It turned out, at least from the look on Billy’s face, to be very all right.
* * *
Later that afternoon the series of newly installed bells rang through the house, a signal for everyone to assemble once again in the main hall, where they found Major Folkestone and Miss Browne seated on a small podium awaiting them.
‘Quiet, please, everyone!’ Major Folkestone called over the hubbub. ‘Quiet please!’
Everyone fell to silence and turned to face the major, who was placing some sheets of paper on a lectern in front of him.
‘Good, thank you – good,’ he began. ‘First of all a formal welcome to Eden Park, and I hope you have all settled in. Now – I won’t beat about the bush. This isn’t a holiday camp or a hotel, so I’m not going to give you any tips about where you can swim or ride a horse or get your hair done or anything like that. Like Miss Browne and me, you are all here to undertake vital tasks, at a very important time. I don’t need to remind you that we stand on the brink of war. I doubt very much if we’ll go another week without a formal declaration and the commencement of hostilities.’ He paused. ‘This might well be the most critical phase in our island’s history since the Spanish Armada. We face a very dangerous foe, and if and when war is declared we also face the very real possibility of an invasion. We’ve seen the invaders off before, of course, and I have no doubt we shall see this chap off as well, but—’ There was an outbreak of applause. ‘No – no applause, please. Very kind, I’m sure,’ the major said with a nod, holding his hand up. ‘But I’m not addressing troops here – I’m not trying to rally you all to the call. I’m simply trying to put you in the picture. So that you may understand why you have all been brought here at considerable trouble and expense, because if and when the balloon goes up you can put fun and games right out of your minds.’
He cleared his throat.
‘You’ve all been hand-picked, as you know, because you’re said to be good at what you do. Just as importantly, you are also deemed to be trustworthy, loyal and utterly reliable. Good qualities – admirable ones, and when you understand the nature of the work we shall all be engaged upon you will see why it is so important that everyone here is trustworthy, loyal and utterly reliable. The operations in which we shall all be involved are classed as top security. You will be working for the government under the auspices of the War Office. In other words, the work we shall all be doing is classed as Top Secret. This means that each of you is required to sign the Official Secrets Act. For those of you who may be unclear as to what precisely signing the OSA involves, it simply means you are sworn to secrecy about every single facet of your work and existence here, as well as every single fact about Eden Park itself and any information that may come your way while you are engaged in the activities for which you are employed. Should you break the trust invested in you by revealing to any other person the nature of your work, the identity of your colleagues, or any information you have gathered in the course of your work, then if apprehended, charged and found guilty you will suffer the punishment that all traitors suffer.
‘Now I want this firmly understood in case in the excitement or the heat of the moment you find yourself forgetting the importance of your work and its confidentiality. Loose tongues cost lives – and never more so than in this case, in the work we shall all be doing here – since we shall be dealing with the lives of agents and operatives. This place is so important it is as if you were at the Front itself.
‘Finally, I have to tell you that now you are all here, now that you have accepted the work offered to you by our field officers, there is no turning back. You may only leave here once you have obtained Special Leave, but even if you do you will still be bound by the OSA in effect for life. That means that if you commit treachery thirty years after leaving here and are discovered, believe me, you could still pay the ultimate price. As far as your day-to-day existence goes, no one leaves the grounds without a Special Pass, and that pass can only be issued by myself. So I strongly recommend you keep on the right side of me, especially in the case of compassionate leave – or passionate leave as I understand it is more commonly known.’
When the ripple of nervous laughter had died down, Major Folkestone continued.
‘You have all been assigned to a section, and each section has its Section Head to whom you are immediately answerable. But finally all roads lead to me, so if there are any special problems, tell your Head of Section, and they will tell me. Good luck to you all.’
Major Folkestone sat down to a round of applause that while respectful was more than a little muted as the assembled company looked round at each other, all of them at last facing the facts of their new existence.
‘Cripes,’ said Billy, when Marjorie and Kate had put him in the picture. ‘Will I have to sign it as well?’
‘You could do, Billy,’ Marjorie replied. ‘I mean you are here for the duration, aren’t you?’
‘Crikey,’ Billy said again. ‘This is exciting, at least it’s really exciting, not just not exciting like it has been up until now.’
‘Major Folkestone told me that if there is a war, he’s got some special tasks earmarked for you, Billy.’
‘What?’ Billy asked incredulously. ‘What sort of things?’
‘I don’t know,’ Marjorie said with a look to Kate. ‘He wouldn’t tell me. It’s too Top Secret.’
For ever after Marjorie remembered the look in Billy’s eyes when he realised that even though he was too young to carry a rifle, he was not too young to play a part in the defence of his country.
Three days later, on 3 September, slightly earlier than predicted by Major Folkestone, Neville Chamberlain broadcast the Declaration of War. Everyone at Eden Park heard the broadcast, and at its closing stood up for the National Anthem. In the silence that followed they listened to Major Folkestone order what was now a platoon of soldiers stationed in the house to lock all gates to the Park, and to mount constant armed sentry patrols, while from the windows of their bedrooms on the third floor of the great house its new inmates gazed out at the countryside beyond the estate walls, a land now seemingly forbidden to them, but a land whose freedom they must do everything in their power to preserve.
‘One bond unites us all, to wage war until victory is won and never to surrender ourselves to servitude and shame, whatever the cost and the agony may be …’
Winston S. Churchill
Part Two
ENGLAND AT WAR
Chapter Eleven
The weather was cold and bleak, and Poppy Tetherington was no more. She had ceased to exist. She had vanished from the scene, leaving behind only rumour. Word was that her marriage to the late Lord Tetherington, although brief, had been such an unmitigated nightmare that on learning of his death she had upped sticks and fled from the hell that was Mellerfont, headed it was said for America, and no doubt the infinitely preferable company of her parents.
Not that anyone cared very much, the fact being that the now missing Poppy Beaumont had few friends and had attracted next to no attention in the Society in which her mother had been so anxious for her to move. As Lady Tetherington, so short and uncharismatic had been the tenure of Basil Tetherington’s timid, bespectacled young wife at Mellerfont, that most who had visited the gloomy Victorian pile would barely have been able to put a face to her, let alone describe her character. The only gatherings she might have been expected to host had been the shooting parties from which Basil had largely excluded her, and as for venturing out, Poppy had attended one private dance and a couple of large dinner parties at similarly disposed houses where she had spent the time either being ignored or listening dutifully to her fellow diners’ post-prandial complaints about their husbands.
Poppy’s disappearance from the social calendar, therefore, went unsurprisingly completely unremarked. Besides, at this particular moment in England’s history, its inhabitants had things of far greater import to occupy their minds than the fate of a dead aristocrat’s unmemorable youn
g American wife. This suited Jack Ward’s game plan admirably, as well as that of Cissie Lavington, the woman to whom Jack sent Poppy to be ‘turned around’, as he called it.
Cissie Lavington was in her early middle age, good-looking in an even-featured handsome way, her strong face marred only by the black silk eye-patch she sported over her left eye.
‘Shot in the eye by mistake while horsing around,’ Jack had told Poppy in advance. ‘Lucky not to have been killed as it happens. Not that she’d tell you that. She treats the whole thing as a huge joke. It just happened as the result of a bit of roughhousing.’
Happily she and Poppy took to each other at once, Poppy unaware that many of her pupils had found Miss Lavington altogether too daunting for words, thrown off balance at the outset by this tall, statuesque woman with her remarkable bone structure, lustrous auburn hair and her chainsmoking habit, the Black Russian cigarettes she so enjoyed housed in a long ivory holder, a prop she used to help describe any salient point she was intent on making.
‘They certainly dressed you up well, my dear,’ she had remarked when Poppy and she first were introduced. ‘Wish I could afford rags like that. But on my pay all I can afford is drab.’
Poppy smiled at the obviously quite intentionally absurd comment, as the woman doing the complaining looked as though she had just stepped straight from the catwalk.
‘Manners are the first thing we’re going to tackle, my dear,’ Cissie had continued. ‘Not that one’s manners aren’t as good as gold, doncher know, but there’s the rub, d’you see? Your manners I bet are more than a mitey too good, and all that. What we got to teach you, my lady, is disdain. You got to learn to look as though you have a bad smell under yer nose. Only people good enough for you are the people who are as good as you – and the Lord only knows they’re few and far between, doncher know? Got it? You know the sort of beast I’m talking about. And that’s the sort of beast we have to turn you into. Gawd help you. The sort of deeply horrid person that as far as I can twig poor you was married to. Yes? The sort of person who’s so busy despising the rest of humanity that his woods become trees, and his trees become woods, and he wants to get rid of all those he considers to be beneath him, doncher know.’
‘Quite correct,’ Poppy agreed, after a short pause, because it did seem to sum up Basil really rather well.
‘Does one remember why one took on and married this beast in the first place?’
‘One does,’ Poppy returned gravely. ‘One thinks,’ she went on, catching on to the game that Cissie Lavington was playing, ‘one remembers, that is, that one’s mother had been such a success during the Season, unlike one, that one had to end off one’s months as a debutante having a wedding to make her feel she had been the great success she had undoubtedly been, most especially since she was leaving for America and all her friends in her luncheon club would have been disappointed if the whole thing hadn’t ended in a titled alliance, d’you see?’
Perhaps because Poppy kept such an admirably straight face during her speech, Cissie Lavington found this unbearably funny, as she was meant to do, and dissolved into paeans of laughter, involving much spilling of ash down her silk blouse, before starting again.
‘Well done! I say, you have cottoned on very quickly. I don’t suppose you spent much time with that ghastly husband of yours rolling round in fits of glee, eh? Bet not. Fascists do take themselves so very seriously, don’t they now? Added to which, the female beauties of the same inclination are too damn’ busy looking after their faces to crease ’em up in smiles et cetera. So besides developing a look as if one has this most ghastly smell sous le nez you will have to learn to grow an iron face as well. Not a smile must pass the lips, let alone a laugh be heard. All helps with the disdain. The Colonel tells me you didn’t have much to do with the other lot, that one was rushed away to one’s wing whenever it was time for them to roll out the old Swastika. All helps, doncher know, if they can’t remember who the hell the beast was married to – not that they’ll recognise you when you’re done here. No, once you are done here, the horrid little housepainter will be extending a personal invitation to you to join him at one of his ever-so-lovely rallies, that I promise you.’
Cissie smiled, stubbed out her now finished cigarette and immediately lit up a fresh one, selected from an expensive-looking gold case.
‘Does one know what one’s letting oneself in for?’ she enquired, staring at Poppy over the flame of her lighter as she lit her smoke. ‘One does know this ain’t all fun and games. One’s going to be mixing with a particularly nasty set, and not just mixing with them – one’s going to be living amongst them. One’s going to have to think like ’em, talk like ’em, and I’m sorry to say behave like ’em too. No going back, doncher know. These people worship Mr Hitty, the horrid little housepainter. Just as they worship power. It’s their aphrodisiac, d’you see? They want to kill the weak, those who disagree with them, and those whom they consider not ethnically pure. Everyone is to be pure, blond, and Teutonic, preferably – and this includes everyone living in this poor old country of ours, so I’m for the high jump, and that is certain. So one’s not playin’ games here, doncher know. This is serious stuff.’
‘I know,’ Poppy had replied. ‘I’m well aware – but thank you all the same. I may not know exactly what I’m letting myself in for, but I know enough.’
‘Course you do. Jack will have given you a rundown. Good at that, the Colonel. One of the best in the game. Not a bad picker, either.’
Again Cissie had regarded Poppy over the end of her cigarette holder, this time with visible approval.
‘First things first,’ she had then said. ‘If we’re burying Poppy Tetherington we have to give you a whole new background. From now on you’re to be Miss Diona de Donnet. Norman family doncher know. Came over with William the Conk – family stayed on in Dorset where they got given a damn’ great chunk of land – and so on. It’s all in here. Read, learn, inwardly digest, then burn it.’
Cissie had handed Poppy a file, which contained everything she would need to know about her new persona.
‘One last thing, my dear,’ Cissie had enquired as Poppy began to look through its pages. ‘One last thing before we get down to work. Why you doin’ this? You doin’ this for you? Or our country? For your parents? For whom? Because there’s always someone one’s doing it for.’
‘I know I’m not doing it for me, Miss Lavington, no. At least I don’t think so.’
‘Good, because it won’t work, you know. If one’s doin’ it to get back at someone. A husband say. However beastly a chap.’
‘And I’m not doing it to get back at my husband. Who as it happens was a very beastly chap.’
‘So why you doin’ it then?’
Poppy thought for a moment.
‘I think I’m doing it, Miss Lavington, because it has to be done.’
Madame Moisewitch, Poppy’s next teacher, had not been so easy to win over. A diminutive, dark-haired woman with a tightly corseted rounded figure, her natural demeanour was one of aggression. She seemed to be waiting to pounce on anyone or anything that crossed her path, and this stance was made all the more apparent since it emanated from a pair of cat-like green eyes. Otherwise Madame’s features would have been unremarkable until you noticed her hands and feet, which were most beautifully elegant.
‘Young woman,’ Madame had said, taking a round-the-houses tour of her new pupil, whom she now looked up and down as if she were a horse trainer inspecting a yearling with four bad legs. ‘I fear you are to be my first failure. The way your head pokes forward – no good. The way you keep staring at your feet. The way your feet splay. Have you never been to ballet class? Is this what it is?’
‘Sorry, Madame,’ Poppy had replied. ‘But no. No, I never attended ballet class, only ballroom dancing.’
Madame snorted lightly.
‘Ballroom,’ she said, as if it was a swear word. ‘Diaghilev was not the choreographer of ballroom dancing. Nijinsky did
not dance ballroom dancing. The Russian Ballet did not come to this country and change everything with a display of ballroom dancing.’
‘I am so sorry, madame, I did not mean to upset you. I was just trying to demonstrate to you how very ignorant—’
‘My dear,’ Madame Moisewitch said, interrupting impatiently. ‘There is very little point in being sorry, young lady. The damage has been done. And well and truly so. So what is it that happened to you? You fell downstairs, perhaps.’ Madame had been round behind Poppy at this moment, which disconcerted her even more. ‘You fell out of a tree, fell off your pony, missed the chair or some such. You certainly must have done something like this.’
‘I fell down the nursery stairs.’
‘Good. I see. That explains this perfectly ghastly posture. Had God intended us to slouch he would have given us bows for backbones, instead of the spine. Straighten up. You will never impress if you look as if you have been humping coal bags on your back. Your weight is on your left foot entirely. Your back is round. Your head sticks out on its neck. We shall have to proceed at once to the barre where we shall start exercises. Please take these ballet shoes and wear them. We must start at once. I do not want you to be my first failure. But unless there is a large miracle, it seems this is what you are destined to become. My very first failure.’
Oddly enough, the lessons with Madame were the most difficult part of Poppy’s transformation. She had never considered herself to be the most graceful of creatures, but conversely nor had she seen herself as the clumsy, lumbering and gauche giraffe that Madame seemed to see her as. She was duly humbled, and the lessons began.
Naturally Poppy could not help wondering why it was completely necessary to start to train as a classical ballet dancer when she had understood that her future occupation as an agent was destined to be one of infiltration – until the day she realised she had actually, physically, changed.
Daughters Of Eden: The Eden Series Book 1 Page 21
