by Lizzie Page
I always dressed with care, but that day I gave it extra attention. Long navy skirt, white blouse, lacy collar. Was it frivolous to be interested in my appearance when we were at war now? Father was still interested in making a profit, Olive was still interested in making art, Aunt Cecily was still interested in hosting parties and no doubt Uncle Toby was still interested in malt whisky and expensive cigars. It must be acceptable.
I tried a different style for my hair, and then another and another. Edmund had never expressed a preference, but a stranger had once stopped me in the street to tell me that the nape of my neck rivalled the beauty of the Venus de Milo and I wondered if maybe everyone felt like that about my neck or if he was just a lone chancer.
Olive was wearing an old dress; the paint stains had come out of this one, but it still looked worn. I tried not to be disapproving but it was difficult to do. It didn’t look fit for an occasion and I dreaded to think what Edmund’s mother would make of it, but then Olive never made an effort and she had got worse since going to art school. That is, her appearance had got worse – admittedly, her mood had markedly improved. She had just started her second year and she adored just about everything about her studies (although she was now scared that the war would bring all her enjoyment to a close). I explained that was unlikely. Everyone said the war would be over by Christmas. I had decided it would be over by the winter solstice – the shortest day – because I thought that would be very fitting indeed.
That Saturday though, Olive was in one of her dark moods again, mostly because her friends, the Fords, were also having a gay old afternoon and she would much rather have been there than at our altogether-more-staid family gathering. The Fords lived in Warrington Crescent, a road as attractive as it sounds, not fifteen minutes from ours in Portchester Terrace. The Fords were American and bohemian. Mrs Ford was an art collector. Her son Walter didn’t do much but he was devastatingly handsome and enviably popular. Their house was always full of the most talented and interesting people, who Mrs Ford collected.
Aunt Cecily’s and Uncle Toby’s gatherings were more restrained and predictable. However, duty still prevailed. Olive was a free spirit, but she was not that free.
My father always dressed very appropriately and that day he was in a fine-fitting suit with shoes so polished we could almost see our reflections in them. He was more proper than most gentlemen. He believed strongly in a smart appearance but, equally, he didn’t impose his views on Olive or me – an attitude that was quite unusual at the time and something I only came to appreciate later.
We walked across the park to our aunt and uncle’s house in Cottesmore Gardens as it was a pleasant summer’s day and my father had decided at the last minute it wasn’t worth hailing a cab. The sunshine was so bright that you couldn’t see much ahead of you. The heat created a hazy film across the trees and the houses. I saw horses stop to drink noisily. Suddenly, I envied Olive’s comfortable shoes, although I remained embarrassed about the silly beret she had popped upon her head at the last moment. Typical Olive.
I didn’t mind hiking across London, I just didn’t want to look like I had. As we turned into Kensington High Street, we had a shock. Great crowds of people were milling around.
‘Ah,’ said my father quickly, ‘there is a recruitment office around here.’
Olive insisted we stop to look. She was like that. Always observing things. She told us that people nowadays don’t see enough: ‘It’s all rush, rush, rush, busy, busy, busy.’ She said you have to see what you see, not what you expect to see. So we all stopped and tried to see. Even Father. What a jolly lot of men they were – there wasn’t one who wasn’t in high spirits. It was clear these men were looking forward to giving the Hun a good thrashing. They were so cheerful, you’d have thought they were off to Southend for teacakes and a paddle in the sea.
And another thing that stood out immediately was something that was maybe obvious but was, I thought, interesting: the men were all shapes and sizes. You had beanpoles, and you had short ones, you had the chubby ones and you had the streaks of water. They also wore very different types of clothes: there were shop assistants, office clerks, postmen and farm boys among them. How wonderful it would be to see them come together and transform into a unified British army. It would take your breath away, I thought.
And then I noticed something else. I nudged Olive.
‘They’re not all eighteen, are they? They can’t be. They look so young.’
‘Some of them will be. Some of them will pretend to be.’
‘They won’t send them though, will they?’
Olive put her arm through mine. She was always the more libertarian of us. ‘If they want to go, why not?’
* * *
‘Richard was right!’ declared my Aunt Cecily as soon as we had crossed the threshold. She didn’t normally answer the door herself. This was another sign of the times. ‘Hello, darlings.’ She was flushed with excitement. Her grey hair was falling out of its bun. Her collars uneven. Her great skirts were even more voluminous than usual.
Even Uncle Toby came out to the hall to greet us. ‘Richard knew!’ he said, shaking each of our hands triumphantly, as though he’d won a bet. ‘And he’ll be better equipped than most.’
Richard was our only cousin and growing up, we spent most, if not all, of our free time together. Olive and I used to make him wear our bonnets and dresses and perform plays: he was a malleable, easy-going boy and he made an excellent Lady Macbeth. His collapse on the floor into madness made us squeal with laughter. As we grew older, and he started to refuse dress-up, we played endless snakes and ladders, chess and backgammon. Richard was one of those people who always wins a board game. In his nursery, which was rather better equipped than ours, there was a row of stuffed bears on the window seat and a rocking horse, and on it I would rock, patting down Dotty, as I called her, while Richard would repeatedly and infuriatingly kick a ball against a wall and Olive would sketch. As we got older still, we would do the same thing out in the garden, only I would chain daisies instead of rocking Dotty.
Earlier in the year, our darling Richard had read an article in The Times that suggested that war was imminent. This had spurred him into action and, without telling anyone first, he had raced off to a recruitment meeting at London’s Hotel Cecil. Naturally, that impressed us all for The Cecil was really rather grand.
‘What happened?’ we had urged him on his return. Richard played nonchalant. ‘They asked me all about cricket and rugby.’
‘And?’
‘And then…’ Richard shrugged modestly. ‘They said they’d take me on.’
Of course they had. Our Richard was brilliant. It would have been unreasonable if the 23rd Battalion, 1st Sportsmen’s Royal Fusiliers hadn’t snapped him up. That was in May, and there was a luncheon party to celebrate then too.
While the parents had debated the likelihood of war, I had asked him if he really thought it would happen, and he took me aside and shook his head knowledgeably. ‘Vivi, those people who say it will never happen need to study history more. Then they will understand: it can, it will and it has.’
* * *
‘You’re too thin,’ my aunt declared of Olive, as she usually did. It was a kind of dance they had. Olive was always thin: she was pale and indoorsy-looking, with dark crescents under her eyes, but she was not too thin. Olive laughed. We loved our aunt very much.
‘Feed me up then!’ she said, which always stirred my aunt and never failed to make her feel important.
After a starter of chicken liver pâté on toast, we raised a glass to our darling Richard just as we had when he had left three months earlier. ‘To King, God and country.’ Then we tucked into the main course of venison. Aunt kept hovering by Olive – ‘One more bite, dear girl’ – like she was two years old again. I half expected her to pretend to be a steam train with the mash on a spoon.
The war had put us in good spirits. The time had finally come. Our mettle would be tested. Uncle T
oby poured more sherry and, caught up in the thrilling atmosphere, I probably drank more than usual, even though I tried to limit myself. I didn’t want to be silly when Edmund and his family came. I suppose we were all feeling relief in the thing being decided, the uncertainty being over. And if all the troops were led by men like Richard, our honey-coloured, athletic gentleman, then the Hun didn’t stand a chance. Or, as Uncle Toby proclaimed, ‘They don’t have a hope in hell,’ and Aunt Cecily, hand over heart, whispered, ‘God help them all.’
‘Anticipating war is worse than war itself,’ pronounced my uncle, smacking his lips. ‘Now we know, now we know.’
Olive smirked. Recently, she found everything Uncle Toby had to say very amusing. She told me he ‘epitomised the capitalist pig with his snout in the trough’. I had protested that was unfair. Aunt Cecily and Uncle Toby had always been very generous to us. Certainly, they had some opinions you probably wouldn’t want paraded in public, but wasn’t that true of many of the older generation? The important thing was that they were good, loving people, wherever they put their snouts.
* * *
Edmund and his parents arrived just as the maid was clearing away the rhubarb crumble. He stroked my back in greeting and this sent an excited shiver down my spine. I couldn’t help it.
Even from an early age, it was clear that the Lowes didn’t feel Olive and I were good enough for their children, but Richard was inseparable from us, and since everyone loved Richard, they eventually had to get used to us too.
After they discovered that Olive and I were not so badly educated – we actually spoke more languages than Christopher and Edmund – the Lowes let their guard down a bit, and when they learned I played the piano, Mrs Lowe became almost accepting. We weren’t parasites on Richard’s coat-tails any longer, we had things to offer too.
Mrs Lowe desperately wanted Edmund to learn piano. When we were about twelve years old, she tasked me with teaching him whenever their family came round. But Edmund did not want to learn, so he just used to sit on the stool gazing out of the window in the hour allocated for us. We devised a game that meant I would play the piano with my right hand, holding his fingers over the keys with my left, while Christopher, Richard, Olive and all the parents chatted in the garden obliviously. These were my favourite times. Eventually, Mrs Lowe realised Edmund was not making progress and we were released from the drawing room, but I missed those days and thought about them still. I knew Edmund thought about them too because occasionally he would mention them and when he did, it made my face grow hot.
Today, Mr and Mrs Lowe were filled with their usual grumbling assessments of the modern world – had we seen the men joining up?
‘Yes,’ we replied with animation.
‘Such energy,’ began Olive. ‘Such verve!’
‘I’ve never seen so many—’ started Father.
‘What a bunch of ne’er-do-wells,’ huffed Edmund’s mother. ‘If this is the best the country has to offer…’
‘It is a worry,’ I agreed, although it had never crossed my mind before.
Olive nudged my ribs so that I could see that she was raising her eyes to the capitalist pig chandeliers.
Edmund’s mother, with her fine-boned figure, her marble skin and her symmetrical features, was everything I aspired to be: a beautiful, opinionated matriarch, adored by her husband and sons. Her approval was everything to me. The harder it was to receive, the more I worked at it. We Mudie-Cookes weren’t aristocratic or connected or even particularly talented – we were certainly less so than Uncle Toby or Edmund’s father – and these were points that went against us. The fact that Father – however amenable and well-off he was – was self-made was always humming away in our background. I couldn’t help feeling that in fine company we were ‘tolerated’ – but whereas Olive loathed that fact, I was grateful for it, and tried my very best not to stand out.
Even when we were children, Olive never liked Edmund or his family very much and she still maintained that he wasn’t good enough for me. She always said ‘With a face like yours you could have anyone, Vivi,’ but she was wrong. We didn’t have the right background, and all I ever did was work for Father and play piano passably. I didn’t amount to much, but what probably irked Olive most was that I didn’t have plans to change either. I didn’t have big ambitions like her – I simply hoped to marry and have my own family one day. Olive declared my goals were terribly bourgeois and tsked, ‘What about Paris? What about New York? Don’t you want to go there?’
That was the thing: I didn’t particularly want to go anywhere. Travel isn’t important to everyone. Olive never understood that.
Edmund was studying philosophy at Cambridge and had an eye on the Indian Civil Service. His older brother Christopher was doing the same.
I once used to dream that Olive would marry Christopher and I would marry Edmund in an adorable Jane Austen-style wedding. These foolish thoughts didn’t last. Olive and Christopher couldn’t stand each other – and not in the Jane Austen style of not standing each other either. Olive loathed Christopher and Christopher loathed Olive. Admittedly, even I struggled to get on with Christopher and I got on with almost everyone (Olive called it an irritating skill of mine). But Christopher was more pompous than Uncle Toby and his own father combined. Fortunately, that Sunday afternoon Christopher was not gracing us with his presence: he was at the races. ‘He’s with a nice set of people,’ his mother told us. I don’t know if it was her intention to make it sound like we weren’t a nice set of people (Olive would have said it was).
If Edmund and I did marry, and if he did join the Indian Civil Service, then I imagined I might have to go overseas – but I didn’t count that as travel in the way that Olive meant. She had ideas of wandering around Europe with just a Baedeker’s travel guide, gallivanting between the sights. In any case, there were a lot of bridges to cross before Edmund and I got as far as marriage.
Bridge one was the fact he hadn’t asked me to marry him.
Bridge two was the fact that Britain had just declared war on Germany.
Bridge three was his mother. I had to win her over first.
Edmund’s mother was talking about Lord and Lady Baker. They never minded dropping lords and ladies into the conversation. She had already told us twice about the wonderful party they’d attended the day before: ‘Oh, the champagne!’ and ‘Who do you think was there? Only the Duke of Norfolk, that’s who.’
Edmund’s mother had black and white opinions on everything, but that afternoon her main bugbear was the Jews: a house in their street had recently been converted into a synagogue. They declared it was manageable when the Jews stayed in their patch of east London but now that they were spreading to the Midlands and the north… Who could think it was acceptable?
It was hard to tell which was worse in Edmund’s mother’s mind: Germans or Jews. ‘There are lots of Jews in Germany,’ she pointed out in that knowing way she had.
‘Christ-killers,’ Edmund’s father added gruffly. He was a man of very few words and those few words were invariably miserable. It was just like him to be annoyed about something that happened two thousand years ago.
‘I thought the Romans did it,’ replied Olive, always ready for a quarrel.
‘Judas was a Jew,’ chimed in Edmund’s mother.
‘So was Jesus.’
Our father joined in. He would always serve up an anecdote at a party; he worked hard to be agreeable. This time, he mentioned an incident with a Jewish customer who hadn’t paid. I had done the accounts: we had plenty of non-payers, but this one had evidently stood out for him.
‘They don’t do business fairly,’ he decided.
This made Edmund’s mother even more furious. Spittle flew from her mouth. ‘I don’t see why we don’t go to war with them!’
Aunt Cecily didn’t like this kind of talk, I could see it from the pursed sulk of her mouth, and Olive also was chewing her lip mutinously. I got out the dominoes and asked my Aunt Cecily to play. I wa
s aware Edmund was watching me and that made me clumsier than usual. My aunt won three times in a row and accused me of not concentrating.
I thought the dominoes might cheer her up but instead she became quite tearful. She said I wasn’t a patch on Richard and it was moments like these she missed him the most.
I patted her hand and promised her I would get better with practice and that I would play her whenever she wanted until the day Richard came home.
* * *
Later, Edmund asked if we would like to take a stroll around the garden. He asked both Olive and me, but I didn’t want Olive to come and she knew it. I wondered if this was the moment he’d ask for my hand and, from the look on Olive’s face, she did too. I could never tell what was going on in Edmund’s handsome head though.
‘So, this is it,’ Edmund kept saying, but I don’t think he meant the ‘it’ I was thinking about.
‘Will you join up, Edmund?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said. He seemed quite uncharacteristically anxious.
He sat on the low step. I awkwardly hovered, and then placed myself next to him with as much grace as I could muster. Look at things carefully, I thought, gazing across the lawn. There wasn’t a weed to be seen. Edmund put his head in his hands. I might not have been there for all he cared.
The day before he had left us, Richard had whispered to me, ‘Edmund’s a hard nut to crack. Take care of him.’
‘I will,’ I promised. I took care of everyone, after all.
‘He loves you…’
I flushed. ‘He hasn’t said as much to me. Has he said anything to you?’
Richard had idly flicked at my collar. ‘Everyone knows it, silly.’
I watched pretty bundles of clouds as they moved across the sky. After they’d made some distance, Edmund spoke. ‘I don’t know what to do.’
