When I Was Otherwise (19 page)

“So's mine.”

Daisy arrived at the window—Marsha beside her, with her hands beneath her elbows.

“Here we are, then,” cried Daisy. “Don't forget to pull the ripcord! There he goes, dear. And remember, now, you've got to fall properly. Don't crack your head on the concrete. Happy landings!”

Daisy leant out as far as she could, as though to make sure her friendly foe would follow her instructions. For one wild moment Marsha was tempted to grab Daisy's heels and swing them up and possibly provide her with a better chance of monitoring the spider. In her mind's eye she watched Daisy flying out and swooping down and felt a thoroughly naughty satisfaction. It wasn't even personal. How could it be, when just now she'd been experiencing absolutely nothing but gratitude towards her stalwart but unsteady sister-in-law?

“Oh, thank you, Daisy. What a relief! I think you've saved my life.”

“I quite believe you, dear. You're white as a sheet. What you need now is a small drop of something to bring back the colour to your cheeks.”

“Oh, we could both do with a small drop of something! Even if it
is
only ten o'clock in the morning! Let's see if there's a little whisky in the cupboard.”

“My word! A nip of whisky at ten o'clock in the morning! (Yes, there is, dear.) What decadence! What fun! I'm going to put the flags out. What a real little adventure we've both been having! I've thoroughly enjoyed myself.”

They made their way downstairs. Daisy had collected her shopping basket and her walking stick and gloves. The
Financial Times
was back in place.

“Yes, a real little adventure. Would you believe: I actually did put out the flags on one occasion? Nothing big. But they certainly stood for something.”

26

On a Friday night in the summer of 1942, when Marie lost the glass from both her bedroom and sitting-room windows, there was a direct hit on a block of flats some fifty yards away. The following afternoon Daisy came home from the ambulance station with a skinny, trembling six-year-old, whom she carried wrapped up in an eiderdown.

“Like Cleopatra in her carpet! Except that this one's called Jimmy and he's suffering from shock. I said we'd take him in for a day or two till things got sorted out. In fact, I insisted upon it, scooped him up from under their wet noses while they were still just wiggling and waggling in the wind.”

Marie didn't stop to ask questions. She instantly took the child and fed him and bathed him and put him to bed. She sang to him while he was in his bath—“Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay! Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay!”—poking her finger in his navel on every ‘boom'. It was the only thing that elicited a smile from him.

Afterwards Daisy told her what had happened.

“His uncle was head porter at the flats. This poor mite was on a visit there with his mother and two sisters. The mother and sisters were killed outright, the uncle died in hospital. Jimmy escaped unhurt. But when they brought him into the station—it was the first thing that I saw of him—he was crying out how he wanted his mummy, where had they taken his mummy, why couldn't he go to see her? He spent the night on a couch, alternately dozing and sobbing and wanting to get up and wander round the station. Wander
out
of it, more like.”

She broke off. Suddenly she shook her fist at the boarded-up window.

“Oh, blast and curse every last one of them!” she cried. “For ever and ever, amen!”

“What's going to become of him?” asked Marie.

“Well, it seems there may be a father somewhere. No one's managed to find him yet.” But now that the gleam had gone from her eyes she was left looking exhausted. “God, though, what a night! Edgware Road and Marble Arch. Paddington, St John's Wood. Gas mains, water mains. Blood everywhere. Fire. People having hysterics. Bedlam isn't the word for it.”

Then, surprisingly, she gave a chuckle.

“But you should have seen me last night hacking my way through mountains of red tape!”

She picked up her glass. It was whisky, which Marie, herself almost a tee-totaller and strongly opposed to the black market, had nevertheless paid an exorbitant price for. She savoured it lovingly.

“You see, I had a girl in the ambulance,” she said at last. “She died on the way to hospital. And the hospital authorities wouldn't take her in. They just wouldn't. Can you believe that? Well, naturally I wasn't going to stand any nonsense. I told them all four bunks would definitely be needed, that it was impossible to drive around with a corpse. ‘So if you can't think of anything else,' I said, ‘simply throw it in the gutter. Use some initiative. Try to be inventive.' My dear, you should have seen their faces. I wish I'd had a camera.”

“But, Daisy, won't there be repercussions?”

“Oh, let there be,
I'll
be ready for them! All I know is, I was driving back to where I was wanted and those four bunks were almost never empty.”

She sat for a long time cradling the whisky and gazing up at the Pissarro. In some ways she was quite enjoying this war. She knew it and she made no bones about it. She felt alive and useful and at her best. Even the red tape was fun to contend against. “Daisy,” people would say, “you just don't care
who
you cock a snook at! You haven't got an ounce of fear in your whole body.”

Well, the first bit was true. The second most certainly wasn't.

She was afraid of the bombs: the heart-stoppingly loud and drawn-out screams they made, the chilling pause before the crashes. She was afraid of the anti-aircraft barrage when she wasn't in the ambulance: many nights on her short walk home (she
refused
to run) she was convinced she was going to be hit by shrapnel. She was afraid that, buried beneath the rubble, there were live people who had somehow been missed by the rescue squads: she was constantly imagining she could hear a movement or a whimper or a plaintive miaow emanating from recently bombed sites; and on dozens of occasions, even when she knew it was probably just the results of her neurosis and the workings of her overstrained mind—God, how tired she was so much of the time, how tired they all were—she was up there scrabbling amongst the piles of debris, feverishly tearing at bricks and stones and timbers and exhorting passers-by to do the same. She sometimes dreamed, during the few snatches of sleep she did get, on average three or four hours per day, that she herself was being buried alive.

She was afraid of going batty.

She was afraid of anything happening to Marie.

But despite all these fears, despite the fact that people everywhere were being cut down in their prime or even before they reached their prime and that to die prematurely in old age was just as much of an obscenity, despite all this she did have to admit that war in some ways suited her. It was utterly selfish but there it was. She enjoyed the comradeship. She enjoyed the grumbles. She enjoyed knowing that a fresh egg would never again taste so good. The awareness and the urgency.

She enjoyed, amidst all the bungling and hysterics and overstretched nerves, the expression of people's resilience and courage.

“Marie, do you know what I saw today? There's a whopping big crater in the Edgware Road. It's the second time they've had a hit in the same place. And somebody's planted a Union Jack right in the middle of it. Well, it really brought the tears to my eyes. I felt like jumping down from the ambulance and standing there and saluting it. I jolly well wish I had!”

“Then you'd better go back tomorrow. And Jimmy and I will come with you.”

“But did you know there are now lots of small flags flying from broken windows all over London?”

Marie shook her head.

“Well, we ourselves have just been blooded.” Daisy stared speculatively at the stout piece of cardboard contributed by their grocer. “I've a pretty good mind to buy one tomorrow and hang it out of
this
window.”

“Buy two and hang them out of
both
windows!”

But the next day was Sunday and so the purchase had to be postponed. The three of them went to church. An elderly vicar preached about the necessity to forgive and the sin of passing judgment. He spoke about motes and beams. It was a brave but not a popular sermon and there were mutterings both while it was on and afterwards, too, while people stood talking in the sunshine. Daisy threw in her own few mutterings yet kept them brief. Partly because of Marie; more because of Jimmy.

On the Monday Jimmy helped her to fasten their own paper flags from the windows.

His father still hadn't been found.

“Marie.” Daisy was drinking some Bovril and eating a sandwich before she went on duty. “What if they don't find him?” she asked, slowly. “What if he's been killed? I've been wondering, you know, whether possibly in that case…whether we ourselves…?”

“
You
, perhaps, Daisy. They'd never let me. Remember, I do happen to be in my seventy-fourth year.”

Daisy didn't say much more about it then but all that night it stayed in her mind—as it had been in her mind, indeed, all of that day and a lot of the previous one as well. Before she finally went to the station she looked in on him. He was asleep. One cheek was resting against the small teddy bear which she'd bought at the same time as the Union Jacks and he was smiling, very gently. A hank of reddish-brown hair had fallen across his forehead and she brushed it back with her fingertips: she had witnessed that scene a score of times at the pictures. She stooped and kissed his freckled nose. He turned over and sighed and murmured, “Mummy…” He was still fully asleep. Marie was in the other room. “Yes, darling,” whispered Daisy. “Mummy's here.” She had never said ‘darling' to anyone; and yet it came quite naturally. With the back of her fingers she massaged the large red patch on his cheek. She knew it didn't require this but half hoped her touch was going to wake him. She decided she also had time to fetch him an apple, to place beside his pillow for the morning. She imagined the three of them in ten years' time: Jimmy then sixteen, tall and broad-shouldered and doing well at school, despite the glint of pure mischief which remained in his green-flecked eyes; she and his Gran feeling so proud of him as they watched him go up to the rostrum to collect his prize: that far-off, peaceful, peacetime speech day. She imagined him running on the sands (he was younger again now) and the two of them side-by-side on their knees building a castle with a swirling brown moat. “Rudolf Rassendyll swimming across to rescue the Prisoner of Zenda!”—she flicked two fingers through the sandy water. She imagined them in the Chamber of Horrors, at
Peter Pan
and
Where the Rainbow Ends
. She pictured them eating their sandwiches together outside the Tower of London and getting lost in the maze at Hampton Court. Later, of course, there'd be a time when Marie was no longer with them, and my, how they were going to miss her! But after a while they'd still adventure off all over the place—Marie would have wanted that—and Jimmy would look down on her from his vast height and call her the midget and appoint himself her protector. What fun it was going to be. She loved him very much already; had done so, she thought, right from the moment she'd set eyes on him.

Only some of this, in fact, passed through her mind while she actually stood at his bedside, a nucleus which she gradually added to during the course of that night, like a gaily coloured patchwork quilt, to be spread out warmly beneath the grim realities of the wounds that had to be bound up and the various forms of suffering that had to be allayed. Somehow, she knew, she would arrange it—yes, somehow she would—whatever they might say about the need or the desirability of a father's influence in the raising of a child. She saw already that she would probably have to contend with a lot of interfering old biddies. Well, she would! My goodness but they'd be sorry in the end that they had ever drawn their swords out of their scabbards.

It came as a real shock to realize suddenly that she was almost hoping for the death of an unknown man, and for the absence too of any caring family. (But she herself would be so much
better
than any caring family. Yes! She could tell the world a thing or two about family.) She tried, after this, to push such dreams out of her mind.

But with only partial success.

It was as well, however, that at least she made the effort, for the following day the news came through, just before she left the station—and while she'd been getting ready actually to run the short way home—that Jimmy's father had at long last been discovered; and was every bit as anxious for a speedy reunion with his son as even Jimmy himself could be for a reunion with his father.

Part Four

27

A few days later Daisy sent a ‘thank you' for her weekend: a travelling chess set and a lace-edged handkerchief. Inside the set was a further small card—“From one outsider to another. All FRILs must stick together!” Andrew was mystified but didn't mention it to Marsha. Instead, one evening before leaving work, he telephoned for enlightenment.

“I rang to thank you, Daisy, for the present.”

“Marsha thanked me for it yesterday.”

“What on earth are FRILs?”

“Florence-Ridden-In-Laws.”

“I should have realized.”

“I'm thinking of setting up a society. Would you like to join?” She offered the inducements of a free blowpipe—a set of darts dipped in poison—and a club tie. “Grand introductory offer. Can never be repeated.”

“Why not?”

“Yes, you're right, of course. Why not? Wax effigies and pins. Unlimited supply.”

“Poor Florence. One almost begins to feel sorry for her. She hasn't got a hope.”

“Yes, I know, dear,” she agreed. “Hopeless.”

“Membership is going to be a bit small?”

“Select.”

“Just you, me, and Erica?”