The Scarlet Nightingale

by Alan Titchmarsh

  Somewhere far away … Spring …

  My darling Rosamund,

  This is to let you know that I am safe and carrying on as best I can, though it is not easy. I miss you so very much. I have to say, in reference to the matter of which we spoke before I left, that I was misguided. Not in matters of the heart – that still stands resolute – but in terms of your future employment. Please do not think of doing anything or going anywhere. It is too risky. Stay where you are, look after your aunt and be safe. I will need you there when I return, though I am as yet unsure when that will be. I cannot say more in this letter for obvious reasons, but be absolutely certain that this comes with all my love,

  Always,

  Harry xxx

  I kept that letter inside the cover of my commonplace book, reading the message every morning of every day, and then folding it away neatly and murmuring as I did so an earnest plea to the Almighty to keep Harry safe.

  Although I knew I could not send it – for I had no idea how to reach him at this point – I wrote Harry a reply. It seemed only right that if he was prepared to express his feelings for me, that I should do the same for him, if only to satisfy myself. I hoped one day at least he might read it:

  My Dearest Harry,

  Please, please, PLEASE take care of yourself. I know you are concerned about me, which is sweet and kind of you and no less than I would have expected, but you must remember how precious you are to me. I do not think I have ever met anyone in my life – apart from Celine, and that is different! – who means so much to me in so many ways. We seem so in tune, so absolutely a part of one another that I cannot bear to imagine being without you. Your love for the things I love, your kindnesses and your … well, I run out of words to express my feelings. Perhaps I should guard them more closely, but this wretched war makes me want to tell you how I feel, and to explain that without you, my life would be empty.

  Be safe, my darling, be careful and come back soon to

  Your loving Rosamund

  I had little appetite for frivolity, in spite of the fact that Diana Molyneux, on her occasional evenings off from Bletchley Park, would beg me to come out dancing, or to join her and ‘the set’ for supper ‘in a darling little restaurant we have found in Maiden Lane where they do the most amazing five-shilling meal. You simply wouldn’t believe …!’

  The Café de Paris continued to defy Hitler and play the tuneful music of Cole Porter and George Gershwin, Jimmy Dorsey and Irving Berlin, for all those who needed a break from the daily grind of wartime work, for airmen between missions, and for those who were intent on one last fling before joining up.

  It was on the evening of 8 March 1941 that Diana begged Rosamund to meet her there, along with Billy Belgate who was on leave and had to return to his squadron at Biggin Hill the following day. ‘Billy says he knows you have “someone else” now, but he’d like one more dance for old times’ sake.’

  Rosamund was torn. She did not want to let her friends down – they must think of her as a real stick-in-the-mud already – but somehow it did not seem right to celebrate while all around families were losing their homes and their loved ones in the nightly raids.

  She spoke to Celine about it. ‘I really need to find a way to contribute, Semolina, but every time I think I have a solution, my plans seem to go awry. I mean, I can’t just say “I want to go to France and help the war effort. Please can I become a secret agent?”, can I?’

  Celine looked at her incredulously. Rosamund had been thinking out loud. The one thing she had not shared with Celine was her conversation with Harry about her war work, and the prospect of her own involvement in an undercover role. She knew that such an idea would horrify Celine.

  ‘Secret agent?’

  ‘Oh, just me being silly. Think nothing of it. But I do need to do something. I feel so shallow going to all these parties.’

  ‘And it is dangerous to be out at night,’ added Celine. ‘I worry every time I go, but I will not let Hitler keep me a prisoner in my own room.’ She put on her beret and her coat and said, ‘I will not be long’ before blowing Rosamund a kiss and leaving the house.

  The risk of losing her own life in the Blitz, Rosamund had come to terms with – most Londoners had learned to live with that risk for the last six months or more. It seemed cowardly to exhibit any hint of fear. What was needed was a brave and determined front. And, anyway, the Café de Paris was regarded as a relatively safe haven, the dance floor being in the basement.

  Diana pleaded with her that night: ‘Do come, Ros. You could do with a break from all those old fogies.’

  Rosamund had finally made up her mind to go – had even changed to go ‘out on the toot’ as Aunt Venetia called it – when fate took a hand and she was deterred. She dialled Belgravia 1066 and explained to Diana that she was all dressed up and ready to go, but that her aunt had retired with the most pounding of heads and Rosamund did not want to leave her alone. Celine was out seeing friends herself and Mrs Heffer had gone to help her brother who had been re-housed in Putney.

  ‘I really do want to come,’ she explained, though probably a trifle unconvincingly, ‘but I just don’t feel I can leave her alone.’

  ‘Oh, alright,’ said Diana resignedly. ‘But next time I won’t take no for an answer, even if your wretched aunt breaks a leg, OK?’

  That night at 9.45 p.m. the Café de Paris received two direct hits. ‘Oh, Johnny, Oh, Johnny, Oh Johnny, oh …’ sang Ken ‘Snakehips’ Johnson before his head was severed from his body by the blast. He was twenty-six years old. Altogether thirty-four people – from the saxophonist Dave ‘Baba’ Williams to waiters and diners – were killed.

  ‘At least I won’t have to pay for my dinner,’ explained one diner, as he was stretchered out of the wreckage. The courageous spirit remained resolute among the carnage and the tragedy, and the bombs continued to fall on London.

  I felt numb the following morning when I heard the news from one of our neighbours. It was not just that I could have been there, but fear and dread that I should discover my friends were among the casualties. I could not help thinking about Diana and Billy Belgate and wonderful ‘Snakehips’ Johnson. He had such an easy way with him – and he was so young, so full of life and music. His was a voice that had charmed us, had taken us out of ourselves when we most needed it, and it would never be heard again. I sat by the telephone and looked out of the window, hardly daring to lift the receiver and make the call to Diana’s number. And when I did the line was dead. How could I have expected otherwise? It had been lucky to survive for so long, while all around us telephone wires hung across the streets like washing lines.

  Aunt Venetia had recovered from her migraine and sat up in bed looking pale and drawn. I sat beside her on the rose-patterned counterpane. ‘I am so glad you stayed with me,’ she said, her voice weak and dispirited.

  ‘Yes,’ was all I could offer in reply. I stroked her hand for some time, saying nothing, and then explained that I simply must go round to Diana’s house in Draycott Place. Whatever the news, I could not go on being kept in the dark.

  I picked my way through the devastation – mountains of rubble that were once houses, now collapsed across the streets; everything littered with the signs of everyday domestic life – a tea towel, a dressing gown, pairs of knickers, a single shoe hanging by its laces from a spike of wood that had once been a floorboard or a rafter holding up the third floor of a tenement block. Brightly patterned wallpaper decorated bare walls, where flying ducks still took wing over fireplaces suspended in mid-air. The head of a child’s doll poked through shattered plaster. Burst water mains spewed fountains high into the air. All of this chaotic drama was accompanied by the sound of men shouting and the shrill clarion of fire engines’ bells. At the sight of an ambulance I would look the other way, rather than gawping, as many did, at the disfigured bodies that were being wrested from the wreckage of what had once been happy homes. Everywhere one walked, broken glass crunched underfoot. The air was thick
with brick dust and filth; the smell of smoke and charred yet sodden wood I can smell to this day. Hoses played on flames that continued to lick the ruins where the previous night’s incendiary bombs had done their worst, until finally I arrived at Diana’s door.

  There have been several times in my life when my mouth has been dry with fear and my heart has pounded as though it would explode. This was one of them. I feared the very worst. Then the door opened and there stood Diana. I fell into her arms and the two of us wept uncontrollably for what seemed like an age.

  When we did speak it was in fits and starts. ‘Are you alright?’

  ‘Yes, yes, I’m fine.’

  ‘And Billy?’

  ‘He’s been patched up. He’ll be fine too. We were so lucky. I’d just nipped out to powder my nose, and Billy had gone to buy cigarettes from the counter. Otherwise … if we’d been dancing …’ Diana stopped talking and the tears came again. Then she pulled herself upright and sniffed. ‘Anyway, we bloody well carry on, don’t we?’

  And we bloody well did. For quite some time, as it turned out.

  Chapter 9

  LONDON

  11 MAY 1941

  ‘505 bombers flew to London on the night of 10 May, the full moon lighting their snaking path along the Thames. The German pilots had fifteen minutes to locate and bomb their targets once they reached London, but still the bombing lasted nearly seven hours …’

  Alex Nunn, West End at War, 2011

  The very worst nights of the Blitz were endured by Londoners that spring, just as they were endured in other cities that had become prime targets for the German Luftwaffe – Portsmouth, Bristol, Coventry, Hull, Liverpool, Plymouth, Southampton and Glasgow among them. Families and property alike were devastated by night after night of bombing. On the night of the 10th May, London took the hardest pounding it had so far experienced, from both high explosives and incendiary devices. It seemed that what was not destroyed by blast was burned to ashes. Our mood changed from the sombre to the dauntless almost on a daily basis.

  Aunt Venetia and Rosamund, alone in the dimly lit cellar at Eaton Place, realised that this was a night like no other.

  Aunt Venetia was untypically edgy. ‘Why is Celine not here?’ she asked, her eyes alight with alarm. ‘Where is she?’

  ‘I told you; she was invited to one of her pupil’s houses for some kind of celebration. She did not say exactly. I think it might be to celebrate her passing her French exam.’

  ‘French exams! The very idea! Ridiculous. Don’t they know there’s a war on?’ Aunt Venetia drew the tall collar of her sable coat high around her neck as she huddled on the cushioned bench in the gloom of the cellar. ‘I mean, there’s little point in learning French now, is there? It’s not as if one can go to Cannes or Deauville on holiday any more.’ Thus she tut-tutted her way through the night, sipping champagne from a coupe, with Rosamund singing ‘Sur le pont d’Avignon’. It was only when her vocalisations had deteriorated to the level of ‘La plume de ma tante, et sur le bureau de mon oncle’ that she managed to get her aged relative to raise a reluctant smile. ‘We should have Celine here,’ complained Aunt Venetia, ‘she has a much better voice than either of us.’

  Come the next morning, the scene that greeted their eyes was one of utter devastation. Eaton Terrace had been badly hit; water and gas mains were ruptured and the handsome frontages of the stucco houses in the Square had been damaged. Worse news was to come. The trench shelter in the centre of Eaton Square had been struck by a high explosive bomb. Twenty-two people had been gathered there, but by some great good fortune the bomb had not fallen on the main part of the shelter. There had been a handful of casualties who had been treated in hospital, but only two fatalities – the Mayor of Westminster, who had been doing the round of the air raid shelters that night, and one other, unknown, explained the next-door neighbour, who appeared to have some kind of direct line to the news gatherers of the day, if not to the Almighty Himself.

  ‘I sometimes wonder if that woman doesn’t have a direct line to Adolf Hitler,’ complained Aunt Venetia, ‘except that her telephone wire must be down as well.’

  When Celine had not arrived by 10 a.m. that morning, both Aunt Venetia and Rosamund began to worry. Perhaps she had stayed with the people she had been visiting the night before; the raid was intense and she – and they – may have felt it was safer for her not to return home.

  ‘I’ll go and see them. We must make sure she is safe,’ explained Rosamund to her aunt.

  ‘Don’t be long!’ pleaded Aunt Venetia from the porticoed porch, now peppered with scars from flying debris, as Rosamund picked her way carefully through the rubble and wreckage.

  ‘I’ll be as quick as I can,’ Rosamund replied, hardly able to look up for fear of missing her footing. ‘You go in. And keep warm.’

  It is only with the benefit of hindsight that one realises how lucky one has been in life to have been surrounded by people one loves, and who love one back, seemingly unconditionally. I had never really thought about life without Celine, quite simply because she had always been there, and I had paid her the supreme compliment (or so it seemed to me) of assuming that she always would be there. She was, after all, not so much older than me, and we were often taken for sisters by those who did not know us, simply because we had grown so alike in the way we behaved, and the way we joked and spoke in French to one another.

  The family in Cadogan Square explained that Celine had not stayed with them, but had left that evening just before the air raid started, assuring them that she would get back home safely or – if the worst came to the worst – she could take to the shelter in Eaton Square. It was, after all, only a short walk away. The bombs had started falling within minutes of her departure, but they had no way of contacting anyone to check that Celine had reached safety. Like me, they were worried on discovering that she had not made it back home. They suggested I should enquire at the hospital where many of the casualties had been taken. The master of the house – a Mr Vansittart – offered to come with me, but I declined. At such a time I did not want to have to make pleasant conversation with a complete stranger, exacerbated by the fact that I was unsure what we were going to discover. It took me a while to walk to the hospital – the bombing had made access to some streets completely impossible.

  On arrival the scenes that met Rosamund’s eyes upset her deeply. Among the weeping mothers and children, the ashen-faced fathers and sons, it took her some time to find anyone to whom she could make herself or her mission understood. She was asked to wait in a corridor that was already overcrowded with casualties and their loved ones waiting for news. Eventually she was seen by a rather harassed young doctor in a white coat that was smeared with blood. He seemed rather embarrassed by his appearance and began to apologise, but Rosamund made it clear she did not care a jot for what he looked like when all around them was chaos. She explained where she lived, and about Celine being missing. Carefully the doctor took down details then asked her to wait while he made enquiries. She stood in a corner, trying desperately to keep out of the way of stretcher cases that were still being brought in – one or two of them completely covered in sheets, so that it became obvious they were fatalities, even though the stretcher-bearers tried to hurry past without anyone noticing.

  It seemed to take an age for the doctor to return – but before he did, Rosamund had her answer. A stretcher was carried past, and protruding from the sheet that covered the body was a foot wearing a shoe that she had come to know so well. Rosamund could not speak, but stood, rooted to the spot as the stretcher passed by.

  Time stood still, and Rosamund had little concept of how long it was before the doctor returned, shaking his head at having failed to ascertain the whereabouts of her missing person. He could tell from her expression that something had happened in the interim. She stammered out that she had seen what she thought might have been her friend on a stretcher that had just been brought in. ‘Was your friend in Eaton Square?’ he asked.
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br />   ‘I don’t know. She could have been. I’m not sure. She was on her way home.’

  ‘Are you … I mean … would you … do you feel up to identifying her?’

  Rosamund could no longer find any words, but nodded her head.

  The doctor motioned her to follow him down the crowded corridor that now seemed eerily quiet, except for the occasional moans of those who were injured or the disconsolate weeping of those bereft. They turned eventually into a side room that contained rows of stretchers, and Rosamund saw again the shoe she knew so well, still sticking out from beneath the sheet. With one hand to her mouth in an attempt to hold back the tears, she pointed toward it.

  ‘Are you sure you feel able to?’ asked the doctor gently.

  Scarcely daring to breathe, Rosamund nodded; the doctor carefully drew back the sheet. There lay her own darling Semolina without a mark on her body, her face calm and untroubled, seemingly in a deep sleep, but totally devoid of any spark of life. Rosamund reached down to touch her friend’s hand. It was Celine’s left hand, and on the third finger was a ring set with a small but shining stone the colour of her beloved Mediterranean sea. An engagement ring. It had not been there when Celine had left the house, she knew that. And surely if Celine had expected a proposal, she would have told Rosamund. Wouldn’t she? It must have come as a surprise to her. And now … Rosamund felt her eyes brimming with tears.

  ‘This is your friend?’ asked the doctor.

  Rosamund nodded as the tears began to course down her cheeks and her body was wracked with sobs.

  The doctor replaced the sheet with the utmost care, then put his arm around her shoulder and said, ‘Blast, I’m afraid. So often the case. Do you think you could give us a few details? This lady had no bag with her, and nothing to offer identification.’