Grace does not want to share her home with an evacuee. And she is disappointed in her father for so meekly succumbing to the authority which says this is what she must do. She had hoped, moreover, to be sent away to boarding school when she was twelve. Now, with the advent of the war, and her father’s inheritance even less likely to materialize, and his shares tumbling, it seems she will never be allowed to leave home.
And if she has to attend the village school – and it looks as if she will – her humiliation, she knows, will be profound. She doubts her own scholastic capabilities, not without reason, and suspects the grubby riff-raff may well do better than her at sums and spelling.
Grace is a lean, pretty, arrogant child, with a wide face, regular features, green eyes, silky red hair and the creamy matt complexion which sometimes goes with it. She resembles neither her father nor her mother. Nervousness makes her rude, and frustration makes her desperate, and for as long as she can remember, she has felt nervous and frustrated.
Thus the conversation goes that morning, at The Poplars, over a breakfast lovingly if clumsily prepared by Esther Songford, Grace’s mother, Edwin’s wife. Esther serves porridge, eggs, bacon, kidneys, toast, mushrooms – she was up early picking them so at least they are fresh, even though they are over-cooked – and Jackson’s Breakfast Tea.
Rationing, of course, so far, affects only the mass of the urban proletariat. The well-to-do find their eating habits unaffected. It takes more than a paper war to alter the servile habits of grocers. The real one, presently, is to turn them into all-powerful tyrants, only too happy to be revenged upon their once mean and arrogant betters. In the meantime, it is not shortage of food but short tempers which makes breakfast at The Poplars an uneasy affair. Grace is pink with fury.
Edwin Stop sulking, Grace. We’re having an evacuee and that is that. We have to set an example.
Ester She’s not sulking, Edwin. She’s just a little quiet. Please don’t shout at her. Grace dear, eat up your porridge and don’t aggravate your father.
Grace It’s burnt.
Esther Only a little bit, dear.
Edwin (Sneering) Like the curate’s egg, I suppose. Good in parts.
Esther I’m afraid it’s the saucepans, Edwin. They’ve worn so thin. They really must be replaced. I’m ashamed to ask Mrs Dover to clean them.
Esther has been asking for new saucepans for seven years, in vain. Edwin controls the household money flow with stringent care. He is not so much mean, as fearful of sudden penury; living in dread of military, social or natural cataclysms which will sweep away pension, profits and property overnight. He fears the working classes, and the creeping evil of socialism, seeping under the doors of privilege like flood water.
And as Edwin walks the country lanes, swinging his blackthorn cane, the very model of a healthy-minded Englishman, he is not raising his face to meet God’s good sun, as you might think, but sniffing the air for the first scent of the enemy’s Poison Gas – expected to envelop Britain at any moment.
Edwin A bad workman blames his tools, Esther. I’m afraid new saucepans are out of the question now, of course. There’s a war on. The metal is needed for guns. I’m surprised you should be so unpatriotic as to suggest it.
Esther Oh dear. I didn’t think of it like that. I’m so sorry. I’ll eat your porridge, Grace.
And Grace pushes her plate over, without gratitude. Mothers, in her view, are born to scavenge, to incorporate the evidence of their culinary shortcomings.
Grace Me? Share with some snotty-nosed urchin from the East End! Molly (a friend) says they had evacuees at her aunt’s and they brought fleas and nits and wet the bed and never take off their vests at night and smell. You can’t, daddy. Not in my house.
Esther Our house, Grace. We’ll manage somehow. Think how much you’ve got to teach them. You must pass on your good fortune. Poor little things, separated from their mothers. Some of them have never even seen a sheep or a cow, let alone a farmyard, in all their lives. Daddy’s quite right. We must all pull together, Grace dear, even the children.
Grace Why?
Esther To defeat Mr Hitler.
Grace Well I hope he wins.
Has she gone too far? Yes.
Edwin Grace, go to your room.
Grace But I haven’t finished my breakfast.
She goes, all the same. She is frightened of her choleric father, especially at breakfast time. So’s Esther.
Edwin Esther, you have let that girl get totally out of control. Let’s hope an evacuee brings her down a peg or two. I’ve put your name down for a girl.
Esther Oh. I was rather hoping for a boy to help with the garden.
Edwin Garden! There isn’t going to be a garden from now on. There’s going to be a vegetable patch. I’m afraid this war’s put paid to your flower shows and your prizes, Esther. No time for your frills and fancies any more.
Esther reels.
For Esther, having more sense of future than her husband, spends much time working in the garden, which flourishes in her care. The soft lawns, the neat flower-beds, the many roses – which make Edwin wheezy – have been her concern, her territory, for many years. Now it seems that Edwin feels at liberty to invade it.
Invasion is most surely in the air. And indeed, throughout the war years, the battle is to rage to and fro across the garden, sometimes Edwin’s onions and carrots winning, sometimes Esther’s herbaceous borders.
Esther, this first morning of declared hostilities, is most upset. She goes into the kitchen and tries not to cry into the washing-up water as she scrapes the burnt porridge saucepan clean.
Who is this Esther, Edwin’s undoubted wife, Grace’s alleged mother, Marjorie and Chloe’s second mama? She is a vicar’s daughter. She has a sense of service, and the feeling that for the children’s sake, at least, she should remain brave, cheerful and uncomplaining. And like her husband she suffers from a sense of loss. He lost his pride and his career. She lost her faith, waking up one morning to the dour sense of her father’s dislike of her, the knowledge of his preference for his sons, and the feeling that God, even if He did exist, was certainly not good. These days it is Edwin, and only Edwin, who makes her unhappy, but he, like her father, is the fact of her existence, and she has become used to it.
She married late, at thirty, after her parents died and left her a little money. She has a faded prettiness, rather large, rather popping eyes, a lot of rather wispy hair, a lax skin. She works unceasingly, and inefficiently, about the house.
She sleeps apart from her husband because after Grace was born (and it was a difficult birth and she had hoped for a boy) intercourse was painful. Their physical union had been, at the best of times, distasteful to her, and difficult for him.
These days, just sometimes, when Edwin has drunk rather more than usual at the Rose and Crown, he will come into her bedroom and face both her distaste and his own probable inadequacy, and despise himself afterwards for his animal nature, and hardly be able to look her in the eye in the morning; the mother of his child so abused and debased, and he himself responsible for it. He would knock himself down, if he could, for the cad he is, and failing that, is ruder than ever to her.
Such a morning is this, and he hates her, and will grow carrots in her flower-beds, yes he will.
And she will not fight him, she will merely weep into the washing-up water. There is such a virtuous obstinacy about her, such a gentility in her bulky tweed skirts and shapeless twin sets, such an unawakened beauty in the body beneath them. This sense of his wife, so unused, drives him to great heights of irritation. He is apopleptic, sometimes. He thinks his heart will stop. As for her, she knows perfectly well that she wrongs him with her niceness, her sweetness and her moral supremacy. But what can she do? Sink to his crude masculine level? Never. She is too angry with him on such mornings.
She will grow roses and make him sneeze and wheeze.
So the day does not start well for Grace, or Edwin, or Esther. Now, at the station, Grace holds her father’s hand – not because she has forgiven him, but because, amongst so many milling women and children, any male is valuable and must be seen to belong to her.