by Lizzie Page
But in general, we were getting more and more fed up with the war. Cargo ships weren’t getting through the Channel. We were anxious about shortages of food. I was unsure how we, as an island, going gung-ho into war, could have failed to anticipate that.
‘How can I create art when I just feel so useless?’ Olive complained. She refused to do uplifting or supportive paintings any more. She had thrown her War Spirit into the fire at Mrs Ford’s. ‘It took ages to burn. If I ever paint again, it will be as a pacifist. I am a pacifist now.’
She was always an -ist or an -ette. Why wouldn’t she just be Olive?
* * *
And then, about five months after Richard died, Olive came home from college and before she had even removed her coat, she was on at me. Had I ever heard of the FANYs? The First Aid Nursing Yeomanry?
I hadn’t.
Olive’s eyes were shining as brightly as they had the day she got her letter of acceptance into Goldsmiths. We went back in the drawing room, where I continued my desultory practice of ‘Für Elise’. I had been at Father’s office, but Mrs Webster had everything under control as usual and I had come home feeling unsatisfied. The newspaper’s stories were harrowing – as was the new usual. And on the way back, I didn’t know if it was my fraught imaginings, but it seemed to me that there were an increasing number of men in wheelchairs in the street.
‘We can’t sit on our hands any longer, we should go and help.’
I stopped playing. ‘Go and help?’
‘YES! We must go to France.’
‘France? What? Why?’
‘The FANYs need drivers, and stretcher-bearers, and tea makers and… we can do it, Vi. I know we can.’
‘Oh, Olive, where has this sprung from?’
Olive knelt at my knees. She gazed up at me beseechingly. ‘Darling, imagine men like our dear Richard suffering.’
I bristled. I had no need to imagine Richard’s suffering; it was something I mulled over nightly.
‘They’re all someone’s brothers and sons. We can go out there and make things better.’
‘But, but… what about Father?’ I asked dully.
Olive looked disappointed. She stood up and brushed herself down. ‘Oh, Father will be fine,’ she said dismissively. ‘What do you say, Vivi? Isn’t it time to do our bit?’
I doubted that Father would be fine. I wasn’t thinking only of the business, but of the way, emotionally, he had always leaned on us.
‘He’s only forty-nine,’ Olive pointed out. ‘That’s not old, Vi. Molly will clean and cook every day. Mrs Webster takes care of everything.’ I blushed. Mrs Webster and our division of labour was a perpetual source of embarrassment to me. ‘I’ve already spoken about it to Aunt Cecily, and she promised to visit him at least three or four times a week—’
‘You spoke to Aunt Cecily before you discussed it with me?’
My sister nodded. She didn’t even have the good grace to look guilty. ‘Aunt needs the distraction more than ever,’ she said decisively. ‘She welcomes the chance to help.’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. For me, of course, it wasn’t just the question of Father. The fact was, I didn’t really want to leave home. I didn’t want to travel and I didn’t want to go to France and I couldn’t see how I could make things better. I was all for the quiet life, and although I may have complained about our mundane existence, I liked it. Olive had adventures and I watched. I was happiest watching.
‘Father, Aunt Cecily and Uncle Toby all wanted war… this is the consequence,’ Olive explained.
This didn’t strike me as fair.
‘We all thought we wanted it,’ I said, even though, immediately, I thought of those I knew who hadn’t: Mrs Webster, for one; her son Harry hadn’t and neither had Uilleam Chisholm from the Fords’ house. And neither did one of the carpet delivery drivers, who, to my mortal embarrassment, had cried in front of me. But then he was a special case – he had fought in the Boer War and couldn’t understand why we were ‘going back for more’.
‘Nobody thought it would last this long.’
‘Nobody thought enough at all,’ said Olive crudely. ‘Well, it has, and it is, and the men need us. The nurses are being run ragged. We have skills.’
‘What? Your sketching and my piano playing?’ I snapped. ‘Are you planning to pencil the Hun to death?’
She ignored me.
‘We have languages. Sturdy constitutions.’
‘Sturdy?’ I smirked. ‘No one’s ever called me that before.’
Olive ignored me. ‘The poor nurses out there are having to do the lot. Transporting and cleaning and goodness knows. If we go out, we can help alleviate the pressure on the professionals so they are free to nurse and we can contribute in other ways.’
‘But, Father…’ I repeated doubtfully. Already I knew this was an argument going nowhere (which was always the case with Olive). She had already won it. And then with a flourish, she dealt her trump card, or her final domino: the double six that she always kept up her sleeve. Peering slyly at me, she muttered, ‘You know, you don’t have to come, Vivi, I could easily go without you.’
She knew I’d never let her do that. We were a team, she and I, team Mudie-Cooke – always had been, always would be. From when the ‘stalk’ grew us, it was always us two sisters against the world. When our mother died in childbirth, even though I was too young to understand anything much, I had understood that I was to do everything in my power to protect this little baby.
And another thing: might not this be the way to show Edmund that I was the girl of his dreams? Mightn’t it spell out to Edmund’s mother that, despite my lowly birth, I was of good stock? I was industrious. I was patriotic. Our father might be self-made, but we were not entirely un-made.
‘All right,’ I said. ‘I’ll find out more. But you must promise to tell Father—’
‘Oh, I’ll tell him it’s for the war effort.’ She looked at me, satisfied. ‘It is, this time.’
* * *
Olive nearly didn’t reach the five foot two minimum requirement. At the interview with the FANYs, she stood on tiptoes in her stockings, her smile rigid, every pore in her body propelling her northwards: I am tall enough, I am, I am. Imagine if she were foiled by a mere inch!
‘We also lay carpets,’ said Olive. She looked at me.
I thought, Good grief, she is keen to go.
‘We don’t have much call for that in France,’ said one of the two women interviewing us without a smile. The other had that marvellous ability to raise only one eyebrow, a talent she was putting to excellent use right now.
Olive fired back haughtily: ‘I merely use it as an example that we’re not afraid to get stuck in.’
‘What about driving?’ the eyebrow-raising woman asked, now examining her own nails.
‘We both drive,’ lied Olive shamefacedly. I coughed.
The non-eyebrow one laid down her pencil. She looked at the other sceptically.
‘How unusual!’ the other said. ‘Pray, tell us. What do you drive?’ I thought we had been found out and judged guilty and would be sent home with a flea in our ear.
‘Cars,’ said Olive brightly.
I licked my lips. I had to support my sister. I knew Olive: if we didn’t go to France with the FANYs, she would just wangle another way to get there. At least this way seemed to be mostly legitimate and structured.
I remembered Walter once leading us outside to admire Johnny’s latest speed-wagon. ‘We learned in a friend’s Silver Ghost,’ I lied. (Johnny would rather have died than let me behind the wheel.)
‘The Rolls-Royce?’ asked eyebrow woman sharply. She did it again now. Hup: one eyebrow nearly at her hairline.
‘Yes. Um, a Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost. It is a beast,’ I said, which was exactly the word Walter had used, ‘but I think after you’ve driven that, you can drive just about anything!’
Olive smiled at me gratefully and I smiled back at her. So, I was in this now. Properly.
&
nbsp; We moved on. When the women heard that we spoke three languages, their demeanours changed. It was like the gaslights being switched on at dusk. Suddenly, we could all see.
One looked at the other. ‘That could be useful.’
‘My sister speaks five,’ Olive boasted. ‘Latin and Ancient Greek, too.’
‘Olive! I don’t speak Latin or Ancient Greek,’ I explained apologetically. ‘I just… studied them for a time.’
A very short time.
‘The height rule is just a recommendation,’ eyebrow woman said. ‘When can you go?’
Olive and I looked at each other.
‘When do you want us?’ Olive said.
We filled out the paperwork.
I still thought it wouldn’t happen. I thought it was just another fantasy of Olive’s. She had these ideas twice a year, usually just before the end-of-term exhibition. They didn’t usually come to anything life-changing.
The khaki tunic is to have four pockets with FANY buttons and badges and made with plain sleeves. There will be a Red Cross circle on each sleeve, the centre of the cross to be seven inches from the shoulder. The bottom of the khaki skirt is to be ten inches from the ground and for footwear, khaki puttees and brown shoes or boots, or long brown boots, are to be worn.
Olive read out the letter, which arrived the Monday after our meeting. My hands were trembling too much to do it.
‘Oh, gracious me,’ I said. ‘So, it’s really happening.’
‘And I’ve just bought new black boots,’ she complained.
‘Take them back to the shop,’ I said, but I wasn’t interested in her black boot woes: they weren’t really woes, she was delighted with her boots; and anyway, I was growing apprehensive about telling Father because Olive still hadn’t done it and it looked like that too was going to fall to me.
I did have another big reservation though:
‘What about driving? I wish we hadn’t lied.’
‘How hard can it be?’ replied Olive.
11
1939 – Now
Early October, when Pearl has been with us for just over a month, Edmund comes home at lunchtime. My heart sinks when I hear his car pull up, then the scrabble of the key in the lock. He stomps into the kitchen and I wonder if it’s German parachutists. It has to be a major crisis to pull Edmund back here at midday.
‘You have to send her back.’
‘What? Who? Do you want a sandwich, Edmund? Cress?’
‘No, I’m not staying. The child. You need to take her back.’
Take her back? Like she’s an item from a shop? Like the unfortunate rabbit?
‘My parents need to come here. It’s not going to be safe.’
‘I know, but Pearl is staying here because it’s not safe.’
‘She can’t. We need the room.’
We have a three-bedroom house. We are three people. Now in a normal marriage, three rooms would be more than enough. In a normal marriage, Edmund could come in with me and we would still have one spare.
‘She has to go. I’ll speak to the billeting officers,’ he says.
* * *
Over the next few days, I fret and fret. How can I let Pearl go back to London? Or should I enquire locally whether someone else would have her? Perhaps Farmer Jones? I could go to the deputy mayor… But no. I don’t want to lose her.
Finally, I give in and talk to Mrs Burton about it. What a joy it is to share something, a pleasure I have been denied for a long time. Mrs Burton is such a good listener, and she also has plenty of problems of her own; knowing this somehow frees me up. Of course, I don’t tell her the long sorry story of my marriage – the short sorry version will suffice. Edmund doesn’t know where to put his parents. He thinks we should get rid of Pearl.
‘What’s wrong with him?’ she ponders out loud. We are waiting for the tea. Mrs Burton won’t serve her tea before it’s perfectly brewed. The kitchen might need a good tidy, but she’s a tea perfectionist.
‘He wasn’t always like this,’ I say defensively, Laurel on my feet.
‘The Great War?’ she asks.
I nod even though if I think about it really, it’s not the only truth. Did I ever know what Edmund was like? Was he an affectionate man before the war? Did he ever love me? I realise that, for a long time, I have been hiding behind this idea that it was the war that damaged him. I am going to fight this. I am not giving her up, not for him. I’ve given up enough things for him.
* * *
Yet when he returns home that evening, Edmund has had a change of heart. Later, I find out that the billeting officers convinced him: it doesn’t look good to reject a child for no reason. And my dear husband is all about looking good.
‘I’ll find out if there’s a place nearby my parents can rent.’
And there is a place they can rent. Mrs Harrison’s boys have gone away to fight. She has turned her large house into an old people’s home. There are four old people there already and Edmund’s parents will round up the number to a perfect six. Mrs Harrison was a nurse so she’ll take care of medication, which is grand because Edmund’s father had a stroke two years ago, and he takes a lot of pills. Edmund’s mother, of course, is in great health. (Sometimes, I think of what Mrs Ford used to say at the end of a long Sunday afternoon when the flames of the fire were dying, and the mood was turning melancholy: ‘Whom the gods love die young.’)
Mrs Harrison will put them up and make them breakfast every morning. ‘Nothing fancy, mind.’ She’ll do eggs and they can ‘like it or lump it’.
They will lump it.
‘Can we at least take on Charles?’ Edmund says, as though I owe him a big concession.
I am going to say: ‘For God’s sake, Edmund, no, not your parents’ tortoise, remember how you made me return the rabbit?’ But then I think… Pearl. Pearl Posner likes animals and so I agree.
* * *
Edmund travels down to London in the car to fetch his parents. When they arrive, Charles is sitting in a cardboard box in the back, regally chewing a lettuce leaf. They have all reinvented Charles as Edmund’s brother’s tortoise, even though as far as I can remember the only thing Christopher ever said about him was that he regretted the family didn’t call him Percy, after Percy Shelley, a joke that took me a while to get.
I greet them at Mrs Harrison’s because it’s the right thing to do and I don’t want people gossiping about the Lowe family not getting on. Edmund is paying some local boys to unload – ‘mind that box, it’s very fragile’ – so we go inside to Mrs Harrison’s sitting room. The armchairs are tired and their sides have been clawed by a cat. Still, there is a gas fire, a wireless, a table and the now-ubiquitous blackout curtains. Mrs Harrison talks to me about how it’s a nightmare in the dark: the old folk roam around, crashing into things, and she’s worried someone’s going to break a hip.
I don’t have to look at Edmund’s parents to know what they are thinking: Common or Couldn’t they find us anything better than this?
Mr and Mrs Lowe are riled up about the war and I imagine they haven’t had much of an audience to offload their opinions on recently.
‘The Huns had to come back for more,’ says Edmund’s father. ‘Didn’t we show them what we are made of last time?’
Bile in my throat. I think, You didn’t show them anything.
‘Filthy, rotten good-for-nothing—’
‘Where’s the evacuee?’ Edmund’s mother abruptly asks me.
‘School,’ I say.
‘Oh, she goes to school then?’
‘Yes.’
Edmund’s mother puts her hand on mine. ‘All the upheaval is awful, isn’t it?’
Tears come to my eyes at this unexpected kindness, but I pull my hand away because I have never forgiven her. And I’m not going to now.
12
1915 – Then
My aunt and uncle used to love holding dinner parties but since poor Richard’s passing, they hadn’t had the heart. Edmund’s parents invited us to theirs
instead. It was going to be a farewell lunch for Edmund and Christopher because, belatedly and reluctantly, they had decided to join up.
Perhaps it wasn’t excellent timing, but Olive and I decided that this would be the perfect occasion to tell our father about our joining up with the FANYs too. Our admittedly convoluted rationale was this: we thought being in public would check Father’s response – whatever it turned out to be; we weren’t sure what to expect – and it would at least ensure he maintained a modicum of self-restraint. Our father wept copiously at Beethoven’s symphonies and Monet’s paintings, whereas Uncle Toby and Edmund’s parents were great believers in the stiff upper lip. Olive decided that, for once, their company could prove an advantage.
But first, I waited impatiently for Edmund to get me alone. He was at the front, back and sides of all my thoughts and now that he was going away, and I was going away, this seemed to me the last chance we would have to cement our relationship for some time. I imagined announcing to our families that we were to be married, and the glorious images in my head were so realistic that I had to remind myself that they hadn’t happened yet. I wanted more than anything in my life to be Mrs Edmund Lowe and to be Edmund’s mother’s daughter.
When we arrived, Edmund stroked my back again, in that intimate way he had, and he raised his eyebrows at me when Olive and his mother argued over some point – the Irish, I think – but I didn’t get a chance to speak to him alone before lunchtime. I wondered if maybe I was being foolish about wanting a declaration. It was suddenly so obvious that we would be together, that we would marry, why did it need to be made public? I smiled at him and he smiled back, and I thought, Well, there it is. It’s happening.
He, Christopher, their father and Uncle Toby talked military strategies and laughed at the Italians and smoked cigars. I watched the hands of the grandfather clock hardly move. It was like it too was struck with a lethargy.
