Rag Doll Ch. 08.2.1 - Connections

"Let me think ab...aaahhh! " I groaned as he began moving against me once again, that old, old rhythm, insistent and irresistible starting as he kissed me and loved me once again.

My Jamie knows how to put a big grin on my face, you better believe it...

*

Darryl & Lena:

Allie came home on a break, missing Lena, missing the kids, missing home, and most of all missing Lizzie, her mother, so most of the weekend was family catch-up time with her, getting her any and everything she wanted, and generally spoiling her. I love my little sister, I'm incredibly proud of her, and I never fail to take the opportunity to spoil her, even if it's just a little. Her mother indulges me, but I have to be fair, so what I give Allie, young Marcus gets something of equal value. Lena just lets me have my head; she knows what they both mean to me.

The upshot of this last weekend was that Allie heard about Nia's problem from Lena, and of course she jumped in with both feet; Allie adores Nia, she thinks she's the most exotically beautiful girl in the world, and Nia's kids swarm her whenever they're around her, so Allie wanted to help where she could. One of her best attributes, as far as I'm concerned, is her dogged concentration on the task in hand; if Allie's looking for a solution to a problem, she'll find it if she has to kick down doors and take names.

After three days solid staring at a laptop screen she'd found nothing about the missing girl, Rosa's daughter, but an extract from a regional newspaper website caught almost in passing yielded a snippet about a coroner's court being convened in the death of a Barbara Jane Davies, not Davis.

The interesting thing was, she was not in Coventry, which is where Nia said was her last known location; no, this Barbara Jane Davies had passed away almost nine years earlier in Carlisle, in Cumbria in the far North-West of England, up against the Scottish border, but the coincidence of the middle name, the same date of birth, very similar surname, all were compelling.

Had Allie maybe found Barbara Morrison at last?

It was enough of a hint for Allie to call up Nia and punt the link over for her to see for herself, not that she needed an excuse; Nia was her idol, and she jumped at any opportunity to talk with her, spend time with her, just be around her.

Nia said she'd discuss it with Jamie, weigh it up, and, if they thought it was worth it, they'd go and take a look.

Lena hugged Allie proudly.

"Thank you, baby!" she grinned, "Nia and her family mean a lot to us, thank you for sacrificing your time like this help her, Darryl and I are so proud of you."

*****

Bobby:

Ricky and I opted to fly down from Lake District Airport to London Southend, in Essex; the thought of driving the length of Britain left us both completely cold, and so we trained into London from Southend, and a quick hop down to South Croydon to pick up our rental car.

Once we'd oriented ourselves, then began the tedious task of combing through the registry offices of each of the four boroughs where James Morrison could possibly be living.

Luckily Ricky was au-fait with driving in London, because the place oppressed me; everything was outsize, the buses were huge, the traffic was ridiculous, if I'd tried this by myself they'd have sent me home in a jar, because Londoners drive like lunatics, they seem to have eyes in the backs of their heads and they all seem to know what each other's doing, but to an outsider like me it was chaos personified.

We went through the Registry Office in Merton first, that was closest. The way birth, marriage, and death records were filed meant that they were rarely filed according to the date they occurred, but rather by the date they were registered, so there might be anything up to a month discrepancy between given dates and actual date of filing, so we ploughed on.

Nothing in Merton, no birth or family records, nothing on the Electoral Roll, so on to Lambeth next. Shari reckoned Lambeth Town Hall was our best shot, the Electoral Roll would be huge, Lambeth is one of the most populous boroughs of London.

She was right; after jumping through nineteen-dozen different bureaucratic hoops and submitting all kinds of requests in triplicate of the "sign here, initial here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and state your inside leg measurement here, blood-type here, photocopy of your dental records, mother's maiden name," type that a bored, dismissive, sour-faced old woman took away to stuff in a drawer somewhere and never read, Rick and I were left to sit and stare at each other while passers-by and security staff stared at both of us for nearly four hours.

Eventually, another bored-looking flunkey came and got us and showed us rows of huge ledgers, at least three dozen of the things on each of five long, long reading tables. Ricky and I stared at him in dismay; WTF?

"They go by year, then by district, then names, hint, the names indexes down along the back wall tell you which ledger entry to look in if you're looking for an address, if you know which district you're looking for. If you know the year you're looking for and it's not in there, try looking at least two years prior, if you get bored, there's a drinks machine in the corridor, no food or drink in the Reading Room, no defacing or writing-on the pages, or erasing or changing entries, and no flash photography. Have fun," he smirked, and left us to it.

Actually, finding information in all those ledgers was quite simple once we worked out the system. The borough was divided into wards, once we found James from his full name we could look up which electoral ward he lived in, and that would give us his street address, so we set to. Seven hours later we'd lost the will to live.

Do you know how many James B. Morrison's there are in Lambeth? Ninety-Seven, out of a population of 325,000, or three times the population of Carlisle, and Carlisle was a city, Lambeth was just a borough of the city of London. This was going to take forever.

Ricky tried a different tack. He tried cross-referencing James B. Morison with Barbara J. Morrison cross-referenced with Jane Blake, Barbara's mother and bingo! We got it. Ricky stared at me, nonplussed. We'd found our uncle's address, what did we do next?

I wrote down all the relevant details, his address and postcode, and we went looking for the flunkey to let us out. When we told him we'd finally found what we were looking for, he smirked again and told us we could have found all that in the data library upstairs!

When I demanded to know why he hadn't told us that in the first place he sniffed that we hadn't asked, we'd asked to see the Rolls, so that's where he'd taken us. God preserve us from nit-picking, dogsbody, jobsworth flunkies...

That night, back in our hotel room, I discussed our next move with Shari over Skype. We agreed that I needed to go find James, if nothing else we could at least let him know we existed, find out what we could, and come home, mission accomplished.

Ricky was the one who was most affected by our search. Of all of us, he'd been the least interested in this wild goose chase, as he saw it; he'd had, and lost, his mother, and really he'd just been humouring Shari and Yaz, because more than anything he adored them and what they'd stood for.

To have something actually come of it, to find the missing part of our family, well, he hadn't really counted on that, and he was somewhat off balance.

He did apologise to me, though, for not being as involved as he should have been in something this important to me, for not taking it seriously, and for not considering my feelings as I searched for my mother and her family. So the next morning, we went to take a look and maybe finally find our uncle.

The address punched into the GPS brought us to a leafy street in Streatham, South London, to a large Victorian semi-detached house just short of being a mansion that looked like it had been carefully preserved and well maintained; all the original mid-nineteenth century features were still there, just like our home in Carlisle.

The house had the same tall, imposing windows, even the same chequered tiled path leading up to a magnificent dark wooden door inset with ornate stained-glass panels and leaded stained-glass side-lights, with extensive mature gardens and closely clipped lawns.

Obviously someone lived there, the place was scrupulously well-maintained, but there was no sign of anyone, there was no car parked on the driveway, and the doors to the double garage were padlocked shut.

We didn't know what to do, repeatedly knocking brought no response, so eventually we doubled back to the little corner-store at the end of the road and bought some stationery and an envelope, and wrote the what we hoped was our uncle a short note.

'Dear Sir,

Our names are Richard Brian Morrison Davies and Robert James Morrison Davies, we are the sons of Barbara Jane Morrison, who we believe was your sister. We are contacting you in an attempt to finally fill in the blanks in our family story because we believe our mother would have wanted us to do this.

Her family meant a lot to her, something we didn't recognise until it was much too late, and so, sir, if you would kindly, and entirely at your leisure, contact us so we may discuss our family and what it means to us we would really appreciate it. Our wives and children would also like to connect with the rest of our family.

Until recently we are all the Morrison-Davies family we knew about, being in contact with your part of the family will mean so much to us. Please contact me, Robert Morrison Davies, at the number below, and I look forward to hearing from you at your convenience.

With my very best regards,

Robert James Morrison Davies.'

I posted the sealed envelope through the door, and that was all Rick and I could realistically do; now it was in the lap of the gods. Ricky sighed and shrugged his shoulders, like a weight had suddenly been removed, and looked at me.

"I suppose we head home now, Bobby; I don't know what more we can do, and I don't know about you, but I really miss Yaz, the kids, proper meals, my own bed. Let's get out of here, we're done now..."

I could only agree with him, if only I could shake that sense of anticlimax; to have come so far to fruitlessly knock on a stranger's door. Still, it wasn't a complete waste of a long weekend; on the plus side, Nicky, Ashley, and the kids were due in Saturday night, and Judy was trying to wangle a couple of weeks so hopefully she and Leon could join us as well.

Sunday was usually the family day; Ricky, Yaz and the kids and Shari, the kids, and me all spent Sunday morning tidying up her gravesite and carefully washing Barbara's headstone, then took the kids to McDonalds instead of a big sit-down family lunch.

We decided to forgo it this particular weekend so we could do it as a complete family later in the week once Nicky and Ashley got over their jet-lag; I'm sure my mother would understand, especially if it meant Nicky could be there too. Sunday was going to be sit-down family lunch for a change, at home, and we'd give Stanwix a miss until Nicky and Ashley were up to it. So that's what we did.

*****

Rag Doll Ch. 08.2.2 - Connecting The Dots will finally draw all the various members of the Morrison-Davis clan together and reunite Ricky, Bobby and Nicky with Barbara's family.