December 1939
At any other time, Alice Fairley would have been overcome by the poignancy of the school carol concert. She was acutely sensible to poignant occasions. The war, however, was too newly begun to permit of backward glances at past ways of life; so she looked with dry eyes at the girls sparsely distributed in the hall beneath. Although she had only been in the WRNS for two weeks, it was difficult to imagine what it had been like to be a pupil of the Winifred Clough Day School for Girls.
Yet for ten years she had been a pupil here, popular, but unremarkable in her achievements; although one of her teachers had told her that she had a gift for expressing the English language. Class photographs showed her as a podgy child, with a good-humoured face and long, plump pigtails. Her face was thinner now; and although the corners of the mouth flicked upwards, apparently amused, some memory of recent illness lingered in the eyes.
The school, too, had had its vicissitudes. Only a third of the pupils was present, the remainder having been evacuated to Dorset, where they were presumably joining in a carol concert conducted according to the alien traditions of their host school. The Headmistress spent much of her time travelling between the separated parts and trying to preserve the identity of the whole.
Miss Blaize, that Wagnerian figure who had ruled the lives of the pupils for so long, appeared much tested by her experience. ‘My dear, I do believe she’s crying!’ Daphne Drummond whispered to Alice when, with a sound as of wind stirring the topmost branches of a forest, the depleted ranks rose to sing bravely, ‘Wake, oh wake, for night is flying’. Alice could see her sister, Claire, towards the back of the assembly, her face alight with that rapt wonder which she could assume with the striking of the first chord of music, while lesser mortals were taking a deep breath. She was one of the few people whom Alice knew who could sing and look like an angel at one and the same time.
As the triumphant music was flung out – in exultation at the release of cramped limbs and the knowledge that the term was now practically over – a closer examination of Miss Blaize’s creviced face would have revealed something more extraordinary than tears. Miss Blaize, gazing from cavernous eye-sockets upon the pupils for whom she had had such high hopes, thought of the doomed culture which they represented, and was aware of the tide of evil surging beyond the walls of the building. She raised her head, eyes burning, and braced herself to take the shock, like a great liner going down with all its lights blazing.
Alice and Daphne were in the gallery, which was allocated to the Old Girls on this occasion. The concert had finished earlier than usual, at half-past three. It was a dull day and the light was fading already. Alice and Daphne helped two members of staff to put up the black-out at the windows. Irene Kimberley, who had been sitting on the far side of the gallery, joined her friends. She was the most intellectually able of the three girls and was now at London University. The staff, however, made little distinction in their greetings. Although academic success was important, the school cherished all its pupils. The teachers were interested to learn that Alice was now a Wren, and that Daphne was learning to drive so that she could ‘do ambulance duty if nothing more exciting turns up’.
‘You must be the first of our pupils to join up,’ the history mistress said to Alice. ‘Why aren’t you in uniform?’
‘The Wrens haven’t got uniforms yet; there’s been some sort of hitch.’ It would have been the only time she had ever been demonstrably first in anything at school. Appropriate, perhaps, to finish as she had begun, without creating undue attention.
Soon after four, the three girls made their way out of the building, secure in the belief that they would never return, since the war was going to change everything. They had little notion of what would happen to them, but the idea that they could ever again be subjected to the tyranny of routine was inconceivable. Even more inconceivable to Daphne and Alice would have been the idea that the school, on which they were now turning their backs, had shaped them for the rest of their lives. They imagined themselves to have sloughed off its influence like an old skin.
The street was dim; darkness seemed to come much earlier now that there was so little street lighting. It was a murky evening. ‘No celestial firmament on high tonight!’ Irene said as they strolled towards Holland Park Avenue.
‘Do Wrens serve at sea?’ Daphne asked Alice.
‘I don’t think so. Not at present, anyway.’
‘I suppose it will be the same in all the services. The men will do the exciting things. I want to learn to fly. How am I to manage it?’
‘I think you may have to modify your ambitions.’ Irene spoke tartly, conscious of her exclusion from the world of action.
‘This is one time when anything is possible,’ Daphne retorted. ‘And I propose to take full advantage of it.’ She was a trim, compact young woman, not noticeably more vigorous than her companions. An acceptable scholar in the Winifred Clough mould, but capable, on occasions of her own choosing, of surprising staff and fellow pupils. She had a mental alertness combined with physical agility which could produce startling results on the sportsfield – no rounders match could be considered lost while she had still to bat. Her friends had little doubt that she was well able to suit actions to words.
Irene said, ‘Flying would probably be rather dull once you had done it a few times – like driving a bus.’ She walked hunched forward, her chin muffled in a long woollen scarf; she had been to the library before attending the concert, and had books tucked under one arm. She was very small and Alice thought she looked like a fourth-former.
Daphne left them at Notting Hill tube station. Alice was going to the home of her sister, Louise, in Holland Park. Irene, who lived near by, walked with her down the tree-lined avenue. They had walked here often in the past, when it had seemed that Irene had the brighter future. Today, she wondered if academic success was what she wanted. She was perceptive enough to know that the time for decision is not long. Unlike her friends, she was aware that the person she would be for the rest of her life was already shadowing her.
‘How does Louise feel about all this?’ she asked. ‘You in the Wrens and Guy in the Army?’
Alice had not considered Louise’s feelings. But Irene remembered that, not so many years ago, they had envied Louise, who was so attractive that life would surely shower her with favours. Then, Louise had attracted Guy, become pregnant, disgraced her family, and married in haste. Now, whatever excitement might be ahead for her sisters, Alice and Claire, Louise would be tied to the Home Front and the care of her two children. Her youth had been over and done with so frighteningly quickly! Irene supposed Alice had not noticed because Louise was her sister and, the Fairleys being a close family, they grew into these things together, day by day. In three years’ time, I shall be nearly twenty-two, Irene told herself, and I shall have done all my growing up in school and college. Does that make me better off than Louise?
‘You will write to me, won’t you?’ she said to Alice.
‘I shall write so much you’ll get tired of reading the letters,’ Alice responded warmly. ‘However many people I meet, I shan’t make any friends like you and Daphne.’
‘You’ll meet far more men than I shall.’
Alice hoped so, since this was a chapter in her life too long deferred.
She parted company with Irene at the corner of Norland Square. For the first time, she found the darkness unpleasant and longed for the familiar light of the lamps. She had been ill in recent years: a breakdown occasioned by the disappearance in Germany of her friend and neighbour, Katia Vaseyelin. It had been Irene as much as anyone who had helped her through this nightmare period when she had not wanted to go out of the house, or to meet people. Irene had been understanding but not invariably sympathetic; and Alice had learnt that one of the tasks which friends perform for each other is to mark the boundaries of behaviour. Without Irene’s occasional crisp disapproval, she doubted whether she would have come through so well. Now, as she saw her friend’s figure swallowed up in darkness, panic threatened her again. A few dimmer lights had been installed in the main road, but the side street into which she ventured nervously was a black hole. At one time, this strange new darkness in the city would have excited her; but since the disappearance of Katia, the unknown no longer drew her so trustingly forward. There was always the fear that she might glimpse, out of the corner of an eye, something grotesque being hurried out of sight.
Her pawing hand touched a hard surface. Involuntarily, she apologized, and then, her fingers coming to the gaping mouth, realized it was a pillar box. She laughed shakily, and, steadying herself with a few deep breaths, walked on, rehearsing how she would make an amusing story of this encounter when she got back to the Wren cabin tonight. The others would have stories to tell, too. She looked forward to seeing them again. They were the people who were important to her now.
She remembered the day, two weeks ago, when her call-up notice had come. On that same day, people all over the country, whom she had never met, had received the same call. In towns and villages of which she had never heard, they, too, were preparing to leave their homes for the place of assembly. Here, they would be kitted out for their journey. For them, as for the pilgrims taking the road to Samarkand, the great gates would open and they would pass on their way, no longer strangers, but people joined in a common enterprise, with their own exclusive language and rules for the road. How eagerly she had set out! The old life had fallen away as the sleepers ran together behind the train. Now, the strangers were already comrades: a new landscape stretched indefinitely ahead of them. As she thought of this, she felt a thrill of excitement and forgot about Katia—and Irene, too. Her family and friends belonged to a world on which she had turned her back.
It was, however, a family party which Louise was giving. Now that Guy and Alice had joined up, who knew when they might be together again? Family meant Louise and her husband Guy; the Fairleys; and Ben Sherman. There had been some argument as to whether in England Ben would have been considered a relative. ‘But it’s not an English relationship,’ Louise had pointed out. ‘It’s Cornish.’ Cornish relationships, it had been agreed, were as intricate as those recorded in the Book of Numbers.
Guy’s parents were not present. Mrs Immingham had not got over the fact that her son had had to marry Louise. Her intractability suited Louise well enough, and harmed only herself and her husband.
It was Louise who opened the door to Alice. ‘Hallo, Dumpling!’ She was plumper than Alice now; but dominance established in childhood tends to remain unchallenged, so that Louise would always have a special licence to comment adversely on her sisters’ appearance, because she was the attractive one. ‘You can read a story to James and Catherine,’ she said. ‘I’m afraid you’ll be a great disappointment to them, though. They were longing to see Aunt Alice in uniform.’
If they were disappointed in their Aunt Alice, their father must have delighted them. Old Grandmother Fairley said to Ben Sherman, ‘What about Guy, then? Don’t he look handsome?’ She sounded huffy, as though the King’s uniform was something Guy had designed for himself for reasons not entirely meritorious.
As she said this, Guy happened to look across at them. He smiled. Ben thought the smile slid like icing down a cake. But then Ben, who had no time for social niceties, was not a great smiler.
‘What’s ’e done to get a pip?’ Grandmother Fairley asked, revealing more military knowledge than Ben had given her credit for.
‘OTC plus six months’ service. Then, of course, he has that certain blend of shy, deprecating charm which is generally supposed to conceal essential qualities of leadership.’
‘Who can you be talking about?’ Louise had joined them.
‘Your husband.’
Ben did not think Louise had cause to object. She had once said of him in his hearing, ‘He is bound to do well at the Bar with his natural capacity for rudeness.’
Louise laughed. ‘You’re just jealous.’
Which irked, because he had once loved her. He shrugged his shoulders. ‘I’m not interested. If they want me, they will have to come and get me.’ He had a promising career ahead at the Bar, and the war was an infernal nuisance. Even so, if it had to be, it had to be; and he was not best pleased that Guy should have been commissioned before he himself was out of civilian clothes. He narrowed his eyes, studying Guy and trying to visualize how he would look with a bit of mud and blood on that immaculate uniform. He had to admit that, pointed in the right direction and told to fire, Guy would probably acquit himself as well as the next man. England was moving into an era where want of self-interest and common sense would be highly valued. Guy Immingham was undoubtedly of the stuff of which such heroes are made.
Grandmother Fairley, now so frail that she could barely move a foot without having to pant for several minutes, had drawn on that reserve of energy which she kept for things she really intended to do, and had bullied her daughter, May, into bringing her here in a taxi. She had been enjoying herself up to now, but felt that insufficient attention had been accorded her by Judith Fairley, her daughter-in-law.
‘Where’s your mother, then?’ she said to Louise.
‘Do you want her?’ Louise beckoned to Judith.
‘This is a sad day for you,’ the old lady said accusingly when Judith joined her. ‘It don’t matter about me. I’ll be in Glory soon. It’s all the young ones that worry me.’ She gazed at them without evincing strong liking.
‘I expect they’ll manage well enough.’ Judith could never refrain from disagreeing with her mother-in-law.
The old lady turned away to take a sandwich proffered by Guy. ‘I’m surprised at you going before you have to,’ she said. ‘What about your poor children?’
‘He’s doing it for his wife and poor children,’ Judith said briskly, thus preventing Guy from saying the same thing more sententiously. He smiled at her. He was very happy. He had found life in an accountant’s office increasingly difficult. Now he had a greater sense of purpose and a renewed belief in himself. The uniform played no small part in this, not because it enhanced his lanky good looks – he was not vain – but because it gave him that sense of belonging which he had had at school.
‘Our hope is that Guy and his comrades will not be let down by mismanagement at home.’
All eyes turned to Stanley Fairley, who was at his most portentous, bushy eyebrows almost, but not quite, masking pebbly eyes full of foreboding, lower lip thrust forward. The voice crying in the wilderness, however, is often least heeded by those best placed to hear it. The boys at his elementary school might accord grudging respect to his utterances; the congregation at the Methodist chapel might be forced, beneath his searching gaze, to examine the state of their souls: Stanley Fairley’s dear ones regarded him with expressions ranging from affectionate tolerance to barely concealed impatience. For many years letters had issued from his home in Shepherd’s Bush to the Prime Minister, the News Chronicle, the Methodist Recorder, warning of the danger posed to European civilization by Adolf Hitler. There had been times, as his children grew older and more daring, when they had complained of ‘having Hitler for breakfast, tea and supper’. There was no need now of such warnings; but Stanley Fairley was not the man to relax his vigilance because events had proved him right.
Judith said, ‘Not Neville Chamberlain today, my love.’
‘Not Neville Chamberlain at any time, if I had anything to do with it.’
‘But you won’t get rid of him this afternoon,’ Louise said. ‘And it is probably the last time we shall all be together this year, if not the next.’
Her easy assumption that their separation could be measured in months silenced him. He talked a great deal about the First World War, but it was usually the amusing episodes which he recounted – his feelings when he had passed his plate up too late for a second helping of Christmas pudding; the time when the makeshift platform collapsed, just as the general was telling them all to ‘bear up’. The darker memories could only have been shared with his old comrades, nearly all of whom had been killed. Ben, sorry to see him silenced, said, ‘All this must bring back memories.’
‘I went through Ypres, Passchendaele and the Somme,’ Mr Fairley informed Ben, alert eyes waiting for the reaction as though it was the first time he had ever divulged this fact.
‘You’ve seen it all before, then?’ Ben affected surprise. He was fond of Mr Fairley and saw no harm in humouring him.
Louise said to her mother, ‘We’re in the trenches now! We’ll be knee deep in mud for the rest of the evening.’
It was Claire who put a stop to Stanley Fairley’s war reminiscences. She arrived from school with a stack of music under one arm, and immediately took centre stage. ‘We got the phrasing all wrong, it was awful,’ she said dramatically, as though the carol concert, and her own performance as a member of the choral society, must be uppermost in the minds of all present. ‘You’d think it was simple enough.’ She sang a few bars, ‘ “What child is this, who laid to rest, on Mary’s lap is sleeping . . .” ’ She had a notably pure voice.
Her father looked tenderly at the earnest little face framed by the abundant red hair. He heaved a sigh, the full force of his emotion now concentrated on the family gathering.
Judith watched her daughter with affection not unmixed with scepticism. Stanley, who expected a lot of his children, must insure himself against disillusion by equating expectation with performance. In spite of one or two shocks over recent years, he still persisted in the hope that, since he could not change, they would adjust to his need. Judith saw her children’s faults clearly, but did not worry about them unduly. Hers was a stabilizing, if not always sympathetic, influence. ‘You’ve got a button coming loose,’ she interrupted Claire’s recital. ‘Come here, before you lose it.’
Stanley Fairley said to Louise, ‘Where is Alice?’
‘She’s reading to the children.’
‘But she should be here with us. They should all be here.’
Louise got up. ‘You can have the kids. But Alice is going to help me in the kitchen.’
When the children came running into the room, it was Ben who claimed their immediate attention. He delighted in young creatures; only those old enough to compete with him got the rough side of his tongue.
In the kitchen, Louise was studying her sister. They had been good companions, but Louise had been unable to understand what had happened to Alice during the last few years. ‘I can’t see why she has worked herself up into this dreadful state about Katia,’ she had said to Judith. ‘It’s not as if there is anything she can do about it.’ Louise did not believe in crying over things which could not be undone. Had she been different, her marriage would have suffered. She said to Alice, ‘There’s someone here I recognize.’ She was delighted to see that sunnier companion she had loved so well. ‘Welcome back.’
Alice, who felt she had changed almost out of recognition during the last weeks, wished she had been issued with uniform to clothe her new personality.
‘You’re going to like it, then, are you?’ Louise asked.
‘It’s marvellous! I’ve never felt so free.’
Louise made a wry face. She had purchased freedom at a greater cost. Now, it seemed that she, who had first broken the mould, was to be the prisoner while Alice became the venturer. She was not a grudging person, however, and as she looked at Alice, she had real hopes for her. Alice’s was not a beautiful face. But where did beauty ever get a woman save into trouble? This was a good- natured face, more ready for laughter than tears; the face of someone with whom men would feel comfortable. Men were going to need quite a bit of comfort in the coming months.
‘Mind you make the most of it.’
‘Yes, I must, I must!’ Alice meant this with all her heart, and yet she had really very little idea of what it was she expected from the war. It sometimes seemed to her that life was like a film shown the wrong way round; so that when the war was over, she would come back to this moment in the kitchen with Louise, and she wouldn’t know until then what it had all been about.
Louise said, ‘No more nonsense about Kashmir?’
Alice frowned. Kashmir, that hidden house in Shepherd’s Bush, had had a special significance for her in her adolescence. She had had glimpses of it from the branches of a tree in the garden of her home. It lay, surrounded by green lawns and gardens, walled like a city, beyond the boundaries of time, beckoning, unattainable. At this stage in her life, Alice was concerned with the attainable. She said, ‘I don’t think about Kashmir now.’
‘That’s all to the good. You were a bit dotty about it once. In fact, you have had a number of dotty spells. So watch out.’
Alice went into the larder. By the time she came out carrying a bowl of trifle, Louise had turned her mind to more immediate matters. ‘Did you know that Mummy plans to learn to drive an ambulance?’
‘Mummy!’ Ambulance driving should be left to young people like Daphne.
‘And Daddy, of course, is going to win the war on the Home Front.’ Louise spoke with more affection of her father than her mother. ‘And you, Louise, what will you do?’
‘I shall look after the children and knit socks for soldiers.’
Alice laughed, sure that life would always have something special in store for Louise.
‘It’s all very well for you to laugh.’ Louise handed Alice a tray with the trifle on it and individual jellies for the children. ‘What excitement can there be here when everyone who is young and healthy has gone rollicking off abroad?’
They went back to the sitting room where their father was talking about the sinking of the Rawalpindi. ‘The gallantry of that little ship . . .’
‘She wasn’t a little ship,’ Ben said irritably. ‘She was a converted liner – 17,000 tons, in fact.’
‘She was no match for battle cruisers,’ Stanley persisted.
‘Her armaments weren’t,’ Ben conceded. ‘But she was a bigger boat.’ He could foresee years of heroism ahead, and was resolved to take an early stand against it.
‘Granny’s taken her teeth out,’ James said, sidling up to his mother.
‘Well, don’t look, darling,’ Louise replied. ‘I expect she’s got a pip stuck. She’ll put them back soon.’
Catherine was sitting astride her father’s leg, playing ‘Ride a Cock Horse to Banbury Cross’. Guy’s adoration of the child was almost painful to see. Claire was being nice to Aunt May in a rather lofty way, illustrating the fact that she was the clever one of the girls by talking about a Neanderthal site in Acton. Aunt May, pleased and bewildered, was giving little gasps, interspersed with inappropriate titters.
When they had finished eating, they gathered round the piano to sing. Claire played, and the children occasionally reached out a hand to press down a note. ‘We must sing Ben’s song,’ Alice said. Ben’s song was ‘Marching through Georgia’. He had once claimed that his American father had been a descendant of General Sherman. This afternoon, for some reason he could not understand, it seemed important to put Alice straight on this matter before she departed to play her part with those who go down to the sea in ships, and do business in great waters.
‘I’m not really related to him.’
‘Oh Ben! And I always believed it.’
‘You mustn’t believe everything a man tells you, Alice, or you’ll end up in trouble.’
He, too, had grown up in a strict Methodist home, and now, in spite of himself, there was a shade of puritanical severity in his tone. Alice flushed. Really, she thought, Ben was becoming rather tiresome. Or perhaps she was more sophisticated? She had once been impressed by him; with that hooked nose and chiselled mouth and general air of controlled ferocity, she had imagined him to be a person one could trust in a tight corner. But might not other qualities be more serviceable? How much of life is spent in a tight corner? She turned away and joined in singing, ‘We’re Going to Hang Out the Washing on the Siegfried Line’.
Stanley Fairley, more than a shade puritanical, did not like the song although he approved of the sentiment. He followed Louise out of the room when she went to prepare the children’s bath.
‘I would have liked us to sing a hymn,’ he said. ‘I suppose that would spoil the party?’
Once, he would have insisted, and that would have been an end to it. But the foundations on which he had based his authority had been shaken, first by Louise’s pregnancy, and then by the disappearance of Katia Vaseyelin. He was more prone than ever now to fits of depression, when he tended to look helpless and vulnerable, as the very dominant can if the power which drives them inexplicably fails. Louise was touched to see him so tentative. She admired him because, however wounded he might be by life, he would always rouse himself for another attack. She did not regard the targets of his attacks as important. Louise would have identified wholeheartedly with Don Quixote: it was the tilting which signified, not the windmills. Now, she laid her cheek against her father’s and said, ‘Of course we shall sing a hymn.’
When they returned to the sitting room, she announced, ‘We’re going to sing “Eternal Father” – for Alice, now she’s a sailor.’
They all sang, and Ben, once he had decided it was a bit of a joke, put an arm round Alice’s shoulder and gave voice in a lusty baritone:
‘O Trinity of love and power,
Our brethren shield in danger’s hour;
From rock and tempest, fire and foe,
Protect them whereso’er they go . . .’
‘Are you coming home with us, darling?’ Stanley asked Alice when the party broke up soon after six. ‘Rumpus would love to see you.’
‘I’ve got to be back in quarters by ten, and I’m meeting Ted at the Corner House first.’
‘Is that your old Zeeta’s boy friend?’ Louise asked.
‘He’s in the Rifle Brigade now.’
‘How sickening!’ Claire exclaimed. ‘I shall marry a pacifist.’ When they reached the main road, she insisted on hurrying ahead, saying she must take Rumpus out for his walk.
‘Look after yourself, my love,’ Judith said to Alice.
‘I’ll be all right. But if anything ever did happen, you wouldn’t have to be sad, you know. This is the most important thing in my life.’
‘I expect we’d squeeze out a tear,’ Judith said drily.
Stanley groaned. ‘Don’t speak of such things!’
After they had seen Alice on to her bus, Judith and Stanley decided to walk home; and Claire, who in reality was too nervous to go far on her own, joined them. Stanley was excited by the evening and wanted to relive parts of it which had particularly moved him. Judith was thinking of the family breaking up. She comforted herself with the thought that it had held together despite Louise’s bombshell, so it would probably survive the present dislocation.
She had sometimes wondered how long Louise would continue to love this rather dull young man, and she had thought she had seen signs of tension. Now, here he was, bright as new in his uniform! She hoped Alice would not come home with something of the same kind in navy blue. Give me Ben any day, she thought; cross-grained he might be, but there was the makings of a man there!
‘It was a very good evening, wasn’t it?’ Stanley said, as they came to their own home. ‘We’re a lucky family.’ He did not look at the house next door where the Vaseyelins, who were not a lucky family, lived.