by Weldon, Fay
The Songfords lived in Ulden, in a solid Edwardian house called The Poplars. It had a good-sized garden, a wind-break of poplar trees, a swing for the children, a tennis court, large attics. a gardener, a daily, a pantry full of bottled fruits and jams, living rooms with chintzy curtains and squashy sofas, Persian rugs, Chinese carpets, much bamboo furniture, Eastern bric-à-brac, mementos of the Indian army from which Grace’s father had been cashiered, and one small bookcase containing the Encyclopaedia Britannica in twelve volumes, some guide books, an atlas, two novels by Dornford Yates, and three thrillers by Sapper and the Light that Failed by Rudyard Kipling.
It was to this house that Marjorie was evacuated, in 1940, coming on a train which stopped in Ulden by mistake. As for Chloe, she was on the train by mistake and it was only by this first fortunate accident that she and her mother Gwyneth, on her way to a domestic job at the Rose and Crown, were able to alight at Ulden.
When we are children, so much happens by mistake. As we grow older, and see a pattern to things, we are obliged to agree that there is no such thing as an accident. We make tactless remarks because we wish to hurt, break our legs because we do not wish to walk, marry the wrong man because we cannot let ourselves be happy, board the wrong train because we would prefer not to reach the necessary destination.
As for a train which stops at the wrong station, disgorges sixty children at the wrong place, and changes the course of all their lives, what are we to say to that?
10
Picture the scene now, that autumn morning in 1940, as the train which carries Marjorie and Chloe approaches Ulden. Grace is waiting at the station with her father who is uncrowned king of the village, a princess dressed like a prince, in trousers and sweater, contrary to her mother’s spoken request, but in accordance with her mother’s deepest wishes. Her mother wanted a boy.
Chug-chug, puff-puff, across the flat fields. It’s like a scene from Toy Town. The day is hot, and calm, and blue. There’s panic in London, but not here. War clouds may be lowering somewhere over to the South East, but here they’re nicely silver-lined with protected farm prices and agricultural subsidies. Full employment in the area at last, laying run-ways for Spitfires on Ulden Common. And out of that cloud, clear into the sunshine, comes the train with two coaches. Its white smoke drifts prettily over the fields, where they’re taking out the daffodil bulbs and laying down potatoes.
Inside the Toy Town train, the picture is not so pretty. The coaches (all that could be spared) are crowded with terrified, weeping, rioting, vomiting and excreting children. There are no WCs. The floors are aswill. These are the evacuees from London. They have been briskly labelled and sent off for their own safety, out of the way of Hitler’s bombs. Many haven’t been able to say good-bye to their parents, most don’t know what’s happening to them. Quite a few would certainly rather be dead than here.
Little Chloe, of course, sits well-behaved and upright amidst the uproar, with her hand firmly in her mother Gwyneth’s. Mothers are clearly a precious commodity on this particular train. And as for Gwyneth, she is feeling quite faint with distress. She is surrounded by misery and filth and deprived of her usual tools for coping – water, soap, bucket, and cloth.
Moreover, being on this train by accident, having mistaken Platform 7 for Platform 8, Gwyneth has been separated from two trunks in which are all her worldly possessions, neatly packed, folded, and interlarded with tissue. What now most preoccupies her is that in the elasticated silk pocket of the smaller trunk, along with the birth certificate and the careful roll of her husband’s tiny landscapes, is his medical record card. This she stole from the hospital where he died, and this she is always fearful will be discovered by someone in authority and used as evidence of her crime. All the same, she has not been able to bring herself to destroy it. Now she wishes she had. Supposing the trunk is searched, the card found, and herself sent to prison? What will happen to Chloe?
What will happen to Chloe? It has been the theme song of Gwyneth’s life for the past ten years.
Gwyneth resolves to destroy the card the minute the trunk reaches the Rose and Crown. She is starting a new life as barmaid and general domestic help, in return for board and lodging for herself and Chloe, and five shillings a week pocket money.
It is as well Gwyneth is so fond of cleaning, for being a widow with a child, this is the direction in which her future clearly lies.
11
Opposite Chloe and Gwyneth, sits a plain, thin, tearful child, with pale, deep-set, slightly squinty eyes peering out from beneath a creased brow. Marjorie. She has a mass of frizzy hair, which is kept back from her forehead by a battery of brown metal hair clips. She is not accustomed to the language and behaviour of the other children in the coach. Until recently Marjorie has lived a protected life. Then her father Dick upset everyone by volunteering for army service and her mother Helen took her away from her private school in the country, and enrolled her in the local state school which promptly closed. Now, re-opened for just one week, the school has been evacuated, and Marjorie with it.
Or, as the lovely, highly-principled Aryan Helen, Marjorie’s mother, wrote to her handsome, tormented, highly-principled Jewish husband, Marjorie’s father, only the night before:
‘We’re all in this together. It’s best for Marjorie to take her chance with the others. I believe she’s going somewhere in Essex. The country air should be good for her spots – I’m afraid London aggravated them shockingly. I’ll be down to see her as soon as possible, though you know what the trains are like, and actually I’ve offered the house as a hospitality centre for Polish Officers and am acting as hostess, so you can imagine how busy I’m going to be. Don’t worry – I’ve packed all your books and papers safely away in the attics – and cleared the library for the dancing. Poor fellows – what a dreadful business this war is: they deserve all the relaxation they can get.’
Dick, posted somewhere in Scotland to supervise the manufacture of Wellington Boots for the WRAC (the Women’s Royal Artillery Corps), can hardly object to anything. If Helen did not consult him before removing Marjorie from her school, neither did he consult Helen before joining the army. He just came home one evening, late at his own party, and said, ‘I’ve done it’ and the next day he was gone. What kind of conduct was that?
If Helen has put his books and papers up in the attics, where the roof leaks, then it is his fault for not attending to the attic roof (as she has repeatedly asked him to do) but going to political meetings instead. If she wants to be unfaithful on the library floor (dancing always makes her sexy, and they both know it) or even on his bed, or even in the corridors in front of the very servants, then she will, and he deserves it, and he knows it. For Dick slept with a friend’s wife – the second woman he’d ever made love to – the night Marjorie was born, and the friend’s wife, in a flurry of either guilty malice or boredom, told Helen. All this Dick knows, and so is helpless.
Dick scarcely knows his daughter Marjorie. First she had a nanny, then she went away to school. He assumes she will be all right. She is not pretty, and he is sorry for her, but now the Army is his life. He can fight Hitler. Helen he cannot fight.
As for Helen, she simply cannot think what she did, during all those lovely laughing years of childless marriage, to deserve Marjorie. Who is plain and who fawns, and at whose birth she lost her husband.
Now little Marjorie, labelled, rejected and forlorn, sits and stares at Chloe’s small gloved hand lying so securely in Gwyneth’s, and starts to cry. Chloe, longing for the safety of a label round her neck, sickened by the noise and the smell of vomit and worse, begins to cry as well.
Gwyneth begins to cry too. She takes her spotless handkerchief from her pocket and dabs her daughter’s face, and her own, and Marjorie’s too, seeing it to be there.
And so the train arrives in Ulden. It was, as we know, meant to go on to Egden, and only the relief train on Platform 6 to stop at Ulden, but the driver has misread his instructions.
&nb
sp; 12
On the platform, Grace’s father Edwin heads the welcoming committee. He is a stout bald man with a braying laugh and what used to be known as a fine military bearing. That is, he stands with his shoulders back and rigid, and his chin high. Thus bold and brave, properly pulled together, showing no sign of weakness and distress, he held out his hand for the cane his father wielded when his school reports were bad – as they always were – thus standing he took the proud parades of his later life, and thus he stood when the Court Martial dismissed him from the Service he had been born and bred to. It is an unhealthy way to stand, thus rigidly, and his back is often bad.
Edwin is nearing fifty now, and has made, he believes, a good adjustment to civilian life, although still, sometimes, even after fifteen years, he finds it strange to wake in a chintzy house to soft female voices, and not to the clanking of boots and the rattling of weapons and commands. Then he will lie late in bed, desperate, waiting for death, with Esther clattering the breakfast dishes more and more frantically below.
His eyes are blood-shot, hooded and close together in a narrow face. His nose is long and thin: he has a handle-bar moustache which bisects his face with its sprouts of coarse reddish hair, and droops to hide the sensitivity of his mouth.
He is a busy man, though he is unemployed. Cashiered he may be – and the village knows it – but gentry he is, and he has his village obligations to fulfil. The flower shows, the fêtes, the sense of service, principles uttered in the pub. He has endless trips to London to make, to see the London lawyers who stand between him and an inheritance. He has his badly invested capital to worry about, and the problem of never eating into it, in the face of his wife’s alleged extravagance. He has his own quite violent fits of anxiety and depression to cope with. Now he has the Home Guard to organize. And every night, he has the Rose and Crown to visit, where he holds court in the Cosy Nook from eight-thirty to closing time. He holds his liquor well, like a gentleman. Or so he believes.
His wife knows otherwise, but says nothing. Grace is Edwin’s only child. It is a source of sorrow to both of them that there are no more children, but they have reached, these past years, such a state of sexual deadlock, so how could there be?
As for Grace, standing on the platform, she is in a bad temper.
13
Grace does not want to share her home with an evacuee. And she is disappointed in her father for so meekly succumbing to the authority which says this is what she must do. She had hoped, moreover, to be sent away to boarding school when she was twelve. Now, with the advent of the war, and her father’s inheritance even less likely to materialize, and his shares tumbling, it seems she will never be allowed to leave home.
And if she has to attend the village school – and it looks as if she will – her humiliation, she knows, will be profound. She doubts her own scholastic capabilities, not without reason, and suspects the grubby riff-raff may well do better than her at sums and spelling.
Grace is a lean, pretty, arrogant child, with a wide face, regular features, green eyes, silky red hair and the creamy matt complexion which sometimes goes with it. She resembles neither her father nor her mother. Nervousness makes her rude, and frustration makes her desperate, and for as long as she can remember, she has felt nervous and frustrated.
Thus the conversation goes that morning, at The Poplars, over a breakfast lovingly if clumsily prepared by Esther Songford, Grace’s mother, Edwin’s wife. Esther serves porridge, eggs, bacon, kidneys, toast, mushrooms – she was up early picking them so at least they are fresh, even though they are over-cooked – and Jackson’s Breakfast Tea.
Rationing, of course, so far, affects only the mass of the urban proletariat. The well-to-do find their eating habits unaffected. It takes more than a paper war to alter the servile habits of grocers. The real one, presently, is to turn them into all-powerful tyrants, only too happy to be revenged upon their once mean and arrogant betters. In the meantime, it is not shortage of food but short tempers which makes breakfast at The Poplars an uneasy affair. Grace is pink with fury.
Edwin Stop sulking, Grace. We’re having an evacuee and that is that. We have to set an example.
Ester She’s not sulking, Edwin. She’s just a little quiet. Please don’t shout at her. Grace dear, eat up your porridge and don’t aggravate your father.
Grace It’s burnt.
Esther Only a little bit, dear.
Edwin (Sneering) Like the curate’s egg, I suppose. Good in parts.
Esther I’m afraid it’s the saucepans, Edwin. They’ve worn so thin. They really must be replaced. I’m ashamed to ask Mrs Dover to clean them.
Esther has been asking for new saucepans for seven years, in vain. Edwin controls the household money flow with stringent care. He is not so much mean, as fearful of sudden penury; living in dread of military, social or natural cataclysms which will sweep away pension, profits and property overnight. He fears the working classes, and the creeping evil of socialism, seeping under the doors of privilege like flood water.
And as Edwin walks the country lanes, swinging his blackthorn cane, the very model of a healthy-minded Englishman, he is not raising his face to meet God’s good sun, as you might think, but sniffing the air for the first scent of the enemy’s Poison Gas – expected to envelop Britain at any moment.
Edwin A bad workman blames his tools, Esther. I’m afraid new saucepans are out of the question now, of course. There’s a war on. The metal is needed for guns. I’m surprised you should be so unpatriotic as to suggest it.
Esther Oh dear. I didn’t think of it like that. I’m so sorry. I’ll eat your porridge, Grace.
And Grace pushes her plate over, without gratitude. Mothers, in her view, are born to scavenge, to incorporate the evidence of their culinary shortcomings.
Grace Me? Share with some snotty-nosed urchin from the East End! Molly (a friend) says they had evacuees at her aunt’s and they brought fleas and nits and wet the bed and never take off their vests at night and smell. You can’t, daddy. Not in my house.
Esther Our house, Grace. We’ll manage somehow. Think how much you’ve got to teach them. You must pass on your good fortune. Poor little things, separated from their mothers. Some of them have never even seen a sheep or a cow, let alone a farmyard, in all their lives. Daddy’s quite right. We must all pull together, Grace dear, even the children.
Grace Why?
Esther To defeat Mr Hitler.
Grace Well I hope he wins.
Has she gone too far? Yes.
Edwin Grace, go to your room.
Grace But I haven’t finished my breakfast.
She goes, all the same. She is frightened of her choleric father, especially at breakfast time. So’s Esther.
Edwin Esther, you have let that girl get totally out of control. Let’s hope an evacuee brings her down a peg or two. I’ve put your name down for a girl.
Esther Oh. I was rather hoping for a boy to help with the garden.
Edwin Garden! There isn’t going to be a garden from now on. There’s going to be a vegetable patch. I’m afraid this war’s put paid to your flower shows and your prizes, Esther. No time for your frills and fancies any more.
Esther reels.
For Esther, having more sense of future than her husband, spends much time working in the garden, which flourishes in her care. The soft lawns, the neat flower-beds, the many roses – which make Edwin wheezy – have been her concern, her territory, for many years. Now it seems that Edwin feels at liberty to invade it.
Invasion is most surely in the air. And indeed, throughout the war years, the battle is to rage to and fro across the garden, sometimes Edwin’s onions and carrots winning, sometimes Esther’s herbaceous borders.
Esther, this first morning of declared hostilities, is most upset. She goes into the kitchen and tries not to cry into the washing-up water as she scrapes the burnt porridge saucepan clean.
Who is this Esther, Edwin’s undoubted wife, Grace’s alleged mother, Marj
orie and Chloe’s second mama? She is a vicar’s daughter. She has a sense of service, and the feeling that for the children’s sake, at least, she should remain brave, cheerful and uncomplaining. And like her husband she suffers from a sense of loss. He lost his pride and his career. She lost her faith, waking up one morning to the dour sense of her father’s dislike of her, the knowledge of his preference for his sons, and the feeling that God, even if He did exist, was certainly not good. These days it is Edwin, and only Edwin, who makes her unhappy, but he, like her father, is the fact of her existence, and she has become used to it.
She married late, at thirty, after her parents died and left her a little money. She has a faded prettiness, rather large, rather popping eyes, a lot of rather wispy hair, a lax skin. She works unceasingly, and inefficiently, about the house.
She sleeps apart from her husband because after Grace was born (and it was a difficult birth and she had hoped for a boy) intercourse was painful. Their physical union had been, at the best of times, distasteful to her, and difficult for him.
These days, just sometimes, when Edwin has drunk rather more than usual at the Rose and Crown, he will come into her bedroom and face both her distaste and his own probable inadequacy, and despise himself afterwards for his animal nature, and hardly be able to look her in the eye in the morning; the mother of his child so abused and debased, and he himself responsible for it. He would knock himself down, if he could, for the cad he is, and failing that, is ruder than ever to her.
