When I was a child there was a movie called “A Little Princess” that I would watch over and over again. Strangely, I related to the main character Sarah, played by Shirley Temple.
Sarah was a beautiful wealthy girl whose father, an important colonel in the army, had to go to war. He had no choice but to leave Sarah at a prestigious girl’s only boarding school in England since Sarah had no mother. Mrs. Minchin treated Sarah with utmost respect knowing she was wealthy, but when her father was missing and presumed dead and the checks stopped, Sarah went from being a “princess” to being a servant.
The pain of losing a father and humiliation of going from riches to rags mimicked my life, but what really got me the most was the ending, when after never giving up hope, she found her father in a hospital with amnesia. I especially loved seeing her restored to her former respected self and watching Miss Minchin’s humiliation for the way she treated her during her darkest days.
I would then fantasize about my happy ending, picturing my father somewhere out there alive, perhaps also with amnesia, and one day I too will find him and life would go back to normal. All the kids who whispered and pointed, all the teachers who didn’t understand, the community who gossiped and abandoned, the relatives who turned their back and the business associates who stole from us, would feel the shame of how they treated us.
I prayed so hard for that ending.
In the end we did find him, nineteen years later, bound, shot and buried… nothing but a skeleton, in a garage coincidently a block away from where we once lived for a little while. My ‘happy ending’ obviously turned out very different..
