I nodded, still gulping and hiccupping.
She told me the story of Mr Bianchi and his Lina.
“That dog was so sweet, just like you, Lina. But then a sad thing happened during the Great War. You know the war that Daddy fought in?”
I nodded. She had told me a little about this before although I didn’t really understand the word ‘war’. Even now, I don’t think I do. It is too slippery a syllable to pin down.
“Everyone thought the Italians would be on the side of the Germans. In the end they weren’t but it took them some months to say what they were going to do. Unfortunately, some people decided that Mr Bianchi was the enemy and they stopped buying ice cream from him. Some horrible people even wrote nasty things about him on his stall.”
“What things, Charlotte?”
“Things like ‘Go Home’ or ‘We don’t like you’. It was such a shame. Mr Bianchi was such a gentle soul and he’d been living in St Albans for a very long time. He didn’t have anywhere else to go. So he stayed and kept selling ice creams, though his big, toothy smile seemed to fade a little. One day, after I met your father, I took him to buy an ice cream from Mr Bianchi. When Daddy saw Lina, he bent down to pat her and she started licking his hand. He laughed and told Mr Bianchi that the dog was the best advertising he could ever have. We bought pistachio-flavoured ice creams and ate them as we walked around the park beside the Cathedral. Just like we did the other day.”
“No, Charlotte. Not pistachio. I had lemon and you had vanilla and Daddy said he didn’t want one.”
“That’s right,” Charlotte said. “What a good memory you have. I don’t seem to like pistachio any more. Isn’t that odd? Anyway, the next thing that happened to Mr Bianchi was very sad. One day, when he was tidying up his stall, someone took Lina. One minute, she was there, snuffling along the street, as she did when Mr Bianchi was closing up, and the next minute she was gone. She wasn’t a very big dog so I suppose it wasn’t so difficult to grab her.”
“Why? Why’d they take the pretty dog?”
“Because, Lina, sometimes people are frightened of things they don’t understand and they try to destroy them to make that fear go away. And sometimes people are cruel. They just are. It’s a sad thing to tell you but I want you to know the truth.”
I nodded solemnly. I had learnt about cruelty that day at school. I was wiser now. It seemed right to nod like clever grown-ups did.
“They found little Lina in the river a few days later. Someone had put her in a sack with some heavy rocks and thrown her off the bridge just down where the park ends, not far from the Roman theatre. But eventually the sack had torn, the rocks had fallen out and the sack floated back to the surface. Mr Bianchi had tears in his eyes when he told me. The poor man kept saying: ‘I just don’t understand. Who could do that to my Lina?’ I didn’t know what to say and soon I was crying too. I’d loved Lina for years. She always licked my hand and if you gave her a treat, she would nuzzle right into your legs. All she ever wanted was to be loved. Even with everything that happened afterwards, all the horrible things in the war, I remember Lina’s death as one of the most awful tragedies of that time.”
Charlotte coughed and shook her head.
“When you were born and you looked up at me with your big blue eyes, you made me think of Lina. It wasn’t just the colour and, of course, that has changed now anyway. It was the way you looked at me. I felt like you were offering me all your love and all your trust even though we had only just met.”
“How? How had we just met?” I asked.
“Well, you’d just popped out of my tummy like all babies do.”
I giggled. It was such a funny idea.
“As soon as I had that thought, I realised that Lina was the perfect name,” Charlotte continued. “And it was also a way to remember a lovely man and his sweet dog and the importance of fighting back against silly people with silly ideas. Even as a baldy baby, you looked like the kind of girl who would know how to stand up for herself.”
“I am, Charlotte. I’m going to box Terry’s ears tomorrow for saying my name is stupid.”
Charlotte laughed. “Maybe don’t box his ears but tell him the story and see what happens. If he still says your name is stupid, you have my permission to box his ears.”
“What happened to Mr Bianchi?”
“Poor Mr Bianchi,” Charlotte said. “He left to go to Italy and nobody ever heard anything about him afterwards. It was a bad time to try to travel all that way because war was breaking out and I just can’t imagine how he would have made it safely. But he couldn’t stay, not after what we’d done.”
So there you have it, Diane. I was named after a tragic dog and the death of an ideal. It could be worse.
Let’s resume. We still have a long way to go.
At the Ministry, my direct boss was a man called Peterson. A north Londoner, he was shorter than me, which was handy as he seemed more interested in my breasts than in my face. A cynical, puffed-up fish of a man with fleshy lips and a way of explaining a task in a flat voice that made it quite clear he was being forced to elucidate because of the listener’s inadequate intellect. I despised him but I was too polite to show it. Instead, I was reduced to shifting my chair every time he came to leer over my shoulder, ostensibly to look at my work but really to get an alternative view of my breasts. I tried wearing sweaters and jackets over my blouses but nothing worked so I told myself to grow up and resigned myself to being very much at his beck and call.
One day, I arrived at Senate House – a Soviet-style hulk of a building near Russell Square – in a frantic mess. I had been billeted in Swiss Cottage with a young mother and her two screechy daughters and one of the children had toothache and was up all night crying. I hadn’t slept a wink until 5 a.m. and then missed my alarm. I rushed in, trying to shrug off my coat as I ran.
“Miss Rose, what time do you call this?” Peterson said, strolling up to me and ostentatiously pointing at his wristwatch.
I mumbled an apology but he was not going to let this opportunity pass him by.
“I knew this would happen. You girls want it all. You want in on the action, you complain about not being allowed to do more, not being allowed to run the country, heaven help us, but when push comes to shove, you spend so much time painting your faces and primping that you can’t even make it to work on time.”
“It won’t happen again,” I muttered. “I just didn’t get much sleep, that’s all.”
“Not enough sleep? My dear, I do apologise. I had no idea you missed your beauty sleep. Good heavens. That really will not do. Would you like to have a nap on the sofa in my office? I’m sure our soldiers out there trying to stop Jerry from sweeping through Europe are also getting a bit of shut-eye, right now. Maybe a bath and a massage too.”
I tried furiously to blink back the tears. I would not give this odious little man the pleasure of watching me cry.
“Her man is over there, Sir,” came a voice from a nearby desk. It was Keith Penrose, one of the senior writers. “I think you might leave it out now.”
Penrose stood up and strode over to us, keeping his eyes firmly on Peterson’s flushed face.
“Actually, I need Miss Rose’s help on a document I’m drafting. I assume I can borrow her for a short while, sir?”
Peterson swallowed a retort and nodded but he threw me a vicious glance as I followed Penrose back to his desk.
“Thank you. You didn’t need to do that. I don’t care what he says,” I said as I removed my hat. My eyes were still wet but my tone must have come out spikier than I intended because Penrose grimaced and said, “You’re very welcome.”
“Sorry, it’s just I am very tired. Bloody screaming child kept me up all night. And I don’t care what Peterson says, sleep deprivation is crippling.”
Penrose nodded.
“I agree totally. I didn’t sleep for nearly two weeks at Passchendaele and I found it quite annoying.”
I looked sharply at him but his f
ace was a picture of innocence. I burst out laughing.
Penrose, who must have been around 40, had a face that was so perfect in middle age it was impossible to imagine how he might have looked as a younger man. He was classically handsome – his hair was grey but thick, he had deep-set eyes and a long, slightly hooked nose. It was the kind of face you would want beside you when the balloon went up, I thought.
After that first rescue mission, he and I struck up what I suppose you might call a May-December friendship and though he ribbed me gently but relentlessly for my childish fits of impotent fury at the way the war was going and my strident impatience with the whole British establishment, I liked spending time with him. I suppose I was flattered that this worldly man wanted to be with a woman who was barely 20. We went to the theatre, we ate our lunch together in Russell Square and now and then we would meet on a rare day off to wander around London’s parks. He was divorced and phlegmatic about it.
“Married too young,” he said. “She was my childhood sweetheart but when I came back from the war, we were both different. We got married anyway because that’s what one did but when she took up with another man and I demanded a divorce a few years later, I think we were both just incredibly relieved.”
One mizzling day in March, we walked to the highest point in Hampstead Heath. You must know it well, Diane. Just above the East Heath. We tramped up from Parliament Hill Fields, past the sand pits where people were filling bags in preparation for the bombardment we were all dreading and simultaneously wishing would start so this appalling period of stasis could end.
“Made it,” Penrose puffed as he turned around on the crest of the hill to look down on the city. “Not as young as I used to be. You, however, seem totally unfazed by that climb.”
“We’re tough in the WAAF,” I grinned. “They put me through my paces at the camp in Cheshire. Strengthened all those muscles I didn’t even know I had.”
“I was pretty fit myself in 1917. Not any more,” Penrose said, patting his stomach. “Peacetime is no good for middle-aged miseries like me.”
We stood in silence, looking down at London and the barrage balloons hovering over the city like giant bees. Below us, an RAF crew was trying to raise a balloon, with little success. It flopped around the grass like an unbiddable, oversized pig. Birds sang around us as though they hoped their melodies could charm spring into life.
“I wonder what it will all look like when this is over,” Penrose murmured. “The city looks so… substantial from here, as though nothing could change this skyline. But it doesn’t take much, you know. When we left Passchendaele, it was like another planet. You couldn’t relate it to any place on this earth or to anything we knew. Everything was gone. The trees, the villages, even the grass. Our capacity to destroy is staggering. It’s as though, every few decades, we feel the need to subjugate the earth, to prove our dominance, to reduce everything to rubble and start again. One day we may go too far, I fear.”
I didn’t know what to say. I was watching five or six soldiers swarming around the ack-ack battery to our right and wondering how Evelyn was doing. Penrose followed my gaze.
“Sorry, how bloody tactless of me. Are you thinking of him?”
“No,” I answered, surprised and embarrassed. I should have been, you might think, but sometimes it was too hard. I missed Robert with an ache that was physical. Sometimes it was like a dull pain in the pit of my stomach, sometimes I felt nauseous, and sometimes I felt his absence in the chronic fatigue that made me take to my bed at 6 p.m., not bothering with the blackout, knowing I would not rise until morning. I could not deal with the reality of his absence every moment and so sometimes I deliberately erased him from my mind. In the same way that you would take a pill for chronic back pain. It doesn’t fix the cause but at least you can function for a few hours. I was self-medicating with conscious forgetfulness. I like to think I was being pragmatic rather than heartless but you may disagree and of course, there is danger inherent in any kind of self-medication. You always risk over-prescribing. “I was actually thinking of my friend, Evelyn, who’s up in Hull in one of those mixed batteries. She just wants it all to kick off.”
“And your man, your fiancé I suppose we should call him? Have you heard from him?”
“I got a letter two weeks ago. No precise location but somewhere in France. He says they are having a sticky time of it. Don’t tell anyone at the Ministry but he’s not particularly optimistic. He thinks Holland will fall and then who knows.”
Penrose – I never called him Keith, I think you can guess why – nodded.
“We always knew the Nazis were strong, we knew they were well-armed but we seem to have struggled with what that actually meant. Or maybe not. Maybe that’s what drove all the appeasement. Chamberlain knew we weren’t ready. He knew we couldn’t possibly win. But here we are, so we’d better pull something out of the hat.”
I started.
“That’s more or less what Robert said in his letter,” I said, huddling deeper into my coat as the wind whipped around our faces. “He wrote: We’d better have a plan now that we’re in this. Not much sign of a plan here but heaven help us if someone doesn’t have something up their sleeve back home.”
“Do you remember all his letters by heart?” Penrose asked, smiling tightly.
“Yes. Is that silly? It’s just because I have enough time to memorise every line before I get the next one. It’s a kind of prayer, I suppose. No, more an enchantment. If I remember what he said, keep his voice alive in my head, then he’ll stay alive out there. Mad, I know, but it seems to work for me.”
“It doesn’t sound mad at all,” said Penrose quietly.
A few minutes later, he took off.
“Race you to the bottom. WAAF versus vet. Come on!”
And so we ran too fast down the too-steep hill until we could run no more and the skyline had gone.
CHAPTER 11
I did receive a poem in the post from Mrs Danton early on in the war but I never saw her again. Before I left England in 1949, I went to her house – a pilgrimage of sorts to the woman who had witnessed the start of our love story and knew my Robert before he became another. In my grief-griddled brain, Mrs Danton had become a larger-than-life oracle. With my parents and Robert gone, I needed a voice from the past to convince me that I was really alive and not just a figment of my own shattered imagination. I needed someone to tether me with testimony that it all really happened. And I had, after all, promised to tell her what I thought of her poem.
The house had not changed – Oxford was spared the bombing, some say, because Hitler wanted to claim the city as his capital when he invaded – but there was no reply when I rang the bell. A grey-haired lady tending roses across the street told me Mrs Danton had moved to Brighton during the war to be with her sister.
“She died in that dreadful raid that hit the Odeon cinema and killed all those children,” she said, shaking her head. “1940 it was. Mrs Danton was not in the cinema but as I heard it, her sister lived on a nearby street and one of the bombs dropped by that German plane fell slap-bang on the house. I imagine poor Lizzie never knew what hit her. That’s something, I suppose. No suffering. Best you could hope for, really. Mind you, I told her not to go to Brighton, many times, but she wouldn’t listen. She said she wasn’t leaving her sister to face it all alone. She was very kind was Lizzie Danton though she hid it well.”
She turned back to her roses but then swung around to me, her clippers waggling just as Mrs Danton had shaken her finger at me that day we left for Felixstowe all those lifetimes ago.
“I remember you now. You were with that handsome lodger that Lizzie had before the war, weren’t you?”
I nodded, tears prickling my eyes at this unexpected resurrection of my husband in the speech of a woman I hadn’t known existed. How many more versions of Robert were out there? How many would I never know?
“I used to see you sneak out first thing. Oh, you were quick and quiet but I’m an e
arly bird myself and I’d be watering my plants up there on my bedroom windowsill and I’d see you running down the lane, hair loose, face flushed, bold as brass.” She was nodding emphatically, the sheen of schadenfreude glazing her watery eyes. She pushed her glasses up her nose.
“Oh yes, nothing passes me by. Not on this street.”
I couldn’t speak but nor could I leave. This righteous busybody was my last link to Robert, to you, to the life I was about to abandon. We stared at each other over the garden wall until she muttered, “There you go,” and headed back inside. She didn’t ask what happened to Robert. The fact that I was alone told her all she needed to know.
I stood there a little longer, watching her yellow roses bobbing over the garden wall. Then, slowly and deliberately, I snapped every flower off and scattered the petals onto the pavement. Much later, alone in my hotel room in London, I buried my head in my hands and cried for us all again. I could still smell the fruity scent of the crushed petals on my fingers.
I found Mrs Danton’s poem a few weeks ago when I was putting some papers in order at home. It is what it is but I thought you might like to have it. It will mean nothing to anyone else now.
A Fond Farewell
Too young they were
Life just a blur
Endless days of loving
They feared not shame
Nor death nor blame
Eternities of flesh
Bare feet running
Cheeks flushing
Infinities of stolen kisses
So young, so bold
Hands never cold
In secret places shushing
Her hand in his, deep is his stare
He sees more now than she can bear
She seeks his shoulder, she hides her face
Shame never saw them, but death does pace
And here, at last, their cheeks do blush
Red rose of love, red rose of death
These flowers of life bend from the knife.
I told you, amateur piffle. Still, it does bring a tear to my eye. I hate myself for such sentimentality but the truth is Mrs Danton’s poem still moves me today.
The Reckoning Page 11
