2

The second year of the war was not a time when the staff of BH gave very much thought to promotion. But, even so, it seemed odd that Jeff Haggard and Sam Brooks, who, though they could hardly be termed Old Servants, had been bitterly loyal for more than ten years, should be nothing more than DPP and RPD. True, nobody else could have done their jobs, and then again Sam always seemed too overworked to notice, and Jeff too detached to care. One might have assumed that they would be there for ever.

But if they were either to move or to leave, it would have to be together. Without understanding either their warmly unreasonable RPD, or their sardonic DPP, the BBC knew that for a fact. The link between them was consolingly felt as the usefulness of having Haggard around when Brooks had to be got out of trouble. This was enough for practical purposes, but Jeff would have liked to have been able to explain it further. By nature he was selfish. He had left his first wife because he had found his second wife more attractive, and his second wife had left him because, as she told her lawyers, she could never make him raise his voice. It was, therefore, going against his nature, a most unsafe proceeding, to put himself out to help a friend, worse still to do so for so long. Their long relationship looked like an addiction – a weakness for the weak on Jeff’s part – or a response to the appeal for protection made by the defenceless and single-minded. Of course, if this appeal were to fail entirely, the human race would have difficulty in reproducing itself.

Perhaps if Sam had ever been able to foresee the result of his actions, or if he had suspected for one moment that he was not entirely self-sufficient, the spell might have been broken, or perhaps there was a fixed point in the past when that might have been done.

‘I ought to have stopped in 1938,’ Jeff thought. ‘With Englishry.’ At the time of the Munich Agreement a memo had been sent round calling, as a matter of urgency, for the recording of our country’s heritage.

It was headed Lest we forget our Englishry. Sam had disappeared for over two weeks in one of the Wolseleys, pretty infirm even at that time, with an engineer and an elderly German refugee, Dr Vogel – Dr Vogel, cruelly bent, deaf in one ear, but known to be the greatest expert in Europe on recorded atmosphere.

There was not much hope of commonsense prevailing. Dr Vogel, in spite of his politeness and gentle ganz meinerheits, was an obsessive, who had been seen to take the arms of passers-by in his bony grip and beg to record their breathing, for he wished to record England’s wheezing before the autumn fogs began. ‘Have the goodness, sir, to cough a little into my apparatus.’ Sam thought the idea excellent.

The expedition to the English countryside arrived back with a very large number of discs. The engineer who had gone with them said nothing. He went straight away to have a drink. It was probably a misfortune that the Controllers were so interested in the project that they demanded a playback straight away. Usually there was a judicious interval before they expressed any opinion, but not this time.

‘What we have been listening to – patiently, always in the hope of something else coming up – amounts to more than six hundred bands of creaking. To be accurate, some are a mixture of squeaking and creaking.’

‘They’re all from the parish church of Hither Lickington,’ Sam explained eagerly. ‘It was recommended to us by Religious Broadcasting as the top place in the Home Counties. What you’re hearing is the hinges of the door and the door itself opening and shutting as the old women come in one by one with the stuff for the Harvest Festival. The quality’s superb, particularly on the last fifty-three bands or so. Some of them have got more to carry, so the door has to open wider. That’s when you get the squeak.’

‘Hark, the vegetable marrow comes!’ cried Dr Vogel, his head on one side, well contented.

For several weeks the Recorded Programme Department was in danger of complete reorganization, for the BBC could form and re-form its elements with ease. It was put to DPP, in consultation, that although RPD was successfully in charge of hundreds of thousands of pounds’ worth of equipment, and no fault could be found with his technical standing.…

‘You feel that he’s too interested in creaking doors,’ Jeff said.

‘He’s irresponsible.’

‘Oh, I wouldn’t say so.’

‘There was a considerable financial investment in this project, and Brooks was well aware that copies of the recordings were to be buried certain fathoms in the earth as a memorial for future generations.’

‘You could still do that,’ Jeff replied. ‘There mayn’t be any doors that creak by then. Mine doesn’t now.’ All the doors in BH were fitted with self-closing devices of an irritating nature.

It was not Jeff’s habit to soothe, but as usual the case he made for his friend, only just over the borderline of detachment, and gradually becoming more serious, proved effective. Sam never heard of these discussions. He continued like a sleepwalker, who never knows what obstacles are removed, and by what hands, from his path.

And Sam was not the only member of the Corporation who confided in Jeff. That was surprising, in view of the imperturbable surface he presented, which gave back only a stony resonance, truthful and dry, to the complaints of others. But his advice was excellent, and he could be relied upon, as so few could, not to wait for a convenient opening to start on his own grievances. Perhaps he hadn’t any, certainly he admitted to none. His calmness was really recklessness, as of a gambler who no longer felt anything was valuable enough to stake. That in turn was not likely to make him popular. Those who valued his cold judgement when they needed it, very naturally resented it when they didn’t. To see the Director of Programme Planning miscalculate might have been a relief, but during the first nine months of the war no hint of such a thing arose – never, until the affair of General Pinard.

‘You’ll get your boy back, then,’ said Della to Lise. A strong line was best, in her opinion. Everyone knew that Lise considered herself engaged and that Frédé was some kind of electrician with the French 1st Army. The way things were going they’d have to bring the French over here, there was nowhere else for them to go.

‘But that will be quite impossible,’ said Tad, demonstrating with his map. ‘You underestimate the obstacle of the English Channel.’

‘In that case, if you want my advice, you’d do best to forget him,’ said Della. ‘After all, he never gave you a ring, did he?’

Lise had not proved any better at her work than Della, which made some sort of bond between them.

Vi’s merchant seaman wrote making apparent references to home leave, but a good deal of his letter had been blacked out by the censor. What a job having to go through other people’s personal letters, Vi thought, they must feel uncomfortable, you had to pity them.

On June 10 1940 the French Government admitted that Paris could not be defended, and left for Bordeaux. Between the débandade and de Gaulle’s arrival on the 17th, there was a bizarre moment of hope when the Government learned that General Georges Pinard had escaped to London, flying his own light aircraft, and bringing with him nothing but a small valise and one junior officer. He went straight to the Rembrandt Hotel.

Historians have not yet decided – or rather, they have decided but not agreed – as to who sent the General on his desperate mission. Certainly no-one could have been more welcome. Whereas de Gaulle was practically unknown in Britain, Pinard was instantly recognizable, with his coarse silvery moustache, the joy of worn-out cartoonists, and his nose broken by a fall from a horse and flattened out of its French sharpness. His name was one of the few that the public knew well and it created its own picture.

The General was a peasant’s son from the flattest, wettest and most unpicturesque part of France, where the provinces of Aisne and Somme join. Born in 1869, he grew up with the Prussian occupation; the army rescued him from hoeing root vegetables, and he rose at a moderate speed through the ranks. Improbable as it seemed, he was a romantic, a Dreyfusard and a devotee of the aeroplane – indeed, his lectures on the importance of airpower delayed his promotion by several years. However, he cared nothing for Empire, nothing for impossible ambitions, only for the stubborn defence of the solid earth of his country. In the Great War, he was with one of the only two divisions not affected by the mutiny of 1917. He always slept excellently, and it was said that he had to be wakened by his orderly before every battle.

When the Ecole Supérieure de Guerre was reopened in 1919, Pinard was one of the first to be appointed, and was looked upon as a sound man, a counterweight, with his peasant blood, to the impossible de Gaulle. In 1940, in spite of his advanced age, he had managed to get himself the command of the 5th Armoured Division, which, in the middle of May, had made a last counterattack against the German advance.

A romantic, then, though limited by earth and sky, but nothing in his military career explained his curious fondness for the English. This could be traced to his shrewd marriage with a very rich woman, addicted, as Pinard was himself, to racehorses. Between the wars he had become a familiar figure at bloodstock sales, and at Epsom and Ascot. Much photographed at every meeting, he was always cheerful, and most important of all, nearly always a loser. That was the foundation of his great popularity over here, something he had never attained in France. On his wife’s money, he became an Anglophile. He learnt to love because he was loved, for the first time in his life.

At half-past eight on the 14th of June the Director General’s office told DPP that General Pinard was going on the air as soon as it could be arranged. ‘He wants to broadcast to the English nation and it seems it’s a matter of great urgency. It’s all been agreed.’

‘Well, the evening programmes must shove over a bit,’ said Jeff. ‘I’ll see to it.’

‘It’s more than that. We want you down in the studio.’

‘What for?’

‘Don’t you speak fluent French?’

‘Well?’

‘He wants you there when Pinard comes.’

‘He speaks perfectly good English, with a strong French accent, which is exactly what you want.’

‘The point is this – the War Office is sending someone and so is the FO, and the DG and DDG don’t think it will look well if we can’t produce a French speaker from our top level in BH.’

‘What do you want me to say?’

‘Oh, it might be a few sentences of greeting. Some hospitality may be considered appropriate. I suppose there’d better be some absinthe, isn’t that what they drink?’

‘The General prefers cognac,’ Jeff said.

‘Have you met him, then? That might be extremely useful.’

‘I met him in a dugout, behind a village called Quesnoy en Santerre, twenty-three years ago.’

‘I’ve never heard you talk about your war experiences before, Haggard.’

‘This wasn’t an experience. We were supposed to be taking over from the French, then it turned out that we were retreating. I was Mess Officer and I stayed to see if the French had left any brandy behind, they did sometimes. Pinard came back with exactly the same idea in mind. He was a captain then. I don’t flatter myself that he’ll remember this incident, by the way.’

‘I see, well, that isn’t really … did he seem to be a good speaker?’

‘He didn’t say very much on that occasion.’

‘In a sense it hardly matters whether he is or not. It’s a morale talk, he’s expected to fly on to Morocco to organize the resistance there, he’ll want to encourage himself as well as us.’

General Pinard arrived brushed and shining, to the relief of the Talks Producer, who believed, in the old way, that appearances were projected through the microphone. His silent young aide wished to accompany him into the studio, but was detained in the rather crowded continuity room. Pinard sat down behind the glass panel, his eyes resting for a moment upon everybody present.

‘He won’t wear headphones,’ the Talks Producer told Jeff. ‘It seems he doesn’t like them. He prefers to go ahead on a hand cue.’

‘I don’t think we should grudge him anything.’

The canteen’s brandy, Martell 2 Star, left over from Christmas, was brought out. The General raised his hand in a gesture of mild, but emphatic, refusal. That meant that no-one could have any – a disappointment to everybody except Talks, whose allocation for the month had already run out. The brandy would now do for the Minister of Coastal Defence, due later that evening. But these considerations faded as the General’s presence was felt. He waited in immaculate dignity. Behind him lay France’s broken armies.

A piece of paper was put in front of him. He looked at it, then moved it to one side.

In the continuity studio it was hardly possible to move. The War Office’s Major, the Foreign Office’s liaison man, sat awkwardly on high stools. The young French aide stood warily on guard. The Acting Deputy Director General suddenly came in through the soundless door to join them. DPP leant in a corner, looking up at the ceiling.

‘Don’t forget it’s your duty to put everyone at their ease,’ he said to the Talks Producer.

‘He didn’t look at my notes and suggestions. We need a run-through.’

‘You’ve no time. I did what I could for you, but we can’t alter the nine o’clock. You’re on in forty-three seconds.’

The producer pressed his switch.

‘How would you like to be introduced, General?’

‘I don’t know,’ Pinard replied. ‘I am in uniform, but I am a soldier without a post, an officer without authority, and a Frenchman without a country.’

‘The English people know your name quite well, sir.’

‘Use it if you wish. But make it clear that I am speaking to them as an individual. I have something to say from the heart.’

‘How long is this going to take?’ asked the programme engineer. No-one knew, it was open-ended. The PE’s face tightened with disapproval.

‘My dear friends,’ General Pinard said, ‘many persons who have occupied the stage of history have been forgiven not only their mistakes, but their sins, because of what they did at one moment only. I pray that for me, this will prove to be the moment.’

It was a quiet, moving, old man’s voice, with a slight metallic edge.

‘It gives me a strange feeling to speak to you this evening, and even stranger, after all that has happened in the past few weeks, to think that I should be speaking the truth, and that so many of you should be willing to hear it. Old soldiers like to tell stories, and old generals most of all. That kind of story is called a giberne.’

The producer passed a note: Should we translate at the end? ADDG wrote: I think a few untranslated French words give the right atmosphere. Jeff wrote: Don’t worry, he’s not going to tell it anyway.

‘This evening I am not here to indulge myself with a giberne. I have come to tell you what I saw yesterday, and what you must do tomorrow.

‘But perhaps you will say to yourselves, “I am listening to a Frenchman.” He is French, and I am English and I don’t trust him, any more than I would have done these past five hundred years, let them make what alliances they will. And today above all I don’t trust him, this evening I don’t trust him, because his country has been defeated. You know that every road leading to the south is impassable, every road is crowded not only with troops in retreat, but with families on the move, the old, the weak and the very young, the bedding, the cooking-pots, the scenes to which we have become so terribly accustomed since Poland fell.’

‘What’s this about cooking-pots?’ said the engineer to his JPE. ‘He may be going to break down. Watch the level.’

‘So, to repeat, you will think: I shan’t trust this man.… And we French, do we trust the English? The answer is: not at all. In the past weeks, most of all in the past twenty-four hours, I have heard you called many hard names, I don’t only mean by colleagues in the Conseil de Guerre but every soldier and every little shopkeeper on the road. They say that you led us unprepared into war with Germany and that having done so you have deserted us. And perhaps “in the misfortunes of our friends there is something not displeasing to us”. Well, in that case you must be satisfied. We are ruined, and we blame it on you.

‘Why then when I began to speak to you did I call you “friends”? That is a word that means so much that I understand no language is without it. I use it to you, and I mean it. The truth is that I am here this evening, in spite of all I have said, because I care deeply for England and the English.

‘Well, is this nonsense, or is the old man weak in the head? No more unsuitable task could be imagined than for a general, worse still, an aged general, to show his feelings. And those who hold power in France at the moment did not wish me to come. They tried to prevent me, but I came.’

Without warning, General Pinard’s voice rose to the level of the parade ground, and the engineer, caught on the hop, allowed it to blast fifteen million listeners.

‘But, believe me, I am not here to flatter you! That would not be the duty of friendship. Dear listeners, dear Englishmen and women, dear people of the green fields, the streets and the racecourses that I know so well – I have seen my nation lose hope, and I say to you now that there is no hope for you either, ne vous faîtes pas aucune illusion, you have lost your war. I tell you – do not listen to your leaders – neither those who are ready, as they always have been, to depart from these shores to Canada, nor to the courageous drunkard whom you have made your Prime Minister.’

The Talks Producer stared round from face to face, his hand on the censor switch, waiting for orders. The Foreign Office confronted the War Office.

‘Who’s going to stop him?’

‘I don’t know who authorized him to speak. I understand it was the War Cabinet.’

‘I’ll get on to the PM’s office,’ said the Assistant Deputy Director General.

‘Don’t barricade yourselves in, dear English people, do not take down your rusty shotguns. The French are a nation who have always cared about their army, while you have never cared about yours. Be sure that it won’t protect you now, and most certainly you cannot protect yourselves. When the Germans arrive, and at best it will be in a few weeks, don’t think of resistance, don’t think of history. Nothing is so ungrateful as history. Think of yourselves, your homes and gardens which you tend so carefully, the sums of money you have saved, the children who will live to see all this pass and who will know that all governments are bad, and Hitler’s perhaps not worse than any other. I tell you out of affection what France has learnt at the cost of terrible sacrifice. Give in. When you hear the tanks rolling up the streets of your quarter, be ready to give in, no matter how hard the terms. Give in when the Boche comes in. Give in.’

A terrible fit of coughing overwhelmed the microphone.

‘He’s overloading,’ said the programme engineer, in agony.

‘Messieurs, brisons là … je crève …’

‘What does he mean by that?’ asked the producer, unnerved, seizing DPP by the arm.

‘What do you think he means?’ said Jeff. ‘He’s not feeling well.’ The General’s right hand, lying on the table in front of him, opened and shut. He tried to force himself to stay sitting upright, but could not. His face, with its heavy silver moustaches, had turned bluish red.

The young aide was almost in tears. He had remained silent, no French junior officer speaks in the presence of his superior, clearly now he was at the end of his endurance. Jeff, who could move very quickly, picked up the bottle of Martell and taking the aide with him went into the other studio, emptied the BBC’s glass of water onto the floor and filled it with brandy for the poor trembling old man. With a very different gesture now, the hand rejected it.

‘Surtout pas ça.’

The duty officer rang through. There had been many complaints. For the past ten minutes there had been total silence on the Home network. The fifteen million listeners had heard nothing. But their reaction was not surprise so much as a kind of relief, the interruption of their programmes being exactly the kind of thing which everyone had expected from the moment war was declared, but which had failed to happen, holding the listeners’ attention in a supersaturated solution which had failed month by month to crystallize. The public put even greater confidence in the BBC, because for ten minutes it had failed to speak to them.

‘Of course I pulled the plugs on the General,’ said Jeff. ‘I felt that what he was going to say wouldn’t, on the whole, be helpful to the nation at this particular juncture.’

‘How in God’s name did you know what he was going to say?’ ADDG asked, jolted and disturbed to the very depths of his Old Servantship.

‘I didn’t know. I guessed.’

‘I don’t get it. He seemed quite all right to me when he arrived.’

‘I didn’t think so.’

‘Why not?’

‘It was something he said to me in the corridor, just before he got to the studios.’

‘I didn’t notice, I came down later.’

‘He did recognize me, after all. I ought to have realized that generals always do remember faces, otherwise they don’t become generals.’

‘What did he say?’

‘He said: I am going to repeat my former advice.’

‘Meaning what?’

‘I told you about the St Quentin front and the cognac. There was plenty left but it wasn’t drinkable, it had got mixed up with dead Germans. I was going to see what I could salvage just the same, but Pinard stopped me. He said, “Soyons réalistes”.’

‘And you went ahead, entirely on your own initiative, because of that?’

‘It’s time to be realistic … I thought I’d better be on the safe side.’

‘If you call it that. Why in the name of God didn’t you consult me? In ordinary circumstances you wouldn’t have been in the studio at all. Of course, I admit that as things turned out we’ve been saved from a very dangerous incident, it might have caused I don’t know what despondency and panic, furthermore it would have given the M.O.I. and the War Office exactly the chance they’ve been looking for to step in and threaten our independence and press for governmental control – I grant you all that, I suppose in a sense one ought to congratulate you, perhaps you’re expecting to be congratulated.…’ He paused. Jeff had never been known to expect anything of the kind. ‘Leaving that aside, you acted without authority, and as a member of the administrative staff meddling with the equipment you’ve risked a strong protest from the unions. I don’t know what to say to you. Heads will roll. He was a privileged speaker. Do you intend to do this sort of thing often?’

‘I hope we shan’t often be within measurable distance of invasion.’

‘I don’t like that, Haggard.’

‘I don’t mind withdrawing “measurable”.’

ADDG had judged the reactions of the Ministries correctly. No-one, it was true, could deny that to let General Pinard’s appeal, so wretched, so heartfelt, go out to the unsuspecting public would have been a setback. Equally, it was no-one’s business, now that the General had been taken seriously ill, to decide what kind of a setback it might have been. This left more scope for attack. The BBC, in face of the grave doubts of the Services, who felt the less said the better on every occasion, persisted obstinately in telling the truth in their own way. But their own way was beginning to look irresponsible to the point of giddiness. And if directors of departments were to take a hand in decision-making of this order, what guarantee could there be that other French leaders who might cross the Channel in the hope of continuing the struggle would not be cut off in their turn? This last remark was part of a combined directive from the Ministries, which also suggested a formula: Haggard might be complimented on his presence of mind and packed off to one of the Regions for the duration. A new post could surely be created if necessary.

The BBC loyally defended their own. As a cross between a civil service, a powerful moral force, and an amateur theatrical company that wasn’t too sure where next week’s money was coming from, they had several different kinds of language, and could guarantee to come out best from almost any discussion. Determined to go on doing what they thought best without official interference, they spoke of their DPP’s artistic temperament which could not be restrained without risk, and when asked why they’d put this freakish impresario in charge of planning, they referred to his rigid schedules and steely devotion to duty. Then, after a few days, it became known that the Prime Minister had heard the whole story and thought it was excellent. He’d particularly liked the phrase ‘to pull the plugs on someone’, which he hadn’t, apparently, come across before.

The Pinard affair was closed. But it did nothing to lessen that distance or difference between DPP and some of his colleagues, which they felt as an atmosphere of faint coldness even when they needed his help. Jeff Haggard was useful because if he felt a matter was worth taking up he didn’t mind what he said or who he said it to. Look at what he’d done, over the years, for Sam Brooks! Undoubtedly, also, he was clever. But they felt, perhaps out of a sense of self-preservation, that no-one can be good and clever at the same time.

ADDG, with the leniency of someone who has been unjust in the first place, considered that Haggard’s nerves might have been overtaxed. The planning of the complete Home and Forces programmes, in all their delicate bearings, couldn’t be undertaken with impunity.

‘I think I’ll advise him to read a few chapters of Cranford every night before he retires to bed. I’ve been doing that myself ever since Munich. I think, you know, that Mrs Gaskell would have been glad to know that.’

The whole notion was comforting, but in fact Jeff had never been nervous and was now arguably the calmest person in the whole building. He didn’t regard himself as either lucky, or in disgrace, but, if he was either, the feeling was quite familiar.

On the night of the 16th of June General Pinard died in the King Edward VII Hospital for Officers. It was impossible to send the body back to German-occupied territory and an awkward funeral took place at Notre Dame de France, off Leicester Square. The BBC sent a wreath, with a card on which Jeff had written À Georges Pinard: mort pour la civilisation. On the 17th of June de Gaulle arrived in this country.

Like Pinard, he had brought only a small suitcase. He was lodged in the Rubens Hotel and given permission to broadcast and to raise his own army.

There were French sailors camping at Aintree, French airmen in South Wales, two battalions of légionnaires at Tufnell Park, French gunners, chasseurs and signals at Alexandra Park. ‘You’ll never find him,’ Vi said to Lise, ‘we’ll all do our best, though. What does your family think?’ But Lise’s father, who had been a cashier at Barclay’s Lyons branch, had brought his family back to England in January and was now a cashier in Southampton. He wasn’t favourable to the idea of Frédé and never had been.

‘Well, does he know your London address?’

Lise wasn’t sure, and it wouldn’t do anyway. She had a room in a Catholic hostel attached to a convent near Warren Street.

‘How do you know he’ll turn up at all?’ asked Teddy. Lise replied that she was psychic, with the result that she had a certain sensation in the points of her breasts when Frédé was near at hand.

‘Who’d be a woman?’ Teddy thought.

All this time Lise had remained steadily in low spirits. RPD had made only a half-hearted attempt to tell Mrs Milne that Miss Bernard was very unusual, probably talented, should not on any account be overworked, and so forth. His heart was not in it. She was less responsive than the deadened walls of the studios. But now her sluggish energies seemed to revive, at least to the extent of asking other people to do something for her.

The mobile unit had been sent by Archives to capture the scene at de Gaulle’s new headquarters in Westminster. Here, in a dusty bare room, those who had made the decision to join France Libre signed their names, and afterwards drank a pledge to Victory from a barrel of red wine in the passage. ‘Not much of a sound picture there,’ said the recording engineer, who had flatly refused to let Dr Vogel accompany him. ‘You’ve just got them taking this oath, footsteps coming and going on the bare boards, a nice bit of echo there, your wine coming out of the tap and a few more words, nothing in English, though.’

‘Did you see anyone who looked like a sapper?’ Lise asked him with dazed, heavy persistence.

‘Search me, sweetheart.’

‘He’s bound to come there one day. He’s sure to want to stay in England.’

‘Well, we’re going back tomorrow to see if we can get some more atmosphere. With luck, one of them might smash a glass.’ The RE told Willie Sharpe that Lise seemed pretty well idiotic. ‘You don’t make allowances for human hope,’ Willie replied.

And yet, out of the two hundred thousand French troops brought over here and quartered at random, in the miraculously fair weather, wherever a space could be found, they did come across Frédé.

They were out for a breather in Kensington Gardens – Della and Vi, with Lise, who had made them go there in the first place, dragging behind. You often saw French soldiers in the gardens, detachments of français libres and of the vastly greater number who had not signed on and were waiting to go back home as soon as they got the chance. There wasn’t much for them to do in a park, but then, there wasn’t much for them to do anyway.

Della never went out looking less than her best. She wore a striped silk blouse with a deeply suggestive V-neckline under her red linen costume; on the lapels of this she pinned, on alternate weeks, her RAF wings, naval crown, Free Polish, Free Czech, Free Norwegian, Free Dutch and Free Belgian flashes and the badges of Canadian and New Zealand regiments. Her hair was gallantly swept back in sparkling ridges and she advanced on high heels, ready to receive or repel any opening shots in the way of glances, remarks, or hard cheek. Under persuasion, Lise had also bought a pair of strapped high-heeled shoes. Della felt almost professionally insulted at the idea of a friend trying to meet her fiancé, if that was what he was, without tarting herself up at least a little. Vi looked her usual self in a cotton dress she had made on her mother’s machine. It was all right, but no more than that.

Kensington’s leafy glades were full of lovers and, at a discreet distance, workers off work, each with their own thermos. The girls passed close enough to the anti-aircraft battery to hear and take no apparent notice of the long whistle that followed them. At last they chose to sit on the ground at the edge of the dingle, with a good view of the Peter Pan statue. ‘I expect the man who made that died young,’ Della said. It was odd for them, after eight hours in BH, to sit on the grass, picking off bits of grass and chewing them, under the lazing clouds.

When the French soldiers appeared they came in two groups, and from opposite directions, a few français libres to begin with, idling across from Hyde Park. They stopped at the bridge and looked at the water, not as if they knew each other very well as yet. Someone had given them cigarettes and they had evidently stopped by previous arrangement to hand round the packets and allow themselves one each. Quite a few of them had légionnaires’ chinstrap beards and Della, who had never seen these before, kept pointing. Vi jerked her elbow down. Without a word Lise heaved herself to her feet and began to stumble forward on her strappies, but the other way, towards the Round Pond.

There the summer turf of the gardens was dotted with more French soldiers coming over the ridge, who suddenly all sat or lay down, like a herd on a fine day. They were determined not to go any farther. A refreshment van, driven by a middle-aged woman in a navy-blue beret, pulled up and parked itself among them. On its side you could read, painted in white, the words ANGLO-FRENCH AMENITIES COMMITTEE. She opened up the side of her van and began to count out rolls of bread and paper cups. Nobody took any notice of her.

Lise gracelessly panted up the slope to within speaking distance. A man got to his feet. True, she’d never told them exactly what this Frédé looked like, but this one was short, and not even dark. It was deeply disappointing, and at the same time confusing – Lise made an awkward grab and then lost her footing, then righted herself and clung on to him, taller than he was and much heavier. She seemed to be wrestling with the dishevelled khaki creature.

‘I wouldn’t have thought she’d got it in her,’ said Della. Stir it up, she thought. She only wanted for Lise what she’d have liked for herself.

‘Yes but those aren’t Free French,’ said Vi. ‘He’s got into the wrong lot.’ She was frightened. Against the protests of Frédé and his cronies Lise was crying out in French, and when she did that she seemed to turn into another person, or let out the one she had been all along. This made the girls feel queer.

By now the FLs on the bridge had finished their cigarettes and put the stubs away inside their caps. Sighting the others on the opposite slope only two hundred yards away, they warily advanced through Peter Pan’s dingle. Then some of them began to run in ragged formation, like boys anxious to get into a football game, the small, neat and elegant ones in front, as though trained, others in the rear beating up clouds of dust with their boots from the dry earth. Lise and Frédé disappeared from sight as the hostile forces engaged, the front runners gesturing, with one fist clenched and one stiffened arm pointing beyond the horizon of the park. They shouted something, as hoarse as rooks, then their voices pitched higher into uproar. The people who had come for a nice afternoon in the gardens stood where they were and stared.

‘They’re having a political altercation,’ said a man with his children. ‘Where’s their NCOs?’

There was a sound of something flat hitting something flat – say a wet cloth on a kitchen table. It was a slap on the face. Just for a moment the girls could see Frédé staggering and holding his jaw in his hand like toothache, with thick blood running through the fingers, but it wasn’t Lise who’d hit him, she was still half up and half down, but nowhere near him any more. It was one of the FLs, and now they were all going down in twos and threes, rolling on the ground in squalor, with banging heads and seams splitting, showing a flash of whitish-grey pants.

‘The soldiers!’ Della cried. ‘They’re fighting! They can’t do that!’

Those who were on their feet snatched up the rolls from the counter of the refreshment van and the summer air was streaked with missiles. The woman in the navy-blue beret was running away towards the Round Pond. Money fell from her bag onto the grass. The food she had prepared was trodden to a pulp and thrust and plastered into angry faces. There was nothing to laugh at, the sight of the homesick boys battering away at each other was like the naked spirit of hate itself.

The torn bread lay scattered everywhere. ‘They’re not English, you can’t expect them to understand the shortages,’ Vi thought. ‘Thank God, there’s Lise.’ She was making her way towards them, looking swollen and ugly.

‘Where’s Frédé?’

Two policemen were approaching in the distance, followed by five or six corporals, who had perhaps been absent without leave in the wine-bars of Kensington. The riot died down, the culprits began to explain themselves.

‘He won’t stay,’ Lise sobbed, ‘he doesn’t want me any more. They hit him. He wants to go back to Lyons.’

‘We’ll have to take her with us, Della. She can’t go back to that convent place looking like that. She’s distraught.’

But Della was going out dancing at the Lyceum. ‘I’ve got to go and get into my black, but it isn’t that that takes the time, it’s ringing up to see if anyone can lend me some pearls or a white collar. If you’re going to wear black you have to have some little touches.’

Vi did not contest this. ‘You can come home with me for a bit,’ she said to Lise. ‘My mother won’t mind.’

They took a bus to Hammersmith. Vi paid both their fares, as although Lise had succeeded in hanging on to her bag she seemed, as often, to have no money with her. But it was a mercy she hadn’t lost her BBC pass and identity card.

They walked up a quiet side road, simmering in the late afternoon heat.

The gate of Vi’s home hung open among shaggy evergreens.

‘Don’t shut it, it’s always open.’

‘It’s a big house,’ said Lise.

‘It has to be. There’s nine of us.’

She went into the dark hall, lit by stained glass, with the air of an eldest child who expects to restore order, and listened for a moment to the noises from radios, hammers, pulled lavatory chains, taps running and a piano banging to identify who was at home, and whether they were more or less doing what they ought to be.

‘You can’t come across the hall, it’s the English Channel,’ said a small boy who was sitting on the stairs.

‘Where’s Dad?’

‘Still at the shop.’

‘Where’s Mum, then?’

She was thought to be putting on the kettle. To oblige the child they retreated through the front door and walked round by the lawn, dug up and planted with vegetables, the one rose-bed, the rabbit-hutches, coal-shed and coke-shed, and entered the kitchen by the back scullery.

‘You want to put these in water at once, Mum,’ said Vi, lifting a pile of crimson ramblers out of the sink. ‘This is Lise Bernard, from work.’

Mrs Simmons was a broadly-based woman in an overall, not at all disconcerted by Lise’s appearance. Having revived her memories of 1914, she in fact expected girls to be in tears. There was no question as to where Vi’s kind heart came from. At home, however, one of her duties was to moderate its excesses.

‘Sit down, Lizzie,’ cried Mrs Simmons, who didn’t get names right. ‘You needn’t mind showing your feelings. I daresay tea will help. But I can’t pretend it’ll alter the fact that he’s far away.’

‘He’s in Kensington Gardens,’ said Vi.

She kept remembering Frédé’s face, dark and mad, with the blood oozing through his fingers.

‘Perhaps Lise could share my room for a bit. She could manage ten shillings a week on what we get, couldn’t you, Lise?’

In both Mrs Simmons’ mind and Vi’s the three-year-old’s cot moved out of Vi’s room and one of the boys went onto the lounge sofa and to compensate for this Chris, the merchant seaman, was asked to bring him something special by way of a souvenir. There was no need for either of them to explain further. It would be no trouble at all.

Lise appeared to be glad to leave the convent, but who could tell what she really thought? She seemed to have relapsed into her old sloth. One would say that she had given up the power of choice. Yet ten days later she left her job at Broadcasting House without saying goodbye. She did not come back to Hammersmith either, and Mrs Simmons couldn’t think what to do with her few things. Finally Vi forbade her to mention the subject more than twice at any one suppertime.