Bombs on Aunt Dainty

by Judith Kerr

  “See?” said Mr Cotmore, as he stood up and walked away.

  Anna was left staring at his work. Well, of course it was easier to do it small, she thought. And she wasn’t sure that putting in all those guide lines wasn’t a kind of cheating. All the same …

  She could hardly bear to look at her own drawing after his. It wambled all over the paper with its funny shoulders and its one long arm and one short arm and its fingers like sausages. She wanted to crumple it up and throw it away but had just decided that this would attract too much attention, when she became aware of the Welsh boy looking down at it.

  “Not bad,” he said.

  For a moment her heart leapt. Perhaps after all …?

  “One of Cotmore’s best,” said the boy. “He’s in form tonight.” He must have sensed her disappointment, for he added, “Your first attempt?”

  Anna nodded.

  “Yes, well –” The Welsh boy averted his eyes from her drawing and searched for a kindly comment. “It’s often difficult to start with,” he said.

  When Anna got home Mama was waiting to hear how it had all gone. “I think it’s very good,” she cried when she saw the drawing, “for someone who’s never done anything like that before!”

  Papa was more interested in Mr Cotmore’s version. “John Cotmore,” he said. “I’ve read something about him recently. An exhibition, I think – very well reviewed.”

  “Really?” said Mama. “He must be good then.”

  “Oh yes,” said Papa, “he’s quite distinguished.”

  They were sitting on the beds in the room which Anna and Mama shared, and Mama was trying to reheat the supper Anna had missed earlier in the dining room. She had lit the gas ring which Frau Gruber had provided in each of the bedrooms and was stirring up some unidentifiable meat, boiled potatoes and turnips in a saucepan she had bought from Woolworth’s.

  “It’s a bit burned,” she said. “I don’t know – perhaps next time it might be better to eat it cold.”

  Anna said nothing.

  It was nearly ten o’clock and she was tired. Her appalling drawing lay on the floor beside her. Next time? she thought. There did not seem much point.

  However, by the following week she was anxious to try again. Surely, she thought, she was bound to do better this time.

  It turned out that the model was the same, but this time Mr Cotmore had persuaded her into a standing pose. Divested of her pink dressing gown, she leaned with one hand on the back of the chair to steady herself and stared gloomily at her feet.

  Anna, remembering the lesson of the previous week, at once attacked her paper with scaffolding lines in every direction. She tried not to be distracted by details, and the upper part of her drawing came out better than before, but all her newfound skill deserted her when she reached the legs and feet.

  She could not make her drawing stand. The feet were at the bottom, but the figure appeared to float or hang on the paper with no weight and nothing to support it. Again and again she rubbed out and re-drew, but it was no use until, towards the end of the evening, Mr Cotmore came round to her. He sat down without a word and drew a foot at the side of her paper. It was facing straight forward like the model’s, but instead of drawing a line round it, as Anna had tried to do, he built it up section by section from the foreshortened toes at the front, through the arch of the foot, to the heel at the back, each piece fitting solidly behind the other, until there on the paper was a sturdy foot standing firmly on an invisible floor.

  “See?” he said.

  “Yes,” said Anna and he smiled slightly.

  He must be about forty, she thought, with intelligent eyes and a curious wide mouth.

  “Difficult things, feet,” he said, and walked away.

  After this Anna went to art school every Tuesday night. She became obsessed with learning to draw. If she could just do one drawing, she thought, that looked as she wanted it to – but each time she mastered one difficulty she seemed to become aware of two or three more whose existence she had not even suspected. Sometimes Mr Cotmore helped her, but often she spent the whole evening struggling alone.

  “You’re getting better, though,” said the Welsh boy. His name was Ward but everyone called him Welsh William. “Remember the first drawing you did? It was bloody awful.”

  “Were your drawings awful when you first started?” asked Anna.

  Welsh William shook his head. “I’ve always found it easy – perhaps too easy. John Cotmore says I’m facile.”

  Anna sighed as she looked at the beautiful fluid drawing which he had produced, apparently without effort.

  “I wish I was,” she said. Her own work was black with being redrawn and almost in holes with being rubbed out.

  Sometimes, as she travelled home on the half-empty tube after the class had finished, she despaired at her lack of talent. But the following week she would be back with a new pencil and another sheet of paper, thinking, “Perhaps this time …”

  She came home from the classes looking so peaky that Mama worried about her.

  “It can’t be good for you, sitting for hours in the cold like that,” she said, for there was a fuel shortage and often the art school was entirely without heating, but Anna said impatiently, “I’m all right – I keep my coat on.”

  There was heavy snow in February and again in March. Everyone was depressed because Singapore had fallen to the Japanese, and the German army, far from succumbing to the Russians, seemed about to enter Moscow. At the office Mrs Hammond caught ‘flu and did not come in for nearly three weeks, so the old ladies were steeped in even deeper gloom. Miss Clinton-Brown no longer thanked God for letting her cut out the pyjamas, but instead had formed a new alliance with Miss Potter against Mrs Riley who upset them all with her Japanese atrocity stories.

  She knew an amazing number and always told them with all possible drama. Leaning on the table with one hand, she would peer over her Bovril with narrowed eyes to impersonate a Japanese commander of unspeakable cruelty, and then open them wide for the noble, well-spoken replies from his English captives who were, however, invariably doomed. Miss Potter always became very distressed by these dramatics and once had to go home in the middle of a pyjama jacket to see, she said confusedly, if her budgie was safe.

  When Mrs Hammond recovered from her bout of ‘flu she told Mrs Riley very firmly to stop repeating such ill-founded rumours about the fate of British prisoners. Mrs Riley sulked for two days and Miss Clinton-Brown thanked God that there were still some sensible people left in the world who were not afraid to speak their mind. It would all have been quite funny, thought Anna, if one hadn’t suspected that most of Mrs Riley’s stories were probably true.

  Going to art school after all this was a relief. Anna had discovered that there was another life class on Thursdays which, for an extra three shillings and sixpence, she was entitled to attend, so she now went twice a week. All the classes had shrunk, for the intense cold kept the knitters and the newspaper-readers away, and Mr Cotmore had more time to teach those students who remained. He corrected most of their drawings every night and during the rest period he would sit in a corner of the life-room with a favoured few and talk. Anna watched them from a distance. They always seemed to have a good time, arguing and laughing, and she thought how splendid it must be to belong to that inner circle. But she was too shy to go anywhere near them, and after school they always left very quickly in a bunch.

  One night she was packing up her things at the end of the class. She had worked with a kind of despair all evening and had managed at last to produce a drawing that bore some faint resemblance to what she had in mind. In the struggle, a lot of pencil had got on her hands and somehow from her hands on to her face.

  Welsh William looked at her with interest.

  “Did you get any of it on the paper?” he asked.

  “Certainly,” she said, and showed him.

  He was quite impressed. “Very forceful,” he said. “We may make something of you yet. Why d
on’t you wash your face and come and have a coffee?”

  She scrubbed her face at the sink and they walked a few doors down the road to a café. As they opened the door there were welcoming cries from inside. She blinked in the sudden light and saw Mr Cotmore and his regular crowd of students looking back at her. They were sitting at two tables pushed together, with coffee cups in front of them, and occupied most of the narrow room.

  “It’s the little girl who gets pencil all over herself,” cried one of them, a small man of about Mr Cotmore’s age.

  “But to good purpose,” said Mr Cotmore before she had time to blush. “It’s Anna, isn’t it?”

  She nodded, and they made room for her and Welsh William at the tables. Some coffee appeared before her and, half-excited and half-apprehensive, she buried herself in the cup, so that no one else should ask her any questions. Gradually the conversation resumed around her.

  “You’re wrong about Cézanne, John,” said the small man and John Cotmore rounded on him with “Nonsense, Harry, you’re just trying to start something!”

  Two girls at the other side of the table laughed, but Harry had evidently been trying to do just that, for soon everyone was disagreeing about the French Impressionists, the Italian Primitives, Giotto, Matisse, Mark Gertler, Samuel Palmer – who on earth were they all? thought Anna, listening in silence for fear of revealing her ignorance. On one side of her Harry was waving his arms in argument, on the other Welsh William was absently drawing something on the edge of a newspaper. A pale man with a pale tie whispered intensely about form and content, one of the girls ordered a portion of chips and passed them round, everyone drank more coffee, and John Cotmore with his warm deep voice somehow kept the whole thing going. He spoke only little, but whenever he did everyone else stopped to listen.

  Once he addressed her directly. “What do you think?” he asked. They had been talking about styles in drawing, some students extolling the sensitive line of someone Anna had never heard of and others defending another painter with a more chunky approach.

  She stared at him, horrified.

  “I don’t know,” she stammered. “I just want to draw it the way it looks. But I find it very difficult.”

  What a stupid answer, she thought, but he said seriously, “That’s not a bad start,” and she noticed that the others looked at her with new respect.

  Later, when everyone else was talking, she plucked up courage to ask him something that had worried her for weeks.

  “If someone was going to be any good at drawing,” she said, “surely they wouldn’t find it so difficult?”

  “I don’t think that follows,” he said. “It might just mean that they had high standards. In your case,” he added, smiling a little, “I would say that the situation looks very promising.”

  Very promising, she thought, and while he was drawn back into the general conversation she turned his answer over and over, inspecting it for alternate meanings. But there were none. He must really mean that her work was very promising. It was unbelievable, and she sat hugging the thought to herself until it was time to go home.

  They sorted out how many coffees had been drunk by whom, and then stood for a moment in the cold outside the café.

  “See you on Thursday, Anna,” said Welsh William, and several other voices echoed, “See you on Thursday.” They sounded strangely disembodied in the dark. Good night, Harry. Good night, Doreen. Then the sound of footsteps as unidentifiable figures melted into the blackout.

  Anna buttoned up her coat against the wind when a voice, deeper than the rest, called out, “Good night, Anna!”

  “Good-night…John!’ she called back after a moment’s hesitation, and as the happiness welled up inside her she broke away from the group into the invisible street beyond.

  John Cotmore had said good night to her. And her work was very promising. The pavement rang under her feet and the darkness shone all about her, like something that she could almost touch. She was surprised to find Holborn tube station looking just as usual.

  Something tremendous, she felt, had happened in her life.

  Chapter Sixteen

  When Anna arrived at the office a few weeks later she found Mrs Hammond already there. It was embarrassing because Anna was late as usual – there seemed no point in hurrying to work when there was so little to do – but luckily Mrs Hammond had not noticed. She was standing in the disused hospital ward, examining dusty shelves and cupboards, and as soon as she saw Anna she said, “Got a new job for you.”

  “What?” asked Anna.

  Mrs Hammond was looking more positive than she had done since Dickie’s death.

  “Sad job, really,” she said. “But jolly useful. Officers’ clothing.” And as Anna looked puzzled, she suddenly said, “Dead men’s shoes! Can’t call it that, of course – upset people. But that’s what it comes to. Pass on uniforms – all sorts of clothes – from chaps who’ve been killed to chaps who are still alive and need them.”

  Anna noticed for the first time that on a dustsheet in a corner of the ward was a pile of garments. There were suits, shirts, ties, bits of Air Force uniform. A used kitbag had P/O Richard Hammond stencilled on it in large white letters. Mrs Hammond followed her glance.

  “Silly to hang on to them,” she said, “when there are other boys who’d be glad of them.” Then she said, “After all, he wasn’t the only one.”

  It turned out that she had a partner in this new enterprise – a Mrs James who had lost both her sons, one in the Army in the African desert and the other in the Air Force over Germany. Anna met her briefly later that day, a gaunt, elderly woman with huge tragic eyes and an almost inaudible voice.

  She had brought with her a little pug-faced man of great energy who proceeded at once to turn the empty ward into a storeroom for the clothing they hoped to receive. He cleaned and hammered and moved furniture and by the end of the week it was ready, with a little office for Mrs James in one corner.

  This consisted only of a table and chair behind two screens, and there was no heating in the whole freezing place except one bar of an electric fire directed at her feet, but she did not seem to notice. She just sat there, staring into space, as though it was as good a place to be as any other.

  Mrs Hammond had kept her office next to the sewing-room but spent a good deal of time running in and out to see how everything was getting on. It was she who composed the advertisement in The Times, appealing for clothes to the wives and parents of the young men who had been killed. Anna typed it out and by the following week the clothes began to come in.

  They varied from single, pathetic garments to whole trunkfuls and they all had to be acknowledged and sorted. It was strangely distressing work. Some trunks, arriving directly from Service stations, seemed to contain nearly all the dead men’s possessions, and there were golf-clubs, paperbacks and writing-cases which no one knew what to do with. Once when Anna was pulling an RAF tunic out of a suitcase a ping-pong ball flew out with it and bounced all over the floor of the empty ward. For some reason this upset her more than anything else.

  At the same time, the old ladies still needed attention – more than before, for they were jealous of Mrs Hammond’s new interest – and the wool still had to be sent out to the knitters, and suddenly Anna found that she was very busy. She no longer arrived late in the mornings and barely had time for lunch. Sometimes when she finished at six o’clock she wondered if she wasn’t too tired to go on to art school, but she always went in the end.

  In the meantime, Mrs Hammond had informed all the generals, admirals and air marshals she knew of her new scheme to help servicemen, and at last, less than three weeks after its inception, the first young man arrived to be kitted out. He was a naval lieutenant who had lost all his possessions when his ship had been sunk by a U-boat, and Mrs Hammond and Mrs James vied with each other to give him everything he wanted.

  Mrs Hammond had been all a-bustle since the new scheme had started, so it was not surprising to see her turning ov
er stacks of clothes to find trousers exactly the right length or a cap with the correct insignia. But it was astonishing, thought Anna, to see the change in Mrs James. For the first time her huge eyes stopped staring into the distance, and as she questioned the young man, gently and sensibly, about his needs, it was as though he were providing some kind of vitamin of which she had been deprived. She smiled and talked and even made a little joke, until Mrs Hammond led him away to try on some shoes, when she relapsed into inactivity like a wind-up toy that had run down.

  After this there was a steady stream of young men in need and an equally steady supply of clothes from the relatives of other young men who had been killed in action. Anna sometimes wondered how it would feel to wear these garments, but the young men seemed to look on them in purely practical terms. Since rationing had been introduced the previous summer every kind of clothing was hard to come by, and it did not do to be too sensitive.

  They were surprisingly cheerful on the whole and sometimes, intoxicated by the money they had saved, they asked Anna out for the evening. They took her to films and theatres and to West End restaurants. It was fun to dress up in Judy’s and Jinny’s more elegant cast-offs for these grand places, just as though she were really the nice English girl they took her for. Afterwards, they usually wanted to kiss her, and this, too, was exciting. I must really be quite attractive, she thought in wonder, but she did not find any one of them more interesting than the rest and she never went out with them on her art school nights.

  “Why not?” cried Mama. “It’s much better for you than those old evening classes!”

  Anna shook her head. “It’s an awful waste of time, really,” she said in the special knowing-her-own-mind voice she had recently acquired. “And, honestly Mama, they seem so young!”