CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
It was a little white-painted cottage, near the lake at Frogmore. The princesses hung back as they approached it. “Come on,” Marion urged them. “They won’t eat you, you know. They’re children, just like you.”
“Not quite like us,” Margaret said in her most princessy voice. And indeed, in their matching blue coats, berets and pristine white socks, there seemed little to link the king’s children with those of some of his poorest subjects. “Alah says they sleep on chairs.”
“Yes, but not because they want to.” She knew from Ivy that a number of the evacuees from the poorest homes, with insufficient beds, had had to be taught to lie down.
Ivy had been delighted at the king’s generous offer of the cottage by the lake. He, for his part, had been relaxed at the idea of his daughters mixing with evacuees. The new egalitarianism of war extended even to royal circles. When visiting troops, the king had made a point of seeking out the lowliest ranks, not just their superiors. His equerries, to Tommy’s horror, were no longer aristocrats exclusively.
While not purpose-built as a school, the building had enough space and light to work as one. Moreover it had a lavatory and running water and lacked a disapproving vicar. Plenty of desks and chairs had been found, although writing materials remained a problem; the Royal Household was as rationed as any other, and more than most, given the king’s zeal in enforcing the rules.
“You must put them at ease,” Marion told the girls as they approached the worn little front door. “They’re away from their families and a lot of them have had their homes bombed.”
Ivy opened the door and smiled broadly at the girls. “Come in, come in.” They passed her haughtily and Ivy looked put out.
“Didn’t I curtsey deep enough? I’m a bit out of practice. Wasn’t much call for it in Bermondsey.”
“They’re just nervous,” Marion muttered, more crossly than she meant.
Ivy looked at her, eyebrows raised.
“Good morning, Your Royal Highnesses,” chorused the class as the girls entered. They may have sounded respectful, but the forty or more East End eyes now seizing on Margaret and Lilibet had a distinctly irreverent gleam. Lilibet cast Marion a rather desperate look.
Ivy, whom neither girl seemed to recognize as a former royal servant, hastily began making introductions. “This is Reg,” she said, indicating a freckled boy of about thirteen whose hair stuck up in all directions, despite obvious efforts to plaster it down. He had long green eyes and a pointed chin and looked like a naughty pixie.
Reg stood up and stuck out his hand to Lilibet. “’Ow d’ye do, mam-as-in-spam-not-marm-as-in-smarm.”
“What?” asked Lilibet, while Margaret giggled.
Reg looked from Lilibet to Ivy indignantly. “That’s what you said I was to call ’er, miss. Mam-as-in-spam-not-marm-as-in-smarm.”
“Yes, but not the whole thing, Reg,” exclaimed Ivy, while the rest of the class cackled behind their hands and nudged each other. “Just the first word. Ma’am.”
The laughter got louder and more abandoned. Reg, having been offended, became delighted. As official breaker of the ice he was the hero of the hour. Margaret settled next to him. “What’s it like to be bombed?” she asked.
Marion gasped at such tactlessness, but Reg was keen to explain. “Well it’s not very nice to ’ave bricks fall on you,” he began. “But it’s quite exciting. First there’s ’ordes and ’ordes of ’Einkels coming over. Like great ’orrible black beetles, all protected by their fighters. With our fighters trying to get between them and shoot ’em down. Ratatatatat. Ratatatatatat!” He made some startlingly lifelike machine-gun noises.
“How do you do that?” Margaret asked.
“S’easy. Just press your tongue against your teeth. Like this. Ratatatatatat!”
Lilibet, meanwhile, had gone to the back. Ivy followed her. “This is Susan,” she said, of a redheaded girl about the princess’s age. The two of them looked at each other uncomfortably.
“How are you enjoying the countryside?” Lilibet asked stiffly.
“Quiet, ain’t it?” said Susan.
“I suppose it is, rather.”
Susan suddenly grinned, widely. “Never mind though, eh. It’s near Slough and that’s where the Mars Bar factory is. They’re rationed at ’ome.”
The boy in front of her turned. “Everything’s bloomin’ rationed,” he pronounced gloomily, then grinned. “Includin’ soap!”
In the front, Reg continued to hold Margaret spellbound with bombing stories. “I had me shoes and socks on in bed,” he announced, of the direct hit on his house. This to him was obviously the great drama of the occasion. “I was blown from one side of me room to me brother’s bed opposite. Then I ran to the shelter with me mum ’olding a dustbin lid over me ’ead.”
Margaret’s eyes were wide. “What’s a dustbin lid?”
Marion and Ivy looked at each other, eyebrows raised.
Several rows behind, Lilibet and Susan had found common ground in animals. “I ’ad a kitten,” the girl said sadly. “A little stray black one. Ever so sweet, ’e was. I called ’im Winston, after the prime minister. Don’t know where ’e is now, though. ’E got blowed up, I reckon.”
Lilibet’s eyes filled with tears. She could not bear anything bad to happen to animals. “That’s so awful. You must come and see my dogs. They’re adorable.”
“Not quite the description I’d use,” muttered Ivy, glancing at her ankles. “I’ve still got the scars.”
“Dookie’s much better behaved these days,” Marion heard herself saying.
Ivy stared at her for a second, as if about to say something. She seemed to bite it back, and looked around. “All we need now is a few textbooks and something to write with. Are you sure ’Is Majesty doesn’t have a few spare pencils?”
Marion nodded. “I’ve asked, I promise you. But everything’s needed for the Household, apparently.”
Ivy knitted her brows. “There must be somewhere we can get them. Someone you could ask?”
Marion was about to shake her head when Peter slid into it. Eton seemed to have a superabundance of everything. She felt again the need to compensate Ivy for something. Surely the most privileged school in the country could provide some materials for one of its most deprived?
“But it might be awkward,” she warned, having explained the plan. She could not imagine how Peter would react to such a request, or even how she would request it.
“Not as awkward as snapping pencils in half and tearing paper into bits to go round!”
THE IMPRESSIVE PILLARED gates of Eton loomed up before them. Marion hastened to get in front of Ivy. “You can’t just walk in. Let me handle it.”
Ivy walked in anyway. She stared round the quadrangle, with its magnificent chapel and the lovely, mellow buildings in which future leaders were educated. “Blimey,” she said. “Good job I smartened meself up.”
Ivy had done more than smarten herself up, Marion thought. Her best suit, snugly fitting, made her frame look both curvy and delicate. Lavishly applied mascara and bright red lipstick gave her pale, sharp face the smoldering air of a Spanish señorita. On her narrow shoulders, her black hair shone and curled.
“Marion! What are you doing here? It’s not your day, is it?” Peter, with impeccable timing, emerged from the porter’s lodge. He looked, in the golden evening sunshine, both youthful and smart in a well-cut suit instead of his usual black and flapping gown.
“We were just passing,” Marion began, uncertainly.
“We want you to ’elp us,” stated Ivy, in her throaty Cockney.
“Perhaps we could have tea,” Marion added. But she could see Peter was not listening. He was staring at Ivy like someone on whom a great and glorious truth had dawned.
“Yes,” he said, in a slightly mesmerized voice. “Absolutely. Of course. Won’t you both come this way?”
IVY GOT HER materials. The writing paper was edged in purple and stamped with the school’s distinctive coat of arms, lilies on a shield with “FLOREAT ETONA” underneath. “Christ only knows what their parents will think,” she said, handing it out so the children could finally write letters home.
Lilibet and Margaret, now keen visitors to the school by the lake, volunteered to help with the correspondence, supplying sentences to describe the strange new rural sights.
Apples grow on trees, Mum, wrote Susan. Not in boxes in shops. Just fancy!
PS I have not been hit by a bomb yet! wrote Reg. PPS I have not been gassed yet! PPPS I have not come into contact with an air gun yet!
Margaret helped address the envelopes, with more enthusiasm than tact. Reg’s Mum, she wrote on one. The Slums, London. Marion whisked it away before Reg could see.
Ivy also got a new member of staff. Peter volunteered to spend his lunchtimes teaching classics at the school by the lake. The children, suspicious at first, quickly grew fond of him. “Of arms and the man I sing!” Reg would roar when the familiar conical head with its wispy suggestion of fair hair could be glimpsed through the classroom window. Peter, for his part, regarded Reg as potential scholarship material. “His brain is like lightning,” he told Ivy, who looked delighted.
Marion had noticed that Ivy was looking delighted quite a lot lately, as was Peter. She felt a stir of envy. Love had gone from her life but left its shape behind. Thank goodness she had two little girls, one in particular, to fill it. They were everything to her now.