AIR RAIDS ON THE CAPITAL BEGAN ON 7 SEPTEMBER 1940. As fires raged across London, Mary knew she had done the right thing in sending her son away, but two months on, she still missed him with an excruciating pain. It felt as if she had been viciously stabbed, and seeing another baby in the street caused the knife to twist. Children are safer in the country, the hoardings proclaimed, but her precious little part-Jewish boy was safest of all in America now that invasion seemed imminent.
The bombers came every night for two months and Mary worked flat out in the first-aid station at Lancaster Road baths, where she had been posted after passing her courses: cleaning, disinfecting and bandaging flesh wounds, putting temporary splints on broken limbs, applying sterile gauze and bandages sprayed with tannic acid to burns. She had feared she might be squeamish, but when there was a patient in pain before her, she forgot her own feelings and did what she could. She worked late into the night and crawled home to sleep in the dawn, so she and Ernest were seldom there at the same time. A couple of days a week she took a picnic lunch to his office and sat there to eat with him, just so they had an hour alone together.
There hadn’t been any letters from Wallis for a long while, but they read in the newspapers that she and David had been shipped off to the Bahamas, where he had been appointed governor.
‘Do you think it’s true that she is pro-Nazi, as the papers are saying?’ Mary asked Ernest over lunch one day.
He pursed his lips. ‘Peter Pan may well be, but I rather credited Wallis with more intelligence. Who knows what influences she has been subject to in Europe since her marriage? Their new friends hardly seem salubrious.’
‘She was friends with von Ribbentrop back in 1935, was she not?’ Mary spoke tentatively. She wasn’t sure if Ernest had heard the rumours of their affair.
He laughed. ‘I wouldn’t say friends exactly.’
‘But he sent her all those flowers . . .’
‘Ah yes, the seventeen roses. Did she never tell you the story behind them?’ He took a bite of his Spam sandwich.
Mary was all ears as she waited for him to continue.
‘We met von Ribbentrop at Emerald Cunard’s one evening. We were all playing poker and Wallis was on a winning streak. She played quite ruthlessly, as you will remember.’ Mary smiled agreement. ‘Anyway, she won rather a lot of money from von Ribbentrop, and when he opened his wallet to pay her, he found that he was seventeen pounds short of the total. He apologised and promised he would bring the money round to Bryanston Court the following day. Wallis said: “But how can we trust the word of you Germans? Look how quick you were to break the Treaty of Versailles.”’
Mary snorted with laughter. ‘Oh, that’s so Wallis! How did he react?’
Ernest grinned. ‘He was ruffled at first, not sure how seriously to take her. I think he was about to launch into a lecture about the punitive nature of the terms of Versailles, but everyone else was laughing so he joined in. And he proved that Germans do have a sense of humour, contrary to the common belief, because he started sending her those bouquets of seventeen roses.’
‘I don’t know why she didn’t tell me,’ Mary exclaimed. ‘What an amusing story!’
Ernest nodded. ‘It was at first, but it became rather embarrassing when the rumour spread that they were having an affair. I think Ribbentrop would have been happy to go to bed with her, because next he sent her a bracelet with the number seventeen engraved on a heart-shaped charm. She was worried Peter Pan would hear the stories so she hid that bracelet and I never once saw her wear it.’
‘So there was no affair?’ Mary still wasn’t convinced.
Ernest finished his sandwich. ‘To tell you the truth, Wallis was never terribly keen on that side of things. She loved to flirt but it was mostly promise and no action. I doubt Peter Pan got a hand below her waist before they were married, and probably not often since then.’ He winked. ‘Take it from one who knows.’
That conversation buoyed Mary enormously. She remembered Wallis saying, ‘Don’t let them go south of the Mason–Dixon line,’ during her marriage to Win. Had she never developed a taste for sexual relations afterwards? Personally, Mary had always adored that side of things.
The winter of 1940–41 brought almost nightly bombardments in London, but if anything the people grew more defiant. ‘We can take it!’ the injured patients at Lancaster Gate baths told each other. ‘Hitler will never win because we will never surrender.’
Mary took some teasing that America had not entered the war. ‘Are you the only one they’re sending, love? Oh well, you might not be able to fly a Spitfire but at least you’re a beauty.’
Ernest and Mary began to hold cocktail parties on Friday evenings for any friends who were in town. They were lively affairs with plentiful alcohol, and guests often ended up dancing to the jazz records Mary had brought over from the States. If the air-raid siren sounded, everyone grabbed a bottle and the party continued downstairs in the shelter. It was good to catch up with old friends and forget about the war for a few hours, and if they got tight, they could sleep it off the next morning.
‘Do you ever hear from Wallis?’ Georgia Sitwell asked Mary one night. ‘Is she happy in the Bahamas?’
‘I don’t know how she could be happy married to that nervous, difficult man,’ Mary replied.
Georgia shrugged. ‘She went to great lengths to win him, so she must have seen something beyond a crown.’
‘Truth be told, she never intended to marry him. Events just got out of control and she couldn’t back down.’ Mary managed to stop herself from adding, ‘Serves her right.’
The only subject she could not discuss with anyone was her baby son. Letters arrived every couple of weeks, and Mary fell apart with grief each time. Once there was a photograph showing him walking with Nanny holding his hands, and the reminder of all the stages of his growth that she was missing was insufferable. At least he looked plump and happy in the picture; that was her only comfort.