Nancy Atherton - Aunt Dimity's Good Deed

“Were you an airman?” I asked.

Tom looked at Nurse Watling. “I must be having an off day, Rebecca. The child thinks I’m Father Time.” He turned back to me. “My dear girl, I was only twelve years old when the war ended. They signed ‘em up young, but not quite that young.”

I gazed at my feet in mute embarrassment, remembering, too late, that Gerald had told Nell his father had been too young to serve during the war. I wondered if I was developing an Aunt Dimity complex. If I wasn’t careful, I’d start seeing her behind every bush.

“There, there,” Tom murmured consolingly. “Not your fault. They don’t teach history in school anymore. I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of the Battle of Britain.”

“Yes, I have,” I said defensively. “In fact, I’m sort of related to someone who died in it.”

“Are you?” Tom said, impressed. “So am I. My mother, my father, my brother Stanley, and my sister Iris. My aunt and uncle lived upstairs, my grandparents next door. Dad sent me round the comer one Sunday for a bit of cheese, and while I was gone a Heinkel dropped a stick on our row of houses. When I came home, there was no row of houses. Just flames and smoke and ruin.” He smiled. “That’s how I became interested in airplanes. Queer, isn’t it?”

Was he delirious? I glanced at Nurse Watling, but she seemed to be absorbed in her reading. I looked at Bill, who lifted his eyebrows, and at Nell, who simply looked faintly puzzled.

“Mr. Willis,” she said, taking the bull by the horns with her usual forthrightness, “how can that be? Your brother’s name is Williston, and Anthea’s your sister, and both of them are still alive. You spent the war at number three, Anne Elizabeth Court.”

Tom shook his head. “I’m loath to contradict you, my dear Lady Nell, but all of that came much later. After Dimity.”

27.

A squadron of Spitfires could have strafed Tom’s backyard and I wouldn’t have blinked. My heart, so recently resuscitated after its encounter with the Gloster Gladiator, had experienced another severe jolt, and I sat as if turned to stone, head pointed in Tom’s direction, mouth agape, incapable of speech.

Fortunately, Tom needed no encouragement to go on with his story. He told it with a detached air, as though he knew that to infuse his words with any strong emotion would be to reduce stark tragedy to mere melodrama.

Tom’s entire family had been killed in a single air raid, part of the “Little Blitz” that had pounded London in January 1944. “They’d tried to evacuate Stanley and Iris and me early on, but my mother wouldn’t hear of it. ‘If we go, we’ll go together,’ she always said. She was wrong, as it turned out.”

There’d been a well-established routine for handling bombed-out families by that point in the war, but Tom had evaded the long arm of authority and lived on his own for the next few months, “like a rat in the ruins,” doing odd jobs and finding trinkets in the rubble to trade for food and drink. He’d made his home in the basement of a ruined block of flats until a rescue worker had finally collared him and hauled him off to Starling House.

I blinked. “Starling House? The home for widows and orphans?”

Tom looked at me with new respect. “Fancy you knowing about that.”

“I, uh, I’ve done a lot of reading about the Second World War,” I told him.

“You must tell me where you’ve read about Starling House,” said Tom. “Did they make any mention of a woman called Dimity Westwood? If not, the account is sadly incomplete. Dimity was Starling House.” He smiled fondly. “Marvelous woman. Changed my life. Cleaned me up, drilled me in my sums, taught me how to speak like a proper little gentleman. Gave me Geraldine.”

Which meant, I realized wonderingly, that Geraldine and Reginald were the stuffed-animal equivalents of cousins. I wasn’t the only one with family connections in England.

“Didn’t you resent it?” Bill was asking. “Not Geraldine, of course, but the discipline, after all that freedom?”

“At first,” Tom admitted. “But once Dimity discovered my passion for airplanes, I was putty in her hands. She took me out to the airfields, introduced me to her flyer chums, let me climb all over their crates.” Tom’s sea-bright eyes glowed as the memories came flooding back. “She was a corker. I adored her. We all did. She made Starling House a home. Invented games, told stories, baked little treats and let us lick the mixing bowls.”

“Butterscotch brownies,” I said numbly.

“I suppose you sampled those at my son’s house,” Tom said. “They’re a great favorite of Gerald‘s—Arthur’s, too, but he’s fond of most things edible. Dimity gave me the recipe. She said she’d had it from a very dear friend of hers, a lady-soldier like herself who’d come all the way from America.”

I put a hand to my forehead. “And Dimity placed you with the Willises?”

“She did.” Tom gave off another wheezing chuckle. “Cousin William said you’d be surprised.”

Thunderstruck would have been more accurate. I’d taken it for granted that Dimity had been drawn back to the cottage solely because of her concern for Willis, Sr. I could see now that I’d been wrong. She must have been concerned about Uncle Tom as well. He was a Starling House kid, one of her own, part of the family she’d created to make up for the one she’d lost when the love of her life had been shot down over the Channel. Tom was as much Dimity’s child as I was. She must have known that something was troubling him, and decided to lend a hand. It just so happened that the hand she had to lend belonged to me.

“Did the Willis family adopt you formally?” I asked.

Tom nodded. “And sent me to school and university. It was rough going at first, but Williston stood up for me every time I put a foot wrong. After a while, I was known simply as the elder son of the family.”

Bill leaned forward. “Does Gerald know that you were adopted?”

“Naturally,” said Tom. “I’ve always been totally honest with my son.” He paused. “I wish I could say that he’s been equally truthful’ with me.” The flowing conversation stopped abruptly. Nurse Watling looked up from her book, but whether she was checking on her patient or simply waiting for him to go on, I couldn’t tell.

“Do you have children?” Tom asked finally.

“Not yet,” I replied, slipping my hand into Bill’s.

“When you do,” Tom said, staring out at the distant horizon, “you will learn that the worst thing in the world is to know that your child is in torment, and not know why.” His fingers fluttered toward the cast on Bill’s arm. “Broken bones will mend, and so will broken hearts, given the proper care and attention. But you can give neither when you don’t know what’s wrong. Helplessness in the face of a child’s suffering is the curse of parenthood.”

Nurse Wading put her book down, filled the glass with water, and brought it to Tom. She helped him to drink, tucked his blankets up again, and stood over him for a moment, as though debating whether or not he was fit enough to continue. Then she reached for the battered old giraffe and nestled it in the mound of blankets on Tom’s lap.

“Dear old Geraldine,” Tom said, breathing slowly and evenly. “We’ve seen it all, haven’t we, old girl?”

Nurse Watling sat down again, but left the book lying on the table and maintained a vigilant watch over her patient.

“Gerald comes to see me every month,” Tom went on. “He always brings a beautiful new book for my library, sometimes a rare edition. We talk about the Shuttleworth Collection, the family, my health—but we never talk about Gerald. I know that my child is suffering, and I would give anything, anything in the world, if he would only tell me why.”