On the morning of Sunday, 3 September 1939, the Reverend Fairhead came home from conducting a service at the hospital, to find Sophie waiting for him in the hall, seated on the cupboard bench inside of which they stored their useful rubbish, such as wrapping paper and Christmas decorations. When he came in he said, ‘Hello, darling, what are you doing sitting there?’
Sophie stood up, put her arms around his neck and began to sob.
In Brighton, Archie Pitt poured himself a stiff glass of gin, even though it was only time for elevenses, and pulled the plug for his single-bar heater from the one electrical socket in the wall. He plugged in the radio, and caught the Prime Minister’s broadcast just in time. It was like the sound of a bugle to an old cavalry horse. He stood up slowly, poured the gin back into its bottle, and went to look at himself in the mirror. Shaven, tatty, pathetically thin, but upright and respectable. He took his black air-raid precautions helmet from its hook on the back of the door, brushed a speck of dust from it with his fingers, and went out to report for duty, no longer a humble roadsweeper.
At the home of their decadent friends in Lewes, Christabel and Gaskell were draped over the sofas, nursing their hangovers. Felix and Felicity had got themselves up and given themselves breakfast and were wrenching quinces from the tree, to throw at each other. Their sibling screams of ‘I hate you, I hate you’ were ringing out over the river valley, from which an early-autumn mist had begun to evaporate. After they had listened to the broadcast, Gaskell said, ‘What are we going to do? Paint pictures and take photographs?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Christabel.
Gaskell thumbnailed her cigarette out of its holder into an ashtray, undraped herself, and went to the French window. She watched the children for a while, and said, ‘We’re going to go home to Hexham and open the house up for refugees. They’ll be evacuating all the children from London now.’
Christabel came and stood beside her, taking her arm. ‘It’ll be the best thing we’ve ever done,’ she said. ‘I’ll go and pack.’
Daniel’s mother, Mme Pitt, wearing galoshes over her slippers, was in the garden in Partridge Green, deadheading the roses, when her neighbour popped her head over the garden wall. ‘I thought you’d like to know,’ she said. ‘On account of Poland. We’re at war. I just heard the Prime Minister. And France is in with us again.’
Mme Pitt took off her gloves and wiped her brow with the back of her hand ‘Oh, mon pauvre pays,’ she sighed. Then she looked up at her neighbour and said, ‘I am selfish to think like this, I know, but at least my boys are too old to fight this time.’
‘No one’s too old,’ said her neighbour. ‘Well, begging your pardon, but you might be, I suppose.’
Mme Pitt gestured towards her flower bed. ‘Je peux faire pousser les légumes between the roses,’ she said. ‘I’ll grow vegetables.’
Mrs McCosh was with Cookie in the kitchen at The Grampians. Cookie was the last servant left, and the two women had been together for more than several decades. There was very little left of the relationship between mistress and servant apart from the formality of Cookie addressing Mrs McCosh as ‘madam’. Cookie was completely reconciled to her employer’s fits of extreme eccentricity, unembarrassed because they had become so completely commonplace.
‘We’ll get bombed again, won’t we, madam?’ said Cookie.
‘I’m not leaving the house. I shall be buried in its rubble, if need be.’
‘They’ll fly straight over us to get to London, won’t they, madam?’
‘Last time,’ said Mrs McCosh, ‘the Kaiser declared war on his own family. The least you can say for Herr Hitler is that he doesn’t have any relatives here.’
‘I think we should bomb them first,’ said Cookie, ‘before they get a head start.’
‘You should write and suggest it to the Prime Minister, Cookie.’
‘Well, madam, I think I will.’
Rosie was at her father’s graveside at St John’s, after matins, when a passer-by waved to her cheerily, and said, ‘It’s war. I don’t know if you heard.’
She went back into the church and knelt in the front row of the pews, but the prayers never came. She wondered how long the war would last, because Bertie might become eligible for it if it went on too long.
Bertie was upstairs at The Grampians wondering what else he could cram into his school trunk, and whether he could get away with taking some tins of pineapple from the larder.
Esther was brushing her hair and making faces at herself in the mirror, hoping that it was lamb for Sunday lunch. She suddenly remembered the ultimatum and went downstairs to the kitchen, where Cookie and her grandmother were sitting together at the table with one of the family cats between them. She saw their numbed expressions, and said, ‘It’s war then, is it?’ She went out into the garden and realised that she urgently needed to see her father. He would know what to do.
Daniel Pitt missed the broadcast because he was out on his Brough, taking a joyride to Box Hill on the way to his mother; but when he stopped in a roadside cafe outside Reigate he caught the painfully halting and monotonous broadcast of the King. Nobody in the cafe spoke for the whole address, and then somebody said, ‘Good old George.’
Daniel went outside. He had been expecting this for months, especially since the partial mobilisation at the time of Hitler’s annexation of the Sudetenland. He was fortunate to have such a record from the previous war, and had been pulling strings for months. Now he was merely waiting for a telegram. The RAF would definitely want him, whether up in the air or not. Whatever happened he was determined to get back up in the air. He was thinking of the Air Transport Auxiliary. He’d be flying every kind of plane there was, and the thought of that was a little intoxicating.
Out in India Ottilie wondered if she could refresh her nursing skills and go back into hospitals, or whether she would be more usefully employed continuing to run her own little clinic for the poorer coolies, just when she was making progress in persuading them to accept inoculation. In any case there were the three children to think of. Frederick wrote to the War Ministry of the Indian government stating that he was a former naval officer, and asking how he might be useful.
Near Berwick, Young Edward, no longer as young as he was, wondered what he would do when the golf course was made into a training ground. They had already built a pillbox on it and an anti-aircraft emplacement that as yet had no gun. There was even talk of turning the par fives into airstrips. Life had suddenly become too serious for golf, and his rigid leg and damaged hip made any military career seem improbable. All the same, he was going to volunteer for the LDV, even if they were presently only drilling with broomsticks. It occurred to him that if the course became an airfield he could give lessons to the young officers.
At the family house in Edenderry, Mary went to the window and looked out at the familiar rain. She calculated that Daniel was too old to fight now, but knew that he still would. She wondered if Ireland would be dragged into the war, and thought, ‘Only if Britain is defeated. Or the Germans start sinking our ships.’ She was sure that the Irish would enjoy the Schadenfreude of watching from a safe distance as British soldiers fell. The sadness of this thought made her regret all over again being neither one thing nor the other.
In Ceylon, when the news of war arrived in the hills of paradise a day later, Samadara stroked the head of her oldest son and remembered the man of whom he reminded her so much. She smiled sadly and wondered if the war would bring him back, and what it would be like if it did, and whether she would even know, and if he were even still alive.