Goodbye Piccadilly

by Goodbye Piccadilly (retail) (epub)

  ‘Ruby’s judgement and you choosing to leave the leafy suburbs and coming to live and work here. And I, for one, am glad that you did. Now come back and Rag with me some more.’

  Back in the hall they were just taking their first steps to the music when the shout ‘Rozzers!’ went up. Danny at once let go of her hands and rushed over to a young man into whose jacket pocket he thrust some papers. At the moment when policemen burst in through both front and back entrances, truncheons raised as though prepared for attack, Danny Turner scrambled out through a window.

  Danny’s agility gave him a head start on the constable who gave chase. In the hall where several policemen were barricading the entrances, there was uproar. People shouting, a dog barking, a baby crying, little children wailing, and a crash of glass at the other end of the hall, where several other young men were scrambling through windows.

  A police sergeant shouted for quiet and ordered all men to one end of the hall. Victoria and Annie remonstrated with him, asking for authority, which the sergeant declared he did not need, saying that they were searching for a conscripted man who had ‘done a bunk’.

  All of the men had papers that were in order, exempting them from Conscription registration. Nothing illegal having been proved, the raiders eventually retreated and the dance was given permission to resume. But the incident knocked the wind out of the sails that had carried the evening along with such enjoyment.

  When the helpers were clearing up, Otis said, ‘I don’t understand what went on here.’

  Victoria said. ‘The men who’ve got an occupation that exempts them from Conscription hand over their exemption papers to men who have none.’

  Understanding dawned on Otis. ‘And the men who have legitimate papers create a diversion by escaping?’

  ‘That’s right,’ Annie said. ‘It’s not against the law to run off. If they are caught they can’t be charged with anything. All that the police can do is to give them notice to produce exemption documents within twenty-four hours – which of course they do. Would you like to see to it that Danny’s papers are returned safe and sound?’

  Otis did not at all mind. It confirmed her a member of the ardent and well-run organization.

  —

  Greywell, Stormont Road, Clapham Common. London.

  My Dear Otis,

  As a favour to me, please do try to be on time for Christmas Eve dinner, if not for my sake then for our guests’. When Max goes back from this leave, I want him to take with him a vision of what he is fighting for – home, family, tradition. We shall dine at nine P.M. sharp and I trust that you will give yourself time to bathe and change into the new gown I have had sent from Madame.

  Affectionately

  E. H.

  Emily Hewetson had gone to a great deal of trouble to prepare a traditional Christmas celebration – at least her domestics had gone to a great deal of trouble on her behalf, and Emily had herself done all of the persuading in Fortnum’s provisions department as well as making up orders for the Army and Navy Stores.

  She knew that Otis would not respond as she ought. Any normal daughter would clasp her hands and say how wonderful everything looked, and how had her mother managed to gather under one roof so many provisions and luxuries that were in short supply, and that the image of the great Christmas tree in the hall was what every soldier should carry in his heart.

  But, Emily complained to herself, Otis had never been an easy child, had been positively difficult as a girl, and was now an impossible young woman.

  ‘I tell you, Martin, no man is ever going to want her.’

  ‘Em, you worry too much. Have you ever known a beautiful young woman, with Otis’s expectations, to want for a husband?’

  ‘I have never known a young woman like Otis. And what kind of husband? One of her rabble? Some coster-monger who eats eels on the street? I have kept well away from that part of her life, as you well know, but that does not mean that I am unaware of what she is up to. You have no idea of what has found its way under this roof. Even as I speak, in her room are pamphlets of instruction that I should blush for the servants to see. Lord, I can hardly bring myself to tell you.’

  Martin frowned to please Em, but he was already aware of some of the activities which, though others of his ilk found nefarious, he did not. In his opinion Otis’s idealism in wanting to educate the masses was worthy of the Hewetsons, who had always taken a liberal view in most matters. Surely only good could come if girls were well-educated and knew how to regulate the size of their families.

  Awaiting the arrival of both Max and Otis, Emily and Martin Hewetson were arranging on the sideboard Christmas greetings cards and small sweetmeats and fruits. ‘D’you know, Em, I think that at the moment we should be more concerned for Max’s welfare than for Otis’s. I’m afraid that there is something amiss.’

  ‘With Max? I noticed nothing. He was edgy, it is true, but surely that is only to be expected in a man who has fought in battle.’

  ‘I believe that he has had some terrible experiences.’

  ‘I am sure that you are right, Martin. Killing people is not nice, and Max was never one for any sort of shooting party, as you well know. One thing though, his uniform does look so much better on him now that he has lost his tendency to podginess. I thought him very handsome.’ She moved the silver-framed photograph of the military Max more centrally on the mantelpiece.

  Martin needed someone in whom he could confide his fears about his young step-brother, but Em was not that person. But, he thought, who is?

  Otis arrived well on time, followed by Max who looked fatigued, in spite of having been on leave. The dinner, the meals that followed next day and the little entertainments she had arranged, were a success, making Emily thoroughly pleased at being back once more as queen over such an elegant household.

  Martin, as he watched his daughter over the two days of her visit, wondered at her chameleon-like ability to adapt to her surroundings. He had visited Islington on only a couple of occasions, but he had observed enough of her life to know that, in her plain clothes and un-elaborate hair style, she was a very different person. There she merged into the busy street-scape. Over Christmas at Greywell, though, she was everything that Em wished for in a daughter – with the exception that she would not rise to any bait when it came to eligible young men, and had once snapped too cruelly at her mother, ‘What young men? There are none, they are under six feet of mud, or strewn about the potholes of the minefields. Or will you provide for me one like Uncle Hewey, shot to pieces in his mind?’

  Fortunately Max had not been in the room, but it had brought into focus the fact that all was not well with his step-brother. Poor Em, she had seemed to deflate, withdraw; and he had seen her following Max with her eyes, smiling brightly at him when he caught her at it.

  On Boxing Morning Otis and Max had gone walking, whilst Martin had taken Em to give thanks in St Paul’s cathedral. In the afternoon Max had returned to his own residence to prepare for his return to his regiment. Over luncheon, Martin had noticed that there had been some kind of new rapport between Otis and Max: she had stopped calling him Uncle Hewey and he had seemed not so twitchy and, in place of his usual paternal patting and her pecking kisses, they had hugged in a very comradely way when they took their leave of one another.

  After Em had gone up that night, it was Otis who proved to be the confidante Martin had been looking for.

  ‘I tried to get Max to give it up, Pa, but I did not succeed.’

  ‘Give up…?’

  ‘Fighting, killing, being killed, mentally breaking…’ Martin looked at the serious face of his lovely daughter. Looking back over the last few years, he marvelled at the changes that had turned a rumbustious girl, who had been kept in pigtails and tam-o’-shanter caps for too long, into this idealistic and passionate woman. And how imperceptibly that had happened. On what day had the line of her mouth changed? In which week had those small cracks appeared at the corners of her eyes? When had her chin
risen and her jaw-line firmed? It was with Otis as it had been with Em, when one day he had noticed that her white hands were showing with the same brown markings of age as his own – the change had seemed to come suddenly. Logic said that they had not come overnight, but it had seemed so.

  Em had an imperious air that others found intimidating, but Martin saw through it. Otis, on the other hand, was sometimes too approachable, too ameliorating. But on the evening of that Boxing Day when he sat in the unlighted room before the glowing hearth and a second, smaller, crystal-bedecked tree, Martin Hewetson felt a little in awe of his daughter whose year of majority had only just passed. ‘You asked him not to return to the war?’

  ‘Not merely asked – tried to persuade him.’

  ‘Max would never do that.’

  ‘The old Max, the dear old Uncle Hewey might not have done so, but he’s changed. I believe that he was on the verge. If it had not been for his men, then I believe that he would have been persuaded.’

  ‘But you were asking him to desert!’

  ‘Of course I was.’

  ‘But soldiers cannot simply walk away when they see fit.’

  ‘It would put an end to them killing one another.’

  ‘And have Great Britain overrun by the Hun? Otis!’

  ‘Not if the common soldiers walked away also. Pa, isn’t anything preferable to eighty-five thousand men being massacred in three months? A further thirty thousand in another month? Three thousand more in a single battle? And what if the worst did happen and we found ourselves under the rule of Germany? Didn’t you used to love taking your holidays there? Aren’t they clean, home-loving, well-disciplined people, according to you? Now they are the filthy Hun. Are you going to tell me that within a year or two of this war ending their businessmen and ours, their princes and ours, will not be hob-nobbing again? But poor old Tommy, he won’t be able to hob-nob, will he?’

  ‘Otis! That is spurious argument and you know it.’

  She admitted it only to the extent that she gave him a short smile and a shrug of her shoulders.

  ‘Your mother said something to the effect that killing is never nice…’

  Otis burst in with a spurt of laughter. ‘Killing not nice! Oh Ma! I can just hear her.’

  ‘But what she was implying is that there are times when one must put aside finer feelings and do the other thing.’

  ‘Such as human beings frying one another in gouts of burning oil? Or spraying acid on to the skin of one’s fellow creatures? Or poisoning the air they breathe with lethal gas?’

  ‘That is not what I meant at all.’

  ‘But that is what it does mean to be in this war. That is what it means to Max.’

  He rose, stirred the fire, added another log and lifted the port decanter as a question.

  ‘Do you have white port, Pa?’

  He smiled. ‘I shall not enquire where an Islington teacher acquired such tastes. Yes, I keep some, but don’t often offer it now that such things are in short supply. But I will gladly share my hoard with a daughter who has developed a taste for it. Shall I play us some music?’

  He had recently persuaded himself that such a large room as this would benefit from a new Auxeto gramophone, and Em had had the pleasure of letting it be known, whispered into an ear or two, that the one hundred pounds laid out was not the half of it. He loved to find an appropriate moment to offer music.

  ‘Lovely, and we shall sit and be cosy until midnight has struck, shall we?’ She accepted the golden drink and tasted it appreciatively. It tasted of George Moth’s mouth. I was a girl then. There are times now when I feel older than Pa. The music poured from the mahogany cabinet and drowned the nastiness into which Otis had been about to force her father’s nose.

  Cello and violin strains swirled around them like drifting mists, out of which loomed the scene that Max Hewetson had described to her that morning, and which was the nastiness that she had wanted her father to confront.

  Otis had been relating what Victoria had told her about the international congress she had attended at The Hague.

  ‘My dear child, you and your friends cannot win. The country has too much at stake to go in for a negotiated peace,’ Max had said. ‘Peace must now be fought for, it has all gone beyond the point where women meeting the King of Norway can influence matters. It will be a fight to the death now, no matter what.’

  ‘Oh Uncle Hew, not more of the same. All these months – killing, killing, killing!’

  ‘There have been too many corpses, Otis, for there to be anything else other than total defeat for the Germans.’

  ‘Them and us, them and us, them and us. There are soldiers who want peace without fighting for it.’

  ‘You are wrong, Otis. The men will not give in, to them anything but outright victory is unthinkable.’

  ‘I believe they do. I meet them and listen to them. It is not the ordinary soldier who wants victory over a pile of bodies – he’ll settle for simple peace. It is the jingoists and the leaders with terrible ideas of supremacy who want a fought-for victory.’

  With a finger under her chin he raised Otis’s face and looked into it. ‘God preserve us, Otis, where did the laughing child go?’

  ‘She went on a trip to Islington and ended up in a bookshop in the real world where she meets soldiers who have given up killing their own kind.’

  ‘It is not a good place to be for a young woman with a conscience.’

  ‘Dear Hewey, it is the only place for her to be.’

  ‘So long as she is still here when I return and not languishing in gaol.’

  ‘Don’t go, Max. I know how to get you out of the country.’

  Now he looked really shocked. ‘Does that mean that you are involved in aiding deserters?’

  ‘Deserters? That is your word. But yes, I intend doing what I can. I’ll help conscientious objectors of any flavour – religious, political, registered, unregistered; any man who refuses to join in the shooting party.’ She knew that this reference was an arrow that went straight home, for he had once told her how he had been ostracized at a weekend house-party for referring to a pheasant shoot as a fulfilment of blood-lust and refusing to take part.

  ‘You are playing a serious game, Otis.’

  ‘It’s not a game, Max.’

  ‘I am glad that you realize it. No matter that you are twenty and very pretty, the powers-that-be are in no mood to be mellow with their opposers.’

  They had now reached open heath-land, where the wind whipped their faces.

  ‘This walk is doing you good, Max. I thought that you would never get colour back in your face.’

  They went to a seat where in summer one might sit beneath the great oak and look out across a green and pleasant land. Now, with the life-force withdrawn, the scene was straw-coloured, except for patches of white where the sun had not reached the hoar-frost. They sat with their warm, woollen coats buttoned around them, both aware that these two days at Greywell had been lived in never-never-land: Emily with her tree and trifles and roast beef, Martin with his thoughtful gifts and his loud orchestras coming from the mahogany box. Otis and Max playing the Hewetsons’ family game as it had been played for twenty years, both feeling guilty for being part of it.

  ‘Shall I tell you how they treat traitors and deserters out in France?’

  Otis guessed that she knew that from what she had already learned at the bookshop, but felt that for the first time in her life she was going to be allowed to see inside her kindly, playful, jolly uncle.

  ‘At one posting I was ordered to make arrangements for the reception of thirty or so prisoners disembarking from England. I thought this strange: why were prisoners being sent out of Great Britain? However, ours is not to reason why, et cetera, so I had the paperwork prepared and we duly received thirty-four men. It was not part of my duty to do so, but I went to look at them to see what sort of a bunch they were, ready for when orders came through about what to do with them.

  ‘I suppose
in telling you this, I am giving you ammunition for your league, fellowship or whatever it is, but what I found was extremely disturbing. I have no intention of describing the detail, but these men, many of whom had been in solitary confinement, had been fed only bread and water for God knows how long. The state of their clothing was pathetic! All of them had scars and contusions from beatings. All of them were under sentence of death.’

  Otis nodded. ‘And all were conscientious objectors, but nevertheless destined for the front line of battle and no chance of escape.’

  He turned to his niece and nodded his head. ‘You really do know what is going on, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes. If it is the same group of men, then one of them had been going to marry one of the women at the bookshop.’ She forbore to tell him the story of how close he had once come to Nancy that year when they holidayed in Southsea: those days had so little to do with these; those innocent people were as dead and gone as Mrs Moth.

  ‘Take care, Otis.’

  ‘It is not I who must do that. Why are you compelled to return to the fighting? I don’t mean compelled by military orders, but I can sense that it is not because of the war that you feel that you must go.’

  ‘It is because of the men. My own men, and those poor damned prisoners. My men… you say that soldiers do not wish to fight, well I tell you this, many of my own men would turn their rifles on me if I suggested that they stop fighting now. You may be right and they might have been tricked by the jingoism – I was myself – but now that they are in they have their comrades’ deaths to avenge. They will go on facing machine-guns, treading on mines and firing at anything that moves.’

  ‘And the Germans will do likewise and kill more comrades to be avenged and so on and so on. And when will it end? When there are no men left at all?’

  ‘Soon. When the Germans surrender. In the meantime my men will go on fighting, defending their homes…’

  ‘When what they are really defending are the homes of people like us, Max. Places such as Greywell.’