Octavia

by Beryl Kingston

  ‘That’s a triumph,’ Octavia told her, ‘and a result of your good teaching. I hope you will take it as such.’

  Elizabeth wasn’t placated. ‘Shortage of books is a disaster,’ she said.

  Octavia went cap in hand to Mr Gillard, but this time he couldn’t help her. ‘We are running over budget as it is,’ he said. ‘I will do what I can but I’m not promising anything. Not till after April in any event.’

  So they had to find a way to make do, partly by advising their pupils to join the public library and partly by setting up a rationing system, which didn’t please any of them, for the girls didn’t like waiting, especially when it was for the one book they really wanted to read, and the staff all said it was defeating the object of the exercise if they had to ask their pupils to defer the pleasure of finding things out just at the very moment when they’d started to discover how pleasurable that could be.

  Octavia did what she could to cheer them up by organising an Easter parade for the last assembly of the spring term, and prevailing on Phillida Bertram to help all the girls who wanted to take part to design their Easter bonnets, which since they were mostly cloche hats was easily done with coloured cardboard and crepe paper and discarded ribbons and trimmings. But April was a long time coming even so.

  The newly formed League of Nations was having a hard time of it too, despite having been inaugurated at St James’s Palace. The civil war in Russia went on and they didn’t seem to be able to do anything to stop it.

  ‘Although,’ as Octavia said to her father, ‘the solution is staring them in the face. They should use their influence to stop foreign powers sending troops and arms to help the Whites and just let the Russians sort it out for themselves. And yes, I know what you’re going to say, the foreign powers are America and Great Britain, but the principle should be the same whoever they are.’

  ‘Unfortunately, you are talking about wealthy capitalists,’ her father said, ‘and they are not open to persuasion, British or American. A communist government would affect their trade.’

  ‘So young men have to be sent to another war so that they can go on making money, is that what you’re saying? That’s scandalous.’

  ‘It is,’ J-J agreed. ‘But there is a worse scandal, I fear. The ruling class are not above calling out the troops to attack their own workers if they come out on strike, even in this country. There are plans already laid for the use of the military against strikers. It won’t just be police with batons next time. They’ve got tanks and machine guns waiting and ready.’

  ‘That,’ his daughter said, ‘is downright disgusting. It shouldn’t be allowed.’

  ‘It is the way our society is organised,’ J-J said.

  ‘Then we should change it,’ his daughter said trenchantly. ‘We should use the ballot box and change it. Being rich shouldn’t give a man the right to dictate to his fellow creatures and he certainly shouldn’t be allowed to send them to their deaths or call out the troops to attack them if they ask for a living wage.’

  ‘We shall see you in Parliament yet,’ J-J said, laughing at her.

  ‘Oh, I do hope not,’ Amy said, pouring more tea for them both. ‘They work all night in Parliament. We should never see her.’

  But for the moment Octavia was fully occupied in changing her school.

  In the summer term the visitors began to arrive, most of them teachers who were curious to see for themselves what this new system was like. So, as well as writing her own syllabuses and helping her staff with theirs, chasing the books that hadn’t been delivered and badgering the governors for more money, Octavia had sightseers to escort round the building and endless questions to answer. She was proud to think that her new ideas were acquiring a reputation and it pleased her to show how well the system was working, even in their rather cramped quarters and with inadequate stock, but it left her with too little time for her family. Her outings with Em and the children often had to be cancelled at the last moment because there was school work that just had to be finished.

  ‘I’m a poor cousin, these days,’ she apologised to Emmeline.

  ‘You can’t help being busy,’ Emmeline told her. ‘But you will help me with Pa’s party, won’t you? You’re so good at organising parties and I’d like him to have one as good as Uncle J-J’s.’

  It wasn’t quite as good because there were fewer people who were able to attend it and bank clerks don’t have quite the same ebullience as eccentric academics, so the conversation was limited, but they made a great fuss of him and drank a great deal of champagne and he said it was the best party he’d ever had and told them all he was looking forward to his retirement and then sprang a surprise.

  ‘Now that the war is over and I haven’t got to work any more I mean to enjoy my life to the full,’ he said. ‘I shall take a few risks for a start because that’s something I’ve always wanted to do and you can’t take risks when you work in a bank and have a family to support. Not that I’m complaining about having a family. They have been the great joy of my life. Nor about my work, which has always been dull but secure, exactly as my teachers told me it would be. It would be the end of civilisation as we know it to run risks in banking, as my colleagues will bear me out. But now I can. So what am I going to do? I’m going to buy a car and Maud and I are going to travel the country. There are so many places we want to see and now we can.’

  ‘Good heavens, Ma!’ Emmeline said turning to her mother during the buzz that followed. ‘Did you know about this?’

  Maud was twinkling. ‘I had an inkling,’ she said. ‘He’s been talking about it for a long time.’

  ‘Where are you going first?’ Emmeline called to her father.

  ‘Scotland,’ Ralph said. ‘And then we can bring you back some Edinburgh rock.’

  They set off three weeks later, on the day the Turks signed their peace treaty with the Allies and lost eighty per cent of their once great Ottoman empire. But none of them except Octavia and her father took any notice of things that were happening so far away. Ralph was impatient to get started. The luggage was packed and stowed in the boot and he’d mastered the art of driving his new toy and could steer well enough to keep out of the way of any other cars he might meet on the road. He could even get into reverse gear, which his grandchildren thought was quite amazing. The entire family turned up to wish them bon voyage and even Algernon-Podge waved his encouragement before slipping away for his date with Olga.

  ‘Who would have thought it?’ Emmeline said as the car rattled round the corner and disappeared from view. ‘I always thought my pa was such a sober man. I never imagined this for a minute. Oh, I shall miss them.’

  ‘How about a trip to the zoo?’ Octavia said, aiming her question at the three children who were looking rather cast down. Now that the term was over she had time for trips – at last – and like her uncle she meant to make the most of it.

  They had an excellent summer holiday, each in their own way; J-J and Amy reading and relaxing in their garden, Algernon-Podge in the dance hall and at the pictures with Olga, Octavia arranging treats for Emmeline and the children – a river trip to the Tower of London, a picnic on Box Hill, and finally a fortnight at Eastbourne, enjoying all the old familiar delights of the seaside, and missing Tommy a lot more than she’d expected to. And Ralph and Maud motored about the Scottish Highlands.

  They didn’t come home until the new school year had begun and eleven-year-old Edith had joined her sister at the North London Collegiate School and seven-year-old Johnnie had started at his prep school, despite considerable misgivings on his mother’s part and considerable opposition on his own.

  ‘Everything’s changing,’ Emmeline mourned, ‘and they’re not here to see it. You’d think they’d at least come home to see my poor little Johnnie off to school. After all, poor little man, it’s a big step to take. But no. Apparently they’re off to Inverness, of all places. Why would anyone want to go to Inverness? It’s right out in the wilds. I had a postcard yesterday and you
should see how wild it looks. I tell you, Tavy, I’m beginning to forget what they look like.’

  They came home halfway through September looking quite unlike themselves. They’d both put on weight and were both wearing new clothes and they’d brought all sorts of strange presents for the children – lengths of tartan and odd hats called tam-o’-shanters and the most peculiar sweets.

  ‘You’re just a pair of old gadabouts,’ Emmeline scolded, ‘away all this time. I don’t know what’s to be done about you. I hope you’re going to stay at home now with the winter coming on and everything.’

  But her mother giggled and her father said he’d got plans for a trip to Norfolk next, to see where Nelson came from.

  ‘I don’t know what’s got into him,’ Emmeline complained to Octavia. ‘I really don’t. They’ll catch their death of cold rushing about all over the place like this. It isn’t natural.’

  ‘We’re in the Twenties now, Em,’ Octavia said, ‘and lots of people are driving. I saw six cars on the road only yesterday on my way to school. Six. Imagine that.’

  ‘Well, I wish they’d take theirs off the road and start behaving like grandparents again,’ Emmeline said. ‘That’s all I can say. It’s going to be a cold winter and I don’t want them driving about in it.’

  It was certainly a difficult one, as the newspapers were constantly saying. The economy had been in decline for nearly two years and now a slump had set in and prices were falling disastrously.

  The price of coal had fallen particularly sharply and the mine owners, fearful because their profits were falling too, proposed a cut in the miners’ wages. According to the Daily Herald, colliers, who were currently earning £4 9s 3d, were now being offered a mere £2 13s 6d, which, by any standard, was a pittance on which to feed, house and clothe a family. It was no surprise to Octavia when they came out on strike. And no surprise to J-J when the government declared a state of emergency and began to mobilise troops.

  Octavia was horrified. And her horror grew when a deputation of London mayors, led by no less a person than George Lansbury, marched to Downing Street, to request an interview with Lloyd George, with several thousand unemployed men marching behind them. It was a peaceful demonstration but for some unaccountable reason the police suddenly decided that Whitehall had to be cleared and ordered a mounted baton charge.

  ‘It’s exactly what they did to us,’ Octavia remembered. ‘They didn’t agree with what we were saying so they hit us with sticks. Oh, Pa, nothing ever seems to change. It was brutal and unnecessary then and it’s brutal and unnecessary now. Violence like that makes matters worse. I shall write to the paper and say so.’

  Meanwhile Maud and Ralph were continuing their travels, writing home rapturously to Emmeline about how they were exploring Norwich, ‘which is such a lovely old-fashioned place’, and rejoicing at how cheap everything was. ‘We can get bed and breakfast for half a crown. Imagine that.’

  Emmeline wasn’t impressed. ‘I shall be glad when they come home and stop all this gadding about,’ she said. ‘It’s nearly November. High time they’d had enough of it, I should have said.’

  It was more or less what the delectable Olga was saying to her brother, only in a rather different setting, in rather different vocabulary and for an entirely different reason. ‘Ain’t you ’ad enough, Algy?’

  ‘No,’ Algy whispered, nuzzling into her neck. ‘You’re too beautiful.’

  ‘You’re too greedy,’ his beloved said, shaking herself free of him. Necking could be uncomfortable sometimes, cramped in the back row. ‘That’s your trouble. I never knew such a greedy guts.’

  ‘Marry me then,’ Algy said. ‘And then I really will get enough. All this stopping and starting and never getting anywhere’s enough to drive a chap bonkers.’

  But at that point the couple sitting in front of them turned round to shush them, so he had to stop what he was doing and make himself respectable again. It didn’t stop the yearning though nor the thought that the cure for it was to get married. If only she wasn’t so dead set against it.

  ‘It’d be fun,’ he urged, over and over again. But her answer was always the same.

  ‘Maybe fer you. It wouldn’t be no fun fer me. I like a bit a’ life. Besides, you don’t get married in the winter in all this rain a’ sleet an’ everything.’

  ‘I’ll ask you in the spring then,’ he promised. ‘That’s got to be better.’

  The spring was worse than the winter had been. In February 1921 the Germans were reeling under the news that their government had been fined 200 billion gold marks as reparation for the damage their army had done in France. In Great Britain there were a million unemployed and ex-servicemen were selling matches and bootlaces on the streets to earn what little they could – and the miners’ strike went on and on. In April the miners’ leaders pressed their allies in the triple alliance to set a date for their supportive strike and the government stepped up its military preparations for an all-out conflict. Soon there were tanks and armoured cars on the country roads and armed troops on standby in every garrison town.

  ‘Wales this year,’ Ralph told his daughter. ‘We want to see the valleys, don’t we, my love?’

  Maud agreed that they did, adding that she’d heard they were very pretty. ‘We’ll send you postcards,’ she promised Emmeline, as they kissed goodbye.

  ‘What about Easter?’ Emmeline asked.

  ‘We’ll be back long before then,’ her father told her. ‘We’ll bring you some Welsh Easter eggs.’

  ‘I don’t want Welsh Easter eggs,’ Emmeline complained to Octavia. ‘I want them at home.’

  The arrival of a nervous police constable on her doorstep late on a cold afternoon at the beginning of April, was almost what she expected. ‘It’s that stupid car, isn’t it?’ she said to him. ‘It’s broken down.’

  ‘Well no, Mrs Thompson,’ the young man said, diffidently. ‘I’m afraid it’s a bit worse than that. They’ve had a crash.’

  ‘I knew it,’ Emmeline said. ‘Are they all right?’

  ‘Well no,’ the constable said again. ‘I’m afraid they’re in hospital. I’ve got the address for you.’

  Her throat was instantly full of panic but she took the little paper from his hands and kept her self-control until he had gone. Then she ran to the telephone to call her cousin. ‘Oh, Tavy, what am I going to do?’ she wept. ‘They’re in hospital.’

  ‘Pack an overnight bag,’ Octavia said. ‘I’ll be with you in half an hour. Your Connie will look after the children, won’t she? Try not to worry. I’ll drive you straight there. Have you told Podge?’

  ‘No. I suppose I should have. It’s just…’

  ‘It’s all right, Em,’ Octavia said. ‘I’ll do it.’

  But the person who answered the phone was Aunt Maud’s one and only servant and she said she had no idea where Mr Algernon was. ‘Out somewhere, miss,’ she said. ‘He’s always out somewhere. Can I give him a message?’

  ‘Tell him his mother and father have had an accident in their car,’ Octavia said. ‘Emmeline and I are going down to Wales to see them. I’ll phone him later when I know how they are.’

  It was a long journey, across country through Oxford and Cheltenham and Gloucester and all along the Severn estuary, as darkness gathered forebodingly around them and the gloom thickened. Emmeline cried nearly all the way. ‘Are we nearly there?’ she asked, over and over again. ‘Oh, poor Pa. Poor Ma.’

  The hospital was dark too, all red brick and tall bare trees, and what light there was from the long windows flickered like candles. They were directed to a woman’s surgical ward, where they found Maud, with both her hands bandaged and her face bruised and patterned with ugly stitches, lying in a narrow bed, too deeply asleep to be woken. Emmeline wept again at the sight of her but Octavia went off to find a doctor.

  It was a woman doctor, small, neat and brisk to the point of brusqueness. Yes, she said, consulting her notes, Mrs Withington had been admitted that afternoon with two b
roken wrists and cuts and contusions, and had since developed concussion. The car she was travelling in had been involved in a head-on collision with an armoured vehicle. ‘It was a very serious accident,’ she said. ‘She is seriously ill. Are you a relation?’

  ‘How seriously?’ Octavia asked. But she knew the answer before it was given. The familiar nightmare was beginning all over again. First Cyril and then the boys and now this.

  ‘The prognosis is not good.’

  ‘You mean she might die?’

  ‘As I said, the prognosis is not good. We haven’t told her about her husband, of course, because of the shock.’

  ‘He is ill too?’ Octavia asked.

  ‘Haven’t they told you?’ the doctor said. And when Octavia shook her head. ‘He was dead on arrival I’m sorry to say. There was nothing we could do for him.’

  Oh dear God! Octavia thought. My poor Em. But she remembered to thank the doctor for her information and to ask how long they could stay on the ward.

  They stayed all night because Emmeline said she couldn’t leave her mother until she’d seen her open her eyes. She never did. By four o’clock in the morning Emmeline was broken by the knowledge that she had lost both her parents.

  She allowed Octavia to lead her out into the hospital grounds and then she railed against everything and everyone. Against her father for coming to this awful place and her mother for coming with him. Against that stupid, silly car – hadn’t she always said it was dangerous? Against the army – what were they doing driving an armoured car along an ordinary road? Against the doctors and the nurses for not saving them, and the weather and the police and that stupid, stupid, silly car, until she ran out of targets and descended into terrible tears. And Octavia held her and tried to comfort her and felt that she was being totally inadequate.

  Afterwards there were things to be done and as Emmeline was incapable of doing anything at all except weep, Octavia took over and, as soon as the new day had begun, made all the arrangements that were necessary. She phoned Podge and her mother and the school, registered the deaths, arranged for an undertaker to transport the two poor bodies back to Highgate, and finally drove her weeping cousin home. It was late on the following evening before they arrived and they were both completely exhausted.