My daughter died giving birth, leaving me to raise her baby girl — 15 years later I found a box she'd hidden before going to the hospital, with my granddaughter's name on the lid, and what was inside made my hands shake.
My daughter died giving birth, leaving me to raise her baby girl — 15 years later I found a box she'd hidden before going to the hospital, with my granddaughter's name on the lid, and what was inside made my hands shake.
Fifteen years ago I drove my twenty-four-year-old daughter to the hospital thinking it was going to be one of the best days of our lives.
Merryn had chosen the name Cleo months before. She had loved it since she was about thirteen, and the day the scan said girl, that was that.
In the car she looked across at me and said: "Mum. What if I'm rubbish at this?"
And I squeezed her hand and said: "You're going to be a wonderful mother. And I'll be right there whenever you need me."
I did not know that sentence was going to follow me around for fifteen years.
Something went wrong during the delivery. Cleo came out fine. Merryn did not come out at all.
Holding a newborn while a registrar told me my daughter had died nearly finished me. I loved that baby the same afternoon. And knowing Merryn would never hold her was a thing I could not get my head round and still cannot.
Her boyfriend lasted nine days.
"I can't do it," Tobin said, in my kitchen. "Every time I look at her I see Merryn."
"She's your daughter. She needs you."
He went anyway, and I raised Cleo on my own while burying my own child.
The first three years were the worst of my life and Cleo is the only reason I got through them. That baby turned into a sensible, funny, slightly sarcastic fifteen-year-old who looks more like her mother every year.
And around her fifteenth birthday I finally decided to go through the last of Merryn's things, which had been in the bottom of her wardrobe in this house since 2011 because I had never been able to face them.
That is when I found the box.
Small, cardboard, pushed right in behind the bottom shelf, with an old towel over it.
And on the lid, in my daughter's handwriting:
***FOR CLEO***
She hid that box before she ever went to the hospital. It had been eleven feet from where I sleep for fifteen years and I had not known.
I sat down on that floor and I opened it.
What was in it.
Not letters. Everybody assumes letters. There were no letters for every birthday, no cards, nothing like that.
There were four things.
A photograph of Merryn at about twenty-two, on a beach, laughing at whoever was holding the camera.
A single sheet of A4, folded once, with FOR CLEO — 15 on the front.
A set of keys on a ring with a paper tag.
And a green cardboard folder with a solicitor's compliment slip clipped to the front.
Inside the folder was a will, and a separate document, both signed by my daughter on the eighth of January, 2011 — nine weeks before she died — and witnessed by two people.
The will is two pages and does almost nothing, because she had about eleven hundred pounds and a car worth less than that.
The other document appoints a guardian for her unborn child in the event of her death.
And the name on it is not mine.
Petra.
Petra Halsey.
She managed the Copperpot, the café on Rill Street where Merryn worked from when she was nineteen until about six weeks before she had Cleo.
She was thirty-six in 2011. She is fifty-one now. I have seen that woman perhaps six times in my life and one of them was at my daughter's funeral, at the back, in a navy coat.
My daughter sat in a solicitor's office nine weeks before she gave birth and signed a document appointing a woman from her work — not her mother — to raise her child if anything happened.
I sat on that bedroom floor holding a piece of paper for about forty minutes without moving.
Then I was sick in the upstairs bathroom.
Then I came back and read the letter.
The letter.
One page. To Cleo. To be given to her at fifteen, which is written on the front in Merryn's biro.
I read it. I want to be honest about that straight away: it was not addressed to me and I read it standing up in a bedroom, twice, before I had decided anything.
It is mostly the things you would expect a twenty-four-year-old to write to a child she has not met. That she loved her already. That she was frightened. That she hoped she was funny.
And then there is a paragraph in the middle that is not for a child at all, and which is why my hands started going.
***If you're reading this and you live with Nanna Deb, that's alright. I'm not cross. But I want you to know I did something before you were born, and somebody has decided not to use it, and that's their business and probably it was the kind thing.***
***I want you to know it existed, because when you're fifteen you'll be old enough to know that somebody thought about you very carefully before you turned up.***
***And because there's a difference between being loved and being wanted for a reason, and you should know which one you've had, and only you can work that out.***
Twenty-four years old, nine weeks before, sitting in a solicitor's office on Rill Street with eleven hundred pounds to her name.
And the eighth of January, which I can also account for, because I keep a diary and always have.
That Saturday, my entry says: M at work all day. Did her ironing. Bought the cot mattress — she'll only argue.
She was not at work all day. Petra has the rota from 2011 in a box in the café office, because Petra keeps everything, and Merryn was not on that Saturday.
She was on Rill Street, in an office above the pharmacy, signing a document with two witnesses.
And I was in this house doing her ironing and buying a cot mattress she had not asked for and did not want, and writing she'll only argue in a diary.
I have read that line about a hundred times since the April.
***She'll only argue.***
Four words that tell you exactly what it was like being my daughter, written by me, in my own handwriting, on the same day she was in a solicitor's office nine hundred yards away.
Why she did it.
I had to ask Petra Halsey. There is nobody else alive who knows.
I did not do it well. I turned up at the Copperpot on a Tuesday morning in the April with a folder in a bag-for-life and asked a woman serving coffee whether she had a minute.
And she looked at me for about two seconds and said: "You've found it, then."
She closed the café for an hour. She made two teas and did not drink hers either.
And she told me that Merryn came to her in the December of 2010 and asked her to be it.
She said no, twice. She said: your mum is right there, your mum is fine, don't be daft.
And Merryn said: "I know. I'm not saying she's not fine. I'm saying I need somebody who isn't her."
Petra asked her why.
And my daughter told her about Christmas Day.
Christmas Day, 2010.
I have thought about that day approximately four thousand times since the April and I can remember it, which is the worst part. I can remember the room and what we had and that the boiler was playing up.
Merryn was seven months gone. She was on the sofa with her feet up on a pouffe. The two of us were on our own; it was the first year we had not gone to my sister's.
And I said something.
I have gone over and over what my actual words were and the honest answer is that I do not know them exactly, and that Petra has Merryn's version, told three days later, and that Merryn's version is close enough that I am not going to argue with a dead woman about a comma.
What I said was something like this.
"You know if anything ever happened to you, I'd have her. I'd take her and we'd start again. And I'd do it right this time."
***I'd do it right this time.***
I meant it as a comfort. I have to put that down because it is true, and I also have to put down that it does not matter at all what I meant.
Because my daughter, twenty-four years old and seven months pregnant, sat on that sofa and heard the phrase this time, and understood that the woman who raised her was describing a second attempt.
Not a granddaughter. A do-over.
She said to Petra: "Mum's not cruel. She's just — she's got a version of me that didn't happen, and she's going to put it on my kid."
Three days after Christmas she asked a woman from her work to take her child, and on the eighth of January she signed a document in a solicitor's office, and on the twelfth of March she died.
What I had actually done.
Here is the part where I have to stop defending myself, because when I first read that letter my entire body went into an argument.
I had Merryn at nineteen. Her father was gone before she was one and I have never wanted to write about him and I am not going to.
And I did my absolute best and I made her do things.
Piano from six to eleven, which she hated, because I had wanted lessons and my mother could not afford them. Ashcombe High because it had the uniform and the reputation, when the other school was where all four of her friends went. Ballet. A summer at my sister's because I thought she was getting "a bit common" with a girl from Rill Street.
She left school at seventeen and worked in a café for five years and I never once said I was proud of that, and I said the other thing — you're better than that — at least three times, and one of those was in front of Petra Halsey in 2009, which Petra remembered word for word and did not tell me she remembered until the June.
So when my daughter said her mother had a version of her that had not happened, she was not being dramatic. She was describing something I did to her for twenty-four years with the best will in the world.
And the reason my hands were shaking on that floor was not shock.
It was recognition. It took about four seconds and then I spent four months trying to get back to the version where it was shock.
And the other thing. What I have done since.
Cleo is at Ashcombe High.
Cleo did piano from six to eleven and stopped, and I said what a shame, you'll regret it.
Cleo sleeps in Merryn's old room, in Merryn's bed, which I did not replace, and which I told myself was practical.
There is a photograph of Merryn aged fifteen on the landing and a photograph of Cleo aged fifteen next to it and they are in matching frames that I bought as a pair, and I put them up in the March, six weeks before I found that box, and I was proud of myself for doing it.
I have called her Merryn out loud. Not often. Four times that I know of — she says six.
Petra Halsey watched all of that from a café on Rill Street for fifteen years and said nothing.
Why she said nothing.
Because of the funeral.
She came to it and she stood at the back, and she had the document in her handbag. She had decided on the way there that she was going to speak to me afterwards.
And she saw a woman of forty-four holding a nine-day-old baby in a church, and she said to me in that café: "You were the only thing that child had. And you were holding her like she was the last thing on earth."
"And I thought: if I put this in that woman's hand today, I take her daughter and her granddaughter off her in the same week."
So she put it back in her bag and went home and she has had a copy in a drawer for fifteen years.
She has never done anything with it and she has never entirely put it down either.
She sent Cleo a card every birthday. Every single year. Signed P, with a fiver in it when Cleo was small and a tenner later.
I remember those cards. I remember thinking it was somebody from Merryn's work being nice, and I remember, about four years in, finding it slightly odd, and deciding not to think about it because there were forty other things to do that week.
A woman sent my granddaughter fifteen birthday cards and I never once asked who she was.
And the rest of that hour in the café, which I have put off writing down.
Petra told me two more things and I am going to put both of them in because leaving them out would be the same as tearing the letter up.
The first is that Merryn nearly told me. In the February. She said to Petra, in the kitchen at the back, that she was going to sit me down and "have it out properly" before the baby came.
And Petra said: what changed your mind.
And Merryn said: "She bought a mattress."
That is all. My daughter was working herself up to the hardest conversation of her life and I bought a cot mattress she had not asked for, and she decided it was not worth it, and she died five weeks later.
The second thing is that Merryn said one sentence about me that Petra has never forgotten and did not want to repeat and repeated anyway because I asked her twice.
"She loves me so much she can't see me."
Not she doesn't love me. The other one. The one you cannot argue with and cannot fix by loving somebody harder, which is the only tool I have ever had.
What I did with it.
Nothing, for eleven days.
Eleven days, and I have told Cleo how long it was, because she asked and because lying about the number would have been the same thing again.
On day three I sat at the kitchen table with the letter and the folder and a lighter that lives in the drawer for the oven pilot light.
I did not do anything with it. But I got it out and I put it on the table and it sat there for about an hour.
I am fifteen years into loving that child more than anything I have ever loved, and on day three I sat at a table and thought seriously about the fact that if those four things went in the bin, nobody alive would ever mention it except a woman in a café who had already decided not to.
And what stopped me was not virtue.
What stopped me was that the letter says somebody has decided not to use it, and that Cleo would have read that sentence at some point in her life — from Petra, from a solicitor's file, from anywhere — and I would have been the second person in this family to decide what she was allowed to know.
And that is exactly the sentence my daughter wrote the document about.
Telling her.
I told her on a Sunday in the May, at the kitchen table, and I did it badly, which Cleo has been generous about.
I gave her the letter first and I made myself leave the room while she read it, which took eleven minutes, and I stood in the hall like an idiot.
And when I came back in she said — and this is the thing I was not ready for — "Who's Petra?"
Not: why didn't Mum want you to have me.
Not: how could you.
She wanted to know who the woman was. Because a stranger had been in her life since she was born and had sent her fifteen cards and she wanted a name to put on it.
They met in the June, at the Copperpot, with me there for the first twenty minutes and then not.
They have a thing now on the first Saturday of the month. Petra has shown her the photographs of Merryn from the café — there are about forty, and I had never seen one of them, because they are the version of my daughter that happened at work, in an apron, laughing, at twenty-two.
Cleo has three of them on her wall. In her room. Which was Merryn's room.
What Cleo said.
She said one thing to me, in the August, that I am going to put down and then leave alone.
We were in the car. She said: "Nan. I'm not going to be Mum. Just so you know."
And I said I know.
And she said: "You don't, though. But it's alright. I'll keep saying it."
Fifteen. And kinder about it than I have managed to be about anything.
The keys.
The fourth thing in the box was a set of keys on a ring with a paper tag.
Two keys. The tag says: Unit 14 — pay Feb.
It took me until the July to work out what they were, and it was Petra who worked it out, not me.
Merryn had rented a storage unit at a place out on the Marlock road in the November of 2010. Six months up front, and then a standing order that went out of an account that was closed in the April of 2011 when I closed her accounts, which is why the payment failed and why, in the September of 2011, the unit was cleared and its contents were disposed of.
There is nothing in it now. There has been a man's garden furniture in it since 2014.
I will never know what was in there and neither will Cleo.
I have decided, and I have said this to Petra and to nobody else, that it was probably baby things. A cot she had got second-hand and did not want me to see because I would have said something about the state of it.
That is my guess and it is the kind one and I am allowed one kind guess.
And Tobin, who I rang in the June, which surprised everybody including me.
He is forty-one and he lives two hundred miles away and he has two sons and a wife who knew all about it before I rang, which I had not expected.
I did not ring him to have a go. I rang him because Cleo had asked one question in the May — did he ever ask about me — and I had said no, and then I had realised I did not actually know, because I had not spoken to the man since 2011.
He had. Twice. In 2013 and in 2016, by letter, to this house.
I do not remember a letter in 2013. I have looked. I think I do remember one in 2016 and I think I put it in a drawer and did not answer it, and I have told Cleo that, and it is the second worst conversation we have had.
He is not a good man in this story and he left a nine-day-old baby. I am not rehabilitating him.
But he wrote twice and I have to carry the 2016 one, because that was mine.
They have spoken now, on video, three times. It is stilted and Cleo finds it exhausting and she is still doing it, which is entirely her decision and about which I have said nothing at all, which has taken more out of me than anything else this year.
Where things are.
Cleo is sixteen in the March.
She is moving into the small room at the front, which was never anybody's, and she asked for it herself in the September, and we have painted it a colour I would not have chosen.
The piano has gone to my sister's.
I still have both photographs on the landing, and I have stopped explaining to visitors that they are the same age in them.
Petra Halsey and I are not friends. We are two women who each did something enormous about the same child fifteen years apart, and we speak on the phone about once a month, and it is mostly logistics, and it is fine.
And my sister Rhona, who I told in the July and who said the thing nobody else has been brave enough to.
She is four years older and she has known me since I was born and she listened to all of it at her kitchen table without interrupting, which is not like her.
And at the end she said: "Deb. I'd have signed it too."
And I said what.
And she said: "If it had been me, at twenty-four, pregnant, with you as my mother. I'd have signed it. And I'd have felt sick about it, and I'd have signed it."
I did not speak to her for nine days.
And then I rang her and said I wanted the rest of it, and she gave me the rest of it, and it took about two hours and included things from 1994 and 2003 that I had genuinely forgotten and one thing that I had not.
She has known for thirty years exactly what I am like and has never once said it, because I am her sister and because there is no good afternoon on which to tell a woman that she is drowning her own child in love.
She said sorry afterwards, about four times. I have told her not to. She is the only person in this who has told me the truth at the first time of asking.
And the last thing.
The final line of that letter is the one I did not quote earlier, because I wanted it here.
After the paragraph about being loved and being wanted for a reason, my daughter wrote this:
***Whoever is reading this to you — if it's Mum, tell her I did it in January and I nearly tore it up in February. Twice.***
***I kept it because I might be wrong about her and I'd rather you had the proof than my opinion.***
I might be wrong about her.
She was not wrong about me. That is the thing I have had to sit with.
She was twenty-four and seven months pregnant and she read me correctly on a sofa on Christmas Day, and then she went away and made arrangements, and then she went back in February and picked the folder up and nearly tore it up — twice — because she wanted to be wrong.
And she put it back in a box behind a shelf in her own bedroom, in her mother's house, addressed to a person who did not exist yet.
Not to protect Cleo from me. If she had wanted that, she would have given the folder to Petra and told her to use it.
She left it where it would be found by whoever went through her things.
May you like
She left it for me.
Fifteen years late, in a box behind a shelf, with a towel over it — one page of handwriting telling a woman she loved exactly what she was doing, in the only way she could think of that would not start an argument in a kitchen while she was still alive.
