INDIFFERENT HEROES

by MARY HOCKING

  Judith left, not dissatisfied. That ‘for the time being’ was Louise’s recognition that she would eventually come to terms with her mother’s remarriage. So, too, would Claire, who would not long hold out against the prospect of finding another father figure – little though Austin might relish playing this role. Alice would be the one who would have most difficulty in acceptance.

  As Judith walked along the street, her doubts fell away behind her. With every step she took, her body gave the affirmation she had sought from Louise. Happiness surged up from the very ground on which she walked, too strong to be refused.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Spring-Autumn 1945

  The war with Germany ended in May. Alice was on duty in the Moat on VE Day and spent her time in a state of deep depression. Peace seemed a great anti-climax, an event for which people were even less prepared than they had been for war. A certain incoherence in the messages from ships spoke for the resentment of signals staff who must carry on as usual on this day. The signals office in the Moat was full of Naval personnel with very bad tempers.

  The next evening was more memorable. Alice and Felicity set out in search of celebration. Several American sailors, waiting outside the Wrens’ quarters, called out to them and held up bottles of gin as bait. For a dry navy, they were surprisingly well-supplied with liquor.

  ‘I really shan’t be sorry when they have gone back “over there”,’ Felicity said disdainfully.

  ‘I wonder if they won’t always be with us? People have adopted so many American ways since they came. I have an awful feeling we shall go on imitating them, and that in the end they will colonize the old country.’

  ‘Watch it, Alice! This is becoming a little obsession with you. Whenever you see an American, you have a rush of prophecy to the head.’

  ‘They corrupted me, that’s why.’ Alice declaimed dramatically, ‘I spent my youth searching for Gary Cooper through the mean streets of Shepherd’s Bush.’

  Felicity said, ‘I do wish Rodney could have got here,’ conjuring up a mental picture of Captain Stowe straining nerve and sinew to reach Plymouth. In fact, he had not put in an appearance since he left hospital. Felicity wrote to him regularly. How often he replied, Alice did not know.

  They made their way to the Hoe, where Lady Astor was encouraging a large crowd to sing. The sailors insisted on ‘Land of Hope and Glory’; after which, they considered they had paid their debt to patriotism. Not so the man who had taken over from Lady Astor. It was his opinion that the proceedings would be improved by reminding his audience of the heroic efforts which men had made to win the war. The sailors, with the serviceman’s unerring instinct that heroism must relate to someone other than himself, made rude noises. He persisted. The sailors turned their attention elsewhere. They began to stack wooden seats; and before anyone was aware of what they were doing, they had a sizeable bonfire going. It was almost dark now, and the ships in the harbour were dim shapes from which occasional sounds of jollity could be heard as a liberty boat set out for the shore. Every few minutes a, searchlight swung across the water from Drake’s Island. People had climbed the mounds around the fire and stood in tiers, the flames making their faces ruddy as a choir of Red Indian braves. ‘Tipperary’ replaced ‘Land of Hope and Glory’. Several children, who had never seen a fire that was not caused by incendiary bombs, were terrified.

  After a time, the NFS arrived to put out the fire. Plymouth, after all, was still under black-out regulations. ‘Who do you think is going to bomb us tonight?’ a sailor called out. ‘The Japs?’ The NFS men moved towards the fire. The sailors closed ranks; more than that, several of them grasped hold of the hose pipe. A tug of war ensued. A Petty Officer, who must surely have belonged to a male voice choir, sang, ‘What shall we do with a drunken sailor?’ and to cries of ‘Hooray, and up she rises!’ the Navy towed the NFS away. Lady Astor shouted ineffectively. The police and the NFS were very good-humoured about it all, and Alice and Felicity left before they ceased to be amused.

  Lectures on aspects of civilian life now began to replace the diet of war films and documentaries. Alice attended one by an energetic Cambridge doctor who spoke uncompromisingly about democracy. There was, he said, no difficulty in people making their voices heard – the trouble with his own generation was that most of them had not bothered. ‘When you leave the services, don’t you make the same mistake. If anyone excuses inaction by talk of “post-war lethargy”, remember that the lethargy that followed the Great War lasted for over twenty years.’ After this, he gave a brisk run-down of the state of English life. Culturally, we lagged behind France and Austria; in education, we were inferior to Sweden, Norway, Canada and Holland; and our technical education was a disgrace compared to that of Germany and Italy. His audience listened enraptured, as only the English can, to this catalogue of failure. He was a County Councillor and could speak with authority on local government. Take education: why couldn’t young people learn in comfort without having to sit at desks? why couldn’t they learn their lessons on a verandah in the heat of summer? why couldn’t education be something to laugh about? couldn’t youth be vigorous and eager? He was so vigorous himself that his hearers were convinced that he was providing profound answers to social questions. He went on to tell them about the committee structure, pausing briefly to ask why there were no women responsible for housing, and all maternity and child welfare committees. He emphasized the importance of each committee by pointing out what would happen without the service in question, painting a horrifying picture of a city where people had no houses in which to live, the education system had broken down because there was no money available for it, transport had come to a halt, and the sewage flowed in the streets. When the lecture was over, his audience filtered out onto the quarterdeck with a feeling of release as though they had attended some mass confessional. They stood, sniffing the warm spring air, and looking for further sins.

  ‘He made local government sound quite interesting,’ Alice said to Felicity as they walked across the moors to Yelverton later in the day. ‘I wonder if I might do that? He seemed to think more women were wanted.’

  ‘If all I had to look forward to was answering the call of local government, I should shoot myself.’ Felicity looked as if she was ready to shoot herself anyway; she had been in a black mood for some time.

  ‘The world seems to be getting smaller,’ Alice said, thinking without enthusiasm that it might be necessary to transfer service from one’s country to one’s town.

  They had tea in a hotel at Yelverton, where Felicity sat staring at an Army officer with a kind of despair, as though he was the last of his breed.

  Alice did her own stock-taking. She had no doubt about the major aim of the war – Hitler had to be stopped. But about her part in it, she was confused. She had seen a bit of the world, met a wider cross-section of people than she might otherwise have done; her work had been varied, and for a few months her conditions had been uncomfortable, if not intolerable. But she was no nearer that reality she had glimpsed when she saw the woman standing in the ruins of Coventry.

  What was she to do now? For three years, she had been something of a wanderer, travelling light, moving on before she had time to become bored. She had liked it. Some of her friends, certain they could never settle down to a routine life again, were trying to find jobs which involved travel – the Foreign Office and commercial airlines being particularly favoured. But recently, Alice had begun to notice that the scenery is not endlessly variable, and the stopping places have certain similarities. If some choice must be made, she could only say that she felt now was a time when she must stand still.

  Guy was in one of the first groups to be demobilized. Louise met him at Victoria Station. He looked taller and thinner than ever. As he came close, she saw that his hairline had receded; and, as though a mask attached to the lower hair had been displaced, another face had appeared. The eager boyishness which Guy had retained into his thirties had been translated into an imma
ture anxiety. The eyes smiled readily, but were too uncertain of their joy to hold the sparkling light long; the mouth showed signs of fatigue. For a moment, as she looked at him, it seemed to Louise that it was the father, not the son, who had returned from the war.

  They embraced. He held her close, repeating, ‘Oh my darling, my darling! How I have longed for this moment.’ Beyond her encircling arms lay the accountant’s office and a life which he dreaded. It would take more than a world war to effect any change in the ordered ways of Busby and Overton. The only difference would be that he was more out of place than he had been before. Whatever his war experiences might have done for him, they had not increased his financial acumen.

  ‘I’ve got a taxi,’ Louise said, gently disengaging herself. ‘You are coming home in style.’

  The taxi driver drove slowly because Louise, regardless of expense, had asked him to. She thought Guy would enjoy this leisurely homecoming; and she was right. He looked out of the window eagerly at sights he had not seen for so long. He scarcely noticed the bomb damage, he had come from scenes worse than this. It was the appearance of the children which amazed him. ‘They look so bonny!’ he kept repeating.

  ‘They have all sorts of extra rations.’

  ‘You must have found that very helpful.’

  ‘Catherine and James are too old to qualify for a green ration book, I’m afraid.’

  He winced. Neither had been too old when he last saw them.

  Catherine and James were peeping through the curtains of the sitting-room when they arrived. They came down to the front door slowly, rather shy. Guy was visibly shaken at how much they had grown. He was unsure of what was due to children of their ages. Fortunately, the situation was unusual enough to excuse any if appropriateness in his treatment of these little strangers. He had brought presents, silk shawls and scarves, which delighted Louise and Catherine; nothing of much interest to James. He was himself sufficiently sensitive to understand his son’s disappointment.

  ‘Nothing much for you, old chap, I’m afraid. But Mummy mentioned in her letters that you wanted a dog. We’ll see what we can do about that.’

  James was more than mollified.

  They had high tea together and soon afterwards the children went to bed early.

  Guy settled back in his chair, more relieved than he would admit to be rid for the time being of their demanding presence. He wanted Louise to himself. He looked round the room; it was just as he had remembered it, only tidier – Louise had made a big effort on his behalf. ‘I can’t tell you how often I have thought of this,’ he said. ‘When I was in hospital, I used to assemble this room in my mind, starting with the mantelpiece. I could remember every ornament.’

  ‘We shall need new curtains, now there is no black-out.’

  He was not listening. He was checking the ornaments on the mantelpiece. It was apparent the unchangingness was of great importance to him in reassembling his own life.

  ‘And you!’ He stretched out his arms to her. ‘You are just the same. Oh, my darling, I have thought of no one but you all these years! I can’t tell you how often I have longed to be with you.’ His voice was shaky. All emotion, of whatever origin, was focused on her now. And Louise, who had so dreaded his return, came to him.

  She seldom anticipated events, but for the last months, this had been forced upon her. Now, she shook herself free of foreboding and came out joyfully to meet her crisis. Challenges physically embodied stimulated her to give of the best that was in her. So it was that when she saw her husband’s need nakedly displayed, her heart opened to him. The relief of finding herself able to respond swept aside all reserve. She was convinced, as she had been years ago when she married him, that all would be well. She would will it so.

  The children had been well-rehearsed for their father’s homecoming and had accepted going to bed early with apparent good grace. It had been carefully explained to them that he would feel very tired after so much travelling. Even so, they were not entirely without resentment. As Guy and Louise embraced, Catherine sat on the edge of James’ bed.

  ‘It’s only for tonight,’ James told her. ‘We shall go on just the same as usual tomorrow.’

  ‘Did Mummy say so?’

  ‘No, but she meant it.’

  Certainly, they meant it.

  Claire and Terence left Oxford proclaiming their relief at escaping from the suffocating environment of tradition and privilege; and their earnest desire to get down to the real business of living. They felt strongly about real people, real places, a real way of life; but found it easier to define the unreal – Oxford, Hampstead, commercial travellers and all academics, women who shopped at Fortnum and Mason’s, and men who worked in merchant banks.

  Both had gained good seconds. For Terence, this result represented the triumph of hard work over moderate ability. Claire, however, had been told by her tutor that she might have got a first had she been more adventurous in her thinking. A natural scholar himself, he had little idea how much she had hazarded in going to university. Once that decision had been taken, her resources of courage and initiative had had to be husbanded carefully to sustain her from one day to the next. ‘Only a small gap separates you from the most interesting students of your year,’ she had been assured; but the gap between intellect and emotion was steadily widening. Her university life was a perilous voyage during which she felt herself moving further and further from all known landmarks, until it seemed she was travelling in a glass globe, amazed at the nearness of stars, and the cosmic wonder of the universe unfolding; while somewhere in that steel blue void a voice of utter desolation was howling. The process of fragmentation had already begun before she went to Oxford; and there was a sense in which her good second was a mark of her striving for integration.

  In spite of their professed delight at leaving university, Claire and Terence were daunted by the prospect of existence beyond the sheltering walls of home or an institution of one kind or another. They were very unsure of themselves. This necessitated their asserting independence in the most abrasive manner and rejecting all offers of help from their families. ‘We’re not going to live in an area like Holland Park, that is just rotting away in the past,’ Claire said scornfully when Louise offered to make enquiries of a neighbour who might have a room to rent. Terence’s parents were informed, ‘We couldn’t possibly live in suburbia – nowhere in the middle of nothing.’

  As the extent of the housing problem became clear to them, so Holland Park and suburbia began to seem more possible; and it was with some dismay they discovered that accommodation suitable to their purpose and purse was not available. They were lodging with friends in Earl’s Court, having refused an offer from Aunt May because ‘Once she’s drawn us into her web, she’ll strangle us with love and we shall never get away.’ It was apparent that the friends had no wish for them to prolong their stay. ‘We’ve got to find somewhere, even if it’s a converted garden shed!’ Terence said miserably. At the beginning of August, they found unfurnished rooms in Hammersmith.

  To be precise, they found one large room at the top of a four- storey house. An alcove on the landing, equipped with a sink and gas-ring, was euphemistically described by the landlady as ‘the kitchen’. The bathroom and lavatory, shared by all the tenants, were two floors below. ‘It’s not quite what we were looking for,’ Claire had said, rather in the manner of an unreal person turning over hats at a milliner’s. The landlady had shrugged. ‘Take it or leave it.’ They had taken it.

  Number 9 Rosemount Street was a Victorian house distressingly within sight and ear-shot of Hammersmith Broadway. The houses on either side had suffered bomb damage and were abandoned; while fissures in the walls of Number 9 gave rise to the suspicion that it, too, might not be safe for occupation. ‘It is in the middle,’ Claire said. ‘Were there two separate incidents, or just the one, do you think?’ She did not like the idea that they might be housed above a bomb cavity.

  ‘It’s not our worry,’ Terence said. ‘E
ven if the foundations are damaged, we shall be out of here before there is any serious subsidence.’ He was beginning to despair of their ever finding an acceptable place to live.

  Claire persisted, ‘I’m not happy about being three flights up.’

  ‘You’d rather be on the ground floor and have the upper storeys fall on top of you?’

  On one matter, they were entirely in agreement; the room must be purged before they could move in. Beneath the dust caused by the bomb damage was the ingrained dirt of over a century. ‘No one bothered about it when the servants lived up here, and no one has since!’ Terence, roused by his sense of social injustice, was ready to rub his knuckles raw on that Victorian filth.

  ‘We’ll have to strip the wallpaper off first, in case of bugs,’ Claire said.

  The landlady, whom they always encountered when she was ‘just on the way to the shops’ – a phrase which she repeated with the look of one brazening out an accusation – said she had no objection to them doing ‘a bit of tidying up, so long as you don’t interfere with the cracks’.

  They were both fastidious, Terence the more so. On the morning when they set to work, his first priority was to clean the lavatory, a task which he accomplished so thoroughly that he used up most of the disinfectant intended for their own room. It was only with difficulty that Claire dissuaded him from tackling the bathroom. ‘As long as we wash under running water, we shan’t come to any harm.’

  ‘Suppose someone hears?’ He would go to the barricades for his beliefs, but flinched from the thought of infringing the requirements of the Ministry of Fuel and Power.

  Claire looked into the wash basin. ‘It’s all right. There’s no plug, anyway.’

  They set to work stripping the walls of their room. This had promised to be an easy task, since the paper was peeling away from skirting boards and ceiling. Elsewhere, however, it had formed into a greasy film which could only be removed together with rather a lot of plaster. The possibility that they were rendering the room uninhabitable occurred to each of them but was not voiced. Terence spurred himself on by hating the Victorians for incarcerating servants up here. Then he thought that perhaps the room had been a nursery at some time; and he was distressed by the picture of children, half-starved and beaten. Claire thought of the attic bedroom she had shared with Alice, of the smell of bacon cooking, of Louise playing her music softly and her father calling them to prayer. She thought of the bombed houses on either side, of the loss of her father, and her mother’s coming marriage. As she stripped down the walls, she felt she was peeling off a skin. They worked in silence, each too appalled to speak.