day, to hint at the story of a kind, gentle man who had a secret. For a moment I despised myself for my melodramatic imaginings.

I poured myself a glass of wine, then fumbled with the first letter. ‘Dear Sir,’ it began. The writer wished my father and his family well. His condition was worsening, he wrote. He was going through a complicated, distressing hospital course. He (the plain pragmatism and lack of romanticism of the letter’s content led me to believe it was a man) added: 'I first had trouble with my bowels in the summer of 1944. You remember, Sir, we were on the banks of the River Orne, we did some swimming in the river amongst the dead horses and cattle that were floating around. There were millions of flies and mosquitoes and wasps. ... I think all that has something to do with my present condition.'

I sat back. My father had kept among his ‘Treasures’ a letter alluding to an incident in France during the war. Nothing could keep my father from water, I knew that. He was born on the coast and loved the sea. But this river, with this unknown companion and the corpses? I clicked my tongue against the roof of my mouth in disbelief. This was too weird.

At the top of the letter, my father had added a date. Why had he done that when it was already clear from the outside of the envelope? He had originally written ‘6/ix/53’, then crossed out the ‘ix’ for September and replaced it with ‘vii’ for July. He had written ‘6 July 1953’ on the first letter that was actually postmarked at the end of the day on the 7th. The mistakes were so unlike him, the careful doctor.

Intrigued, I opened the second letter. It was written 10 months later, from the hospital bed the writer had been confined to for so long. He thanked my father for the book he’d sent and for writing to his doctors in Manchester. He congratulated him on the purchase of his new house and his growing family. He went on to describe the bad ‘enteritis’ he had had after the swim and the crippling problems with his stomach, bowels, kidneys, and testicles that had plagued him every day since the war. ‘You were a bit off colour too, Sir,’ he reminded my father. He was frustrated by the multiple invasive procedures, trials of medication, and surgeries. ‘They won’t tell me what the infection is but of course I can guess.’

The letters were from a man far away in Manchester who addressed my father as ‘Sir’ and signed with his last name only: ‘Edisbury’. I leaned back in the chair, stretching my aching back. Outside, night had fallen. The wind had started to swirl around the trees and I heard an urban fox screeching his lust. Why had my father kept these letters among his ‘Treasures’ — and what had my mother known?

...

Four years after reading the letters from ‘Edisbury’, I happened to be in Yorkshire at a residential writing retreat at Lumb Bank. I couldn’t get the mystery of the two letters out of my head. I showed them to a fellow attendee and we talked for a while about how I was trying to figure out why they were so important to my father. ‘It’s clear,’ she said, after a bracing hike around Heptonstall. ‘We have to find Edisbury. Come to dinner. Stay the night.’

All we had to go on was ‘Edisbury’ and ‘Manchester’. Sitting at the wooden kitchen table in my friend’s Hebden Bridge farmhouse, we trawled the internet for help. LinkedIn presented us with a young man called Anthonie Edisbury, the 21-year-old manager of a charity shop in Wythenshawe, a suburb of Manchester. It was 5pm, closing time on a darkening Friday night. I had to leave the next day and was despondent at the thought that no one would answer the phone. However, to my delight, Anthonie did answer. When I told him I was looking for a man called Edisbury who knew my father and might have died in 1954, he was taken aback but charming. He promised to ask his grandfather and get back to me soon.

First thing next morning, I received an email from a woman called Pat Jennings who said she remembered her father, Tommy Edisbury, talking about a doctor he knew well. They had been together at the D-Day landings with a regiment called the 22nd Dragoons. Edisbury was the doctor’s driver.

...

I had no idea my father had been at those intense landings in Normandy in June 1944. Edisbury had been his driver — but what of it? I imagined that all the officers had drivers. Why were his letters with my father’s ‘Treasures’? I called Mrs Jennings right away. She was very excited. I asked if I could come and see her that afternoon. She was expecting the grandchildren for Sunday lunch at three o’clock. I said I’d help peel the potatoes, and we laughed at the thought of my coming all that way to prepare vegetables with her.

And so, on a bright, cold autumn day, I found myself speeding through the West Riding of Yorkshire, into Cheshire, and on to the village of Cheadle to meet with Pat Jennings, the woman who had been a little girl when her father went off to war. I had difficulty finding her apartment building, and there was no answer when I rang the buzzer at the number she had given me. For a while I stood forlornly on the grass outside. Surely I wasn’t going to mess this up. Not now. Eventually, someone came out of the building and I pleaded with her to go back and tell Pat I was outside. People in Cheadle, it turns out, are very helpful.

Pat and I greeted each other with open arms. We had no words at first. At 82, she looked well. Strong and spry, with dyed blonde hair, manicured nails, and the dry yellowish skin of a smoker. She was surely a woman who had granddaughters — modern haircut, flattering clothes. She showed me in and introduced me to her brother Jimmy, a frail man with rheumy eyes, who had been crying since I got in touch. He is an emotional man, she told me later, and very ill with symptoms similar to those of his father.

We sat at a small square table in the very warm living room of her unassuming apartment, and I gave her copies of the letters her father had written to mine. She was embarrassed that she read so slowly, so I explained to her how her father’s letters described swimming in a river in France and the stomach infection he had had afterwards. Her eyes filled with tears. Until I arrived, Pat and Jimmy had no idea what had happened to their father. But they always knew their father had caught something bad during the war. They knew it was the reason he had spent the last years of his life in hospital.

Pat showed me a framed head-and-shoulders picture of Tommy Edisbury. It was taken when he joined the army at the start of the war, in 1939. He was 31 then, a husband and father of four. He is wearing his new military beret and thick army green-brown serge battledress blouse. His skin is clear and clean-shaven. He has thick eyebrows, hooded eyelids, and a large nose. His lips are thin and about to slide into a conspiratorial grin.

I showed Pat and Jimmy the first of two tiny sepia photos I had found. My father, Captain Childs, in his army officer’s uniform, is in the first. He is with a group of men and a dog, his medical team I presume. It is a warm day. The men have their sleeves rolled up, and they are next to a brick wall below an open window with paint chip- ping off the frame. Perhaps a barracks. The Edisbury siblings did not see their father in that photo.

The second photo shows a quartet of soldiers, in uniform, relaxed and posing with their dog. ‘That’s him!’ said Pat, pointing at the thin man on the left, standing slightly behind the much bigger man in the middle. Edisbury!

The Tom Edisbury in the photo does not look like the sturdy man in the frame on Pat’s table. He is boyish and slight. But the siblings agreed that it is their father. ‘My dad loved swimming,’ Pat sobbed, still shaken by the circumstances of my arrival.‘He swam every day in the local baths after work. He once jumped into the Mersey to save a couple of greyhounds. Any excuse to get in the water, really.’

  So, Tom Edisbury had loved swimming. Perhaps he wasn’t, as I had feared, the unwilling victim, dragged into the foul water by the officer, my enthusiastic father. Perhaps the doctor was the hesitant swimmer, the sensible one. Perhaps the conditions — of military hierarchy, masculinity, punishing summer heat — were such that neither could object to theother’s exhortation. And so they swam, their pale bodies splashing among the corpses. And now neither is alive for us, the daughters of the two men, to ask about that hot afternoon in France.

Getting ready to leave, I glanced at the book on the table. Pat tenderly picked it up and peeled back the faded yellow paper dust wrapper, revealing the book’s title: XXII Dragoons, 1760–1945, The Story of a Regiment, by Raymond Birt. The curved index finger of her left hand outlined the gold crest embossed on the bright-green linen binding. Nec Aspera Terrent. I summoned my high school Latin and tried to translate. Something like ‘don’t be afraid,’ I said, although I knew it was probably something more elevated.

Pat showed me the flysheet’s inscription, and it was my turn to get weepy. There, in the small, precise handwriting I remembered so well, were words my father, Michael Childs, had written to his driver. I took some photos and said goodbye to Pat and Jimmy, leaving with more questions than I had had before I arrived.

As I drove off through the Manchester grey, I couldn’t get the inscription out of my mind. I left the motorway, pulled over, and looked at it again. Is the first word ‘Tom’ or ‘Tpr’ for Trooper? I think he began to write ‘Tpr’ and then changed the ‘pr’ to ‘om’. Otherwise why would he write ‘late Trooper’? It was hard, though, to imagine ‘Tom’ and ‘Michael’ for them, given that the soldier’s letters to my father began ‘Dear Sir’ and ended with his last name only. My father kept his rank by (unnecessarily?) adding his role as medical officer of the regiment.

How did their relationship change after the war? In his letters Mr Edisbury wrote with formality, presumably compelled by social constraints. Yet ‘Sir’ and ‘Tom’ struck me as equally out of place, perpetuating an anachronistic system of hierarchy. Did this relationship hold more than meets the eye?