I'll Be Seeing You Read Online Free PDF Page B

was true. ‘Well, we’ll see you next week. Would you like to stay the night here?’
    â€˜Love to but I’ll have to get back to old Reggie and the dogs.’ There was a pause, a slight lowering of the voice. ‘You know, Juliet, when your mother dies, you suddenly realize all the things you wish you’d asked her before. I felt just the same when your grandmother went – so did Daisy, too. We both wished we had. Only somehow when they’re alive, there’s never quite the time or chance, is there?’ A sigh and another faint clink. ‘And then, of course, it’s too late.’
    Following my aunt’s example, I went in search of a drink and poured a large malt whisky. It felt physically warming and gave me the courage to go upstairs and begin the task of clearing out my mother’s desk. I sat down at the desk once more and began on the pigeonholes. I went through everything, making a pile for things that could be discarded and others that should be kept, and, as I worked, I kept having the eerie sensation that she was standing behind me, watching. I turned my head several times, hairs prickling on the back of my neck, but, of course, there was nobody there.
    The letters I found were mostly recent – from friends, from Drew and Sonia, from Flavia and myself, from Aunt Primrose – and family snaps taken not so long ago. Her last year’s diary, kept in the central pigeonhole with her old and tattered address book, showed regular appointments with the doctor and hospital from early October onwards. Beneath the pigeonhole there was a small drawer and inside it I found my mother’s fountain pen and her marriage certificate. Marguerite Anne Woods had married Vernon Henry Byrne on 16th April 1944, at a register office in Buckinghamshire. Somehow Drew and I had never thought about how long they had been married. Their wedding anniversaries had passed almost unmarked – I’m sure Da forgot most of them – and this was the first time I had ever laid eyes on their marriage certificate. I was poor at arithmetic but I could do the sum. I had been born on 14th September 1944 – five months later.
    I closed the desk lid and moved on to the drawers below. In them, I found bundles of much older letters – some of them going back a long time. I came across several that I had written to her as a child, handmade birthday cards I had given her over the years and some old school reports. There were more photos: ones of Drew and me as small children in the Oxford garden, of Da reading in a deckchair under the beech tree, of long-since dead pets – dogs, cats, rabbits. And even older photos of Ma herself with her sisters as young girls – one of all of them together with arms linked in a smiling row at the seaside, dressed in funny, old-fashioned woollen swimming costumes and rubber bathing caps: Violet, Lily, Iris, Primrose and, the youngest and smallest at the end of the row, my mother, Daisy. I put those aside for Aunt Primrose and opened another drawer. Old diaries, old theatre programmes, a box of paper clips, luggage labels, a bottle of blue Quink ink, a grease-stained notebook of post-war recipes that Ma had written down: tips on cooking with dried egg, ways of stretching the meat ration, new ideas for fish dishes. There was nothing that related to the American pilot. No more crew photos, no letters from him, no mementoes of any kind.
    Until I came to the last drawer – the bottom drawer on the left. There were only two things in it and I took out the first. It was a small sketchbook – I had one rather like it myself that I carried about in my bag. This one was full of pencil drawings – sketches done on an air force station in wartime – and the people, the planes, the vehicles were all American. American uniforms, American Jeeps and American bombers with big white stars. The single exception was a drawing of my English mother in her