JEWELS: Josa Keyes

 

When I was a child all grown-up women I knew wore pearls around their necks. Any other kind of bead was unthinkable and déclassé.

Pearls were the badge of these ladies – that is how they thought of themselves, as ladies. Some of them were Ladies too, but not aristocracy. Oh no. This was the vanished class known as the gentry. They ran things in the past – the armed forces, the diplomatic, the Empire.  They had a code and stuck to it. And pearls were part of that code. The invention of the cultured pearl in 1916 was a boon and in no way diminished their lustre as symbols. My mother wore her pearls almost daily, except when her five children were at their most grabby stages.

Families tended to have a whole lot knocking about that would be strung and restrung into necklaces – always on silk and with a knot between - to give to daughters on a significant birthday. I was given a graduated double string and a little single string, and wore them casually as even in the 1980s it was a thing to do.

I grew up, married and had two children.  When my daughter was 4, and my son a baby, my beloved mother suddenly grew thin and frail and died very quickly of ovarian cancer at 68. The one adult I could rely on completely was gone and I was left bereft.  She left my elder sister her double string of pearls, and me her single string, as is only fitting.

At some point, not long after her death, the string she had left to me vanished. I searched everywhere and felt physically sick at my own carelessness in losing this precious memory of my lost mother. I couldn’t look at my other pearls, let alone wear them, as I remembered my guilt each time and misery gripped me. They were nowhere.

When my son was eight, and singing like an angel in the Westminster Abbey choir, I was surprised to find myself pregnant again at 42. The pregnancy, although physically easy, was emotionally very difficult. Where was my mother when I needed her most?

My little boy was born perfect and very lively. He was, as they say, ‘into everything’ and could run at 10 months. One day, when he wasn’t much older, he was fossicking around while I tidied my bedroom.  I heard an excited squeaking and looked up to see him running towards me clutching something in a small pink hand.

I seized him and kissed him, and took his prize gently from him. It was my lost mother’s lost pearls.

The little creature had found them in the pocket of an old sponge bag that I was about to throw away. A message from the past brought to me by the grandchild she never knew.

Cultured pearls aren’t worth much these days. The influx of freshwater pearls from China saw to that. You can pick up a nice vintage string with a gold clasp on Ebay for a couple of hundred pounds. My grief at their loss had nothing to do with their monetary value. It was the broken connection to home, family, love, motherhood and a vanished past that gave me such pain.

I wear them now as much as I can to keep them bright, with a sense of exhilaration that my baby restored them to me and I need mourn no more.

'A sweeping multi-generational tale that will catch your heart.' 

SUNDAY TIMES NO 1 BESTSELLER KATIE FFORDE

'Josa Young writes with warmth and wisdom about the complexities of motherhood in this captivating tale of four generations of women that sweeps eighty years of English history. Her eye for period detail is masterly and her characters so vivid they dance from the page and into our hearts.' RACHEL HORE

Josa's first novel, One Apple Tasted, was published in 2009. The second, Sail Upon the Land, was published 1 December 2014.

In 2019, she achieved Distinction for her Creative Writing Master's from Brunel University London, supervised by Booker winner Bernardine Evaristo. Previously, for her Oxbridge entrance exam, she was tutored by Penelope Fitzgerald, who won the Booker in 1979. She correctly predicted Bernardine would win exactly 40 years later.

A chapbook of poems, 'My Love Life and Other Disasters' will be published in 2021.

Find out more at www.josayoungauthor.com