In August, two women wearing hats and holding clipboards come to do the room count. They are in the house for all of one minute. They trot straight upstairs and push open the doors, then, before I’ve had time to put on my lipstick, they are back down again. All that morning’s cleaning, baking and wiping was in vain. They thank me kindly for my time and I am still thanking them kindly for their efforts when they are gone.
I can’t leave it like this.
I swing open the front door and follow them down the path. Never mind my tartan carpet slippers; if I don’t speak out, Edmund will give me what-for.
‘Excuse me, I say – excuse me!’
They turn wordlessly.
‘Our spare rooms are not actually spare rooms,’ I explain.
The smaller woman raises her eyebrow at me but it does not feel like an invitation to continue.
I continue anyway. I am in for a penny, in for a pound.
‘My husband needs one. It is for visiting family members.’
Taller woman looks at me disapprovingly. ‘That still leaves one.’
‘Dressing room?’ I say and as the words come out my mouth I know how stupid they sound. Not just stupid – these days, such words could even be treasonous.
She tilts her clipboard at me to have a look. ‘We’ve put you down for one,’ she says, pointing at our names: Mr and Mrs E Lowe. Three Bedrooms. ‘Just the one. You’ll manage.’
The smaller woman leans towards me. ‘It might not amount to anything.’
But I know it will come to something. I know it will because it did last time when no one else thought it would. It’s all very well saying ‘It never came to anything in 1933, or in 1937’ but it did in 1914, a fact people conveniently like to gloss over.
Still, I stand there hesitant on the garden path. The women carefully open and shut the gate – no one could say they are not thorough – and I open and shut my mouth like a goldfish in a (one-bedroom) bowl. They trot off to number six, where Mrs Dean appears to welcome them in warmly.
Mrs Burton comes out of number two, next door – they were at hers just before mine. I note she is holding a dishcloth and a mug in her hands and one fat, pink curler dangles precariously over her forehead. Who am I to judge? Standing in my slippers for all the world to see?
Mrs Burton and I have been neighbours for eighteen years but I can count the conversations we’ve had on one hand: gutters; trees; Christmas greetings. And the two times her dogs got out. Edmund hasn’t encouraged friendships. He doesn’t like people knowing our business (even though as far as I know we have no business).
She sees me and nods. She is a mild-mannered, gentle woman. I imagine she is about my age, but she looks older in that way that women with children often do.
‘Didn’t take too long, did it?’
‘No…’
‘Wish we had the room,’ she says pleasantly.
‘Oh yes.’
‘Be nice to do our bit.’
‘Do our bit, absolutely.’ I hesitate. ‘It probably won’t amount to anything though, will it?’
Mrs Burton’s house is also a three-bed but she has two nearly grown daughters. One girl is bold, leans out of the window and waves at people in the street and the other always has her head in a book. Mrs Burton has been put down for zero. She laughs, but wistfully. Says she would have liked to have nine or ten come to her. ‘You just want to do something, don’t you? Help the children escape the bombs.’
I do, I do, but there are so many things stopping me. I don’t.
Mrs Burton is about to go back into number two when she reconsiders. ‘Why don’t you come over for a pot of tea, Mrs Lowe? You look like you could do with a brew.’
Mrs Burton’s house is identically laid out to ours, but its decor and its furnishings are much shabbier. The kitchen wallpaper is peeling in parts. The ceiling shows signs of a leak. The cream surfaces are now brown. I decide that there is more love here. Less love for accrued items means more love for the people. I don’t know if that’s true, but it feels true.
My house is very tidy.
Mrs Burton is worried that her dogs will worry me. They are two large hairy dogs and I don’t say it, but these are particularly unattractive specimens. It seems odd to me that out of all the dogs in the world, she has chosen these. I tell her they are fine, and when they jump up and paw my skirt, I pretend it’s charming. They turn their attention to my slippers and I try to nudge them off. The dogs, that is, even though I am appalled at my slippers too.
The visiting billeting women have thrown me. I want it known that I am not the kind of lady who would usually venture outside in her slippers. The dog mounts the armchair and proceeds to manoeuvre its hind parts up and down over the cushion there.
I blush. I am not used to dogs and I don’t know if this display has been put on for me alone, or if everyone who enters the house is the recipient of such a show. Maybe the dog is trying to tell me something?
Mrs Burton asks if I’ve been allocated an evacuee and I reply wearily, ‘One, just one, but my husband…’ and I am thinking, Can this really be happening? Since when was one just one?
Mrs Burton finally drags the dogs outside and asks if I’ve got anything for him or her, and I stare at her mystified.
‘I mean for the evacuee?’
Still nothing. Edmund says I can be very slow sometimes.
‘Toys?’
Toys! Of course. I didn’t think of that. ‘No, nothing.’ Pity the poor child coming to my house. Not a rocking horse. Not even a teddy. I have such a lot to learn. I can’t help feeling excited, but then quickly tell myself, It’s not going to work, don’t get your hopes up.
‘I might be able to help you there,’ says Mrs Burton, and even as I am saying, ‘No, no, Mrs Burton, please,’ she has rushed upstairs, leaving me alone in the kitchen at the table with the ticking clock. It is five minutes fast. Or am I five minutes slow? I wish I weren’t so awkward. Mrs Burton has lace doilies of the type my sister used to hate. I look at my nails. My nails at least are clean. There is a newspaper on the other side of the room but I can’t get over to it and it’s not one of the terribly informative ones anyway.
Finally, Mrs Burton staggers down the stairs behind a full cardboard box. With an ‘oof’ she places it down between us, pulls things out one by one. Pens, books, crayons, marbles, football, stamp-collecting album and, just in case, a skipping rope – ‘Only let ’em do it in the garden, mind. I lost three of my favourite ornaments with that – boy on the piano, girl with the violin and the goatherd.’
I don’t know if I’m expected to select one thing, or the whole lot, but then she shoves it across to me. ‘It’s all yours, Mrs Lowe.’
‘I don’t think it’s likely—’
‘It’ll make the little one feel at home, won’t it?’
Oh dear Lord, is this really happening? So much for it not amounting to anything.
Mrs Burton tips sugar into my tea. She is so eager to make life sweeter. She is sunshine, and I am rain.
I fumble in my pocket, wondering if I should make a payment. Mrs Burton laughs incredulously. ‘You’d do the same if it were the other way round, wouldn’t you?’
‘Absolutely no way are we having an evacuee here,’ Edmund says over the chicken and leek pie with mash. Admittedly, the gravy is not my best work – I’m not getting the consistency right recently. I’ll add it to the long list of inadequacies that dogs me. The carrots are also perilously overcooked, but Edmund prefers them like that. Even his own crunching annoys him.
‘It might not come to anything,’ I say. ‘I don’t think there’ll be another war, do you?’ I add nervously. ‘No one is that stupid.’
Everyone is that stupid.
‘I’ll not have screaming kids running around here.’
‘Why would they be screaming?’ I always try to remain civil over dinner with Edmund. It’s twelve minutes out of my day, that’s all.
I imagine numbers one, two, three, five and six – our neighbours, normal-appearing people – excitedly getting everything spick and span for London children who need to escape the bombs. I imagine they all have their husbands’ blessings.
I continue cutting my pie. The knife squeaks for mercy against the plate. Edmund winces.
‘Don’t want filthy city kids smearing their fingers over our walls.’
‘Why would they do that?’
‘There are plenty of families who can take them.’
A pause.
‘Edmund, we’re a family who can take them.’
‘I meant the ones who have children, they know children. They’ll be better at looking after feral city kids than us.’
Than me, Edmund means. He thinks I can’t look after a child. The second he rests his knife and fork on the plate, I whip it away, scrape the remains in the bin, take the plate to the sink and scrub it clean. He is still sitting there, staring into the distance. Together time is over.
Three weeks later, German armies are amassing by the Polish borders and Hitler has gone and signed a peace treaty with the Russians, which is not what we want at all. Britain is in uproar. Not again. The Nazis have got to be stopped – but really, does it have to be us who do the stopping?
I read the government leaflets on how to protect ourselves from bombs. I buy and hang material for the blackout – every window must be covered, not a chink of light may give us away. The streetlights don’t come on any more and Edmund has even unscrewed the lamp from his bike. There’s talk that rationing will be brought in sooner rather than later because everyone agrees that last time it came in too late. ‘Lessons have been learned from the Great War,’ pronounces the minister ominously on the wireless.
Not that many lessons, I think.
When the postman brings the anticipated letter, I leave it for a bit and in my head, it ticks like a bomb on the kitchen table.
Edmund goes to the living room to tune in to the next instalment of bad news. They tell us what we have already guessed: Operation Pied Piper – the mass evacuation of children from London – is going ahead.
I clean the already-clean kitchen, avoiding the letter. Eventually, I open it, read it. So, it’s true. We have been allocated one, just the one. I am to go to the village hall tomorrow and collect him or her. The hall is only five minutes’ walk away, so I can’t complain about that. Everything is only five minutes away in Hinckley.
I bake an apple pie because this is a national emergency. And what could be more welcoming to a little traveller than a slice of pie? We are more than halfway to war – there’s no going back now – and children will be delivered from London. I think it’s a bit like the stories we were told when we were little: about the stork that brought the baby, only I used to think it was ‘stalk’ and the baby grew from a root and then was plucked from a branch.
While the pie is in the oven, I go up to look at the spare room, the one I’d told the billeting officers that family use when they come to stay. The only one who ever used to come was my sister, Olive, and the last time she came to stay was over fifteen years ago.
The walls of our house are bare. I sometimes remember the chaotic beauty of Olive’s friend Mrs Ford’s house in Warrington Crescent: there was barely a space not covered by art – not just the walls, but the chests of drawers, the tables, the display cabinets, every surface was hidden with a carefully selected lamp, statue or ornament from Christie’s. Mrs Ford was known for her excellent and transatlantic tastes. When we first moved here, I planned to put up pictures everywhere but Edmund said he didn’t want to spoil the plaster.
The spare room is the only room where the walls are spoiled. On the wall behind the headboard is a picture that Olive drew. It lives inside an elaborate golden frame that doesn’t really do justice to the simplicity of the pencil-drawn portrait inside. It was one of her many sketches of me. She had done a series to support her application to study art at Goldsmiths College, which was accepted. In the picture, I’m looking out of the drawing-room window of our old family home. I find the way she captured my face both familiar and unfamiliar: all my features are there, all rendered in their correct proportions, but they are arranged in an expression of optimism or perhaps enthusiasm. Not my habitual look. I was nineteen when she drew it. She was seventeen and a half. That half was always very important to Olive.
This picture wouldn’t be strange for a young child to have in their room, would it? Should I get something else? What do children like to look at? Pretty cottages? Ponies?
I take the pie out of the oven and let it cool on the side. Then I go to bed. Edmund is outside, in his shed or somewhere else. I don’t know where he goes.
I can’t sleep.
A child.
One child, just one, may be coming to live with us!
Everything was shaky, everything was blurred. It was our generation’s chance to prove ourselves. This was it! Excitement was overflowing like an unwatched pan. I was nineteen, Olive had just turned eighteen. Richard and Edmund were both nineteen. Christopher was twenty. We thought we knew everything.
Smack bang in the middle of the street, stopping all the traffic, the newspaper boy had jumped onto a stool and was shouting aloud from the paper. At each point he made, the crowd cheered and he extravagantly threw his black cap up in the air and then deftly caught it on the down. I found myself quite mesmerised.
‘Britain Prepared for War!’
‘Hoorah!’
‘Shipbuilding Yards Working at Full Pressure!’
‘Hoorah!’
‘Asquith Still War Minister!’
‘Hoorah!’
The war woke us up. It was as though we had been sleepwalking until then. Suddenly we were full of adrenalin, full of whizz, bang, fizz, crammed with possibilities. They called it ‘war spirit’ and it was everywhere, contagious as measles.
The Saturday after war had been declared, Father, Olive and I were invited to Aunt Cecily and Uncle Toby’s for a special luncheon party. I don’t think it was a celebration, but it came pretty near. Edmund, his brother Christopher and their parents were coming to join us after lunch. Their family and my aunt and uncle were exceedingly close and there was rarely a family do without them making an appearance.
I always dressed with care, but that day I gave it extra attention. Long navy skirt, white blouse, lacy collar. Was it frivolous to be interested in my appearance when we were at war now? Father was still interested in making a profit, Olive was still interested in making art, Aunt Cecily was still interested in hosting parties and no doubt Uncle Toby was still interested in malt whisky and expensive cigars. It must be acceptable.
I tried a different style for my hair, and then another and another. Edmund had never expressed a preference, but a stranger had once stopped me in the street to tell me that the nape of my neck rivalled the beauty of the Venus de Milo and I wondered if maybe everyone felt like that about my neck or if he was just a lone chancer.
Olive was wearing an old dress; the paint stains had come out of this one, but it still looked worn. I tried not to be disapproving but it was difficult to do. It didn’t look fit for an occasion and I dreaded to think what Edmund’s mother would make of it, but then Olive never made an effort and she had got worse since going to art school. That is, her appearance had got worse – admittedly, her mood had markedly improved. She had just started her second year and she adored just about everything about her studies (although she was now scared that the war would bring all her enjoyment to a close). I explained that was unlikely. Everyone said the war would be over by Christmas. I had decided it would be over by the winter solstice – the shortest day – because I thought that would be very fitting indeed.
That Saturday though, Olive was in one of her dark moods again, mostly because her friends, the Fords, were also having a gay old afternoon and she would much rather have been there than at our altogether-more-staid family gathering. The Fords lived in Warrington Crescent, a road as attractive as it sounds, not fifteen minutes from ours in Portchester Terrace. The Fords were American and bohemian. Mrs Ford was an art collector. Her son Walter didn’t do much but he was devastatingly handsome and enviably popular. Their house was always full of the most talented and interesting people, who Mrs Ford collected.
Aunt Cecily’s and Uncle Toby’s gatherings were more restrained and predictable. However, duty still prevailed. Olive was a free spirit, but she was not that free.
My father always dressed very appropriately and that day he was in a fine-fitting suit with shoes so polished we could almost see our reflections in them. He was more proper than most gentlemen. He believed strongly in a smart appearance but, equally, he didn’t impose his views on Olive or me – an attitude that was quite unusual at the time and something I only came to appreciate later.
We walked across the park to our aunt and uncle’s house in Cottesmore Gardens as it was a pleasant summer’s day and my father had decided at the last minute it wasn’t worth hailing a cab. The sunshine was so bright that you couldn’t see much ahead of you. The heat created a hazy film across the trees and the houses. I saw horses stop to drink noisily. Suddenly, I envied Olive’s comfortable shoes, although I remained embarrassed about the silly beret she had popped upon her head at the last moment. Typical Olive.
I didn’t mind hiking across London, I just didn’t want to look like I had. As we turned into Kensington High Street, we had a shock. Great crowds of people were milling around.
‘Ah,’ said my father quickly, ‘there is a recruitment office around here.’
Olive insisted we stop to look. She was like that. Always observing things. She told us that people nowadays don’t see enough: ‘It’s all rush, rush, rush, busy, busy, busy.’ She said you have to see what you see, not what you expect to see. So we all stopped and tried to see. Even Father. What a jolly lot of men they were – there wasn’t one who wasn’t in high spirits. It was clear these men were looking forward to giving the Hun a good thrashing. They were so cheerful, you’d have thought they were off to Southend for teacakes and a paddle in the sea.
And another thing that stood out immediately was something that was maybe obvious but was, I thought, interesting: the men were all shapes and sizes. You had beanpoles, and you had short ones, you had the chubby ones and you had the streaks of water. They also wore very different types of clothes: there were shop assistants, office clerks, postmen and farm boys among them. How wonderful it would be to see them come together and transform into a unified British army. It would take your breath away, I thought.
And then I noticed something else. I nudged Olive.
‘They’re not all eighteen, are they? They can’t be. They look so young.’
‘Some of them will be. Some of them will pretend to be.’
‘They won’t send them though, will they?’
Olive put her arm through mine. She was always the more libertarian of us. ‘If they want to go, why not?’
‘Richard was right!’ declared my Aunt Cecily as soon as we had crossed the threshold. She didn’t normally answer the door herself. This was another sign of the times. ‘Hello, darlings.’ She was flushed with excitement. Her grey hair was falling out of its bun. Her collars uneven. Her great skirts were even more voluminous than usual.
Even Uncle Toby came out to the hall to greet us. ‘Richard knew!’ he said, shaking each of our hands triumphantly, as though he’d won a bet. ‘And he’ll be better equipped than most.’
Richard was our only cousin and growing up, we spent most, if not all, of our free time together. Olive and I used to make him wear our bonnets and dresses and perform plays: he was a malleable, easy-going boy and he made an excellent Lady Macbeth. His collapse on the floor into madness made us squeal with laughter. As we grew older, and he started to refuse dress-up, we played endless snakes and ladders, chess and backgammon. Richard was one of those people who always wins a board game. In his nursery, which was rather better equipped than ours, there was a row of stuffed bears on the window seat and a rocking horse, and on it I would rock, patting down Dotty, as I called her, while Richard would repeatedly and infuriatingly kick a ball against a wall and Olive would sketch. As we got older still, we would do the same thing out in the garden, only I would chain daisies instead of rocking Dotty.
Earlier in the year, our darling Richard had read an article in The Times that suggested that war was imminent. This had spurred him into action and, without telling anyone first, he had raced off to a recruitment meeting at London’s Hotel Cecil. Naturally, that impressed us all for The Cecil was really rather grand.
‘What happened?’ we had urged him on his return. Richard played nonchalant. ‘They asked me all about cricket and rugby.’
‘And?’
‘And then…’ Richard shrugged modestly. ‘They said they’d take me on.’
Of course they had. Our Richard was brilliant. It would have been unreasonable if the 23rd Battalion, 1st Sportsmen’s Royal Fusiliers hadn’t snapped him up. That was in May, and there was a luncheon party to celebrate then too.
While the parents had debated the likelihood of war, I had asked him if he really thought it would happen, and he took me aside and shook his head knowledgeably. ‘Vivi, those people who say it will never happen need to study history more. Then they will understand: it can, it will and it has.’
‘You’re too thin,’ my aunt declared of Olive, as she usually did. It was a kind of dance they had. Olive was always thin: she was pale and indoorsy-looking, with dark crescents under her eyes, but she was not too thin. Olive laughed. We loved our aunt very much.
‘Feed me up then!’ she said, which always stirred my aunt and never failed to make her feel important.
After a starter of chicken liver pâté on toast, we raised a glass to our darling Richard just as we had when he had left three months earlier. ‘To King, God and country.’ Then we tucked into the main course of venison. Aunt kept hovering by Olive – ‘One more bite, dear girl’ – like she was two years old again. I half expected her to pretend to be a steam train with the mash on a spoon.
The war had put us in good spirits. The time had finally come. Our mettle would be tested. Uncle Toby poured more sherry and, caught up in the thrilling atmosphere, I probably drank more than usual, even though I tried to limit myself. I didn’t want to be silly when Edmund and his family came. I suppose we were all feeling relief in the thing being decided, the uncertainty being over. And if all the troops were led by men like Richard, our honey-coloured, athletic gentleman, then the Hun didn’t stand a chance. Or, as Uncle Toby proclaimed, ‘They don’t have a hope in hell,’ and Aunt Cecily, hand over heart, whispered, ‘God help them all.’
‘Anticipating war is worse than war itself,’ pronounced my uncle, smacking his lips. ‘Now we know, now we know.’
Olive smirked. Recently, she found everything Uncle Toby had to say very amusing. She told me he ‘epitomised the capitalist pig with his snout in the trough’. I had protested that was unfair. Aunt Cecily and Uncle Toby had always been very generous to us. Certainly, they had some opinions you probably wouldn’t want paraded in public, but wasn’t that true of many of the older generation? The important thing was that they were good, loving people, wherever they put their snouts.
Edmund and his parents arrived just as the maid was clearing away the rhubarb crumble. He stroked my back in greeting and this sent an excited shiver down my spine. I couldn’t help it.
Even from an early age, it was clear that the Lowes didn’t feel Olive and I were good enough for their children, but Richard was inseparable from us, and since everyone loved Richard, they eventually had to get used to us too.
After they discovered that Olive and I were not so badly educated – we actually spoke more languages than Christopher and Edmund – the Lowes let their guard down a bit, and when they learned I played the piano, Mrs Lowe became almost accepting. We weren’t parasites on Richard’s coat-tails any longer, we had things to offer too.
Mrs Lowe desperately wanted Edmund to learn piano. When we were about twelve years old, she tasked me with teaching him whenever their family came round. But Edmund did not want to learn, so he just used to sit on the stool gazing out of the window in the hour allocated for us. We devised a game that meant I would play the piano with my right hand, holding his fingers over the keys with my left, while Christopher, Richard, Olive and all the parents chatted in the garden obliviously. These were my favourite times. Eventually, Mrs Lowe realised Edmund was not making progress and we were released from the drawing room, but I missed those days and thought about them still. I knew Edmund thought about them too because occasionally he would mention them and when he did, it made my face grow hot.
Today, Mr and Mrs Lowe were filled with their usual grumbling assessments of the modern world – had we seen the men joining up?
‘Yes,’ we replied with animation.
‘Such energy,’ began Olive. ‘Such verve!’
‘I’ve never seen so many—’ started Father.
‘What a bunch of ne’er-do-wells,’ huffed Edmund’s mother. ‘If this is the best the country has to offer…’
‘It is a worry,’ I agreed, although it had never crossed my mind before.
Olive nudged my ribs so that I could see that she was raising her eyes to the capitalist pig chandeliers.
Edmund’s mother, with her fine-boned figure, her marble skin and her symmetrical features, was everything I aspired to be: a beautiful, opinionated matriarch, adored by her husband and sons. Her approval was everything to me. The harder it was to receive, the more I worked at it. We Mudie-Cookes weren’t aristocratic or connected or even particularly talented – we were certainly less so than Uncle Toby or Edmund’s father – and these were points that went against us. The fact that Father – however amenable and well-off he was – was self-made was always humming away in our background. I couldn’t help feeling that in fine company we were ‘tolerated’ – but whereas Olive loathed that fact, I was grateful for it, and tried my very best not to stand out.
Even when we were children, Olive never liked Edmund or his family very much and she still maintained. . .
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