At the end of the week Neville Chamberlain returned from Scotland and presided over a full meeting of the Cabinet which resulted in the immediate call-up of certain personnel of the Army, Navy, Air Force, and ARP, and the Civil Nursing Reserve.
I wondered if it were coincidence that all the German girls employed as household helps by my friends had returned to Germany on the pretext of summer holidays, and that several German acquaintances had also gone to the Baltic. The Baltic could also be Germany. Ruth was violently excited by this. ‘They’ve all been recalled,’ she insisted, and ‘Ask any German you know-either they are on holiday in Germany or in the Baltic.’
How did Ruth know these things? But she did know them. I presumed that there was a refugee drum system here as there was all over the East. ‘There is going to be war,’ she cried, absolutely distraught, ‘and I have nowhere to go – I cannot go back to Germany where I’d be thrown into a concentration camp – but if I stay here they will intern me just the same – in a camp – you must help me. You MUST.’
There were thousands like her and it was impossible to reassure them. What I found difficult to understand was the hysterical fear of Ruth and her fellow refugees. Surely nothing which could happen to them in the future could be worse than what had already happened? I found it difficult to put myself in her place – because I didn’t want to have to think of such horrors. I had, while in Germany, attended a Nuremberg Hitler Rally and it was without exception my most terrifying experience hitherto. In the fierce light of thousands of flood lights and arc lamps a huge solid mass of hypnotized humanity had literally petrified me with its emanation of leashed power ready to explode at the slightest wish of the Führer.
On Thursday, August 31st, Mr Elliot, the Minister of Health, had made an announcement about the decision of the Government to evacuate school children and younger children accompanied by mothers, expectant mothers, blind, and crippled people. The newspapers carried the heart-breaking little lists of necessities for those to be evacuated. School children were to be taken by their teachers to homes in safer districts where they would be housed by people who had already offered to receive them and look after them. Parents were urged strongly to allow their children to go and were to be told where their children were as soon as they had reached their new homes.
Thousands of children had been registered during the Munich scare – now some 500,000 school-children from nearly a thousand LCC schools were actually evacuated. With the hundreds of other volunteers I went to Charing Cross to help this huge undertaking.
The move caused a certain air of panic among the parents whose children were to attend school next day with their little cases ready for unknown destinations; many of them would be away from their parents for the first time in their young lives. The teachers, many of them young girls, were wonderful in their patience in dealing with anxious mothers and agitated fathers, and here I had a glimpse of the magnificent work of the WVS, who seemed able to cope with anything from little Doris’s diarrhoea to ‘our Tommy’s’ inability to sleep by himself. They dealt with lost children, lost luggage, forgotten packets of food, took children to lavatories, and performed a thousand and one tasks with amazing efficiency and cheerfulness.
A little boy in my group had come quite alone –no parents were seeing him off. He sat quiet and round-eyed in the train when at last we got them all into their seats. Then I saw large tears trickling down his cheeks. I thought he was crying for his parents, but he had eaten his packet of food for the journey as his mother had not given him any breakfast. The other children were all proudly displaying theirs. ‘What shall I do? Mine’s all eaten!’ he asked, weeping. The WVS coped with this too – they had thought of everything. Weeping children, wailing children, laughing children, and bravely smiling white-faced children– the stations were full of them everywhere and the Southern Railway had notices at Charing Cross telling the general public of certain trains which had had to be cancelled because of the huge-scale evacuation and asking the public not to travel unless their journeys were absolutely essential.
It was strange to stand in the station when train after trainload of children had disappeared – and the sudden silence after their shouts and chatter had a poignancy which was shattering. Here we stood, waving good-bye to thousand upon thousand of London’s future citizens, and to me there was something more ominous in this than in any of the growing tension abroad. I went back to Chelsea feeling miserable. A few children played in the streets, for the schools were temporarily closed to those who had not been evacuated, and the unnatural stillness was noticeable everywhere.
At night from sunset to sunrise there was now a complete black-out which it was the duty of the air-raid wardens and the police to enforce. Black-out curtains were being run up everywhere –dark rugs and cloths hung temporarily over windows. I found Mrs Freeth re-hanging the long studio windows with my lovely Indian ones which had been lined with heavy black. She was pasting black paper round the edges of the window frames and sticking the glass all over with cellophane tape. On my painting table lay the latest Government leaflet What to do in an Air Raid. Mrs Freeth had twin sons of fifteen, Jackie and Ronnie. She also had a married daughter and a grown-up son, but her diminutive prettiness, her lovely marmalade-coloured hair, made it difficult to believe that she was already a grandmother.
It was September 1st, warm, sunny, and lovely, when it was announced on the radio that German troops had invaded Poland at 5.30 that morning. The same day Danzig, the pivot of all previous controversies with Poland, was proclaimed united with the Reich by Herr Forster, Nazi leader of Danzig from whose buildings the swastika now flew.
We heard that Poland was resisting valiantly, and I listened to President Moscicki’s stirring proclamation to the country to resist the invaders. It seemed extraordinary that one could listen over the air on a perfect summer day to such world-shaking events. It must have been strange in the 1914-18 war to have had no radio and to have had to rely entirely on couriers and war correspondents’ despatches for news. Now, with the previous year’s tension reaching a dramatic climax, people would await the BBC’s news bulletins with such eagerness and apprehension that for many the days seemed to be marked only by the intervals between them.
We knew that no answer had been received from Germany to Britain’s and France’s ultimatum that their troops quit Poland, and those who secretly hoped for some dramatic last-minute dash by an envoy stating that the terms of the ultimatum had been complied with realized the death of such wishful thinking with Neville Chamberlain’s broadcast to the nation on Sunday morning, September 3rd, at eleven-fifteen, that we were at war with Germany. Scarcely had his voice died away from this short dramatic announcement when an even more dramatic event startled the listeners – the sounding of an unmistakable air-raid ‘Alert’ warning at eleven-thirty.
I had been listening to Mr Chamberlain in the studio with some friends and my upstairs neighbours, the Marshmans, and Mrs Freeth, and the air-raid siren sent everyone scurrying about to the half-finished or the temporary shelters to which they had been allotted. We looked out of the windows into the streets, which were still lost in the usual Sabbath quiet. So unexpected was the air-raid warning that there appeared to be no wardens out yet.
Our landlord owned a Rolls Royce which he kept in a garage at the back of No. 33. Over it was a flat for his chauffeur and family. The entrance to the garage was through an archway of ferro-concrete and the entrance to my two-floored flat was under this archway, one side of which formed a wall of the entrance hall and dining-room. The huge studio above this ran right across the whole frontage and the archway. When we had been filling sand-bags during the Munich scare of the previous year the landlord had provided enough sand-bags for the archway to be closed at each end and had reinforced it so that it made a splendid shelter for us tenants. When the scare died away, however, he wanted the use of his Rolls Royce, as he was an old man and could not get about. So all the sand-bags were taken away, and he b
uilt a shelter for us at the back of the house in the small courtyard there. It was to this shelter we sent our friends when at last air-raid wardens appeared shouting in the streets for everyone to take cover.
It seemed quite unreal to all of us – for the cloudless blue sky showed nothing untoward and the silence of that Sunday morning was only shattered by the orders of the wardens. Most people thought it was a joke or some kind of hoax – actually it was a mistaken warning given for an unidentified lone plane which turned out to be a friendly one – but we did not know this until later. By the time we had all made up our minds what to do and I had decided to report to the First Aid Post, the All Clear was warbling and everyone had come out of the shelters and was gathering in small groups to discuss the events of the morning. I saw neighbours who never spoke to one another chatting excitedly, and when we listened to that first All Clear warbling note I don’t suppose any of us had an inkling of how eagerly or with what relief its advent was to be welcomed in the days ahead.
That afternoon I went with a friend for a long walk in Battersea Park. The sky was gay and alive with silver balloons going up slowly and awkwardly like drunken fish. Chelsea boasted two, to be affectionately known as Flossie and Blossom, though why both should have been feminine was a mystery unless it was that they were operated by men.
Blossom’s site was only a few hundred yards from 33, Cheyne Place, on the cricket grounds of Burton Court. Flossie was tethered in the grounds of the Royal Hospital.
Looking across London and right up the Thames towards Westminster as far on all sides as the eye could see, I counted over eighty members of this glittering silver barrage intended to protect us from low-flying enemy planes. But the scene was so peaceful, the gardens in the park so lovely, and the people walking by the river so unperturbed and ordinary with their perambulators and dogs, that it was impossible to realize that these silver roach in the sky were there because we were at war. War seemed too remote and archaic a word to contemplate.
In the park by the river we met my Norwegian friend, Asta Lange, with her dog, Peer Gynt. Peer Gynt was a terrier whose ancestry was cloaked in mystery. Black and white, he was as intelligent as his mistress, whose acquaintance I had made through his admiration for my small Dachshund. Asta was excited about the news, and as we all walked, we talked about Norway and its threat from Hitler, for Asta had no illusions as to Hitler’s talk of Lebensraum. Lebensraum, she said, meant Norway and Denmark. ‘He will need food – especially dairy produce for his jackbooted armies. You just see if I am not right.’ Asta was small and not young in years, but she was an ageless lovely person whom one would trust in any kind of emergency. She had something tough and indefinable about her, a resilience to life and its problems which attracted me to her just as Vicki was attracted to her tough, wiry little terrier. She lived near me in Cheyne Gardens and we often met in the grounds of the Royal Hospital, a favourite playground for dogs and children.
The thought uppermost in everyone’s mind now was – what difference is the war going to make to me? How is it going to affect me? Kathleen Marshman was worrying about that. Working for the Disabled Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Industries, she was wondering how long such an organization would be able to carry on. The widow of a naval officer, she knew only too well what war could mean. She knew that it wouldn’t be long before supplies of materials would make things difficult, and that a fresh war could ruin the livelihoods which the disabled victims of the last one had so painstakingly built up for themselves and their families, and she could not help being depressed. Only a few weeks previously the Queen had visited an exhibition and sale of the men’s work which Kathleen had helped to arrange at Claridges. The girls who sold the beautiful work had included many of the season’s most lovely debutantes, Kathleen’s daughter, Anne, and the two attractive young girls from South Africa whose portraits I was painting.
As a result of the Queen’s interest, business was still brisk, and there were enough orders to keep the men busy for some time ahead. But now? What would happen now? Kathleen Marshman was one of those people who possessed the rare gift of making every occasion seem like a party. She made each guest feel that he or she was the one person present in whom she was interested. Extremely generous and hospitable, she loved company, and her flat, like mine, was always overflowing with guests. Her elder daughter, Anne, was a pretty blonde girl who seemed rather quiet and melancholy, but this I discovered was due to a recent love affair which had gone awry. She was naturally vivacious and gay and extremely unselfish. Her protective love for her younger sister, Penty, who could never be like other girls, was most touching when one considered that for an attractive girl like Anne with many young men friends the presence of this retarded sister must sometimes have made things awkward.
Anne was passionately fond of dancing and at this time was learning tap dancing. I used to hear her practising in the kitchen above my bedroom and sometimes she would come down to dance in my big studio, which had a parquet floor, and she would make me try all the latest steps which she was mastering. I had been friendly with this family since moving in to No. 33 but now that war had been declared we all instinctively became much closer. Kathleen Marshman had had a sad life in many ways, and her greatest worry now was her little daughter, Penty.
Chapter Three
THE FIRST WEEKS of the war were curiously quiet as was the weather, still, warm, and sunny, and a strange brooding spell hung over us all. The RAF, however, were by no means quiet. They were making their first raids on Wilhelmshaven and Kiel and getting direct hits on the German battleships there. They were also dropping pamphlets on the Germans. The Royal Navy had begun an intensive blockade of Germany, and our British merchant shipping was being attacked by German U-boats.
On the 5th we were startled by the news of the torpedoing of the transatlantic liner, Athenia. Bound for New York, she had been sunk without warning when 250 miles off Donegal on September 4th. Amongst the 1,400 passengers on board were 300 Americans. Most of the passengers had been picked up by British destroyers but 128 had been drowned.
I think the news of the sinking of the Athenia really brought home to us the actuality of war – the victims of this brutal attack were, like us, civilians. Its effect on my young sitters from South Africa who were waiting for passages to Cape Town was unnerving. I was thankful when at last I saw them off on a boat-train in a blacked-out station bound for an unknown ship whose name they would only know once they were actually on board. It was a sad ending to their first visit to Britain and to their first season in London, but whereas we were nearing winter with the fear and horror of war looming over us, they were sailing into the sun to land where air raids, at least, would be unlikely. I watched their fresh, lovely young faces at the train window until it disappeared. Something vividly alive and care-free went with them, and, left standing on that dreary blacked-out station, I experienced the same feeling of emptiness that the train-loads of hand-waving children had given me. Meg’s portrait was not completed – it was still on the easel in the studio. I went back after seeing them off and stood looking at it. In the pale pink presentation dress in which she had made her curtsey to the King and Queen she seemed now a tragic reminder of the end of summer. A summer which for her had been a gay succession of parties, dances, theatres, ballets, and operas to many of which I had accompanied her.
Many friends, both men and women, were called at once into the Services and there was a spate of hectic good-bye parties before they went. The night life was as yet uninterrupted, and getting to places in the black-out was fun. Ivor Novello’s The Dancing Years was playing to packed houses and was the good-bye choice of many romantic young men and women. Me and My Girl, with its ‘Lambeth Walk’, had passed its thousandth performance and was still drawing large audiences. I went several times to this with parties. A painter friend called up in the Artists’ Rifles took me to a wonderful performance of The Importance of Being Earnest, at the Globe. Its cast included John Gielgud, Edith Evans, Gwen
Ffrangcon-Davies, Peggy Ashcroft, Jack Hawkins, and Margaret Rutherford. I found this play of Wilde’s so fascinating that I began rereading all his works, including the fairy tales. They would remain in my mind all through the long rather dull hours at the First Aid Post, known as FAP, and seemed to me to have much more real importance than the bandaging at which I was not at all deft at first. Elliot Hodgkin, with whom I was often paired for these practices, used to tease me unmercifully about this. It irked me that a man should be so much better with bandages than I was.
In Calcutta I had worked for a time in the General Hospital because I had wanted to get more knowledge of the Indian people. But I had been allowed to do very little because I was European and the menial jobs had to be done by ‘untouchables’. The European sisters in the hospital had had no use for me because I was untrained, and it was from the Eurasian nurses that I had learned the little that I knew about nursing. From Dr Rudolf Treu, in whose home I was staying at the time, I learned to read X-ray plates, for he had been one of India’s most renowned radiologists, and he also taught me to give injections, for which he said I had a real gift.
Now, as well as the constant practices at the FAP in splints and bandages, and the first essential aid to the injured, we were being sent to various hospitals to get our necessary nursing experience. I was sent, first, to a hospital for women in the Marylebone Road. There was no question there about my not getting the menial jobs – they were about all I did get, and the day on which I emptied eighty-four bedpans without vomiting was quite an event. But even at this it seemed I was not too deft and had several unfortunate incidents.
A Chelsea Concerto Page 3
