The Sweetheart Locket

by Jen Gilroy

Genres: World War II

Synopsis

'A story that will linger in your heart long after you finish it' Maisie Thomas

What if the key to your present lies in the past?

London, 1939
On the eve of the Second World War, Canadian Maggie Wyndham defies her family and stays in England to do her bit for the war effort. Torn between two countries, two men and living a life of lies working for the Special Operations Executive (SOE), Maggie's RAF sweetheart locket is part of who she is...and who she isn't.

San Francisco, 2019
Over twenty years after Maggie's death, her daughter Millie and granddaughter Willow take a DNA test that's supposed to be a bit of fun but instead yields unexpected results. Willow has always treasured her grandmother's sweetheart locket, both family heirloom and a symbol of her grandparents' love story. But now she doesn't know what to believe. She embarks on a search for the truth, one she doesn't know will reveal far more about herself...

A gripping and heart-breaking dual timeline novel about love, loss and buried secrets, The Sweetheart Locket is perfect for fans of Lorna Cook, Rachel Hore and Suzanne Kelman.

Release date: March 17, 2022

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 336

Sample

MaggieLondon, August 1939

Margaret Wyndham stood on the platform and crumpled the rail ticket in her damp palm. She’d done it. She couldn’t change her mind or go home, either, whatever home meant now. A whistle echoed and the train slid out of the station, carriages clattering as if it were an ordinary journey on an ordinary day.

She stood motionless as people surged around her, their voices a hum above the roar in her ears. Until the last minute, she’d hesitated. She’d even had one foot on the carriage step before she’d drawn back and shoved her hands into the pockets of her wrinkled blue summer dress.

Turning, she bumped into a man in labourer’s clothes, a flat cloth cap atop his bald head. The bold, black headline on the newspaper tucked under his arm sent a sliver of dread mixed with excitement to twist in the pit of her stomach.

‘Sorry.’ The word came out in an accent that wasn’t truly English but now, after five years here, not Canadian, either. Mid-Atlantic, the girls at school said. Girls with plummy vowels and imposing country houses who had pearls, ponies and brothers named Henry and Rupert who did something in banking or the foreign service. Girls who,
although they were friendly enough on the surface, had given Margaret a sense of inferiority and being out of place. The girl from what they called ‘the colonies’ whose family had money but not social status, and who didn’t have the right accent, the right clothes or the easy way in the world that came from knowing exactly who you were and where you belonged.

‘Ta, miss.’ The man tipped his cap as he rushed past, a scent of sweat mixed with tobacco and fried fish lingering in his wake.

She moved across the platform and propped her case against a metal railing. Her legs shook as she uncurled her fingers from around the ticket and stared at the ink until it blurred. There were other trains, but there wasn’t another ship from Liverpool to Montréal with passage booked on it for her. Like the train that had disappeared around a silvery curve of track, the ship would sail tomorrow without her.

She pictured her father’s face. The bushy white eyebrows above the dark-blue eyes she’d inherited. The strong nose and determined mouth quicker to frown than smile. What would he say? She pressed a hand to her stomach. What would they all say?

Her two older sisters, married and with children of their own. Her brother who’d gone into business with their father as soon as he left school. If her mother had lived things would have been different, but her mother’s death was why Margaret had been sent to stay with widowed, childless Aunt Elsie, her father’s older sister, in the first place.

A hot, dusty wind ruffled her bobbed light-brown hair. She was eighteen, almost nineteen and free to make her own choices. Her family was thousands of miles away so they couldn’t physically haul her home. Aunt Elsie, ostensibly Margaret’s guardian, couldn’t haul her home, either. Her tall,
narrow house on Highgate Hill was shut up for what she called ‘the duration’ and Aunt Elsie was already on her way to Scotland to stay with a cousin.

If only, instead of that finishing school, Margaret could have gone to university after she’d passed her school certificate. Instead, though, she had a smattering of flower arranging, cookery, deportment, and typewriting classes, none of which, apart from the typewriting, counted for much.

‘You all right, love?’

She turned towards the speaker, a round, cosy woman shaped like a cottage loaf with grey hair pinned into a bun. ‘Yes, thank you.’

As the woman disappeared into the milling crowd, Margaret fumbled in her handbag for a handkerchief, catching her passport in her sticky palm. She flicked open the passport and stared at the photograph with her name and signature below. Margaret Aline Savard Wyndham.

The name that embodied her father, now a sober-suited captain of industry, but once a scrappy boy from a back-to-back house in an industrial town in the Black Country, who’d left England at fourteen with not much more than the ragged coat on his back to make his fortune in Canada. And her French-Canadian mother too, a farmer’s daughter from the Gaspésie, a rugged land where Québec meets the blue-green sea, who’d brightened the dark house in Montréal with music, fresh flowers, dancing and laughter.

Together, they’d built a life Margaret was destined for but had never truly wanted. The dutiful life of a society wife to the son of one of her father’s business associates who’d already been picked out for her, at least according to the barely concealed hints her eldest sister had dropped in her last letter. Yet, that was the life that went with the wedding invitations from friends already piling up, each fat
white envelope that came through the letterbox a reminder of duty and family expectations that sat heavy in the pit of her stomach like stodgy custard from a hundred school dinners.

A life now as ill-fitting as the turquoise and silver T-strap evening shoes that chafed her narrow heels and pinched her toes, which she’d left in the back of the wardrobe in her bedroom at Aunt Elsie’s. She flipped the passport shut and tucked it back in her bag along with the handkerchief. ‘Maggie Wyndham.’ She tried out the name sotto voice.

Unlike the proper and conventional Margaret who was supposed to be seen more than she was heard, Maggie was brave, adventurous and not afraid to speak her mind. The girl who’d played ice hockey with the boys when she should have been sewing by the fire and who’d preferred her brother’s Meccano set to dolls. The one who’d been the fastest swimmer and school tennis champion and who’d helped in the fields every summer at the farm in the Gaspésie. Maggie wouldn’t be packed off to Canada like a parcel to be sucked into a life of obligations and routine.

Maggie Wyndham was smarter and more independent than anyone had ever given her credit for. And she’d stay in England to do her bit for the coming war – and prove to herself and her family she was more than a pretty face with an accurate typing speed of one hundred and twenty words per minute.

Besides, the war would be over soon, everybody said so. If she wanted, she could be back in Montréal by Christmas or next Easter at the latest. She tore her unused railway ticket into small pieces and tossed the bits of card above her head where the wind whisked them across the rail line like awkward debutantes at their first ball.

Her family couldn’t be angry forever. She’d talk them
around somehow. Pushing the doubts aside, she picked up her case and made her way through the crowd towards the station exit. It was her life and if she didn’t seize this chance to live it her way, maybe she never would.

WillowSan Francisco, June 2019

Two more sleeps. Willow Munro checked her messenger bag to make sure she had the folder with her research notes, locked the door of the office she shared with other free­lancers and stepped outside into the afternoon sunshine. England, the place she’d travelled to in her imagination for almost her entire life would soon be the place she’d visit for real. She touched the locket nestled at her throat and gave a little skip.

Crossing a leafy park, she headed towards her dark-green Mini wedged into a narrow parking space on a residential street beneath a towering strawberry tree, a navy-blue slice of San Francisco Bay peeping through its thick branches. She unlocked her car and grabbed her phone, Aretha Franklin’s ‘Respect’ ringtone echoing from the depths of her bag.

‘Hey, Saffy.’ Willow greeted her cousin and settled into the driver’s seat, warm from the sun, tossing her bag beside her. ‘What’s up?’

‘I’m glad I caught you.’ A child wailed in the background. ‘Wait a second.’

Willow drummed her free hand on the steering wheel. Like her dad, she was always in motion. Her heart constricted.


She still thought of him every day, even though he’d been killed in a surfing accident when she was eight.

‘I’m back.’ Saffy was out of breath. ‘While you enjoy being an empty nester, remember me knee-deep in teething and tantrums. If I sing ‘The Wheels on the Bus’ one more time, I swear I’ll lose my mind. I used to think the corporate world was tough, but it’s nothing compared to wrangling a toddler.’

‘You love it, though.’ Even as she made her tone light, Willow’s good mood slipped. Unlike her, Saffy had a loving husband to share the highs and lows of parenting and share a life with too, currently a sprawling ranch house at his family’s winery near Sonoma. ‘Tell your sweet boy I’ll miss him while I’m away.’

‘Lucas will miss you too. I’ve got him watching a DVD for a few minutes. Does that make me a bad mother?’ Saffy gave an embarrassed laugh.

‘Of course not. You’re a great mom and you shouldn’t judge yourself by what other people might think.’ Advice that was easier for Willow to give than live herself. Maybe being the child of hippies who’d never let go of the hippie lifestyle, even when most of their peers had moved on, had made her more sensitive to how others saw her. At forty-two, though, and with her daughter now grown and launched, it was something she was determined to change in this next phase of her life, the one after motherhood.

‘True, but it’s hard, you know?’ Saffy let out a long breath.

‘Yeah.’ Saffy, once Saffron, and her younger brother, David, birth name Dusk, were the children of hippies too, so maybe it was inevitable all of them would go as far as possible in the other direction and try to blend in and be like everyone else. Willow leaned back in her seat and wound the window halfway down. ‘You never call me at this time of day. Is everything okay?’


‘I don’t know.’ Saffy’s tone was uncharacteristically hesitant. ‘You remember the DNA test I gave everyone for Christmas?’

‘Sure. You pestered me for months so we finally did it together. My mom as well.’ Willow inspected the tiny moon tattoo on the inside of her left wrist. She’d got it when she’d turned eighteen because her dad had called her his moon child, born on the cusp of spring under a full moon. Knowing her parents, she was lucky they hadn’t called her Moon. Although she’d hated Willow, Moon would have been much worse.

‘Did you get your results yet?’ Saffy’s voice was careful.

‘An email came in earlier but I haven’t had a chance to open it. Today was crazy busy.’ And now all Willow wanted was to pick up a meal from her favourite neighbourhood deli, go home, change and finish packing for her trip.

‘I got my results too. I wanted to wait to look at them until I could talk to you. I thought it would be interesting to compare.’

‘Sure. Why don’t we talk later? I’ll have time after Lucas goes to bed. I took your advice and decided to be organised for this trip so I could relax before I leave.’ Although Willow usually left packing to the last minute and threw clothing at random into a suitcase, this time she’d planned her outfits in advance.

‘No, we need to talk now. Your mom called me. Since I gave her the test, I guess she thought I could help her figure out what the results meant, so I looked at mine too.’

‘It’s not a big deal. Like Christmas and birthdays, the two of you can never wait to open presents.’ Of course her mom would have called Saffy first. They shared a closeness that, although she didn’t like to admit it, often made Willow feel left out.


‘I think it could be a big deal.’ Saffy paused. ‘I might be interpreting your mom’s results wrong, but look at yours.’

‘Now? I’m parked near work. If I don’t leave here soon it will take me ages to get home.’ The little house in Noe Valley had given Willow the small-town life she craved in the middle of a big city, and she’d managed to buy it almost twenty years before – thanks to money she’d inherited when her gran passed.

Although she’d never met her, that English gran had still been an important part of Willow’s life, and the locket Willow wore almost every day had come from her. Her grandad had given it to her gran before he left to fight in the Second World War – a sweetheart locket because it had the Royal Air Force insignia on the front and was part of the tradition of military-themed jewellery servicemen sent to women at home.

‘What’s so urgent it can’t wait a few hours?’ She glanced at the dashboard clock.

‘This.’ Saffy’s voice was soft but determined.

Willow shivered as the sun slipped behind a cloud and a cool breeze blew through the half-open car window. ‘Spit it out.’ Saffy was smart. In addition to her Stanford MBA, she had an enviable attention to detail. She’d have checked those results a couple of times before she picked up the phone.

‘Given what I know about my parents, my results are what I expected but your mom’s report is weird. I said she should talk to you but then she said it didn’t matter and changed the subject to tell me about something that happened at her weaving group.’

‘That was a surprise how?’ Saffy wasn’t only Willow’s cousin. Since the accident that had killed Willow’s dad and Saffy’s parents, Saffy and Willow had grown up together so Saffy was as good as a sister and also one of Willow’s closest
friends. ‘You know what Mom and I are like. I was always closer to my dad.’ And when she’d lost him, the bottom had dropped out of Willow’s childish world. Unlike Saffy and her brother who barely remembered their parents, even now, thirty-four years later, Willow’s dad’s absence was still a hole that would never be filled. ‘Mom’s also an expert at avoiding or deflecting anything she doesn’t want to talk about.’

‘Yes, but this is different. Your mom is usually so easy-going but when she called me, for the first few minutes she was as upset as I’ve ever heard her, before she shut down like nothing was wrong. I said the results were probably a mistake but look at yours so we know for sure. If there’s a family secret . . .’ Saffy stopped and murmured something to her son.

‘Know what for sure?’ Saffy was talking in riddles. ‘I don’t have any secrets from you.’ Willow didn’t have secrets from anyone. Her life was an open book. ‘Hang on, I’ll look at my results now. I always thought I must have some Scandinavian heritage because I was obsessed with pickled herring when I was pregnant.’

Willow pressed her lips together. Her fondness for pickled herring likely had more to do with her daughter’s dad, an exchange student from Sweden Willow had met her first year of college. She tapped her phone screen to find the email from the DNA test company, sandwiched between an update from her gym and a bank statement notification, and logged in to her account.

English and Scottish ancestry. Okay, not a surprise. Her mom had been born in England and her dad’s family had come to the United States from Scotland way back. Wait. Willow squinted at the screen and put Saffy on speakerphone.

‘It says I have Italian ancestry and some Jewish too.’ She blinked to bring the words, numbers and accompanying
charts into focus. ‘There’s French heritage as well. This doesn’t make sense.’

‘Your mom’s results don’t make sense either. They say she’s part Italian, along with some French and Jewish ancestry too. Maybe it’s not a mistake.’ Saffy’s voice reverberated in the quiet car.

Willow’s heartbeat sped up. ‘It has to be. I knew taking that test was a bad idea. I worried about data protection but now they’ve mixed up our DNA samples. I’ll call the company. They’ll have to sort it out. You should get a refund.’

Saffy cleared her throat. ‘If you want, we can call together. In a way, I’m responsible because I gave everyone the tests.’

‘It’s not your fault.’ It was pointless to try to assign blame. ‘Mom never talks about her family, but from the little I know, my gran was as English as they come. Grandad too. He died before I was born but from everything I heard, he was a Second World War hero. Gran wrote me letters, one or two a month, sometimes more.’ Letters Willow kept in a cardboard box on a shelf in her bedroom closet. ‘I wrote back to her and told her things about school, my whole life.’ It had often seemed as if her faraway grandmother was the only person who’d truly understood her.

‘I remember those letters. They came in blue airmail envelopes.’ Saffy’s tone warmed. ‘I used to think your gran was the one normal person in our whole family. Lucas pulled one of those old photo albums off the shelf the last time we were at your mom’s house and . . . wow! Your parents and mine . . . sex, drugs, rock and roll, or what?’

‘Unfortunately.’ Willow shuddered, trying not to think about those pictures with the long hair, tie-dye T-shirts, flared jeans, beads and medallion necklaces. Staring blurrily into the distance like it was some kind of promised land,
their parents could have been on a poster for the late 1960s and 1970s Haight-Ashbury scene.

‘We turned out okay, though.’ Saffy’s tone was bright. ‘Now I’m a mom myself, I can’t imagine how your mom coped with taking on two more kids alongside losing her husband. I thought she’d marry again once we were all out of the house, but she seems to like her own company.’

‘She does.’ Willow cherished her independence too, but along with her dad’s death, was it because of her family’s example that Willow avoided permanent relationships?

‘I’m sure there’s a logical explanation for the test results.’ Saffy’s voice was her business one; crisp, reassuring and matter of fact. ‘At least you know your mom is your mom. I’ve heard of people finding out they weren’t related to their parents or siblings at all. It could be worse.’

True, but that thought wasn’t much comfort right now. Dizzy, Willow tried to steady her breathing. ‘How could Mom’s family not be English?’

‘Who knows? But since your ancestry profile is like your mom’s, anything unexpected doesn’t come from your dad’s side. If it did, I’d have some of it too since your dad and mine were brothers.’ Saffy’s laugh was without humour.

‘True. They were all Scottish crofters.’ Thanks to one of her dad’s distant cousins who’d taken up genealogy in his retirement, Willow had seen the Munro family tree. ‘From bits Mom’s said and pictures I’ve seen, my gran was so proper you wouldn’t believe it. Church every Sunday, gloves, pearls and the whole deal. My mom left England as soon as she could to get away from all that.’

Willow stared out her car window and fingered the sweetheart locket; cherished family heirloom and symbol of loyalty, sacrifice and timeless love.

Brightly painted houses lined the hilly street where a teen
girl in a neon-yellow T-shirt talked on her phone, and two guys with man bun hairstyles held hands as they walked a Golden Retriever. Everything was as ordinary as it had been a few minutes before, but yet it wasn’t. Like one of those distorting mirrors at a carnival, the image Willow had of her life was all of a sudden different, almost unrecognisable.

Her mom was British, so Willow had to be too. They had no Italian heritage she knew of, let alone French and Jewish. She had a passion for English history because it was her family’s touchstone. That family might not have been conventional – they’d lived in a commune during Willow’s early childhood, and along with Saffy and David she’d been the only kid whose mom turned up for parent–teacher meetings in a rainbow-coloured VW bus plastered with peace signs – but she’d always known where she came from.

Willow tried to work moisture into her dry mouth. Bits of memory surfaced along with questions her mom had never been able to answer. Why was Willow left-handed when her parents and grandparents were all right-handed? Why did she have dark-brown hair with riotous curls that refused to be tamed no matter how much styling product she used, unlike anyone else in the family, her mom included? Unease circled from her stomach up through her windpipe to lodge in her throat.

She had forty-eight hours before her flight to London and the trip, although for work, was also a brief pause in the middle of her life for Willow to think about who she was and, after years of single motherhood, who she could be now her daughter was grown. ‘The results are wrong. They have to be.’ She made herself sound confident.

‘Yeah.’ Saffy’s tone was doubtful. ‘You should still talk to your mom, though.’

Willow pressed a hand to her stomach. She and her mom
never talked about anything important so why would this time be any different? Besides, her mom had left England at nineteen and, as far as Willow knew, had never looked back, embracing a new life in California as if nothing had come before it. There were no old family photos on display in her home or talk of school, childhood friends or her parents, either.

Saffy let out a breath. ‘Have a great trip and call me anytime. I’m here for you, always.’

‘Sure, we’re family. We always will be. Nothing will change. Like you said, whatever this is didn’t come from my dad or yours.’ Willow’s laugh was high-pitched, forced.

‘Yeah, nothing will change,’ Saffy said.

Except it seemed something already had. At a time when Willow was already charting a new direction as an empty nester, once again her world had shifted. Nausea bubbled as she said goodbye to Saffy and studied the message with the test results again. She was a ghost writer and the project taking her to England was for a Silicon Valley tech guru who’d contracted her to research and write his family’s memoir. But what if there were ghosts in her own family tree?

After closing the email, she secured her seat belt and started the car. So much for relaxing before she left on her trip. She wouldn’t get anywhere by calling her mom so she’d go see her tomorrow morning, early enough so her mother wouldn’t be out.

Willow glanced over her shoulder as she pulled out of the parking space. Whether alone or with her mom’s help, she had to discover the truth. If the results of that DNA test she’d taken almost as a joke were right, she wasn’t the person she’d always thought she was.

And if she didn’t know who she was, how could she figure out who she could be?

MaggieLondon, September 1939

Maggie crossed the road by the stately Hotel Russell and turned towards Russell Square where men piled sandbags around nearby buildings. One of many signs that London was a city at war.

Despite the midday sun that shone bright in the clear, autumn-blue sky, there was a new sense of anxiousness and hurry and expectation that hadn’t been there before war was declared.

And war was the reason she was still here. Although Maggie had stuffed the telegram from her father at the bottom of her case beneath a winter cardigan, the words were imprinted on her memory. A short but unmistakable expression of disappointment. Once she got his promised letter, there would be anger too and more reproaches of the kind she’d already had from Aunt Elsie in Scotland.

She turned into the square and found a bench in a sunny corner near a horse chestnut tree, spiny seedpods almost ready to split and scatter mahogany-brown conkers onto the path below.

Sitting on one end of the bench, she took a cheese and pickle sandwich wrapped in brown paper from her bag, along with the Agatha Christie book she’d bought on Saturday. Her
family weren’t here and neither were their recriminations. Don’t think about what might be, focus on what is.

‘Miss Wyndham?’ A plump, blonde girl who sat three rows behind Maggie at the office hovered beside the bench, a taller but still boyish man, despite his sober navy suit, white shirt and muted paisley tie, at her side.

‘Yes, but it’s Maggie.’ She searched for the girl’s name and came up blank. She’d only been there a few days and even if the other girls hadn’t already known each other, clustering together in groups at break in the canteen, there was no time for chatting, only a relentless clack of typewriter keys punctuated with the clang of carriage returns. Maggie had taken the job, the first one she’d interviewed for, because she needed money to live on while she figured out what she wanted to do next. She manufactured her best social smile and slid her sandwich back in the bag.

‘Evelyn Fox-Willoughby but everyone calls me Evie.’ The girl sat on the bench beside Maggie. Beneath a small grey hat with a dashing pink feather, her wavy blonde hair framed a round face with a friendly smile. ‘I spend most of the day staring at the back of your head. This is my brother, William, known to his friends as Will.’ She gestured to the man at her side.

‘Hello.’ Will was older than Evie, likely mid-twenties, with laughing blue eyes and, beneath his dark hat, the same light hair as his sister. ‘Evie.’ He leaned closer to flick the feather on his sister’s hat in a way that, when they were children, he might have tugged on her plaits. ‘Perhaps Maggie wants to read her book and eat her lunch without your chatter.’ Like Evie’s, his accent was precise and clipped, the kind that spoke of tweed-suited shooting parties and glittering twenty-first birthday balls.

‘No, it’s fine.’ In almost a week, the only people Maggie
had talked to for any length of time were the woman mopping the corridor at her hostel and a bus conductor, both of whom were at least forty years her senior. ‘I’m happy for you to join me.’ Before she’d been sent to England for school, she’d been like Evie, friendly and open, but school had made her wary and distrustful of strangers. This was a fresh start, though, and a chance to make new friends.

Will sat on the other side of Evie. ‘Don’t mind my sister. She talks too much.’ He gave Maggie a sideways glance and winked.

Evie rolled her eyes and grinned. ‘And don’t mind my brother. He’s nice, truly, but he doesn’t talk enough.’ She dug in a paper bag and pulled out two wrapped sandwiches. ‘You’re new, aren’t you?’

‘Yes, I started on Monday.’ Because she’d practiced in her own time, those typewriting classes that had been almost an after-thought between the tedium of flower arranging and frustration of ladylike deportment, meant Maggie could earn her own money and not depend on her father.

‘I’ve only been there three weeks.’ Evie unwrapped her sandwich and her eyes twinkled. ‘Not that typing letters is exciting, but it’s something to do while we wait.’ She smoothed her tailored grey dress. Although she could only have been a year or so older than Maggie, together with the fashionable hat, her dress, red lipstick and heeled suede shoes had an air of sophistication that made Maggie feel like a gauche schoolgirl.

‘Wait?’ Maggie tucked her feet in her plain black shoes further beneath the bench before she took out her sandwich again. ‘You mean for the real war to start?’

‘Yes.’ Evie’s vivacious expression sobered. ‘My parents say it wil. . .