The Penguin Complete Novels of Nancy Mitford

by Nancy Mitford

  ‘Well, that’s all now, Greta. Good night,’ Sophia said. Greta slunk out past Florence, who did not give her a glance but told Sophia that she had come in search of an aspirin.

  ‘I had to go off duty, my head ached so badly.’

  ‘Oh, what bad luck. Would a Cachet Fèvre do as well? I’ve just been having such a scene with Greta; she has got it into her head that somebody is going to take her back to Germany, silly fool. I wish to goodness somebody would, I’d give anything to get rid of her.’

  Florence said it was always a mistake to have foreign servants, thanked her for the Cachet Fèvre, and went upstairs. Sophia had rather been expecting that now Luke had gone perhaps Florence would be moving too, but she showed no signs of such an intention. However, the house was large, and they very rarely met, besides, she did not exactly dislike Florence; it was more that they had so little in common.

  ST ANNE’S HOSPITAL FIRST AID POST

  My own darling Rudolph,

  Florence has joined the Post, did I tell you, and it really is rather a joke. All those terribly nice cosy ladies who have such fun with the Dowager Queen of Ruritania and whether she had Jewish blood, and whether the Crown Princess will ever have a baby and so on, are simply withered up by Flo who says she finds extraordinarily little pleasure in gossiping nowadays. They had rather fun for a time, coming clean and sharing and being guided and so on, but they never really got into it. The last straw was that Miss Edwards said she simply couldn’t tell fortunes any more when Florence was there because of the atmosphere, and Miss Edwards’ fortunes were the nicest thing in the Post, we all had ours done every day.

  Anyhow, it seems that last night the nurses went to Sister Wordsworth in a body and said that although of course Florence is very, very charming and they all liked her very, very, very much, they really couldn’t stick her in the Treatment Room another moment. Sister Wordsworth is wonderful, she never turned a hair. She sent for Florence at once and asked her if, as a great favour, she would consent to take charge of the Maternity Ward, which is that little dog kennel, you know, by the Museum, with a cradle and a pair of woolly boots. As it happens, Florence is very keen on obstetrics and she was delighted. So all is honey again and the Dowager Queen of Ruritania and Miss Edwards reign supreme. Sister Wordsworth says the head A.R.P. lady in these parts is a pillar of the Brotherhood, and sent Florence with such a tremendous recommendation that she can never be sacked however much of a bore she is.

  Heatherley and Winthrop have also joined as stretcher-bearers, in fact the Brotherhood seems to be doing pretty well, just like I never thought it would. I wonder if Heth isn’t a bit in love with Florence, there was a form which looked awfully like his on the half-landing when I got back late from the 400 a day or two ago. I was too terrified to look again, so I ran up to my room and locked myself in. Probably it was my imagination.

  Love my darling, when are you going to have some leave,

  Sophia.

  The telephone bell rang and Sophia answered it. ‘Southern Control speaking. Practice RED, expect casualties.’ This meant that ‘casualties’ would be arriving from the street. She ran up to the canteen to warn Sister Wordsworth, who was having tea.

  ‘Thank you, Lady Sophia. Now would you go and ring up the doctor?’ said Sister Wordsworth. ‘If you hurry, you will catch him at his home address. He said he would like to come to the next practice we have here.’

  Sophia ran downstairs again. On her way back to the office she nearly collided with Heth and Winthrop who were carrying a stretcher.

  ‘Casualties already!’ she said, and as she was going on she noticed that the ‘casualty’ under the rugs on the stretcher was her own maid, Greta. For a moment she felt surprised, and then she thought that Florence must have asked Greta to do it; probably they were short of casualties. Greta was far too superior to be bribed by threepence and a cup of tea. She had a sort of bandage over her mouth, and had evidently been treated for ‘crushed tongue’, a very favourite accident at St Anne’s. She seemed to have something in her eye, or at any rate it was winking and rolling in a very horrible way.

  Sophia, as she went to the telephone, giggled to herself. ‘Typical of them,’ she thought, ‘to treat the wretched woman for crushed tongue when really she is half blinded by a grit in the eye. Let’s hope they’ll take it out and give her a cup of tea soon.’ As the practice got into full swing Sophia became very busy and forgot the incident. She never saw Greta again.

  7

  The sensation which was caused by the supposed murder of Sir Ivor King, the King of Song, at a time so extremely inconvenient to the British Government, had scarcely subsided when the old singer turned up, wig and all, in Germany. It happened on the very day that Vocal Lodge was opened to the public, a ceremony which, at the request of the A.R.P., was unadvertised, and which therefore consisted of Sophia, in a simple little black frock, dispensing cocktails to Fred, in his pin-stripes, and a few other friends. The house was rather bare of furniture, owing to Lady Beech. Hardly had Fred arrived when he was called to the telephone; white to the lips he announced that he had had news which compelled him to leave for the office at once.

  The German Press and Radio were jubilant. The old gentleman, it seemed, was visiting that music-loving country with the express purpose of opening there a world-wide anti-British campaign of Propaganda allied to Song. This campaign, it was considered, would have a profound effect on neutral opinion, and indeed might well bring America into the war, on one side or another. He was received like a king in Germany, the Führer sending his own personal car and bodyguard to meet him at the airport, and he celebrated his first evening in Berlin by singing ‘Deutschland über Alles’ on the radio in a higher and then in a lower key than it had ever been sung before.

  Lord Haw-Haw succeeded him at the microphone, and in his inimitable accents announced that the Lieder König was too tired to sing any more that evening but that listeners should prepare for his first full programme of Song-Propaganda in two days’ time at 6.30 p.m. on the thirty-one meter band.

  ‘You must all be most anxious to hear,’ continued Lord Haw-Haw, ‘how the Lieder König came to our Fatherland. (He himself will be telling you why he came.) Your English police, it seems, never realized that the body found on the Pagoda at Kew Gardens was, in fact, the body of a wigless pig. Had they not jumped so quickly to conclusions, had they not assumed, as, of course, they were intended to assume, that these bleeding lumps of meat did constitute the mangled body of the Lieder König, they would not, I expect, have been in such a hurry to bury them. There must be many housewives, whose husbands are at present behind the lines in France, flirting with the pretty French demoiselles, and to whom your Minister of War, Mr Horribleisha, has not yet paid their pathetically small allowances, who would have been only too glad to dispose of these lumps of pig. For bacon is extremely scarce in England now, and is indeed never seen outside the refrigerators of the wealthy.

  ‘Again I ask, where is the Ark Royal?

  ‘Here are the stations Hamburg, Bremen and D x B, operating on the thirty-one metre band. Thank you for your attention. Our next news in English will be broadcast from Reichsender Hamburg and station Bremen at 11.15 Greenwich mean time.’

  For a day or two the English newspapers assured their readers that the loyal old ‘King’ was really reposing in his Catholic grave, and that the Germans must be making use of gramophone records, made before the war had begun, in order to perpetrate a gigantic hoax. Alas! The ‘King’ only had to give his first full-length broadcast for this theory to collapse. Nobody but himself could say ‘Hullo dears! Keep your hairs on’ in quite that debonair tone of voice.

  ‘I have come to Germany,’ he went on, ‘with the express intention of lending my services to the Fatherland, and this I do partly because I feel a debt of gratitude to this great country, this home of music where many years ago my voice was trained, but chiefl
y because of my love of Slavery. I have long been a member of the English Slavery Party, an underground movement of whose very existence most of you are unaware but which is daily increasing in importance. It is my intention to give bulletins of news and words of encouragement to that Party, sandwiched between full programmes of joyous song in which I hope you will all join.

  ‘Land of dope you’re gory

  And very much too free,

  The workers all abhor thee,

  And long for slavery.’

  After bellowing out a good deal more of this kind of drivel, the ‘King’ told a long story about an English worker who, having been free to marry a Jewess (a thing which, of course, could never happen in Germany), had been cheated out of one and sixpence by his brother-in-law.

  ‘Now here is a word of advice to my brothers of the Slavery Party. Burn your confidential papers and anything that could incriminate you at once. Those of you who have secret stores of castor oil, handcuffs and whips waiting for the great dawn of Slavery, bury them or hide them somewhere safe. For Eden was seen entering the Home Office at 5.46 Greenwich mean time this afternoon, and presently the Black-and-Tans are to conduct a great round-up in the homes of the suspects. For the benefit of my non-British listeners, let me explain that the Black-and-Tans are Eden’s dreaded police, so called because those of them that are not negroes are Mayfair playboys, the dregs of the French Riviera. They are a brutal band of assassins, and those who fall foul of them vanish without any trace.’

  Now the sinister thing about all this was that Mr Eden really had entered the Home Office at 5.46 on the afternoon in question. How could they have known it in Berlin at 6.30? The Ministry of Information decided to suppress so disquieting a fact for the present.

  By the next morning, of course, every single window of the newly constituted Shrine of Song had been broken. Lady Beech having removed all her own furniture, books, knick-knacks and kitchen utensils in three large vans, there was fortunately nothing much to damage, except the ‘King’s’ tatty striped wallpapers. Larch and his fellow-domestics gave notice at once, and fled from the Shrine of Shame as soon as they could.

  Poor Sophia felt that she had been made a fool of, and wished the beastly old fellow dead a thousand times. She communicated this sentiment to the many reporters by whom she was once more surrounded, but unfortunately, once crystallized into hard print, it did not redound entirely to her credit considering that she was the ‘King’s’ heiress. The dignitary of the Roman Catholic Church, too, was very much displeased at having been bamboozled into allowing a Requiem Mass to be sung for the soul of a pig. Indeed Roman Catholics all over the world were aghast at the ‘King’s’ treachery, the more so as they had always hitherto felt great pride that one so distinguished should be a co-religionist, had regarded his enormous fame as being a feather in the cap of Holy Mother Church herself, and had never forgotten the pious deeds of his late wife, the posthumous Duchess King. At last Papist feeling became so strong on the subject that the Pope, bowing before the breeze, removed the body of the posthumous Duchess from its distinguished resting-place in the Vatican gardens, and had it re-interred in the Via della Propaganda. When a German note was presented to him on the subject, he gave it as an excuse that the younger cardinals were obliged to learn bicycling on account of the petrol shortage, and were continually falling over her grave. Equally furious and disillusioned were music lovers and fans of the ‘King’ in the whole civilized world. His gramophone records and his effigy were burnt in market towns all over England, his wigs were burnt on Kew Green, whilst in London his songs were burnt by the public hangman.

  But the person who really caught the full blast of the storm was poor Fred. He hurried round to No. 10, and did not spend anything like half an hour there, but only just so long as it took him to write a letter beginning ‘My dear Prime Minister’ and to hand over his Cabinet key. He was succeeded at the Ministry by Ned, to Ned’s delight hardly veiled. The Daily Runner unkindly printed extracts from the ‘Oh! Death! where is thy sting’ speech, and crowed over Fred’s resignation, but was not the least bit pleased over Ned’s appointment, and suggested that it was a case of out of the frying-pan into the fire.

  Fred and Sophia dined together very sadly at the Hyde Park Hotel. Ned would not risk being seen in such discredited company and kept away, and probably he was wise because, as they went into dinner, they were ambushed and subjected to withering fire by about ten press photographers. Fred could no longer afford oysters or pink champagne, so they had smoked salmon and claret instead.

  He was intensely gloomy altogether. ‘My career is over,’ he said.

  Sophia told him, ‘Nonsense, think of Lord Palmerston,’ but there was not much conviction in her voice.

  The next day she heard that he had taken over Serge’s Blossom.

  ST ANNE’S HOSPITAL FIRST AID POST

  Oh, darling Rudolph, who ever would have thought it of the old horror?

  I must say there is one comfort to be got out of the whole business and that is the broadcasts. Aren’t they heaven? I can’t keep away from them, and Sister Wordsworth has had to alter all the shifts here so that nobody shall be on the road during them. I can’t ever go out in the evening because of the 10.45 one – the 6.30 I get here before I leave.

  Poor Fred sometimes sneaks round, when he can get away from his Blossom, and we listen together after dinner. His wife simply can’t stand it, and I don’t blame her when you think of the thousands a year it is costing them. Certainly it comes hardest on Fred, but I look a pretty good fool too what with the Requiem Mass, Shrine of Song, and so on.

  It was fortunate about Olga being a plucky Fr. widow you must say, and being photographed with Fred, otherwise how she would have crowed. I hear she was just about to proceed to John o’ Groats when she guessed it was me and now she’s furious so I must think up some more things to do to her. Perhaps you could think as you’re in love with her – do.

  What else can I tell you? Oh yes, Greta has left, isn’t it lucky? She came round here to lend a hand with a practice and hasn’t been back since and apparently her luggage has all gone so I suppose she just walked out on me. I’m very pleased, I really hated having a German in the house especially as she used to be so keen on all the Nazi leaders, she gave me the creeps you know. So now Mrs Round can talk world-politics in her own servants’ hall again.

  Here everything is just the same. Florence, Heatherley and Winthrop hardly ever leave the Maternity ward at all nowadays. I can’t imagine how they squash into that tiny room. They seem to be for ever fetching food from the Canteen. I believe Brothers eat twice what ordinary people do. Anyhow they don’t hurt anyone by being there, and Miss Edwards is back on the top of her form again telling the most heavenly fortunes, and isn’t it funny she says she can see the same thing in all our hands, like before a railway accident, and it is SOMETHING QUEER UNDER YOUR FEET. Thank goodness not over your head because then I should have known it was parachutists and died of fright. She thinks perhaps this place is built over a plague spot, but Mr Stone says it must be the Main Drain and I suppose there are some pretty queer things in that all right.

  I must fly home now because the old wretch is going to sing Camp Songs (concentration camp, I suppose) at 8 for an extra treat.

  Love and xxx from

  Sophia.

  PS. There is a water pipe here which makes a noise exactly like those crickets on the islands at Cannes. Much as I hate abroad, you can hardly count Cannes and it was a heavenly summer, do you remember, when Robin lent the Clever Girl for the Sea Funeral of a Fr. solicitor from Nice and the coffin bobbed away and came up on the bathing beach at Monte Carlo. I wish it was now. Darling.

  Henceforward the doings of the Lieder König were a kind of serial story, which appeared day by day on the front pages of the newspapers, quite elbowing out the suave U-boat commanders, the joy of Fre
nch poilus at seeing once more the kilt, and the alternate rumours that there would, or would not, be bacon rationing, which had so far provided such a feast of boredom at the beginning of each day. He soon became the only topic of conversation whenever two or more Englishmen met together, while the sale of wireless sets in London were reported to have gone up fifty per cent, and a hundred people of the name of King applied to change it by deed poll. His programmes were a continual treat, especially for collectors of musical curiosities, as, for instance, when he sang the first act from La Bohème, ‘Tes petites mains sont gelées,’ etc., twice through with Frau Goering, each taking alternately the male and female parts. It was after this that he suddenly gave an account of the Prime Minister walking in St James’s Park that very morning, with a list of all the birds he saw and exactly what they were doing; and although the birds, owing to the autumnal season, were behaving with absolute propriety, and therefore nobody need feel embarrassed on that score, the mere fact of such accurate knowledge having reached Berlin so quickly was disquieting to the authorities. On another occasion he sang through an entire act of Pelléas et Mélisande, taking all the parts himself; as a tour de force this was pronounced unique and even The Times musical critic was obliged to admit that the Lieder König had never, within living memory, been in better voice. A touching incident occurred some days later when Herr Schmidt, the Lieder König’s music teacher, who had prophesied all those years ago in Düsseldorf that Herr King’s voice would make musical history, was brought to the microphone. He was now 108 and claimed to be the oldest living music teacher. His broadcast, it is true, was not very satisfactory and sounded rather like someone blowing bubbles, but the Lieder König paid a charming tribute to the old fellow. He said that as all his success in life had been due to the careful training which he had received from Herr Schmidt, a German, he was so happy that he had the opportunity of helping the Fatherland in its time of difficulty. He and his teacher were then decorated by Herr von Ribbentrop, speaking excellent English, with the Order of the Siegfried Line, third class.