A Chelsea Concerto

by Frances Faviell

  This was as blunt as were President Roosevelt’s words. I don’t think it frightened anybody because we had the absolute conviction now that Churchill would lead us safely to victory. It was innate in all of us – after all, hadn’t we all been taught in our history books that Britain always came out on top? I had met people on the Continent and in India who said that we British were a most conceited and arrogant race – that we behaved as if we were superior beings. Well, that might be so – but if we had those qualities they stood us in good stead now. For no one took any notice of the flood of threats from Germany. We took much more notice of the fact that cheese was to be rationed. It had long been the one thing we could fall back on now that almost everything else was doled out in one or two ounces per head per week. At the end of March we were to be allotted one ounce of cheese per week – good-bye to Mrs Freeth’s cheese omelettes, and surely the next thing to go would be eggs. When our butter ration had been suddenly increased from two to four ounces temporarily because of an unexpected supply it had seemed too good to be true. I was beginning to get tired very easily – as we all were – and it was not to be wondered at on the rations on which we had to do a hard day’s work. Lord Woolton might tell us continually that people all ate too much meat and that potatoes were good for us – but there was not much danger of having too much meat when the ration was 1s 2d. worth a week.

  March 23rd was a Day of National Prayer, ordered by the King. I went to Chelsea Old Church with a turn-out of the Red Cross. Since having had to pick up and fit together the pieces of my fellow-men, women, and children, I was not sure about prayer – a nagging doubt was at work in me – but I loved Chelsea Old Church, More’s church we often called it, and Richard had been christened in it. There was a Parade of the Chelsea Sea Cadet Corps and Chelsea Air Training Corps. There were about sixty lads in each unit; their fine, keen young faces and their smart trim appearance made a most poignant impression on me as I looked at them in the light from the lovely windows of the Old Church. If the war went on much longer – and Churchill had just warned us that it would – then many of these boys would soon be wearing Naval and Air Force uniforms. The vicar, the Rev R Sadleir, who was Chaplain to the ATC, conducted the service, and afterwards the cadets were inspected. The little garden at the rear of the church was full of spring flowers just coming out. The Embankment was quite crowded with spectators and the parents of the boys on parade. I wandered round the church after the service, showing it to Larry, who had accompanied me.

  The Rev Sadleir was the leader of a fire party for watching this famous church and they used his study on the first floor of Petyt House as a fire post. He had arranged tiers of bunks at one end of the room so that the watchers could sleep when not on duty. The fire watchers were very proud of their comfortable post and very proud of their leader, the vicar. Larry spoke to many of the cadets afterwards. I have never known a young man more interested in and attracted to children and adolescents – he loved them and had already asked if he could be godfather to my baby, which was to be born in September. At the very end of March Mr Herbert Morrison in a broadcast gave us a warning about the possibility of the use of gas by the Germans. ‘Have your gas masks ready,’ he warned us.

  This resulted in some practices in the FAP with our gas-masks on and it was a most eerie feeling seeing our fellow VADs in such hideous guise. We also went to a fresh spate of lectures on gas. One listener told the lecturer that she had discovered that by wearing her gas mask while peeling onions she avoided the usual weeping from their irritation of the eyes. Before the lecturer could comment every woman present had already shouted, ‘Where did you get the onions?’ for they were as scarce as gold and the most wonderful present I had received recently had been two enormous onions in a box from my sister in Bristol.

  The problem of occupying the refugees was one to which we were all giving thought. Apparently they were not yet considered sufficiently screened for munition work. One or two of their own Civil Servants were already working with the Belgian Government now set up in Eaton Square, and these men were slowly beginning to assume some kind of responsibility for the others. Most of the houses in which they were living had gardens at the rear and Suzanne and I thought that it would be a good idea if they could cultivate these gardens and grow themselves some vegetables. The Committee thought it an excellent plan, and Margerie Scott, as usual, found gardening implements for them. The question was, however, how to divide up the small gardens so that each family living in the house should get an equal share. This was so delicate a task that some of the Town Hall officials had to be asked to do it. The gardens were divided, seeds and plants arrived with forks, spades, shovels and picks and rakes. The refugees were delighted and all got to work on their plots. Alas – it seemed that the division was not satisfactory to their ideas of fair shares. I got complaints but ignored them. I had not divided the gardens, I told them, why blame me?

  One Sunday morning in March an apologetic policeman appeared, begging me to come at once as the refugees were fighting and he wanted them to be warned that if they would not desist he would have no choice but to arrest them. One of the old Pensioners who was having his Sunday beer with us offered to come round at once and help. ‘I’ll give ’em fighting,’ said the old man, who was over eighty, ‘I’ll soon show ’em.’ In his scarlet coat and his row of medals, which included those of four wars, and with his white moustache bristling, he meant what he said. I promised to send the policeman back for him should we need help.

  We arrived in Tedworth Square to find an amazing spectacle on this quiet Sunday morning. In the back garden of the house where The Giant lived (I had feared it as soon as the policeman came) he and two other men were fighting savagely with the picks and forks provided for cultivating the soil. Their womenfolk were watching and encouraging them with excited exhortations…all except Madame R, who had come over from another house to try to stop the combatants. Two of the smaller men were warding off The Giant. With their backs to the wall of the garden they were parrying, with spades, his attacks with a huge garden fork, and at the same time endeavouring to get a thrust in at him whenever possible. Monsieur C’s face was cut and blood was streaming from it, Monsieur B’s hand was bleeding, and all three combatants had filthy faces from wiping their wounds after having been digging. The women fell upon me, as with the policeman I endeavoured to make myself heard. The Giant shamefacedly lowered his fork as soon as he saw me. ‘It’s not my fault, Marraine – it’s no good your blaming me. This P here, he took more than half a metre of my plot while I was in the shelter last night. Yes, Marraine, he and that C there, moved the pegs and the string put there by the gentleman from the Town Hall while I was in the shelter during the raid. They thought I wouldn’t see. But I saw – as soon as I got back from Mass this morning I saw that the pegs and string had been moved. I challenged them – and why them? Because they were late in coming into the shelter last night. Yes, very late. And I know that they’re no braver than the rest of us and would only stay during a raid for something important. My plot! That’s what was important to them. Stealing it! Thieves! Thieves!’ He shouted loudly, raising the fork again. ‘Stop it!’ I told him sharply. ‘If you don’t stop this fight the police will have to arrest you. We don’t allow fighting here! You know that already. You have made trouble before – and the police know you for it. Put down that fork.’ ‘I will if those thieves will put down their spades,’ he cried. ‘Let them put them down first.’ ‘No. You all put them down,’ I shouted, in Flemish, while the policeman shouted in stentorian tones, ‘Put those implements down – in the name of the law!’

  Very reluctantly they laid the things down and the policeman gathered them up. I said to him, ‘Shall we take them round to my place? They can have them back when this business is settled.’ He collected the remainder of the gardening tools into a heap. The Giant looked up dismayed as a child deprived of his toys. ‘But, Marraine,’ he wailed, ‘no more work on the garden to-day? It’s Sunday �
� everyone gardens on Sundays.’

  But there was the problem of the plot and its having been moved. The women reluctantly agreed that it had been moved. But the two men stoutly denied having moved it. Why were they late in going to the shelter? I asked them. It had been Saturday, they had drawn their Public Relief money on the Friday, they had gone to a pub for a drink. They were just beginning to pluck up courage to enter pubs. They missed their wine and cognac, they said. They had met an Englishman who had stood them both drinks. He knew Ostend well and had been to Dunkirk and they had got on fine. Did they know his name? I asked them! Yes, they did. They took out a crumpled piece of paper. Written on it was the name of Tom Baynes, whose boat had been to Dunkirk.

  ‘It’s no good,’ I told The Giant. ‘They have an alibi. Whoever did it, it wasn’t them.’ Both their wives confirmed that they had come to the shelter smelling of drink, and both had told their wives of their new acquaintance.

  The Giant was not satisfied. ‘Listen,’ I said. ‘I’ll put it back to where it used to be. Will that satisfy you?’ ‘No,’ he shouted. He wanted to know which person amongst them was a thief. He was not accustomed to living with thieves, would I ask the police to investigate? The police had something better to do than investigate such petty things, I retorted. Probably someone had done it for a joke. I translated a long and impressive speech by the policeman about law and order and that such incidents could only lengthen and not shorten the period until they could all be employed in the war effort. Although they could not understand him, his stern voice and face were enough without the translation. They were frightened and abashed, and the two with cuts followed me sheepishly to No 33 to have their wounds dressed while the representative of law and order led the way with the gardening things.

  Our guests were highly amused at my bringing back two patients, but the Chelsea Pensioners were scandalized. ‘Don’t they reverence the Sabbath in their country?’ one demanded. ‘Fighting on a Sunday morning!’ ‘They’ve been to Mass,’ I said. ‘Shocking!’ exploded the grand old man. ‘Supposing we were to come out of Church Parade and start fighting over our allotments! We’ve got ’em, you know. We can all have a bit if we want it. Got to help the war effort! My two patients, bound up and disinfected, were given some beer and, sheepish and apologetic, took leave of us for the canteen in St Leonard’s Terrace.

  There were two young girls who were much on my mind now that my hours of duty were somewhat less. One was Catherine, who was terribly unhappy still, and the other was Anne.

  Catherine was shunned by many of the refugees, who felt that her place was with her baby. She was still anaemic and frail after her illness, and I began teaching her English apart from the class. I saw that her fanatical insistence on joining one of the Women’s Services was something implanted very deeply and that I had no right to dissuade her from it. Whenever she saw Kay Kelly in her smart uniform she would become melancholy and brooding. Kay’s sister Vi was now in the WAAF, having sent her little daughter to America to relatives and I asked her if it would be possible to get Catherine into that Service. She said that it might take time, but that they wanted more recruits and Catherine’s knowledge of Flemish might be useful. She could also type as she had had to do her former employer’s business letters and keep his accounts. I told her that if she would work hard at her English and concentrate on getting her health improved as Dr Pennell wanted her to, then she might have a chance of getting into one of the Services.

  She had not been to visit Francesca once – and when I asked her why not she replied that she just didn’t feel she could go there. I wrote to the nursery and was told that Francesca was well and growing splendidly – that she was a lovely child and they couldn’t understand why her mother did not take any interest in her. The fact that Catherine did not want to visit her baby infuriated the women refugees. She was unnatural, they said.

  Anne, on the other hand, looked very happy and she had that vital look which is inseparable from love. She was, she told me, madly in love with Cecil and he with her. I thought it was lovely – they were both very young, very good-looking, and very attractive. What, then, was the trouble? I asked Anne, when she came in one evening after telephoning me. It was Mother, she said. Kathleen, apparently, was opposed to their marriage. She did not think they were suited – and she wanted Anne to wait. Cecil, with the same impatience as the other Canadians, to see some real action, was certain that very soon his unit would be sent overseas and he wanted to marry before he went. She asked me to talk to Kathleen. Her mother, she said, would listen to me although I was so much younger than she was. When did they want to get married? I asked. Quite soon – in fact almost immediately. Cecil could get a special licence – they both lived in Chelsea, there would be no residential qualification trouble. They wanted to be married at once.

  Anne was over twenty-one – legally Kathleen could not prevent her marriage – but the two had always been very close, partly because Kathleen had long been widowed, and partly because Anne had always shared the responsibility of Penty with her mother. We were in a dilemma over it. I felt that I was not capable of giving advice or trying to influence either party. Richard felt the same way but was inclined to agree with Kathleen that to wait would be wiser. He reminded me when I pressed the young lovers’ cause that we knew absolutely nothing about Cecil. I have always thought that we can really know little about anyone – only what they choose to show us and that is not always their true side, so what difference did it make? They were in love – and I felt for them. We were very happy, why shouldn’t they be?

  We talked to Kathleen that evening. She was terribly upset. She couldn’t tell us why she felt that it would be a mistake, but she did feel it. She was Irish, and she had frequent intuitions which were infallible. I did not laugh at such things – I had them myself – and they were often right. But whereas she had one that the marriage would be a tragedy mine was that it would be a success. The change in Anne was wonderful. She was gay, always laughing and teasing Cecil, her blue eyes literally dancing with mischief, her whole demeanour was one of happiness and of the fact that she was loved and wanted. Cecil was less demonstrative – but he was terribly in love and impatient to marry her.

  Kathleen, after much discussion, said that there was nothing she could do. Anne had never gone against her wishes before – but Kathleen felt that she would do so now. She wanted Cecil and she was going to marry him. We had a long talk with her about everything – and about Penty, whose future was an ever-increasing anxiety to Kathleen. I think Kathleen felt that Anne should do much better for herself. Cecil had no money except his pay, and Anne, who earned a good salary in the City, had been used to comfort, if not luxury. But Cecil was very young, and was the type who would get on. Canada is the land of opportunity – surely after the war he would not lack chances? The thing which swayed me and which had struck me forcibly all through the Blitz was the bond between these two people. You could call it sex or you could call it love – it was that indefinable something which is the strongest and most lovely of all human emotions. I had seen it all through the horrible tragedies of the war – this love which mattered so much more than the Blitz or the bombs showed me that the annihilation of the body was of no importance. I had seen a couple locked together during the most terrible bombing, absolutely oblivious of anything except each other. I had seen husbands and wives united after thinking that one was dead and their meeting had been too poignant to watch. The love of mothers for their missing children was equally – perhaps more – moving because of its unselfishness, but it did not have the terrible urgency or indefinable insistence of that other love. I saw this now between those two, Cecil and Anne, and who were we to deny it them? I was far nearer to them in age than I was to Kathleen and I pleaded for them.

  Anne and Cecil were married in the middle of March at the Chelsea Registrar’s Office. Richard and I gave them a small wedding luncheon at the Royal Court Hotel. Mr Wilde worked wonders, producing not only white flower
s for the table and silver horseshoes for each of us, but a small white wedding cake with a wonderful sugar and silver Cupid on it. Kathleen and I gave up our sugar and fat ration so that this could be made. Cecil was shy, but his best man, a friend from the Canadian RASC, was a man of the world and soon put him at his ease. Anne looked lovely in a blue dress and tiny hat. She was radiant. I had never seen her look prettier. Kathleen put a good face on it, and the party was a great success. We drank to the young couple’s health in champagne and Mr Wilde added some of his own as a gift to the war-time wedding. Cecil talked of taking Anne to Canada when the war was over – she was excited at the idea. Kathleen was upset. I liked Cecil – he was shy with women and not at his ease in company – but as he had spent a great deal of his life in the frozen North as a trapper this was not to be wondered at. He was an orphan, he told us – and had gone to Canada as a child. We gathered that he had had a lonely but not unhappy life. The best man was a delightful person. He told me that Cecil was very popular in the regiment, that he had a lot of friends. We had asked him to invite some of them to lunch – but he had only wanted this one special friend – and Anne had not wanted any of her girl friends. So we were a small party – but a very gay one. Anne and Cecil went away for a couple of days – Cecil had no leave until April when they planned a proper honeymoon. When they had left Kathleen came back with us and stayed for the evening. She was terribly upset – she was not happy about the marriage and I wondered if we had done right in approving it. But, as Richard said, what was the use of her objecting? Anne was over twenty-one and would have married him anyway.