Solstice

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2024

Some birthdays are a delightful treat. They burn brightly for a day before fading into a vague memory of happiness. A treasured, longed-for gift is received, or a chocolate birthday cake baked from precious, carefully hoarded ration coupons, but the details of the day are forgotten after only a few weeks. You recall a moment or two when someone asks for specifics, but remembering every hour of every birthday is unrealistic.  

  And yet, other birthdays burn fiercely, like a flare exploding over a moonless blitz sky, or the flash gun used by a photographer; it can imprint the image forever in your memory.

  My sixteenth birthday was one such day for me. I am approaching my full century on this earth, yet I still remember that long-ago morning in September 1945.  

My story is both endlessly complicated and ridiculously simple. You may roll your eyes when you read it and wonder what on earth I was thinking of in some places. I know I will as I write it. I often look at my daughters, granddaughters, and great-granddaughters and know they would never, ever allow themselves to be used, manipulated, and abused the way I was. Sometimes, I wish I could reach into the past and shake that bright-eyed, innocent, trusting, and naive little girl. I want to tell her to open her eyes and ears, think about every decision she makes, and understand the insanity of the situation she finds herself in.

  But grief is a peculiar thing, making the strongest of us timid, the bravest passive. My father and Samuel Murray brought me up to be strong and courageous, questioning and curious, but on the day Beatrix Blackstone arrived on Jean Cavanagh’s doorstep, that courageous and curious Mina Hart had curled up inside a monochrome shell of fear and passivity.  

  Try not to think too badly of me, as none of you can judge me as harshly as I judge myself. I had lost my world. My structure. Everything. I was devastated and I was frightened, so I was perfect and ripe for what was to come.

  This story is long. So very long. I shall not be able to tell it all as I am not the person with the complete narrative, but I think I come first. Well, first in this part. My one hundred years is merely a microsecond in the millennia that have unfolded behind me and the millennia that will continue to spiral long after I am dust.  

Enough rambling; I shall start at the beginning, and the rest will come in its own time. My name is Samina Hart, no middle name, and I was born in Eden. My dad liked to say that, and when he did, he said it with a strange reverence, which made me wonder if he was thinking of my mother. In reality, I was probably born in the foothills of the Zagros Mountains, somewhere in the region of northern Iraq or southern Turkey.  

  My mother was Layila, a Kurdish tribeswoman of some status, and my father was a Manx man travelling far from home. They married after the tribe fostered Dad, and I was born a year or so later. My mother died of a massive haemorrhage only minutes after my birth, so I never knew her. 

  I was almost three years old when my father returned to England, taking me along with him, and Eden was lost to us both. Dad never blamed me for the death of my mother, so I don’t think he ever considered leaving me with my grandfather, the tribal leader, Amin, or with my Aunt Letya, who had nursed me as an infant. Instead, we travelled together overland by mule to reach the glittering Mediterranean and a steamship bound for England. I have no memories of that journey or my early years with the Kurds, which saddens me, but I understand and respect the decisions my father made at the time and why he made them.

My father was Marcus Hart, an academic writer working and researching for the British Museum in London. His friend and benefactor, my godfather and substitute grandfather, was Samuel Murray. A professor at both University College, London, and the British Museum, Samuel had taken Marcus under his wing when he first arrived in London aged eighteen. He paid for him to travel around Africa and the Middle East in return for regular letters filled with research, and opened his home to us when we arrived in England in the summer of 1932. Samuel’s house was in the London Borough of Highgate: a tall, thin end-terrace, only one room and staircase wide, but four rooms deep, and standing four storeys high, including a dusty attic. Untidy and cluttered, full of books, papers, and strange artefacts, it very quickly became home.

Since early childhood, I have been blessed - or cursed - with dreams. I dream nightly, and my dreams are especially vivid. Sometimes they are so lucid, I can smell, feel, and taste as well as hear and see minute details.  

  I remember dreaming of my mother when I was newly living in London. Her kind, pretty face and soft, dark eyes.  The wishful thinking of an orphaned child, you will be thinking, but in my dreams, I also knew she had a keen and mischievous sense of humour. I knew she was unusually sentimental regarding the mules and goats of the tribe. I knew she wore gold rings in her ears and gold bangles on her wrists, and I knew she had a teardrop-shaped birthmark on her left hip.

  Sometimes, I would awake in the night, screaming in terror, my father quick to comfort and reassure me that I was safe. More often, I would awake in the morning, puzzled or amused by the ridiculous level of detail my brain would create to entertain me as I slept.

Samuel Murray died when I was ten years old. A series of strokes took him from us, bit by bit. First, his balance, his short-term memory, and his usual good humour. Samuel became unsteady on his feet, forgetful, and easily frustrated, but he was still Samuel and still both funny and kind. The second stroke hit him in the autumn of 1939, mere weeks after Great Britain declared war on Germany. In a sombre mood of threat and danger, gas masks, blackout, and rationing, Samuel failed to join Dad and me at breakfast, so Dad went upstairs with a mug of coffee to teasingly coax him downstairs. Instead, he found him conscious but paralysed, his face slumped, his mouth drooping, and his eyes full of fear. Thankfully, this condition lasted only a few months before he simply failed to wake up one morning. Although Dad and I were devastated by his loss, we knew he was living a miserable half-life, and our grief was tempered by the knowledge that his death was a release.

  The reading of Samuel’s will brought fresh surprise and gratitude to an old man who had no blood tie to us and no obligation to consider us anything other than long-term lodgers. His estate, including the Highgate house, investments, and stocks, was left in my father’s trust for me.  I would receive all of Samuel’s wealth and property on my twenty-first birthday or my marriage, whichever came first. Unusually for the time, it was also very clear in his will that all of my inheritance was to be mine and mine alone and that no future husband could lay any claim to it. My father’s face was odd when he read out that codicil, both musing and relieved, I think, which was very strange. Now, of course, I don’t think it was strange at all.

As a reader myself, I despise the whole ‘I know something you don’t know’ narrative that some stories take. Ugh. Either tell me or shut up, I want to shout at the paper or screen. Yes, my ninety-nine-year-old eyes struggle with some print now, but I love my little e-book which means I can take my entire library with me and, more importantly, zoom the screen large enough to read every word. So, to avoid the danger of becoming the kind of narrator I detest, I am going to return to that sunny September in 1945. Four months after the end of the war in Europe, a month after the end of the war in the Far East, and the weekend of my sixteenth birthday.