The Flight of the Maidens

by Jane Gardam

  Neither of them had ever travelled far from their home county, yet the Red Cross had stiffened their lives and given them a sense of the world. Since 1919 these two women had lived together, needing nobody else for any emotional fulfilment, sexual appetite being of little consequence to either of them. The First World War had deprived their lives of brothers and cousins and friends but had drawn them together into a harmony that made men unimportant.

  The First World War, which had shattered bodies and spirits, had been the making of Hilda and Dorothy, and on 11 November every year since 1919 they had come into their own, striding together at the head of their local organisation in the November Armistice procession, to the sound of martial music often out of tune, as they were—or Dorothy was—sometimes out of step. Eyes-right to the war memorial, Hilda and Dorothy had saluted.

  The mayor always stood on the cenotaph steps. He was both mayor and bank manager of the town, the bank where Hilda worked as chief clerk. The mayor had left the bank entirely in her care for years, knowing that as a woman she could never be manager and that she would never disloyally go elsewhere.

  On these occasions Dorothy, less militant than Hilda, gave little smiles at people as she marched along. Dorothy was a teacher of small children, who all adored her, and when she marched, plumper and bouncier than Hilda, the children ran along the pavements beside her waving flags and shouting, ‘There’s Miss.’

  Dorothy and Hilda sometimes doubled on these patriotic occasions as Girl Guide captains, which they had also been for many years, and then they appeared in cockaded hats, their left arms a tapestry of badges for proficiency. For twenty years on several evenings a week between the two wars they had continued in their different uniforms and never missed a meeting. Within minutes of the news at eleven o’clock, at the outbreak of the Second World War and the first hysterical (mistaken) air-raid siren, they had scrambled into uniform and in moments were organising shelters and first aid, casting people out of schoolrooms and parish halls, setting up depots for making and winding bandages. They were ready for anything. Except perhaps for the rehousing of unguaranteed Jewish children escaping from the Nazis who were arriving in Britain with nowhere to go.

  Hilda and Dorothy had little real knowledge of Germany or what was happening there. They saw it through the pages of their old school books. The word German meant, simply, evil. The word Jewish meant something a little shady and quite apart. There had been no Jews in their Red Cross or Girl Guide companies. They would, however, do their best, and their duty.

  On York railway station then, in October 1939, they were awaiting a large contingent of Kindertransport Jewish children, rather nervously.

  But out stepped, in the care of a woman who introduced herself as a member of ‘The Movement’, a pale wisp of a child holding a small, neat suitcase and a paper bag, who seemed possibly to be deaf and dumb, or even retarded.

  In the little car with the Red Cross regalia in the windscreen and on the back window, old squashy leather seats and blinds with strings and pompons, Hilda Fletcher in 1939 had driven the child across the Vale of York. Dorothy had sat next to her in the front and Lieselotte crouched in the back, so hunched and small that she could scarcely be seen by either of them in the front mirrors. She seemed to have placed herself determinedly out of sight and when Dorothy brought out her compact to powder her nose the mirror in it had gleamed on Lieselotte, who at once slid down on to the floor.

  From the floor she had looked up at the two uniformed backs and thought that though the hats were very dull and ugly they were not menacing. The conversation of the two women was incomprehensible and not at all like the English she had been learning at her Volkschule school. Since 1936 she had been forbidden school.

  Outside, the country rolled flatly along on a sorrowful day of rain, one of the few wet days that summer. The stubble fields bristled like pewter, the farmhouses were a raw, rough red. Airfield after airfield came into view with lines of waiting bombers standing in the rain.

  The car was being driven slowly, the lady driver changing down at every bend, an orange carrot shooting out on either side of the front windscreen to indicate which way she would cautiously be turning next.

  At a railway level-crossing there was an incident. A truculent woman carrying a bucket in one hand was trying to lower the crossing gates with the other, the sound of a goods train steaming ever nearer. The sillier of the two ladies got out to help. The little engine with its blacked-out hood and a long line of covered trucks went clinking by, and the surly woman, who was in semi-railway uniform, raised the barrier and set down the bucket. ‘Doing my bit,’ she said. ‘I can’t manage the signal-box yet. Are you lost? I can’t help you, I’m afraid; it’s me first day and I don’t know the area. But, then, I never did know much.’ She looked without much interest at the dark, pale child crouched in the back of the car, like a cold puppy.

  Lieselotte thought that the woman had a very coarse way of speaking but quite liked the laughter of the Red Cross ladies, and after a time she scrambled up and sat on the leather seat. The little one turned round and said, ‘Are you all right, dear?’ Then: ‘I don’t think she understands English!’

  ‘I don’t see why she should understand English,’ said the driver. ‘They’ve been having lessons in the depot down south. But poor little things. She has dreadful dark rings round her eyes. What does it say in her papers? Did I have them or you?’

  ‘I saw none. The Movement woman rushed away. I’m glad she’s going to the Stonehouses. I think they’ve been down south to meet her once already. The Quakers know all about the Kindertransport. They’re about the only ones who do.’

  ‘Not long now, Lieselotte,’ said the tall one, and Lieselotte jumped with surprise at hearing her name.

  ‘I wish I had a sweet for her,’ said the fat one.

  The three of them stood on the Stonehouse threshold and after a time Hilda and Dorothy left. Lieselotte felt sorry to see them go and wished they had shaken hands with her instead of saluting.

  Mrs. Stonehouse hung up the child’s coat and unpacked her small bag and set her down at a table, where she looked at the food but did not eat it. Before bedtime she was able to play about with a piece of bread and margarine. Mr. Stonehouse showed her some children’s books. One was a German edition of Strewelpeter, which failed to move her. The sun came out just before it set and the house, filled with light, was silent and grave. Lieselotte was very polite and did not look much about her, but Mr. Stonehouse took a photograph of Winston Churchill off the wall and replaced it with one of the sensitive, reluctant King.

  ‘We won’t switch on the News,’ he said.

  ‘She wouldn’t understand it.’

  ‘No. But she must be spared the tone of it. And the music. It’s all patriotic at the moment and she’ll have heard enough of all that.’

  That night Mr. and Mrs. Stonehouse went to look at Lieselotte in her bedroom to say good night. The old rag doll she had had in her suitcase was not in bed with her, but bravely put at the other end of the room, and Lieselotte was already asleep. But even in sleep the pale face gave nothing away. It held an expression of sugary sweetness, almost complacency, but not peace. They felt that had Lieselotte awoken at that moment and looked directly upon them, she would still have been far away. Though she would have smiled and smiled. At the refugee camp at Dovercourt, for the past months, she had become an expert in invisibility.

  The weeks had come and gone. No relatives had emerged as promised, for they had grown tired of waiting and hurried on to America. At last the Quaker guarantors of the unguaranteed had come through. Lieselotte had heard nothing of her parents.

  With the Stonehouses Lieselotte’s appetite quickly revived and she had soon put on weight and her colour had become less ashen; but her sleep had continued unnaturally deep and they never once saw her without the cat-like smile, nor broke through her elderly, almost obsequious manner
. It was the only thing that they found difficult about her.

  From the start, the Stonehouses had taken her to Quaker meetings on Sundays. The Quaker way of asking no personal questions, not even one’s name, had suited her; but when the other children left the meeting after the first fifteen minutes, to play outside, Lieselotte had chosen from the first meeting to sit with the Stonehouses, in the silence. During one Sunday dinner, she asked suddenly why there were so many young men at the meeting not in uniform.

  ‘They’re called “conchies”. Quakers have to be conchies. We don’t believe in killing and so we are not able to join the armed services. It’s hard to get accepted as what is called “noncombatant”. Non-violent. It’s very hard for us. I don’t think there’s one of us who doesn’t feel guilty.’

  ‘You should feel guilty,’ said Lieselotte, still smiling, but her eyes were now like coals.

  ‘It’s hard,’ Mr. Stonehouse said. ‘We serve in other ways. In the last war I drove an ambulance in France.’

  ‘And now?’

  ‘I’m old now. I haven’t been called up. I read, and try to understand.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘I’m in the Fire Service. You sound as if you don’t think it is enough?’

  ‘No. I should choose to kill. I shall always want to kill, and kill.’

  On Remembrance Sunday for the First World War, the mayor of East and West Shields, in scarlet and gold, with his boots showing under his robes, one sole flapping (cobblers now being in short supply), inspected the town’s opposition to Hitler as it went marching past the cenotaph, more or less in step. Brownies, Boy Scouts, Boys’ Brigade, the Fire Service, the Women’s Voluntary Service in purple and green, the Observer Corps. The Home Guard carried pitchforks and broom handles. When Hilda and Dorothy came striding at the head of the Girl Guides to the sound of drums and tin whistles, Lieselotte, on her way home from a Quaker meeting, stopped and her smile left her. She gave a sharp cry and burst into tears. Dorothy saw her and waved and nodded in sympathy. Hilda of course did not turn her head or break step but contrived somehow a sympathetic wink. That was six years ago.

  7

  Hester left for her Lakeland retreat at the end of August 1946. It was a very wet day, a day so soaking that a taxi had to be ordered which would break into the first of Miss Kipling’s five-pound notes, to the annoyance of a driver with no early-morning change. Hester was prepared to walk to the station in her mackintosh and pixie-hood, her great sack of books on her back and lugging her suitcase; but she was not—after many a contretemps and storm of maternal tears, and then at last the most awful accepting silence—to be allowed to travel alone. Her mother was to accompany her as far as Darlington and wave her off from there.

  It was a poor compromise Kitty Fallowes had won and it did not comfort her. She still had many momentary panics at Hester’s three-week seclusion and defection into the intellectual life.

  But when the day came, wet though it was, Kitty Fallowes had reached an almost holy calm. She had made arrangements to meet a friend in Darlington for lunch at Dickson and Benson, before returning home; and the rain, the unrelenting rain, and the low autumnal skies were only proving what she had been saying all along: that the Lake District would be a wash-out. It had always been a wash-out. Mrs. Brownley had said she thought Hetty should have chosen Torquay.

  ‘Well,’ Kitty said, ‘at least this Mrs. Satterley sounds a perfectly good sort of woman and it’s a clean farm.’

  ‘How on earth do you know, Ma?’

  There was silence. ‘Oh, well. Well. I got the vicar to write to the vicar there. You gave me the address you know, Hetty. He’s going to come and see you.’

  ‘He’s what! A vicar? There? Come and see me? That’s it, then. How dare you, Ma! Right. I’m going by myself. You can stay here and stuff Dickson and Benson’s. If you go, you go in a separate carriage.’

  But her mother in the taxi caught up with Hetty thundering along to the station beneath her haversack, like Quasimodo along the Excursion Walk.

  ‘Oh, Hetty!’ she beseeched, through the taxi’s window. ‘Oh, Hetty, do let me come. Hester? I’m so sorry. I do keep doing the wrong thing. I always did. Do just let me come so far on the train with you. I’m so sorry to have butted in again.’

  The wet mountain of Hetty avalanched, sopping, into the cab and her suitcase after her, but she was in a steaming rage.

  In the train her mother, now thoroughly damp from standing on the open platform, sat in a corner, penitent, Hester ignoring her. Soon the train passed her home and she saw the grave-digger standing hatless in the rain, regarding his leeks on the allotment. He did not look up to salute the train as they went by.

  ‘He has already forgotten us,’ said Mrs. Fallowes, and a quarter of an hour later—it was an empty carriage except for the two of them—as they steamed through the bombed Middlesbrough slums, ‘Oh, don’t you see how I need the vicar?’ She was crying into a pretty handkerchief and looking red and bloated. ‘Oh, I’m so sorry, Hetty. I shouldn’t involve you!’ The weather lightened a little over Northallerton, and a ray of sunlight pierced a green field. ‘So pretty—look, Hetty. So lovely!’

  Mrs. Fallowes had been taught, and believed, and had always impressed upon her daughter, that remorse is a sin. Repentance and apology are the thing. Our Lord has taken away our guilt. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I’m so sorry, dear. Now you say sorry to me. It’s all we need to do, you know. Though I’ve always believed in Confession to a priest as well.’

  ‘I’ve nothing to confess.’

  ‘If you think that, dear, then I’m afraid you’re in rather a bad way.’ (The sweet thing about Mrs. Fallowes was her uncertainty whenever challenged, but sometimes she spoke from automatic reflex.)

  ‘Someone’s said that to you, haven’t they? You’re just quoting. So who do I confess to? The vicar? Knowing what I know about him?’ Hetty could never expatiate upon the vicar; the mere thought of his love for her mother revolted her. She could not bear to see him touch her mother’s hand. ‘You’ve never given the matter a moment’s rational thought, have you?’

  ‘How can I have rational thoughts? With you and your father? Oh, I’m sure nobody else gets spoken to like you speak to me,’ and Mrs. Fallowes wept again.

  Hetty’s love for her mother made her crueller. ‘So who do you suggest I confess to? And what? You—you actually checked up on me. Got the vicar to write and see where I was going. Without telling me. And when? When, for goodness’ sake, were you doing all this? Christ!’

  ‘I will not have Christ’s name taken in vain,’ cried Mrs. Fallowes. ‘And I will not have you speak to me in this way. Do you think Una speaks like this to her mother? Or Mrs. Black’s Nadia? I got the vicar to find out where you were going the minute you told me—your father caring nothing. And I’ve checked up with the Stonehouses, and with Hilda Fletcher, of course. You know I have to be ahead of myself. Always. It was the way I was brought up at the convent.’

  ‘But so secretive! You’re not quite straight, Ma.’ Hetty as usual had no handkerchief and so she pressed her pixie-hood up against her mouth.

  And so they carried on, all the way to Darlington, and left the train exhausted. Hetty’s train for Carlisle was to leave from the same platform.

  ‘You look worn out, dear,’ said Mrs. Fallowes nervously.

  ‘No, I’m O.K. I’m sorry.’

  Mrs. Fallowes put away her handkerchief and put on her gloves and a brave face. ‘You really do look poorly, dear. Oh. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Have we time for a cup of coffee? I do get worked up, I always did. I can’t help it. It’s my blood pressure.’

  ‘No. We can’t leave all this luggage standing around.’

  ‘Oh, you’re crying too! Oh, Hetty! You do know how much you mean to me?’

  ‘The train’s coming.’

  ‘Oh, no. No, it can’t be. Not yet. Oh, yes!’<
br />
  They stood with long faces, side by side. ‘Oh, come on, Mum,’ said Hetty. ‘You’d think you were never going to see me again.’

  ‘Oh, Hetty!’

  ‘I hope Joan Thing’s all right and you get a good lunch.’

  ‘Oh, Joan’s always all right. She’s always well. I haven’t seen her for years, but we write of course. This is such a chance. It’s quite an occasion.’ The tears that had been on her face like dew were gone and she was smiling. ‘Now write, darling, won’t you? Can I have a kiss?’

  But Hetty was bending to the knobbly haversack and arranging it on her back.

  ‘Oh, Hetty, you look terrible. Please forget everything I’ve said!’

  As Hetty straightened up carefully and picked up her suitcase before turning to kiss her mother, some people, another mother and daughter, came laughing and pushing into the carriage ahead of her.

  ‘Oh, hurry, dear. I’ll feel so dreadful if you miss it now.’

  Hetty scrambled in and as the door shut and she turned back to wave, both the people who had pushed past her on the platform pushed past her again, flung themselves at the window and leaned out. They were laughing and hooting and waving at whoever it was who was seeing them off and they filled not only the open window but darkened the windows to either side. All Hetty was able to see of her mother as she bobbed and twisted among the arms and legs and waving hands was a glimpse of a blotched and seeking face, a handkerchief in a clutched-up gloved hand and, for an instant, her mother’s small feet in her old shoes and the zip-bag she always carried when she went anywhere where there might be nice shops.