The Largest Act of Disobedience Available to Her

NOT TO BE OPENED.

Her mother wrote that. And then kept the box for sixty-six years, through two house moves, and put it under the water tank in a loft, in a house she knew perfectly well would be cleared by Gwen, because Ian lives in Canada and there was nobody else.

If she had wanted it gone, she had six decades to burn it. She had a bin, a fire, a hundred opportunities, and a daughter who would never have known there had been anything to know.

If she had wanted it said, she had six decades to say it. She had Gwen in that front room for three weeks at the end, holding her hand, saying everything.

Instead she did the third thing.

She left it somewhere it would certainly be found, with an instruction on it that she must have known would not be followed, at a point when she would no longer be there to be asked about it.

---

Ian thinks that is cowardice.

He has said so twice, once bluntly and once after a drink, and he is not being cruel when he says it. He loved her. He just cannot get past the twenty-eight years on the register, and Gwen understands that, because on about one day in ten she cannot get past it either.

Gwen does not think it was cowardice.

---

She thinks her mother was nineteen, in a mother and baby home outside Bristol, in February 1959.

She thinks about what that actually meant: that a girl was removed from her town so the town would not see, and was put somewhere with other girls, and had a baby, and was told — by her own mother, by a matron, by a doctor, by a priest, by everybody in the building and everybody outside it — that this had not happened and would never be spoken of again.

And she thinks about the fact that she then went home to Wolverhampton and worked in a drapery and married a man in 1963 and had two children and made Christmas cakes in October for sixty years, and did as she was told, every single day, for the rest of her life.

That was not a personality. That was a training, and it was administered to an entire generation of women with enormous thoroughness.

---

“So she couldn’t say it,” Gwen says. “Not couldn’t as in wouldn’t. Couldn’t. The part of her that could have said it out loud was taken out at nineteen and it never grew back.”

And what she did instead — the only thing left available to a person that thoroughly trained — was to keep every letter, and the certificate, and one photograph, in a box, for sixty-six years, and put it somewhere her daughter would find it.

“That’s not her hiding it,” Gwen says. “That’s her telling us. That is the largest act of disobedience she had left.”

---

Peter came to the house before it completed.

Gwen kept the keys an extra week to make it possible, which cost her about four hundred pounds in the end and which she would pay again without thinking.

They walked round the empty rooms. She told him where things had been: the table there, the chair there, the tree in that corner every year because of the socket. He was very quiet and she made herself stop talking twice.

In the front room he stood for a while at the window.

“Is this where—”

“Yes,” said Gwen.

“Right,” he said.

---

At the front door he looked back down the hall.

“She lived here the whole time, then.”

“Forty-six years.”

“Right,” said Peter, again.

They stood on the step for a minute. It was one of those bright cold days at the end of October.

Then he said: “Did she keep the letters from Joan?”

“All of them,” said Gwen. “Twenty-two.”

“That’s good,” said Peter. “That’s good, isn’t it. I’d have hated it if she’d been on her own with it.”

---

Joan Prentice — she married Mr Prentice, the menace, in 1963, which Gwen discovered and which she considers the finest thing in the entire story — died in 2009 in Telford.

Her daughter has the other half of the correspondence.

She and Gwen have met twice.