castigate the woman for a lack of compassion that bordered on callous, but I was confident enough in my own impressions not to accept her assessment. Vivien Longmeyer was not simple, I could tell that much by looking at her; however, I could also see what it was that made her aunt describe her thus. Vivien had an ability, that bordered at times on unsettling, to sit still for very long periods of time, her face—not blank, certainly not that—rather alight with electric thought, but privately and in a manner that made anybody watching her feel excluded.
I was an imaginative child myself, often upbraided by my strict Protestant father for daydreaming and writing in my journals—a habit I continue to this day—and it seemed quite clear to me that Vivien had a vibrant inner life into which she disappeared. Further, it seemed natural and understandable that a child suffering the simultaneous loss of her family, her home, and the country of her birth, might necessarily seek to preserve what small certainties of identity she had left to her by internalising them.
Over the course of our long sea voyage, I was able to gain Vivien’s trust sufficiently to establish a relationship that continued over many years. We corresponded by letter with warm regularity until her tragic and untimely death during the Second World War, and although I never taught or counselled her in an official capacity I’m pleased to say that we became friends. She didn’t have many friends: she was the sort of person others longed to be loved by, yet she did not make connections easily or lightly. In retrospect, I consider it a highlight of my career that she opened up to me in detail about the private world she had constructed for herself. It was a ‘safe’ place into which she retreated if ever she was scared or alone, and I was honoured to be permitted a glimpse behind the veil.
Katy Ellis’s description of Vivien’s retreat into a ‘private world’ tallies with accounts of the adult Vivien: ‘She was attractive, the sort of person you wanted to look at, but whom afterwards you couldn’t really say you knew’; ‘She gave you the feeling there was more going on beneath the surface than there seemed’; ‘In some way, it was her very selfsufficiency that made her magnetic—she didn’t appear to need other people.’ Perhaps it was Vivien’s ‘strange, almost otherworldly air’ that caught the eye of Henry Jenkins that evening at the Nordstrom School. Or perhaps it was the fact that she, like he, had survived a childhood marked by tragic violence and been removed soon after to a world peopled by those with vastly different backgrounds from her own. ‘We were both outsiders in our way,’ Henry Jenkins told the BBC. ‘We belonged together, the two of us. I knew it the first time I laid eyes on her.
Watching her walk up the aisle towards me, perfect in her white lace, was the completion, in some ways, of a journey that started when I first arrived at Nordstrom School.’
There was a spottily reproduced photograph of the two of them then, taken on their wedding day as they emerged from the school chapel. Vivien was gazing up at Henry, her lace veil rippling in the breeze, as he held her arm and smiled directly at the camera. The people gathered around them tossing rice from the chapel steps were happy; yet the photograph made Laurel sad. Old photographs often did; she was her mother’s daughter; there was something terribly sobering about the smiling faces of people who didn’t yet know what fate awaited them. Even more so in a case like this one, where Laurel knew precisely the horrors that lurked around the corner. She had witnessed first-hand the violent death Henry Jenkins would suffer; and she knew, too, that young Vivien Jenkins, so perfect in her wedding photo, would be dead a mere three years after it was taken…
There is no doubt that Henry Jenkins adored his wife to the point of adulation. He made no secret of what she meant to him, calling her variously his ‘grace’, and his ‘salvation’, ex-pressing the sentiment, on more than one occasion, that without her his life would not be worth living. His claims would prove sadly prescient, for after Vivien’s death in an air raid on May 21st, 1941, Henry Jenkins’s world began to crumble. Despite being employed by the Ministry of Information and having first-hand knowledge of the