The FitzOsbornes at War

by Michelle Cooper

  ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘Everything’s horrible, I know. And it’s so much worse for you and Toby.’

  ‘I didn’t have to go into the air force,’ he said. ‘We all have some choices, even in these circumstances. Anyway, what are you going to do now? Have you decided?’

  I sighed. I’d had a long chat about this very issue with our friend Colonel Stanley-Ross on our way back from Switzerland last week. (I think he’d wanted to distract me from what he termed ‘a spot of turbulence, quite routine’, but was actually our aeroplane being battered by gale-force winds, eight thousand feet above the jagged tops of the Alps.) The Colonel had suggested that Veronica and I do a secretarial course – he thought typing and shorthand would come in handy, regardless of what we ended up doing. He’d asked what skills I had, and I’d explained I didn’t have any.

  ‘Now, Sophie,’ he said. ‘What about your writing?’

  ‘Nearly everyone over the age of seven can write,’ I pointed out.

  ‘You know what I mean. Governments always seem to require enormous quantities of pamphlets and reports and manuals during a war, and someone has to write and edit them. What languages can you speak?’

  ‘English.’

  ‘And French?’

  ‘Not really. I can read it, a bit, but I can’t speak it. Veronica knows lots of languages, though.’

  ‘Latin and Cornish,’ Veronica said, from the other side of the Colonel. ‘And won’t they be a huge help if there’s a war? Assuming it’s a war involving Ancient Romans and Bretons.’

  ‘She’s fluent in Spanish, too,’ I told the Colonel. ‘Her mother used to speak it with her.’

  ‘Is that so?’ he said, looking at Veronica thoughtfully. ‘Well, the other thing to do is a first aid course. That’s always useful.’

  ‘I couldn’t,’ I said. ‘Honestly, I faint at the sight of blood.’

  ‘Can you drive?’

  ‘No,’ I said, feeling more and more useless. ‘But Veronica can.’

  ‘Oh, look!’ interrupted Veronica, pointing at the window with great excitement. ‘We must be over France now! It’s as though we’re floating across a giant map. Is that the Seine?’

  I knew that if I looked out the window and saw how high we were, I’d be sick, so I concentrated even harder on my conversation with the Colonel. ‘Besides, Aunt Charlotte is never going to let us train for anything, let alone apply for jobs,’ I told him. ‘She doesn’t even approve of girls attending school. She thinks it hinders their marriage prospects.’

  ‘Would you really want to marry the sort of man who’s intimidated by educated women?’ said the Colonel (reminding me of why we like him so much). ‘Although I do think your aunt’s attitude will change if war is declared. Everyone doing his or her bit for the war effort, you know. You might find you have more freedom than you expected.’

  ‘We’ll have to get jobs, anyway,’ said Veronica, ‘because she’s cut off our allowances. And that was simply after Toby refused to marry that Helena girl – nothing at all to do with our League of Nations trip. She’s going to throw a fit when we get back to England.’

  That was putting it mildly. Aunt Charlotte was completely incensed that we’d disobeyed her orders and sneaked off to Geneva. And that was before she even got around to reading the day’s newspaper headlines:

  ‘Princess Rebukes “Brutal” Germany’;

  ‘League Condemns German Invasion of Montmaray’;

  ‘My Life in Exile: The Tragic Tale of a Beautiful Princess (exclusive interview on page five)’;

  and so on.

  Most of our aunt’s fury was vented on Veronica. ‘I’ve never heard of anything so vulgar in all my life!’ Aunt Charlotte raged. ‘Making a public spectacle of yourself! Giving political speeches! Allowing yourself to be photographed! And this exclusive interview – unchaperoned, no doubt!’

  ‘It wasn’t an exclusive interview,’ Veronica attempted to explain. ‘There were dozens of newspapermen there –’

  ‘Dozens! Newspapermen!’ Aunt Charlotte was actually rendered speechless for a moment. When she recovered, she turned upon Simon. ‘And where were you while all this was going on, may I ask?’

  ‘I was extracting Toby from the depths of a Swiss police station!’ he retorted, returning her glare. She looked rather taken aback – until that moment, Simon had always been the epitome of deferential diplomacy around her. But now he had chosen a side – ours, not hers – and he was sticking to it. Besides, the prospect of having to fly off to battle the Luftwaffe must have made Aunt Charlotte’s wrath seem relatively inconsequential.

  ‘No, I haven’t yet decided what I’ll do,’ I told Simon, in response to his question. ‘But I do know I could never be as brave as you. Just getting into an aeroplane again . . . let alone being a fighter pilot!’

  ‘I may not end up a fighter pilot,’ he said, ‘or any kind of pilot at all. It depends on how my basic training goes. But I don’t think women in the air force do any flying – it’s mostly administration. You could do that.’

  ‘There’s no point in me aiming for any of the services,’ I said. ‘Aunt Charlotte would never agree, she’d think the uniforms too unladylike. Anyway, there’s so much to do here right now, I’ve barely had time to think about it.’

  For one thing, there’s the blackout to organise. Every single window and skylight and glass door at Milford Park needs to be covered up at night, so that not a sliver of light can escape (apparently, anything more than a pinpoint could act as a beacon for German bombers). On Friday morning, I went around with Barnes, Aunt Charlotte’s maid, to measure all the windows, and there were three hundred and seventeen of them, not including the gatehouse and the stables and the hothouses. There wasn’t enough black material in the whole of Salisbury to cover them, but we bought what we could find and have started making curtains. Meanwhile, the groundsmen are busy constructing wooden shutters for those upstairs rooms that are hardly ever used, and Parker, the chauffeur, has made little masks to fit over the headlights of the motor cars, and has painted all the running boards and mudguards white, according to the regulations.

  Then there are our evacuees, the poor little things. They’re all from the East End and have never been out of London before. One small boy had a screaming fit when he stepped off the bus and came face to face with a cow. (She’d been painted with white stripes to prevent her getting knocked over by motorists in the dark, so I suppose she looked a bit odd.) I went down to the village on Friday afternoon to help with the billeting arrangements but, fortunately, there wasn’t much to do, nearly all the children being scooped up at once by villagers who remembered our Basque refugees and were eager to help. The only ones left were four brothers who refused to be separated – the eldest said he’d promised their mum that they’d stay together, no matter what. They looked so pitiful, cardboard labels strung around their necks, gas masks dangling from their bony shoulders, all their clothes stuffed inside a single pillowcase that the eldest was hugging fiercely to his chest. In the end, they went off to the rectory with the Reverend Webster Herbert. Aunt Charlotte decided against billeting any of the children at Milford Park, of course – in fact, I suspect she agreed to be the district head of the Women’s Voluntary Service precisely so that she would be the one to get to make those sorts of decisions. She did put eight of the youngest children, accompanied by their expectant mothers, in the Old Mill House, which was recently vacated by its tenants . . . Oh, and here comes Aunt Charlotte now, back from church, and in a rotten mood by the sound of it. Will finish this later.

  AFTER LUNCHEON, WHICH WAS NOT very pleasant (the conversation, that is, not the food – although even that was not up to its usual standard, the cook having had her pastry-making interrupted by the air raid alert). It appears that at least half the evacuee children are infested with lice, and quite a few are bed-wetters. They are all desperately homesick, and crowded round Aunt Charlotte this morning, begging to be sent back to London. Also, two little girls turned out to
be Jewish, and were horrified to be offered bacon and eggs for breakfast.

  ‘Quite right,’ said Henry. ‘Eating pigs is cruel and disgusting. It ought to be illegal.’

  ‘And they refused to attend church this morning,’ Aunt Charlotte went on over the top of Henry (our aunt considers vegetarians to be almost as objectionable as Communists). ‘Poor Mrs Heggarty is at her wits’ end. She asked the girls to run up to the shop yesterday for some more sugar so she could make a pudding, and they said they couldn’t run errands because it was the Sabbath! It really is astounding, that children could be so ungrateful when they’ve been rescued from certain death. I suppose you heard the air raid siren this morning? Well, that may have been a false alarm, but one can be certain the Germans will start bombarding our cities any moment now.’ Aunt Charlotte sighed. ‘One would think the children could show a little more appreciation, being taken from those horrid slums and given a holiday in the fresh country air. But one can’t expect much else from the lower classes.’

  ‘Because the upper classes have maltreated them for so long that they’ve lost any hope of improving their condition?’ offered Veronica.

  Luckily, Aunt Charlotte, up the other end of the table, misheard her. ‘Yes, you’re quite right, it’s a thankless task, but one must do what one can for the good of the nation. I only wish Pamela Bosworth could comprehend the enormous weight of responsibility that has fallen upon WVS leaders such as myself. She was complaining yesterday about running a couple of first aid classes for the Red Cross! That’s nothing at all, a few hours a week, compared to labouring night and day to help these wretched evacuees! And all of this, of course, on top of one’s usual duties, right at the moment when half of one’s staff decides to run off . . .’

  Here she fixed Simon with a gimlet eye, which was most unfair. After all, she was the one who ordered Simon to enlist in the RAF to keep watch over Toby (not that the air force even works that way, when the two of them are at different levels of training, and could end up at opposite ends of the country). But it wasn’t Simon’s fault that he’d have to give up typing Aunt Charlotte’s correspondence, keeping track of her committee meetings and doing a thousand and one other administrative tasks for her. I just hoped she wasn’t expecting Veronica or me to take over from him.

  ‘My secretary, three of the footmen, five gardeners, a scullery maid and the stableboy, all gone!’ declared Aunt Charlotte. Then she turned to Henry. ‘And, as if that weren’t bad enough, your governess has just resigned.’

  ‘Really?’ said Henry with interest. ‘Miss Bullock’s leaving?’

  ‘Enlisted in the Auxiliary Territorial Service, if you please!’

  ‘I’d have thought she’d be a bit old to join the women’s army,’ said Henry.

  ‘Old?’ said Aunt Charlotte, frowning. ‘The woman is barely thirty.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Henry. ‘Ancient.’

  Aunt Charlotte (at least fifteen years older than that) started to puff up with indignation. I quickly passed her the butter dish, even though she hadn’t asked for it, and it seemed to work as a diversion at first. But then Toby said, ‘Well, poor old Miss Bullock should find army life pretty easy after two years of you, Hen. Perhaps the ATS could use you as a sort of one-girl training scheme, a means of toughening up new recruits and weeding out the – Ow! See what I mean?’

  ‘Henrietta, don’t hit your brother!’ snapped Aunt Charlotte. ‘You ought to know better, but apparently none of your governesses has managed to teach you any ladylike behaviours whatsoever!’ Our aunt tore her bread roll apart and began stabbing at the butter. ‘And there’s not a prayer of finding anyone else remotely suitable for the position, with things the way they are.’

  ‘Will I be going to the village school then?’ asked Henry. ‘That would be quite good, because my friend Jocko –’

  ‘Don’t be absurd,’ said Aunt Charlotte sharply. ‘Your manners are bad enough as they are. I will not have you consorting with a lot of village children, not to mention all those evacuees – and how they are all to fit into that little schoolhouse, I haven’t the faintest idea. No, Henrietta, I will have to locate a suitable educational establishment for you.’

  ‘Boarding school,’ I translated for Henry, because she was looking puzzled.

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Oh, no, I don’t think I want to go away to school, thank you. Carlos would miss me too much, and Mr Wilkin needs me to help with the chickens and cows and things, now that his son’s been called up.’

  ‘I do not recall asking for your opinion, Henrietta,’ said Aunt Charlotte. ‘My mind is made up.’

  ‘Also, there’s Estella,’ said Henry. ‘Some people think pigs don’t have feelings, but she gets very upset if I don’t have a chat with her every single day and take her for walks and –’

  ‘Henrietta! You may leave the table!’

  Henry obeyed, in the slowest possible manner, and could be heard muttering mutinously as she stomped down the hall.

  Meanwhile, Toby had poured himself more wine, and I saw Aunt Charlotte narrow her eyes as she tried to recall whether it was his second or third glass. On any other day, Simon would have jumped in at that point and steered the conversation into safer waters, but he was gloomily chasing a solitary pea around the edge of his plate. And then I remembered.

  It was his birthday.

  He was twenty-five years old today, and he’d just learned he was expected to go off and put himself in terrible danger and try to kill people, simply because a lot of politicians couldn’t get along with one another. Poor, poor Simon! How unlucky for him to have been born a boy! And poor Toby, too.

  I thought a bit more. Poor Henry, as well. And poor Aunt Charlotte. Poor all of us.

  As I said, it was a pretty depressing meal.

  7th September, 1939

  I DIDN’T HAVE TIME TO finish writing down all that happened on Sunday – in fact, I can see that keeping an accurate record of every significant event of the war is going to be impossible. That’s supposing one can actually figure out what’s significant and what’s not, when one’s in the middle of ‘living through history’, as the newspaper put it this morning. I think I will just do as I’ve always done and write about whatever interests me, and if anyone rescues my journal from the ruins of civilisation after the war is over, they will just have to pick out the significant bits for themselves. That’s assuming they’re able to decipher my abbreviated Kernetin, which is unlikely, given that Veronica and Toby are the only other people who can read our family’s secret code – and even they don’t understand my abbreviations.

  Anyway, after luncheon on Sunday, Aunt Charlotte went back to the village to do more arguing with and about the evacuees, and the rest of us held a Council of War in my bedroom. There was quite a bit of Montmaray business to sort out before the boys left. Firstly, there was our letter declaring war upon Germany, the draft of which Veronica read aloud. Toby and I nodded our approval; Henry didn’t think it was threatening enough; Simon pointed out that we needed to include how Germany had ignored our League of Nations letter of protest.

  ‘That’ll remind everyone that we really did try every diplomatic means possible to resolve this,’ he said. ‘It might help get the Americans on our side.’

  ‘I don’t think the Americans are even on Britain’s side,’ I said, as Veronica amended the letter. ‘They don’t seem to want to get involved in a European war at all, according to Mr Kennedy.’

  ‘Sooner or later,’ said Simon grimly, ‘everyone will have to choose a side.’

  ‘All right, how does this sound?’ And Veronica read the revised letter to us:

  The Kingdom of Montmaray was illegally invaded by Germany on the twelfth of January, 1937. Germany has neither apologised, nor restored the island of Montmaray to the Montmaravian people, nor responded to a request from the League of Nations to join mediated talks to resolve this issue. Therefore, on this day, the third of September, 1939, the Kingdom of Montmaray formally declares war upon G
ermany.

  ‘That’s fine,’ said Simon.

  ‘No, it’s not!’ Henry exclaimed. ‘You forgot to say that we vow eternal vengeance on Gebhardt, because he was the one responsible for bombing Montmaray and he tried to assassinate you lot in Paris! Also, put in that the brave people of Montmaray will never rest until justice is –’

  ‘Henry,’ said Veronica, ‘it’s a diplomatic missive, not one of your twopenny adventure comics!’

  ‘I’m only trying to help,’ she huffed. ‘I just think it sounds a bit soft, that’s all.’

  ‘I’ll type it up now, if you like,’ I said. ‘Does Toby need to sign it?’

  ‘That reminds me,’ said Toby, ‘I ought to give the Royal Seal to you, Veronica, for official correspondence. You and Soph can take care of all of that, can’t you, while I’m away? Um, what else . . . Oh – money.’

  ‘That’s simple,’ said Simon. ‘We don’t have any.’

  ‘I wonder what RAF officers get paid?’ Toby said. ‘Not much, I’d imagine. But what about you girls, what are you going to do?’

  ‘Well, Julia was telling us about this secretarial school in London that offers intensive courses,’ said Veronica. ‘Her friend Daphne’s cousin did one of them. It’s in Bayswater Road, so all we have to do is get Aunt Charlotte to agree to us living at Montmaray House by ourselves.’ Veronica gave a wry smile. ‘I thought I’d leave the Getting Permission bit to Sophie – she’s our best strategist. After that, we’ll just have to see what sort of jobs we can find. The Colonel said he’d help with that.’

  Simon had turned a searching look upon me. ‘But Sophie,’ he said, ‘do you really want to be in London if there are bombing raids?’

  ‘No,’ I said frankly. ‘But then, I don’t want to spend the war sitting in the countryside knitting socks for the troops, either. Especially the way my socks turn out, all lumps and no heel – although perhaps I could send them to the Germans, rather than our own side. No, the thing is, I want to do something really useful, and I think I’d have to be in London to do that.’