The FitzOsbornes at War

by Michelle Cooper

  The first consequence of the war spreading to the Far East has been the shops running low on rice and tea. (Of course, I’ve now developed an absolute craving for rice pudding.) I also had to queue up for three-quarters of an hour yesterday to buy our fortnight’s ration of sugar. It was a good thing I had Barchester Towers with me. (How would Mrs Proudie react to rationing, I wonder? She’d probably have married Lord Woolton and seized control of the Ministry of Food by now.) On my way home, I saw another queue and automatically joined it, not even thinking to ask what it was for until I’d been standing there ten minutes. But luckily, the shop had just received a carton of tinned meat from America and as I had enough points, I bought some Spam. We’d tried it at Julia’s the night before – studded with cloves and baked with a glaze of plum jam – and it was quite nice, as long as one didn’t try to think of it as actual meat.

  At Julia’s, we somehow fell to talking about what we missed most from before the war.

  ‘Silk stockings,’ Daphne said, then corrected herself and said no, it was being able to buy new clothes whenever one wanted. ‘I can’t stand having to think about every single little purchase! I was about to buy some handkerchiefs the other day, and then I remembered I need another sturdy pair of shoes for work and I ought to save up my coupons for that. And yet, all my handkerchiefs are oily rags and completely useless and oh, the agony of indecision!’

  ‘What makes my heart sink is when Mrs Timms tells me the Hoover’s blown up or something like that,’ said Julia. ‘Because I know it’ll be impossible to get spare parts for it or buy a new one. Also, I remember when I was looking for a teddy bear for Penelope’s baby – absolutely nothing in the toy shops. Think of all the poor children, growing up with no toys!’

  Veronica said she missed proper newspapers. What with limited supplies of paper, and censorship, and most of the newspaper reporters having been called up, even The Times is down to only eight pages.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ sighed Julia. ‘And the weather reports, I miss those. I can never decide what to wear each morning.’

  Weather forecasting – or even mentioning the weather of the past week – is strictly forbidden, in case the Germans use the information to plan air raids.

  ‘Which is so ridiculous,’ Veronica pointed out. ‘All the Nazis have to do is stand at Calais and look across the Channel if they want to know about the weather in England.’

  ‘What I miss,’ I said wistfully, ‘is orange juice. I used to drink a big glass of it every morning at Milford, before the war. But the price of fruit is ruinous nowadays, if one can find any in the shops. It’s a wonder we aren’t all riddled with scurvy.’

  ‘Yes, I desperately miss lemons,’ said Daphne. ‘Gin and tonics just aren’t the same any more. And I miss lemon icing on cakes.’

  ‘Stop it,’ said Julia. ‘No talking about food, especially after I’ve just given you such a pathetic dinner. How did we get onto this subject, anyway? Who started it?’

  ‘You did, I think,’ said Daphne. ‘But better to have a good honest whinge every now and again, than to go all Mrs Miniver-ish, exclaiming over the lovely smell of sandbags, and how sweet the barrage balloons look, and how utterly thrilling the blackout is. Easy for her to gush about how wonderful the war is, when she buggered off to America long before the Blitz started.’

  ‘Well, the poor Americans know a bit about bombing now,’ I said.

  ‘Hawaii,’ mused Julia. ‘I didn’t even realise the Americans owned part of it, did you? And I thought the only islands in that part of the Pacific were the Sandwich Islands.’

  ‘Hawaii is the Sandwich Islands,’ said Veronica. ‘They’re the same thing.’

  ‘Mmm, white bread,’ said Daphne, ‘with real butter and –’

  ‘What?’ said Veronica.

  ‘Sandwiches,’ said Daphne. ‘I desperately miss smoked salmon sandwiches.’

  ‘Will you please stop talking about food!’ said Julia.

  So we talked about Daphne’s latest boyfriend, who’s one of those Americans being sent out here to tell us how to win the war. He couldn’t believe the daughter of an earl worked six days a week as an aircraft welder. ‘A qualified semi-skilled mechanic,’ Daphne corrected him, with some pride. She told him how all single women here under the age of thirty are conscripted into the army if they aren’t already doing war work, and he was absolutely horrified and said back home, they’d never even contemplate asking that of their ‘womenfolk’. Isn’t that funny, when America seems so modern and progressive? But then, I suppose they haven’t been fighting off invaders for the past two years.

  28th April, 1942

  VERY EXCITED LETTER FROM HENRY, who was meant to go back to school last Monday after the Easter holidays, but broke her thumb while trying to fix the henhouse door. Her excitement was not merely due to having an extra week off school, but also to an incident in Milford on Friday. She was walking to the village shop with a list Barnes had given her, when an army lorry pulled up outside the inn to ask directions. (I suppose it’s quite confusing for them, navigating with no road signs and having to make constant detours around bomb craters and broken bridges, but it does make one wonder how they’d manage in a war zone.) While the captain was talking to the innkeeper, a few of the soldiers climbed out of the lorry to stretch their legs, and Henry caught sight of a familiar face. She dropped her basket, shrieked out his name and rushed over to fling her arms around him.

  And it was Jimmy Smith! Alice’s son, from Montmaray! Fancy Henry recognising him after all these years! But they were best friends for most of their childhood, and it turned out he’d sent her a card at Christmas, saying he was desperate to leave home because he hates his step-father. Apparently the old man, never very amiable, has been in a permanent black mood since the navy requisitioned his fishing boat.

  Still, Jimmy couldn’t be eighteen – Henry doesn’t turn sixteen till August, and he wasn’t quite two years older than her. He doesn’t have a birth certificate, though, and he’s always been big for his age. It’s probably easy enough to join the army, if one’s determined enough. Boys are called up anyway, the moment they turn eighteen, so it’s better he goes in as a willing recruit, even if it is a few months early.

  Jimmy told Henry it was his first week with the company – which is a bomb disposal company, of all things! They were on their way to Exeter, to help defuse all the unexploded bombs after that dreadful air raid. Raids, I ought to say, as there was another one in Exeter that very night, and then several in Bath, and now the Luftwaffe has moved on to Norwich. The Baedeker Blitz, the Germans are calling it – apparently they’re trying to destroy every historical building awarded three stars in Baedeker’s guidebook to Great Britain, in retaliation for the RAF bombing German cities. And those RAF raids were probably retribution for the razing of Coventry, and the Coventry massacre was no doubt ordered by Hitler to avenge some earlier British insult to the Fatherland . . . No wonder wars go on for years and years, when the people in charge have that sort of attitude.

  Henry said that she invited Jimmy’s entire company to the gatehouse for luncheon (I’m sure Barnes would have been thrilled), but of course, they had to be on their way at once. She also wrote that Jimmy sent his love to all of us, including Carlos, so now I feel horribly guilty about not having written to Alice and Mary for ages. Poor Alice must be so anxious about Jimmy – her only child, away from home for the first time and doing such a dangerous job – and I must say, her husband doesn’t sound very pleasant. It also reminds me that I must send Phoebe something nice for her birthday next month. She loves working on that farm in Somerset and seems to be unofficially engaged to the farmer’s son, but her favourite brother is fighting in the Middle East, which is a constant worry for her.

  Really, it seems everyone is fretting about someone. Veronica had luncheon with Daniel at his parents’ house on Sunday, and came home terribly concerned about him. She thinks his work is making him ill. He’s lost weight – as if he weren’t thin eno
ugh already – and he looked as though he hadn’t been sleeping. Of course, he’s not allowed to breathe a word about his job.

  ‘But what do you think he’s doing?’ I asked Veronica.

  ‘Well,’ she said slowly, ‘I’m starting to wonder if he’s interrogating prisoners of war.’

  ‘German prisoners of war? But we don’t have any here, do we? Except a few Luftwaffe pilots who’ve been shot down, and they wouldn’t know much.’

  ‘There’s Rudolf Hess.’

  ‘Hess?’ I stared at her. ‘That deputy of Hitler’s who flew here, claiming he wanted to make peace with Britain? But he’s mad, isn’t he? Besides, that was a year ago – they’d have run out of questions by now.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ she said. ‘But there have been a lot of battles in North Africa and the Middle East lately. The Allies must have taken some Wehrmacht officers prisoner by now. They’d have valuable information.’

  ‘Well, I can’t imagine they’d be willing to share it.’

  ‘No, not at all willing.’

  ‘You can’t think . . . Veronica! The British wouldn’t torture their prisoners!’

  ‘Wouldn’t they?’

  ‘No, of course not! It’s against the Geneva Convention! The British aren’t like the Nazis –’

  But then I stopped. I was thinking of Chamberlain’s speech, that day he’d declared war on Germany, when he’d said the Nazis stood for ‘brute force, bad faith, injustice, oppression and persecution’.

  Brute force – well, we were bombing Germany just as hard as they were bombing us. Their women and children must be dying by the hundreds, too. And injustice – what about poor Anthony? What about all those innocent German refugees still locked up on the Isle of Man, and the ones shipped off to the Dominions? What about the Mosleys? Admittedly, they probably lived in much nicer conditions than the refugees, and Oswald Mosley was a truly detestable man. But if there was evidence that he and his wife were guilty of treason, then why hadn’t the two of them been put on trial? If the British government could do that – keep its own citizens in prison indefinitely without charging them with a crime – then perhaps it might be as capable of evil as the Nazis . . .

  ‘You know those houses up the road?’ Veronica said. ‘The ones everyone says have been requisitioned by the War Office?’

  ‘The ones with barbed wire round them?’

  ‘Yes. Well, a few days ago, I saw some men outside there and I could have sworn one of them was wearing a Wehrmacht uniform. He didn’t look very well, either. He was sort of hunched over and the other men shoved him into a car. I couldn’t help thinking . . . well, you know. That they’d been interrogating him, inside that house.’

  An interrogation centre, in Kensington Palace Gardens? It doesn’t seem very likely – and yet, Veronica isn’t usually given to flights of fancy. It was such an alarming idea that I hastened to reassure both of us.

  ‘But Daniel could never be involved in anything like that,’ I said. ‘How could he possibly intimidate anyone into giving up their secrets? He’s too . . . nice.’

  ‘Perhaps someone else does the interrogating, and he writes it down and translates it,’ she said. ‘I don’t know. I just know he’s unhappy. And I can’t do anything to help him, because he’s not allowed to talk about it.’

  Then she went out into the garden to vent her frustration on the dandelions that are threatening to annex our potato patch. I left her to it, because I had a week’s worth of ironing to do. Unfortunately, ironing doesn’t require much brain, so my thoughts were free to wander back to what Veronica had said – and then they drifted into areas that were even more uncomfortable.

  For instance, so much of this war seems to be about us hiding the truth from one another. I know ‘careless talk costs lives’, but sometimes all this enforced silence seems completely counterproductive. For instance, it was only a few months ago that the censors allowed the newspapers to report that Bank underground station had been bombed, even though that raid happened a year ago. The newspaper report couldn’t even say how many people were killed, even though I know it was more than a hundred (Julia was on duty that night). The Luftwaffe pilots must have understood they’d hit something big – they only had to look out the windows of their planes to see the devastation. And all the survivors and the emergency workers (and the German spies who are supposedly hiding behind every second lamp post) saw exactly what happened. By suppressing the facts, the government simply encouraged people to speculate about what else they weren’t being told. It caused ‘bad faith’ – as Chamberlain said about the Nazis. As for ‘oppression and persecution’ – well, what about last year, when the BBC announced they were banning any actors or musicians who supported the People’s Convention, which had called for a negotiated peace? The Communist newspaper, The Daily Worker, is still outlawed, even though the Soviet Union is on our side now. And it’s all very commendable for Mr Churchill to sign that Atlantic Charter with Mr Roosevelt, saying the Allies support the right of all peoples to choose their own government – but what about India? It’s a bit hypocritical to attack the Nazis for occupying France and Belgium and all those other countries, when Britain’s been occupying India for decades, and whenever Indians say they want self-government, they get thrown into prison or shot dead.

  Everyone says that now, with both Russia and America on our side, the Nazis cannot possibly win. But when the fighting eventually stops, will there be freedom and justice for all? I don’t remember it being that way at any stage of history before the war.

  14th May, 1942

  THE TELEPHONE RANG THIS MORNING as Veronica and I were getting ready for work, rushing about in our usual last-minute hunt for clean handkerchiefs and lost gloves. I was closer, so I picked up the telephone receiver.

  ‘Hello, Sophie,’ said Simon’s voice. ‘Is Veronica there? Could I speak with her, please?’

  ‘Yes, here she is,’ I said, handing over the receiver. ‘Simon,’ I explained to her, and she gave an impatient huff.

  And I didn’t even stop to wonder why he’d be ringing us at that hour. Because I’d suddenly remembered Anne had asked to borrow my copy of Ariel and I was trying to recall where I’d left it. I’d just turned to peruse our bookshelf when I heard Veronica gasp – as though Simon had reached down the telephone line and slapped her. I whirled about. Veronica was now asking a lot of crisp, practical questions – ‘When?’ and ‘Where, exactly?’ and ‘To Milford?’ But her voice had a crack running through it, and her face was starting to crumple.

  And even then, I hadn’t the slightest inkling. If I was imagining anything at all, it was that Aunt Charlotte had had an accident. She’d fallen off a horse, broken her leg, something like that.

  Then Veronica said, ‘Thank you, Simon. It’s very good of you to think of contacting us first. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it,’ and I realised the world had tilted on its axis. But I still didn’t comprehend the cataclysm until Veronica put down the telephone and held out her hand.

  ‘Sophie,’ she said, and I went to her, and she folded her arms round me.

  ‘It’s Toby,’ she said.

  I HAD TO PUT DOWN my pen there. I couldn’t – physically could not – write the next bit. And I’m not certain I can now, although at least I’ve stopped crying. Mostly.

  So. What happened next was that Veronica told me what Simon had said. Then she tried to telephone Milford, except she couldn’t get through.

  ‘But Barnes will be the first to see the telegram,’ Veronica said. ‘She’s the one who usually answers the door. She’ll know how to tell Aunt Charlotte.’

  ‘What about . . . What about Henry?’ I said, but I couldn’t get any further with that thought. Neither could Veronica.

  ‘Later,’ she said. ‘We’ll think about that later.’ We perched on the sofa, gripping each other’s hands, unable to move. We seemed to be waiting for someone to come and tell us what to do. At last, Veronica said, ‘I should go in to work.’ This idea invigorat
ed her. She jumped up, grabbed her coat and darted into her bedroom for her bag.

  ‘I’ll keep trying to get in touch with Milford from the office,’ she said. ‘Perhaps I could ring Henry’s headmistress – no, a letter’s best, don’t you think? And someone ought to get in contact with Julia. Do you want me to do that? I could call the aerodrome, too, ask to speak with his Wing Commander.’

  I managed to stand, and to nod and shake my head in the appropriate places. All I knew was that I couldn’t bear the thought of being alone in the flat, and that I wanted to keep busy. Going to work seemed the logical thing for me to do, too.

  But when I reached the office, it was even worse. Miss Halliday snapped at me for being late, and I couldn’t explain why I’d missed my bus. I simply couldn’t find the words. I’d never before had any sort of conversation with her that wasn’t about my work. I knew Anne would be sympathetic, but I didn’t want sympathy. I hadn’t earned it. I wasn’t in pain, not at that stage. I was still numb with disbelief, almost paralysed with it. My tongue had turned heavy, my limbs seemed to belong to someone else, my fingers fumbled with the easiest and most familiar of tasks. It took three attempts to thread a piece of paper into my typewriter. Then I stared at the brochure copy I’d proof-read the previous afternoon, and it might as well have been written in Swahili, for all the sense it made.

  Some time later – after I’d remembered how to use a typewriter and finished a clean copy of the brochure and dropped it into Mr Bowker’s tray and sat back down at my desk – I decided the RAF had made a mistake. It couldn’t be true, what Simon had said about Toby. Their error was quite understandable, of course. I forgave them at once. One couldn’t expect the RAF to keep track of every plane, every single pilot – especially a pilot who made a habit of ignoring regulations. And it certainly wouldn’t have been the first time the RAF had blundered . . .