He trained on a Maurice Farman and then an Avro, after a while in ground school. His friend was Rattler, with whom he was billeted in a room above a gunsmith’s. He had two hours of dual instruction. His instructor was only twenty and looked younger than he did: yellow down where a moustache was intended. Dick learned with hushed fear that only the month before, two instructors had been killed by their pupils. It wasn’t necessary to fly over the German lines to meet death.
Machine-gun class he found too easy and consequently dull. ‘The return of the fusee.’ ‘The tripping of the lock.’ Rattler whispered loudly: ‘What about the tripping of the light fantastic? Tonight’s the Bunny Hug if they let us out in time.’ He had his eye on some very attractive nurses stationed nearby.
A chap named Wheatley went up to loop without permission, and crashed. His wings fell off. ‘I’m not interested in stunts,’ Dick told Rattler. But it was all Rattler wanted to do. He dreamed of swooping like a bat, beneath a bridge, closer, closer to the ground. People beneath him scattering in terror. Skimming the tree-tops, circling church spires, dicing with danger.
It wasn’t what Dick wanted. Surprisingly in all those days of training, he had never lost that first vision of a lark soaring. The day he took his altitude test, more than nine thousand feet up, he saw in the distance what he thought was a bird. It was another plane. After a while it began to spin. Spinning, spinning, and disappearing beneath the clouds. He went up and up, his wings ice-covered from the clouds, dense white, that he’d passed through. And then above, a sky of such blue. That very blue into which the lark had soared. Underneath him the white clouds were snow-covered mountains. How far could he see? If not to heaven then at least to France and beyond: Germany, Hungary, Russia. Happy, so happy in his loneliness. As alone, solitary, as that lark had been.
*
Autumn of 1917 and they were in France. Added now to the other smells of flying, the castor oil, the varnish, the petrol, was the smell of fear. The Germans had parachutes. The British had not. Better a machine-gun blow you to smithereens, even to drown in mud, than to fall from the skies – a ball of fire trapped in a machine. Price-Davies told him:
‘If you’re going to be ushed out in a blaze of glory, then for God’s sake, carry a revolver.’
There were good times. His friends saw to that. Littlewood, who’d achieved a bullet wound in one ear, wondered if he should wear a ring in it? ‘Bound to impress the ladies.’ Not that Dick was very much gone on girls. At home there had been no one – unless it had been Nancy Carstairs in the days of dancing class. Nancy Carstairs from the richest family in Middlesbrough. At parties she had chosen him always, and just after his seventh birthday he had asked her to marry him. Since then, it was rumoured that she was sweet on him. At training school in Lincolnshire there had been the nurses. Forbidden meetings, jaunts. Eve, the vicar’s daughter from Wiltshire, who had flirted, held his hand, laughed at and excited him. She had had only two topics: teasing him and admiring herself. He’d liked both. But for all the evenings he’d spent with her, alone together only when walking the short distance home, there seemed nothing now.
They didn’t speak much of their fears. Better not. In the evenings in the mess, sounds not of a lark singing, but of a bunch of boys. Dick at the piano, stomach in knots, head throbbing.
‘Rag it, tickle the old ivories, Grainger.’ Often, too often, there was a death to celebrate. They sang:
‘… The young aviator lay dying, and as ‘neath the wreckage he lay, To the Ack Emmas around him assembled, these last parting words did he say.’
Littlewood, Judson and Price-Davies were all dead by early September. The next week Dick received a ‘lucky’ light shoulder wound. Soon after he left the hospital, he learned that his squadron was to go on to Home Defence.
Rattler was not pleased. ‘Gothas and Zeppelins – not the same at all. I’d much rather get the Hunfamous Hunarinos in a straight fight …’
‘… Take the cylinder out of my kidney, the connecting rod out of my brain, From the small of my back take the crankshaft, and assemble the engine again …’
3
A sharp cold morning in January 1918. Mrs Dennison’s voice, at nearly seventy as firm and clear as a young girl’s, came from upstairs: ‘Eleanor, what are you doing, are you down there, Eleanor?’
Eleanor, tempted not to answer at all, had learned over the years that it didn’t help. ‘I’m writing to Basil,’ she called up firmly, ‘and am trying to concentrate.’
That should have silenced her mother, but instead, mention of her beloved priest-son brought her, slowly and heavily because of her increasing lameness, down the stairs.
‘Wait, please, Eleanor, I have a message. The memorial cards for Mrs Struther –’ She was approaching the desk, small plump hands clasping her cane. Below the net which tidied her wispy front hair (and tonight would leave a red mark) little gold-rimmed spectacles. Behind them, cold pale blue eyes.
‘Did you hear me, Eleanor?’
‘I must finish what I’m writing first –’
‘I don’t care for your tone. Basil is more likely to wish for a message from me than anything you might have to say, my dear.’
Eleanor’s lips tightened to keep back the angry words – full lips that became suddenly thin.
‘Tut! I’ve come downstairs without my knitting. Run up, would you, Eleanor?’
Despising herself, Eleanor went. Heavy, angry, so that it seemed to take her as long as it would have done Mother. She wanted to drag the khaki sock from its three needles, to pull and pull the thread: her fingers ached with renounced mischief.
‘At last. I wondered if perhaps you had decided to stay upstairs contemplating a work of art?’
Back at her letter, Eleanor thought suddenly, painfully, of Eric Grainger, and of how she loved him. ‘It seems to me,’ her mother was saying, thrusting in the needle, smoothing the khaki stocking stitch, ‘unnecessary to have told Basil of my small upset with the coalman –’
‘Kindly do not read my letters!’
‘Temper, my dear, temper.’
Agitated, Eleanor addressed the envelope. ‘The Reverend Basil Dennison, SJ’ Her hand shook. A duty letter, its contents dull and uninspired, and even then Mother had found matter for discontent. It’s as if she knew, Eleanor thought, that I don’t care much for Basil, just as I don’t care for my sister, Margaret. God must know, have always known, which of the family I loved best. Or why else would He have taken them away?
Six of them: the children of Lieutenant-General Roland Dennison and Dorothy Cicely Lockwood-Turner, married in Egypt in 1873. Guy first: Eleanor marvelled later that he should have been at once so perfect and so nice. Remembering a lawn in sunshine and a godlike being with curly hair, taller even than Papa, who’d swung her round and round (‘Stop, stop, do it again!’) For three happy years she had been able to follow him about. Worshipping. But even in those days, it had not been right with Mother. That voice, haunting her earliest memories, cutting, accusing. Father was often fierce but, heard from behind the nursery door, not truly frightening. It was the reassuring boom of a foghorn (seaside holidays at Cromer), the excitement of a thunderstorm.
After Guy, another son, Arthur, who had lived only ten months. Then Margaret and after they were back in England, Basil. And Barbara. Babs. My sister. When anyone said, ‘sister’, Eleanor thought always of Babs (why never of Margaret with her Guards colonel husband and her four lively children, the eldest already asking how soon could he ‘have a go at the Hun’?) Babs, eighteen months older than Eleanor and, after Basil went away to school, her chief companion, friend and protector.
She and Babs were to be educated at the convent Mother had attended in the eighteen-sixties. Margaret had left the year before and their questions bored her, while they regretted all the times she’d talked of school and, uninterested, they hadn’t listened. She was going out to India that autumn to act as hostess for Guy whose regiment was stationed in Naipur. Her mind was on t
hat, and on the wardrobe she would take.
September 1895 saw them at the Convent of the Resurrection with its views of the Sussex Downs from the high dark windows. The nuns were called by their surnames prefixed by Mother. Some were quite young, but all seemed to Eleanor to hint disapproval in a way that reminded her of Mother. Indeed when she answered them: ‘Yes, Mother, No, Mother,’ there seemed little difference.
Altogether she wasn’t too happy in this dour stone building with its long corridors, strict rules, cold mornings and lumpy porridge. But it was all right because of Babs. The nuns spoke of her as ‘dear little Barbara’. That never happened to Eleanor who was not little – indeed she’d grown so fast that, standing straight, her head cleared Babs by a full two inches.
Babs was naughty (‘Let’s commit a teeny half-size sin, the sort Our Lord’ll hardly notice and Mother Etherington not at all …’) but never brought any wrath down on herself. Her face wore the right expression. Eleanor’s did not. ‘Bold,’ the nuns said, ‘I don’t like your bold manner, Eleanor. Why can’t you be more like Barbara?’ Praise and comparison that could have made her dislike Babs. Only Babs didn’t want to be good – though she rather fancied, she said, a broad blue Child of Mary ribbon. She puffed out her small ripening bosom in anticipation.
In the summer of 1896, Babs, thirteen now, became ill. The illness began with a nagging pain which Mother Kenward, the Infirmarian, thought was constipation. Babs said: ‘She asked me if I’d been, you know, on the throne. “Have you done your duty, dear?” and then gave me fizzy Eno’s.’ But after two mornings of fruit salts Babs had still not been able to do her duty. Castor oil followed. Pain then, violent ineffectual griping, cramping. Babs was in the infirmary. The school doctor was sent for.
‘I want to see her,’ Eleanor said, lips trembling. When Mother Hilderson told her, ‘Later, after lessons,’ she repeated, ‘I want to see her now.’ The nun, irritably tapping her hand: (‘Is that the way to speak to a Mother?’) told her: ‘Very well. But five minutes only.’
The doctor had just left when she arrived panting at the infirmary door. She rushed over to the iron bed: ‘Babs, they won’t tell me what’s wrong, are you going to die?’
‘Silly, rumpty foo,’ Babs said in a brave voice. Eleanor sat on the end of the bed while Mother Infirmarian hovered. ‘The doctor asked where Daddy was and I said in Egypt. I terribly wanted you to come and see me.’ She clung to Eleanor’s outstretched hand. ‘I’m frightened,’ she said, ‘the pain …’
Eleanor laid her head on the high pillow beside her sister. ‘Babs …’
Mother Infirmarian pulled her away. ‘What a lot of fuss. Back at once to your classroom.’
Babs had a fever next time she was allowed in. Word went round that Barbara Dennison was very sick. Eleanor overheard the head girl talking: ‘They say it’s a bowel obstruction.’ It was to be years before she knew the truth. The ineffectual, irritating laxative followed by the heavy purge. The ruptured appendix. Peritonitis setting in. Fever, more pain. Their father, cabled. Mother, ill in bed – too ill to travel, she said.
Babs’s face was heavily flushed, her legs drawn up under the blue cotton blanket. She breathed raspingly, and when she spoke her voice was so faint, Eleanor had to bend right over the bed. Another time, Babs was asleep when she came in. Eleanor wanted to sit by the bed and hold her hand, but Mother Infirmarian shooed her away. ‘She’s always worse after you’ve excited her.’
But as Babs grew more and more ill, Eleanor didn’t want to leave her. She wanted to sleep in the infirmary with her. Mother Kenward discouraged this, sending her back whenever she made further, frequent visits without permission.
One evening, escaping from her dormitory before Lights Out, it seemed to her that Babs was much worse. She lay mouth open, face flushed, breathing heavily. Eleanor said:
‘She shouldn’t be like that. I want to talk to her. Babs, talk to me!’
The nun took hold of her arm. ‘Don’t disturb your sister. You are a thoughtless child.’
She pleaded: ‘The infirmary – it’s nearly empty. I want to be with her.’
‘The infirmary is for sick people … Don’t be difficult, child.’ Her voice although exasperated was kindly.
Eleanor began to whimper. That was a mistake. They would never allow her to stay now. She knew even as she wept.
‘You’ll wake her, if you go on. She needs the sleep.’
‘She isn’t asleep,’ she cried, almost screaming in her panic, ‘she isn’t asleep, she’s dead.’
Mother Etherington from the dormitory had come in. They reasoned with her. ‘Look, child, you can see her breathing.’
They were kind still. Reasonable. They promised her if there was any cause for worry, they would send for her. ‘You promise?’ she begged tearfully, looking over to where Babs lay, tucked tight in the high iron bed. Back in the dormitory, she could not sleep. She lay, chilled, behind the curtains of her bed. Praying. Oh, how she prayed. Six decades of the rosary. The Memorare, over and over. ‘O Blessed Virgin Mary, never was it known that anyone who had recourse to thee …’
She must have slept a little because when the heavy bell sounded it was as if through a fog, the words insistent, ‘Vigilate et orate, vigilate et orate,’ as the prefect went down the beds. She splashed water, dressed hurriedly, forgetting the sash for her cotton frock. Then as the others looked on, without speaking she rushed from the dormitory.
Mother Kenward came to the door. She put a finger to her lips. ‘Hush.’
‘Where is she? I want –’
The nun took her by the hand. ‘Quietly, my child. I have to tell you –’
‘She’s dead, isn’t she? She’s dead?’
‘Our Lord has taken her. You see –’
‘You promised,’ she cried, ‘you promised!’ She rained blows on the nun’s habit. She shouted, ‘Was she alone when she went to Jesus – when she died?’ That terrible dark word with its long corridors, leading where? (Not to hell – however naughty Babs had been, they had not been grave sins.)
The nuns made excuses. Eleanor had been tired, of what good to wake her, to frighten her? And Babs had slipped away. She had never woken. It had all been too late to do anything.
She went numb after that. She was numb for a long time. She felt terror whenever she thought feeling might come back. Mother was angry with her for not wanting to talk about Babs. ‘I myself suffered deeply, confined to bed, unable to visit her. The nuns tell me you were very difficult and hysterical. That cannot have helped.’
Hard times. Times of heavy winter-cold sorrow: reproached by the nuns for not honouring Babs’s memory, reproached by Mother, watching her body grow taller and heavier, carrying before her unwanted embarrassing breasts. Looking in the glass and seeing that she would never be beautiful. She cried only when she was alone or when she dreamed, as she did sometimes, that Babs was still alive. So that it was somehow not so much of a shock, she was in a way prepared, when three years later, in the Boer War, her beloved Guy died. His regiment had been sent from India to South Africa at the beginning of the fighting. He was dead within a month of enteric fever. Margaret, about to be married to one of his brother officers, sailed for England. Her fiancé survived, came home (and now in 1918 was still fortunate, having a staff post with Field Marshal Haig).
At seventeen she left the convent. She did not have much social life. She enjoyed good clothes, but not the frills that Mother insisted on. She remembered a dreadful yellow-spotted chiffon ball dress with ruffles. Mother told her: ‘You quite spoiled it, Eleanor – a solemn face weighs a frock down so.’ Once someone described her as: ‘A handsome girl. Rather splendid-looking, really.’ Mother, hearing, snorted gently.
In 1905 when she was twenty, Father, who’d been retired some time, decided they should live in Yorkshire. He bought Park Villa in Thackton-le-Moors, an 1877 house of red brick, gabled and with a generous garden and small orchard behind. It stood on the road leading out of the village. Two r
ooms were set aside for Eleanor. It was taken for granted she would be staying as mother’s companion. No one so much as mentioned ‘When you get married’. Father, who seemed never to notice that she and Mother did not get on (Mother was always so charming to him, so full of flattery and solicitude), told Eleanor, ‘It’s good for your mother to have you there. When I go …’
By this time Margaret was busy with three children, and following her army husband around. Basil had been already some years with the Jesuits. He told Eleanor that it was Guy’s death which had shown him his vocation: ‘Even though I knew, as son and heir, it might be my duty to have a family. There was quite a conflict.’ All this, in his dry voice with its almost querulous tone. She had wished she could like, even love him a little. But they had never been easy together. In his twenties he had already begun to seem elderly, with his fine thinning hair and his narrow-bridged nose which looked always a little disdainful.
He was critical of Eleanor, suggesting that she didn’t take enough care of Mother. ‘You are not a very spiritual person, Eleanor,’ he said on the eve of his ordination. ‘I speak of course as a brother, not as a priest.’
‘A priest to be,’ she corrected him.
‘What’s in a day?’
‘Everything. If you believe that God is about to change you, make an indelible mark on your soul –’
He interrupted: ‘You’ve skilfully changed the subject. As so often, I suspect, in your life, turning it to your seeming advantage.’
The Golden Lion Page 5
