Octavia's War

by Beryl Kingston

Emmeline had heard the news on the wireless that evening and had been worrying about him ever since, so she was highly relieved to hear his voice, even if he was still talking in his incomprehensible language. Still, once she’d gathered that he wasn’t hurt, nothing else really mattered. She listened to his laconic account of his two kills, winced at how much he had changed and, when there was a pause in the conversation, ventured to ask when he was coming on leave.

  ‘Leave?’ he said, his voice incredulous. ‘There won’t be any leave while this is going on, Ma. There’s a war on.’

  Her heart contracted with misery but the pips were sounding and it was too late to ask him anything else. He was already saying goodbye. ‘Chin-chin, old thing. Keep your pecker up!’

  ‘And how can I do that,’ she said to Octavia, ‘when he could be shot down at any minute? I hate this war. It makes me dread to hear the news.’

  But dreading it or not, she listened to every bulletin and was drawn with anxiety at the news of yet another raid on the following day. ‘I hope they’re not going to keep this up,’ she said. ‘We shall all be worn to a frazzle.’

  ‘That’s the object of the exercise,’ Octavia told her grimly.

  The next day it was raining heavily and the German attack was called off. ‘Thank God, for that,’ Emmeline said. ‘Give our boys a bit of peace. At least we’ve got the weather on our side. Long may it rain, that’s what I say.’

  But on the 15th of August it was a beautiful summer’s day with clear blue skies and perfect visibility and the Luftwaffe flew across the Channel in force. Five hundred and twenty German bombers crossed the Channel that day, aiming to bomb British airfields and the radar installations that were strategically placed along the south coast. The perfect sky was criss-crossed by the long white lines and graceful parabolas of chalky vapour trails, as Spitfires and Hurricanes battled to fight off the attack. By the end of the day, as the BBC was happy to announce, seventy-six German planes had been shot down at a cost of thirty four British fighters. And the bombing had come to London.

  It was Edie who broke the news to her mother. She rang from the phone box on the corner of her street and her voice was breathless with the drama of what she had to say. ‘They’ve bombed Croydon airport, Ma,’ she said. ‘I can see the smoke from here. Great back cloud, sort of hanging in the air. We heard them go over. Funny thing was they didn’t sound the sirens until afterwards. Still never mind, we’re all still here.’

  ‘Oh Edie,’ Emmeline said. ‘Don’t you think you ought to come back to Guildford?’

  ‘And face old Mother Hemmings?’ Edie said. ‘No fear. I had enough of her to last a lifetime. No, no. We’re fine. I’ve made a shelter under the stairs with a mattress and pillows and everything. We’ll be snug as a bug in a rug.’

  ‘You haven’t got any stairs.’

  ‘Well, no,’ Edie admitted, ‘not stairs as such but I’ve got a cupboard under where Mrs Holdsworthy’s stairs are. Mr Topham says it’ll be fine. Not to worry, Ma. We’ll be safe as houses.’

  ‘Houses aren’t safe at all,’ Emmeline said tetchily. ‘They get blown up.’

  ‘Not our house.’

  Emmeline decided not to remonstrate. There didn’t seem to be any point. Not when Edie had so obviously made up her mind. ‘Anyway, who’s this Mr Topham?’ she said.

  ‘Our Air Raid Warden,’ Edie told her, ‘and if he says it’s all right, it is. Trust me.’

  ‘She’s being perfectly damn ridiculous,’ Emmeline said to Octavia when she’d hung the receiver on its hook. ‘She’ll worry the life out of me, Tavy, staying there. I mean, if they’ve bombed Croydon airport, what will they bomb next? It could be Colliers Wood. She hasn’t thought of that.’

  ‘That’s where Tommy flies from,’ Octavia remembered. ‘Croydon Airport. I hope he’ll be all right. The last time I spoke to Elizabeth she said he was due back tomorrow.’

  ‘They’ll have it cleared for his sort of plane,’ Emmeline said. ‘Bound to.’

  But she was wrong. The airport was still out of action the following morning and Tommy’s flight was diverted to Biggin Hill. He and his team stayed there for over an hour enquiring what had happened in Croydon and the news he brought back to Elizabeth was, as he admitted, ‘pretty bad’. Three hangers had been hit in the raid and so had the terminal building which had been very badly damaged because it was being used as an ammunition store. Sixty-two people had been killed and nearly two hundred injured, either on the airfield or in the town. ‘We’re in for a rough ride,’ he said.

  Elizabeth looked at his weary face and knew that his trip to Washington hadn’t gone well but she didn’t ask him about it. He would tell her in his own good time. Which he eventually did, when he’d eaten poorly and slept fitfully and woken late and disgruntled.

  ‘Total waste of time and effort,’ he said as he drank his breakfast coffee. ‘We couldn’t shift them an inch. Isolationists to a bloody man. I think Roosevelt would back us if he didn’t have an election coming up but the rest of the team were intransigent. They’re not going to join us this time round and we needn’t think it. None too keen to help us in any other way either. We got them to agree to some trade deals, armaments and food stuffs mostly, but we’ve got to meet the costs of shipment. Apart from that it was a complete failure.’

  ‘I am sorry,’ Elizabeth said.

  He put down his cup and smiled at her wearily. ‘Let’s go down and see our Lizzie,’ he said.

  ‘Today?’

  ‘Why not?’ he said. ‘Give her a surprise. The Foreign Office can do without me for once. I’ve earned a day off.’

  He is low, poor man, Elizabeth thought, and she leant across the table to pat his hand.

  ‘Have you heard from the boys?’ he asked.

  ‘They ring every day.’

  ‘They’re good lads,’ Tommy said. ‘Whatever else, we’ve done a good job with our children.’

  That ‘whatever else’ was telling. He’s depressed, Elizabeth thought. I wish he didn’t set himself such impossibly high standards. That’s what comes of having a father who always wanted his own way. As she knew only too well for her own father had been similarly heavy.

  The good lads were in constant action during that summer, for the German attacks on the British airfields were determined and incessant. The Luftwaffe took very heavy casualties – by the end of August they’d lost over six hundred planes – but they knew that Hitler’s invasion of England couldn’t take place without the defeat of Fighter Command, and as they’d been instructed to see that the defeat was complete and total before winter weather made it impossible for the German troops to cross the Channel, they kept on coming. The task that Fighter Command had set themselves was even harder, for they were fighting for survival. They, too, took heavy losses – two hundred and fifty-nine fighters were shot down during that August – and they were in an even more difficult position than their adversaries, for although the factories were working night and day to replace the lost aircraft, and new pilots were being trained at an impossible rate to replace the men who’d been killed or too badly injured to fly, by the end of the month there were so few pilots remaining that the survivors had to fly more sorties than anyone thought humanly possible, taking to the air again and again as soon as they’d refuelled. By the 31st of August they were in a parlous condition.

  ‘Not good, old man,’ Flight Lieutenant Mark Meriton admitted when he phoned his father. ‘We shan’t be able to keep this up much longer.’

  ‘How long?’ Tommy asked.

  ‘If we go on losing planes at this rate,’ his son said, ‘a week.’

  * * *

  A week later, and totally unexpectedly, Hitler changed tack. If he couldn’t defeat the RAF and Goering seemed to think that was now the case, he would reduce London to rubble and break the morale of the British that way.

  On the 7th of September he sent four hundred bombers with full fighter escorts to attack the East End of London in broad daylight. The fires they lit
with their incendiaries were still burning that night when another two hundred bombers returned to continue the pounding. It was the worst day of the war, so bad that the government issued an invasion alert. But it was a last minute reprieve for Fighter Command.

  Chapter Eleven

  ‘Coo-ee, young Edie!’ Mrs Holdsworthy called. ‘You ain’t ’alf took a long time with that shopping.’ She’d been keeping watch at the window ever since Mr Topham told her the good news, and as soon as she saw Edie and Joan coming along the street she pulled up the sash-cord and leant out, both hands on the window sill and her face beaming. ‘They’ve opened up the Tube for us, duck. What did I tell you?’

  Edie was tired that morning. She’d had a bad night, what with the raid and everything and her shopping basket was dragging her arm down and Joanie was grizzling enough to try the patience of a saint, but she looked up at her neighbour and smiled at the good news. ‘Thank God for that,’ she said. ‘High time they saw sense. Perhaps that’ll stop my mum being on at me. When can we use it?’

  ‘Tonight, so Mr Topham says. I’m gettin’ me things together.’

  Edie gave her daughter’s hand a shake. ‘Stop that row, Joanie,’ she said. ‘We’re home now. You don’t have to go on. I can’t hear your aunty talk.’ And when the child sniffed and stopped she looked up to question her neighbour again. ‘What can we take?’

  ‘He didn’t say,’ Mrs Holdsworthy told her. ‘Just it was going to be kept open for us. Bedding I reckon, don’t you. An’ me flask. We shall need that. Cup a’ tea.’

  It’ll be cold sleeping on the platform, Edie thought, as she put her key in the lock. I wonder if I’ve still got those old sleeping bags me and Arthur used to have. They’d be just the thing. Couple a’ pillows.

  There’d been an air raid every night for the last three weeks and she was heartily sick of them, hating the sound of those awful bombers overhead and the thud, thud, thud of the ackack, hating the fear that griped her stomach every time the sirens went and the fear she saw on her children’s faces when the noise got too bad, hating everything about it. ‘There you are, Joanie,’ she said, as she took off her daughter’s coat and hung it on the hook in the hall, ‘we’re not going to hear any more nasty raids ever again. We’re going somewhere safe, right away from them.’

  ‘And Barbara and our Maggie,’ Joan said.

  ‘’Course. We wouldn’t leave them behind, now, would we? Come on we’re going to find some sleeping bags.’

  ‘What’s a sleepin’ bag?’ Joan wanted to know, but her mother was already standing on a chair in her bedroom, searching through the bedding on the top shelf of the wardrobe.

  Just as Edie had feared, it was cold on the platform and the concrete floor was extremely hard to lie on, but she didn’t care. For the first time since this awful Blitz began she felt safe, cocooned in the familiar sulphur-smelling darkness of the underground, surrounded by her sleeping children – and what a relief to see them fast asleep for once – with neighbours nearby to talk to and, most important of all, completely cut off from the horror of what was happening in the sky above the battered streets.

  ‘Best thing they ever done,’ she said to Mrs Holdsworthy, sipping her welcome mug of tea, ‘opening up like this. They should ha’ done it weeks ago. I shall bring a couple a’ blankets down tomorrow. Pad these bags out a bit. Wait till I tell my Arthur. He’s been worrying himself silly since this started. Now I can tell him he’s not to worry no more. Best thing they ever done.’

  Emmeline was relieved to hear her daughter’s news too, although she still thought she ought to come back to Guildford and be really safe. There were occasional raids during the day and she could easily get caught in one of them – after all she couldn’t stay in the underground day and night – and although the newspapers didn’t say much about casualties, she knew very well that ever so many people were being killed and injured.

  Octavia knew that better than most, for she and Maggie were coping with the terrible grief of girls who had lost their mothers or fathers or older brothers. There had been six of them since the start of the Blitz and each one seemed to be harder to comfort than the last. The most recent had been little Iris, who’d come to Lizzie’s attic room before morning school began the previous day, weeping so terribly she could hardly speak and saying between gasping sobs that she wanted to go home.

  By this time Lizzie could guess what had happened and knew exactly what to do. She found a handkerchief and dried Iris’s eyes, then she put her arms round her and held her until she’d recovered enough to tell her what was the matter, the words gulped out between sobs. ‘It’s Mum. My – aunty – wrote to me. She’s been – bombed.’

  So it’s bad, Lizzie thought, but she didn’t press to be told any more. She simply took Iris’s hand and led her down the back stairs to Maggie Henry’s office. ‘We’ll go and see Matron,’ she said. ‘She’ll know what to do. She’s ever so good.’

  Maggie Henry opened the door as soon as Lizzie knocked. She’d dealt with so much grief over the past few weeks her senses went into full alert at every knock. ‘Tea,’ she said to Lizzie as she led the little girl to the sofa. ‘Three cups. When did you hear, Iris?’

  ‘Yesterday afternoon. My aunty wrote to me.’

  So she’s been grieving all night on her own, poor little thing, Maggie thought. ‘And it was bad, wasn’t it?’ she said.

  ‘Oh, Miss Henry,’ Iris cried. ‘She’s dead.’

  ‘You cry, darling,’ Maggie said, cuddling her. ‘Cry all you want. It’s a terrible thing. The worst.’ And as Iris wept against her shoulder she began to rearrange the child’s day. ‘Take a look at the timetable,’ she said to Lizzie, ‘and see who’s teaching her first lesson.’

  The tea was made and drunk, the timetable was consulted, and Lizzie went off to find Iris’s teacher and let her know what had happened, leaving Miss Henry to look after everything else. As she left the room Iris turned her poor little blotched face towards her and thanked her. It was all she could do not to burst into tears before she could get out of the room. She wept all the way to the classroom, torn with a dreadful aching pity. Poor Iris. What has she ever done to deserve this? It isn’t fair!

  The autumn term continued and so did the bombing. Bad news soon became a part of the school’s life.

  ‘We shall need an extra special Christmas this year to lift our spirits,’ Octavia said, when the staff gathered at her house at the end of October for their regular weekly meeting. ‘Perhaps we ought to start considering it. I hope the sixth form are doing their play.’

  ‘It’s already written so they tell me,’ Morag Gordon reported. ‘It’s going to be Snow White in Woking.’

  That provoked smiles all round the room.

  ‘Thank God for the sixth form,’ Octavia said.

  ‘Are we going ahead with the music festival?’ Jenny Jones asked. She’d had a festival planned since the end of the summer term, soloists, choirs, even the venue. The local Boys Grammar School was going to let them use their hall. ‘I mean, do we think it’s – um – suitable?’

  ‘I don’t know about the rest of you but I think it isn’t just suitable, it’s a necessity,’ Octavia said. ‘We need as many good things as we can cram into our lives.’

  There was a murmur of agreement.

  ‘Only the thing is,’ Jenny said, ‘the thing is, Iris was going to be one of our soloists, you see, and I wondered… I mean, I don’t want to put pressure on her or anything now she’s… I don’t really know what to do for the best.’

  ‘Let her make the choice,’ Morag advised, flicking ash from her cigarette. ‘If she feels she’s up to it, it could be the best thing for her.’

  ‘I think we ought to have a school party at Downview,’ Helen Staples said. ‘It would be a squash but I don’t think they’d mind. Could be fun.’

  ‘An excellent idea,’ Octavia said and teased, ‘Are you volunteering to arrange it?’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind,’ Helen said. ‘With a
bit of help.’

  Help was instantly forthcoming – from Alice Genevra, who offered to be Phillida’s assistant and make the decorations, and Sarah Fletcher, who said she’d do the catering, and Elizabeth Fennimore, who said she would cost it and order all the things they needed ‘within reason, of course’.

  Not for the first time, Octavia thought what a good team they were. They take everything in their stride, she thought, and they never complain, no matter what this war flings at them. ‘Thank you very much, all of you,’ she said to them, ‘I don’t know how this school would manage without you.’ And she grinned at them and quoted one of their favourite hymns. ‘“He who would valiant be, ’gainst all disaster.” Only, of course, it should be she in your case. Don’t you think so Jenny?’

  ‘It’s us to a T,’ Jenny said, blushing but pleased to be given such praise. That was what was so nice about old Smithie. She knew how to thank you.

  Darkness descended on them earlier every day, the dormitories were cold, far too many girls had chilblains and head colds and Matron Maggie was kept busy with Wintergreen ointment and Vick. The first fogs of November swathed the town in a miserable dampness. The rations were reduced. And the Blitz went on, night after night. It was, as Tommy Meriton had predicted, a rough time.

  Despite all the difficulties of the job she was doing, Dora Erskine was really quite pleased with herself. When the Blitz began and she first started edging her ambulance through the darkened streets, she was afraid she would hit a wall or a pillar box or run someone over, but she was surprised by how quickly she grew accustomed to the lack of light, even on nights when there was no moon and it seemed pitch black. It was partly because she knew how important it was to reach her casualties as quickly as she could and partly because she knew the roads so well, having walked through them by day. As the nights passed, she saw some terrible injuries but there was even a good side to that. It wasn’t that she’d grown hardened to seeing people in pain and bleeding, it was because the familiarity of it made her philosophical. ‘I’ve seen it all now,’ she would say wearily at the end of her shift, and she would think, I’ve seen it and I haven’t panicked. Before very long she became a steadying presence in the stink and darkness, someone who was totally dependable and always calm, the way she’d been taught to be.