Dora

1987

Dora bustles about in her kitchen, preparing. For what? An onlooker might
take in the jars of jam, chutney, pickle and honey and the tins of cakes and
biscuits, the flasks of hot fluid, the tin foil wrapped sandwiches, the checked
wool blanket, the knitted Tammy and bed socks and the eye cover and ear
plugs, all gathering on the well scrubbed kitchen table, and conclude that
Dora is preparing for some kind of embattlement or imprisonment in a place
devoid of the comfort, warmth and peace of her own home.
In a sense they would be right. For Dora is going on a journey. But they would
be wrong in thinking that she dislikes what she is about to put herself through
in any way. On the contrary, Dora loves to go on a train journey and
especially on the Inverness to London sleeper, and very especially when it’s
to see her sister (which it always is, for she knows no-one else in London).
Dora is in fact preparing for her annual trip to London to be with her one
remaining sister for a one week visit. This encompasses both Christmas and
their shared Boxing Day birthday. On the 30 th of December Dora shoots back
up to Scotland, for she likes to be home in time for Hogmanay. For balance
Irina returns the favour with an annual trip to Inverness each July, for no
particular celebrations, just for the company and some Scottish weather (sun,
rain, whatever they are blessed with).
Dora (christened Isadora) and Irena are, as you may have surmised, twins. Or
so they say to anyone who asks. In truth though, they are the two remaining
sisters of a set of triplets, Imelda having succumbed to Scarlet Fever at the
tender age of seven. Up until then they were a cheerful, boisterous and
inseparable threesome known as Izy, Immy and Irry, growing up in Edinburgh
in the bright dawn of the twentieth century.
Since then, and there have now been eighty intervening years since the tragic
death of Imelda, Dora and Irene (as they respectively prefer to be called) have
stuck together through thick and thin. They have been inseparable through
the desperate need for support and security that only bereavement can bring.
Through adolescence, marriage, child rearing, widowhood and now through
old age, they continue to love and hold one another against the tragedies of
the world.
This, you might think, is difficult when the two live so far apart. It was indeed a
shock to the system (both systems), when they first had to separate at the
age of 22, but one which was ameliorated by their (plural) newly-wed status.
For they had married the sons of Dr Fleming, their local family GP, both of
whom had recently graduated as doctors from Edinburgh University. Dora
married the elder boy, Duncan, who simultaneously became a partner in his
father’s Colinton GP surgery. Irene married younger son Angus, who took up
a post as a Junior House Officer at Guys Hospital in London.

And so their young married lives were spent apart. They were both sad and
lonesome without each other, but it was not such a terrible wrench as it could
have been, given that they were both instantly taken up with the whirl of
married life, the fulfilment of childbirth, the rearing thereof and the exhaustion
of keeping perfect homes, cooking perfect dinners and generally being model
1920’s wives.
Lives that were to be damn near torn apart 19 years later. Two years into the
Second World War. The Blitz. Angus has signed up and is an RAF doctor. At
dusk one wet evening Irene hears the sirens and hustles her brood of four
down into the basement of their London home. It is the last time she will see
her home intact. Twenty minutes later a direct hit blasts it to smithereens.
Twenty four hours later (thank goodness for all Dora’s jams and chutneys and
Irene’s emergency food rations, stored in the basement for just such an
occasion) mother and four children are finally dug out of the rubble, shocked
but unharmed and euphoric to be looking once more upon daylight (or dusk at
any rate, still wet and now hung with brick dust) and breathing fresh air (albeit
tainted by the stench of burst sewerage).
The silver lining for Dora and her brood of five children, surviving alone up in
Edinburgh while Duncan fought in France, was that her homeless sister
caught the first train north and landed on her doorstep within days of being
dug out. The poor wains still bore the sweat, dust and tears of their ordeal.
Dora delightedly rallied to the cause: her four-storey town house had plenty of
space for all. The four teenage girl cousins (thank God they were all girls, both
Dora and Irene clutched at their hearts in relief, and would not have to sign
up) took over the top floor and could be heard chatting and giggling and
exclaiming long into the night. The five little boys hurtled around on the third
floor and learnt how to slide down three sets of banisters without ever
touching the ground (except when they fell off, usually with dramatic effect
and much howling). Thus the two families spent the next three years.
As the war ended change was in the air for everybody. Duncan returned from
battle nervy and jaded and opted for the quiet life of a GP post in Inverness.
Angus, having enjoyed several promotions through his years as an RAF
doctor, was offered a top slot in London with the onerous task of rejuvenating,
and rebuilding in some cases, London’s exhausted hospitals. The sisters
reluctantly separated.
Forty-two years on and the sisters continue to keep in close touch with letters
every week, phone calls most days, and of course the annual trips, Dora to
London at Christmas, Irena to Inverness every July. Between them they have
nurtured nine offspring into adulthood and laid to rest their two husbands, who
died in the same month of the same year; February 1976.
For about the last decade, since the death of their husbands, Dora has been
trying to get Irene to move back to Scotland. But Irene and Angus’s children
have all settled in and around London and Irene now has eleven
grandchildren to visit with, knit for, bake for and enjoy the nonsense of. She’s
not for moving, not even for her sister.

And Dora? Well she would never in a million years live in London. Not even
for her sister. It is England after all! So their system of letters, phone calls and
twice yearly visits continues and each is quite content with it really. Dora
always takes batches of jams, chutneys, cakes, shortbreads and the like,
south, determined that England cannot produce such fine foods as Scotland.
And Irene always brings Tourist tat – royal mugs, tea towels and the like –
north, convinced that Scotland is behind the times and these things will not
have reached it yet.
It’s 12 noon. Another five hours until Dora has to be at the station to her
Inverness to Edinburgh train. She’ll just check through her packing one more
time and then settle down with a nice cup of tea.

©Julia Welstead