Phyllis was glad that she and June were sitting together. If they weren’t permitted to look out of the window they could at least keep one another company.
‘One could write a terrifically stirring piece of music based on the sound of a train,’ said June.
‘But wouldn’t it just be a din?’ asked Phyllis. ‘They make such a racket.’
‘That’s just what I mean! One could incorporate an entire percussion section, make it start off rather slowly and then go faster and faster; and then bring in horns for the brakes and engine-squeaks and strings to represent the gathering momentum. I think it would be great fun.’
‘You are daft, sometimes,’ said Phyllis.
‘I shan’t deny it,’ said June. ‘But I manage to keep myself amused.’
With the other women in their carriage they played I Spy for a few rounds, but soon ran out of things to see. The guard who was travelling with them refused to join in, but turned the pages of his newspaper, licking his thick thumb each time in order to separate them. By and by they fell silent, each of them considering what this move would signify. There had been rumours of deportation. It was said that other prisoners being held under Regulation 18B had been taken to the docks at Liverpool and despatched to Canada, or even the further-flung colonies. There was talk of camps on the Isle of Man. Just the day before they had heard of some of the men being kept in abandoned housing at Huyton, on the outskirts of Liverpool: one of the women had received a letter from her husband, who was being held there. He complained of broken pipes, rats, makeshift roofing of corrugated iron which failed to keep the rain out. Some of the women wondered if they were being taken to join the men there. At least it was the summer, now, so there wouldn’t be the relentless cold to endure.
For Phyllis the journey was wrenching: each mile took her further from home and from her children. Dreadful as Holloway had been, it had at least become familiar. Even though she was confined, knowing that the great city of London was swirling outside the gates gave some reassurance. Letters had arrived, from her sisters, from the children, from Hugh and from Greville, who was still exerting himself on her behalf but whose reassurances became more empty with each week that passed. Since Christmas Jamie had sent a letter every week, all of them illustrated with his own drawings. He never folded the paper in the same way, so the envelopes bulged as if they might burst and spill, like a paper twist packed too full with sherbet. He drew the pump in the farmyard, hung with icicles in the February freeze. As the weeks moved on he depicted the coming of spring: snowdrops under the old apple trees in the walled orchard where his parents had kept their beehives; the bright leaves of the quickthorn; cow-parsley and herb robert on the verges. More than anything, Jamie’s missives gave Phyllis comfort and hope. How would his letters ever find her, now?
At length the train arrived and the women were taken to a waiting bus which conveyed them to the docks. They stood about on the wind-blown concrete concourse for what seemed like hours, in abject confusion. Even cheery little June struggled to maintain her composure. Phyllis felt her heart racing and she repeated a silent prayer, over and over, in her head.
‘Please God, don’t let it be Canada. Please don’t take me so far from Edwin and Frances and Julia. I promise I’ll be good and not ask for anything else.’
Then a porter came for their cases and they were led to a vessel, on the side of which the words ‘Isle of Man Steam Packet Company’ were painted. Phyllis felt the strength go out of her legs from relief and had to cling on to the handrail as she came aboard. She had only a very vague idea as to where the Isle of Man actually was – somewhere between Liverpool and Ireland, she thought – but at least it was within the isles of Britain, not too impossibly far away. Her greatest fear throughout her incarceration had been some accident befalling one of the children: a broken leg, say, or complications from measles. Not that she would have been able to do anything to help from within the prison, but at least there’d be some comfort in knowing that she was not too far away.
The same police guard who had travelled with them from London suddenly reappeared and walked them swiftly up several flights of narrow metal staircases to a series of small cabins, where they were to spend their passage. They were instructed not to roam the decks, but to stay put.
‘Hullo, Officer? Sir? My friend’s feeling rather giddy,’ June said to the guard. ‘Is there any chance, do you suppose, that she could have a cup of tea?’
To the surprise of all in their little party, he seemed to soften, now they were on board the boat. ‘I’ll go down and ask the steward to bring a tray presently,’ he said. ‘And I daresay a sweet biscuit wouldn’t go amiss. We’ve a way to go. A little sugar wards off sea-sickness, I believe.’
One or two of the others fell asleep, rocked by the motion of the sea-swell and worn out from the exertion and uncertainty of their day. Phyllis tried to look out from the porthole, but saw only spray and roiling grey water, for miles and miles. She’d envisaged a passage no longer than that to the Isle of Wight, but the journey took very much longer, four hours or more. It was early evening by the time she felt the boat slow and judder as it made to enter the harbour at Douglas. There was a long delay while the other passengers disembarked. At last their turn came and they stepped off the gangway. Straight away a newspaperman came forward and began to take pictures, until one of the police guards saw him and shooed him away. After that he turned his attention to their piled-up luggage. The next day the paper carried photographs of their cases alongside an article insisting that they had made their transit in the lap of luxury, accompanied by trunks full of expensive clothes.
At the entrance to the harbour a small group of islanders had gathered to gawp and now some of them called out jibes at the women. One or two had cameras and flagrantly took pictures, as if Phyllis and her companions were living curios in a travelling circus. At length they were led away from the dock and trudged uphill through the town before coming to a small but elaborate Victorian red-brick building: the railway station. The group were ushered through the ticket office and out on to the platform beyond. Phyllis almost laughed when she saw the waiting train. It was like a toy railway, standing only a few feet tall and with little carriages upholstered in rich red plush, like seats at an opera house.
‘Where’s the Seven Dwarves, then?’ called out one of the women.
Everyone laughed. Terrible though it was to find themselves prisoners on an island miles from anywhere and with no knowing what their living quarters might turn out to be, a feeling of lightness became palpable among them. The absurdity of the dinky train somehow brought out an unexpected gaiety, as if they were after all holidaymakers.
They were not required to draw down the blinds for this leg of their journey, since the train had been requisitioned for the purpose of transporting them to the other side of the island and would make no stops along the way. The women in Phyllis’s carriage – there were four of them, besides herself – agreed that it would be refreshing to have the windows open, for all that the cooler air before dusk was drawing in. Phyllis sat in a corner seat, drinking in the sights and smells of the countryside which unfolded ever so slowly outside. The pace was no quicker than the trot of a plump pony and with a similarly rolling motion. To begin with the track was hemmed in and gave no sight of sky. As they pulled out of Douglas there were banks of hills to either side, which with a pang reminded her of the Sussex Downs. The train went through the deep shade of a wood. A rocky siding sprouted lush fronds of bracken, dotted with tall occasional foxgloves, before giving way to woods again. Phyllis caught a glint of a low waterfall giving on to a clear brown stream below. She could make out the white undersides of blackberry leaves and the compact white flowers where the berries would come, fluttering from the motion of the passing train. The cool smell of wild garlic wafted from the carpet of white flowers beneath the trees. As they passed through a short tunnel, steam obscured the outlook altogether.
Then suddenly, and it seeme
d to Phyllis miraculously, there were long views: two-thirds of the window contained an expanse of blue, blue sky and below it were green pastures dotted with whitewashed farmhouses; and beyond the fields were glimpses of the sea. Everything looked bright and fresh and new. There was honeysuckle and fuchsia in the hedgerows and long low mossy walls of stone enclosed the neat fields. The train edged closer to the coast, then further inland, but the sea was rarely out of sight. In a small field of coarse reedy grass she saw thirty or more plump white geese standing stock-still, looking indignant. There were sheep and cows. At a level crossing she saw a Jack Russell sitting on the lap of an old man on a tractor, its ears cocked. There were rooks making their way home to their nests in high elms. Apprehensive as she was, sad as she was, Phyllis nevertheless experienced deep in her chest a lurch of something very like rapture: the world was really so very green, so extraordinarily blue. A little flicker of hope, no bigger than a pilot light, sprang to life within her.
She wished the train would go on for ever, chugging merrily through the woods and farms. But at length it stopped in a great billow of steam and she and her companions alighted. Phyllis found she had pins and needles in one foot. They lingered on the platform, waiting for the bus to take them to the next place. Their fragile gaiety was fading with the light.
‘Don’t just stand there, you lot! Chop, chop! They’ve kept some hot food for you, but you’ll need to hurry it up.’
The speaker was a youngish woman in an unidentifiable uniform. She cradled a wooden clipboard in one arm and her skirt was too tight. She at once reminded Phyllis of her sister Nina. The women trooped the short way after her along a narrow shopping street, turning left and then right and then left again until they came to a church hall. Here their names were read off from a list on the woman’s clipboard. Each was allocated her billet. They still had no idea how much further they had to go, nor what kind of accommodation awaited them at the camp.
Several of the women – June among them, to her chagrin and Phyllis’s, for they had hoped to be put together – were led off on foot by a rather grumpy older woman. Their new guard told those who remained to follow her and led them out on to the pavement.
‘There’s a short-cut to the back of the hall, you’ll find it for yourselves once you get your bearings. But we’re going along the promenade now. Only takes a couple of ticks longer and it’ll give you a better sense of the place and where your lodgings are.’
They found themselves on a wide crescent of stucco-fronted hotels which stood behind a broad street, following the curve of the beach beyond. The tide was out and little fishing boats lay on the strand. A light shone from above a long building to the left of the bay and was reflected on the wet sand below, hazy and yellow, like a late-summer moon. There was a low sea wall running along the edge of the beach, faced by a row of cottages. Out on the headland to the right of the bay Phyllis could just discern some sort of tower. It wasn’t a town of any size: bigger than Bosham, but very much smaller than Bognor or Littlehampton. Despite being called a port, it was more of a resort: all the buildings they passed seemed to be boarding-houses or small hotels. They made their way uphill for only a few minutes, until they came to a small lane of just five or six Edwardian villas.
The first was double-fronted, with decorative barge-board details and a tiny balcony above the front door. A pair of bay windows on the ground floor flanked the door.
‘This is you,’ said the woman who reminded Phyllis of Nina. She checked the names on her list.
‘Mrs Forrester, Mrs Bingham, Miss Parkinson and Miss Thomas: you’re in number three. I’ll just show you in, introduce you, if you lot wouldn’t mind hanging on out here for a moment.’
‘It’s Mrs Thomas, actually,’ said Margaret Thomas with a small self-righteous sniff. She wasn’t Phyllis’s most favourite fellow prisoner. She very much hoped she would not be obliged to share a room with Margaret, who suffered from her sinuses, which meant that she was forever complaining of headaches and sniffling into her handkerchief. Rowena Bingham would be the best room-mate among the group: she was quiet and purposeful. She had worked at London HQ, organizing the speakers’ training courses. There were rumours of an affair with a married man.
To their great surprise, they were introduced not to another guard in uniform but to a civilian woman, a Mrs Powell, who seemed to be the perfectly ordinary proprietor of what was under normal circumstances a bed and breakfast establishment. She did not seem especially pleased to see her new guests – there were no smiles – but nor was she markedly hostile. She took them up the stairs to the bedrooms on the first floor, of which there were three: two larger rooms at the front, each with a pair of beds and a smaller single room at the back, next to the bathroom.
‘You can sort out your sleeping arrangements to suit yourselves,’ said Mrs Powell. ‘There’s a meal waiting for you downstairs – if you’d come down sooner rather than later I should appreciate it.’
‘You should have the single room, Margaret,’ said Phyllis. ‘Then if you get one of your sore heads you can rest undisturbed.’
‘I don’t know whether I’ll be able to get to sleep if you lot are in and out of the bathroom at all hours, pulling the chain,’ she said.
‘Tell you what, we’ll agree not to pull the chain after ten o’clock: how does that sound?’ said one of the others.
Phyllis and Rowena’s eyes met.
‘Well, I’m sure we’ll be able to sort something out, between us,’ said Phyllis. As she spoke she turned into the bigger of the front bedrooms and put her case down next to the bed furthest from the door. There was a washbasin, two high beds with damask pink eiderdowns, a rug. ‘I’m going in here, anyway. We can unpack later. I’m starving.’
‘I’ll join you,’ said Rowena.
It was the best night’s sleep Phyllis had had since she’d been picked up from home by the policemen, over a year before. She could scarcely believe the feeling of actual bedsprings beneath her, yielding when she turned, and the delicious weight of the eiderdown and blanket on top. Her feet were not cold and there was no ache in the small of her back. Best of all, there was fresh air on her face. At Holloway it had not been possible to open the tiny windows. Here, she and Rowena had moved in unison to open the tall sash window as soon as they’d come up after supper. When Phyllis woke it was to an unfamiliar and slightly guilty sensation which it took her some minutes to identify as optimism. She realized that she was looking forward to the day ahead. Standing, she looked out across a sloping meadow of long grass down to the houses of Port Erin, which were clustered around the bay and scattered up the green fields that rose to the far side of the beach.
The sky seemed immense. Birds were chitting in the hedge which separated the narrow front garden from the lane. And here she was, in a room; an actual room, with a sprigged paper on the walls and a looking-glass and a polished chest of drawers. She looked down at her bare feet, taking in the nobbles of her toes and the gaps between them and the feeling of the tufted wool rug on the soles of her feet. She couldn’t remember the last time she had been aware of her own feet – of any part of herself, really – other than to register how cold she was, or how hungry. It was as if she had been discarnated by imprisonment.
After breakfast the bossy young woman in the tight uniform appeared. She explained the camp to them: they were free to roam the lower part of the town and a certain distance along the path which led out to the north of the bay, as far as the cedar trees at the end of the lawn by the tea-room. The limits of the camp would be evident: fences and barbed wire. They must not engage in any activity which sought to advance their beliefs, nor were they allowed to enter into discussion about politics and the war with any member of the public or fellow internee. There were a great many other internees in the town, mostly German women, as well as Austrians. They were absolutely forbidden to discuss their ideological beliefs with the enemy aliens; nor were they to solicit the views or backgrounds of these fellow internees. They mus
t remember at all times that they were here as guests of their Manx hosts and behave with courtesy. It was with their hosts in mind that the decision had been made that they should not be allocated work, apart from a laundry rota in which each of them would do her stint twice weekly.
This was in order to preserve the jobs of the local people. They were free to form societies for their own occupation and self-improvement: to practise calisthenics, for example, or art classes. They were also at liberty to join such classes as already existed in the town, of which there were many.
‘Will we be allowed to attend church services?’ one of the women asked.
The answer was yes. They were permitted to use any premises and/or establishment which was open to the public, including churches and chapels, library, shops, banks and post office, the dance-hall and tea-rooms. All goods and services must be paid for in full in advance: anyone attempting to persuade a shopkeeper into opening an account would have her privileges revoked.
‘May we go to the hairdresser’s?’ asked Rowena.
At this the young woman smirked. ‘You can try. However, I think it only fair to warn you that there is just the one hairdresser in the town and the lady in question has a son in the army.’
‘And why should that pertain?’ asked Rowena. Phyllis noticed that they were all beginning to speak like officials.
After the Party Page 21
