Come the Hour

by Peggy Savage

  ‘It was more than that,’ Dan said. ‘It opened an attitude of mind. It wasn’t just numbers. It suppressed all sense of the future, of consequences. Look at the world now – there’s killing going on everywhere. I sometimes wonder where the planet is going. The human race gets bigger and bigger. It learns more and more about all the wonders of science and less and less about how to use them for good.’

  Charlie didn’t reply. Dan noted the silence. He glanced at his son, walking beside him, looking straight ahead. He felt the beginnings of the knowledge that sooner or later must come to all men. He saw that the game was no longer his, that he must hand the torch, whatever it might become, to his son, and to all their sons. He felt a kind of humility, and enormous, heart-clenching affection. The little dog brought the ball back, opportunely, Dan thought. He could bend down and pet the dog and hide his face. The dog scampered away after the ball. ‘Perhaps we’d better be getting back,’ he said, ‘see if the girls need anything.’

  Tessa finished the potatoes and sat on the edge of the kitchen table. She looks well, Amy thought – and happy. There hadn’t been a chance for a real chat since they came home. ‘All well, darling?’ she said.

  Tessa nodded. ‘Fine. I’m really enjoying it.’

  ‘No regrets? Even after dissection?’

  Tessa laughed. ‘No, of course not. It’s got to be done, and it isn’t so bad, is it, after the first shock.’

  No, Amy thought, there were worse things. Her thoughts must have shown in her face, and Tessa noticed. ‘What is it, Mum?’

  Amy shrugged a little. ‘Oh – nothing.’ She turned away and stirred, unnecessarily, the bread sauce.

  Tessa got up and stood beside her. She put her arm around her shoulders. ‘You must stop worrying, Mum. There probably isn’t going to be a war, and if there were it wouldn’t be the same as last time. Things have changed.’

  Amy made herself smile. ‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘I’m being silly.’ Tessa kissed her cheek. ‘Are the students nice; are you making friends?’

  ‘Yes,’ Tessa said, ‘but you’d be surprised how much male opposition there still is. There are still some diehards, even among the students.’

  I’m not surprised, Amy thought. Even with all the things that women did in the last war, there were still some men who clung for dear life to their God-given superiority. How many girls were there, in Tessa’s year, reading medicine – ten, perhaps? Ten out of how many? A couple of hundred? And what about girls like little Sara Lewis? Good minds wasted. She was female and she was poor.

  ‘How’s Charlie getting on?’ she said. ‘Do you see much of each other?’

  ‘Not really,’ Tessa said. ‘I haven’t got the free time that he has. I seem to have every minute accounted for. But we meet at weekends quite often.’

  Amy took the turkey out of the oven, basted it carefully, and put it back. ‘Has he got a girlfriend?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Tessa laughed. ‘I don’t think he’d tell me about it anyway. I think he’s rather shy with girls. That’s boarding school for you, I expect. They don’t get much chance to meet girls, do they?’

  ‘What about you?’ Amy said.

  ‘No chance.’ Tessa put some dishes in the sink. ‘I’ve got too far to go. I’m not going to go all wobbly about some male. I might think about it when I’m about fifty.’

  Amy laughed. She looked at Tessa’s bright head bent over the sink, washing up the dishes. She has so much to learn, she thought, her heart aching a little. Tessa was just at the beginning. She saw medicine as a clinical science: note the symptoms, make a diagnosis, apply the treatment, job done. She hadn’t yet had to watch someone die because there was no way to treat them: no cure for septicaemia, pneumonia, TB, and many other diseases. She knows nothing of love, she thought, of driving passion. And she knows nothing of loss, of the pain of it. Her heart ached more, with the hope that her daughter would never know the latter, never have to go through what she had gone through, never have to see what she had seen.

  How do you accommodate to it, she thought? How do you change from a carefree student who knows nothing of the world, to someone who can bear the suffering and pain of other people? How do you learn not to be overwhelmed by it, and stay steady and useful and do your job?

  She remembered the shock of her first day on a ward as a clinical student. There she had seen a woman in dreadful pain, longing for death, and no one had been able to help her. The next day, mercifully, she was dead. It was her first brush with such suffering. And then came the shock and horror of the outrageous, inhuman suffering in the trenches in France, and the deadening pain of loss for those who loved them. Johnny, her first love, had died, killed in the Royal Flying Corps. There was joy too – joy of a new life beginning, of a patient getting better, defeating death.

  Tessa was humming a dance tune – something of Fred Astaire’s, probably, shrugging her shoulders to the rhythm. Life, Amy thought. You can’t put life into a test tube, my darling Tessa. Life you have to learn with your heart, not your brain.

  Tessa turned to her and smiled. ‘You look very thoughtful, Mum.’

  ‘It’s nothing,’ Amy said. ‘I was just thinking how lovely it is to have you all at home again.’

  Amy’s father sat alone in the sitting room, sipping coffee, and listening to the carols on the wireless. He knew Amy so well. He could read her face, more or less knew what she was thinking. She was still worried, he knew that, even though the Prime Minister seemed to have sorted things out with Germany. He had to admit to himself that he was worried too. You couldn’t trust the Nazis to do what they said. Look what they’d done already, bombing Spain. This Czechoslovakian thing was a disgrace. The Nazis did what they liked and no one attempted to stop them. What would they try next? If they did anything, it would be Poland, for sure. They were already making noises about Danzig. And what would the rest of Europe do about that? He feared, as Amy and Dan must, for his grandchildren, for all the young ones.

  He got up and walked around the room, touched a silver bauble on the Christmas tree, making it swing, glinting in the firelight. He remembered all those bleak Christmases without Amy when she went to the hospitals in France in the Great War – year after year of appalling work for her and appalling worry for him. He remembered her pain and her tears, sobbing on his shoulder. She lost her first love, Johnny Maddox, shot down in an aeroplane. Then she lost her best friend, Helen, blown up by a bomb in the hospital encampment. What she must have seen and endured! Things he could scarcely imagine. He was suddenly angry, outraged. Surely she had suffered enough pain and loss? Surely they all had, the Germans too? How, in the name of God, could anyone contemplate another war? He didn’t know how she could bear it if it happened again. Human beings could only take so much without breaking. The last war had proved that, there had been men with broken minds as well as bodies.

  She had never really told him about her war. Whenever he asked her questions she avoided them, laughed them off, or brushed them aside. But he had seen her war in her face, in her eyes, heard it in her silence. How could one possibly know or feel what it was like? No wonder she was terrified that it might happen again. Where could she go for comfort? He assumed that she talked to Dan about it. Thank God for Dan. He had been there with her. He knew. He understood.

  Nora laid the table in the kitchen for Christmas dinner. She spread a spotless white cloth and decorated it with a sprig of holly and some Christmas crackers. At least they were going to have a real Christmas dinner this year – a roast chicken. Last year had been terrible; Jim had been out of work again and it was a struggle to feed them and pay the rent. They’d had a rabbit pie. No Christmas tree, just some paper chains she and Sara had made. This year the kitchen was warm, a big fire burning in the grate. Jim had bought a treat – a bottle of sweet sherry and some cider to have with dinner. The delicious smell of roast chicken filled the house, and the tangy scent of the onions and the dried sage leaves she’d rubbed between her hands to cru
mble them into the stuffing. The Christmas pudding, with a few silver threepenny bits inside it, to be discovered with feigned but delighted surprise, bubbled in the simmering water at the back of the stove.

  Sara hovered in the kitchen, savouring the scents. She touched the holly, bright with berries. ‘It looks lovely, Mum,’ she said. The berries gleamed red, almost too perfect to be real. Funny to think that inside each berry were the seeds, tiny little things you could hardly see that, amazingly, were going to be the next holly trees. How did they do that? How did they know that they were holly trees, and not roses or rabbits?

  ‘That smells good,’ Jim said. ‘It’s a long time since we had a chicken.’

  Sara had watched her mother preparing the chicken. It had been bought from the butcher ready plucked of its feathers, but her mother had to pull out its innards, saving the neck and the heart and liver to make the gravy.

  Her mother made a face. ‘I hate doing this,’ she said, ‘putting my hands in here, all cold and slimy.’

  ‘I’ll do it,’ Sara said. ‘I’d like to,’ but her mother shook her head.

  ‘I don’t know why you want to be a doctor or a nurse,’ Jim said. ‘It’d be worse than chickens, putting your hands inside people.’

  ‘Not a nurse,’ Sara said. Jim gave an exasperated sigh and Nora glanced at him and shook her head. Sara only had time for a brief look at the heart and liver before they went into the saucepan.

  When she woke that morning her stocking had been on the end of her bed, as usual. She still had a stocking, though she didn’t believe in Father Christmas any more. There was the usual orange and a few nuts in the toe. There was a pair of warm woollen gloves that her mother had knitted, and some new pencils and a notebook, and a new pencil-case that her father had made for her, beautifully veneered in soft, silky wood. Her real present had been unexpected. Nora and Jim handed it to her in the sitting room, a small box, longer than it was wide. They waited, expectantly, for her reaction. She opened it carefully. Inside was a fountain pen, dark blue with a gold band round the middle. She gave a little gasp. A fountain pen! She could fill it with ink and write and write without dipping her pen in the ink all the time. It was perfect. She filled it from the ink bottle and wrote her name carefully in the notebook. The writing looked different already, firm and even and grown up.

  After Christmas dinner she sat at the table, writing with her new pen in her new notebook. What should she write? My autobiography, she wrote at the top of the page. As she wrote, she remembered quite a lot of her early childhood, before they came to London. She remembered the long, straight road in Trafford Park, grey and unrelenting: no trees, no gardens, not a flower or blade of grass. She remembered the back yard with the outside toilet, freezing on winter nights. She remembered the lamplighter coming to light the streetlamps with his pole and his ladder, and how she had been afraid of the Sisters of Charity with their great white headdresses, going about the streets among the really poor. When she was little she thought they had no faces. This street wasn’t that much different, but at least the toilet was inside and they had a proper bathroom. Things were better here, and her father had a proper job. She knew how important that was.

  She remembered her father coming home with his eyes red and streaming when he’d had a job for the day, loading lime on to lorries at one of the factories. She remembered him pulling up the grate over the drain in the street because he’d dropped a half crown and it had rolled, almost purposefully, into the drain, and sat there, glittering. He had lain down in the gutter to fish it out – half a week’s rent. She remembered her mother’s desperate tears when he lost his job again. He had a job now, but she knew that her mother was always worried. She never felt safe.

  There was one other memory that she found very hard to put into words. It seemed to have a meaning for her that she couldn’t quite describe. One summer’s day, when she was quite small, she had been in the back yard playing on her own, her mother busy in the kitchen. It was summer. She looked up into the intense blue sky and she saw a little aeroplane turning and looping, making a noise that sounded almost like words, coming from far away. It was beautiful, dancing in the sky, glittering in the sun. As she watched, fascinated, it came to her quite suddenly that this was not just a thing that happened to be in the world. It was not a bird, flying on its own. There was a man inside, making it fly, and somewhere, somehow, a man had made it. She had realized, with a shock of amazed excitement, that people could do this – they could make things and change things and make things happen. All kinds of things; there were all kinds of things to think about.

  Looking back, it seemed to her that it was the first time that she had ever felt separate, a person on her own; as if, for the first time, the world had revealed itself and she was looking out into it with her own mind and her own self. She was her own person. She ran inside to her mother, to tell her this amazing thing, but she was too little, she didn’t have the words. ‘I saw an aeroplane,’ she remembered saying, and her mother smiled and nodded. There was so much more to it than that. She wrote it down now because it seemed important. She didn’t really know why, but it was something that she always remembered.

  My mum is still worried, she wrote. She still thinks my father is going to lose his job and we’ll have no money and have to go on the dole, or she thinks there’s going to be a war with the Germans.

  She wrote on a new line, I am going to grammar school now and I’m going to be a doctor when I grow up.

  Even as she wrote, she didn’t connect the reality of the world she lived in with the reality of the words on the page. They seemed, somehow, quite separate, as if one had no effect on the other. She was nearly twelve. Her father, he had once told her, had a job in a steel works when he was twelve, and her mother had been in domestic service when she was fourteen. They didn’t know anyone who hadn’t left school at fourteen. They certainly didn’t know anyone who had been to a university. She worked hard at school – she loved it, but she had no idea how she was going to get where she wanted to go. Medical school. She didn’t even think about it, or what she was going to do if it didn’t happen. Childlike, she just saw the goal as a kind of reality, already achieved.

  Chapter Six

  1939

  Amy drove the twins to the station when term began again. The platform was crowded with young men with the same rowdy energy, squash rackets, hockey sticks, flying scarves – all the paraphernalia of being young, being free from responsibility. But she sensed a change. They seemed to her to be more subdued, the laughter and the jumping about and the energy not so free. Perhaps it’s me, she thought, perhaps it’s all in my mind.

  She was trying to suppress the memory of standing on the platform at Victoria Station in 1914, watching endless streams of innocent, untried young men on their way to the killing fields of France. There had been laughter then, and jokes and calling voices and backslapping camaraderie, but behind it all there was a reservedness, an apprehension. Those were young men, many of them just boys, going into unknown dangers, not knowing what waited for them in France, unable to imagine anything so terrible. She shivered and tried to shrug off the thought.

  Tessa noticed. ’Are you cold, Mum?’ she asked.

  ‘No,’ Amy said. ‘Just a goose walking over my …’

  Tessa kissed her cheek. ‘Got to go. See you at Easter.’

  Amy watched the train pull slowly out of the station. She understood now how her own father must have felt, watching her leave for France at the beginning of the war, wondering whether he would ever see her again.

  Charlie and Tessa settled down in a crowded carriage. One of the young men smiled at Tessa. ‘Are you a student,’ he asked, ‘or just visiting?’

  ‘She’s a student,’ Charlie said, before she could answer. ‘A medical student. She’s got someone’s leg in her suitcase.’

  The young man flushed, looking shocked, bemused.

  ‘I’ve only got the bones,’ Tessa said hurriedly. ‘I’ve been st
udying them in the vacation.’ The young man looked away and didn’t speak to her again. He looked, she thought, thoroughly disgusted.

  When they got out at Cambridge she dug Charlie in the ribs. ‘What are you trying to do?’ she said, laughing. ‘Ruin my marital prospects?’

  Charlie grinned. ‘Merely revealing that he was a complete twerp. You have to admit that I was right.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You were right. Obviously an anti-woman-doctor diehard. Anyway, I’m not in the market. Five years and three quarters to go.’

  Charlie carried his suitcase up the staircase to his room and unpacked. He realized that he had a certain amount of envy for Tessa. He envied her complete assurance about her future, her determination about where she was going. What was his future? The Civil Service, perhaps, or the Colonial Service, or teaching. He couldn’t quite see himself spending the rest of his life as a housemaster in some minor public school, or swatting flies under a solar topee in some remote part of the Empire. He had no idea where he was going, no matter how much he thought about it. It was like an itch that he couldn’t scratch. Most of the acquaintances he’d made seemed to be the same, but most of them didn’t seem to worry about it. That was OK he supposed, if you came from a rich family and didn’t have to work for your living.

  The exception, he thought, was Arthur. Arthur seemed to know where he was going all right. He seemed to know where the whole world was going. Was he right? If so, then he, Charlie, and all the others, would have no decisions to make.

  He walked to the window and looked out over the quad. It had not changed much since it was built, some of it in the sixteenth century. Would it survive now? Or would some vicious German bomber wipe it out in an instant, intent on destroying everything the British held dear, intent on breaking their spirit, wiping out their history? Frightening us to death.