Octavia

by Beryl Kingston

  ‘It’s bad, isn’t it?’ she said.

  ‘It’s no picnic,’ he agreed but she could see from his closed expression that he wasn’t going to talk about it. He opened the car door for her and gave her his old courteous bow. ‘Hop in,’ he said. ‘Let’s go and have fun.’

  They spent as much time together as they could, given that she was at work and they ‘had fun’ every evening. She found it exhausting and perplexing, for although it involved a nightly trip to a theatre or a music hall, which was pleasant enough, it also meant some very heavy drinking, most of it whisky, which was a taste she’d never seen in him before, and that wasn’t pleasant at all. Too much drink made him rough when they finally got to bed, and she was used to gentleness. It was almost a relief when his leave was over and they were kissing goodbye at Victoria station again.

  ‘Toodle-pip,’ he said, in his laconic way. ‘See you again soon. DV.’

  It wasn’t until she was home again that she realised they hadn’t talked about her work at the school. Not once, in the entire week. And they’d never mentioned their wedding either, so she’d been right to say it had been postponed for the duration. The war’s taken him over, she thought. He’s not interested in anything else. It was understandable, given how awful it must be out there, but it hurt her feelings to be marginalised. It’s just as well I’ve still got a job to keep me occupied, she thought. And she returned to it with renewed enthusiasm.

  Two weeks later she found an advertisement in The Times that made her sit up and take notice. It was asking for applications from ‘Teachers of English Language and Literature’ for a position at a local grammar school. She passed it across the breakfast table to her father.

  ‘I’ve half a mind to apply,’ she said, taking care to sound casual. ‘What do you think, Pa?’

  He thought it an excellent idea. ‘Bernard Shaw would be delighted,’ he said. ‘Has he not always maintained that you should be training the next generation of teachers?’

  ‘Indeed he has,’ she agreed. ‘He maintains it with steady regularity. But if I do apply, it will be for my benefit and not that of the great dramatist.’

  He laughed at that. ‘Then you must do it for your benefit – and the benefit of your pupils,’ he said.

  So the application was sent. And in the rush of the school week, quickly forgotten. It was an exceptionally cold week, with flurries of snow most playtimes and frozen pipes in all the lavatories. ‘Makes yer life a right misery,’ the school keeper complained. ‘Mussen grumble though, not when you think of our poor fellers out there in them trenches.’

  Octavia thought of them every day, when she sat at her desk to write to Tommy. It was no good asking him to tell her how he really was – she’d learnt that now – but that didn’t stop her from telling him how anxious she was for his safety. ‘I think of you every day,’ she wrote, ‘and hope you are well and haven’t been hurt, you and Squirrel and Podge and Jimmy. If I could send you each an invisible shield to protect you I would.’

  But as things were, all she could do was write, and worry, and try to read between the lines of his laconic answers. Revelation, when it came, was at a moment when she least expected it and she was shattered by it.

  There were four letters for her that morning, delivered to the breakfast table in the usual way by Mrs Wilkins and she looked at them in the usual way to see whether one was from Tommy – postcard from Emmeline, letter from the WSPU, something official by the look of it, and a letter from the Front. But it wasn’t from Tommy. It was from Cyril. She opened it and spread it out in front of her to read while she ate her toast.

  ‘Dear Tavy,’ it said. ‘I hope you will forgive me for writing to you like this but I have to tell someone what is happening here or I shall go mad and I can’t tell Mama or Emmeline, they would never understand.

  ‘Life here is hell. There is no other word for it. We are not supposed to tell anyone about it for fear of breaking morale and every word we write is censored, so I’ve arranged to send you this with the help of a girl in a local estaminet behind the lines. It would be all blue pencil if I posted it in the normal way. We officers talk to one another, of course, but it’s mostly chaff. No one wants to lose face, I suppose. We mustn’t say anything in front of the chaps. That’s absolutely forbidden. We’re supposed to keep up their spirits, though they must know what we think, and how you can keep up anyone’s spirits when you could all be killed the next time you go over the top is beyond my comprehension.

  ‘Yesterday was the worst day since I came out here. The worst day of my life to tell you the truth. We were supposed to be out of the line for a couple of days because we’d just finished our stint and we were resting in a trench a few miles back, but we were woken at three, so we knew there was something up. Not much for breakfast – just bread and cheese and pretty hard tack at that. But that’s standard. We’re often on short rations. I’ve known days in the line when we were out of food and water altogether. I don’t know how we’d manage sometimes if it wasn’t for your parcels. Pretty soon word came down the line that the Germans had broken through and we were to proceed to the forward trenches. So I got my platoon in order pretty sharpish and we marched off in good order. When we got to the railway line it was full of refugees, all scared stiff, running away from Ypres as fast as they could, heading for Dickesbusch. It was ten kinds of chaos, people in a terrible state, rushing at us out of the darkness: old women hib-hobbling along, children in filthy clothes pushing carts piled so high with mattresses and chickens and pots and pans they couldn’t see where they were going, women with babes in arms, and all their livestock with them, cows, goats and kids all covered in mud and bleating and baaing and kicking up a racket, and everybody shouting and crying. We knew something bad was going on but we couldn’t make out what they were saying so we left them to it and just pressed on. It really put the wind up some of our lads, the locals running away and us marching into it.

  ‘When we got there we could see that the forward trench was still in our hands, which was one good thing, but we’d hardly arrived before the barrage started up. Big one this time and the noise enough to shatter your eardrums. Our gunners hadn’t got their range and a lot of shells were falling short which made us jittery, although we all tried to hide it. It’s no joke being out in no-man’s-land and being fired on by both sides. Bad enough being fired on by the Hun. Then the order was given and we had to go over the top. I don’t know how I’m going to tell you what happened next. It is making me cringe to think of it. But I must tell someone or my nerve will crack entirely, which would never do. An officer has to keep up his morale for the sake of his men. Only, after yesterday, I feel so much worse, I don’t think I can do it for much longer. If people back home knew what is going on out here they would do something to stop it. Only how can we tell them? I can barely find the words to tell you. It is all too enormous and beastly and brutal and inhuman. Every time I get back to the line I feel as if I’m stepping off the edge of the world. The line goes on for ever. You cannot see the end of it. They say it runs from the Channel to Switzerland in a long strip ten miles wide and everything in it is blackened and destroyed. There is nothing where I am but mud with the stumps of trees sticking out of it and bomb craters full of foul water and the twisted corpses of men and horses, everywhere you look, lying in heaps, decomposing. We bury our dead whenever there is a lull and the stretcher-bearers can get out to gather them in but the next push leaves the place full of dead and dying all over again and the horses lie where they fell, all twisted and distorted with the rats eating their flesh. You only have to look at them to see what pain they were in when they died. The stink of dead bodies is dreadful. It fills your nose and throat and makes everything taste bad. It is worse than a nightmare. At least a nightmare stops when you wake up but this goes on and on, day after day and month after month, getting worse and worse and worse. I am sorry to write to you like this, but it is the truth.

  ‘I was going to tell you about yesterd
ay, wasn’t I? You see how it is, your mind gets twisted up in this place and you forget what you were going to say. We went over the top at dawn with the bombardment going on all round us. Appalling noise, shells screaming overhead, explosions, men screaming when they were hit, the Hun’s machine guns rattling. The machine gun is the most efficient killing machine known to mankind. It can kill fifty men a second, and does. It just rattles on and on, spitting red-hot metal and our chaps drop like flies. They were falling all round me. I could see that there were fewer and fewer of us still running. Although you can’t see very well what with the smoke and the mud being thrown up by the explosions and men falling everywhere. I must have gone about twenty yards when the soldier in front of me was hit. I was going so fast I fell over him. Knocked the wind out of me. And the spirit. I should have got up and run on but I didn’t. Oh, my dear Tavy. I hardly know how to tell you this but in the end I have proved a coward. That’s what I am. A miserable rotten coward. I just lay there in the mud, playing possum, praying not to die, trying to scrabble into the filth to find somewhere to hide. I couldn’t stand up and get shot. The man I fell over was groaning and calling for his mother and I didn’t even crawl over to help him. I was stuck to the spot. A yellow-bellied coward. I don’t know how long I lay there in that shameful way. The man stopped groaning so I assumed he was dead but I didn’t go to see. In the end I heard whistles and someone yelling that we were falling back and then I got up and ran hell for leather until I was back in the trench. The same trench. Back where I’d started. There were only three of us left alive and unharmed from the entire platoon. All that suffering and all those lives lost and that poor devil lying out there in the mud and me not helping him and all for nothing. I should have gone to help him. I know it. It was shameful. They were my men and I let them down. Shameful. Well, now I have something to expiate.

  ‘Please don’t let any of our parents see this letter. It is for your eyes only. I’m sorry to be such a coward and I shan’t be surprised if you write back and tell me never to write in such a way again. If you do I shall obey you of course. You can tell them I am not wounded. Not wounded in body anyhow, although I fear I am shamefully wounded in spirit.

  ‘I am your loving and most miserable cousin,

  ‘Squirrel.’

  Octavia folded the letter and tucked it back inside its envelope carefully, keeping her head down and her expression under control and moving in the calmest way she could as though it was one of Squirrel’s usual cheerful missives. The shock of what she had just read was making her heart shudder but, if she was to be true to her cousin and guard his secret, she had to hide what she was feeling. She was glad that her father was absorbed in The Times and wasn’t looking at her and that her mother was complaining about the price of bread. ‘Up again, J-J. It can’t go on. A large loaf costs eightpence. And it was fivepence ha’penny when the war started. I think it’s scandalous.’

  ‘We can afford it, my dear,’ J-J said from behind the paper.

  ‘But what of the poor?’ she asked, blue eyes earnest. ‘They can’t and they’ll have a hard time of it. Especially in this weather. It’s those awful profiteers, that’s the real trouble. The government should do something about them.’

  Outside the windows of their coal-warmed room, the sky was leaden with impending snow. But inside it was an easy, luxurious place. Octavia looked at the voluptuous patterns of Mr Morris’s wallpaper behind her father’s head, the familiar painted roses on the teacup in her mother’s hands, the shine on the white damask tablecloth under her fingers, the flames flickering above the coals, the gleam of the fire irons, the expensive watercolours in half shadow on the walls, the chaise longue with its pile of tumbled cushions welcoming in the window bay, and she felt cosseted and protected, ashamed to be living so well when her cousin was suffering so much.

  ‘Who are your letters from?’ her mother asked mildly. ‘Is that a card from our Emmeline?’

  Octavia read the postcard to bring herself back to the reality of the morning and to prevent her mother from asking about Cyril. ‘She wants me to go to tea with her this afternoon instead of Thursday,’ she reported, glad that what she was saying was so mundane.

  ‘Shall you?’ her mother asked.

  ‘I expect so.’

  ‘Are they all well?’

  ‘She doesn’t say.’

  ‘So we may presume that they are,’ J-J said. ‘Amy, my dear, could I trouble you for another cup of tea. Is there any in the pot?’

  The difficult moment passed and Octavia could turn her attention to the rest of the morning’s mail. After Cyril’s letter it would be hard to take much interest in it but she was dutiful about her correspondence and there would be sufficient time before she had to catch the tram to work for her to answer the most important. Which was perhaps just as well for the official letter was from St Barnaby’s High School for Girls.

  ‘Well, well, well,’ she said to her parents. ‘You remember the job I applied for last week? The one at the grammar school. They’ve asked me to go for an interview.’

  ‘So they should,’ her father approved. ‘When is it to be?’

  ‘Friday week.’

  ‘You must have a new hat,’ her mother decided, planning the event at once. ‘And a longer skirt, I think. Those new short skirts of yours won’t be at all the thing in a grammar school.’ The length of Octavia’s skirts had been a sore point ever since the new style came in. In her mother’s opinion – frequently given and as frequently rejected – any woman showing her ankles was unladylike.

  For once Octavia didn’t argue about it. She just said, ‘Um, well, we’ll see,’ in a vague way, as if it wasn’t important, which of course it wasn’t, not after Cyril’s letter. Then she went on opening her mail, still keeping calm. The last one was from the WSPU and contained a piece of news that gave her an outlet for the anger she’d been holding in check. ‘Oh!’ she cried. ‘How disgraceful!’

  Her father set The Times aside and smiled at her affectionately. ‘What is it, Tavy?’ he asked. ‘Who has the ill fortune to be out of your grace this morning?’

  ‘Listen to this,’ she ordered, glaring at the letter. ‘Mrs Pankhurst is organising a march to demand – what is it she says? – women’s right to serve in this awful war. She has the backing of Mr Lloyd George, so it says, and is hoping for “a demonstration of at least forty thousand women”.’

  ‘And that displeases you?’ her father asked.

  ‘Yes it does,’ she said firmly. She had to be displeased about something. ‘Our movement was organised to demand the vote, not to kowtow to politicians.’

  ‘Kowtowing to politicians might be exactly the way to get what you want,’ J-J said. ‘Your Mrs Pankhurst is a very shrewd lady. A patriotic march could sway public opinion in your favour. The next time you ask you might be heard with more sympathy. Which would be no bad thing, surely?’

  Octavia was in no mood to be reasonable. ‘It’s dishonest,’ she said. ‘We should be campaigning for what we want, not organising a patriotic parade. Oh, I can see what they’re up to. Lloyd George wants more women to work in munitions now that the men are away at the war and we’re a big organisation so he’s enlisted us to help him. We shall be waving white feathers next. It was a great mistake to stop the campaign when the war began. We should have gone on and pushed them when they were weakened. I thought so then and I think so now.’

  ‘So you won’t be taking part in this parade?’ her father asked.

  She answered firmly, from the rigid determination of fear and anger. ‘No, I will not.’ Then she gathered up her letters and went to answer the easiest ones. Cyril’s would have to wait until the evening when she could write at length and gently.

  On the way to Bridge Street School, as snow swirled about the windows of the tram and her fellow passengers coughed and snuffled and complained to one another that the weather really should be improving, ‘bein’ it’s February. I mean ter say, it can’t go on much longer’, she thoug
ht of her cousins and her dear Tommy, out there in the cold facing up to horrors she would once have said were beyond imagination and could now imagine only too well. It as was if Cyril’s terrible letter had been etched into her brain. She could remember it almost word for word – the terror and pain of it, his needless, heartbreaking shame at what he called his cowardice. As if anyone could blame him for wanting to stay alive. At least she could reassure him about that. Who better after the way she’d behaved when they let her out of Holloway that last awful time? She thought of what he’d said about telling people what was really happening, about how necessary it was to tell the truth, and how it couldn’t be done, how even her friends in the WSPU were compromising themselves because of this war. Their kowtowing march was planned for the summer so the politicians obviously thought the war would still be going on then and for all she knew it could drag on into next winter too. It’s only four months since Podge and Squirrel and Tommy had their farewell party, and now they’re facing death every time they go over the top and we live in dread of the casualty lists. What will become of them? It seemed to her, sitting there, cold-footed on her uncomfortable wooden seat as the tram jerked along the rails and the snow tumbled against the window, that the world was changed beyond hope or redemption and that all three of her darlings would be killed.

  The woman sitting next to her was patting her arm. ‘Bad news is it, duck?’ she asked, her lined face full of concern.

  ‘No,’ Octavia said, trying to smile and failing. ‘Not really. Not the worst.’

  ‘That’s it, duck,’ the woman said, acknowledging the half smile. ‘Gotta keep cheerful, ain’tcher, or where would we be?’

  ‘Bridge Street,’ the conductor called. ‘Anyone fer Bridge Street?’

  Thank God for work, Octavia thought, as she trudged off towards the school. At least I’ve got something to keep me occupied. If I had to sit at home waiting for news I should go mad.

  Two of her pupils were waiting for her at the school gate, hopping up and down to keep warm. They were very excited, waving at her as she approached, and as soon as she reached the gate, they told her their news. ‘We got our own colourin’ pencils, miss. Look! Ain’t they dandy! We gonna do our colourin’ in today, miss?’