Authors: Elswyth Thane
“And hot-water bottles!” said Dinah. “And thermos flasks, if you can find them. And get yourself a siren suit, they’re heavenly if you have to turn out in the night. All in one piece, with a hood.”
“Rosalind wants one too, we wear the same size. Where’s the best place to go?”
The conversation, though brief, became technical.
Before she returned to Farthingale, bitter cold had set in, and Finland seemed the grim answer to the dreadful query,
What
Next?
which had overhung them all since the Polish surrender. If Finland went under, which seemed inevitable, it would be the eighth small nation in two years to be obliterated by dictator tactics.
“This Christmas will be even stranger than last year,” said Mab as they sat in Virginia’s room wrapping toys for the children’s tree on the night of Virginia’s return from London. “Will any of the family be able to come away from Town, do you think?”
“Whoever does come will have to double up and sleep on sofas and what-not,” said Virginia cheerfully. “Unless some of the Bank get leave to go home, which could happen, please God.”
“Anne Phillips hasn’t got much of anywhere to go,” Mab said thoughtfully. “She said I could call her Anne. Before she came here she lived with some kind of cousins that she doesn’t seem to care about. I like her the best of our lot. I’d like to invite her to be one of our family for Christmas.”
“If you like,” Virginia agreed, for the girl’s gentle humour
and reticence appealed to her too. “But that means we will have to take in any of the rest of them that are stuck here, along with her.”
“Wouldn’t we have to anyway?”
“Oh, dear, I suppose so,” Virginia sighed. “It can’t be much fun for them either.”
“It’s funny how some of them just don’t belong,” Mab reflected. “Well, look at Claudia Merton, moping around about her precious Harold when he’s still safe in England anyway—and then look at Mona, I bet there’s never a peep out of her about Michael!”
“Miss Merton has been awfully good with the children in the village,” Virginia pointed out fairly, for Claudia had coaxed and bullied and bribed the little evacuees into learning a Christmas play to be presented in the Parish Hall on the twenty-second, which was a Saturday. “She’s taken endless trouble with those poor little snotty-nosed infants, I’m afraid I never would even have tried.”
“Yes. I don’t think they thank her for it,” Mab said with her sometimes frightening penetration. “I think they’d much rather be let alone to bore themselves in their own way.”
“Perhaps. But with the weather what it is now, though we mustn’t mention that where Hitler can hear, they can’t be turned outside to play and something has to be done with them or their hosts will go mad.”
“Shall we all have to go to the performance on Saturday and applaud?” asked Mab resignedly, knowing the answer.
“Certainly we shall.”
“Don’t tell them that in London, they might not come at all.”
“How
can
you?” cried Virginia, pretending to be shocked. “When the poor girl has tried so hard!”
“The vackies are all crazy about you,” Mab reminded her. “And you never lift a finger at them.”
“I do, I do! I’ve had countless working-parties to make flannelette nighties for them, and I’ve sat up with Rosalind devising a way to feed them better in batches, and we’ve swapped them round in their lodgings to get them satisfied and break up feuds—”
“But you don’t
bother
them,” Mab explained placidly. “For their own good, I mean.”
“Because with an American income I can satisfy my conscience by buying them things instead,” Virginia admitted
ruefully, jerking a red bow into place on the knobby parcel a toy anti-aircraft gun made no matter how you wrapped it. “I hope we’re right to give them these modern war machines to play with. I can remember when one bought a whole model farm, tree by tree and cow by cow, for the young. Nowadays you set up a miniature war on the nursery floor—even to barrage balloons and barbed wire and dugouts. It can’t be good for their what-you-call-its. Even the dolls are in uniform this year!”
“Yes, I’m glad I was young before it began,” Mab nodded, looking down from her new teens. “I had a toy garden, remember—it would be fun to get it out again, just for old times if Sylvia comes.”
And if Jeff comes, she thought secretly. She and Jeff had chosen most of the garden together—tree by tree, just as Virginia had said, and three-inch lengths of cream-coloured balustrade and inch-square blocks of crazy-paving and a tiny sundial and wheelbarrow…. Bracken surely wouldn’t send Jeff to Finland now—there was already a staff man in Rome and in Brussels—Bracken had recently gone to Geneva himself—and it wasn’t as though the raids on London had started….
Like everyone with any sense, Mab was quite aware that the raids would start some time. The war could not be won by sitting behind fortified lines on the Continent. And Germany never packed up, Bracken said. The Germans were used to hardship, they had known nothing else for twenty-five years. Germans didn’t miss peace and security and freedom to do as they pleased with their lives, because they hadn’t had it to lose, last September.
Bracken said it was childish of people to count on the Germans cracking, or starting underground plots to get rid of Hitler. They believed in Hitler, and so far, said Bracken, he had delivered the goods. The Germans would not give up Hitler until he was hauled out of the Siegfried Line by the scruff of the neck and beaten up on the Western Front. Mr. Chamberlain had recently told the House that the war might last three years, which would be September, 1942, and Virginia had at once recalled that when Kitchener said the same thing in 1914 he underestimated the Germans even then.
And what would it be like, Mab wondered, tying up a Red Cross nurse doll, for these Birmingham children in the village to go home after three years away, after they had got used to the country and had got fond of the people they were
staying with? The little ones wouldn’t remember anything else. After three years nobody would be able to remember exactly what it was like before last September—except as Virginia remembered the time before the Kaiser’s war, like a different world. And after the raids came, they might not have homes to go to, their parents might not be alive to claim them, and their war-time hosts, many of them very unwilling still, might find themselves saddled forever with what began as an emergency duty.
Mab had seen the pictures in the weekly illustrated magazines of Warsaw after the German bombers had finished with it, and she understood that British cities might look the same in a few months’ time. When the crocuses bloomed again, they said, Hitler would strike at England. March was his month. He always broke loose then. It was horrifying to find oneself dreading the spring. The uncertainty, Mab thought, feeling it like a cold draught down the back of her neck. The daily knife edge of
not
knowing.
It must have taken courage for Evadne to come back from Williamsburg to the warden’s post in Bayswater. I couldn’t have done it, Mab thought humbly. I’d have made some humiliating, transparent excuse and stayed safe in America. But then, I’m a coward….
“Mona is hoping Michael may get leave for Christmas,” Virginia was saying, for she felt the silence had lasted long enough. “Nobody knows where he has got to by now, of course.”
“Will they get married if he does?”
“Mona would, like a shot. But Michael has other ideas. He’s afraid of coming back maimed and useless. Most of them dread that as much as dying, I think, if they really stop to think about it. They used to say in the last war that everybody has their own particular secret nightmare—blindness, amputation, disfigurement, fire—”
“Or the roof falling in,” said Mab, and her eyes were lowered to the tissue paper in her hands. “If I were ever in a raid that’s what I’d think of first. I’d hate more than anything being in an underground shelter, for fear it would all come down on top of me.”
“That’s claustrophobia,” said Virginia, deliberately unemotional. “Some people have it so badly they can’t even bear going into a lift.” And she thought, So that’s what’s been going on behind her face all this time. I knew there must be something—nobody could be as unconcerned as she seemed
to be, but I thought she’d never give me a clue. They’ve got such
pride,
not to let you know they’re afraid. We weren’t like that, we’d have confided more and let ourselves be comforted. Or would we? How do I know how I would have reacted to all this, it hadn’t been dreamed of when I was Mab’s age. Even when the Zeppelins came over, it was nothing like this. Even when it happened in Spain, we never really thought of it in terms of London. It was all waiting—building up—for Mab. I must say something, I must keep on talking, what can I offer her, how can I help, I mustn’t shirk this, perhaps she ought to be drawn out now that it’s come up at last—
“Tell me more about London,” Mab said steadily, closing the crack again. “What else have they done, in London?”
“Well, I told about the sandbags, didn’t I, even round Eros’s pedestal in Piccadilly—and the pillar boxes are all ringed with white and have yellow gas-detector paint on top. Kerbs and traffic islands are checkerboarded black and white, it’s quite gay, really, in the daytime. When you come out of hotels or theatres into the blackout the commissionaire says, ‘Three steps, madam,’ as though you were blind. There’s no more evening dress, women go dancing in uniform, even in trousers. Everybody’s likely to sing
Run,
Rabbit,
Run
as it gets towards closing time. The pigeons are still on duty, and the policemen. But the policemen wear blue steel helmets and gasmasks—”
“And the pigeons haven’t got any,” said Mab.
Virginia bit her lip. Nothing was safe to say any more. Had Sylvia thought about the pigeons? One gas raid and the pavement would be thick with dead pigeons….
All because of one man—one bloody awful little man called Hitler….
As Christmas drew near, there was a general exodus of the evacuees back to Town, in spite of Government pleas and warnings, and most of the bereaved country households found it hard to refrain from encouraging it, if only for a few days’ respite from unaccustomed crowding, confusion, dirt, and dissension—to say nothing of regaining a spare room for a relative on leave. There were children who preferred to stay with their sometimes embarrassed hosts, and were yanked back to London anyhow. There were wives who wanted to go back
and whose husbands wanted them to stay away. And there were violent quarrels between parents who took opposite views on where the children should spend Christmas.
Virginia’s thankfulness for her eight adult Bank guests increased when six of them proved to have devoted families and all wangled trips home for the holidays, while Claudia and Anne gratefully accepted the invitation to share the Farthingale festivities. It was the last feast while this abnormally normal interval lasted, before rationing and economy set in in dead earnest.
Bracken and Dinah elected to stay in London where they had so many friends who were doing the same thing, and send Jeff and Sylvia to the country for a few days. Jeff’s mother Phoebe and her second husband Oliver found opposite numbers with London ties to cover their Red Cross and warden jobs for the Christmas weekend. Stephen was pinned down with a Christmas show in the North and Evadne was released from duty by Smedley, who was in a visibly convivial mood, to join him there.
Everyone’s plans were of course hedged thickly round with ifs and buts, and a single raid could have thrown them all endwise. The moon would be full on Christmas Eve, which was a blessing for those who wanted to travel, even across London to a party, but at the same time everyone realized that it might tempt Hitler’s bombers to open the ball over England. It would be just like him, people said, to try to spoil Christmas.
On Friday morning a telegram arrived at Farthingale:
Homesick. Past-sick. A sofa will do. Arriving tea time today. Nigel.
And Virginia caught herself singing.
She had tried hard to be sensible about Nigel, and it was difficult not to cling on to him because of his likeness to his father. Slender and fair, with a deceptive gravity which had once masked a very subtle wit, and which now since his sorrow was without the relief of drollery which made Archie such an enchanting companion, Nigel embodied for Virginia the very essence of all she had lost in 1918. Just to look at Nigel she found comforting proof that such a man as Archie had once existed. Nigel’s choice of the Bar as a career, his manner of speaking even across a dinner table, his quick, legal turn of mind even on a joke, and particularly his profile in his barrister’s wig, twisted her heart between memory and present joy. And to have him turn homeward at last, voluntarily and doubtless at
some pains, made up more than a little for Evadne’s second absence on Christmas Day.
Nigel arrived by the same train which brought Phoebe and Oliver, and having hoarded petrol for that purpose Virginia was able to drive the car to the station to collect them in the usual way. With them as they descended from the train was a tall boy in Air Force blue, whom Virginia identified after a startled moment as her sister-in-law Clare’s youngest, Roger Flood, grown a foot since she last saw him, and carrying himself with the easy grace of his Campion uncles.
“I am a homeless orphan,” he announced tragically, posing before her on the platform. “I got holiday leave all of a sudden and there is no one to care. Nigel said you might give me a dry crust and a straw pallet by the fire.”
“Fool,” said Virginia with affection, kissing him on tiptoe. “Where have all your rafts of relations got to?”
“Gone,” said Roger drooping dramatically between her hands. “All gone with the wind, to Scotland and Wales and who knows where!”
“Seriously,” said Virginia, “does your mother know you’re out?”
“She’s in Edinburgh with brother Lionel,” Roger explained, gathering up luggage right and left. “She said to ring you up and ask, but Nigel said that nowadays we mustn’t use the telephone for idle gossip, so I just came.”
“And I am delighted to have you, of course,” said Virginia, making swift mental calculations about sofas and blankets and bathrooms and butter. “You can amuse the Bank.”