‘You must tell her, Edie,’ Dora said. ‘You can’t go on wearing that great cardigan all the time and hoping no one’ll notice. You’re really showing now. It’s not fair. Think how she’ll feel if she finds out from someone else. Her own daughter not telling her. And Christmas coming and everything.’
‘It’s my baby, Dora,’ Edith said sullenly. ‘I’ll tell her when I’m ready. Just not now.’
‘I don’t see why not,’ Dora said, drinking her tea. ‘I would if it was me.’
‘But it’s not you, is it?’ her sister said. ‘It’s me, and it’s my baby.’
Dora put down her tea cup, took a drag at her cigarette and looked at her sister levelly. ‘I’m beginning to think you don’t want the poor little thing,’ she said.
‘Well, I do,’ Edith told her stubbornly. And it was true. She hadn’t wanted it a bit, not at the start, but now that it was kicking she felt really sorry for it and was ashamed to have been so unkind. It must be the worst possible thing for a baby to come into the world and for its own mother to say she doesn’t want it. She was drawn with pity at the very idea.
‘Have bittick?’ Margaret said, looking at the biscuit tin. ‘Please, Mummy.’
‘One piece,’ Edith allowed, adding sternly, ‘I don’t want you spoiling your dinner.’ Now and then, as a great treat, she bought half a pound of broken biscuits and the girls loved them.
‘And me,’ Barbara said. ‘Please, Mummy.’
‘Since you’ve asked nicely,’ Edith said and watched while they made their choice. ‘Then I shall have to get on.’ There was a pile of ironing waiting on the ironing board and dinner to cook. ‘I will tell her Dottie. Only in my own time. I can’t rush it.’
‘Well, I’ve said my say,’ Dora sighed. ‘I can’t do more than that.’
‘It would be easier if the house wasn’t full of foreigners all the time,’ Edith said, putting the biggest iron on the trivet. ‘It’s not something you can tell your mother with a lot of foreigners all over the place.’
‘Take her out for a walk,’ Dora suggested.
‘Oh, come on, Dottie,’ Edith protested, ‘when does she have time to go out? She’s always working. Mind you don’t go near the iron, Margaret.’
Emmeline had taken to her new job as hostess and carer easily and with enthusiasm. The Mannheims had taught her enough German to be able to welcome her guests, and to enquire if they needed another blanket or if they would like a second helping or another cup of coffee, and from then on and with Janet to help her, she’d been coping if not entirely happily then at least with the satisfaction of knowing she was doing something well worth while. Coffee had been a problem to start with because she really wasn’t very good at making it, but it was a problem solved when Mrs Mannheim offered to do it for her and actually found a delicatessen where they sold freshly ground coffee which made a lot of difference. From then on she simply handed the job over to someone else, surprised to see that even quite small children could manage it.
‘What you’re used to, I suppose,’ she said to Octavia. ‘It wouldn’t do for me but it takes all sorts. What are we going to do about Christmas?’
‘We shall invite them to join us,’ Octavia said. ‘We’ll give one another presents and we’ll buy a few little gifts for them and we’ll treat it as a holiday. They have a religious ceremony at Christmas time too. It’s called Chanukah. I’ve been looking it up. Perhaps we could combine them.’
But as it turned out, there were no refugees to join them that Christmas. Mrs Hutchinson rang Octavia in the middle of December to tell her they were having great difficulty in getting anybody out at all. ‘It could be better in the New Year. We must hope so. I will keep you informed.’
So it was a simple family holiday after all and a cheerful one. They spent most of their Christmas dinner happily castigating King Edward, although, as Emmeline said, ‘I suppose we can’t call him that now.’
‘He’s a fool whatever we’re going to call him,’ Dora said trenchantly, as she helped herself to more bread sauce. ‘Fancy giving up the throne of England for that ugly woman. She’s got a face like a flat iron.’
‘She’s no beauty, I’ll grant you that,’ J-J said, encouraging her. ‘But we can’t all be beautiful. She must have other charms.’
‘I can’t see what,’ Dora said. ‘She’s got no figure to speak of, she’s American, she’s plastered in make-up, she’s had two husbands. I mean, two husbands! What does that say about her?’
‘I think she’s a gold digger,’ Edith said. ‘She wanted to be Queen and wear ermine and jewels and drive about in the state coach. Good riddance to her, that’s what I say.’
‘I wonder what the new king will be like,’ Johnnie said, spearing a Brussels sprout. ‘They say he’s a timid sort of bloke. Got a stutter apparently. Can’t get his words out.’
‘The Queen’s all right, though,’ Dora said, ‘as far as you can tell. At least she’s pretty.’
‘And they’ve got two pretty little girls,’ Octavia said. ‘Like you, Edie.’
The pause that followed her remark went on just a little too long, so she looked up from her plate to reinforce her compliment with a smile – and then realised that Emmeline was giving her daughter the oddest look, that Dora was flashing an eye-warning to her, and that Edith was blushing. What have I said? she thought. It’s almost as if I’ve put my foot in it.
‘Not quite like you though, eh, Edie?’ Emmeline said, heavily. ‘If I’m any judge, you’ve gone one better.’
‘I was going to tell you, Ma,’ Edith said, looking shamefaced. ‘Only there were always so many people round. I mean, I never got you on my own. I mean, it’s not something you can say in front of a load of foreigners.’
‘When is it going to be?’ Emmeline said. ‘If we’re allowed to know.’
‘When’s what going to be?’ Johnnie asked. The conversation seemed to have taken a turn he couldn’t follow. He looked round the table at them all, his eyes questioning.
‘We’re expecting,’ Arthur told him, rescuing Edie. ‘Beginning of April.’
‘Good-oh!’ Johnnie said, and returned to his meal.
His nonchalance made them all laugh and the tension broke into a chorus of congratulation led by J-J. ‘What good news, Edith, my dear!’
‘Yes, it is, isn’t it,’ Dora said, this time giving her mother a warning glance. ‘We’re all really happy for you, Edie. Aren’t we, Ma?’
And John Erskine echoed her, ‘Good news, Edie. Really good news.’
Margaret had begun to suspect that something was going on. ‘What is, Mummy?’ she said. ‘What’s good news?’
‘Nothing that you need to know about,’ Edith told her firmly. ‘I hope you’re going to eat that all up like a good girl.’
The child scowled and appealed to her father. ‘What’s good news, Daddy?’
‘That we’ve got two pretty little girls,’ he said. ‘Like the new Queen.’
That was a better answer. ‘Has she got two pretty little girls?’
‘Yes, she has,’ her father said, ‘but they’re not as pretty as mine.’
It was such a splendidly affectionate and diplomatic answer that there were smiles all round the table, even from Emmeline, who was still feeling annoyed that she hadn’t been told before, and took care to have the last disapproving word. ‘I hope it doesn’t choose to arrive on All Fool’s Day, that’s all,’ she said.
But the baby, who turned out to be another girl, to her father’s secret disappointment, was a creature of great good sense. Not only did she stay where she was until the foolish day was past, she arrived quickly and with very little fuss in the middle of the morning on Sunday the 5th of April, so that her sisters could tiptoe into the bedroom and see her as soon as she was born and her father could walk to the corner of the road and phone her grandmother with the good news.
Emmeline put on her hat at once and took the tram to Colliers Wood. And fell in love at first sight. ‘Such a little duck,’ she said to Edith, sitting beside the bed and slipping her finger into the warm, curled fist of her new granddaughter. ‘Just look at those dear little dimpled hands. Couldn’t you just eat her? What are you going to call her?’
‘Joan,’ Edith said. ‘I think she looks like a Joan, don’t you?’
‘I think she looks like a little duck,’ Emmeline said, as the baby clutched her finger. It was the most loving and natural approval.
Later that day, when Emmeline had come happily back to Parkside Avenue glowing with delight at her new grandchild and full of plans for the clothes she would make for it – ‘I shall get the wool first thing tomorrow morning. She’ll need a nice new matinee jacket. Edie’s kept her baby clothes very nicely but there’s no warmth in hand-me-downs’ – Octavia and her father sat by the fire in the study and told one another how relieved they were that everything had gone so well.
‘To be truthful, I thought she might take against it,’ Octavia admitted. ‘She was so touchy at Christmas.’
‘We live in troubled times,’ J-J said. ‘I think it is making us all touchy.’
That was true enough, Octavia thought. Far too many people were quick to take offence these days and usually with very little cause. ‘It’s all this talk of war,’ she said. ‘We live under a shadow.’
‘I’m afraid we do, my dear,’ J-J said, and sighed. ‘We know what we’re in for this time, that’s the trouble. We know what’s coming and we can’t do anything to prevent it.’
‘If the League of Nations had taken action against Mussolini when he invaded Ethiopia, we wouldn’t be in such a mess now,’ Octavia said. She was seriously disappointed in that organisation. ‘They asked for help, specifically asked for it, and all they got was a lot of useless talk in Geneva and no action at all. We should have sent in an army to drive him out.’
‘Exactly so, my dear,’ J-J agreed, ‘but we didn’t have an army. Tommy is right. An international organisation needs an international army. Moral force is useless against a dictator, I’m sorry to say.’
Octavia was sombre. ‘How long do you think we’ve got, Pa?’
‘There’s no way of knowing,’ her father admitted. ‘It depends on Herr Hitler and what he does next.’
What he did next, on a peaceful April day while Edith and her two little girls were walking their old pram and their new baby up the long slope of Wimbledon Hill to visit their grandmother, was to order the German Air Force to bomb a small market town in northern Spain. A small market town called Guernica. He chose his moment brutally because it was a Monday so the market square was crowded with men, women and children.
The attack was described in shocked and shocking detail in all the English newspapers the following morning. On their first bombing run, the planes dropped high explosives, on their second they set the shattered streets alight with incendiary bombs, and then, as if they hadn’t done enough damage, they flew low over the wreckage and machine-gunned the fleeing inhabitants. Eye witnesses spoke of the shock and terror of it, of injured people sitting by the roadside too dazed to speak. Soldiers were collecting charred bodies, one man wrote. They were sobbing like children. The smell of burning human flesh was nauseating. Houses were collapsing into the inferno. It was impossible to go down many of the streets because they were walls of flame.
J-J was always the first person to read the paper in the morning, usually as he sat at the breakfast table while Em and Tavy were busy making the tea and cooking the breakfast. Then he would pass the paper on as soon as Johnnie had come yawning downstairs and they were all settled. But that morning he was so upset by what he read that he was very near tears and couldn’t trust himself to speak. He held the paper up so that they could all see the headlines and passed it to his daughter without a word. She read it quickly, frowning and troubled, and when she’d passed it on to Emmeline, she got up, lit a comforting cigarette and switched on the wireless.
‘It’s almost time for the news,’ she said. ‘They might know more.’ But she kept the volume turned right down so that her father wouldn’t be disturbed by the preceding programme. Light music is all very well, but it can be irritating when you’re distressed.
Presently, the well modulated voice of the newsreader spoke into the quiet of the room, as Emmeline wept and her son smoked and read the newspaper grimly. The horrific details of the air raid were given calmly and without emotion in the time-honoured tradition of the BBC. Yesterday morning there had been an air raid on the Basque border town of Guernica. It had been carried out by squadrons of German planes, Heinkel 1-11’s and Junkers 52’s, with fighter support. The town was almost completely destroyed. There were many casualties. ‘This morning survivors are evacuating the town.’
‘I don’t understand it,’ Emmeline wept. ‘These are ordinary young men, that’s all, ordinary young men like our Johnnie, and they do a thing like this. It’s hideous. Dreadful. Don’t they have mothers and sisters? I mean what’s the matter with them? Why are they killing Spaniards? There’s no sense in it.’
Octavia was remembering what Mrs Mannheim had told them. ‘They’ve been taught to hate,’ she said. ‘That’s what’s the matter with them. They’re not like Johnnie. They’ve been turned into fighting machines. They obey orders.’
‘Then they could attack anybody,’ Emmeline said.
‘Yes,’ Octavia told her sadly. ‘That’s what they’re for.’
‘They could attack us.’
‘Yes.’
There was a long fraught silence. Outside in the garden the new grass was freshly green, the ancient apple trees grew tender with pink and white blossom, daffodils fluttered as disarmingly as butterflies in all the borders, the blackbird was singing his passionate yearning song. Spring was waking their world with the promise of new precious life and they sat in their comfortable kitchen, at their familiar table, facing the possibility of death and destruction. This house could be blown to pieces, Octavia thought, this warm, comfortable, peaceful house, where we’ve lived so happily and easily all these years. She could already see it as a pile of rubble.
‘What on earth would we do?’ Emmeline said.
‘The children are going to be evacuated,’ Octavia said, thinking aloud. ‘They’ve had plans drawn up for years, according to Tommy. He told me about it ages ago. Very well then, once I know where we’re going, I shall rent a house big enough for all of us and evacuate you too.’
‘And leave this house?’ Emmeline said.
Octavia’s answer was brusque with the distress she was hiding. ‘If it’s likely to be bombed, yes, of course.’
‘It would be a load off my mind if I knew you were out of it,’ Johnnie said.
‘Oh dear,’ Emmeline said. ‘You’re all talking as if it’s bound to come.’
‘It is bound to come, Ma,’ Johnnie said, brown eyes serious. ‘In fact…’ Then he paused and gave thought to what he was going to say. He knew it would hurt her but it would have to be said sooner or later and this seemed as good a moment as any. ‘The fact is…I was going to tell you this in a day or two anyway. The fact is, I’ve joined the RAF.’
The silence that followed his announcement was complete and intense, all three of his relations watching him with total attention. Then Emmeline began to howl. ‘Oh, my dear, good God! Don’t even say such a thing, Johnnie. You can’t do it. You simply can’t. What were you thinking of? You’ll get killed.’ She picked up the paper and waved it at him. ‘You see what they’ve done. They kill people.’ She was weeping in earnest now, the tears streaming down her cheeks. ‘Tell him, Tavy. He can’t do it. Oh, I can’t bear it. Not with the baby and Arthur in the army and everything. Didn’t we have enough last time? Tell him, Uncle. Oh, please somebody, tell him.’
Johnnie got up, walked round the table, sat beside her in Octavia’s empty chair and tried to hold her hands, but she shook him away, weeping terribly. ‘Don’t touch me!’
He was very upset but he tried to be reasonable. ‘The bombers will come, Ma,’ he said. ‘There’s no doubt about that now. You must see that. They will come and we’ve got to be ready for them. I knew it would upset you but I had to do it. I couldn’t just sit by and leave it to other people.’
‘I don’t see why not,’ Emmeline wept. ‘Why does it have to be you?’
‘I’m going to learn to fly one of the new fighters,’ he told her patiently. ‘Look, I shall be called up eventually, Ma, we all will. You do know that, don’t you. You must. It’s been in all the papers. We’ll all get called up. We shan’t have any choice about it. So I thought if I’ve got to go anyway I might as well go now under my own terms. This way I can get to do the job I really want, instead of being drafted into something I might not like. It’s all right, really it is. I shan’t take risks.’
‘Oh, oh, oh,’ Emmeline wept. ‘I don’t want you to go at all. You’re my only son. Can’t you see that? The only one I’ve got left. I don’t want you to go at all.’
He looked across the room at Octavia. ‘Aunt?’ he appealed.
‘I don’t want you to go either,’ she said. There was no criticism in her voice, only admiration. ‘None of us do, if we’re honest, but I can see that you must. I think you’ve done a very courageous thing. And so does your mother. It’s just a shock to her at the moment, isn’t it, Em?’
But Emmeline was drowned in tears and couldn’t answer.
‘It’s the only thing I could do,’ he told Octavia. ‘I can hardly go on designing buildings when they’re going to be blown up. That would be nonsensical. Still, I’d better go and do it now or I shall be late and that won’t please Mr Carmichael.’
Emmeline managed to stop crying long enough to kiss him goodbye, but when he was gone, she sat in her chair and cried most bitterly. ‘It’s just like the last time all over again,’ she wept. ‘Why can’t those stupid fools in Geneva do something to stop it? They must have seen it coming. That was supposed to be the war to end all wars. They kept on and on about it. The war to end all wars. And now look where we are. First Squirrel, and then my poor little boys, and now my Johnnie. And baby coming along so well too. And Arthur in the Territorials, and God knows what will happen to him either. I don’t think I can bear it.’
‘The trouble is nobody’s asking us whether we can bear it or not,’ Octavia said. ‘They’re just assuming we will.’
Emmeline raised a tear-streaked face to her cousin. ‘I don’t think I can, Tavy.’
‘Whatever happens,’ Octavia promised, ‘we will bear it together. All of us. And now I must go to school or I shall be late and there’s a lot to do. We’ll put our minds to all this as soon as I get home. Ah now, here’s Janet come.’ What a relief to have that sensible girl to look after Pa and her poor Em. ‘More tea I think, Janet. We’ve just heard the news about Guernica.’
‘I’ll have it on the table in two shakes of a lamb’s tail,’ Janet promised, putting on her apron. ‘Doan’t you worry, Miss Smith.’
The advice was unnecessary, for Miss Smith was not a woman to worry. She was a woman who took action. If there was a problem she would deal with it. By the time she got back to the house that afternoon, she knew what had to be done and set about doing it at once.
First she wrote a careful letter to The Times. She described the attack on Guernica as cruel, callous and totally unjustified, and pointed out that the Spanish people were no threat to Germany, and that to allow a military power to bomb an open city and kill and maim its inhabitants was completely intolerable. ‘Something must be done to deter Herr Hitler,’ she said. ‘The man is a bully and needs to be stopped.’
Then, since she was fairly sure that her letter and others like it would be ignored – how could it be otherwise when the League had no military power with which to respond? – she turned her attention to matters which were within her competence. She picked up the phone and asked for Tommy’s number.
It was a relief to hear his sensible voice. ‘Tavy, my dear. What an unexpected pleasure.’
‘It might not be quite such a pleasure when you hear what I want,’ she warned him.
‘I presume this is about Guernica.’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘it is, although not directly. I need some information.’
‘Fire away,’ he said. ‘If I can give it to you, you shall have it.’
Straight in, blunt and to the point. ‘Where is my school going to be evacuated to?’
There was a pause while he gathered his thoughts. ‘That may take a bit of finding out,’ he told her. ‘It’s all very hush-hush at the moment.’
‘But they’ve made plans for it, haven’t they?’
‘And they want to keep them secret. It wouldn’t do for the Germans to get wind of them. We wouldn’t want them dive-bombing the trains.’
‘No,’ Octavia said, shuddering at the thought. ‘We would not. But I don’t need to know the details. It’s nothing like that. Just where we would be going. A hint would be enough. I’d keep it to myself.’
‘I’ll see what I can do,’ he promised. ‘You’ll have to be patient though. I can’t rush it. How’s the family?’
‘Johnnie’s joined the RAF. He wants to fly a Spitfire. Em’s in a terrible state.’
‘That’s two of them then. Mark joined up last week.’
Octavia could feel her heart sinking. ‘I thought he was going to Oxford.’
‘So did we. But apparently not. He says it’s something he’s got to do and Oxford will have to wait. Foolhardy, of course, but admirable.’
‘Like father like son,’ she said. ‘I can remember what you said when you joined up.’
He laughed. ‘It’s more than I can.’
‘You said it was the done thing. It was expected of a chap.’ She could remember his voice saying it.
‘Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose,’ he said.
‘Heaven help us all,’ she said and meant it.
Her letter was published in The Times the next morning and so were several others from some rather eminent people. But, just as she feared, nothing came of it. The League of Nations deplored the attack but went no further, the British Government discussed it but decided that nothing could be done, the newspapers continued to print letters about it for a day or two and then dropped it and after that, to her annoyance, everything went quiet and the horror seemed to be forgotten. The people of Guernica buried their dead, General Franco, encouraged by the unchecked power of his German ally, redoubled his attacks on the government army in northern Spain, convinced that his rebellion would soon be successful and that he would be the next European dictator, and the British press turned its transient attention to the coming coronation.
‘And what good that will do to anyone,’ Octavia said, ‘I really can’t imagine. All this silly flummery. We should be concentrating on the things that matter.’
‘It won’t stop our young men joining the Forces,’ Emmeline said bitterly. ‘And that’s all I care about.’
Johnnie got his expected letter two weeks later and passed it to his mother at the breakfast table. She took it better than Octavia had feared and only wept in private where none of them could see. Tommy and Elizabeth came to dinner with the news that Mark had already gone, and the two mothers commiserated with one another when they were all walking in the garden afterwards. Octavia was glad they had one another for comfort and company, and besides, it gave her the chance to ask Tommy if he’d found out what she wanted to know.
‘I have tried,’ he said. ‘But nothing yet, I’m afraid. I can’t push it or they’d smell a rat.’
‘I only need to know the name of the town,’ Octavia told him. ‘That’s all. Uprooting a Dalton school is going to take a lot of organisation. We need more space than most schools and better timetabling. We need to start planning it now.’
He smiled at her urgency. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I know. I’ve seen Lizzie’s timetable. Couldn’t understand a word of it. Don’t worry, old thing. I’ll persevere. You’ll get your name in the end.’
But it was very unsatisfactory and her face showed it.
The summer progressed as though the world was still normal. The much vaunted coronation was held – despite her poor opinion of it – in May and exactly as planned only with a different king and queen, both archaically grand in state crowns and velvet cloaks. The two little princesses wore cloaks and crowns too, to Margaret’s intense interest, and although rain was threatening all day, it held off until after the ceremony which the papers said was ‘a good omen’.
‘Good omen my eye!’ Emmeline said when she read the newspaper accounts at breakfast the next morning. ‘Still, at least it’s over and done with. I was getting heartily sick of it. All that fuss. Now I suppose his silly brother will marry that awful woman of his.’
‘I don’t think it matters what he does now,’ Octavia said, buttering her toast, ‘providing he keeps quiet.’
‘No,’ Emmeline agreed, ‘you’re probably right. Personally, I shall take the children to Eastbourne, as soon as Johnnie goes. They could use a holiday and Arthur’s going to be away with the Territorials, so Edie says. You and Uncle can manage without me for a week or so, can’t you? You’ve got young Janet.’
In fact she was away for a month and, during that time, Tommy and Elizabeth came to dinner again, Johnnie wrote to report that flying was an absolute joy and, down in Sussex, Barbara and David celebrated their sixth birthdays and wore paper hats and had a special party at the boarding house.
According to Edith and Dora, who sent their aunt a daily postcard, all four children were enjoying the seaside very much and were being very good. ‘It might be the last holiday we get,’ Dora wrote, ‘so we’re making the most of it.’
It might be the last holiday I get to organise this evacuation, Octavia thought, and I can’t even start. Oh, come on, Tommy. Buck your ideas up!
But September came and the new term began and she was still waiting. And to make matters worse, Hitler seemed to be starting up again. At the end of the month, the papers were full of pictures of him at his annual Nuremburg rally, posturing and shouting on a stage backed by an enormous swastika, and all of them reported his boast that the Third Reich would last for a thousand years. Then, as if he hadn’t made his point abundantly clear, he appeared again, in the Olympic Field of May, dramatically spot-lit, with the hideous Mussolini pouting like a toad beside him and an audience estimated to be almost a million strong. Both men talked about their countries need for an empire. ‘Without colonies,’ Hitler said, ‘Germany’s space is too small to guarantee that our people can be fed safely and continuously.’ Germany needed Lebensraum and he was determined to give it to them. ‘The attitude of other Powers to our demands is simply incomprehensible.’
Octavia wrote a postcard to Tommy that evening. ‘This war is rushing down upon us at a rate of knots,’ she said. ‘I need that information.’
Four days later he rang her at school. ‘Tavy,’ he said, ‘I believe you were thinking of taking a holiday in one of our country towns.’
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘I could recommend a trip to Woking.’