by Peggy Savage
Students were arriving, talking in groups, silently watched by the ancient stones, by mullioned windows that had looked out on the same scene for hundreds of years. All-out war would make no differences amongst them. The scholars and the dilettantes, the swotters and the time-wasters, those who studied every day in their rooms and those who spent the day messing about on the river, would all have the same future. For God knew how long. And a sizeable number of them would never have to think about it again. They would not be here. They would be a name on a village war memorial, a photograph on a cottage sideboard. Would he be one of those? These ancient stones, God willing, would still be here, a reminder, watching over the generations to come. The thought was a kind of comfort.
He remembered Arthur’s amused remark about knights on horseback. In a way, Arthur was right; that was how he felt. If it came to it, that would be what he wanted. Face-to-face combat with another man – not firing a huge gun, or scattering machine-gun bullets, or dropping bombs, not knowing who or what it might wipe out at the other end. When they were settled in he would go to see Arthur again.
‘Hello Tessa.’ Rita bounded into Tessa’s room. ‘Good Christmas?’
‘Yes,’ Tessa said, ‘it was lovely. Just the family.’
Rita sat down on the bed. She looked excited, bursting with news. ‘Guess what I did in the vacation.’
Tessa smiled and shrugged. ‘What?’
Rita held out her left hand. ‘I got engaged.’ Her third finger bore a small diamond solitaire.
Tessa was almost shocked. ‘But – how can you?’ she began. ‘You’ve got all this to do …’ Her voice tailed off.
Rita looked pensive. ‘I can still do it,’ she said. ‘Being engaged won’t stop me.’
‘But when are you thinking of getting married? You know they might not let you stay here if you are married.’
‘We’ll wait,’ Rita said defensively. She turned the ring on her finger. ‘He’s in the army, you see – a lieutenant. We wanted to make it official.’
‘But you’ve got three years just at Cambridge, and then there’s the clinical training,’ Tessa said. ‘It’s a long time.’
‘It doesn’t matter.’ Rita was even more defensive. ‘If he has to go away, if I don’t see him for months at a time, I want him to know that I’m here and I’ll wait, no matter what happens.’
Tessa stared at her. She couldn’t imagine anything that might divert or distract her, but then, she couldn’t imagine having those feelings, having those dreadful worries. She sat down on the bed and smiled and gave Rita a hug. ‘Well, congratulations,’ she said. ‘It’s great news and I hope you’ll be very happy.’
Rita slipped off her ring and hung it on a chain and put it around her neck. ‘I just hope he doesn’t have to go,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what I’d do if …’ Her eyes glistened.
Tessa took her hand. ‘Why does everybody think that war is inevitable? Mr Chamberlain has sorted that out.’
‘My fiancé thinks it is,’ Rita said, ‘and he ought to know.’ She touched her ring with her fingers. She coloured a little. ‘Tessa,’ she said, ‘do you know anything about sex?’
‘What do you mean?’ Tessa said. ‘I know how babies are conceived. You must know that. You must have done biology at school and we’ve done human reproduction in physiology lectures here.’
Rita coloured even more. ‘I know that,’ she said. ‘But it’s sort of skimmed over, isn’t it? They don’t tell you anything about feelings. I always thought you only did it if you wanted a baby. You know – you got married and did it and had a baby and then if you wanted another one you did it again. My mother never told me anything. It was absolutely taboo. I thought perhaps, with your mother being a doctor….’
‘Well, what is it you want to know?’
Rita bit her thumbnail. ‘My fiancé says people do it all the time, whether they want babies or not. He says they do it to show they love each other.’
‘You mean he wants you to have sex with him before you’re married?’ Rita nodded. ‘But you might get pregnant before you’re married.’
‘He says there are ways of preventing it. And he says he’d marry me at once if I did.’
‘I see.’ Tessa said. She knew about contraception, from her mother, but she didn’t really see. She had never imagined herself having this problem. Her mother had explained it to her as far as she could, but it had all seemed theoretical to her. Marriage and sex could wait. That was somewhere in the future.
‘Have you ever done it?’ Rita said.
Tessa, despite herself, was shocked. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Of course not.’ She paused. ‘But then, I’ve never been in love with anyone.’
Rita sighed. ‘I don’t know who to ask.’
‘Whoever you ask,’ Tessa said, ‘they’ll say no. If you’re asking me, I’d say it’s not a good idea.’
‘I just wish he wasn’t going away. I wish there wasn’t all this about war. If we got married I suppose I’d have to give up my training.’ Rita got up. ‘I’d better go and unpack. You won’t say anything to anyone, will you?’ She left, closing the door gently behind her.
Tessa crouched before the fireplace and put a match to the fire. There’s so much I don’t know, she thought. I’m going to be a doctor; I ought to know about these things. She remembered her mother’s anger one day, when she came home from work. She heard her telling her father. One of her patients, a girl of sixteen, had become pregnant outside marriage. ‘They’ve locked her away,’ her mother said, ‘the authorities. She’s been put in a mental hospital with a “diagnosis”,’ she pronounced the word with utter scorn, ‘of moral insanity. God knows what that means and God knows when they’ll let her out. And she’s not the only one. And the man gets away scot free. He’s only got to deny it and there’s no way of proving that he’s the father. Moral insanity! Good God. It’s ignorance. If these girls were given a bit more information, it wouldn’t happen so often.’
How had Rita got herself into this situation, she thought? She couldn’t allow herself to be involved with a man if there was going to be a war. How could you live with that kind of fear and worry? It would be nightmare enough worrying about Charlie. How would she manage her feelings? Am I a coward, she thought? Would I falter and break if it all got really bad? Handling bits of the human body were one thing if they were long dead. How would she cope with those other realities, with violent pain and death? I’ll ask my mother, she thought. She’ll know. She’s been there. She had never talked about it, but she knew. There were a lot of things she needed to know.
Arthur was in his room when Charlie went up to speak to him. He was making one of his innumerable cups of tea. ‘Hello Charlie,’ he said. ‘Come in and take a seat.’ He poured and handed Charlie a cup of tea. ‘Just a social visit?’
‘Not exactly,’ Charlie said. ‘I wanted to ask you something.’
‘Fire ahead.’
‘I believe you’re in the University Air Squadron,’ Charlie said. Arthur nodded. ‘Done my first solo and short cross-country. Not far off a private licence.’
‘Do you have to be an engineer or something to get in?’ Charlie asked, ‘or will they take anybody?’
‘They won’t take just anybody,’ Arthur said. ‘You’d have to show some kind of ability. Why? Are you interested? Do you see yourself having a nice little hobby playing with an aeroplane?’
‘Arthur,’ Charlie said, annoyed, ‘I’m not a complete wet. I’m prepared to fight if it comes to it. I just think I’d rather do it in the Air Force.’
Arthur smiled a grim smile. ‘Why? Do you think it would be an easy option?’
Charlie stared at him for a moment. Did he, he wondered? Did he think it was an easy option, spending a war living in England probably, or at least sleeping in his own bed at night? ‘It isn’t that,’ he said. ‘I don’t quite know what it is. Perhaps I just want to see my enemy – one to one, man to man.’
Arthur grinned again. ‘See yourself as a f
ighter pilot, do you? Only kill the man who’s trying to kill you? The old white knight again. What if they put you on bombers? What if you had to fly over Germany and drop your bombs on cities full of civilians? What then?’
Charlie hesitated. It was something he had not been able to decide about. Not that he would have the choice. ‘I expect I’d have to do what I was told,’ he said.
‘Too damn right.’
Charlie said nothing, watching Arthur’s face.
‘Why do you want to talk to me about it?’ Arthur said softly. ‘You’re not like me. You’ve never had to fight for anything, have you, Charlie? You’ve just been given everything. Most of the men at this university are the same. Born with silver spoons. Just look at them. Dawdling dandies, most of them, come here to finish off a gentleman’s education, and then out into the tight little world of the old-boy network. Most of them look down on people like me with scholarships – working-class upstarts.’
‘I don’t,’ Charlie said, irritated. ‘My parents aren’t like that; they’re both doctors. My mother does a lot of work in the slums.’
‘Maybe she does,’ Arthur said, ‘but it’s charity, isn’t it? Charity hospitals, soup kitchens, hand-me-downs from charitable ladies. It’s disgusting. These people have a right to a better life. They thought they’d get it after the last war, but they didn’t.’
Charlie didn’t know what to say. He had a flash of memory of Germany, of their heartless strength. They seemed prosperous enough, but surely that couldn’t be the way to go. There was a better way of living, of thinking. ‘Is there going to be a war, Arthur?’
Arthur gave his gusting laughter. ‘There’s a breathless hush in the close tonight, Charlie, and it isn’t going to last. And who’s going to be fighting? Blokes like me. Have you forgotten those blokes at the Oxford Union who said they wouldn’t fight for King and country?’
Charlie was stung, annoyed. ‘We’re not all dawdling dandies,’ he said. ‘Some of us do think, you know. And sometimes diplomacy is best. The pen is mightier than the sword.’
‘I know that,’ Arthur said. ‘Strangely enough, some of us think so too, but sometimes only the sword will do.’
‘Can you get me into the Air Squadron, Arthur?’ Charlie asked, ‘without the rhetoric.’ His voice held an edge that Arthur seemed to recognize.
‘I can take you along,’ Arthur said, ‘but I can’t guarantee anything. I’ll take you on Saturday. Meet me here at eight o’clock. Wear something warm.’
Charlie went back to his room. Them and us, he thought. Why is it like that? Maybe part of the German strength was the way they had united the people, made them feel that they were all equal, even if it was in some kind of oppression. Why were his countrymen only equal when they were fighting, and mostly not even then? The equality didn’t seem to last. Kipling had it in a nutshell: ‘Tommy’ was almost an insult in peacetime, but ‘Tommy’ was a hero when the drums began to roll. No wonder Arthur was so cynical.
On Saturday afternoon Sara arrived at Kathy’s house. The street was very different from what she was used to. The houses looked big and had big pillars at the doorways and steps that went down into a sort of basement. They were all nicely painted and there were one or two cars parked in the road. No one had had a car in Trafford Park except the doctor and his looked a bit old and shabby. Her dad went to work on his bike – when he had a job. There had been a few big houses at the top of their street, but they didn’t look like this. The doctor lived in one, and the headmistress of her school in another, and someone her father called ‘that useless councillor’. They might have been big but they looked all gloomy and neglected. She had never been inside a house that looked like this.
She rang the doorbell. After a few moments the door was opened by a maid in a white apron. ‘I’ve come to see Kathy,’ Sara said. The maid opened the door and gestured for her to come in.
She stepped into a long, wide hall paved in black and white tiles, with a long, silky-looking rug down the middle, deep red and blue. Somewhere in the house music was playing. It wasn’t the kind of music her mother listened to on the wireless, or sang about the house, or her dad sometimes strummed on the piano: ‘Alexander’s Ragtime Band’, or something like that.
The maid disappeared and then Kathy came running into the hall. ‘Come in,’ she said. ‘My mum’s in here.’
Sara looked about her. The sitting-room was big enough to have two sofas and there was a marble fireplace with a log fire burning brightly. She could see the laid wooden floor round the edge of the carpet. Parquet, her Dad had told her once. He put it down sometimes for someone as an extra job. They had lino at home.
‘This is my mum,’ Kathy said. Her mother was small and round and her hair was going a bit grey. She held out her hand. ‘How do you do, Sara.’ Sara shook her hand and just smiled. She was a bit overcome by the poshness of it all: the marble fireplace and the big windows with big curtains and the cabinet with little figurines in it. She tried to tuck it all into her memory. She knew that her mother would want to know all about it when she got home.
‘Come up to my room,’ Kathy said. They climbed the staircase, with its polished rails and banisters and brown carpet held down by gleaming brass rods.
Kathy’s room was bigger than hers at home, but not different, really. It had a bed and a desk and a table and there was a teddy bear on the bed. That rather surprised her. She had given up teddy bears long ago. As her eyes took it all in she realized that there were a few differences. Kathy had her own wireless, and, wonder of wonders, there was a radiator giving out heat, just like they had at school.
Kathy shut the door with a little bang. ‘Beethoven,’ she said. ‘Lily’s always playing Beethoven on her gramophone, but I’d rather have dance bands. My mum say I’m a philistine.’ Sara wasn’t really sure what that meant, but she didn’t like to ask. Kathy did a few dancing steps. ‘Can you do the quickstep?’
‘No,’ Sara said. ‘I don’t know how to dance.’
‘I’ve got a book,’ Kathy said, ‘that tells you how to do it.’ She turned on the wireless. ‘Sometimes there’s Victor Sylvester’s band on in the afternoons.’
There was no music, only some man talking about Italy and Mussolini. ‘I do wish they’d stop going on about it,’ Kathy said. ‘They never seem to talk about anything else. It’s so boring.’
She showed Sara her clothes. Sara had never seen her in anything but her school uniform. They’re not much different from mine, Sara thought. Her mother always made sure that she was nicely dressed – neat and tidy. ‘What does your dad do for his living?’ she asked.
‘He works in a bank,’ Kathy said. ‘I don’t know what he does there. Counts the money, I expect.’ Sara could see and feel the money all around her. She didn’t suppose that Kathy’s father had ever been out of work.
A bell tinkled down below. ‘That’s tea,’ Kathy said. ‘We’d better go down.’
Tea was bread and butter and cake and a cup of tea in a flowery china cup. There wasn’t anything like real food, Sara thought, and anyway, it was too early. She’d have to have her proper tea when she got home.
She left at half past five and took the bus home. Her mother was getting tea ready – no, not tea, she’d have to learn to call it dinner – sausage and mash today. Her father was sitting at the kitchen table reading the paper. ‘Have a good time?’ her mother asked.
Sara nodded. She had a strange reluctance to go into it all, all the descriptions of the house that her mother would want, but she knew she’d have to do it after tea – dinner.
‘We had tea,’ she said, ‘but it was only bread and butter and cake.’
Her mother nodded. ‘Afternoon tea,’ she said. ‘That’s different.’ She turned back to her potatoes, her back to Sara.
‘They had a maid,’ Sara said. ‘She brought in the tea.’
Her mother said nothing for a moment, but Sara could see the sudden tenseness in her shoulders and the momentary halt in her peeling of
the potatoes. ‘Oh, did they?’ she said.
When Sara went up to her room Jim put his paper down. ‘Now look what’s happened,’ he said. ‘What’s she going to think when she goes into these houses with these people? We’re not going to look very good, are we? She’s going to be ashamed of us, isn’t she?’
‘No she isn’t,’ Nora said. ‘She’s not like that.’
‘You’re going to lose her, that’s what,’ he said. ‘If she ever gets what you want you’ll probably never see her again.’
‘Don’t be daft,’ Nora said. ‘She wouldn’t do that. She’d never be that sort of snob.’ But she felt a little chill. I don’t care, she thought. Just as long as she gets it.
‘You’ll see,’ he said. ‘That’s if we’re not taken over by the Germans.’
‘Just let them try,’ she said.
At eight o’clock on Saturday Charlie met Arthur in his room. ‘The airfield’s at Duxford,’ Arthur said, ‘but I believe there are plans to move to Marshall’s.’
They took the bus to Duxford and walked into the airfield, towards the hangars. Arthur took a deep breath. ‘Smell it,’ he said. ‘It’s the best smell in the world, oil and aircraft dope and all the rest. You can keep your posh perfumes.’ Charlie glanced at him and smiled. He hadn’t suspected Arthur of having a poetic soul. Flying seemed to bring it out.
There were three aircraft parked on the grass. ‘That one’s an Avro, and those two are Tiger Moths,’ Arthur said. His voice held a tone of pride and satisfaction. ‘One of the best aircraft ever made.’
He took Charlie into the office. ‘Another recruit, Bill,’ he said. ‘I’ll have to go. I’ve got a flight booked this morning.’
Bill was tall and thin, wearing a flying suit. ‘Have a seat,’ he said. ‘So you want to fly. Have you any experience?’
‘No,’ Charlie said. ‘I’ve never been up before.’
‘I see.’ Bill looked at him for a moment. ‘What are you reading?’
