The Penguin Complete Novels of Nancy Mitford

by Nancy Mitford

  Sophia and Rudolph strolled out into the sunshine.

  ‘Let’s go to Kew,’ said Sophia.

  ‘Yes, we will when you have got your job.’

  ‘Oh darling, oh dear, do I have to have a job?’

  ‘Yes, you do, or I shall be through with you. You know that I think it’s perfectly shameful the way you haven’t done any training the last few months. Now you must get on with it quickly. There is only one justification for people like you in a community, and that is that they should pull their weight in a war. The men must fight and the women must be nurses.’

  ‘Darling, I couldn’t be a nurse. Florence has a first aid book and I looked inside and saw a picture of a knee. I nearly fainted. I can’t bear knees, I’ve got a thing about them. I don’t like ill people, either, and then I’m not so very strong, I should cockle. Tell you what – could I be a précis writer at the Foreign Office?’

  ‘There haven’t been précis writers at the Foreign Office since Lord Palmerston. Anyway, you couldn’t work in a Government Department, you’re far too mooney. If you can’t bear knees and don’t like ill people, you can scrub floors and wash up for those that can and do. Now here we are, go along and fix yourself up.’

  Sophia found herself in a large empty house, empty, that is, of furniture, but full of would-be workers. She had to wait in a queue before being interviewed by a lady at a desk. The young man in front of her announced that he was a Czech, and not afraid of bombs. The lady said nor are British women afraid of bombs, which Sophia thought was going too far. She gave the young man an address to go to, and turned briskly to Sophia.

  ‘Yes?’ she said.

  Sophia felt the shades of the prison-house closing in on her. She explained that she would do full-time voluntary work, but that she had no qualifications. For one wild moment of optimism she thought that the lady was going to turn her down. After looking through some papers, she said, however, ‘Could you do office work in a First Aid Post?’

  ‘I could try,’ said Sophia doubtfully.

  ‘Then take this note to Sister Wordsworth at St Anne’s Hospital First Aid Post. Thank you. Good day.’

  Rudolph was in earnest conversation with a German Jew when she came out. On hearing that she was fixed up, he said that she might have a holiday before beginning her job. ‘You can go to St Anne’s tomorrow,’ he said. ‘I’m taking you down to Kew now.’

  They sat on a bench at the end of the ilex avenue and stared at Syon House across the river. Sophia asked Rudolph what he planned to do, now that the war had begun.

  ‘I hope for a commission, of course,’ he said; ‘failing that I shall enlist.’

  ‘Somebody who knows all those languages could get a job at home – I mean not a fighting job. Perhaps it is your duty to do that,’ she said hopefully.

  ‘Can’t help my duty; I’m going to fight Germans in this war – not Nazis, mind you, Germans. I mean huns.’

  Sophia agreed with him really. The huns must be fought.

  ‘How strange everything seems now that the war is here,’ she said. ‘I suppose it is unreal because we have been expecting it for so long now, and have known that it must be got over before we can go on with our lives. Like in the night when you want to go to the loo and it is miles away down a freezing cold passage and yet you know you have to go down that passage before you can be happy and sleep again. We are starting down it now. Oh, darling, I wish it was over and we were back in bed. What shall I do when you’ve gone?’

  ‘Don’t you anticipate,’ said Rudolph severely; ‘you never have, so don’t begin now. You are the only person I know who lives entirely in the present, it is one of the attractive things about you.’

  ‘If you are killed,’ said Sophia, paying no attention.

  ‘You are one of those lucky women with two strings to their bow. If I am killed, there is always old Luke.’

  ‘Yes, but the point is I shall have such an awful grudge against Luke, don’t you see? I do so fearfully think the war is the result of people like him, always rushing off abroad and pretending to those wretched foreigners that England will stand for anything. Cracking them up over here, too; Herr Hitler this, and Herr von Ribbentrop that, and bulwarks against Bolshevism and so on. Of course, the old fellow thought he was making good feeling, and probably he never even realized that the chief reason he loved the Germans was because they buttered him up so much. All those free rides in motors and aeroplanes.’

  ‘You can’t blame him,’ said Rudolph, ‘he never cut any ice over here, but as soon as he set foot in Germany he was treated as a minor royalty or something. Of course it was lovely for him. Why, Berlin has been full of people like that for years. The Germans were told to make a fuss of English people, so of course masses of English stampeded over there to be made a fuss of. But it never occurred to them that they were doing definite harm to their own country; they just got a kick out of saying “mein Führer” and being taken round in Mercedes-Benzes. All the same they weren’t directly responsible for the war. Old Luke is all right, he’s a decent old fellow at heart. I feel quite happy leaving you in his hands. I believe he’s getting over the Brotherhood, too, you’ll see.’

  As they strolled across Kew Green to get a taxi, an unearthly yelp announced to them that they had been observed by Sophia’s godfather, Sir Ivor King, and sure enough, there he was, the old fellow, waving a curly, butter-coloured wig at them out of his bedroom window. He invited them to come in for a cup of tea.

  This faintly farcical old figure was the idol of the British race, and reigned supreme in the hearts of his fellow-countrymen, indeed of music lovers all over the world, as the King of Song. In his heyday, he had been most famous as a singer of those sexy ballads which were adored by our grandparents, and for which most of us have a secret partiality. He was unrivalled, too, in opera. The unique quality of his voice was the fact that it could reach higher and also lower notes than have ever been reached before by any human being, some of which were so high that only bats, others so low that only horses, could hear them. When he was a very young man studying in Germany, his music teacher said to him, ‘Herr King, you shall make, with that voice of yours, musical history. I hope I may live to hear you at your zenith.’

  The prophecy came true. Ivor King was knighted at an early age, he made a large fortune, gained an unassailable position and the nickname by which he was always known, ‘The King of Song’, largely on the strength of this enormous range of voice. Largely, but not solely. A lovable and very strong personality, a genial quality of good fellowship, and latterly his enormous age, had played their part, and combined with his magnificent notes to make him not only one of the best known but also one of the best loved men of several successive generations. Among particular achievements he was the only man ever to sing the name part in the opera Norma, the script of which had been re-written especially for him, and re-named Norman.

  The King of Song had toured the world, and particularly the Empire, dozens of times and these tours were indeed like royal progresses. In very remote parts of Africa the natives often mistook him for Queen Victoria’s husband, and it was universally admitted that he had done more towards welding the Empire in the cultural sphere than any other individual. Quite bald, although with a marvellous selection of wigs, and finally quite toothless, he still maintained a gallant fight against old age, although some two years previously he had succumbed to the extent of giving a final farewell concert at the Albert Hall. He had then retired to a charming house on Kew Green, which he named Vocal Lodge, and devoted himself to botany; in the pursuit of this science, however, he was more keen than lucky.

  ‘She wore a wreath of roses the day that first we met,’ he chanted, cutting a seed cake. It was what the most vulgar of the many generations which had passed over his head would call his signature tune, and he sang it in a piercing soprano.

  Sophia poured out tea, and asked after his Lesbian irises.

/>   ‘They were not what they seemed,’ he said, ‘wretched things. I brought the roots all the way from Lesbos, as you know, and when they came up, what were they? Mere pansies. Too mortifying. And now I’m the air-raid warden for Kew Gardens, in a tin hat – and it will be years before I visit Greece again. It may be for years, and it may-hay be for ever. As you will note, the war has found me in excellent voice. I am singing at the Chiswick Town Hall tonight to our local decontamination squads. Such dear boys and girls. And let me darkly hint at a more exalted engagement in the not-too-too-far-off future. I was trying to decide, when I saw you on the Green, whether I should go to my interview with some Important Personages as a blond or a brunette. I think I favour the butter-coloured curls,’ he said, taking off his wig and revealing beneath a head of egg-like baldness.

  Sophia and Rudolph were quite used to this, for the King’s wigs were as much off as on, and there was never any kind of pretence about them being his own luxuriant hair.

  ‘Yes, I have always liked that one,’ said Sophia, ‘it softens your features. What important personages?’

  ‘Ah,’ said the old singer, ‘I can keep a secret. What are you up to, Rudolph? I haven’t seen you since the Munich crisis. I may tell you that, having heard that you were doing the Italian broadcast from the B.B.C., I switched on the wireless to listen. Well, I said to Magdalen Beech, poor Rudolph sounds very ill – then we discovered that it was the dear late Pope, and not Rudolph at all.’

  Sir Ivor was a fervent Roman Catholic. For a short time, many years ago, he had been married to a woman so pious and so lavish with Sir Ivor’s money that she had posthumously been made a Papal Duchess and was accorded the unique honour of being buried in the Vatican gardens. Lady Beech was her sister.

  ‘Now you can tell me something,’ said Sophia, glancing at the Sargent portrait, in brown velvet and lace, of Duchess King which hung over the chimneypiece. ‘I had a letter from Lady Beech saying what a pity, as we must all so soon be dead, that we shouldn’t all be going on to the same place afterwards. What really happens to us heretics, darling old gentleman?’

  ‘Darling pretty young lady, you pop straight on to a gridiron and there you baste to eternity.’

  ‘Baste?’ said Sophia.

  ‘Baste. Whenever I have time, perhaps say once in a million years, I will bring you a drop of water on the end of my finger. Apart from this, your pleasures will be few and simple.’

  ‘What I’m wondering is,’ said Rudolph, ‘how much you and Lady Beech will enjoy such purely Catholic society for so uninterrupted a spell?’

  At dinner that night, Luke’s information was that a huge scheme of appeasement, world-wide in its implications, was even now being worked out. He said the wretched Socialists were not making things easy for Our Premier, but that he was too big a man and the scheme too big a scheme to be thwarted by pinpricks in Parliament. Parliament and the Press might have to be got rid of for a time whilst Our Premier and Herr Hitler rearranged the world. In any case, there would be no war. The next morning poor Luke was so wretched that Sophia felt quite sorry for him. He really seemed astounded that Herr Hitler should be prepared to risk all those wonderful swimming-pools in a major war.

  When the Prime Minister’s speech and hoax air-raid warning were over, Sophia went round to report at the First Aid Post. Here, in a large garage under St Anne’s Hospital, cold, damp and dirty, pretty Sister Wordsworth was bringing order out of confusion. She really seemed pleased to engage Sophia, in spite of her lack of qualifications, and told her that she could come every day from one to seven. The work was simple. Sophia was to sit behind a partition of sacking, labelled Office, to answer the telephone, count the washing and do various odd jobs. In the case of raids, Sister Wordsworth assured her that while she might have to see knee joints, she would have no intimate contact with them.

  Henceforward Sophia’s life was sharply divided in two parts, her life behind the gas-proof flap of the First Aid Post and her own usual unhampered life outside. Sometimes she rather enjoyed her sacking life, sometimes she felt that she could hardly endure it. The cold stuffy atmosphere got on her nerves, she was unaccustomed to sitting still for hours on end, and what work there was to do, such as counting washing, she did not do very well. On the other hand, she liked all the people in the Post, and habit once having gripped her, as it does so soon in life, she became quite resigned and regarded the whole thing completely as a matter of course.

  3

  Rather soon after the war had been declared, it became obvious that nobody intended it to begin. The belligerent countries were behaving like children in a round game, picking up sides, and until the sides had been picked up the game could not start.

  England picked up France, Germany picked up Italy. England beckoned to Poland, Germany answered with Russia. Then Italy’s Nanny said she had fallen down and grazed her knee, running, and mustn’t play. England picked up Turkey, Germany picked up Spain, but Spain’s Nanny said she had internal troubles, and must sit this one out. England looked towards the Oslo group, but they had never played before, except little Belgium, who had hated it, and the others felt shy. America, of course, was too much of a baby for such a grown-up game, but she was just longing to see it played. And still it would not begin.

  The party looked like being a flop, and everybody was becoming very much bored, especially the Americans who are so fond of blood and entrails. They were longing for the show, and with savage taunts, like boys at a bull-baiting from behind safe bars, they urged that it should begin at once. The pit-side seats for which they had paid so heavily in printer’s ink were turning out to be a grave disappointment; they sat in them, chewing gum, stamping their feet and shouting in unison, ‘This war is phoney.’

  Week after week went by. People made jokes about how there was the Boer War, and then the Great War, and then the Great Bore War. They said Hitler’s secret weapon was boredom. Sophia hoped it was. She had long cherished a conviction that Hitler’s secret weapon was an aerial torpedo addressed to Lady Sophia Garfield, 98 Granby Gate, S.W., and she very much preferred boredom.

  Sophia had two friends in the Cabinet. They were called Fred and Ned, and as a matter of fact while Fred was in the Cabinet, Ned had not yet quite reached that sixth form of politicians and was only in the Government, but Sophia could not distinguish between little details like that, and to her they were ‘My friends in the Cabinet’. She often dined with the two of them and found these evenings very enjoyable because, although they both had young and pretty wives, it seems that the wives of Cabinet Ministers race, so to speak, under different rules from ordinary women, and never expect to see their husbands except in bed if they share one. So Sophia had Fred and Ned to herself on these occasions. As she liked both male and female company, but did not much like it mixed, this arrangement suited her nicely.

  They took her to dine at the Carlton, and talked a great deal about the political prospects of their various acquaintances, and it was talk which Sophia was very much accustomed to, because it had begun years ago, when she was a young married woman taking Fred and Ned out to tea at the Cockpit; only then it had been a question of Pop and coloured waistcoats, and the Headmaster in those days had delivered his harangues in Chapel instead of on the floor of the House. She told them all about her Post, and Ned wrote things down in a notebook, and promised that A.R.P. should be reconstructed on the exact lines suggested by Sophia. She knew from experience how much that meant. Then Fred asked her if Luke was in the Tower yet, and this annoyed her because, while it was one thing to say to Rudolph in the privacy of Kew Gardens that Luke was an awful old Fascist, it was quite another to have Fred, that ardent upholder of Munich, being facetious about him; so she turned on poor Fred with great vigour, and gave him a brisk résumé of the achievements of the National Government. She very nearly made him cry, and was just coming nicely into her stride over the National Liberals, of whom Fred was one, when Ned came loyally to his res
cue saying ‘Ah, but you haven’t heard of Fred’s wonderful scheme, all his own idea, for fixing Dr Goebbels.’ And he proceeded to outline the scheme.

  It appeared that Fred’s idea, his own unaided brainwave, was to invite Sir Ivor King, the King of Song, to conduct a world-wide campaign of songful propaganda.

  ‘Harness his personality, as it were,’ Fred explained, warming to his subject, ‘to our cause. He’s the only chap who could bring it off, and it would be wicked not to use him – why, he is one of our great natural advantages, you might say, like – well, coal, or being an island. They’ve got nobody to touch him over there. Now my idea is that he should give out a special news bulletin every day, strongly flavoured with propaganda, of course, followed by a programme of song. See the point? People will switch on to hear him sing (the first time for two years, you know), and then they won’t be able to help getting an earful of propaganda. We’ll have him singing with the troops, singing with the air force, singing with the navy, jolly, popular stuff which the listeners all over the world can join in. You know how people like roaring out songs when they know the words. Besides, the man in the street has a great respect for old Ivor, great.’

  According to Fred, he and the man in the street were as one, which was strange, considering that, except for the High Street, Windsor and The Turl, he had hardly ever been in a street.

  ‘When you say listeners all over the world can join in, you mean English listeners?’ said Sophia. She wanted to get the thing straight.

  ‘By no means,’ said Fred, eagerly, ‘because, you see, the strength of this scheme is that it will be world-wide. I confess that, to begin with, I forgot that it’s not everybody who can speak English. Then of course I remembered that there are Chinks and Japs and Fuzzy Wuzzies and Ice Creamers and Dagoes, and so on. Ah! but we can overcome that difficulty. Is there any reason why he shouldn’t learn to make those extraordinary sounds which they think of as music? Of course not. No. The old chappie is full of brains and enterprise – take on anything we ask him to, you bet.’ And Fred began to give what he thought an excellent imitation of un-English music, nasal sounds of a painful quality. A county family who were dining at the next table told each other that this could not be the Minister for Propaganda, after all. Ned beat two forks together as an accompaniment, and they assured each other that neither was that the Member (so promising, such a career before him) for East Wessex.