The Secret Letter Read online

  The Secret Letter

  Gripping and heartbreaking WW2 historical fiction

  Debbie Rix

  Books by Debbie Rix

  The Girl with Emerald Eyes

  Daughters of the Silk Road

  The Silk Weaver’s Wife

  The Photograph

  The Secret Letter

  Contents

  Prologue

  I. The Phoney War

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  II. Plotting

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  III. Victors and Vanquished

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  IV. Homecoming

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  The Photograph

  Debbie’s email sign up

  Books by Debbie Rix

  A Letter from Debbie

  Historical Note

  Daughters of the Silk Road

  The Silk Weaver’s Wife

  The Girl With Emerald Eyes

  Acknowledgements

  For my mother and father –

  whose experiences, diaries and letters

  inspired the characters of Imogen and Freddie

  In War: Resolution. In Defeat: Defiance.

  In Victory: Magnanimity. In Peace: Good Will.

  Winston Churchill

  Prologue

  Chiswick, London

  December 2018

  The letter landed on the mat, just as Imogen walked into the narrow hall from the kitchen. She usually ignored the uninteresting brown envelopes that slipped through the letter box. They lay undisturbed for days in an untidy pile until she was forced to gather them up simply to open the door. But even at a distance this handwritten envelope was intriguing. In spite of her arthritis, she bent down slowly and retrieved it, along with the pile of bills, and carried them through to the conservatory at the back of the house. Winter sun streamed in as she sat down in her favourite wicker armchair. She laid the unwanted mail on the kelim-covered footstool in front of her and examined the handwritten envelope, noting the German postmark and slid her long elegant finger under the flap.

  Dear Imogen,

  I hope you will forgive this intrusion, for we have never met, but please let me introduce myself. I knew your husband when I was a young woman living in a small village in Germany. We lost touch after the war, but it was with great sadness that I heard of his death, only recently, from a mutual friend. I understand he died nearly two years ago and had I known, I would have made the journey to England to meet you then and offer my condolences in person.

  You will be wondering how we met – he and I. Let me explain. He lived with me and my family for a few brief, but significant, days in the last months of the war in 1945. He was one of the bravest men I have ever met and certainly the most noble. Your husband showed great courage and performed an act of huge kindness in our village and I have long wondered how to thank him for it.

  I have decided to arrange a ceremony of thanksgiving and reconciliation next Spring – to commemorate what happened. As your husband cannot be there, will you come to Germany, in his place? This was a dark time in our history and I will explain more in due course. You would be welcome to stay with me. I live on a farm outside the village and we would be delighted to welcome you.

  I look forward to hearing from you.

  Yours

  Magda

  Imogen removed her reading glasses and gazed out at the wintry garden. Frost still covered the lawn and a robin perched on the edge of her bird feeder, clinging to the wire structure with its tiny claws. She stood up and walked over to the French windows to get a better look, but the robin, ever alert, flew away.

  ‘Magda,’ she muttered under her breath. She caught a glimpse of herself in the glass – still tall and erect in spite of her arthritis, her hair unnaturally dark for a woman of her age, streaked with broad swathes of silver. Magda… the name seemed familiar and yet had been lost to her, somehow, over the years. She lifted the lid of the pine chest that stood near the French windows. Brought from her father’s house after he died more than thirty years ago, it had lain relatively undisturbed since that time. She had been preoccupied then, in her early sixties, still working full-time as an architect, helping her young adult children, and had neither the time nor interest to investigate its contents. She knew it contained mementoes of her family’s past, photograph albums and so on, but now she wondered if it might also contain some clue as to the identity of Magda.

  She opened a small, dark red leather box and found her father’s medals from the first war; in a small cardboard box was the King George medal her grandmother had been sent, with a letter informing her that her other son, Bertie – her father’s brother – had been killed. A sepia photograph had been tucked between the folds of the letter. It showed a young man in uniform, with a high forehead and bright pale eyes staring into the camera. ‘What a waste,’ Imogen muttered. She sat down heavily on the kelim stool and picked up her father’s old pipe. She held it to her nose, inhaling the familiar scent that had somehow clung to it for nearly thirty years.

  She rummaged deep in the box, finding photograph albums filled with small black and white photographs of long-lost family members. Among them, she found a picture of seven little girls wearing white pinafores over their dark dresses, standing in a row on a line of wooden palings on a stony beach. Written beneath the picture, in her mother’s neat handwriting, were the girls’ names: Mimi, Bella, Amelia, Rose and friends. August 1902. There were pictures of her mother as a young woman – so pretty and vivacious, tiny in her corset, her hair piled on top of her head. Her parents’ wedding photograph… her mother in a nineteen-twenties wedding gown, her father so tall and upright in his top hat. Her own wedding photograph: Imogen wearing a long cream satin dress, and a veil that pooled on the ground. At the bottom of the chest was an old shoe box from a store in Newcastle called Bainbridge & Co. On the lid was a picture of a woman wearing a flowing full-skirted dress next to the words ‘fine feminine footwear’. Imogen smiled. Her mother had always loved pretty shoes. Imogen opened the box and found that it was full of letters. As she inspected the dates and postmarks on the collection of pale blue, cream and green envelopes, she recognised her own girlish hand and realised they were letters she had sent home to her mother when she was a girl. It was touching that her mother had kept them – neatly curated in date order, and curious they had lain undisturbed all this time.

  She removed one letter from its cream envelope. It was dated 6th October 1939 – the start of the war. She had been fifteen, and recently evacuated with her school from her home in Newcastle to the safety of the Lake District.

  ‘I wish you were here,’ she had written to her mother,

  ‘to help me solve all my difficulties – Miss Linfield is so beastly and Helen is not nearly so nice as she looked at first, and I had a
pain today again and my maths won’t come out and Helen is just going to see her Mother and Daddy for a whole week next week…’

  To her surprise, tears came into Imogen’s pale green eyes, as she reflected on that young girl, alone and hundreds of miles from home. The letter seemed filled with self-pity – not a characteristic she was aware she had ever possessed. As she rifled through the faded envelopes, she tried to remember what it had been like in those first few weeks of the war, when everything had seemed so simple and straightforward…

  Part I

  The Phoney War

  1939–1940

  As a National Socialist and as German soldier I enter upon this struggle with a stout heart. My whole life has been nothing but one long struggle for my people, for its restoration, and for Germany. There was only one watchword for that struggle: faith in this people. One word I have never learned: that is, surrender…. If our will is so strong that no hardship and suffering can subdue it, then our will and our German might shall prevail.

  Adolf Hitler, speaking to the Reichstag, 1st September 1939

  I am speaking to you from the cabinet room at 10 Downing St. This morning the British ambassador in Berlin handed the German government a final note stating that, unless we heard from them by 11 o’clock that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us. I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received, and that consequently this country is at war with Germany.

  Neville Chamberlain, Prime Minister, 3rd September 1939

  Chapter One

  Newcastle, England

  The last days of August 1939

  Imogen Mitchell ambled along the cul-de-sac, dragging a long stick that bumped against the railings with a satisfying thud.

  ‘Bumpety, bumpety, bumpety… ’ she murmured in time with the rhythmic clattering.

  ‘Imogen Mitchell! Stop that!’

  It was Mrs McMasters, who lived across the street from Imogen’s imposing Victorian red brick house. Mrs McMasters was in her front garden pruning the fading florets of the hydrangea bushes. She wore a knee-length skirt and a pretty grey blouse that looked as if it was made of silk, Imogen thought. Mrs McMasters’ hands were protected by immaculate leather gardening gloves and as she dropped the florets into a basket Imogen noticed her neatly shod feet encased in pale cream leather brogues.

  ‘Sorry, Mrs McMasters,’ Imogen called out in a sing-song voice. Imogen hated Mrs McMasters. No, that wasn’t quite correct. She didn’t hate her because, as Mummy always said, you shouldn’t ‘hate’ anyone, really. But she found her irritating. Mrs McMasters was always complaining about something, and really, if you thought about it, she had nothing to complain about. She lived in a lovely house, had a nice enough husband, expensive shoes and three handsome sons. She also had a maid as well as a cook, and a gardener who came twice a week to mow the lawn and ‘do the heavy work’. Imogen wasn’t sure what ‘the heavy work’ meant, but it was obviously useful.

  Imogen hoiked her stick into her hand, and began to plant it firmly in front of her, just as her father did with his walking stick, or his umbrella. In fact any stick-like object that her father held in his hand was used in this fashion – as if he was marching in time to a military band.

  Imogen muttered the marching rhyme her father had taught her as a tiny child, adjusting her stride so that her feet hit the ground on the words ‘left’ and ‘right’.

  ‘I had a good job and I left,’

  Serves you jolly well right.

  Now you’ve got it now you keep it,

  Left, right, left, right.

  I had a good job and I left…’

  Her steps were now magically in synchrony with the rhyme, the stick hitting the ground with military precision.

  She opened the garden gate to her own house and walked up the drive past the neat borders of annuals and the well-trimmed lawn. Standing her stick in the corner of the tiled porch, she removed her front door key from the pocket of her bottle-green school tunic. As she opened the door to the dark hall she inhaled the comfortingly familiar scent of floor polish and beeswax, overlaid with the sour smell of overcooking vegetables and just a hint of dog.

  Honey, her cairn terrier, bounded up to her.

  ‘Hello girl,’ said Imogen, scratching the little dog’s blonde ears.

  The cairn bounced around at her feet, delighted that Imogen was home and available to play.

  ‘Not now, Honey,’ said Imogen. ‘I’m starving.’

  She meandered into the morning room that led into the kitchen. She could hear the sound of the maid, Hetty, singing tunelessly in the scullery. Imogen opened the biscuit barrel that her mother kept on the dresser and took a piece of homemade shortbread, before retreating into the hall.

  ‘Is that you Miss Imogen?’ Hetty called out in her broad Geordie accent.

  ‘Yes… it’s me,’ replied Imogen, already half way up the stairs,

  ‘Do you want some tea?’

  ‘No… no thank you,’ Imogen said, skipping up the last few stairs and into her room, closing the door with a satisfying click. The dog scratched at the door, whining piteously to be let in. Imogen, holding the biscuit between her teeth, ushered the little dog into her room, snapping the door shut the moment Honey jumped on the bed, her black claws catching on the silky paisley eiderdown.

  ‘Oh Honey…’ said Imogen, lying down next to her dog. She broke off a little piece of biscuit and fed it to the dog, which licked her fingers, hoping to extract every last crumb, each last sweet taste.

  ‘Lie down, there’s a good girl,’ said Imogen as she lay crunching her own share of the buttery shortbread, gazing out of the bedroom window at the large copper beech that dominated the back garden.

  The sound of the front door slamming shut interrupted her daydreaming.

  ‘Ginny?’ She heard her mother calling her name from the hall. Imogen went out onto the landing.

  ‘Yes Mummy… I’m here.’

  ‘Oh good – well come down darling, there’s something I want to discuss with you.’

  Imogen found her mother, Rose, in the drawing room at the back of the large double-fronted house. The room always struck her as particularly feminine and was very much her mother’s domain. It was here that Rose played bridge twice a week, serving tiny sandwiches and slices of homemade fruit cake. Her mother made a new cake for each of these occasions – not trusting Hetty with such a task.

  ‘That girl hasn’t the least notion of how to bake,’ her mother often said, despairingly. ‘I’ve tried to show her, but she really is as dim as a TocH lamp… It’s as if she can’t retain the simplest piece of information. How I do wish Edith would come back.’

  Edith was the Mitchell’s regular maid. She had been with the family for nearly twenty years, but had recently returned home to care for her own dying mother and Hetty had replaced her. Imogen wished that Edith’s mother would either hurry up and die, or get better, so that Edith could come back to them. Then her own mother would be happier and life would return to normal. Imogen knew it was wrong to wish someone dead, but as her mother always said, ‘we all have to die sometime.’

  Rose stood by the fireplace. Although a tiny woman, she had the ability to command a room. She had been a teacher before she married, and emanated a quiet sort of strength. It was not difficult, Imogen thought, to imagine her holding forth in front of a class of children.

  ‘Come here darling,’ Rose said. Imogen’s feet sank into the silky pile of the pale cream Chinese rug as she walked towards her mother. Kissing her lightly on the cheek, Imogen inhaled the scent of lily of the valley.

  ‘Did Hetty give you some tea? I left a cake cooling on the rack before I went out and asked her to ice it for me and make sure you had a slice. I know you’re always starving when you get home.’

  ‘No…’ said Ginny. ‘I just had some of your delicious shortbread.’

  ‘I see,’ said Rose, ‘well sit down Ginny; there’s s
omething I need to discuss with you.’

  Imogen sat down on the sofa. It was covered in lilac-coloured linen decorated with large white wisteria flowers and contrived to be both feminine and charming.

  Imogen had a bad feeling about this ‘chat’. She had played a bit of a prank at school that morning – pretending to faint in assembly. Two teachers had rushed to Ginny’s aid and carried her to the sick room. The last sight she had of her two best friends – Joy and Norah – was of them rocking with suppressed laughter as she was carried bodily out of the assembly hall. Had the headmistress realised she had been pretending? And if so, had she since been in touch with her mother? A sense of dread spread up through Imogen’s body, working its way up her legs, until it reached her stomach, where it sat like an undigested meal, heavy and uncomfortable.

  ‘No need to look so worried, darling,’ her mother said, sitting down beside her on the sofa and taking Imogen’s hands in hers.