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‘No. It would have been where your gran grew up. She married Colin, your grandpa, the year I was born, when she was eighteen.’ Mum blushed crimson on Izzy’s behalf.
I squinted at a stamp. ‘Italian, perhaps.’
I sorted them by date stamp, which was hard, many were smudged. The first letter wasn’t easy to read, most of it was in Italian and the handwriting was characterised by big loops. Many English words were often wrongly spelt. As I turned over the paper, what caught my eye was the name, Lora. An Italian friend? I checked the postage date.
‘Nineteen fifty-two. How old was Granny back then?’
Mum calculated on her fingers. ‘About eleven.’
‘Sweet, she had a pen pal in Italy; the postal address is Potenza, Basilicata.’
Mum shrugged. ‘Ever since she was little, she was obsessed with Italy.’
‘Why?’
‘Oh, obvious, her mother, your great-grandmother, Catherine. She lived out there before the war, when Mussolini came to power. Catherine was a political activist.’
‘For or against?’
‘Oh, against. She made posters, wrote propaganda and journal articles, according to my grandfather,’ she said, ending on a bitter note.
‘You mean Nigel.’
Nigel Drake was my great-grandfather. Remarkably, he was still alive, somewhere. Ancient and forgotten, he had abandoned his family because of the scandal of Izzy’s shotgun marriage to Colin. The last we heard, having been widowed for the second time, he had settled in New Zealand.
‘So, Izzy was writing letters to an Italian, da-dah.’ But Mum didn’t smile. Too soon, perhaps for a return of humour. She had the look of someone lost in the past, something I easily recognised. Granny Izzy liked to reminisce too, but she often couldn’t tell the difference between fact and fiction.
Mum’s train of thoughts was elsewhere. ‘It got her in trouble… Catherine. She nearly ended up in prison, so she had to leave Italy. She was a talented artist. Then suddenly, she stopped painting, too.’
I flinched at the word painting. I hadn’t known. Nana Catherine had died in an air raid in London not long after Isabel was born.
Mum spread the letters out. ‘They’re in Italian and English, a bit of a mix, some strange symbols, too, like hieroglyphics. Everyone thought she was joking when she said she could read Italian.’
‘Izzy?’
A big sigh from Mum and I detected regret in the accompanying murmur. ‘Apparently, she could.’
I picked up a letter and read it aloud. ‘Dearest Isabel. I am in good health. Father has allowed me out to play. My leg braces hurt. But I must not take them off.Lora’s English is good.’ I found the last letter, according to the postmark. ‘Dated 1958. Granny Izzy would have met Grandpa by then.’ An obvious conclusion because Mum was born in 1959.
‘Your gran married so young.’ The laughter died on her lips ‘Nigel had lost Catherine and by then had married again.’
There were widows and widowers a plenty after the war, and two such people had met. Nigel, single father with young Isabel, married lonely mother of two, Carole. The two families merged under one name, Drake, and the union gifted Beryl and her brother a step-sister, Isabel. Years later, Colin had snatched Izzy from the cradle of this family, and there had been a notorious, somewhat acrimonious wedding. I couldn’t remember much about my grandfather, Colin, other than he favoured beer and didn’t like Nigel, hence the estrangement. He died a few years before Izzy passed away.
I was about to fold the letter away, when with a thump of my heart, something in the last paragraph sharpened my attention. ‘Listen.Does she suspect we are writing? We must be careful. If my father finds out, he will be angry. He says I must never mention Mama’s name. My memories of her are long gone. Perhaps you could send me a picture, you must have photographs?Whose mother is he talking about?’
Mum’s lips pressed tighter together.
‘Mum?’
‘Rumours, just family gossip.’ There were fresh tears in her eyes.
‘What rumours?’ I led her to the settee, and she sat, cradling the letter I had read in her hands.
‘That Catherine had a lover in Italy before the war.’
‘But you don’t believe it?’
‘Izzy, when she was in that psychiatric hospital, talked a lot. But you know we thought her memory wasn’t reliable, all those silly things she said.’
