I knew this old lady during my years in London, 1989-1995, who worked all night in a factory somewhere in the Midlands during World War II. She lived in the flat beneath mine with her cat, Clio.
She was in pretty bad shape, physically, when I knew her and I knew she would die soon, so I did whatever I could for her, which was mostly just to be kind. We had some good talks in which she withheld nothing. The last time I talked with her was by phone a year or so after I left. She told me how she had recently fallen down into the gutter at the edge of the street and couldn't get up. “People were very nice about it, Valdemar,” she said.
She had a baby before the war by a guy named Pearson who didn't marry her but she used his surname the rest of her life. She told me that the last time she saw him she asked if he wouldn't help with child expenses and he told her, “I'm not a millionaire, you know.” “I never saw him again after that,” she said.
World War II came along and her boy was “shipped out” to some remote location. It was during the war that she walked this long distance to a factory and back home again under the stars. I believe she told me that it was a five- or six-mile walk. She said “What I remember most about that walk was looking up at the stars on way home. Looking up at the stars.”
I met her son a few times and he seemed pretty much out of it, as if he were undeveloped in some way or as if something just plain missing. But that son, damaged though he was, meant more to her than the stars.
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