The Dollhouse
Birgit named her daughter Adalheidis because Birgit was from Norway where such a name would keep a child warm, so many body-heated syllables expelled upon the girl every time her name was called. But Birgit’s husband Roger was English and preferred clipped names. Heidi wouldn’t do – smacked of Bavaria – and Hitler was already making headlines. Adele – that was a good English name. Roger agreed to name the baby Adalheidis, but they would call her Adele. Adele Rose Watson. Adalheidis’s mother acquiesced, but nonetheless stitched reindeer with fuzzy muzzles on Adele’s baby blanket, and later on her Peter Pan collars, a sort of emblem for the child.
Adele was wild for an English girl of the day, but just right for a Northern sprit. It was somewhat a shame that she grew up in Bath instead of the Outer Hebrides or at least the Isle of Skye. Bath was built on good behavior and climbing roses. Covert female persuasion. After all, Jane Austin is the city’s patron saint. Adele smacked the ball, broke her crayons, preferred exposed wounds to band aids. Red was always better than pink. Her parents, maybe especially her father, came to love her for this and understood that the girl would have to go to college. Mind like that would never settle for the kitchen.
It should have been a good life. Milky tea and Victoria sponge. But the trajectory of Adele’s life was broken long before she was born. Any Gypsy could have told Adele it was out of her hands. Almost one hundred years before her birth, the first Baedeker travel guide book was published in Germany. In 1839, Verlag Karl Baedeker sealed Adele’s fate.
Alys
I thought Nan resembled her house. Oh, not as in big as (that would better describe me) – but as in weathered. Her time-soft silvery hair was coveted by nest-building sparrows, and her eyes drifted between the greens and blues of sea glass. She favored sand-colored capris and flats. Cashmere sweaters of abalone gray or shell. She blended into the shore like driftwood.
The childhood days I spent with Nan were my best.
I grew up on the wrong side of the Golden Gate Bridge for a kid who preferred to be outside. Color to me was stacked oranges outside of the corner grocery and the cherry-headed parrots of Telegraph Hill. It isn’t that nature doesn’t exist in San Francisco, certainly it does. It’s just that honking cars and honking geese are not the same thing. And it wasn’t as if I was allowed to go to Golden Gate Park on my own after school. At Nan’s cliff house, I could sit in wait for whales, birds giving me their opinions. At night, the stars were stars, not fluorescents in a high rise office building illuminating the poor soul working late.
On the days my younger brother Kyle and I stayed with Nan, we were as close to feral as children who are expected to eat with a knife and fork could be. We stayed out all day; I’m sure we smelled like sheep. We slept in red plaid sleeping bags on the floor by the low fire, and the glass wall blocked nothing but the wind. When the moon came up, it felt personal.
Nan was a terrible cook and not in the least interested in entertaining us, unless it was to take us for long cliff walks or down to the tumbling beach. Nan read books and worked on watercolors that were not transcendent, most of which she threw in the fireplace. I loved to watch the thick paper take light, the cold sea colors succumb to the flames. It seemed a sort of game of paper-rock-scissors to me. Always I thought the paper, so saturated in water and color would defeat the flames, but fire wins out.
One night, Nan and Kyle asleep, I threw my crayons – only the broken ones – into the fire just to watch them melt into a puddle of color. When Nan saw my artist’s pallet in the morning I thought I was in trouble for sure, but she said, “That’s rather nice,” and the three of us took to sometimes seeing what colors or scents we could elicit from various leaves or cones, and what would melt best. The undisputed winner was Kyle’s plastic farm animals turned Dali-esq.
All this time I was becoming fat, like the word fat, short and round. Almost fourteen years old, 5’4” (hopefully still growing!) and 13.5 pounds over doctor recommended weight. In my unfulfilled cotton training bra, I looked like the food pyramid.
Nan didn’t over-serve me, although I could eat a wedge of her artisan double-cream brie as if it were pie. (She only gave me pale slivers on fancy rectangular crackers.) It wasn’t even my mom, who tried for three colors on a plate. I did it to myself; I ate alone after school. Because now girls I had known all my life were toting tubes of lip gloss and nail polish, or that ultimate badge of honor – tampons. A period to me was nothing but grammar. Katy Carmichael was shaving her legs, and I was embarrassed when my mom so much as served chicken breasts. Puberty is an old story, unless it’s yours. This was when I developed asthma. My mom called it drama-induced asthma.
Nan told me not to worry – this too shall pass. She said I had the looks of a Siamese seal point. Artic blue eyes, dark brown hair, creamy skin.
That’s what Nan said. Kyle said I had the blubber of a seal, alright.
For God’s sake, Kyle, she does not! What’s wrong with you?!
Cinnamon Sugar Toast
White bread works best for empty calories, but wheat is acceptable
Toast the bread
Butter liberally so the topping will adhere
Do not use margarine unless that’s all your mother buys (poor you)
Mix equal parts cinnamon and white sugar
Eat about half a loaf for maximum results
I’m telling you, you can hide inside a layer of fat. Few people will see you under there. It’s safe, like a parka.
There came a day at the end of 8th grade when we went on a field trip to the Muir Redwoods and then to Stinson Beach. The forest air was as good as a hit of Albuterol, mulchy in the best way, earth and vinegar. I felt my lungs expand. The redwoods are grandfathers who survived the war of years – you’ve got to respect them. They have stories to tell. Some are scared by fire. Some have tufts of fern.
We got to Stinson Beach and from the parking lot it was a landscape of pointillist dots of bright color from the people on the sand, their suits and blankets. The ocean was Pacific gray; it is always cold. A watery sun was out. Katy Carmichael and Ashley Severs took their shorts, their shirts right off, boobs behind triangles. Then the other girls followed suit. Pretty soon the boys were picking up the girls and tossing them into the surf. The girls fake shrieked. Sounded like the mating calls of banshees. I sat on the beach, ran my fingers through the sand, poured it over my knees, into the folds of my shorts. I was the only girl not in the water.
Mr. Whitaker came over to me, reached for my hand. I knew a pity move when I saw one. “No thanks,” I said. “Great whites troll these shores. Attracted to the thrashing.” I never wanted a great white so bad in my life. Poor Mr. Whitaker. He was just trying to be nice.
Nan had a dollhouse. I assumed it was a childhood relic but she told me it was custom made. She kept it in the alcove built for a TV, she sometimes sat and watched it as if it was Days of Our Lives. Three stories, faux honey-colored limestone exterior, little brass address on the footstep. A painted-slate roof that lifted on hinges to reveal an attic. It didn’t have a front. It was open to the interior, to nine rooms of various theme. It looked comfortable. Wrought iron beds, patchwork quilts with tiny embroidery. A five-plate stove. Tartan rugs and a bookshelf. No people.
“It’s for looking, Alys, not for playing.”
Why have a dollhouse if you can’t play with it? Adults are stupid.
One fall day Nan left us at the house and went to Gualala for groceries. It was a just-right day for jumping into fall leaves. But the Monterey Cyprus, the bishop and shore pines had no concern for autumn. They remained resolutely evergreen. But there was something in the crisp and salty air that made the two of us naughty. I blame the influence of the turncoat season.
Kyle, at the fearless age of ten, climbed up on the shake roof, skateboard in hand, with the wild intent of boarding from the roof to the trampoline Nan had put out for us that summer. I guess he thought it was a fair substitute for turning leaves.
I had my own plans. I climbed up on a chair and shimmied the dollhouse out of it’s alcove. Brought it outside into the bright, delightful light of day. I sat it on the flagstone. Oh to touch that tiny furniture, to burn my fingers with the pleasure of disobedience on the five plate stove.
With a Rebel yell, Kyle skated off the roof, hit the trampoline, bounced airborn again, got hit below the eye with the skateboard, which changed his trajectory and the level of his scream, caromed off the tramp and landed on the dollhouse like a wrecking ball.
The bruise on his face was immediate and headed to prismatic.
We were speechless.
Not knowing what else to do, we went into the house and stood against the wall. That was Nan’s usual punishment, although it normally only lasted about ten minutes. Then she would bring us books and blankets and sometimes hot chocolate until we fell asleep in puddles of comfortable shame. To our credit, we stayed standing for over a half hour until she came home.
Nan saw the demolition on her way in. She found us standing Beefeater against the wall. She was wearing her favorite kimono with the butterfly sleeves. Arms akimbo, she looked on the verge of karate chopping us in the neck. “What happened?!” she yelled. We broke.
“Kyle skateboarded off the roof!”
“Alys brought the dollhouse outside!”
We turned on each other simultaneously, rats that we were.
Nan left us to our misery and went outside to salvage some of the tiny furniture, put it in her pocket like stones. She threw Kyle’s Mad Circle skateboard that she had bought him last Christmas into the trash. With the sudden strength of a warrior, she dismantled the trampoline that our dad had assembled, and I knew Nan was scotch-bound. She put all the pieces, metal and tarp, into the back of her Subaru and drove, presumably to the dump. We stayed against the wall, but our legs, the traitors, deserted us.
When Nan came home she got the skateboard out of the garbage, handed me the pathetic pieces of furniture which felt like thirty dirty pieces of silver, and then made us hot chocolate. Poured that scotch for herself – we could smell the peat.
“Do I ask that much of you?” she said, sitting down with us, handing Kyle an icepack and an Advil.
We shook our heads no. We loved her for her lack of rules within the safety of her Pacific croft.
“What is your mother going to think of me, letting you skateboard off the roof?” she asked Kyle. We hadn’t thought of that.
“Let’s lie,” ventured Kyle.
And we did. Because Nan knew how sorry we truly were and because sometimes you just have to protect yourself. I didn’t know it then, but Nan was a liar from way back.
High school was a continued reign of terror. I will admit, mostly self inflicted. It is unfortunate for me that I came of age when pop princesses decided that female sexy is an exposed midriff. Midriff is a pretty word. It sounds as if it should belong to the ocean, a phase of the tides. There was another 90s word: Muffin top. That’s used to describe girls who’s stomachs poof over the top of their hip-hugging jeans. Muffin is a nice word too. It belongs to the bakery. It belongs to the fat girls.
It was around this time that I took my rage out on my Barbie collection. It wasn’t a good collection to start with. I had lost half the clothes and was always fond of cutting that Oleo hair. Kyle once punched Hulu Hair Barbie’s conical boobs in with a pencil so her chest looked like imploded volcanos. I don’t know what that says about his mommy complex. The Barbies came to represent something I could not be. Oh sure, I could be a doctor, lawyer, huluist. President, sure. But I would never look like Barbie. I had a special shelf; in one fell swoop I relegated those dolls to an empty UHaul box I found in the garage. Put the box out for Goodwill. Good-riddance more like it.
The Barbie-que was Nan’s idea. She saw my cardboard box of ratty dolls and put it in the trunk of her Subaru along with my and Kyle’s paper bags of weekend clothes. It was October and cold enough for a fire. We hadn’t melted anything in the flames for years. Nan poured herself a glass of wine. (Waterford hands-off crystal, long ago wedding present.) She produced the box of askew limbs, mostly-naked, absolutely flat-midriff and eyes-so-bright dolls.
“Let’s burn these bitches,” said my grand Nan. Oh I loved her so! She got me.
Kyle was all for it, but he was in his science phase. “The plastic might be toxic.”
“Who cares. It’s a rental,” Nan said.
“I mean our lungs, not the fireplace,” responded Kyle.
“Have you ever smoked a cigarette?” Nan looked at him with her sea-faring eyes.
“No” Hard to lie to those eyes. “Yes.”
“Well, it’s not going to be any worse than that,” she said and tossed in Great Shape Barbie. “We’ll just burn a couple.”
Oh what a melt! The sizzle and the smell, think acrylic nail polish and burnt hair. We would have torched them all, I know we would have. Nan was doing it for me. She strapped one to a piece of kindling with kitchen string, put her in. It was Talking Barbie who had a repertoire of things like Let’s go to the mall! And I don’t know what. Let’s plan our dream wedding! And I swear on my Nan’s (eventual) grave that that doll said in a very high pitched, non-Barbie voice “See you later!” as her little plastic hands melded.
The three of us screamed and then laughed so hard Nan peed her granny panties. Then we threw the rest of the Barbies over the cliff into the high-tide ocean and vowed never to burn anything again.
But Nan had accomplished her mission. Barbie was nothing. I was something.
I just had to decide what.
To this day I sometimes think about the Barbies we pitched to sea. I picture a preteen walking the beach with her parents on a fresh day, the water schooling the sky on the color blue. The girl runs ahead and finds a tide of drowned Barbies. One with seaweed garroting her neck, all of them crabby. But still basically intact because – plastic is forever.
Nan had already taught me to make macramé knots around abalone shells and moss. She taught me how to make candles by pouring hot wax in the sand, and crowns of found feathers. I told her I wanted to learn how to make stained glass like in the chapel. She bought me plastic goggles, a cutter and a grinder and we picked out sheets of colored glass the way some do bolts of cotton. I shredded my fingertips on glass splinters, but Nan said that was good in case I ever broke the law.
the color) with the straight across bangs, my vintage cat’s eye shades. He said I was beautiful. Fragile. Fragile. How did he know?
On graduation night we went to the sanctioned party at the Highlander Club. Silver balloons and blue sparkle stars fallen on the tables. I told Jack let’s go, and he drove his old Honda Civic over the Golden bridge to tiny Muir Beach, rolled down the windows to eucalyptus and brine. It was cold. We got in the backseat and a rogue wind blew our clothes off, the moonlight turned our skin to candles. I willed myself over him and it hurt somethin’ awful – oh you know the drill (haha) – it lasted a minute and a half and then Jack was A Man.
But in a way he was. Jack had a dozen roses for me secreted in the trunk of the car. I could have taken it Victorianly – flowers for the deflowered – but he bought the bouquet before he knew my Muir Beach plan. The roses were white. Jack was leaving shortly for the Army and his destiny laid in the crosshairs of a Taliban sharpshooter armed with a Soviet rifle.
It wasn’t as if we were going to get married. I was headed to Oregon to learn how to blow glass. I wasn’t interested in production or art glass. Only glass windows, but I wanted to make my own the sheets of glass. Colors wielded straight from the earth – cobalt and copper. Sulfur. Cadmium, iron, and chrome. It may have started with the crayons in the fire. A desire for melty color.
I felt I wanted to build my life around fragile, beautiful things.
Jack and I wrote each other a few times. He never wrote directly of the fight. He told me about a dusty land. He said he missed the redwoods – trees like that, a forest like that, could not be blown to bits, surely it could not be blown. I wrote him that red glass used to be made with gold. And I sent him a pair of my panties. Which were kind of big.
When Kyle told me of Jack’s passing – bam, right between the eyes! – I broke.
“What a fucker you are Kyle,” I shouted into the phone and hung up on him. Anger felt better than grief. But anger is a sprinter and grief is a long-distance runner. That night all I could see was the way Jack’s chest looked in the moonlight, full of white roses. We were so young.
I couldn’t sleep. A week later I went to Nan’s. Seven hours and thirty-three minutes. Her door was never locked.
“You look as if you’re dissolving into that cup of tea,” she said, returning from her errands and finding me at her farmhouse kitchen table.
“I am, but it’s okay,” I said. “There’s sugar at the at the bottom of the cup.”
She gave my attempt at philosophy a half smile to match my own, sat down next to me. Drank my tea. “What’s up?”
“Jack died.”
“I heard. Your mother me told Kyle described it rather bluntly.”
“Yeah, like it was just a video game. I’m sad.” My eyes brimmed.
“Oh. You loved him.” She knew we dated.
“Maybe. Yes, I did. But I think it’s more that he’s just the first person I know who died and now I know for sure that people die. Oh, god, I sound so stupid.” I felt as if the last of my childhood had ended. It had turned into a version of Nan’s long-gone dollhouse – something I could peer into that was tilting toward dusty melancholy. “I’ll never be able to play Remember When with him.”
“Yeah, that’s a tough one,” Nan said. “I’d say you’ve lost the absurd certainty of personal immortality. Happens to us all.” She paused. “Sooner or later.”
Looking back, I might have caught her inflection, seen her memory-flinch. But I was self-absorbed, the way most grandkids are with their grandparents. I only saw my pain. In that moment I wanted there to be a heaven for Jack. 72 virgins, why not? Angel wings, sunrise pink. I don’t even know if I believe in Heaven, but I wanted it for Jack. Because Heaven is a sort of continuation of life. Further, Jack’s death made me assess the direction of my own life. Was I blowing my life away inhaling silica and inflicting 1,000 cuts upon my skin? Did I really care about the way sunlight and clouds cartwheeled through colors of glass?
“How’s about a scotch?” Nan ventured, pulling me back.
It was as good an answer as any. Tried and true.
In the morning, which was more like noon, over strong and scalding coffee, I told Nan the plan I had come up with to reset my inner balance. “I’ve decided to go to Europe,” I said.
She nodded. “To see famous windows?” she guessed.
“No. To walk the Cotswolds.”
That stopped her. “In England?” She knew it was in England, of course she knew. She was born there. And she was the one who had told me about the walk when she read about it in the Chronicle. “Why there? The Cotswolds are full of doilies and rose arbors. It’s for old people.”
“It is not. It’s pretty. And way less dramatic then the Alps or the Pyrenees. Your stuff gets delivered from inn to inn.” I wasn’t crazy.
“How long is the walk?”
“About 100 miles – ten or so days.”
Then Nan said something to me the likes of which she had never said before. “You know you can’t lose much weight in ten or so days.”
“Seriously?!”
“Then why are you going?!”
“Because you were born there, it’s our history. I don’t know why. I just want to stop thinking and walk.” I couldn’t put into words the fact that I had started to write bad, woebegone haikus on really expensive paper.
“Because Jack died?” she pushed again.
“Maybe not specifically him. But yes.”
“I see. You’re thinking ‘What are you going to do with your one wild and precious life?’ Now that you accept that it’s definitely going to end.”
Nan used to read us that Mary Oliver poem when we were young. “Yes!” I said, “Yes, I think that’s it,” and I knew that Nan understood my crossroads.
“I’m going with you,” she declared.
“You can’t go. You’re old.” Paid her back, and so easy!
“You’re fat.” She doubled down. “We’ll walk at the same pace.”
We smiled at each other. Insults turned bubbles. Suddenly I wanted to walk with Nan, to see her county with her. “Maybe we could see some church glass too,” I said and she knew she was in.
She bought us business class tickets!
The next day shit got real. 15 miles to Cleeve Hill and here’s what I learned: Walking is ridiculously hard. One would think it is like breathing. No particular skill set required. But breathing is equally hard while walking. Honestly, you can’t do both at once. And those walking sticks – those are to impale yourself on to end the misery.
The English don’t understand the word traverse. Let me give an example – there’s a very steep hill where a double Gloucester 9-pound round of cheese is released with a one-second head start over the idiots who race it down. Ambulances wait at the bottom, which should tell you everything you need to know. Our path went up that hill and we wished for an ambulance at the top.
We walked on. The days blurred. Stow-on-the-Wold where King Charles the First met his Waterloo. Ninety-nine yew trees in the St. Mary’s churchyard in Painswick, the 100th belongs to the Devil. King’s Stanley. Wooten-Under-Edge. We took shelter from the rain under a high- and-mighty copper beech, leaves as dark as bruises. Through pastures of sheep and sheep poop. Fields of crops, meadows of red poppies forever associated with the poetry of WWI. Roadside Queen Anne’s lace – or could it be hemlock? Let’s try it, end this foul life! Over styles – 300 before we were done – and at first they were quaint, but by the end they were fucking hurdles.
Once there was a coffee truck (!!) on the side of our path and once an outdoor restaurant on a spectacular view point. Old wooden benches placed just so at the top of endless hills. The clean white lines of turbine windmills far off, and then we walked to them. Clean white sheets at the end of the day. Pints of beer with lunch, for were we not indeed parched!? We sang Over the Fields and Through the Woods to Grandmother’s House We go, like idiots. Other idiots joined in.
Slowly I turned from my own problems (or got bored with them) and elicited entertainment from Nan. Tell me, tell me, tell me about you. Living here. Why had I never asked before?
“You have to remember, Alys, the war broke out when I was five. My parents listened to Churchill on the radio – I thought his was the voice of God. I rather still do. There was rationing of sugar and butter and this seemed very unfair to me. I remember once, when my mother’s back was turned, I licked my fingertip and pushed it into the off-limits sugar bowl. That looted sugar was almost too pretty to eat.’
‘I knew words like blitz and Nazi. Luftwaffel, which I originally thought was for breakfast, maybe a type of buckwheat. I couldn’t read the papers, but I could see the photographs. Crushed buildings in London. What must it take to crush a building! More than that, I could feel the anxiety of my parents, my older brother. Really the whole city. Only the babies, my little sister, were immune to it. Maybe not even them. I remember Margaret was cholicy. But my mother told me we were safe. Bath was far from London. Some miles even from Bristol with its port and munitions factories – which was getting bombed as often as a Highlander on leave. Bath meant nothing to Hitler.”
I interrupted her, “You had a sister and a brother?!” News to me. Why was she talking about backwater Bath instead of telling me about my aunt and uncle?
She stopped walking, stopped her reverie. Hesitated. “Yes. Peter and Margaret.”
Peter and Margaret. “Where are they?” I asked.
“They went with my parents.”
She pushed ahead, ending the conversation and did not offer why she did not go with her parents too.
We entered a canopy thick enough for thieves. The sun broke the forest shadows, the leaves to pieces. I felt I was walking into a Tiffany glass window, a kaleidoscope, each step tumbling into a new pattern. I knew I would try to make mottled sheets of glass inspired by this forest. British racing and finch green.
The scent of the woods brought me back to earth. The forest floor was crowded with wild garlic. “It smells like Everything In stew,” Nan said. “We ate that a lot.”
I could only imagine.
On a curve of a hill too high to ask to be climbed, we came upon a slat-sided box fixed to a supporting post. It said Message Box. Well, it would be impossible not to open the hinged top! If it had said Drink Me, we would have. Inside, a book and pen for trekkers and poets. Nan wrote out her family recipe:
Clean out your vegetable bin of anything on the bendy side.
Add mince beef if you got it. If something else, keep it to yourself.
Several soft tomatoes that are good for nothing else.
Garlic, plus garlic leaf (remove leaf before serving)
Oxo and Marmite – or my papa says use a pinch of tobacco if you’re in a pinch.
Salt and pepper
Stew it.
I wrote just below Nan’s entry: I’m not eating that. You people with your blood pudding and your tripe. Take me to The Queen’s Head. I need a pint.
As we walked farther through the forest, Nan shared another memory of food. “When I turned eight, I wanted a birthday cake from Ruby’s Bakery,” she started. “Ruby had decorated cakes in the window on glass stands set at varying levels.” She moved her hand up and down to match her memory.
I pictured stands of opaque milk and barely-pink depression glass. Ghostly Vaseline glass, the uranium glowing after dark. Nan was talking cakes but I was momentarily lost in cake stands.
“It was a lovely display.” Nan pulled me back. “I was so insistent on getting dessert from Ruby’s that finally my papa gave me some money and told me to go pick out whatever the money would buy. Inside, because of the war, it was all loafs and bisques, Sally Lunn buns. The only decorated cakes were in the window. I knew I couldn’t buy much. I chose a small, violet- frosted round with thick piped roses like a wedding bouquet on top. Ruby didn’t want to sell it to me. I interrupted, I wouldn’t listen to her. I told her it was my birthday, I wanted the cake in the window. In the end, she gave it to me for free! Put it in a pink box. Oh, I wanted to eat those roses.’
‘Well, mum pulled that cake out of the nice box and the cake was made of painted spackle spread over corrugated cardboard! All the cakes in the window were. Of course they were. Where would all that sugar and eggs came from?”
“Oh, Nan, did you cry?”
“I wanted to. But then, I don’t know, we just laughed. My mum hadn’t made any special dessert because I was going to the bakery, so we had carrot cookies.”
“Carrot cookies?”
“Wartime cookies. Carrots and oats. And margarine – butter was on the ration. The radio told kids carrot cookies would help us see better in the dark during blackouts. We believed it.”
popular scotch in Britain, he brought her a shot of Johnnie Walker Blue and she made me drink it. “You see that,” she said pointing at the drink, “that’s what’s wrong with Britain today.” She hated a blend.
Nan introduced herself to fellow hikers as Adalheid while I went with the trail name of Strawberry Fool.
I lost track of the days. But not the colors. Smoke and slate. Pine and moss. Every shade of rose. I found myself thinking about how I could make those hues. Yes, I still cared about glass. Because it is a prism, and bender of light and reality. Because it is beautiful.
The last day from Cold Ashton to Bath was brutal. We left the fields and came slowly into the city; I thought we were done. Nan knew better. We had the whole city to cross before we reached the round marker in front of Bath Abbey. We expected some sort of fanfare when we finally arrived. But the city was full of day-trippers and sticky-fingers, long lines for the ruins of the Roman Baths, ticky tacky shops. (But also Edinburgh cashmere!) No one noticed the gals in from the country, dressed in dirt. We gave up looking for accolades and looked for our hotel. Nan seemed exhausted. Well, so was I. Too tired for tourism or a reunion of family memories. The sheets on our beds were Irish linen, the little shamrocks edged on the pillowcases for good-luck dreams told me so. I did not yet know of these events, but I know the past is never past. Just biding its time. While we slept, Nan’s was catching up with hers.
Adalheidis’s fate was found within the pages of a German tourist guide. But it was Winston Churchill who made the first move.
March 29, 1942. It was a beautiful night in Lübeck, Germany, a town on the Baltic Sea of historic, but not of military value. Cold and clear, with no blanket of clouds to warm the earth, hoar frost etched the beech and oak, each branch, and over the earth itself. All the land turned to glittery bone. The moonlight alchemized the Trave River, the Elbe-Lübeck Canal to mirror.
It was the perfect setting for the Snow Queen on her troika, wolf fur, Turkish Delight in her pocket. But it was the Royal Air Force who came that night. Wellington and Stirling bombers with tons of blockbuster bombs and incendiary devices. And landmines. Imagine landmines falling from the air. The bombs smashed the old brick and copper roofs, then the incendiaries set fire to the many-timbered medieval buildings. The bronze bells of the Church of St. Mary’s rang and rang and then the spire and the bells collapsed into the church. The broken, silent and slumped bells remain there to this day.
Inside the church, The 500-year-old Danse Macabre frieze was destroyed, or perhaps the painting transmigrated into a fleshy performance through the people of Lübeck that burned skeleton, or were crushed to dust that night.
In the days that followed, 1,800,000 oranges were passed out like life jackets for sinking hearts. There was Bismark Herring by the barrel. But the champagne and chocolates, the Jägermeister (which is what everyone really wanted) was pilfered by the officials in charge of the charity work.
Same as it always was.
Glasses clinked in England. Pol Roger Cuvée, Winston’s favorite. Aiming to damage the morale of German civilians through terror proved remarkably successful. But whatever in this mad, mad world made Winston Churchill think Adolf Hitler wouldn’t retaliate?
We joined our guide Robin and a small group in front of the semi-eclipse of connected terrace houses that make up the Royal Crescent. The Crescent is a lovely shape. As if the massive thing were doing a bit of yoga. Cat stretch pose. The honey-colored limestone is a quiet color; it seemed to me to purposely offset the grandeur. But all of Bath is built of that local stone.
“I remember this place,” Nan almost-whispered. Well, how could she not? It’s famous. But she wasn’t looking at the Georgian architecture. She was looking over the vast lawn that fronts the Crescent. “The back part was the cabbage plot,” she said. “It was vegetables, not grass.”
Robin led us down Brock Street to the Circus. The same tall and narrow row houses built in a large circle with a park in the middle. I fell in love. A curve releases where a straight line binds. I know that from glass. But it can be learned from the shape of a guitar, or a hip bone. Or a smile. Why don’t more city planners know that?
Robin took us to all-thing-Jane-Austin and if I had ever read any of Jane’s novels I might have been more appreciative. And if I wasn’t busy window shopping Milsom Street and thinking about a Ploughmen’s lunch, I might have noticed that Nan was becoming littler by the minute. She was on her way to eight.
“Are any of you familiar with the Baedeker guides?” Robin asked. “Lovely travel books with quite detailed maps ” she said, stopping at a pock-marked wall of the old Labour Exchange. No one was. Well, Nan was, but she wasn’t talking. “After England bombed Lübeck, Germany, which had no military value, the Nazis retaliated. Gustav Braun von Stumm from the German Foreign Office said the goal was to bomb every city in Britain marked with three stars in the Baedeker Guide. That story went quite about. It may or may not be true, but Bath was targeted.” She pointed to the acned wall. “This is shrapnel.”
Robin had more to say about the war, but Nan took my arm and led me back to a park. We were dropping out of the tour. I thought she was tired. We sat down on a bench made to accept all burdens. She kept her eyes straight ahead on the row houses across the street from the park. “I got used to the air raid sirens the way you do church bells,” she said. “Sort of a catch- and-release pull on your attention. But for my mum, I thought the sirens and the bells must have meant the same thing because when the air raid sirens when off, she would always whisper a prayer. I remember that. In truth, people mostly ignored the sirens; it was assumed the planes were headed to Bristol.”
I felt a prickle on my arms. The leaves of the trees mottled us with shadows and gave us a kind of draped privacy. Tell me, Nan, tell me.
“We had blackout curtains, gas masks hanging from the coat pegs in the entry hall,” Nan said. “Mine looked like a leathery shrunken head. But you see, you grow used to it. Grab your galoshes and go. I remember – I remember my mum said the mists kept us safe. She said the German planes would think they were flying over a lake.”
Judging by her face, Nan was reviving the memory for the first time. I pictured the heat of the hot springs the Romans so loved colliding with cold night air to veil the city in mist. Turn Bath Atlantis.
“What is war to an eight-year-old?” Nan’s fingers dismissed conflict with a flick. “It lived in the radio. I didn’t listen. I didn’t understand, so I didn’t care. Not really.”
I thought she was done, but she continued. Dropped a bomb of her own.
“On the night of the Bath Blitz – it was late at night, April, 1942, I don’t know the exact date. I just know the cherry trees were in bloom.” She raised her hand.
I looked up. “These trees, Nan?” I asked. “Right here!?” Still her eyes keep straight ahead to the row house across the street. I followed her gaze. Now I saw the familiar warm limestone and high-arched windows. And then I saw the street sign: Queen Street. The same name as the tiny brass plate on Nan’s three story, custom made, open-faced dollhouse. The one Kyle and I destroyed when we were kids. “Queen Street, I said. “You lived there.” I was breathless. It wasn’t a question.
“I did,” Nan said. “A long time ago. They rebuilt. I always rather pictured it as still in ruin.”
She said it as if it meant nothing but her hand tremored and I pushed on. “When you said your brother and sister left with your parents…”
“Left this earth,” she finished for me.
“But not you,” I said. Stupidly.
“I came downstairs when I heard the first bombs; we would go to the basement for shelter. My brother was collecting Margaret; my parents were in the kitchen getting some food…. Alys, I don’t know how I survived. I don’t know why. The street was rubble, the front of our house – just sheared. I could look into the open, collapsed rooms.”
Just like her dollhouse.
“The city was bright with fire, magnesium flares, the noise was – I couldn’t hear myself scream. Maybe I didn’t. But I think I did. It was hard to breathe, dust and smoke, roils of it. My family … was somewhere under the enormous pile of bits, and somehow I was here – in the park. Filthy, I had a concussion, my head, my body felt as if they didn’t even belong to me. I was in my pajamas. Yellow with white rabbits” She looked at me. “Alys, I still have them.”
A million thoughts pinballed. My whole understanding of my Nan shifted. I pictured the nighttime streets of Bath lit by a Danse Macabre of flames. Did they even find the bodies of her family? – I could not ask. I wondered – were there no dolls for her dollhouse because she didn’t know what colors to paint the eyes on the once taken-for-granted faces, or was just too painful? I thought of all the exacting furniture, the doilies and the stripped plum wallpaper. The umbrella stand. With a rush on hot shame, I realized that when Kyle and I destroyed her memory-house it must of resembled the destruction of a Luftwaffe bomb. I was so sorry.
Nan continued. I was mute. “The Red Cross, or some such organization, sent me to the Bendy family in St. Andrews.”
I always thought the Bendys were my blood relatives! Grandma Joan and Papa Arthur.
“They were so nice to me. I worked harder on forgetting that I did on remembering until I realized that might be a mistake. And then it was too late. But then you just get on with it, don’t you? Sooner or later you have to pull on your Wellies and wade through the flood of your own tears.”
Poetic. And sad. I could only nod. “You don’t remember your mom’s face?” I asked. That seemed particularly low.
“I do. I think I do. I told you about dipping my finger in the forbidden sugar bowl?”
I nodded yes.
“When I pulled it out, sugar sticking to my guilty finger, my mum turned around and caught me. I expected the paddle! But she came over to the kitchen table, licked her finger and covered it in sugar too. Then we both ate it! Oh, it felt such a secret. I remember that. I think I remember the smile on her face.”
Over pints, pickles and ham, the Gloucester cheddar of our Ploughmen’s lunch, we toasted my Jack. I pictured him in his Harry Potter glasses, lightening tattoo. Sent to meet his personal bullet by his Uncle Sam. We clinked to Brigit and Roger, Peter and Margaret. My God, we had visited their graves.
“I’m so sorry we wrecked your dollhouse,” I had to say it again.
Nan fiddled with her napkin. “Here’s the funny thing. When you idiots wrecked it, my first emotion was sadness for Papa Arthur. You remember he was a carpenter – he’s the one who built it. We started it about a year after I got there. Grandma Joan was against the idea – why stir up the past? – but I guess Papa Arthur thought I might need, I don’t know, some sort of touchstone. When you and Kyle broke it, my first feeling was that I lost something dear of Papa Arthur. And then of course my feelings went back to Bath.” She put the napkin down. “But there is no need to apologize anymore Alys. I’m realizing now, the thing may have become a bit of an albatross for me.”
Eventually we toasted ourselves for walking one hundred miles. Nan moved up to Talisker, gold as stone. She seemed a little better. “It’s okay that I came,” she said, swirling the scotch, releasing the peat. “Sometimes that part of my life, honestly it didn’t even feel real. I…appreciate the pain. My family deserves at least that.” Her sea eyes lifted to mine. “Thank you, Alys.”
I felt a little older.
The next day, as we shoved dirty clothes into our suitcases and headed out to Heathrow, Nan asked me, “Have you ever heard of the Camino de Santiago?”
I had. “What, you want to go walk like 500 miles now?!”
She did.
Next summer – we are. And I will learn more about my Adalheidis Rose Watson.
In 2023, an 80-year old wax paper-wrapped hazelnut and almond cake was found in the unearthed basement kitchen of a house on Alfstrasse, Lübeck. The cake is a charcoal briquet, but still recognizable as cake. Rosettes and an edge of scalloped frosting – a Palm Sunday desert that was baked the night before the RAF attack. I picture the woman who made it, hair in braids, crisscrossed and pinned to the back of her head. Apron round her waist. Wrapping the cake carefully to save for the morrow. Now the briquet-cake is headed to a museum.
I hope the kids licked the frosting spoon, I really hope they did.
end