Authors: Elizabeth Jane Howard
I still thought sometimes about the summer, and the carefree life at Clifton Hill, with all the talk and jokes and music, but then Wayland came into the picture – the times on the river
– and I’d learned to stop thinking about that because I couldn’t bear any more of the sick, raw unhappiness that lay in wait. It wasn’t possible to love Wayland; forbidden,
hopeless. He’d probably found someone else by now; someone it would be all right for him to love. But I didn’t want to think much about that either. The whole thing had been wrong and
irresponsible, I’d put it all away.
That was all very well, but it didn’t make me love Pete the more.
And so, I suppose, with dull predictability, I began to fall in love with someone else – with Philip who amused, entertained and flattered me with his attention. It wasn’t easy for
us to be alone together, but he took to turning up at the hotel to have tea with
me, or a drink at the bar, and we’d carry the drinks into the enormous lounge where we
could sit in a quiet corner. He had a slight drawl, was rather a Wildean character. He told me that before the war he’d got a scholarship to Cambridge. ‘I don’t come from your
sort of background at all,’ he said. He asked me about my marriage, and I said things weren’t going well. He’d perceived that. ‘The first two things I noticed about you was
that you didn’t wear a bra, and that you weren’t happy.’ I didn’t want to tell him more about being unhappy, and he didn’t press me.
Then, one wintry afternoon, he turned up, said he had the afternoon off and proposed that we should go for a walk. We went high up the small mountain where there was snow in the crevasses
between the rocks, and we lay in it and he made love to me. And so I became in love. I honestly don’t know now how much, or indeed whether this was at all true: I certainly wanted it to be. I
loved his gentleness and his wit; it was balm to be wanted, approved of, to have someone to talk to about books and ideas. And, of course, the very secrecy that had to be preserved made it
exciting. The time on the mountain – although it was never repeated – had been thrillingly romantic. Pete didn’t seem to notice anything, but the temperature between us had
lowered to a kind of affability – wary on my part, breezy on his. I found it much easier now to play my part.
Holyhead came to an end. The boats were all going south in preparation for the invasion. I went back to London and Clifton Hill.
I got back to find the house teeming with romance. Audrey was going to marry John Rideout, Denis was going to marry Penelope Gough, Dosia’s sister Nancy had fallen in love with one of the
Craxtons, Anthony, and, best of all, Dosia and Barry were all set for marriage. I was a witness at their wedding; that morning, the three of us sat in our dressing-gowns eating burnt toast and
discussing the gloomy alternatives of birth control. Eventually Barry said we’d better be off to the registry office. When we came back to Clifton
Hill, Barry said,
‘Now, where were we? Plenty of time to discuss it now.’ He had a studio in Kinnerton Street in Knightsbridge where they went to live, and I used sometimes to stay with them there. I
told them about Philip, and they met and liked him.
It was through Philip that we all got to know Anne Richmond. He had often talked to me about her, said she had become his friend at Cambridge, but when I asked if he’d been in love with
her he said no. She was madly in love with someone called Pete Piper, who’d been taken prisoner by the Japanese. She wrote to him all the time, but hardly ever had any news. He took me to her
room in Percy Street, near where she worked in the Ministry of Information. She was a tall, red-haired beauty, with a soft voice in which she made unexpectedly ironical and funny remarks.
One winter afternoon, on the top of the 53 bus in Abbey Road, I met a man who was sitting with an actor I vaguely recognized. The man I knew turned out to be Jack Watling. His companion changed
seats to be nearer to me and asked if I was an actress. The theatre still smouldered in my mind, so I said that I was, or had been. He said he’d like to take me to see someone who was looking
for a girl to play a part in a new play. We made arrangements and he took me. The playwright was Terence Rattigan, who at that time lived in Albany, just off Piccadilly. Mr Neuman – I think
that was his name – introduced me as not only an actress but a writer. I’d told him about the fragmentary novel I was working on. I was given a script and asked to read two scenes. The
play turned out to be
While the Sun Shines
and the part I read was a good-time girl, so well played subsequently by Brenda Bruce. It was clear that I was hopelessly unsuitable, but Rattigan
was courteous about it. He asked me what I was writing. A novel. Title? I was going to call it
The Deep Blue Sea
. ‘That’s a very good title,’ he said, ‘
Very
good.’ That was that. When I did finish the novel I called it
The Beautiful Visit
, but I like to think I gave Rattigan his title for that excellent play.
By then, in 1943, I’d got a job. Wyndham Goodden had
introduced me to Norman Collins, the novelist, who had a high-up administrative position in the BBC. He employed me
as a continuity announcer. I had to work four floors underground in what had been the Peter Robinson department store in Oxford Street. As the most junior of the announcers, I had to work the night
shift. I was to trail someone who already knew the job. This turned out to be a girl of about my age, very beautiful, with black hair, dark eyes and a very white skin. She was dressed in a flowered
silk dress, and was extremely friendly and helpful. Her name was Jill Balcon and she’d trained to be an actress. She had a good sense of humour, and we got on at once, but in no time I was on
my own – with only two junior programme engineers on the other side of a glass panel.
The job consisted of reading news bulletins every hour, announcing live concerts, selecting and playing gramophone records but, above all, never allowing more than fifteen seconds of ‘dead
air’in case the Germans used the airwaves. This doesn’t sound arduous, but it was, because quite often we had to stop live concerts in mid-phrase for air raids, and substitute a record
very quickly. Every single detail of every recording broadcast had to be laboriously logged, and if the news bulletin arrived thirty seconds before it was to be put out, it had to be read without
rehearsal of often difficult and unknown place names.
There was a break sometime during the night when you could go to the canteen and have a dried-egg omelette and coffee. Through Jill, I met Noël Iliffe who was producing a programme called
Chapter & Verse
, and I used to read the poetry for him sometimes. He was a man with a gentle, pedantic voice, who was devoted to the theatre and had met his wife, Simona Pakenham, when
they were both at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin.
At the end of the shift I used to walk across the road to the Underground where the platform would be full of sleeping bodies lying on newspapers and wrapped in blankets and overcoats. Every
three or four minutes a train would rumble into the station, with its preceding rush of brown air, but the bodies were used to this
and didn’t move. As the weeks went by I
saw that they each had their particular place staked out. Many of the women slept in curlers, some had Thermos flasks beside them; the men slept in their boots or shoes and women in bedroom
slippers.
I’d leave the train at St John’s Wood and walk, in the blackout, home to Clifton Hill where, soon after, my housemates would be getting up, hurrying each other about the bathroom,
eating slightly burnt toast and drinking tea. The discomforts, looking back on them, were considerable: there was no way of heating the house except for the gas fire in the nursery and a coal fire
– when we could get coal – in the drawing room, and food was pretty awful. ‘There’s nothing to eat in this house but cork mats,’ Wyndham remarked one day, morosely
biting into one. The cook I’d started life with there had soon given notice – she couldn’t get used to our ways, she said. We didn’t mind. She used to riddle the range
furiously at night, which we called ‘Mrs Upton taking off her stays’. We lived on music, and jokes, and falling a little in love – but not too much – with one another.
It was a carefree, light-hearted life and I felt happier than I had for months.
Anne Richmond came to Clifton Hill and everyone loved her, but some time during that summer, her anguish about Pete Piper became so strong that she decided to join the FANY, the First Aid
Nursing Yeomanry, and go to India, feeling it would be that much nearer to her Pete. On the night before she left we played Ravel’s choreographic piece ‘La Valse’ on the
gramophone and she got up suddenly and danced – by herself – for the entire piece. Marie Paneth was there that night; she said how beautiful Anne was and we were all very moved.
Leaves became rarer, but Philip managed to get up to London from time to time and Barry lent me his studio for our meetings. I wrote copious letters to Philip, and he replied, but in more
guarded terms. He had been put in charge of a frigate that was to be the headquarters from which naval operations were to be conducted.
This was a dangerous job: Philip already
had a DSC and had proved himself. He told me rather wryly that Pete had assigned him.
I remember particularly a night in June when he rang to say he was coming up for the evening and would I meet him at Waterloo. We met in the blackout at the station and got a cab to
Knightsbridge. It wasn’t until we were safely in the studio that I saw how haggard he looked. ‘I’ve been up for three nights,’ he said. ‘I had to stop a train to get
here.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘I had to get them to make a train stop at a station it doesn’t usually stop at, or I wouldn’t be here at all. I said I was an admiral. And now to bed.’
He left very early in the morning and the next day was D-Day – 6 June 1944.
The next few weeks were nerve-racking. Occasionally Pete rang, and once came up for a night. He was tired but exhilarated. The weather had been bad, which had made the landings much harder for
the wretched troops in the assault craft – most of them were seasick crossing the Channel. I couldn’t imagine anything more awful than having to wade ashore, sick and laden with weighty
equipment under heavy fire. On the other hand, the bad weather and the stretches of coast chosen had been an element of surprise. Philip was doing a marvellous job, he added casually.
I went on writing to Philip. I thought now that he’d taken all that trouble to get to London that night because he knew that the invasion was starting and that he might be killed.
Occasionally, he rang up. It was ‘madly war’, he said – a phrase coined earlier by some officers and which later entered the language. He thought he might get some leave in a few
weeks’ time, wasn’t sure when. Then, perhaps we might go away together? We might indeed. This was something to look forward to.
I’d been twenty-one in March; had celebrated my birthday, wanly, in a pub with Barry and Dosia. I thought I was old now, but I wasn’t; neither old nor mature – that longed-for
goal.
One hot evening in July, I checked into my continuity studio to
find a new girl just preparing to leave the shift. ‘Oh, by the way, you know Philip Lee, don’t
you?’ Yes, I did. ‘Isn’t he charming? He’s just come to collect my flatmate Elena and they’re off for a heavenly holiday in Westmorland. Isn’t she the lucky
one?’
I noticed that she looked rather hard at me when she said this and I was careful to look back expressionlessly.
Then she went. I was reeling, almost faint with shock, but I wasn’t alone: on the other side of the glass window were the two junior programme engineers cheerfully waving good evening to
me. The news bulletin was brought in, and in twenty seconds I’d have to read it.
Somehow, I got through the night, logging programmes, selecting records to play for the following evening, reading bulletin after bulletin. In the break, I went to the lavatory to cry, but found
that I couldn’t even do that. I took refuge, dramatic refuge in giving an impeccable performance in front of the JPEs.
Leaving the train at St John’s Wood, I was alone at last. It was beginning to be light, but there was no one about, and I walked home streaming.
I thought he would write to me, but he didn’t. That was the end of it. I didn’t see him again for years, until we met at a party. He was drunk.
I find it difficult to know now
how
unhappy this made me. I suspect that I dramatized it, tried to make it more than it could ever have been – simply a wartime affair of which there
were so many at the time. I don’t think Pete ever knew about it. If he did, he was silent on the subject, and continued to be the same to me as he’d been for months now: affable,
sometimes sentimental. Like many who have very little interest in people, sentiment was often his substitute for anything significant (I’d begun to recognize that he wasn’t really
interested in people).
The pressure for me to have another child continued. Even when I went to Sussex to visit Nicola, Nanny would say, with nauseating coyness, how much Nicola would like a little brother.
I knew that, with all the marriages, Clifton Hill was going to break up and I had to think about an alternative. Love, which still seemed to me the most important thing in the
world, had eluded me; I seemed incapable of sustaining, inspiring or receiving it. This reinforced all my secret feelings of being worthless. The war, despite successful invasions, stretched
interminably before us – indeed, after the Japanese assault on Pearl Harbor, it had seemed simply to proliferate.
And so I went to Fritton as I was told to do.
Pete was sometimes sleeping on his ship, sometimes at home. There was a new ordeal for me now. K received me blandly with no hint of trouble while Peter was in the house, but the moment that he
was gone she began to cross-examine me about Holyhead. It was clear she knew something, and that she was very angry. Eventually, she mentioned Philip and asked me what I’d thought of him. I
said I liked him and that he’d been a very good Algernon in the play. ‘Oh, Jenny! What a little
liar
you are!’ She said she knew all about it, that I need not think that
she was so stupid. On our return, at our first meal, Pete had asked her whether she’d seen Jack Lambert when he’d been stationed at Lowestoft. Several times, she’d said, and how
nice it had been, and I realized that he’d betrayed me – no doubt under close questioning, but none the less he had. She asked me whether I’d had an affair with Philip, and I
answered, would it matter what I said since she thought I was a liar?