The Consequences of War

by Betty Burton

‘No problem,’ (the book had an American publisher – Fiskess, Frankel Books), ‘we’ll write and get them to agree to it.’

  ‘And if they do object?’

  Nathan Fiskess had patted down the air. ‘That’s for our legal people to sort out. But I don’t believe we’re talking litigation here.’

  ‘I think perhaps I should ask them personally.’

  ‘Write the book first,’ Nat had advised.

  ‘You mean let them see what I’ve written?’

  ‘They’ll love it. Georgia – they’re wrinklies now.’

  ‘Thanks, Nat, they’re my contemporaries.’

  ‘Giacopazzi is nobody’s contemporary.’ Nathan Fiskess spread his hands. ‘We can stand a little litigation now and then. I promise you, Georgia, watch my lips and put a dollar on my words – write what you like and they’ll love it. We worry – you write. The Giacopazzi circus rolls again.’

  She smiled wryly now as she remembered his grin as he flicked an imaginary whip. That’s what the Giacopazzi industry had become: a great twenty-four-hour-a-day, world-wide glitzy entertainment of books and videos and films. Nothing arty-farty about Nat Fiskess: he was in publishing for the bread. If anybody had created Giacopazzi from the English novelist, it was Nat.

  So far, he had been right. There had been no problems in Johannesburg, where she had expected some. To write the book, she had bugged her memories of those who had been her closest friends during the war years, and had written a fiction around the facts of their lives. And now she was facing them in turn – those who were left. Had they remembered her kindly? A flash came to her of the emaciated, drip-fed figure in the luxurious room in Johannesburg. I wasn’t unkind … nor unfair.

  She turned her mind now to how to handle the reunion.

  A reunion of wrinklies who had once been young and who had been arbitrarily thrown together in wartime Britain. Hardly thrown, she thought, remembering their sedate first meeting. All of us wearing hats except Mrs Farr.

  I can’t remember ever seeing Mrs Farr wearing a hat: she always wore a scarf tied behind like an Italian peasant woman. I suppose it was small things like that which made her different. There was something about Mrs Farr that was rather romantic. Why didn’t I remember that when I was writing about her? Mrs Farr had taken to Markham, but Markham had never really taken to her. Has it taken to her now? Probably not, unless in the last fifty years Markham has changed out of all recognition.

  1939

  Summer

  It was only in retrospect that the strange, golden spring and summer of 1939 was thought of as golden and strange by some of the people of Markham.

  Golden, because it was the driest summer ever recorded in England, and green all but disappeared from the landscape.

  Strange, because in that bee-humming, woodbine-scented, blue-domed land, people were burrowing holes in the earth and roofing them over with iron sheets to make bomb-shelters. Strange, because swaying carts loaded with fast-grown, sweet sun-dried hay, passed wheel to wheel with lorries taking to store piles of stretchers, hundreds of flat-folded brown board coffins and great bolts of pretty flowery fabric bought up cheap for the making of shrouds.

  Markham. It had been a settlement long before its first tiny Saxon church had been built, or the Normans came to change it, influencing the style of windows, turning it into a great abbey for future tourists. At the time of that golden and strange summer, Markham was an insignificant market town, its days of any real importance long gone. The town was about a mile square. Five roads led out of it, three of them steeply uphill.

  As well as being an ancient cattle market, it was now a bakery and a brewery town. At times the air made people salivate with its illusory aroma of home-made oven-baked. At others it reeked of hops and yeast and malt and pungent effluent. A town of 6,000 inhabitants and 101 pubs. Until one got to the town boundaries, it was not necessary to walk for more than five minutes in any direction to obtain a drink of beer.

  There was an old saying: ‘He’s that drunk, he must have been to Markham. ’ These days there wasn’t much drunkenness: Markham men could hold their beer. Or perhaps it was, as visiting Northerners said, that Markham beer was gnats’ pee put up in barrels.

  Until the summer of 1939, Markham had only dipped its toe in the twentieth century.

  True there was a cinema, a Co-op, a new Woolworth’s, and the railway station, but people remained parochial and life was still lived at a rural pace. There were very few cars, and cattle and sheep were still driven through the streets on Market Day. Milk was brought by horse and cart direct from the cow in brass churns, still containing its farm-fresh bovine TB. Beasts were slaughtered behind butcher-shops from where the occasional bullock escaped its tether and ran terrifyingly amok through the lanes and back-streets.

  If Markham had a character, it was smug and phlegmatic; if it had a style, it was a century out of date.

  Most employment for men and single girls was provided by Hardy’s Bakery and the local brewery. There were one or two small employers, such as Southern Cereals where Georgia and Hugh Kennedy had been employed, and a bit of horticulture and retail shop-work. Almost all other men’s work was beyond the town boundaries – farms, Southampton Docks, and Southern Railway.

  Unlike their sisters in the potteries and mill towns, few women went out to work after marriage. Not only was there little employment available, a working wife was frowned upon and a working mother viewed with disgust. Of course, there was the Oaklands Estate mansion where there was occasional skivvying to be had, but Markham people didn’t like working for The Estate. Years ago, a poacher had been hanged for the death of a gamekeeper. Markhambrians had long and unforgiving memories.

  From a vantage point on any of the surrounding hills, the eye was always drawn to the elegant thrusting spire of the abbey and the twin erections of the bakery and brewery chimneys.

  Whether or not the children of the town were aware that their parents were preparing themselves for war, it is difficult to say, for they scuffed their way to school and raced their way home as they had always done. To them, every summer was strange and golden and, as always in July and August, they gathered each morning by certain special hedgerows bordering certain special meadows, or at the places where the River Bliss provided a little shallow bay. At the chosen place they laid out their bags of lemonade, broken biscuits and dripping bread, and prepared to hurl themselves into meadows, trees, hay, water.

  Old bent men leaned on bridges and watched, and their weathered wives halted momentarily and listened, remembering their own calling, laughing, squabbling, leaping and splashing, tiddler-jar days. Nothing had changed in a hundred years. In the rented terraces and council houses, the busy generation looked at their kids returning home late in the evening, river-washed and sun-burned, and supposed that the Germans must never have had that sort of fun. What else could account for them being like they were?

  If Markham had a voice, it would have said, ‘Don’t nobody come here telling us what to do, we done all right up to now.’

  1939

  Saturday, thought Marie Partridge, Saturday, when Charlie had only the one round of deliveries, always had a different feel about it. Kids were about. Girls feeding chickens, fetching the bread, minding babies, doing shopping for grandmothers. Boys running errands, helping on allotments, lugging home a shilling’s worth of coal in old prams. All of them scuttling about to get jobs done and be away to the river-banks or to the twopenny rush at the Picture House.

  Women did the weekend shopping on Saturday mornings.

  The choice of the weekend joint was the most important purchase. It provided a roast on Sunday, cottage-pie on Monday, stew from the bits on Tuesday, and if any stew remained with a few lentils and pearl barley, a good broth for the kids on Wednesday. Marie and her mother-in-law always went together, leaving Bonnie to go to the allotment with Charlie and be spoilt by him for an hour or two.

  This morning there was an atmosphere you could cut with a knife
between her in-laws.

  ‘You all right then, Dad?’ Ignoring what was obvious to anyone who knew him – that Sam Partridge’s nose had been put out of joint.

  ‘No, Marie, but there I dare say you knew all along what she was up to.’

  Although she did not know what Dolly was up to, Marie flushed, ‘I don’t know what you’re on about,’ knowing that she looked guilty.

  ‘Oh no? Well she’d better tell you then.’ He flicked his head in his wife’s direction.

  ‘Who’s she, the cat’s mother?’ said Dolly, rubbing her lips aggressively with a nub of lipstick.

  Marie and Dolly exchanged sharp glances, and Marie knew it was best to keep neutral. Her father-in-law’s tone was scathing. ‘She wants to go out to work. A decent woman… at her age, too.’

  ‘I’m still in my forties, Sam Partridge, not a hundred.’

  ‘And just what do you think it makes me look like? Oh, I know… it makes me look like an old soldier who can’t even keep his own wife.’

  ‘Take no notice, Marie,’ Dolly said, blotting her lips and setting the lipstick with powder.

  ‘What about your Mum, Marie?’ Sam said, determined to draw her in. ‘I ask you, what would your dad say if it was her, eh?’

  Marie knew well enough that her father would as soon lock Mum in as allow her to go out to work, but Marie kept out of it.

  ‘And Charlie’d soon put his foot down. Make him look small in front of everybody… put his foot down all right.’

  Sam already knew that Charlie had put his foot down, ages ago when Marie had been offered a chance to go back to hairdressing on Saturdays. Charlie had been incensed – ‘If the day ever comes when I can’t provide for my own wife and child, we’ll be in bad straits. Till then you can forget about any Saturday job.’ Marie hadn’t broached the matter again, but had never let up the pressure when it came to making him shell out for decent things for their home.

  ‘Don’t try and drag Marie into it,’ Dolly said. ‘I’ve got the job and that’s that!’

  Marie was surprised into saying, ‘You’ve got a job, Dolly?’

  ‘Without asking me. Without saying nothing to nobody,’ Sam said.

  ‘Yes, Sam Partridge, making up my own mind and without saying nothing to nobody. And don’t drag Marie into it.’

  ‘Marie’s already in. How do you think she’s going to feel married into a family where women goes out skivvying? Her family’s like ourn, kept ourselves above that sort of caper.’

  ‘God alive, Sam, anybody’d think I was going down the Docks and stand on the corner of Bugle Street to hear you talk. And I keep telling you, this is a proper job – it’s not skivvying.’

  Sam drew breath to answer back, but Dolly raised her voice and continued, ‘People can do and think what they like, and I’ll tell you this for nothing, if there’s a war, there won’t be many weeks pass before half the women in this road will be sorry they hadn’t heard about this job, just you mark my words. It’s a good, decent job and nothing to be ashamed of.’

  ‘Oh you think so? Well, I’ll tell you this for nothing. If there’s half the women getting the idea of working, there a be half the husbands that a be giving them the rough side of their hand.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t doubt that for a minute, there’s plenty of men trying to keep going on Hardy’s wages that’d rather see their wives go all week on a Foster and Clark soup cube than see them get a few hours’ work.’

  ‘You an’t never gone on soup cubes, Dolly.’

  ‘I never said me.’

  Dolly, now ready for Saturday shopping, wearing the beige straw summer hat she had worn for years, turned to face Sam and Marie.

  ‘I’m sorry if anybody’s feels hurt because of it, but I made up my mind and I mean to do it. It’s a decent, respectable job working in the kitchens of the new Town Restaurant the Government is starting. It isn’t any different from when I worked in hospital kitchens years ago, except that I shall get training under the cook.’

  Sam, fiercely buttoning up his park-keeper’s uniform, said angrily, ‘A course it’s different, woman – you’re married! And a woman’s place is in the home.’

  ‘And I suppose that’s wrote into your bloody Labour Party manifesto, too.’

  Dolly, keeping her dignity, unwilling to be ruffled, picked up her leatherette bag and nodded to Marie that she was ready. ‘When it comes to it, Sam Partridge, your lot and the Tories is hand in glove with one another about women. Half the world’s made up of women and none of you ever been able to work that out yet, have you?’

  Sam’s fingers seemed to freeze to his metal buttons and for once he had no cliché to refute her accusation.

  Dolly was exciting. Marie had never seen her mother-in-law so worked up: the thrill of it made her behind tighten and her eyes widen. ‘Married women will have to work in this war, same as in the last one,’ Dolly went on. ‘You can see that can’t you, Marie, and it will be first come, first served with the good jobs, and up to now the Partridges have been too proud to push themselves forward for anything like that.’

  The two women left the house. Half-way across the yard, Dolly called back over her shoulder, ‘And if Marie wants a job, there’s one going.’

  1989

  The Boeing 747 was within half an hour of its first touchdown. Georgia Giacopazzi could see nothing in the cabin window except for her own reflection. An unruffled face whose outlines had been lightly padded and pouched by years. Lively hair controlled and drawn back in a simple chignon. Seen indistinctly like this, if she raised her head to stretch the loose skin beneath her chin, the well-preserved elderly woman looked much like the young Georgia Kennedy. As she had done when writing Eye of the Storm, she had for the past half-hour been thinking dispassionately about herself when young. Not only Georgia Kennedy, but Georgia Kennedy and the men who had meant something to her – none had been more difficult than Nick Crockford to put into the novel. Others had been easier, because once she began to write they gradually became characters in the novel, but not Nick Crockford.

  In retrospect, events seldom seem to have been random: human beings are usually able to find a pattern, a design, and call it Fate… God’s will – ‘If I had only done so and so, I should never have…’, ‘If I had had ’flu that week instead of the next it would have been different…’ or, ‘If I had left the house five minutes later…’ So it was with Georgia Giacopazzi. During the writing of the book, she had come to the conclusion that the events of the next fifty years of her life, about which she had thought so much over the last year, had had their beginnings at the meeting in the Town Hall.

  1939

  Early in June, a meeting, which had its beginnings, as did most meetings concerning Markham, within the walls of the Tory Club, was arranged for ten o’clock in the Council Chamber of the Town Hall.

  Georgia set off in plenty of time with a feeling of elation because she was actually going to do something positive. The freedom from Hugh’s domination, which a couple of months ago she had expected would change her days dramatically, had not come up to expectations. The first days of making spur-of-the-moment trips to Southampton or Salisbury or Winchester, simply to wander idly the streets and cathedral precincts, soon lost their appeal. Such trips were best shared, but since she had adopted Hugh’s Sports Club-centred life, she had lost touch with her old friends; and she had never felt close to the ‘girls’ of the club.

  But today… She had awoken early and completed the very small amount of housework and laundry engendered by a single, tidy woman within half an hour. She had bathed, and as she dressed she realized that she was singing quietly to herself, and feeling stimulated at the prospect of the meeting. The invitation to attend as representative of the Sports Club was to Hugh, but in reply to her letter about what to do he had phoned to say that in future she could deal with all that kind of thing. ‘Just let the management committee know that I said it was OK, darling, they won’t want to be bothered with all that fiddly sort of stuff
. You’ll do it wonderfully, you’re good at those things.’ He had been in a hurry to do much more important things with ‘the men’, so that she had no time before the line went dead to feel put down.

  Never mind, it was not a fiddly thing, it was a gathering of all the representatives of organizations in Markham, from the fire service to the Girl Guides. It now seemed certain that war with Germany could not be avoided, and that Markham was lagging behind other towns in getting itself organized. In the interests of efficiency, Freddy Hardy, as leading burgher, decided that they should be brought together and put under his control.

  So it was that on that warm morning an extraordinary meeting of the Markham Borough Councillors sat with invited representatives of ‘interested and appropriate’ bodies, with Georgia standing in for Markham’s Sports Club Secretary and cricket captain. For half an hour before the appointed time, there flowed into the Town Hall an assortment of Hon. Presidents, Hon. Secretaries, of the Rotary club, the Tory and Liberal Clubs, Secretary of the Labour Party, which had no clubhouse, the Red Cross and St John’s Ambulance.

  God was represented by an Anglican vicar, a Catholic priest, some Evangelists and Free Church preachers, a Quaker Friend, a Salvation Army captain and three teaching nuns from the local convent school.

  The Townswomen’s Guild, Church Wives, Young Mothers and Co-op Women’s Guild, Chairmen.

  Scout Captain and Brown Owl, husband-and-wife team. Heads of all the Markham schools – C of E, Convent, Private, Council, as well as the Markham Sports Club, the Tennis, Swimming, Football and Cricket Clubs, and the Allotment Association.

  No Markham Trade Union representatives had been invited – there were no Markham trade unionists.

  Well, that is not strictly true. The Tolpuddle and Swing protests were as but yesterday to Markham, and the hand of Victorian-type employers was heavy on the work-force of Markham – heaviest at Hardy’s Bakeries. There were a few postal workers and the NUR men who, although they lived in the town, worked outside at the Railway Works and so were free to be a Comrade.