Unlocking the Past Read online

  Unlocking the Past

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Copyright

  Unlocking the Past

  Grace Thompson

  Chapter One

  Caroline picked up the dress in which she had been married to Barry Martin. It had been an unorthodox wedding, as the couple had not intended to stay married. A divorce had been planned before the wedding date was fixed. But their feelings for each other had changed and now she and Barry were going to make the marriage a real one and the dress had greater significance. Perhaps she would wear it on the day she left her parents’ house to live with him for the first time.

  The flat above Temptations, the sweet shop in Sophie Street owned by Barry’s mother, was empty and as Nia wouldn’t charge them any rent, Barry thought they should live there for a while to enable him to concentrate on building up his business.

  She held the dress up to the light to make sure there were no marks or serious creases. She would have to take in the seams a little as she had been expecting Joseph when she and Barry had dishonestly sworn they would stay together “Til death us do part”. She hung the dress in the wardrobe and went downstairs where her mother was getting Joseph, her eighteen-month-old son, ready to go for a walk. She smiled contentedly. Little Joseph, the reason for marrying Barry Martin.

  She watched her mother with great affection as Janet finished dressing the little boy. As Caroline had lived at home throughout the pregnancy and birth it meant Janet had been very involved in Joseph’s welfare and now, with the plans to move out of the family home so imminent, Caroline knew that her mother was feeling an agony akin to bereavement.

  Janet fastened the buttons on Joseph’s coat, counting as she did so and praising the child as he joined in. Her face wore an expression of such love that Caroline felt a lump swell in her throat. She had a glimpse then of the lovely young woman her mother had once been, although Janet’s hair had now turned to grey, held back in an untidy bun from which wisps fell to frame her face; her rosy, country-woman’s face, which was lined now and showed so clearly her sixty-five years.

  Janet picked up the child and kissed his smooth cheek and he wrapped his chubby arms around her neck to clutch her against him as he returned the kiss soundly.

  “Nana’s best boy,” Janet murmured.

  As Janet put the little boy down and watched him scuttle away to find the toy he planned to take with him on his walk, Caroline saw her expression alter and a frown cross her face.

  “Don’t be sad about us leaving, Mam,” she said softly. “I won’t be far away, and I want you to be as happy about Barry and me as I am.”

  “Happy for you? Of course I’m happy. Didn’t I know that he wouldn’t be able to stop himself falling in love with you? Married in name only, for heaven’s sake! A beautiful girl like you? There isn’t a man of flesh and blood who could fail to love you, Caroline, my lovely girl.”

  Caroline Griffiths had realised she was carrying their child only months before Barry Martin’s older brother, Joseph, was killed in a road accident. They had made plans to marry and for the shy Caroline her future looked perfect. Then a moment’s stupidity had ended Joseph’s life and Caroline couldn’t face a future without him.

  Barry had found her when she was overwhelmed by despair and contemplating suicide and agreed to marry her to give the child his rightful name of Martin. When Joseph Hywel Martin had been born, Barry had taken to the the child as if he were his own. His pride in his development and his charm and attractive looks – so like his dead father – had thrilled him more and more as time passed.

  For a brief moment she relived the terror of the night when her life had changed so dramatically: hearing about the accident involving a van in which Joseph and Lewis-boy had been on the way back from Cardiff with two girls, the wealthy and outrageous Weston Girls. Then being told that both Lewis-boy Lewis and Joseph Martin were dead, leaving her carrying Joseph’s child. Suicide had seemed the only way out.

  Although it had not been a real marriage, Barry had enthusiastically taken on the role of father to little Joseph, and his affection for his nephew-cum-step-son gradually overflowed to include the child’s mother. It was only recently that Caroline and Barry had accepted that their friendship was changing into something deeper, and now they had decided to make the marriage of convenience a real one and call off the divorce that had been their original intention.

  Janet said little as the three of them walked along the lanes towards the outskirts of Pendragon Island. She pointed out the birds, who, in this lovely month of March were already pairing off and flying about with beaks filled with materials for nest-building, and named the flowers and insects they discovered to an interested Joseph, but her replies to Caroline’s remarks were brief and with even a hint of sadness. “What are you thinking about, Mam?” Caroline asked. “You seem miles away.”

  “Not that far, only a few miles,” Janet replied. But although Caroline waited for further explanation, none came. Mam would tell her when she was ready.

  * * *

  Janet was thinking about her own parents and wishing they could have been there to enjoy little Joseph with her, but she hadn’t seen her parents, her sister Marion or her brother Adrian, since she had run away from the miseries of her home to marry Hywel.

  Since cutting off all contact with her family, she and Hywel had been so happy that she had rarely thought of the family she had left behind. With her own sons and daughter, life had been full, rich in laughter and contentment if not in material things. Hywel and their boys, Basil and Frank, had been joined by their orphaned cousin Ernie, who had been brought up as their brother. Her gentle and kindly daughter, Caroline, was the only one with a regular job, working in the town’s wool and sewing shop.

  Before Basil had married and settled down, her husband Hywel and the three boys had lived on their wits, rarely working, surviving on the crops they grew and the animals they kept, easing the family budget with odd-jobbing, poaching and petty thieving, something that Janet had learned to accept together with the rest of Hywel’s carefree attitude to life.

  Perhaps it was the fact of growing old, but thoughts had strayed more and more often to her family, wondering where and how they were. She hardly remembered her unkind brother and had even less recollection of her sister, Marion, who had left the family farm when Janet was very young. Curiosity about them grew and grew into a hesitant idea, which she shared with her daughter.

  “Having your young Joseph and our Basil’s little Ronnie has given me so much pleasure,” she began, “that it’s started me thinking of my own family, wishing they were the kind of people I could invite to share it. But Mam left when I was three, and apart from that gift when I married your father, I’ve never heard a word since. My father is dead. Mrs Phillips got in touch and told me that. There’s only my brother, Adrian, and I doubt if he’s changed enough for me to enjoy his company!”

  “Do you ever think about your sister, Mam?” Caroline coaxed.

  Janet shrugged. “I’ve wondered whether I could find her, but no, she’s probably dead too. I’ve heard nothing of her since I was six years old. Eleven, that’s all she was, poor little dab, when she ran away from my father’s bad temper.” She opened the cutlery drawer and began setting the table for the evening meal, lips moving as she counted. “B
arry’s coming, isn’t he? That’s eight and the two little ones, but our Frank and Ernie might be late. A law to themselves those two brothers of yours.”

  “Auntie Marion. Strange to have an aunt I’ve never met. She could still be alive. Why don’t you try again to find her?”

  “I doubt she survived long. Sickly she was, and my father wouldn’t make any allowances, insisted on her getting up for milking and doing a share of the heavy work like the rest of us. And dear brother, Adrian, snitching on her whenever she paused for a rest.” She sighed. “We weren’t born out of love, like you and the boys, and like little Joseph here. We were born to provide an unpaid workforce for Dad.”

  “It wouldn’t hurt to advertise for her, make a few enquiries.”

  “It’s all so long ago. Seventy she’d be, five years older than me, and I have tried from time to time and got nowhere.”

  “Perhaps Uncle Adrian would know?”

  “I’m not asking him! He wouldn’t give anyone the muck off his boots! All I’d get from that one is the threat of a shotgun for trespassing. Worse than my father, Adrian is. Nasty bit of work. No, it’s too late, best I lock up the past where it belongs and enjoy your Joseph and Basil’s Ronnie all to myself.”

  “Who did you say told you about your father’s death?” Caroline asked.

  “Mrs Phillips, the wife of a farm-worker who had once worked for him. She found out where I lived and wrote to me. Why?”

  “She might be able to to tell you what happened to your sister.”

  “Too long ago. She’s probably gone too.”

  Although she had firmly shrugged aside any idea of finding her sister, Janet found the idea, once revived, refused to go away. It wouldn’t hurt to ask a few people. The farm where she had been born wasn’t that far away, some fifty miles, no more. She was able to drive and the old van wasn’t always needed by Hywel or the boys. She could tell the family she was going into Cardiff to buy a dress. The plan formed and grew almost of its own volition.

  She could visit the village, chat to some of the elderly people who lived there, pick up some tenuous threads and check them out at her leisure. She quelled her growing excitement. Silly to build up her hopes. She’d been along that path before and it had come to nothing. A day spent asking about her family mustn’t be important enough to end in disappointment. No, she would treat it as an outing to find a few of the people who might still remember her, nothing more.

  But still that glimmer of hope remained, forming a vague picture of an elderly woman who would be her sister. She tried half-heartedly to push it away but it crept back and brought a frisson of excitement. So much would have happened in sixty-one years that listening to her sister’s story would be like having a book read to her. And what a lot she would have to impart about her own unconventional and resourceful family!

  * * *

  Janet and Hywel Griffiths and their family lived in a small cottage a few fields away from the edge of the town of Pendragon Island. They had a few acres of land and lived almost independently, growing food, keeping chickens and, from time to time throughout rationing, an illegal pig which they killed and cured in the smokehouse beyond the toolshed. A large toolshed-cum-garage had been joined to the house and was now a bedroom for their son Frank and his cousin, Ernie. Their other son, Basil, was married to Eleri and lived in rooms in Trellis Street with their small son, Ronnie.

  Although small, the cottage seem capable of holding an inordinate number of people. With the windows wide open and light spilling out onto the yard, laughter echoing around the fields, it was a place that drew people to relax and have fun. Invitations were rarely necessary for a party to happen and regarding the celebration of Caroline and Barry’s decision to start a home together, a party would automatically ensue. She made a list to remind herself to buy extra flour to make bread and hoped there would be some way to fill enough sandwiches. Hywel usually found something, bartering this for that, his shotgun and fishing lines being the starting point for acquiring off-ration butter and cheese and even an occasional joint of meat.

  It didn’t occur to her that no one would come. Neither did it occur to her that Hywel’s search for food to fill them all would fail.

  * * *

  Caroline knew she was making it difficult for everyone by refusing to decide on a date for moving in with Barry and beginning her new life. It was such a complicated and strange occasion to arrange. Not a wedding, not a house-move, not even a re-affirmation of their marriage vows. No ceremony and no excuse to dress up in splendid clothes or for people to bring gifts. How could even someone like her Mam make a celebration and a party out of that?

  If it had been possible, Caroline would have chosen to just quietly move her belongings out of her parents’ house and into the flat above Temptations sweet shop. It sounded so simple, but with the sweet shop run by Rhiannon Lewis, Barry’s ex-fiancée, that was not possible. They had to mark the occasion in some way and give Rhiannon a chance to decide whether or not she could continue working at the shop with Barry and his family going in and out.

  Before she could begin life as Barry’s wife she had to talk to Rhiannon and, although she had tried to find or create an opportunity, she had so far failed. One Wednesday afternoon, as she and her mother finished a walk and reached home with a tired Joseph clutching some early primroses in his tight fist, she decided that she wouldn’t leave it a moment longer.

  “Mam, will you look after Joseph for an hour while I go and find Rhiannon? I can’t let things drift on any longer and I can’t decide on a date for moving out before talking to her.”

  “Go on, you. Joseph and I will busy ourselves getting dinner. Now, let’s see, Joseph, how many plates will we need?” She began counting the members of the family on her fingers helped by her grandson as Caroline kissed him and walked once more down the lane towards town.

  * * *

  In Temptations sweet shop on the corner of Sophie Street, Rhiannon Lewis was preparing to wash the shelves under the counter. It was a Wednesday afternoon and most of the town’s shops were closed. She often used the opportunity to do the cleaning that was difficult to achieve while customers needed to be served. She had returned to the shop that day at two-thirty and, as usual, had run straight up to the flat to see whether Barry Martin was there. He wasn’t and she washed his dishes and tidied the living room of the flat before going down to begin her pre-planned tasks.

  She stopped in the doorway of the room above the shop and looked around to assure herself there was nothing else that needed doing. She knew she should no longer involve herself, even so trivially, in Barry’s life, now he and Caroline had announced their intention to live together and make their marriage a real one, but the habit, begun so many weeks ago, was difficult to break.

  The whole of Rhiannon’s relationship with Barry Martin had been complicated. Most of her friends met someone, fell in love, became engaged then married; but for her things hadn’t been that simple. She and Barry had fallen in love and that was followed by their engagement. But due to a misunderstanding the engagement had ended and, almost immediately, Barry had married Caroline Griffiths.

  Then their engagement was on again when Barry had explained that the reason for his wedding was solely to support Caroline; to marry her and give his name to the unborn child of his brother Joseph, who had been killed at the same time as her own brother, Lewis-boy. The gesture had seemed so foolish, then noble, and now, with the engagement off once again and Barry telling her he would remain married to Caroline, so confusing, she didn’t know how she felt or how she was expected to feel.

  There was resentment, and some peevish anger towards Caroline. She had been let down and, worse, made to look foolish. That was hard to accept, with even her closest friends making jokes about the peculiar situation. She hadn’t spoken to Caroline since the latest change in her relationship with Barry, and had wondered if she ever would. Then, the final insult. She had been told by Barry that he and his wife and her son were go
ing to live in the flat above Temptations. It was so thoughtless of him, and somehow typical, she decided. He could at least have found somewhere further away so that he didn’t have to walk through the shop every day, showing her and everyone else how happy he was.

  She wondered how she would behave when she and Caroline did meet. Would she smile and pretend? Or act more in the style of her mother, the archetypal redhead, Dora, and rant and rave and tell her how much she hated her for ruining her life?

  If she were truthful she couldn’t say her life was ruined. She and Barry would never have been a perfect couple. In fact it was doubtful if they would have married even if Caroline’s troubles hadn’t intervened. There were many times when he forgot an arrangement, or was late, and each time he expected her to understand without complaint. What was worse, he had never made her feel adored. Adored was a word she used whenever she day-dreamed about the man she would marry. No, Barry had never adored her and that was what she wanted when she became a wife – an adoring husband.

  Barry Martin was a carpenter by trade but he worked as a photographer, and was slowly building up a reputation for quality and reliability. He had bought an old garage and had converted it into a workroom with a reception and display area, but he continued to use the flat from time to time. It had once been intended to be Rhiannon’s home, hers and Barry’s, but walking through the rooms and looking around her now, the pain and disappointments had faded to the point where she could feel only the slightest tinge of regret.

  She admitted to herself that the only pain really left was that of rejection. If only she had been the one who had faced facts and told Barry goodbye. Then there would be nothing left but relief. But she hadn’t, and the best way of dealing with the situation was with a façade of hurt pride. She couldn’t make it too easy for Caroline and Barry!