Page 91 of A Fresh Start at Bramble Cottage
“That’s right.” She smiled. “You must come over and have a look.”
“I’d like that.”
“Can I come?” Lisa asked eagerly.
“Of course.” She turned back to Pam. “You knew Aunt Molly well, didn’t you?”
“Oh yes — I knew her for nearly forty years.” Pam laughed. “She was quite a character.”
“So I’ve heard. I’ve found out quite a bit about her that I never knew. Dancing at the Moulin Rouge, modelling for a top Parisian fashion house. And I found a medal she was given for working with the Resistance in the Second World War.”
Lisa’s eyes widened. “But wouldn’t she have been just a teenager then?”
Vicky nodded. “Yes, she was. But Mr Digby’s friend, the one who found out about the medal for me, said there were quite a few teenagers who helped. The youngest child who was involved was only six years old.”
“Six!” Lisa looked shocked. “That’s not much older than my Noah!”
“It’s true — I looked him up. His father was a Resistance leader, and he carried letters between groups in his schoolbag. Molly ran messages for the Resistance too, and sometimes she carried weapons for them. And Mr Kovacs, the medal expert, told me that she’d helped with the lifeline for airmen who’d been shot down, and escaped prisoners of war, guiding them between safe houses on their way to Spain.”
“That’s right — that was how she came to be left the cottage.” Pam had finished her dinner and took a sip of her wine. “There was a pilot who’d broken his leg when he’d bailed out — he couldn’t be moved for a couple of months. Molly took care of him — nursed him, took him food. His wife and baby daughter had been killed in the Blitz, and he never married again. When he died he left the cottage to Molly, in gratitude.”
“Oh — that’s so sad.” Vicky sighed.
“And that wasn’t all,” Pam went on. “Molly told me that she had spent several years in East Berlin during the Cold War,running a nightclub and cabaret. Then when they closed the border she began smuggling defectors to the West.”
“Wow!”
“She was allowed to go backwards and forwards into West Berlin every few weeks, to buy the good wines and spirits the senior party members preferred to the stuff you could mostly get in the East. The border guards never even thought of stopping her or searching her van — she was too friendly with the higher-ups.”
Vicky listened to the story, fascinated.
“She had a secret compartment behind the passenger seat where a person could hide. She brought out several disaffected military and party members, but most of them were just ordinary people who wanted freedom and a better life. That was how she met Juan.”
“She helped him escape?”
Pam shook her head. “No. There was another artist, who’d been blacklisted by the Russians — they didn’t approve of his work. He’d been labelled a dissident and warned he was in danger of being arrested. By that time things were getting a bit too hot for her in Berlin, so she fled with him to Spain. There was a group of other artists living there, and that was where she and Juan met.”
“Oh, yes — Mr Loughton, the auctioneer, told me she and Juan lived in an artists’ colony near Barcelona. Molly modelled for several of the artists, but it was Juan she fell in love with. Did you ever meet him?”
“No — he died a few years before I married Jack. She didn’t speak about him much.”
“There was nothing of his in the cottage, except for the portrait, and a poem he’d written. I wonder why she got rid of everything?”
Pam’s eyes softened. “She once told me that she didn’t need anything to remember him by. She sold everything but the portrait, and sent the money to an orphanage in Spain.”
“Oh . . .”
“That’s lovely.” Lisa sighed. “So romantic.”
“Why did they come and settle in England?” Vicky asked.
“I don’t know the details. It was something to do with his brother and an assassination attempt on some politician. They lived here for... oh, it must have been about fifteen years. Then Juan got sick — lung cancer. It was quite quick in the end.”
“He wrote a poem for her?” Lisa asked, a wistful note in her voice. “And he’d painted that portrait of her, too.”
“Yes — I found the poem in one of her books. And he did the sketch of Arthur’s wife, and a few others.” Vicky took a sip of her wine. “They’re all in that same weird style — not quite surrealist, not quite cubist. I don’t know what you’d call it — it was unique. Mr Loughton at the auction house said it was closest to Expressionism.”
“He did one of my grandmother,” Lisa recalled. “Mum thought it was rubbish — she kept threatening to throw it away. But I think she’s still got it. She’d probably be quite keen to sell it, if it was worth anything.”
