Kitty

Thomas turns his book over on his knee and puts the spectacles he can no longer read without to one side. He is sitting in his favourite rocking chair in a cosy corner of the lounge surrounded by piles of  books and sheets of piano music. The late morning sunshine beams through the open French doors and he can smell the aroma of sweet pink dog roses. His younger brother George is digging over a new flower bed in the garden of the Cheshire home they share. Thomas gently strokes his long white beard, watches George break up the soil with his spade and thinks to himself this is a Maymyo morning. Maymyo is the town in Burma, where many years ago he would sometimes take respite from the unbearably hot weather in the south and the travails of managing production in a tobacco plantation. 

Reclining in the chair with its arms warm and embracing  like the woman he once loved, the nagging pain in his rickety back is eased. It is a place of sanctuary and the only piece of furniture he wanted from their mother’s home when she passed away. It lay in the cupboard under the stairs for years, until he decided one day to get it out and mend its broken spindles. His grandmother would sit in the chair sharing her memories and family tales while her young grandsons snuggled  into the ample proportions of her lap. The brothers turned the chair upside down when she was preoccupied in cooking or some other task, pretending it was a chariot. They would ride away travelling to exotic places, circumnavigating the world from Africa and Australia to the Americas and Asia.

Nowadays, Thomas is more likely to be found dropping off for 40 winks in the chair before George calls him into the dining room for lunch. This most commonly would consist of sandwiches and soup, mulligatawny if they’re lucky, prepared by the daily help Thora. The chair has been  so well used, his bottom has worn its cushion thin requiring it to be re-upholstered several times. Their niece Martha disapproved of the material chosen on the last occasion. “Next time you get Thora to re do the cushion you might like to use fabric which matches the chintz curtains I put up,” she said. The daughter of the oldest Nicholls brother William, now deceased, she pops in from time to time to check on the pair, boss them around a bit and keep them up to date with news of goings on at the family tobacco factory. The brothers had retired several years earlier, just as the new King George V was taking to the throne. A visit from Martha is about as exciting as their life gets these days. Until this morning that is. 

Thomas feels likes Alice tumbling down a rabbit hole when somehow he is dragged back from a drowsy sleep by the clang of the front doorbell

In the distance. Thora dashes from the kitchen, her black lace ups clip clopping on the hard brown and white tiles, creating an echo along the narrow hall. Thomas hears voices, but he cannot make out what is being said. George has heard the door go too and thinks it odd, as they were not expecting a call from Martha today. Seconds later Thora, with her apron, tight pin-curled hair and face covered in specs of flour, emerges into the garden. The white of the flour on her face used for the pastry of the apple pie she had only moments ago placed in the oven, is in sharp contrast to the growing redness of her round cheeks. Her blue eyes sparkle and her hands can’t keep still as she speaks to George. He rests his spade against the garden wall. They both look up from their hurried conversation towards the French doors. Thomas is now standing and staring at them. 

George strides hurriedly towards his brother, Thora a few steps behind peeping around him, switching to the right and then to left. As they enter the lounge George says hesitantly: “Thomas there’s a person at the door. She says her name is Katharine, but that you will remember her as Kitty, and furthermore she says . . . she is . . . your daughter.” Thomas falls back into the chair and takes a minute to compose himself, his gnarled hands on trembling knees. He looks up, not at his brother but at Thora. “Show her into the front room Thora. And then can you set us some tea in there. Use the best china mind!” She nods and rushes out at a pace, running round the furniture, books and sheets of music on the floor as if they have been put deliberately in her way for some kind of obstacle race. George is certain he sees her jump over the last pile.

Moments later in the drawing room with the tea laid out, Thomas introduces George to Kitty, a fine-looking middle-aged woman with pale skin and dark brown curly hair in the fashionable bob of the period. Thora has taken a large handkerchief from the pocket of her piny and is dabbing her eyes witnessing the reunion of father with daughter, when she suddenly remembers the apple pie. 

“Oh my gawd, my best pastry an’ all!” she shouts galloping once again out of the room in pretty much the same way as she entered it. 

George is staggered by the revelation that his brother has not only a daughter but a son too. He knew Thomas to be preoccupied with his thoughts sometimes and even sad on occasion, but he could never have guessed his brother left a family behind him when he was recalled home from Burma all those years ago. They had always been close, and George thought his brother shared everything with him. 

Kitty is married to an English railway policeman in Rangoon. They have journeyed to England to visit his family in Crewe. While there she decided to take a trip to Chester and look up the Nicholls tobacco factory on the River Dee, of which she had read so much. When she called by at the factory a gentleman working in the office by the name of Hughes told her where to find “Mr Thomas and Mr George”. Kitty had shown him an old cracked photograph, taken of her father as a young man sitting on a horse in front of a Burmese pagoda. 

Kitty has brought a cloth bag with her. She pulls out from it  a large colourful piece of cloth. 

“It is a Buddhist prayer flag,” Kitty explains. “It was a gift from my mother Ma-hla and now she has passed, I would like you my Father to have it in memory of her. You can put it in your garden amongst the flowers.” Learning the identity of Kitty’s mother, George begins to realise why perhaps his brother kept his secret all these years. Their Victorian middle class mother would never have accepted her son’s mixed race children. 

George feels a deep sense of remorse on his behalf. An emotional Thomas tells them between his tears of the money and letters he sent to Ma-hla via the Hegermeister Rice Merchants, a company trading between Rangoon and Liverpool. Over the years he did not receive any correspondence in return, the First World War broke out and the Hegermeisters told him his family had disappeared and could not be traced. 

 “When mother called at their office in the Secretariat Building she was told there was nothing for her and to go away,” Kitty replies. Their mother became desperate and the children were eventually taken in by The Little Sisters of The Poor.

“Ma-hla was a devout Buddhist, and knew little of their ways, but she was convinced by the Mother Superior that you would want us brought up in the Catholic faith. When we went into the dormitory at the convent it was full of children just like William and I. The ‘cafe au lait’ the British called us.  Our mother was allowed to visit, but only on Sunday afternoons. She would bring us little Burmese treats like Balachaung and a straw ball to play chilon with. Eventually she married a Burman in her village and had more children, but we didn’t see them often as they resented the Anglo Burmese. I went on to teach at the convent and William trained as an accountant with a local government office.” 

“How is he now?” Thomas asks.

“He is well. You have five grandchildren and another on the way. I can’t have children myself. But William and Matilda have more than made up for it! Matilda’s father was an officer on the Irrawady Flotilla, John Cowell.  Perhaps you came across him while you were in Burma?”

“What a coincidence. There was a Captain called Cowell who helped me more than once when I was drowning my sorrows on the passage home,” recalls her father. 

“But listen, if I write William a letter, would you mind, please, to take it to him for me? I should like to help him and his family if I can.” Kitty smiles and nods in the affirmative. 

“Are you able to come and stay for a few days before you leave? We have so much to talk about. And you can make us some Balachaung. I loved your mother’s savoury dishes.”

“What is it? It sounds intriguing,” George asks.

“What it is, is a very pungent smelling dish made with shrimps, onions and garlic. I am not sure Thora will like it!” Thomas replies.

“Do stay with us. You will be able to meet your cousin Martha. She looks very much like you. Thora can make up a bed for you in the guest room, and your husband of course,” says George, who is excited at the thought of a whole new extended family he never knew existed. 

“Robert will be busy on police business, but I would love to stay,” replies Kitty. She spends three wonderful days with Thomas and George and discovers a shared love of playing the piano. Martha joins them, although she’s not sure if she approves of the whole situation. They play and sing songs late into the night, Thora keeping them supplied with tea and slices of apple pie. Kitty then has to join her husband for the voyage back home to Burma. Thomas’ vivacious daughter slips out of his life as quickly as she came into it. 

The next decade passes with occasional letters from Burma, which Thomas devours as soon as they land on the doormat, reading every line, and in between, avidly. He rarely goes out now and has even stopped playing the piano, leaving the occasional tinkling of the ivories to George. The cosy corner is his oasis of calm and from his rocking chair he sees the seasons alter. On afternoons such as the one he is now enjoying, with the sun shining on George’s beans and the faded red Buddhist prayer flag in the garden, he rocks gently to and fro in his chair. He thinks back to the time Kitty arrived unexpectedly and grieves for the life they could have all shared if only things had been different. She had told him prayers from the flag would drift out into the world for the benefit of all ‘sentient beings’. In return treasured memories come to him of his lost love, beautiful Ma-hla with a white sprig of jasmine in her long black ebony hair, rocking in a chair just like the one in which he is now resting. The image he sees before him is one of perfect contentment, she looking like an angel absorbed in the act of feeding their little ones. He smiles, his eyes close and his arthritic hand lets go its grasp of the wired spectacles and photograph of Kitty he has been holding. George comes in from the garden moments later to find them on the floor, his brother slumped to one side and the chair still, having stopped rocking finally and forever.