Flora and Grace

by Maureen Lee

Genres: Coming of Age; Siblings; Sagas; 20th Century Romance

Synopsis

The Second World War - a mother must make a heartbreaking sacrifice in order to save her child...A poignant and powerful family saga from the author of Au Revoir Liverpool. 1944. It is spring, late morning, when Flora's life changes for ever. She is standing on a platform in the Swiss mountains, watching as a cattle train draws near. From within the wooden trucks she can hear human voices - groaning, pleading and desperate. Horrified, she begins to run alongside the train, frantically trying to help. But as the train picks up speed, a filthy bundle of rags is thrust through the slats and into her arms - 'Take him. His name is Simon.' Flora stands on the platform, a baby boy cradled against her. And although everything looks exactly as it did moments before, nothing will ever be the same again. Sunday Times bestseller Maureen Lee has written a powerful, moving story of war, motherhood and love.

Release date: March 28, 2013

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 319

Sample

It was spring, late morning. Flora breathed in the sweet, sharp air, closing her eyes and smiling blissfully. This must be what the best champagne tasted like. It made her feel quite dizzy. The sun was as yellow as a lemon in the powdery blue sky, and the train that had just left the station on its way to Zurich puffed white smoke as it became smaller and smaller, adding to the fairy-tale quality of the scene.

She collapsed on to a wooden bench, her long legs stretched out as far as they would go, arms resting on the bench’s back, sorry to have just said goodbye to nice Mrs Rhona Charlesworth, the American-born lady from Zurich who came regularly to see Andrew and Else at the school.

St Thérèse’s school had been established ten years before in memory of Mrs Charlesworth’s daughter, Antonia, who had died of consumption. It was named after Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, a Carmelite nun, who had died of the same disease at the age of twenty-four.

Flora Knox had been at St Thérèse’s since 1938, when she was eleven. Her parents were dead, and her Aunt Winifred had read an article in The Lady about the school for delicate children in Switzerland. Anxious to get rid of her niece, Flora had been despatched there on the pretence of having a persistent cough. The cough had disappeared shortly after her arrival and never returned. She and her aunt corresponded rarely.

After war broke out, Aunt Winifred hadn’t bothered to arrange for Flora to return to England during the months when it was possible to travel through unoccupied France. Once Germany had invaded that country, escape was impossible. Switzerland remained neutral, but there were occupied countries on every border.

Flora preferred to be left where she was. She hadn’t enjoyed living with Aunt Winifred, who continued to transfer the school fees twice a year to a bank in Zurich; Flora’s parents had left the money for their daughter’s education, so her aunt wasn’t out of pocket.

Another train was approaching, travelling very slowly along the lines that shimmered in the sunlight. Flora watched with interest as it came nearer, wondering if it intended to stop. The railway employee who had examined Mrs Charlesworth’s ticket when they’d entered the station came on to the platform to watch. He was very young; about the same age as Flora. His uniform was much too big.

Flora would have to leave soon. A small bus would arrive shortly at the station to take her up and up the winding road as far as the Hotel St Aloysius, where Else would be waiting in the big Mercedes-Benz. The old car’s engine was tied together with string, or so Else claimed. From there, the road turned into a bumpy earth path that led to the school – an old wooden convent, long ago abandoned, set within a small forest of tall evergreen trees. Else would have driven Mrs Charlesworth all the way to the station in Zurich if Andrew hadn’t woken during the night with one of his horrendous headaches, which meant he would be confined to bed for the next few days. During that time Else wasn’t prepared to leave the school for more than half an hour or so, not even with Flora in charge. It would have been irresponsible, she claimed.

The advancing train was gliding into the station, only the wheels making any sound; a dull clickety-click, clickety-clack, repetitive and hypnotic. It was a cattle train, a long line of slatted trucks. Flora lost interest and began to study her long, thin feet. She badly needed new shoes. She looked up when she became aware that the sounds coming from the train weren’t made by cattle, but were human.

Oh, my God! She wasn’t sure if she spoke the words aloud or not. She jumped to her feet. There were people in the trucks. She could see them here and there between the odd missing or broken slat; someone’s shoulder, the top of a head, a pair of hands, the occasional white face regarding her with deep-sunken eyes. It was like something out of the worst of nightmares.

Agitated and horribly frightened, Flora began to walk alongside the train, waving her arms, wanting to help, wanting to make it stop, but the engine at the front was too far ahead. These people needed water and food. They were jammed together like – well, like cattle. The smell was atrocious; of lavatories, vomit and death.

‘Where are you going?’ she cried. ‘Who are you?’

Nobody answered. The faces, the eyes, continued to stare. The sight would haunt her for the rest of her days.

‘Signorina.’

Where had the voice come from? And was it her imagination, but was the train beginning to go faster?

‘Signorina.’ Louder now.

In the passing truck, hands were tearing away the wooden slats. More hands appeared. The wood snapped and splintered. A space was being cleared. A woman shouted desperately, ‘Hurry!’ The train had definitely picked up speed. Flora began to run.

A baby was thrust through the space. Flora ran faster and met the haunted eyes of another woman; black-haired, dark-eyed, desperate. ‘Take him,’ she gasped hoarsely. ‘His name is Simon.’

‘I’ve got him!’ Flora grabbed the child from the woman’s arms, stumbling backwards as the train hurried out of the station and out of her life.

She was on the bench again, shaken to the core, the baby on her knee. He was a big baby, quite a few months old. He wasn’t crying, but she could tell from his little screwed-up face that he was in distress. Oh, and he did smell! His beautifully knitted lacy shawl was grubby, and he felt excessively hot. She moved the shawl to reveal dark red wavy hair. His eyes were a lovely clear green.

Flora lifted him on to her shoulder and gently patted his back. It just seemed the natural thing to do. ‘There, there, Simon, darling,’ she whispered. ‘There, there.’

Everywhere looked exactly as it had done only minutes before: the station, the sun, the sky, the young railway worker, who hadn’t moved a jot, everything. Yet nothing would ever be the same again.

Andrew Gaunt, a landscape artist of much promise, as he had been described after his first exhibition in London, had gone on to fight in the Spanish Civil War. He had been badly injured, and shortly afterwards nearly died of smoke inhalation when the church in which he had been sheltering was set on fire.

In hospital, he had fallen in love with his Swedish nurse, Else Landstrom, and she with him. The Civil War over and another world war about to begin, Else had taken her lover to Switzerland, where the pure air would be gentle on his scorched lungs and permanently weakened chest. A giant, broad-shouldered man with a thick thatch of hair that had turned white overnight, he was now thirty-five years old and little more than an invalid, mainly from the headaches that haunted him.

The problem of how they would make their living quickly arose when Andrew discovered he had no more interest in painting, and had lost the talent for it. Instead, he and Else started a school for frail youngsters, a place where they could spend just a few weeks convalescing, or however long was needed for the sake of their health. They resolved never to have more than twenty children at a time. It was then that they met Mrs Charlesworth, a resident of Zurich, who offered to fund their project in memory of her daughter.

For Andrew, the scheme became a fascinating experiment. Having been raised in the industrial Midlands, the only child of a mother with a penchant for reading the Bible aloud and a father who believed that sparing the rod spoiled the child, he was keen to see what a completely liberal upbringing would have on young minds.

The children at St Thérèse’s were encouraged to express themselves without regard to what other people thought, to say whatever came into their minds, to spend the day in bed rather than attend lessons, should that be what they wished. He discovered that young people genuinely wanted to learn when left to their own devices; that they were quite capable of original thought when they hadn’t been told what to think.

The former convent was a spacious, bright, single-storey building with numerous small rooms in which the nuns, who had gone to live in Africa, had slept, a large room where they had eaten, a chapel where they had prayed and a somewhat crude kitchen. There wasn’t a bathroom, just a row of stalls, each containing a sink and a row of three lavatories that had been outside, but which Andrew had connected to the main building with a rough-and-ready covered passage.

It was nine o’clock in the evening; some of the children had gone to bed, some were playing table tennis in the dining room. The ones in bed might well be reading. Andrew or Else would tour the building later and douse the oil lamps. If anyone wanted to continue reading, they would have to do so by candlelight. At the present time, not counting Flora, there were only three girls and six boys, their ages ranging from eleven to fourteen.

The chapel had been deconsecrated and now served as a living room. Flora, just seventeen and almost an adult, usually stayed up late. She no longer attended lessons. Instead, she taught English language and literature with considerable verve and much throwing about of arms and rolling of eyes. Tonight, she would find it hard to sleep after the events of the day. She had just finished describing for the third or fourth time what had happened when she’d taken Mrs Charlesworth to the station that morning.

‘I shall go back to the station tomorrow,’ she was now saying, ‘and should another train like the one today attempt to pass through, then I shall stand on the line and flag it down, giving the poor souls on board the chance to get off and be saved.’

‘You will do no such thing, idiot,’ Else said mildly. ‘You will be mowed down. You will end up as bits in a box ready to be buried. And there’s not likely to be another train like that. That one today must have lost its way, or something. It was a mistake.’

Else was small and pale, with wispy fair hair and wonderful blue eyes. She was as strong as an ox, capable of lifting absurdly heavy weights such as Andrew himself, on more than one occasion. He loved her more than life itself.

Flora was quite different. Tall and slender – perhaps a little too slender – she had silver-grey eyes that were flashing with anger at that moment, and very long blond hair that could also look silver in a certain light.

In their isolated ex-convent, little was known about the war except by Andrew and Else, who listened to the wireless in their bedroom. Until Andrew had told her earlier, Flora had been entirely unaware of the existence of concentration camps in other European countries where members of the Jewish race were being sent. She was horrified when told that the unfortunate passengers in the train were almost certainly Jews on their way to a camp in Germany or Poland.

‘Mussolini,’ said Andrew, ‘despite being a Fascist, was not willing to imprison Italian Jews just to please his friend Hitler. But since Mussolini’s downfall, Germany is now in control of part of Italy and is rapidly getting rid of the Jewish population. That is where the train you saw must have come from; Italy.’

‘The woman who spoke to me, the first one, she called me, “Signorina”,’ Flora explained. ‘But the one who gave me the baby spoke English – perhaps she did that because I had shouted in English.’ Tears came to her eyes. ‘Imagine how she must have felt, handing over her beautiful baby to a stranger.’

The baby, Simon, was half sitting, half lying in a wooden cradle an appropriate distance from the roaring fire. A handsome child with his auburn hair and unusual eyes, Else had guessed him to be about eight or nine months old and well looked after. His good-quality clothes had been removed and washed and were drying in the kitchen. Now he wore an assortment of much too big children’s clothes. An old towel had been cut in four pieces to make nappies.

‘He hasn’t been circumcised,’ Else had whispered earlier, ‘so he might not be Jewish.’

‘Poor little bugger.’ Andrew shuddered. Instead of getting worse, as usually happened, his headache had got better as the day progressed. He wondered if it was the arrival of the baby, a change in routine, something out of the ordinary that had done it. Perhaps what he needed was a change in his life, in their lives, his and Else’s, so that the headaches wouldn’t come with such deadly regularity as they did at least once a month.

The baby was wide awake, unable to take his eyes off the dancing flames. After a bath, the fresh clothes, a meal of thin soup, apple purée and milk, all fed to him with a spoon, he seemed to have recovered from his ordeal on the train.

Tomorrow, Else would go to Zurich to buy baby food, a bottle and more clothes. He no doubt missed his mother, but he was being made an enormous fuss of, and that was enough to make him smile from time to time. Every now and again, Flora would kiss him, hold his tiny hands or stroke his hair. She talked to him non-stop, telling him all sorts of things about herself, about Andrew and Else and about the school. The baby listened intently, his eyes locked on hers.

She was going to keep him for ever, she declared. ‘He was given to me, and it is my duty to look after him.’

‘But Flora,’ Else argued, ‘Simon will have had a father as well as a mother. Even if neither survives the war, there will be aunts and uncles, grandparents who will want him. As soon as this horrible war is over, your duty should be to find these people.’

Flora had looked momentarily nonplussed, but swiftly recovered her composure. ‘How do I find them?’ She shrugged, lifting her thin shoulders. ‘The train came from Italy. So, who do we contact in Italy? His mother spoke English. What part of the United Kingdom does she come from? And she might be American or Canadian. How on earth would we find out?’ She spoke quietly and reasonably. Flora rarely made a fuss, no matter how angrily or strongly she felt about something. She stooped over the baby and lifted him out of his cradle, pressing him against her breast. ‘And Lord knows what sort of fate those poor people on the train are destined for. Who will know that he was given to me on the journey?’

‘There are agencies,’ Andrew murmured. He looked at Else and made a face. As Flora’s teacher, it could only be his fault that she spoke like a forty-year-old. ‘Organisations will have records, or can get them from other organisations. The Red Cross is one. They won’t have you on their records, Flora dear, but in time they could well have Simon and his mother noted as having disappeared. There are probably ways they can be traced.’

Flora just smiled. The baby’s arms had crept around her neck. She was convinced they were meant for each other. ‘I don’t trust agencies and organisations. It was an agency that took me to my Aunt Winifred after my mother and father died and insisted that she have me, when she didn’t want me at all. I would have been far better off adopted or put in a home.’

Now Andrew smiled. ‘But then we wouldn’t have had the pleasure of your company all these years, Flora.’

‘Nor me yours,’ Flora conceded. ‘I don’t know how you have put up with me for so long. I know how stubborn and awkward and impatient I can be.’

‘That is the way I have encouraged you to be,’ Andrew said. ‘Why should children automatically think that adults are always in the right when they could well be in the wrong?’ But she was probably correct in what she said about the baby. The chances of locating his wider family were remote. As for the poor mother, she could only have given him to Flora in order to save his life.

The war was at a crucial stage. Having invaded Italy by way of Sicily, the British forces and their allies were gradually making their way northwards. Early in June, thousands of troops of different nationalities had crossed the English Channel and landed in Normandy. They began to fight their way across France. With the Russians attacking through Poland and the Allies advancing north through Italy, the German war machine was being assailed on all sides. There was every likelihood that the war would be over within the year.

In the little school of St Thérèse, cut off from everyday life, things continued as normal. There’d been no shortage of food or other necessities. Baby Simon thrived. Flora, who’d shown no aptitude for such work before his arrival, was constantly knitting him clothes. The finished garments were clumsily made, full of knots and dropped stitches, but the baby wore them without complaint.

It was September, and Andrew and Else were on the veranda watching the children climb trees and kick balls to each other. The girls had pitched a tent and intended sleeping in it that night. In front, a brilliant sun was setting in the dusky sky. The Hotel St Aloysius, the only sign that other human beings existed on the planet, was like a doll’s house in the distance far below them.

Andrew felt that his health had improved enough for him to travel, to find somewhere warmer for them to live, once this terrible war was over; perhaps even to paint again.

‘I would like to stroll along a golden beach with the blue sea frothing at my feet,’ he said somewhat poetically.

‘What about our school?’ Else enquired.

‘It’s not our school, Else, although we started it, but Mrs Charlesworth’s. I’m sure she will find someone else to run it. Dozens of men would jump at the chance of living in such a remote, peaceful place after the violence of a war.’

‘And women,’ Else reminded him. ‘The war was violent for everyone.’

‘And women,’ Andrew hastily agreed. He didn’t want to be thought a misogynist. ‘If you are agreeable, I shall suggest that Mrs Charlesworth engage a married couple. If she wants us to stay until she finds a replacement, then we will. We can’t let her down.’

‘Of course we can’t.’ Else slipped her small hand into his large one. ‘I am agreeable, though I shall miss the children terribly. I do wish we could have some of our own, Andrew.’

Andrew sighed. ‘Me too. But you know, there’s time. We are both still in our thirties. We’ll just have to try harder. And there was something I was going to suggest, any way.’

‘And what’s that?’

‘That we take Flora and Simon with us. I doubt if Flora’s aunt wants her back. In all these years, she has shown little interest in her niece. I have looked upon Flora as ours for a long time. She has no one close, and neither has Simon – at least, not that we are aware of.’

Else’s lips twisted wryly. ‘You’re wrong, darling. Flora and Simon have each other.’

‘But the two of them can’t possibly manage on their own.’ He paused and sighed. ‘And, in my humble opinion, it would be a very bad idea for them to try.’

Flora had designated the first of August as Simon’s birthday. On the day itself, she had made a cake bearing a single candle and they’d eaten it after tea and sung ‘Happy Birthday’. The other children loved him. He was everyone’s baby brother, a happy child, full of life, tottering all over the place on his little fat legs, chattering away at ten to the dozen.

He was becoming spoiled, Else thought, but when she mentioned this to Flora, she pooh-poohed the idea. She didn’t deny he was being spoiled, but couldn’t see that it would do him any harm.

‘I wish someone had spoiled me when I was a baby. As it was, my mother and father weren’t there most of the time, and I was looked after by landladies, bit-part actors and stagehands.’ Flora’s parents had belonged to a group of travelling actors based in Scotland who had toured that country and the North of England. They had died when their van crashed in the Scottish hills. Flora, aged six, was in the back wrapped in blankets, and had survived the accident. She made the remark without resentment, as she did whenever she spoke about her Aunt Winifred’s unwillingness to take care of her. She had grown used to her lonely situation, and it no longer bothered her.

Simon was being cuddled on her knee. She gave him a tight squeeze and he giggled. ‘When he grows up, maybe he will spoil me,’ she remarked.

‘Are you still determined to keep him?’ Else asked.

Flora put her head on one side and said thoughtfully, ‘If it’s humanly possible, then yes.’ She stood the little boy on her knee and they rubbed noses. ‘I love you, love you, love you, Simon Knox,’ she sang.

Simon giggled again. ‘Love you, Flo,’ he sang back.

Else sighed. Simon Knox! Any minute now Flora will claim to have given birth to him. She somehow doubted if the mother would ever come back.

It was Christmas, and Allied troops were approaching Germany from different directions with the aim of coming together in Berlin.

‘I think the end is in sight,’ Mrs Charlesworth remarked when she arrived on New Year’s Day to stay for a few days. She was a stout, comfortable woman who wore a maroon velvet turban throughout her visit. She was never seen without a hat. Flora had wondered if she was bald, but tufts of grey hair were visible on the back of her neck.

She had agreed to advertise for another couple to run the school as soon as the war was over. ‘Travel will quickly be back to normal, the trains running and the planes flying. I am longing to visit my sisters and my brother in New York. In fact,’ she said soberly, ‘I might even decide to stay on there. I have been a widow a long time now, and lost my only child many years ago.’ Mr Charlesworth had been the head of an American bank. ‘It’s only friends keeping me in Zurich.’

‘Friends are far better than relatives,’ Flora assured her with all the wisdom of a seventeen-year-old. ‘Friends grow to like each other. With relatives, it’s the other way around.’

For the sake of all concerned, Flora desperately wanted the war to end, but could see no reason to alter the course of her life when it did.

She was therefore taken aback when she discovered that as soon as it was over, Andrew and Else genuinely did intend to give up the school and travel.

‘Hopefully after a while we will find somewhere less isolated, and with a more comfortable climate, to settle down,’ Andrew said, adding that he and Else dearly wished that she and Simon would join them on their travels. ‘We would become a family,’ he said warmly.

‘But I want to stay here,’ Flora wailed. ‘I thought I would stay for the rest of my life.’

‘Flora, my love,’ Andrew said calmly, ‘you are only eighteen. There is a big world out there for you to experience. You don’t know a single person your own age, either male or female. The only adults you meet regularly are me and Else. You have never seen a film or a play, or gone to a dance or a party – I mean proper dances and parties, not the sort we have here.’

‘I don’t want any of those things,’ Flora said sulkily. Andrew could tell she was upset, scared to leave the school and the protection it offered. For all her confident and assured manner, the tragedy of her early life must have affected her; the death of her parents, living with her miserable aunt in London, then being despatched to Switzerland – actually on her own, at the age of eleven, with a list of the trains she had to catch pinned to her sleeve. Else had gone to Zurich station to collect her, and found her hiding her tears behind a fit of temper at the lateness of the train. She was enormously brave.

‘Why can’t I take over the school and run it?’ she asked now. ‘I’ve been helping you and Else for years.’

‘Because you are much too young for the responsibility,’ Andrew said patiently. ‘It requires a couple, so that the responsibility is shared. And Else is a nurse. Some of the pupils arrive quite run-down. They have to be looked after. You couldn’t possibly manage alone. Why won’t you come with us, Flora dear?’

Flora shrugged and didn’t answer.

She didn’t like to tell them that she wanted Simon to herself; they wouldn’t approve. Else and Andrew loved the little boy, adored him; and he loved and adored them back, though it was Flora he loved the most. If they lived together, the four of them, in an ordinary place, an ordinary town or city, then Flora would be encouraged to go to the parties and dances that Andrew spoke about, and to see the films and plays. The time would come when she would feel obliged to go to work. And who would look after Simon then? Else, of course, while Andrew was in his studio, painting, Simon would come to regard Else as his mother, while Flora was merely a woman who played a much smaller part in his existence.

In all her life, Flora had never loved anyone as much as she loved Simon. And she loved him not just for herself, but on behalf of the mother who had entrusted him to her care.

Once they became independent, she and Simon, money would become a matter of concern. She had not long turned eighteen, and her education was finished; so how much was left of her parents’ legacy? Indeed, had there been a legacy? Perhaps there’d only been enough money for her education. The minute the post was back to normal, she would write to her aunt and enquire.

Andrew had placed the wireless in the living room, where everyone could listen to the British Broadcasting Corporation relay the news of how the war was progressing. They all understood English perfectly and would cheer when it was announced that Paris had been reclaimed, then Brussels, Belgrade, Athens . . .

Germany had been bombed mercilessly, entire cities almost disappearing beneath the weight of numerous raids. Late in March, American forces captured two important enemy airfields. Winston Churchill himself was reported to have crossed the Rhine with the 21st Army Group. Soviet troops entered Austria. Concentration camps were liberated and vast horrors exposed. Flora half expected Simon’s mother, having survived her own horror, to turn up wanting her son back. She would surely be able recall the place where she had handed him over to a stranger.

At the end of April, it was revealed that Adolf Hitler had killed himself and the children shouted for joy. To all intents and purposes, the war was over. For Andrew, it only proved that there was no such person as God. A real God would never have allowed such an evil man as Hitler to exist. He had turned his formerly civilized country into a mon. . .