Authors: Sheila Hancock
Miss Carter's War (6 page)
‘See you on Monday, you lovely creature.’
She was glad that he didn’t suggest coming in. It would be a step too far, too soon. Besides, she had not yet had time to make the flat into a home. It had a bedroom, bathroom, sitting room and kitchenette – the ‘ette’ meaning there was just a rudimentary Baby Belling cooker and larder – and little in the way of furniture. She sat on her one armchair, gazing at the rain through the window and wondering at the whirlwind of the last week. After the turmoil of the past it seemed her future was set fair. She was also aware that she was looking forward to seeing Tony the next day. She fell into a contented sleep, curled up in the armchair.
Over the next few months Marguerite enjoyed making her flat into a comfortable refuge. Money was tight on her teacher’s salary, but she overcame sentimentality, and sold some of her mother’s jewellery that was too ostentatious for her to wear. She had visions of inviting guests to civilised dinners, where wine and conversation flowed, although wine was a rare commodity in the austerities of English shops. Also, she discovered that civilised dinners were not a form of recreation customary in post-war Dartford. After the conviviality of her childhood in Paris, where her father’s job in the British Council necessitated entertaining visiting artistes and writers, and the fun and fierce exchange of ideas at Cambridge, this was difficult for her to adjust to. Everyone was friendly in a polite, distant sort of way but social gatherings did not seem to take place even amongst her colleagues at work. Anyway, to begin with, she had little time for leisure, what with lesson preparation, teaching, playground and dinner duty; and out-of-hours activity, the redoubtable Tudor-Craig’s choir on Tuesdays, some French-conversation coaching to help out the French department, parents’ evenings, staff meetings and the endless marking.
As she settled into a routine she had more free time, and this she began to spend with Tony. The rest of the staff were older than her, with established friendships, and she found Tony more fun to be with. He occasionally went away for the weekend to visit ‘a friend’, so Marguerite assumed he had a serious relationship with someone and she settled for merely enjoying his companionship. They were merry in each other’s company. He lightened her life with laughter. As at the Tory rally, he had a knack of drawing attention to himself. At first she felt embarrassed by this, but she could see that people were amused by his extrovert behaviour. Having, of necessity, always inclined towards reticence, she found herself enjoying being on the sidelines of his escapades. He could turn an everyday occurrence into an event. For instance, shopping.
Miss Fryer had hinted that his apparel for Parents’ Day – a pair of the newfangled blue-denim Levi’s and a Fair Isle jumper – was unsuitably casual, so Marguerite dragged him to the local department store to buy something more appropriate, despite his protests that he was a PT teacher, not a bank clerk, and the jeans, as he called them, were the latest thing. The whole shop was brought to a standstill by his howls of horror at his reflection in the mirror now that he was wearing a dark grey-flannel suit, complete with waistcoat and stiff-collared shirt and tie.
‘I can’t move. Arggh! I’m choking. I feel done up like a dog’s dinner. I wouldn’t be seen dead in this.’
Marguerite encouraged the gathering group of laughing staff and customers to reassure him.
‘You look very smart, son,’ said the lady on the glove counter.
The ‘A real gentleman’ from a passing Brylcreemed customer in an identical suit didn’t help, but the two saleswomen from corsetry did. The elderly one, her ramrod stiffness a credit to her department, ventured, ‘You look like a film star.’
‘Which one? Bela Lugosi?’
But it was her sweet blonde colleague, a walking endorsement of their uplift brassieres, with her brazen, ‘I could fall head over heels for you in that,’ that quietened Tony’s wails. Pouncing on his hesitation, Marguerite wrested the money from his pocket, handed it to the manager of the store, who, on Marguerite’s insistence, stuffed it quickly into a container, and sent it whizzing along the overhead wire towards the cash desk, to the applause of the onlookers, who had thoroughly enjoyed the diversion from the usual solemnity of mahogany and hushed voices in the sedate emporium.
Thenceforth, outings were classified ‘suit’ or ‘non-suit’. Definitely ‘suit’ were staff meetings with Miss Fryer, trips to the theatre, apart from the Royal Court, where his maligned jeans were de rigueur, concerts at the Wigmore Hall, but not Promenade Concerts at the Albert Hall. He and Marguerite always went up to the top gallery, where they were allowed to sit or lie on the floor, blissfully drinking in the music for which they shared a mutual love. Also ‘suit’ was a visit to the doctor’s surgery with his smoker’s cough.
More ‘non-suit’ occasions were trips to the pub, and going up to town, wandering round the bomb-scarred city, usually ending up at Joe Lyons Corner House for an ice-cream sundae whilst listening to Ena Baga, resplendent in chiffon, playing popular tunes on the Hammond organ, to which Tony would sing along, sometimes joined by other customers, to the delight of the usually ignored Ena.
‘Semi-non-suit’ occasions were football and motorbike speedway races when the waistcoat and stiff collar were replaced by a pullover, and team scarves and rosettes permitted. Both sports were new to Marguerite but she loved watching the English abandon their reserve and sing and shout their support or good-humoured opposition.
All political events, especially door-to-door canvassing, were definitely ‘suit’, to add respectability to the Labour Party members in the light of the patrician, born-to-rule image of the leading members of the Conservative Party. Sadly Aneurin Bevan and Ernie Bevin in their shambolic suits were no competition, in the sartorial stakes, for the relaxed elegance of Eden and Macmillan, or Churchill’s aristocratic eccentricity. Tony did his best with his flannel, but after a while it began to look the worse for wear. He flatly refused to buy a new suit, arguing that the leather patches he stuck on the frayed elbows of the jacket were a good example of ‘make do and mend’ that the working class would understand only too well. He did not talk much about his childhood, but the odd comment made it clear that his personal experience of deprivation was what fuelled his left-wing zeal and devotion to a party that seemed, with its construction of the Welfare State, to be doing something about it.
They were both bitterly disappointed when the Labour Party suffered a major decline in its majority in the 1950 election. Marguerite was torn in her allegiance, feeling a secret delight that Margaret Roberts seriously challenged the seat of the long-standing male socialist MP, despite her sex and inexperience. Both of them had to be careful to keep their political activity separate from their job. Many of the girls demonstrated passionate commitment to the parties they were representing in the permitted mock elections, but Miss Fryer was adamant that the staff should be apolitical within the school gates.
Thus it had to be in a hidden corner of the school field that Pauline, a member of the Labour League of Youth, and Hazel a Young Conservative, cornered her with a leaflet about a meeting they were organising in the boys’ grammar school, united by their opposition to the hydrogen bomb. Marguerite identified with the two girls, having grown up listening to her parents’ political rhetoric and participated in their activism. She understood the passion for a cause that can consume a child.
She promised that she and Mr Stansfield would attend. It was probably breaking the no-politics rule, but the cause was so crucial to her that she decided it was worth the risk. Marguerite had been horrified at the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the Allies’ atom bombs; this meeting, jammed full of concerned youngsters, brought home to her how fear for the future, indeed the likelihood of no future at all, overshadowed the lives of these war-weary children.
The diminutive Pauline, with pink-satin ribbons in her pigtails, opened the meeting by reading out in a shaky voice the constitution.
‘ “We, the representatives of our respective countries, believing that since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed, and believing that the peace must be founded, if it is not to fail, upon the’ – here the girl took a deep breath – ‘intellectual and moral solidarity of all peoples, have resolved to combine our efforts to form an association of the peoples to be known as the World Federation of United Nations Associations.” ’
Having made it to the end, she beamed with pride.
‘That’s us. There’s going to be lots of us all round the world. So that’s good, isn’t it?’
And she took her seat amongst the people on the stage. Above her chair was a plaque dedicated to the sixty young men from the school who had died in the two wars. Marguerite could see that the poignancy was not lost on Tony.
Then the politicians had their say. A bumbling aide introduced the town’s Tory candidate as ‘Margaret Roberts, now Margaret Thatcher after her marriage to the distinguished Major Denis Thatcher who is in paints’. She was transformed by her recent triumph at the polls; she may not have won, but the number of votes she had secured was a remarkable result in a Labour stronghold. Being married to a rich man probably helped as well. Her hair was several shades lighter, and her frock, a vivid blue to match her eyes and her politics, was short enough to reveal shapely legs, enhanced by elegant shoes, the high heels of which improved her previous clomping walk. She spoke with vigour of the danger of unilateral disarmament at which Tony groaned only very quietly, so as not to disrupt the meeting so efficiently organised by the young activists.
As they left the hall, Tony linked arms with Marguerite and muttered, ‘Dear God, what have we done to these children – we so-called grown-ups? What kind of future have we given them?’
She and Marcel creep through the lavender field, the perfume makes her head swim; or is it the fear? The house seems deserted but the door is wide open. They enter cautiously, guns at the ready. There is a whimpering sound. As they go into the parlour the little boy clings to his mother, lying dead on the floor in a lake of blood.
‘Please don’t hurt us,’ he says.
‘I think a stiff drink is in order.’
Several beers and whisky chasers later, Tony blamed his mood on a headache brought on by suppressing his natural instinct to shout at politicians in deference to Pauline and Hazel. And ‘complications’ in his personal life. Plus ‘the slight worry that we may be about to blow our world out of the solar system’.
Marguerite offered him a Veganin, ignored the ‘complications’, and insisted that things would change for the better.
‘The stakes are so high now – total annihilation – the world will have to come to its senses.’
‘Give or take the odd bomb-owning lunatic that may not have any senses to come to.’
‘They will be defeated. Good will prevail.’
‘Ever the bloody optimist. Little Lizzie Dripping.’
‘Who’s she?’
‘Dunno. It’s what we people oop north call people we love.’
When he said things like that she sometimes wondered how much he meant it. She half hoped that their warm relationship would develop into something more serious if he sorted out his ‘complications’. But she was content to leave things as they were. Her working life was all-consuming.
Her pupils were her raison d’être. They were the future. Forget about the past.
Yes, for pity’s sake, forget that.
From the window of the tower Marguerite would often feast her eyes on the girls’ lithe bodies as they leapt around in their skimpy gym skirts doing PT outside in the sun. She earnestly hoped that their beauty would not be drained away, as it had been from the careworn mothers she met on Parents’ Day, nor their bright eyes dimmed by disappointment with their lives, scarred by war and want. She did everything she could to build their confidence; if they achieved something or amused her with their giggly humour, she would give them a hug. It would be no exaggeration to say that she loved them. The more unprepossessing, verging on hopeless they were, the more she endeavoured to transform them. Her Messiah complex, Tony called it.
She was never bored. She relished the challenge of changing her teaching techniques according to age group. Her relatively stylish clothes and slight accent made her the target of many a schoolgirl crush, which she learned to handle with tact. She gave equal energy to all her classes but she could not help having a soft spot for her very first pupils.
Irene Brown perplexed her. In the class situation it was well nigh impossible to deal with chronic shyness, as drawing attention to it only made the sufferer more withdrawn. Because Irene never joined in discussions, it was difficult to get to the bottom of her problem. Marguerite could forge no bond with the girl. The breakthrough came of its own volition. It was not part of the syllabus, but after the United Nations Associations meeting, which many of them had attended, motivated by Pauline and Hazel, it seemed apposite for the girls to look at the war poets. She Roneoed copies for all of them of Rupert Brooke’s ‘The Soldier’, and Siegfried Sassoon’s ‘Suicide in the Trenches’.
Rupert Brooke irked them. They all knew men who were buried in ‘some corner of a foreign field’ and for them, the bitter loss overrode the patriotism. The Sassoon spoke more to their understanding of the fate of ‘a simple soldier boy’. As Hazel Evans read the final verse Marguerite noticed that Irene was trying to hide the fact that she was crying.