The FitzOsbornes at War

by Michelle Cooper

  Evening now. Two sorties today, the second involving a bit of action. That is – we ran into a German reconnaissance plane being escorted by a couple of fighters and we fired off a few rounds. Didn’t hit a thing, as far as I could tell. The Germans turned tail and fled back across the Channel the moment they spotted us, so I guess we achieved that, at least. The whole thing lasted about ten seconds. Nice day for it, though – absolutely wonderful weather here.

  Well, we’re off to the pub now – the others are trying to teach me to like beer. Unfortunately, that’s the only drink on offer, apart from a very inferior brand of Scotch. Have you seen Simon lately? Tell him to have a word with the RAF high-ups so that they ban all night patrols, would you?

  Will post this now, rather than waiting to add more tomorrow. Hope you’re well.

  Love to all,

  Toby

  P.S. Veronica not back yet? Will send this to Julia’s, just in case.

  Then from Henry:

  Dear Sophie (and Veronica, if she is there),

  How are you? I am good well. We have moved into the gatehouse now, but you can still send letters to the main house. The workmen are bilding ramps on the terrace, so that people in weelchairs can get down to the lawn. The drawing rooms look HUGE now they are empty! They are perfect for roller-skating but soon they will be filled with beds, as that’s where all the payshents will sleep. They will have fizical therapy (I don’t know what that is) in the dining room and music room, and the nurses will live on the first floor. We’ve moved all Aunt C’s furnicher and other stuff to the second and third floors. Only Barnes knows exactly where everything is, so we’ll be up a gum tree if anything happens to her.

  Estella bit one of the workmen on the leg, but he deserved it because he yelled at her and tried to kick her after she walked on some wet cement. So now I am not allowed to take her anywhere near the house when we go for swims in the lake. The workman was not hurt, he was wearing thick trowsers.

  Sophie, could you please write and tell Aunt C that the school she has found is NO GOOD! I just read the school pamflet and it sounds worse than my last school! Anyway, I am too busy here to leave. There are still big boxes in our sitting room that we haven’t unpacked (I think your stuff is in one of them). The first thing we did was get Toby’s room ready, for when he has leave. He has the second biggest room. I made a shelf for his books and put his gramofone by his bed, with all his records, so I think he will like it. I am in the attic, far away from Aunt C! You and V can have the other attic room when you visit.

  I have to go now to help Jocko. We are sharpening hayforks to use as weapons, because the Milford LDV (now called the Home Guard) only has two rifles to share between fifteen men. Barnes says they should use Estella as an attack pig. Aunt C has given them her opra opera glasses, so that the lookout can see if the Nazis are coming. If he sees any, he will give the signal, and we will put up our roadblocks and throw petrol bombs at them.

  Love,

  Henry

  P.S. If you haven’t bought my birthday present yet, I would quite like a single-barrelled shotgun and a box of cartridges. I would share it with the Home Guard, of course. Otherwise, I would like a new fishing net with extendible handle.

  P.P.S. Aunt C has just bought two Spitfires for the RAF! They cost £5,000 each! She heard Lady Bosworth had bought one, so she bought two! She is allowed to name them, so one is ‘Queen Clementine’ and one is ‘Queen Matilda’. Aunt C wanted to give the Spitfires to Toby, but I explained he already has one. But maybe he could have these as spares, or lend them to his friends.

  And then there was Veronica’s letter. If only hers had arrived through Julia’s letter slot, too . . . but getting hold of it was a rather fraught business. I’d been growing more and more anxious, as Veronica’s ‘few days’ away became a week, then ten days, and still no word from her. I even went so far as to try to contact the Colonel, with no success. Then came the mysterious summons at work this morning. Two gentlemen arrived and claimed they had come to escort me to Whitehall.

  ‘You aren’t even in uniform,’ I said, looking them up and down suspiciously. ‘Why should I go anywhere with you?’ For all I knew, they were Tyler Kent’s henchmen, sent to wreak some awful revenge on me.

  ‘We have written orders to collect Miss Sophia FitzOsborne,’ said one of them, and he handed a piece of paper to Miss Halliday.

  ‘Is this Colonel Stanley-Ross’s signature?’ she asked me.

  ‘Well,’ I said reluctantly, ‘it does look like his writing . . .’

  And when we all trooped downstairs, the black motor car parked by the front doors did seem very official. However, I made sure my car door opened from the inside, and I kept a careful watch on our route – which, it turned out, did lead directly to the Foreign Office. But this was almost as frightening as finding myself being dragged off to the East End and tossed into the Thames. What had happened to Veronica? What couldn’t they tell me over the telephone? Was she hurt, kidnapped . . . even dead?

  So I was in a complete state by the time I was ushered into a windowless room in the depths of the building. The sight of the Colonel did little to allay my fears. He was glaring at another middle-aged gentleman, this one in an army officer’s uniform, who was glaring right back. They reminded me of two tomcats I’d once seen circling each other, keeping a precise, unchanging distance between themselves as they hissed and snarled and spat.

  ‘Sophie!’ said the Colonel, wrenching his stare from the army officer to give me a bright smile. ‘Terribly sorry to interrupt your work like this.’

  ‘What’s going on?’ I asked.

  ‘Absolutely nothing to worry about,’ he said. ‘Have a seat. Oh, this is Major Beckett.’

  The Major jerked his head in my direction, and I tried to remember whether a colonel out-ranked a major. I thought so – but then, the Colonel wasn’t in the army any more, was he? He was with the Foreign Office now. I also noticed another man in khaki, much younger, hunched expectantly over a notebook.

  ‘So!’ the Major said to me in a belligerent way, as though we were already halfway through an argument. ‘Miss Veronica FitzOsborne has written a letter. In code.’ He brandished a piece of paper. ‘I have been informed that you will be able to read it.’

  I couldn’t see why Veronica would write anything work-related in Kernetin, but at least if she was writing letters, she wasn’t dead. I nodded.

  ‘You will read it aloud,’ ordered the Major. ‘My secretary will transcribe it as you speak. Is that clear?’

  I was beginning to understand why the Colonel disliked him.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘May I have the letter?’ Then, as I read the first line, my indignation spilled over. ‘This is my letter!’ I cried. ‘My own personal, private letter from my cousin, addressed to me, and you’ve opened it!’

  ‘Any material sent by persons in the Foreign Service while carrying out duties abroad is subject to security,’ said the Major, puffing out his chest. ‘May I remind you that this nation is at war, Miss FitzOsborne?’

  ‘That’s “Your Royal Highness” or “Princess Sophia” to you,’ I snapped, and the Colonel gave a little cough of barely suppressed amusement.

  ‘Please read the letter aloud, Your Highness,’ said the Major through gritted teeth.

  Fortunately, Veronica was a step ahead of everyone else, as usual.

  Dear Sophie, she wrote,

  I expect they’ll open this, even though it’s private correspondence, and make you decode it –

  I looked up to glare pointedly at the Major.

  – but I thought I should write a quick note to let you know I’m all right.

  Thank you for insisting on me packing a second evening gown, because much of my work involves interpreting conversations at dinner parties, which go on for hours, in rooms that are like saunas. I can’t say much about that, of course, but I do wish I’d had a chance to visit this city before the war. It must once have been beautiful, but now nearly every buildi
ng façade is scarred from machine-gun fire and bomb blasts, half the windows in our hotel are boarded up, and the nearest church is a burnt-out shell. As for the people: the few who are in power are fat, well-dressed and smug, and everyone else is starving, homeless and terrified. The Americans ought to come over here so they can get an idea of how an entirely Fascist Europe would look. Perhaps then they’d stop dithering about entering the war.

  Anyway, I’m sorry this trip is taking so long, but I can see I’m needed here for another week, at least. None of the others speak much Spanish, you see, which can be a bit frustrating – for me as well as them. There was one particularly obtuse army officer who questioned absolutely everything I interpreted. Once I told him our waitress had said that a certain route out of the city was closed, but he insisted on sticking to his plan, and of course, it turned out a bridge had collapsed and we had to take a three-hour detour. Luckily he’s gone back to England now.

  I glanced up. The Major had turned a peculiar shade of blotchy purple.

  I should be home very soon, and in the meantime, please don’t worry about me. I do hope that you are well and Toby is all right. Regards to Julia and Rupert.

  Love,

  Veronica

  ‘You see?’ burst out the Major, whirling upon the Colonel. ‘Exactly as I suspected, clear evidence of Communist partisanship!’

  ‘Really,’ drawled the Colonel, raising an eyebrow, ‘I fail to see anything of the sort. All I heard was a brief description of an unnamed city that’s recovering from a terrible war.’

  ‘Only a Communist would use inflammatory words like “starving” and “homeless”!’

  ‘Oh, is that what’s upset you?’ The Colonel tilted his head in an attitude of mock sympathy.

  ‘It’s the general tone of . . . of disrespect!’ The Major’s face was almost the colour of a blackberry by now. ‘And what about calling the Falangists “fat”? What if one of the Spanish authorities had got hold of this letter? It could have jeopardised the entire mission!’

  ‘The letter was sent in the diplomatic bag, so how could they have got hold of it? And if they had, how would they have been able to read it? After all, your intelligence people couldn’t.’

  The Colonel must have won the deciding point in whatever game they were playing, because he then reached for his hat.

  ‘Come along, Sophie, I’ll give you a lift back to your office.’

  ‘Yes . . . Well . . . I’ll have that document back, thank you!’ said the Major, waving his hand at me in a peremptory way. But I’d already tucked the paper inside my jacket.

  ‘It’s my letter,’ I declared, and I bolted out the door before he could stop me.

  ‘Well done, Sophie,’ said the Colonel, looking very pleased with himself, once we were safely settled in his motor car.

  ‘What on Earth was that about?’ I burst out, in a rush of uninhibited relief.

  ‘Oh, just a bit of healthy rivalry between the army’s intelligence people and the Foreign Office,’ he said.

  ‘There doesn’t seem to be much “intelligence” about it,’ I said. ‘You do realise you’re supposed to be fighting the Nazis, not one another?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, pretending to look chastened. ‘Yes, you’re absolutely right.’

  ‘I don’t suppose you’ve seen Veronica?’ I asked.

  ‘No, I’ve been busy elsewhere,’ he said. ‘But she should be back soon, and she really is doing a marvellous job. Don’t pay any attention to old Beckett, he’s just jealous the Foreign Office is having more success than the army. Apparently Veronica got our man an audience with one of Franco’s ministers – turns out he’d been a friend of her grandfather.’

  ‘I still think the whole thing sounds very dangerous.’

  ‘Well, when she gets back, you can tell her not to go on any more trips abroad,’ he said mildly – knowing perfectly well that diverting Veronica from a course she’s set upon is like trying to turn back the ocean.

  10th August, 1940

  I FEEL A BIT UNEASY, writing this in Kernetin – even in my abbreviated and newly modified form. I’m certain the army intelligence people made a copy of Veronica’s letter, and now that they have its translation, they could easily work out most of the code, if they cared to make the effort. Still, the British government isn’t very likely to be interested in my ramblings, and who else would bother to search for my journal, which I keep hidden away so carefully? I suppose it could be of some, very limited, value to the Nazis when they invade – but then, we’ll all be dead or in prison camps, so it won’t matter very much.

  Does everyone do this, I wonder? Dwell upon the worst imaginable outcome in horrifying detail, in the superstitious belief that this will stop it happening in reality? Or that if it does happen, it won’t come as too much of a shock? No, it’s probably just me.

  But it’s no wonder I worry so much about everything, when I have Veronica telling me all sorts of hair-raising tales. Her trip to Spain, for example, to stop the Duke and Duchess of Windsor being kidnapped by Nazis!

  ‘What?’ I gasped. ‘You were dealing with Nazis?’

  ‘No, no,’ said Veronica, calmly unpacking her suitcase. ‘Well, not directly, although there were certainly a lot of them wandering about Madrid. No, we were just trying to dissuade the Spanish authorities from helping the Nazi agents.’

  Then she explained that after Paris had fallen to the Nazis, the former King Edward the Eighth and Mrs Simpson – now the Duke and Duchess of Windsor – had fled to the south of France, and then driven across the border to Barcelona. A ship was meant to be arriving there to evacuate some British diplomats, but there was confusion as to whether anyone actually wanted the Duke – and especially his wife – back here in England. Apparently the British royals were furious about the prospect. By the time they’d decided to allow the Duke to come here, he’d gone on to Madrid. And that’s where he really started causing trouble – spending all his time with pro-Nazi Spanish aristocrats, talking loudly about how wonderfully the Nazis had transformed Germany and how Britain ought to sign a peace treaty with them.

  ‘Well, you can just imagine what Churchill thought of that,’ said Veronica. ‘Oh, and the Duke was making all sorts of personal demands, too – insisting on a job of “first-class importance” if he returned to England, and that his wife be titled “Her Royal Highness”, and so forth. But he’s still technically an officer of the British Army, so Churchill threatened a court martial if the Duke didn’t obey orders. And eventually, they packed up and went to Portugal as they’d been told.’

  Veronica shook out a very crumpled chiffon evening gown, bearing signs of repeated hand-washing. ‘I don’t think this is fit to be worn ever again,’ she remarked.

  ‘You have lots of other gowns,’ I said impatiently. ‘Go on, what happened in Portugal?’

  ‘Well, the British Ambassador had organised for them to stay at a hotel, but they insisted on moving in with some local banker, who just happened to be a known Nazi agent. By then, Churchill had decided the Duke should be sent to the Bahamas as Governor. It was so far away, how could he possibly get into any trouble there? But it would take time to organise a ship, and meanwhile, that idiot Ribbentrop – you know he’s Germany’s Foreign Minister now – hatched this plot to get the Duke back to Spain. Once he was there, the Duke could be fed a lot of Nazi propaganda and “hold himself in readiness”.’

  ‘In readiness for what?’

  ‘Why, to become King of England again, of course. And then he could appoint Oswald Mosley as Prime Minister, and Britain could surrender to Germany.’

  ‘But . . . that’s insane!’

  ‘Perhaps, but Hitler agreed with Ribbentrop’s plans. And the Duke did send a telegram to the King, telling him to dismiss Churchill and the War Cabinet, and set up peace negotiations with Germany.’

  ‘I’m surprised the Germans would need to kidnap the Duke,’ I said. ‘It’s a wonder he didn’t just waltz off to Berlin of his own accord.’
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  ‘Well, that’s where the combined efforts of army intelligence and the Foreign Office came in, trying to persuade the Duke to stay in Lisbon till his ship arrived. And then another lot of us was in Spain, trying to convince the Spanish government to stay out of the whole thing.’

  ‘And you succeeded?’

  ‘Or the Germans failed, one or the other. Anyway, the Windsors are on their way to the Bahamas now.’

  ‘Goodness!’ I said, sitting back. ‘To think I was here in London, teaching Julia how to boil an egg, while you were doing all that!’

  ‘I’d rather have been with you,’ she said. ‘The food would have been a lot better . . . Oh, but I don’t mean to complain. Really, I was grateful we had anything at all to eat. It was so sad, Sophie, you’ve no idea. We’d drive past all these bombed villages, no crops planted, people huddled in make-shift shelters and eating weeds – and there isn’t any effort whatsoever being made to rebuild industries in the cities. Franco seems determined to drag the entire country back into the Middle Ages.’

  ‘Did you go anywhere near the Basque country?’

  ‘No, Madrid was the furthest north I went. We flew there from Lisbon.’ She closed the now-empty suitcase and set it on the floor. ‘Anyway, what’s new here?’

  ‘Not much. We had a letter from Alice in Fowey. Her brother-in-law took his fishing boat to Dunkirk and rescued five soldiers – it was awfully heroic – and now Jimmy’s longing to be old enough to join up. Oh, and a parcel arrived for you from America. I think it’s from Jack Kennedy.’

  ‘You could have opened it.’

  ‘I didn’t like to.’ I didn’t mention that the censor already had (and not done a very neat job of rewrapping it, either). I went to find it.