THE QUEST FOR KATHLEEN

Kitty’s mission in life, as she saw it, was to write the biography of her great grandmother and namesake, Kathleen Sheridan. Everything else was on hold until that was done. She had formulated a version of reality where she made a deathbed promise to her grandmother, Kathleen’s daughter Francesca, that she would write the biography of her “remarkable great grandmother” and would not rest until she did.

     This was not entirely true. It was not entirely false, but it was not entirely true either. Kitty had last seen Francesca two months before she passed, and what Francesca had said was more along the lines of “If ever you feel like writing something other than your stories, then Mother’s life might be no bad subject!” 

     From that day, five years ago now, it had become something of an obsession for Kitty. Oh, she carried on working as a teacher of modern languages, but lost all interest in promotion and her pupils were wont to say, “Miss Judd’s lessons just aren’t as interesting as they used to be”. She carried on supplementing her income by sending some short stories to magazines, and getting at least half of them accepted, but the editor of one of her “favourites” had said, ever so gently, in her most recent email, that her writing was getting a little formulaic. She had forgotten her ideas about writing a novel.

     Fact was frequently far more interesting than fiction, after all, and Kathleen was by way of being a family legend. Stories about her abounded. She had run away to France in pursuit of romance when she was only 16, and in the war she had flown Spitfires – not in combat, of course, that hadn’t been allowed – but had transported them when they had been repaired or serviced. 

     Everyone seemed to have an anecdote about Kathleen, and the practical details of her life were reasonably well documented. There were photos, too, and Kitty especially loved a faded newspaper one, rough at the edges, showing her sitting in the cockpit of a plane, a cap at a rakish angle on her head. Oh, Kathleen, she thought (she always thought of her as Kathleen, not Great-Grandmother) how I wish I’d known you!

     She had started spending all her holidays in the little village in Normandy where Kathleen had had her daring teenage romance. It was a pleasant village, though off the tourist trail, and with more modern bungalows than quaint cottages. Yes, some of the older villagers remembered the auberge called Chez Gaston where they had met, but Monsieur Lavalle, the manager of the hotel Mercure where she usually stayed (she had to admit cheap chains had their uses) and with whom she had become quite friendly, said, frankly “Mademoiselle, I know everyone goes on about heritage and history and how it is a shame when they are lost, and I by no means disagree, but I have to say that, at least in my lifetime, Chez Gaston was a rather shabby establishment and most of us were not sorry to see it go.” A kind man, he added, “I daresay in its heyday it may have been a different story.”

     He means well, thought Kitty. Does he think I am so desperate for Kathleen and her love to be in some quaint and romantic and ivy-walled rustic tavern? This is the true story of the life of a strong and remarkable woman. This is not some romantic whimsy of the type I send to magazines; and then they accuse me of being formulaic when that is precisely what they want!

     She didn’t even really know if he were French or English. It had been handed down in the family that his name was Louis, which could have been either. It wasn’t even pronounced differently. 

     Sometimes she seemed to make some progress. She knew about Kathleen’s education, for instance, that she had been a pupil at a private girls’ school called Marlowe House that, unfortunately, had not been a school for decades, and had first been converted into a hotel, but was now an old people’s home. Kitty was not unaware of the rather wistful symbolism of that, and reminded of a hospital in a nearby town where a geriatric ward was next to the maternity ward. There were still some records remaining, but they were disappointingly sparse and Kathleen seemed to have been an able pupil, but not an outstanding one. That’s fair enough, thought Kitty. School swots rarely amount to anything exciting. She sighed, thinking of her own excellent reports. She was hungry for accounts of her indulging in madcap activities, but then reminded herself this wasn’t a school story, either.

     In real life, as she knew better than most, school was prosaic and not really that interesting at all. She had a recollection that she had once seen it differently, and had planned lessons into the night, not realising that the hours were slipping by. 

     She was still quite popular with her colleagues, though they would have shared her pupils’ view that she was not as interesting as she used to be. She more than suspected this and did not especially care, though she was still polite and passed the time of day with them. That had been one of her grandmother’s expressions for a relationship that was pleasant but superficial. She was pretty sure that Kathleen would never have been content to just “pass the time of day”.

     Old habits died hard though, and Angela Leeson, a history teacher, whom she had first got to know properly when they were both in the staff choir (Kitty had subsequently lost interest in that) asked her if she’d like to go with her on holiday to Austria over Easter. “I have some tickets for the Salzburg festival from a friend of a friend, and you know they’re like gold dust,” she said. “It’s very kind of you to offer,” said Kitty, “But I have my holiday already planned.”

     “Normandy again? Kitty, it’s none of my business, and you’d be quite within your rights to tell me, but surely you’ve found out all you’re going to by now, and there’s always the Internet!”

     Kitty restrained herself from coming out and saying that it was, indeed, none of her business, but made it plain that the conversation was over. She found out later on that Angela had asked Keith the English teacher from the choir if he wanted to come with her, and he had accepted. 

     Angela didn’t understand. There was always the possibility of a chance meeting with someone whose grandfather remembered what HIS grandfather or grandmother or great aunt or whatever had told him about Kathleen.

     But she was determined not only to concentrate on this element of the story. She was worried to realise that more and more she was inventing or at any rate imagining how it was, and she didn’t want that. But she didn’t mind all her holidays there seeming the same. She didn’t even really think of them as holidays any longer. 

     A couple of weeks after she returned from her latest stay there, she had a row with her mother. Though their relationship had never been saccharine, they were close, and especially since she had become an adult too, they rarely fell out, or if they did, made up soon enough. But (had she known it, her mother, Petra, was on a bit of a knife edge anyway as she had a bad toothache) this time Petra, normally a long-suffering woman, exclaimed, “Kitty, for heaven’s sake, give me a rest from Kathleen! Mum, may she rest in peace, used to ram her down my throat and it got on my nerves at times, but I swear you’re worse!”

     “Well, you’ve no need to get in a strop because Granny was proud of her, and I am, and it seems that you’re not!” 

     It wasn’t quite saying the unforgiveable, but neither woman was prepared to back down, and they didn’t see anything of each other or visit each others’ house for almost a month. Things were patched up, though neither of them actually apologised. 

     To nobody’s surprise, Angela and Keith were now an item, and everyone at the school agreed they made a very sweet couple. Though Angela and Kitty still “passed the time of day”, they were growing further and further apart. So Kitty was a bit puzzled when Angela “caught” her on the way out of school and asked if she wanted to come for a coffee. Kitty didn’t, not really, but she didn’t have anything else planned that night, though she could always find something Kathleen-related, even if it was going over old ground. She accepted, not wanting to make an issue of it. She was glad that Angela didn’t suggest going to her flat, but the Parasol Café near the school. It even had parasols inside which was arguably an affectation, and worried those who thought open umbrellas inside were unlucky (though did parasols count?) but was still popular. At the moment it was quiet though. “Kitty, I’ve thought quite a bit about this and didn’t know what to do, and Keith advised against it, but it won’t let me rest.” Kitty, not terribly convincingly as she knew herself (and didn’t care) put on an “okay, I’m listening” face and thought, oh, just get on with it! Perhaps there was a flicker of hope that it might be something Kathleen related.

     “Keith is working with his Year 9 pupils about the history of the press, and how the Internet is giving us access to stories that have been forgotten. They’re loving it, and he’s the first to admit that a fair few of them are better at it than he is! Anyway, a couple of days back he said, “For some reason this article is ringing a bell, but I don’t quite know why”. As soon as I saw it on his tablet, I knew. It was – that picture you have of Kathleen.” Kitty felt herself warming to her friend again. “But it’s the whole article, not just the picture,” she got out her tablet and Kitty had to make an almighty struggle to stop herself drumming the table with anticipation and impatience. Angela said quietly, “The thing is – I don’t know if you’re going to like it …..”

     Of course, she recognised the picture at once. But it was not in isolation, clipped out and fragile and passed down the generations. It was sturdy on a screen, and there was the attendant article. It was about a local airshow, and showed Miss Kathleen Harper (which was her maiden name) “posing in the cockpit of a plane, wearing a borrowed cap”. It was quite a charming picture, in its way. But it did not show a brave and pioneering young woman piloting her Spitfire. 

     “It doesn’t mean she didn’t,” Angela said, and Kitty knew, much as she might have wanted to think otherwise, that Angela wasn’t taking any pleasure in this whatsoever. She also knew – and it really was almost as if she saw things in the Parasol Café go out of focus and the voices of the others in there take on a strange, echoing quality – that Kathleen had never flown a Spitfire in her life. Nor probably a plane of any description, in war or peacetime. And she ought to have known it all along, or made the effort, the real effort, to find out. There were archives about such things. She had gone through the motions of finding out, but had concentrated on the “great romance”.

     That night she made a more detailed study of the family tree (they didn’t go in for family history the way some people did, tracing it back to the Middle Ages and beyond, but with the help of family records had gone back as far as the mid-19^th century). She hadn’t been that interested before – after all, it only gave dates, and though they were useful coathangers, they didn’t tell you much. And she discovered that Kathleen had a cousin called Louis, 2 years older than she was. She had started weaving a story again, but this time it was a more prosaic one, one that, at least initially, was far less to her liking. A family holiday “with the cousins” – she had been on such ones herself – and a schoolgirl – probably sometimes rather a tiresome one – making herself look grown up going for a drink with her “almost a man” cousin. 

     She had often heard the figurative use of the phrase “the cold light of day” but this was the first time she really understood what it implied. 

     Kathleen certainly hadn’t been a bad person. And it wasn’t even her fault, not really, not entirely. But a snippet here, a half-heard there, a slight embroidery somewhere else, had all woven into a tempting, thrilling tapestry. And now that tapestry was fraying, unravelling, turning back into prosaic threads. 

     It wasn’t an easy time for Kitty. Everything seemed empty and faded and her life had lost the one thing that had become its focus. Nobody truly knew just how hollow and betrayed and confused she felt, though her mother and Angela had some notion.

     Her recovery began with the most trivial of things. She was passing a night when wakefulness and too heavy sleep alternated, and the idea suddenly came to her that her younger pupils might love making a French comic, even possibly inventing their own characters, though a couple of possible names occurred to her, and she even found herself wondering if it should be small or large format. Then when she was watching a TV show sponsored by a company doing river cruises she thought that though ocean cruising (even apart from the cost!) had never appealed to her, that might be interesting and enjoyable.

     When you have spent so long, and so much mental and emotional energy, with only one thing that matters in life, the world is a frightening place without it. But it was, as gradually and inexorably as the dawn itself, revealing itself as one that could be fascinating if she gave it a chance.