After the Party

by Cressida Connolly

  The word was that the handful of captured German National Socialists did not involve themselves in these activities, preferring to keep their distance. Phyllis heard from her landlady that there had been some fear, when the enemy aliens had first arrived, of an eruption of hostility between the two groups. The National Socialists were put accordingly into a couple of boarding-houses some little way to the south of the town; while the vast majority of Germans and Austrians, the Jewish women and their children, were housed close to the promenade. Many of them, with their husbands and young families, had been living and working in London and other cities, refugees from their homelands. By May 1940 it was thought that the risk of German invasion was high and many of them were interned, for fear of fifth columnists. They were bewildered to find themselves captives on this speck of an island, miles from anywhere. It was clear that they posed no threat to national security: they were hardly likely to stir up pro-Nazi feeling, having themselves fled from the regime.

  During the first week or two there had been notional efforts to keep Phyllis and her friends apart from the foreign nationals, lest arguments broke out. At British Union meetings Phyllis had of course heard of the dangers posed to English concerns by international Jewry. Several of the better-known speakers were vociferous about it all: in order to prevent them from prating, the Leader had proclaimed that only ten minutes in every hour-long speech could be dedicated to the growing economic threat posed by Jewish interests. It was all very complicated. International forces, business ownership imperilling British livelihoods, secret economic alliances formed in order to increase political leverage: such talk came up regularly. Be that as it may, Phyllis and her fellow internees agreed that they had no quarrel with the German and Austrian women, where individuals were concerned. They were all victims alike, here. Some of them had turned their backs, when the Holloway contingent walked into Collinson’s; but on the whole they were accepted with fairly good grace.

  The town’s hairdresser remained their strongest opposer, refusing outright to allow them into her premises. To begin with there had been frank stares from various other shopkeepers, and more than once there was a hostile silence from island customers, a scraping back of chairs. Sometimes people called after them in the streets: traitors! They had been instructed to maintain their composure and civility in the case of such provocation, but sometimes it was very trying. Out on an errand one afternoon, one of the older women had been taunted by a group of Manx women and had shouted back: ‘My husband fought for this country in the Great War. What’s yours ever done – catch mackerel?’

  But over the weeks relations appeared to thaw on all sides. The Germans and Austrians who ran the classes were kind, and Phyllis especially liked the older woman who taught the crochet group. Sometimes it seemed to her that the world would be a better and more peaceable place if men were kept out of things altogether.

  Phyllis could not say that she was happy, and the unreliability and limitations of the post made her permanently anxious about her children. At Holloway rules surrounding letters had eventually been relaxed, so that there was no quota in place; all post coming in and going out was still subject to scrutiny and occasional censorship, but there wasn’t a limit on letters. Here on the island the women had the run of the town, or most of it, and a great deal of freedom to do as they pleased. Yet they were suddenly confined to two letters a week, sent and received. Also, post seemed to take for ever to arrive. It was common for letters to come as much as a month or more after posting, which was worrying for those women who had children. It meant they fretted terribly if a child complained of some ailment or woe. The delay also weakened the bond of communication, the sense of being part of each other’s daily lives. It wasn’t much use to a child if he or she wrote to say that a favourite pet had died, only to receive a consoling reply some eight or nine weeks later: by then they would have put aside their grief and very likely installed a jaunty successor in the rabbit hutch or guinea pig cage.

  Phyllis had to ask her sisters to write alternately every third week, so that her limit wasn’t used up. She saw no reason to tell them that she wanted to leave the way clear for the long letters full of drawings which she still received from Jamie once a fortnight, but left them to assume that the children’s post was her priority. The fact was that Jamie’s letters brought her a great deal of comfort and she savoured each for many days. The drawings were so vivid and the things they depicted so delightfully familiar: the farmyard, the stooping old trees in the orchard, even the now dilapidated fruit cages at the Grange, where he had done a series of sketches. The net above the raspberry bushes sagged like a dew-weighed cobweb and was full of holes; in the letter he told her that blackbirds feasted openly on the fruit and barely troubled to fly off when he sat sketching.

  Jamie’s letters were like missives from the distant past, from the safety of home and her own childhood; whereas her sisters’ were rather stiff, Patricia’s especially. She supposed she must be difficult to write to. Presumably they didn’t want to make her feel left out by describing high days and holidays, nor worry her by recounting their troubles. Any discussion of politics and the war was forbidden. Patricia’s letters tended to go on at great length about the nuisance of rationing and ongoing arrangements about fetching and depositing the children from and at their schools. Nina’s were cheerier and mostly revolved around the new baby’s winning ways. ‘It was priceless!’ was a recurring phrase. Every so often she got a letter from Greville, assuring her that he continued to lobby for her release.

  One of the younger German women at the crochet class was an artistic type. She was in the boarding-houses where the Jewish women lodged, not one of the Nazi women who roomed at the southern edge of the town. Anna had long hair like a schoolgirl’s and there was something slightly theatrical in her gestures, as if when she was a little girl she had been complimented in a ballet class and she’d taken it very much to heart. She always carried a small drawing book around with her and a little tin with charcoal and a few pencils. Anna was in the habit of stopping whatever she was doing on a whim and opening the tin: she was to be seen on the esplanade or at the outdoor café along the headland, sketching fiercely. She was already very adroit at crochet work and only came to class as company for the woman who ran it, who was one of her housemates. More than once Anna had been known to put down a lacy collar halfway through the lesson and instead start on a pencil portrait of one of the women in the class. It occurred to Phyllis that she might be willing to part with two or three drawings. In this way she could send something novel to the children and to Jamie.

  Anna was delighted to find a customer. The foreign women were mostly pretty hard up, having left behind everything they owned when they came away to the safety of England. Apparently some of them had been obliged to leave in such a hurry that they had travelled with only the clothes they stood up in. It was fortunate that they seemed to be so adroit at handicrafts and art: several of them made a little money from providing local shops with items that they had made: felt animals, knitted and crocheted goods, embroidered needle cases, gloves and carved napkin rings. From Anna’s sketchbook Phyllis chose a view of the harbour for Julia, a little scene of fishing boats for Edwin and a lovely drawing of a pair of finches for Frances. She asked if Anna would draw something else for her, something especially: a view from the esplanade up the town to the north, showing the front of the house where she was lodging, with the pasture in front and the curve of the bay below. She had this in mind for Jamie, so that he could see where she was. It made Phyllis feel that she was still a real person if someone she cared for could picture what her life looked like; otherwise she sometimes felt as though she was in a sort of limbo, neither quite a ghost nor fully of this world. She packed the drawings very carefully, sandwiched between corrugated paper. She sent the packets off to Jamie and Edwin first, and those to the two girls the week after.

  Visits from the men’s camp began as the summer gave way to autumn. A coach brought
them and took them away at the end of the day: they were not permitted to enter the women’s lodging-houses, but there were tea-dances, and they were free to walk about in the town and to visit the outdoor swimming bath, the cliff-walk tea-rooms and the beach. The women whose husbands were on the Isle had signed various petitions asking to be interned in married quarters: they believed they were in with a good chance of success, since the word was that the Prime Minister himself was in favour of couples being housed together. This was rumoured to be because the Leader’s health – in former times so vigorous – had been sorely damaged by prison food and the lack of fresh air and exercise. Many of the women now included him in their nightly prayers. It was rumoured that he would soon be reunited with his wife, in prison, where it was hoped he would regain his health. The last thing the powers that be wanted was a martyr on their hands.

  Phyllis felt much fonder of Hugh than she had feared she might. Being apart for so long, she had formed a picture of him in her mind that was not quite true to the reality. Yes, he was rather stiff and formal; yes, he liked nothing more than to be right, or better still proved right. But when he stepped off the bus from Peveril the warmth of his smile when he caught her eye touched her unexpectedly. He took her arm and they kissed, briefly, the roughness of his cheek against hers unfamiliar to her now. Here was someone who was absolutely on her side. And later, when he got back on the same bus at the end of the day, there was something touching about his retreating form, about the short hair at the back of his head and his upright carriage, as if he were a prep school boy trying to be good, trying to be brave.

  ‘You’ll never guess which individual is residing in the hotel next to mine,’ Hugh said, after they had had lunch in the dowdy little pub near the railway station.

  ‘One of the speakers from Chichester days?’

  ‘No. That young fellow, Freddy.’

  Phyllis remembered him all too clearly, the good-looking youth who had caused the embarrassment with their daughter Julia.

  ‘Freddy as in Freddy from the summer camps? The son of Little Jim, you mean?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know who his father is, but yes. It seems he got involved in some trouble over in the East End, smashing people’s shop windows, that sort of thing.’

  ‘You remember Little Jim, he did the catering? Nice chap. Whistled a lot. It was his grandson who was such chums with Edwin. Has Freddy acknowledged you?’

  ‘He’s been perfectly civil. Hasn’t actually acknowledged that we’ve met before; well, I suppose we hardly have. I don’t think we ever exchanged any words on the few occasions I came to camp. Why would one’ve?’

  Here he paused. ‘Just between us, I think he could have had the good grace to at least look a bit, I don’t know; not shifty exactly, but something at least approaching that. But there’s been no sign of anything of the kind; much less an apology. A lot of water has flowed under the bridge, I daresay …’

  ‘Well, yes. It’s not uppermost in his mind, p’raps.’

  ‘No. I don’t expect it would be. I’d pretty much forgotten about it myself, to tell you the truth, until I caught sight of him at Peel.’

  ‘Of course.’

  On Hugh’s second visit, Phyllis brought out her letters for him to read. The children did write to him, but not so often as they did their mother: that was understandable. And being an only child he had no brothers or sisters with whom to correspond. Most of his letters had been to MPs and tribunal people, lobbying for his and Phyllis’s release, as well as for the other detainees. He’d had letters from her, but rather little else in the way of personal post; she felt rather sorry for him. It would amuse him, she thought, to see her letters. Frances in particular had something of a way with words; she’d picked up phrases from all those books she read, perhaps. Only the drawings and accompanying notes from Jamie she left in her bedroom drawer. Hugh had never shown very much interest in Jamie.

  In early November word came that Phyllis was to be moved from Port Erin to married quarters at the island’s capital, Douglas. Many of the enemy aliens had already been released by then and had gone back to the mainland to resume life with their families. Gradually, Port Erin had emptied. Her artist friend, Anna, had gone in September. Before she went she had made Phyllis a present of a drawing: a girl diving from the higher of the two boards into the town’s sea-water pool. Now that their numbers were so sparse the classes dwindled: there was still music and movement and art, but the other lectures and lessons had stopped when the Germans and Austrians went, as had the weekly concerts and choir. There were informal recitals, mostly on the boudoir grand piano in the semi-circular ballroom at Collinson’s, but there was an end-of-term feeling about them. Phyllis was sorry to be leaving the little town. She had grown fond of her daily walk out to the café at Bradda Glen, overlooking the bay, and of the view from her bedroom window. On clear days it was possible to discern the distant hulk of the Mountains of Mourne to the west: people in the town used to say that if you could see Ireland it was about to rain and when you couldn’t it was because it was already raining. But Phyllis didn’t mind the frequent showers. The rain was what made the hills to either side of the bay so very green. It rinsed the sky, leaving drops all along the fence to the front of her lodging-house which were luminous in the glancing evening light after a downpour.

  She would be sorry, too, to be parted from Rowena and June. Rowena was to be sent back to the mainland, but there was no job for her now in London: so she was to go and stay with her mother, in the Chilterns. She thought she would look for work in nearby Wycombe, which she hoped would be safe from the bombing raids. June, who having been a District Leader was more senior than Rowena, was to remain at Port Erin. Still no one was any the wiser as to how long they would be kept away from home.

  The married quarters at Douglas were very much less comfortable than the boarding-house in Port Erin had been. They were housed in two tall Victorian buildings at the top of the town. There was a smell of cauliflower and stale mothballs and the landlady had bad hips, which made her ill-tempered. She complained about the many stairs she was obliged to go up and down every day: she planned to move to a bungalow once the war was over. Phyllis offered to help her by emptying the upstairs grates and carrying the buckets of ashes down; Hugh volunteered to bring fresh coal back up: but she was not to be appeased. She spoke accusingly, as if it was the fault of her tenants that there was a war on. Resentment hung over her like the unpleasant odours which lingered over the landings of her house.

  If you stood on tip-toe you could see pasture in the distance from the room Phyllis and Hugh shared on the second floor, but there was no sea view. When some errand took her into the town – she was permitted to walk down to the centre, twice a week, as long as she signed out and then in again in the book that was kept on the hall table for that purpose – she walked along the wide esplanade, enjoying the cold salt air and the call of the gulls. But Douglas faced due east. It made Phyllis feel more cut off from home than ever, that you couldn’t see the coast of mainland England from here, even though you knew it was there, far away across the expanse of grey sky and water. And Phyllis found it difficult to get to sleep, now that she had become accustomed to nights alone in a narrow bed. Without all the activities the Germans had put on at Port Erin, the days dragged.

  But Hugh was kind, which was an unexpected comfort. Not since the days of their courtship had he been so attentive, so considerate. She saw a gentler side of him. When a letter came from Edwin, she handed it to him to read first. After a few moments she glanced across the breakfast table and noticed he’d gone pale. At once she felt her insides gripped with fear.

  ‘What is it? Is something the matter?’

  ‘No, no: he seems to be getting on quite well. Went to your sister Patricia for his long exeat.’

  ‘Oh. But is everything all right? You looked … concerned, just now.’

  ‘No indeed. Read for yourself.’

  Phyllis took the letter, which was wri
tten on two sheets of paper; a rare treat from Edwin, whose correspondence generally read as if he was struggling to fill even one side of a page. The children had been taught, as Phyllis had in her own childhood, that thank-you letters must go over the page in order to count. If you didn’t go over the page you didn’t seem grateful enough. Perhaps with this in mind, Edwin and Julia always managed a line or two on the reverse of their first pages, before signing off. Frances’s letters, by contrast, were sometimes three pages long, full of snippets about her time at school and of the sayings and doings of her friends and what matron said when she caught them larking about after lights out.

  As Hugh had said, Edwin reported that he’d been to Rose Green for long exeat. While he was there the most tremendous thing had happened: Uncle Greville had given him his very own gun! It was called a 20-bore and it had belonged to Uncle Greville himself, when he was a boy. Then Uncle Greville had taken him out into the fields with his own gun which was a bigger gun and they’d had a go at some rabbits and he jolly nearly got one and Uncle Greville had got a pigeon and had taken a shot at a squirrel but missed. Edwin didn’t mind that he hadn’t shot anything and Uncle Greville said it was a skill he’d learn in time and he wasn’t to take it to heart as it was his first time. Almost as much fun as shooting the gun was cleaning it and taking it apart: there was oil in a tin with a nozzle, made especially for guns, and a long stick with a rag tied to the end that you put down the barrel to get out any traces of shot. The gun came in its very own case which was made of old leather, with straps. It was the greatest fun and next time he went to stay with Aunt Patricia they were going to go out again and then one day, if he got good enough, Uncle Greville would take him on an actual shoot, with beaters and dogs and everything!