Safe Passage

by Mary Burchell

  If I had time—! But there was no time. And so I had borrowed recklessly and mortgaged as much future income as I dared. There were times where I literally wondered where to find the next penny.

  I remember the most acute crisis, which had a flavour of real comedy about it. I simply had to lay my hands on eight pounds somehow. I had racked my brains, I had tried everything I could think of, and still the eight pounds remained elusive.

  Then I went to visit Nesta in hospital, having decided I must produce a bright smile and put my financial worries behind me for the moment.

  Almost her first words to me were, “Ida, there’s something that’s worrying me a bit.”

  I took a deep breath and asked what it was.

  “Well, they keep on sending me my salary from the office,” Nesta explained, “because this is the only address I have. But I don’t like keeping it here. Would you take care of it for me?”

  I laughed—much more heartily, even hysterically, than was fitting in a sick room.

  “Nesta dear, with more pleasure than I can possibly tell you,” I assured her. “May I borrow eight pounds of it? I’m in an awful jam.”

  “Borrow the lot, if you like,” Nesta replied. “I shan’t need it for a long time.”

  We often laughed about that afterwards. It was the nicest instance of “the Lord providing” quite unexpectedly.

  It took me the first two or three years of the war to straighten things out, but I did it eventually. I have sometimes wondered since if I ought to have plunged even further than I did, in that mad summer of 1939. I thought I had stretched things to the limit of my capacity. But I don’t know. I suppose if any of us could possibly have conceived of what was coming, we would all have done more than we did.

  Every weekend, Jane, Louise and I used to visit Nesta in the hospital outside London where she had gone for long plastic surgery treatment. And presently, she was well enough at least to telephone us. We were expecting her call that first time, and the moment she spoke, one of us said, “Wait a moment. We think you would like to hear this.” And we played her Ponselle’s well-loved La Vestale on the gramophone, because we wanted her to feel there were still things of supreme beauty for her to enjoy.

  She was thrilled beyond expression. After that, she would telephone us quite often. The telephone operator was very sympathetic and used to forget about time limits for toll calls, so we often played Nesta a favourite record or two, as well as exchanging the news.

  I had always planned madly for the future and usually had one ridiculous project or another on hand; but at that time, I lived only for each day. One could not, dared not, plan for the future.

  Louise and I occasionally permitted ourselves to say, “One day—” but we no longer used expressions like, “There’s always Rosa.” As the years went on, we almost accepted the fact that all links with the past had snapped. The bright hopes that had sustained us through years of refugee work seemed unreal now. With some shock, we realized that it was ten years and more since those days we had accepted as the golden norm of existence.

  Were we really the same two who had saved our money, nearly twenty years ago, to go to America and hear Galli-Curci? Were we the same two who had basked in the beauties of every performance Ponselle ever gave in Europe? Were we the two who had sat in the opera queue in the sunshine and snapped the stars, until one day we took the snap that was to draw us into the dark melodrama that had enveloped Europe?

  We dwelt very much in the past in those days. We now knew that the one thing that can never be taken from you is the memory of the great times that once were. But we no longer expected to repeat them in the future. Urgent work in Europe had claimed us, and while we did it, we had assured ourselves that one day we would have a radiant reward. We would go back to New York. We would hear the kind of operatic performances that had irradiated our youth. We would know the same carefree happiness again. Above all, we would hear our matchless Rosa in the many roles we still had never heard.

  Now we knew that, at least, would never be. Ponselle had married and retired at a phenomenally early age. The bright, almost legendary figure of our happiest days was no longer before the public.

  And let no one think this was a minor matter. I can say quite honestly that the money and energy and thought that we put into our refugee work never really entailed much sacrifice for us. But what we did give as the price for our refugee work was the chance to hear the performances we loved best in the world and that would never come again.

  We do not regret our choice in the least and, of course, we would choose exactly the same way again. But when people say to us, “What it must have cost you to do that work!” I always think, It cost us Rosa’s Donna Anna and Carmen and Luisa Miller and L’Aficaine. That was what mattered.

  However there was to be one more phase that would jerk us out of any leisurely nostalgia, or indeed, out of anything but the defiant desire to live until the end of the war, whatever it brought.

  In June, 1944, the first of the flying bombs came.

  Personally, I was more frightened of them than anything during the Big Blitz. Partly, I believe, because distant victory was in sight, and the thought of being killed now was unbearable. The horizon had been slowly expanding once more. We had begun to look cautiously into the future, any future. That it might be snatched away even now was unthinkable.

  During a long night, when the infernal things seemed to be whirring over our heads almost without interruption, and as Louise and I crouched under the dining-room table side by side, I suddenly and boldly pronounced a plan for the future once more.

  “If we ever live to see the end of this war,” I shouted to her above the din, “you and I are going back to America. We’ll fly there. We’ll do ourselves well over everything. We’ll go right over to California and see Lita and Homer again. And maybe, somehow, we will find Rosa. The Ponselle performances may be over, but I’m going to see her, if only to stand in front of her and look at her.”

  And much as she had replied to a similar plan twenty years ago, Louise said, “Of course. How soon after the end of the war, do you think?”

  “The first minute we can,” I vowed, as the ground shook under our knees, and our knees shook under us.

  13

  Our new American plan sustained us through the last ferocious months of the struggle.

  Less than a week after our decision, a doodlebug came down and pushed in the back of our house. But, crowning mercy for us, no one was at home. Louise and I had finally persuaded the parents to go to Northumberland. I had written an old school friend of mine asking if she could find somewhere for them to stay in her small country town. And, with the letter in her hand, she went to her father and said, “What about it, Dad?”

  To our lasting gratitude, he didn’t say, “Well, now, let’s see,” or “If we think it over, perhaps….” He said, “Telegraph for them to come to us now.”

  We saw them off the next morning on the ten o’clock train. At one o’clock, the flying bomb came down. When Louise came home from the office at six o’clock, it was to find the whole house blasted. And when I arrived ten minutes later, she greeted me with a characteristic Cook-ish announcement: “Yes, we’ve been bombed. But never mind the house. Igor is missing.”

  I cannot imagine how I have written thus far and not dealt with Igor, prince of cats and probably the most important member of our family. He started as Prince Igor, because he came to us in all his black Persian beauty during the summer that Rethberg sang in Prince Igor at Covent Garden, 1935. His aristocratic name, I regret to say, rapidly degenerated into Iggie in all affectionate moments, but he retained his superb and kindly dignity under any name.

  He had gone bravely through the war with us, running to his own personally selected air-raid shelter under the sideboard in the dining room whenever danger was near. And many were the nights we had gazed across at each other in sympathetic understanding—and strictly at ground level—as we crouched under the table and
the sideboard. That he should now be missing was a tragedy transcending all mere material losses, and Louise and I went out to look for him immediately.

  Eight houses had been reduced to rubble, and we were lucky, we realized, not to have had more damage than we had. Our luck had not ended there. We had the priceless assistance of our good friends, the Beers, who lived a few roads away. The moment Mrs. Beer saw the bomb flying down and realized that it must be near our house, she came running to our aid. She guessed that the house would be empty, and she was determined no looters should pick over our belongings before Louise and I returned.

  She stayed in the house until we came, and when she finally left, she promised to bring back her husband the moment he returned from work. Mr. Beer, who was so like a craftsman out of Shakespeare that one could hug him, so utterly and absolutely a constant British type persisting in all ages—Mr. Beer, she assured us, would know how to re-hang doors and strengthen shaky locks, so that the house would be safe at night.

  Louise and I, having returned from a fruitless search, were standing in the plaster-strewn hall discussing our next move when suddenly, through the doorway where the kitchen door used to be, came Igor—a very dusty Igor, extremely annoyed about the whole incident—for which he obviously held us personally responsible—but intensely pleased to see us.

  We fell upon him with cries of joy. Then all three of us sat down on the stairs amid the ruins and congratulated ourselves on being alive and reunited.

  Every clean-up had been accomplished before the kind Beers returned. And, sure enough, Mr. Beer knew exactly what to do next. We moved all movable objects from the ruined back rooms, and he nailed off the shattered part of the house, rehung the centre door, and boarded up the windows. By the time he had finished, Louise and I felt we could, with a clear conscience, leave the place.

  With Igor in a large basket, we departed for the flat. When we were halfway there, it dawned upon us that we were the refugees now. Countless others had sought sanctuary in the famous flat. Now it was our turn.

  We lived there nearly four months, with Nesta and Jane, until the house could be roughly repaired. There were still some bad moments, of course, but from then until the end of the war, our spirits slowly rose.

  Will anyone ever forget that May day when it was suddenly all over? Well, not quite over. For of course, in theory and, to many people, in hideous fact, it was not “all over” until August. But perhaps Londoners may be forgiven for feeling that their own special war was over on that wonderful sunny afternoon when the voice of Churchill—that voice that had sustained and inspired us through so many months and years of mortal struggle—told us that the war in Europe was over and we knew then that the bombing had ended too.

  It was a superb day in every sense of the word. All London drifted happily through the streets and the parks, milling around the palace and calling for the Royal Family, who were so much part of us. So dear to us personally, so precious to us symbolically. For a few hours, it seemed that we must all live happily ever after. Grim realities were something in the past or in the future. On that day of days, I think we all recaptured something of the artless, carefree joy of childhood. We had come out, literally, into the sunlight once more, and we could only blink at each other, smiling incredulously.

  Something of the glory and the relief lingered with us during the following weeks and months. The tension slowly relaxed, the walls of our tight little island were expanding once more, so that we could allow our thoughts and our hopes to reach out. It was like stretching after a long, nightmarish sleep. And, if we woke up gradually to some rather dismaying realities, at least we were among the lucky ones who did wake. Too many, in those terrible years, had fallen asleep, never to wake again.

  Louise’s and my determination to visit America no longer looked like a vague dream. There were going to be difficulties, of course, in getting abroad for some while after the end of the war. But when in August peace finally came, we began to plan in detail.

  There was a certain nostalgic familiarity about calculating our finances, tackling official difficulties, working out a programme. And there was very real pleasure in writing to our many refugee friends in the States, telling them that we hoped to see them in something over a year’s time.

  We wrote also to the operatic stars whom we numbered among our friends, and as Christmas drew near, I decided I would not let the first peacetime Christmas go past without trying to make contact with the greatest figure of our happiest opera days, Rosa Ponselle.

  I had no address to write to. But I knew that two or three years before the war, she had married the son of the mayor of Baltimore. So I simply addressed my letter, “Rosa Ponselle, Baltimore, USA,” and sent it off.

  In that letter, I tried to tell her something of what she had been to us all during those three great seasons at the Covent Garden, and how she had remained in the memories of so many of us when we had nothing but memories to sustain our courage and our hopes. I added that Louise and I intended to come to the States in about a year’s time and that, if we got near Baltimore, we would perhaps pluck up courage and ask if we might see her.

  I am not sure that we even expected a reply. It was simply the first attempt toward doing something practical when we did arrive on the other side of the Atlantic. I thought the letter would probably, though by no means certainly, be delivered. But prima donnas are notoriously bad correspondents—Geraldine Farrar being the only exception I have known personally—and while of course I hoped for a reply, I felt no more confident than the rawest fan sending a first artless request for an autograph.

  But I need not have doubted. The reply came. And, with it, the first return of that sense of continuity the refugee years and the war had so cruelly torn away. Ponselle wrote as though we had parted yesterday.

  No words, she said, could describe how happy and touched she was to be remembered thus in London, where she had spent some of the happiest days of her whole career. It was true that much water had passed under the bridge since last we met, but we were moving on to the brighter future now, and at least we were alive and able to make the contact that meant so much. If Louise and I really came to the States, she and her husband absolutely insisted that we come to stay with them for a while, so that we could see her and hear her and feel that she was real once more. She ended by asking me to remember her to all the Covent Garden admirers who had remembered her so faithfully.

  “There’s always Rosa,” Louise and I had told each other, half-laughing, half-crying, during those dreadful years. And there was! For years now, we had wondered if it had really become just a meaningless catchword. But we were to see her, know her, hear her sing again. It was a sort of private vindication of our belief in the ultimate rightness of things.

  I lived on the telephone that day, ringing up all the old admirers I could reach. We nearly burnt up the telephone wires. All the conversations began carelessly with, “Who do you think wrote to me today?”

  When I had answered Rosa’s letter and settled down to a normal routine again, Louise and I decided that, on the anniversary of Ponselle’s London debut—the never-to-beforgotten May 28—we would give a party for as many of the old fans as we could cram into the flat, and we would have a ten-minute Atlantic call with her.

  Everyone received the idea with enthusiasm, for Atlantic phone calls were pretty unusual things in those days. Our only difficulty was that the flat had not elastic walls.

  I wrote explaining the idea to Ponselle and asked if she would like it. She simply wired back, “Will be waiting for your call—Rosa.”

  The flat had seen many sad, glad, crazy, serious—even tragic—gatherings since the day I first went into it. But it never saw a more excited, moved or strangely enough, nervous gathering than on that evening of May 28. I was the last to have spoken to her, but that was thirteen years ago in Florence. None of us had ever spoken on the Atlantic telephone before, and this attempt to bridge both time and distance was strangely unnerving.
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  Promptly at eight o’clock, the telephone rang, and dead silence fell upon the room. I don’t mind admitting I was trembling a bit as I picked up the receiver and the operator stolidly checked over the details of names and time.

  Then he said, “Go ahead.” Out of the past, Ponselle’s unmistakable “dark” Italian-American voice spoke, almost in my ear, “Hello, Ida! Is that you?”

  Shades of all the great days of our youth. Of the times we crouched on an uncomfortable seat in the gallery to cheer her Norma and Gioconda and Traviata! Of those days I tracked her through London, not daring to ask if I might snap her.

  “Hello, Ida!” said Ponselle, over three thousand miles and thirteen years. “Is that you?”

  It was like raising the dead.

  I forgot to call her Madame Ponselle. I called her Rosa, as we always had amongst ourselves. Incredibly enough, everyone who spoke to her over the telephone that evening called her Rosa.—Except Douglas, who then and ever afterwards, addressed her as “Casta diva.”—She asked me how many were there. When I told her, adding that they were all as silent as they had been when they waited for her “Casta diva” years ago, she laughed and asked, almost diffidently, “Would you like me to sing for you now?”

  “Will you?” I gasped.

  “Yes,” she said. “Call them all around and hold up the receiver. I’ll see if I can get it over to you all.”

  I called them around. We sat, knelt or stood as near to the telephone as we could, and held up the receiver.

  There was a moment’s silence. And then—in miniature, but clear, matchless—her tremendous, characteristic entry in the “Pace, pace,” from the fourth act of the Forza del Destino crossed the years and the ocean. The pianissimo, growing to an incredible fortissimo and back to the golden thread of her unrivalled pianissimo once more. We would have known it anywhere, any time, as Ponselle—at the North Pole or on the banks of the Styx. We nearly went crazy.