The blue Ford car trailed down the coast, the ruined battlements of a broken-down castle on the blustering coast fading into the past in the rear view mirror. The life that baby Soraya had been going to have disappeared at that point. The life in a Georgian house filled with antiques and paintings and a chipped veneer of middle-class propriety. She was too young to see its image extinguished, dwindling in the the background of a hastily arranged future. They drove towards the next life, with only the vaguest idea of what it might be.
When she was a year old, Soraya’s mother packed her, along with her own pepper-and-salt haired mother that Soraya called Nana and their mongrel collie dog, into a car with everything of their lives they could carry and drove away. They were running from Soraya’s grandfather, a sea captain who was rarely there, but when he was, he was unkind. He would rant for hours through the night, in his cups. That was the first secret. If Soraya asked about her grandfather, they told her he was dead.
They went ex-directory, out of the phone book. Nana’s sister lied that she didn’t know where they were, when the sea captain called her to rage and threaten. They kept this tale going, that Soraya’s grandfather was dead, until she was nine. Then Soraya waited at home for her mother while she went to his funeral, because, at last, his liver pickled like a blackened gherkin, he was really dead.
The second secret was about her own father. Soraya waited for him, year after year. She ached for him to come and live with them. When she had a chicken wishbone, and Nana dried it and broke it with Soraya between their pinky fingers so she could make a wish, she always wished for her father. He was beautiful. He was brilliant. He laughed and had fun and told stories of princes and boar hunts and panning for emeralds in mountain streams. Only when Soraya was fourteen, standing in the rain and mud, helping her mother knock in fence posts in a field, did she tell Soraya the secret that explained why he didn’t come.
These two secrets, about two men whose absence shaped her life, became the parameters, the book ends, in Soraya’s childhood of women.