War Classics

by Flora Johnston

  My spirits rose as I settled in the car at the thought of what a strangely mixed party we were. My host looked already as if he now regretted asking me, when the violet-eyed widow, with the sigh of a martyr, made room for me beside her. We whirled out of Dieppe at a great pace, past the camps and huts I had grown to know so well, and I had already forgotten my company when there was a resounding groan and the car slowly came to a standstill. Our host descended. ‘What is the matter?’ he enquired of his chauffeur somewhat nettled. ‘This car has never broken down before.’

  I began to wish I had gone to Paris after all. Small French boys collected from nowhere and stood around with interest. Our host invited Violet Eyes to come and sit on the nearby bridge with him. The Leading Lady and I were left alone. After an interval he returned. There was an inn close by – would we all go there with him? The drive was obviously more than ever to his distaste. We were only five or six miles from Dieppe, but wild horses would not have taken him back there. To begin with, he was piqued at the car breaking down; and secondly he was angry with himself at being caught with three women all together. One at a time was his motto, and let the time be short, not three in a bunch as now, with no prospect of getting rid of any of them either. He was plainly cursing his own flirtatious disposition last night.

  In the meantime, we adjourned to the inn for a sober repast of coffee and omelettes. At the end, Violet Eyes and our host went out, and now that the boat at Havre receded further and further into the distance, I resigned myself to extracting as much amusement as I could from the present. It was a fine day and the Leading Lady and I strolled out. The chauffeur was still tinkering with the car, which looked as if it had been reduced to its elementary parts. The road was strewn with bits of its insides. Our host and his fair lady were deep in conversation on the bridge. For six hours we waited, until at last a car was seen approaching from the opposite direction. Our host stopped it at once and after some colloquy, it turned round and we were bidden to get in. It was an Australian YMCA car – a beautiful touring Daimler – returning from Havre, where it had discharged its passengers. ‘You must go straight back to Havre and in double-quick time,’ the Australian driver was commanded. Here the Leading Lady and I humbly begged that our luggage too be transferred as our host showed signs of abandoning all our personal possessions and urging on the driver at the butt of a revolver. Violet Eyes was only going to Havre for a joyride and had no luggage. Our request was curtly granted and we started off at last.

  This time our host must needs sit by Violet Eyes, not by the driver. This arrangement put the Leading Lady in the front while I – being rather small – squeezed into the corner in the shelter of our host’s large back, his face being turned towards the charmer. My heart now was set on Havre, as firmly as ever Queen Mary’s had been on Calais, and all my hopes of courtesy from our host had vanished into a lazy sort of curiosity as to whether he would kiss her before or after we had got to Havre, and whether she would let him do it openly.

  We flew along the long straight roads, past village and hamlet, skirted the coast, whirled and flew and whirled again and then really, at long last, the lights of Havre did begin to appear. It was almost too good to be true and I just sat up and shook myself awake when the car stopped in the centre of the town. We all got out; my luggage was dumped down on the pavement, the Leading Lady picked up her suitcase and our host came up to me. ‘There, now,’ he said, looking down at me, ‘I’ve done what I promised. I’ve taken you to Havre. Good night. I’ll see you on the boat.’ And they all walked away – leaving me ‘plantée là’ as the French say, with my luggage on the pavement.

  I looked around for a cab. There was none in sight, nor any likelihood of getting one, judging by their scarcity all over the North of France. While I looked, I heard a voice address me. ‘Say, aren’t you with these folks or have they left you?’ It was the Australian soldier driving the car.

  ‘They’ve left me, I’m afraid,’ I said with a rueful smile. ‘I suppose you couldn’t take me to the boat, could you?’ I asked him tentatively.

  Before I had the question well out, he was down on the pavement picking up my luggage and stowing it in the car. ‘Now,’ he said, holding the door open for me, ‘I guess we’ll just go on anywhere.’

  ‘Trust the Army,’ I said to myself. ‘They’ll never let you down.’

  We drove slowly along brightly lit streets until we struck an English military policeman, who directed us to the docks, and in a few minutes we were there, and at the quay before us lay the Antonia ready to take us home.

  I made for the AMLO – could I leave my luggage? He surveyed my dusty and dishevelled figure with a kindly pity, then came out to inspect the luggage. It was a small black trunk, now completely veiled in dust and with its bottom nearly knocked out through much jolting in the car. The silent Australian lifted it off and the Sergeant turned to me. ‘You’ll never get this to England, Miss’, he told me. ‘It’ll be broke in bits long before then.’ I suppose I looked about to cry at the news, for he added, ‘Never mind, missie. I’ll look after it. I’ll sew it up in sacking for you and it’ll go over OHMS. It’ll be all right that way.’

  ‘Will you really?’ I breathed.

  ‘Sure thing,’ he answered. ‘You look out for me before the boat goes.’

  It appeared the boat would not leave much before midnight. Boats are, in this way, so like their sex: you never know what they are going to do. ‘Varium et mutabile’ [Fickle and changeable] came into my head at that moment – now with a train, though the heavens fell, it would leave at or near the scheduled moment. With heartfelt thanks, I said goodbye to the Australian and moved across to the Shipping Office in the hope of getting a cabin. By a piece of luck, I got one of the best deck cabins and much relieved, made for the local Education centre, where I knew the Chief – an English Professor who had often invited me to visit him and whose admiration of the Argyll and Sutherlands had been so profound.4 With open arms he welcomed me, gave me dinner, introduced me to his Secretary who pleaded with me to stay all night. I confessed I might have to, as my passport was not viséd.

  ‘Not viséd,’ they cried. Oh, but they knew the APM. The Secretary herself would come down with me to the boat and see him. So in the education car down I spun to the boat again, and got on board first of all the passengers. There was no sign of the YMCA host or of Violet Eyes. Presently they drew up and to their great surprise beheld me, passport viséd, luggage on board care of the Army, deck cabin engaged, car that had brought me waiting at the quay. I confess I was pleased. Our host looked blank. ‘Oh, so you managed,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ I replied demurely, ‘I managed.’

  In the blue darkness the lights gleamed – the lights of peace. The low sound of the sea sucking the Antonia’s keel came up to me. French voices mingled with English: when the dawn came, I reflected, it would rise for me in England. France and all it stood for would be far behind. There would be no more RTOs to help me over the rough places, no more soldiers to be proud of me and to make me proud of them. I should meet again rude women and indifferent men, and there would not be the Army by my side to retrieve me from the shock. After that night I should never again be ‘Care of the British Army’. Though I said these things over and over again to myself, I did not realise them. How could I, with the Sergeant coming up to see if I had a nice deckchair and to tell me that my luggage was sealed and sewn and would carry to the end of the world! And how could I indeed, with Violet Eyes in the dusk lifting her white face to our host a few yards away and the sound of broken voices drifting across to me. For that too was France. In England tomorrow it would not happen. For England stood for other things.Thackeray knew France too, and he sang:

  The reddest lips that ever have kissed

  The brightest eyes that ever have shone

  May pray and whisper and we not list

  Or look away and never be missed

  Ere yet ever a month is gone.5

  For I knew that
England would bring that too – it was a clean slate for the Army and for me, when we came home again. Memory is short – it cuts both ways – and English traditions would hold when we got over the water.

  But, lying back in my deckchair, I knew that Life would never again hold anything as good for me, as it had held these six months in France. I had met all kinds of people that in England I should never have known; I had learnt what seemed to me most amazing things – to flirt, to be made love to, to nurse, to cook, to be friends with quite uneducated people without feeling in the least superior to them, to sleep in empty houses without feeling frightened, to know that a man will ‘kiss the lips that are near’ whether he be married or not, and to accept the fact. I had learnt too that good people were infinitely more numerous than I had supposed, that they didn’t look it, and that it was nothing short of a miracle how good they were.

  All these may seem but trifling things to have learned; but they are not so really. In the ordinary orbit of experience, one is rarely so detached from one’s circumstances as to be able to meet people while one remains a complete nonentity oneself. The label is rarely absent from the observer and is sometimes all that those who are with him, react to. But in France no one knew whether I was rich or poor, good or bad, educated, religious or the reverse. I was simply an English girl and people approached me under each of those characters. I was offered money, very tactfully I will admit – I was assumed to possess a maid and dine at the Carlton. I was invited – perfectly frankly – to come to Paris by a married officer, as if it was a quite ordinary proposition, and to my life-long surprise I nearly went; I was more decorously invited to be the wife of others; I was treated with great affability and some condescension by people who in England are the strictly segregated tradespeople; I had dined with an Oxford don and found him dull, with an ungrammatical Sergeant and found him thrilling; I had played hymns at Evangelistic meetings that would have sent cold shudders down academic backs; I had looked with the rapture expected of me at boxing matches and melodramatic ‘pictures’; I had listened to high regimental officers making fools of themselves over classics and humble private soldiers toiling at the same with love; and ever through the phantasmagoria, here, there and everywhere, came the people I had loved. Every day and every place, there seemed to be fresh ones and always dearer because of the background of tragedy from which the men came and the background of evanescence that showed up the women.

  Tomorrow, we would all be where? One a mannequin in London, Circe to a girls’ school in Calcutta (Circe of all people!), the Lady of the Lovely Hair would return to a husband and a grass hut in Central Africa, one would go to China as a Secretary and me to a High Table in Oxford, to chaperone the young and foolish. The cards were well shuffled and the world is wide; but the face that stood out clearest, as the Antonia weighed anchor and headed back to England, was the face of the officer who had wanted me to go to Paris and whom I had sent back to his wife:

  She said, ‘Now kiss me and be going

  My sweetest dear

  Kiss me this once and then be going

  For now the morning draweth near.’

  With that the shepherd waked from sleeping

  And spying where the day was peeping

  He said ‘Now take my soul in keeping

  Since I must go, since day is near.6

  At breakfast time we steamed into Southampton and at lunch I faced the Principal over the High Table and expressed my pleasure that the Scholarship candidates – girls of 17 and 18 from English High Schools – Dio Mio! – would be ready to be interviewed that afternoon. It is our life in Oxford.

  Notes

  1. ‘Locksley Hall’ by Alfred Lord Tennyson.

  2. This man, whom she later describes as ‘the host’, is not a member of the army but is with the YMCA.

  3. Christina may have wired to Julia and Mildred in Paris that she was not coming, but they never received the message. Mildred wrote to her mother on 12 April: ‘We expected Tiny on Tuesday and luckily I was unable to get away and go to meet her at Gare St Lazare as she did not turn up at all. Jul and I were both to have had the afternoon off that day, but neither of us could get away before 1 p.m. It is a pity she wasn’t able to come here as she would have loved seeing the [Hotel] Majestic and as it happened there was a singularly distinguished party at lunch that day.’

  4. This ‘Chief’ was the area sub-director for Le Havre, Professor Medley.

  5. ‘The Age of Wisdom’ by William Makepeace Thackeray.

  6. ‘The Wakening’, John Attye’s First Book of Airs, 1622.

  13

  L’Envoi

  Weeks afterwards the poem that follows arrived for me:

  La belle Marguerite at St Hilda’s

  You tell me of the scented hours

  When memories of a gayer land

  Come dancing o’er the trees and towers

  That make your Oxford green and grand.

  I do not blame; nay, I should laugh

  If ever I could chance to meet

  On a St Hilda’s garden path

  A Don, and with her, Marguerite.

  And I should watch you as you walk

  Along the sheltered river-side

  You pouring out high-table talk

  And shewing Magdalen’s storied pride.

  And she responds ‘How wise’ ‘How fair!’

  Then she will give a little sigh,

  As if she wanted fresher air

  And something that is not so ‘high’.

  Then, with a swift-shot, sidelong glance

  – A glance that is a shy caress –

  She whispers but the one word ‘France’

  And all your heart cried out with ‘Yes!’

  The scene dissolves as in a dream;

  A straight road, poplar-fringed and white,

  Where was the brown meandering stream,

  And you are racing through the night!

  Your pulses quicken as you ride;

  What can you answer but ‘you may’,

  As life holds out its arms so wide

  To carry you away – away?

  Marguerite is smiling through it all

  – A smile that almost is a kiss!

  Then suddenly – the curtains fall

  And you are back again to this.

  To Oxford and its perfect peace,

  To Hilda’s and her guarded ways,

  To ancient love of Rome and Greece,

  To donnish and to decorous ways.

  ’Tis evening, and, to evensong,

  The Cowley bell calls through the air;

  It is not that you have done wrong,

  But you are hardly fit for prayer.

  Is it not really more than this?

  Was even that the true, the whole?

  You’ll say ’twas something not to miss

  Yet – let me put it to your soul –

  Might not it rather miss the more

  Where all is reckoned up and told?

  Lady – I feel I only bore,

  Moreover, I am growing old.

  (PS If you – by any chance,

  Some other day, again should meet,

  That lady friend of yours from France,

  Please give my love to Marguerite.)1

  Note

  1. This poem sums up perfectly the tension Christina felt between the stately reserve of Oxford life and the whirlwind freedom of her six months in France – so perfectly that it leads to the suspicion that she may have written it herself. Her brother, in his notes on the manuscript, is quite sure that this is not the case. Christina apparently kept the original with her for forty-five years until her death, and Barrogill goes on to say: ‘The poem quoted in L’Envoi is not in the author’s handwriting and obviously was sent her by one of the friends she had made in France. I do not know who the writer was but I thank him for it.’

  Afterword

  Lying back in my deck chair, I knew that Life would never again hold anything as goo
d for me, as it had held these six months in France.

  Christina took up her position at St Hilda’s College, Oxford, and remained there for the rest of her university life. She expected a high standard of her students, who included not only those who had chosen to do Honours in Latin or Greek but also many who reluctantly studied Latin as a requirement of an Arts degree. Her teaching was thorough, but also tended towards the dramatic and descriptive.

  She never married – despite the existence among undergraduates of a ‘Society for Marrying Miss Keith’. As she grew older she became more idiosyncratic, and one college obituary described her as ‘someone about whom legends rose’. Although comfortable in the academic environment, there is a sense that her spirit still longed for something more. Maybe it had something to do with the Caithness winds and wide horizons which had shaped her early days. She looked beyond the confines of the university, and became involved in teaching inmates in Oxford’s prison in a move which surely held echoes of her Dieppe experiences. She also continued to travel. In 1925 she embarked alone on a world cruise, and wrote a series of letters to her mother, describing the ports of call, her fellow passengers and their experiences with her customary vivid colour.