More from The Shell Seekers

Nobody had ever known. Somehow, this seemed saddest of all. You should have talked about him, Mumma. Told me. I would have understood. I would have wanted to listen. She discovered, to her surprise, that her eyes had filled with tears. These now spilled over and ran down her cheeks, and the sensation was strange and unfamiliar, as though it were happening to another person and not herself. And yet she wept for her mother. I want you to be here. Now. I want to talk to you. I need you.
. . .
She was a schoolgirl again, bursting in through the door of that huge basement room in Oakley Street, calling "Mumma!" and knowing that, from somewhere, Mumma would answer. And as she wept, that armour which she had gathered about herself--that hard shell of self-control--broke up and disintegrated. Without that armour she could not have got through the first days of living in a cold world where Mumma no longer existed. Now, released by grief, she was human again and once more herself.