Octavia's War (34 page)

The news lifted spirits all over the country. Even Lizzie took heart from it, especially as Ben wrote to say that there was a rumour that part of the Eighth Army was going to be sent back to England to join the new Army of Liberation.

I do so hope you're right,
she wrote back.
Let me know the minute they tell you. I can't wait to see you again. Do you think this really is the beginning of the end?

It was certainly the gathering of a huge army. By the middle of January, when Margaret was sitting her scholarship examination and David was re-sitting his, to Dora's considerable relief, the south of England seemed to be full of troops on the move, travelling in trucks and lorries all marked in a new way with a white, five-pointed star.

‘It gives you such hope to see them all like this,' Phillida Bertram said, as she and Octavia watched a convoy pass. They'd been in Chertsey Road buying paper from Mr Elton's stationery shop, as the supplies from London had been delayed and the art classes had run out of nearly everything they needed, and the convoy had come through just as they were setting off to Downview again.

Octavia agreed that they did. ‘And just when we needed it most,' she said.

‘I wonder how long it will be before they're ready to invade,' Phillida said. ‘It's about time we took this war to France.'

‘I'll ask Tommy Meriton,' Octavia told her. ‘He's usually a good source of information. Although he'll probably say it's hush-hush.'

But before she got a chance to speak to him the war came to Horsell Common in a way that none of them had expected.

It was a bright, cold Sunday and the Downview girls were happily occupied in their usual ways, reading, writing home, knitting or out in the garden digging over the vegetable patch. One or two had gone out for a walk on the common, among them Iris and Sarah, bundled and be-scarved and both wearing two pairs of gloves to keep their hands warm. They'd reached the Six Cross Roads and were discussing the relative merits of their various screen heroes, when they heard a plane coming their way. Iris looked up idly to see what it was. They were used to light planes flying over Horsell Common because there was an aerodrome not far away at Fairoaks, and sure enough this was one of their planes. The two girls watched as it circled and lost height.

‘I think there's something the matter with it,' Iris said. ‘It's dropping ever so quick.'

‘It's on fire!' Sarah said. ‘Oh my God, Iris, it's on fire.'

She was right. There was black smoke billowing out of its tail.

‘We must do something,' Iris said, her eyes round with horror. But it was too late to do anything. Even as they watched, the little plane burst into flames and plummeted to the ground, its engines screaming.

The two girls clung together, too shocked to move. Then they saw that there were two men in Army uniform running through the bushes towards the flames.

‘Come on,' Iris said. ‘We've got to do something.' And ran after them.

What they found was so terrible that for a few seconds they couldn't accept what they were seeing.

The plane was burning like a bonfire, roaring flames and throwing up thick black clouds of smoke in a stink of burning fuel and rubber and hot steel. The superstructure was all that was left of it and that was burnt black and twisted in the heat and all around it the trees and bushes were burning too, crackling and spitting sparks. The two men were standing to one side of it, shielding their eyes from the intense heat, and lying on the charred grass at their feet there was a man writhing and moaning and so badly burnt he was black all over. His clothes were just black rags and his hair was shrivelled to his head like shreds of black cotton. As they watched one of the men took off his tunic and lowered it across him.

‘Oh my dear, good God,' Iris said.

The second man was running over to them and now they could see that he was in the Army Cadet Force and not much older than they were. ‘Don't come any closer,' he said. ‘There's another one in the plane and we can't get him out.'

‘Where's the nearest telephone?' Iris asked. ‘One of us ought to phone.'

The cadet wasn't sure and while he was telling her so, they heard an ambulance ringing its bell and, turning towards the sound, they glimpsed the white sides of the vehicle as it bumped through the bushes. So somebody had phoned. Thank God for that.

Then they were all calling and waving their arms. ‘Over
here! Over here! Oh please be quick!' And long seconds later the ambulance driver had taken command of the situation while his companion was down on his knees by the injured man. ‘You two girls go home,' he said. ‘There's nothing more you can do here. Leave it to us.'

As they walked away, Sarah began to shake. She was still shaking when they crossed the road and walked through Downview's front door.

‘Go and get Matron,' Iris shouted to the nearest girl she saw, ‘and be quick about it.'

Octavia had been cleaning her bedroom when she heard the roar of the plane's engines. Since Janet left them she'd got into the habit of cleaning it herself, because it wouldn't have been fair to expect Emmeline to do it, not on top of everything else she had to do. It wasn't done regularly, she had to admit, but she tackled it whenever she had the time and noticed how dishevelled it was getting. Now, she put down the carpet sweeper and opened the window to lean out and see what was wrong with the plane. She was just in time to watch it catch fire and to realise that it was falling towards the common. Then she heard the impact and the explosion and knew that she had to go to Downview straight away. Some of the girls would have been out on the common and they would need her. She left the sweeper where it was and ran down the stairs.

She was halfway down when Emmeline began to scream and by the time she reached the hall Edith and the girls were running out of the dining room and heading for the kitchen. They found Emmeline rolling about on the floor.

‘We shall all be – killed,' she howled. ‘All of us. Every single one. They won't – be satisfied – 'til they've – killed us all. Oh,
oh, oh! I can't bear it. I can't. I can't. All killed.' Her sobs were as searing as they'd been on the last two occasions but now there was an hysterical edge to them, as if she didn't know where she was or what she was doing. She rolled from side to side, screaming and babbling, her face so wild she was almost unrecognisable. ‘Oh! Oh! Blown – to bits. I can't bear it.'

‘Get up!' Octavia said sternly. ‘Nobody's been blown to bits. It was a plane crash. That's all.'

But that only made her worse. ‘All?' she screamed. ‘All? All of us dead. Is that all? Don't you see…?'

Octavia decided to try reasoning with her. ‘You're upset and you're making yourself worse by rolling about,' she said. ‘Get up and stop screaming.'

But she was wasting her breath. Emmeline went on rolling about and weeping that she couldn't bear it.

Edith was watching her with disbelief. ‘What are we going to do?' she said to Octavia. ‘We can't let her go on like this. She'll hurt herself.'

Octavia moved into second gear. Reasoning had failed. Now it was time to organise. ‘Nip upstairs and get her a couple of pillows and her eiderdown,' she said to Barbara and Margaret. ‘If she won't get up we can at least make her comfortable where she is. Joan, you can help your mother to make some tea, can't you. I'm going to phone the doctor. I know it's Sunday, but we can't let this go on. And then I must go to Downview. Some of my girls could have been out on the common and I want to be sure they're all right.'

The doctor was quiet and helpful. He was just on his way out to see another patient but he said he would come on to Ridgeway as soon as he could. ‘Keep her warm,' he advised, ‘and try to calm her if you can. There will be a Sunday fee, of course.'

So they eased the pillows under Emmeline's rolling head and wrapped the eiderdown around her as well as they could and offered her tea, which she refused, and although she didn't stop crying at least the screaming part of the fit seemed to be over.

‘I won't be long,' Octavia promised. And cycled to Downview.

It was a relief to find that Miss Fennimore and Miss Gordon were there before her and that they'd run a check and knew that all their pupils were present and accounted for.

‘Some of them were a bit upset,' Elizabeth reported, ‘but they're calmer now. Two of them saw it, I'm afraid, and they came back in rather a state. Maggie's looking after them.'

Iris and Sarah were still sitting in her room, wrapped in blankets and drinking tea, having told her all about the crash, detail by horrific detail.

‘We're over it now,' Maggie reported as Octavia came in. ‘They've both been very good.'

‘Of course they have,' Octavia said. ‘They're Roehampton girls.'

But Roehampton girls or not, the crash had burnt itself into their brains and they needed to tell the story of it all over again. So she stayed with them and listened and told them she was sure the doctors would do everything they could to help the man they'd seen – ‘they do some wonderful things with burns these days' – and let them talk for as long as they needed to. It was well over an hour before they were in a fit state to leave and she could cycle back to Ridgeway.

The doctor was still there and turned out to be an avuncular man with a gold watch chain draped across his belly and a white beard trimmed about his chin. To her relief, Emmeline was sitting at the kitchen table. Her face
was still blotchy and she was still swathed in her eiderdown but she was talking to him more or less sensibly.

‘Miss Smith?' the doctor said, when Octavia walked into the kitchen. And when she acknowledged her name, he stood up and prepared to take his leave. ‘I have given your cousin a prescription for some nerve tablets,' he said, ‘which I am sure will help her. We must hope so, mustn't we, Mrs Thompson. Let me know should you need another call.'

But once he and Octavia were out in the hall, his tone was decidedly more brisk and less avuncular. ‘Hysteria is a difficult condition to diagnose,' he said, ‘and even more difficult to treat, I'm sorry to say. The pills I have prescribed may alleviate her condition but on the other hand they may have little effect. It is necessary to get to the root of the problem, which in this case seems to be an anxiety of some sort. As far as I can see, what seems to be troubling your cousin is being an evacuee. She tells me the work is very hard here and she feels left out of things. Powerless, was the word she used. Did you know about this?'

‘I had some idea,' Octavia told him, remembering. ‘She said something similar in one of her other attacks.'

‘Quite,' the doctor said. ‘Well, the upshot of it is that she wants to go home to Wimbledon.'

It wasn't a surprise but it wasn't exactly timely. ‘Do you think she would be better there?' Octavia asked. ‘Happier?'

‘I think it is possible,' the doctor said. ‘I wouldn't go further than that. Is the house habitable?'

‘It isn't damaged, if that's what you mean,' Octavia said. ‘It's very dirty because nobody's lived in it since we were evacuated but, yes, it's habitable.'

‘Then if you will take my advice,' the doctor said, ‘you will arrange for her to return. I will send you my bill in due course. Good afternoon.'

‘Well?' Edith asked, when he'd driven away.

Octavia led her into the drawing room, where the girls had returned to their jigsaw puzzle, and told her what had been said.

‘Well, she can't go back on her own, that's for sure,' Edith said, sitting in one of the easy chairs by the fire. ‘She'd never manage. We shall have to go with her.'

‘I can't,' Octavia said sitting in the other chair. ‘I can't leave the school and we've been advised not to go back until after the Second Front.'

‘Could you stay here on your own?' Edith asked, poking the fire.

‘I don't think I'd want to,' Octavia told her. ‘It's a big house for one person. I might go to Downview. The school's shrunk so much we've got empty rooms there now. Anyway that's not the point at the moment. The first thing is to get your mother back to Wimbledon.'

She moved a fortnight later, with Edith and the girls to keep her company and help her run the house and with their few belongings crammed into the boot of Octavia's car. And the next morning, Octavia packed her own personal possessions into the empty car and moved into an empty room at Downview. It felt very strange and very sudden.

That first morning back in Wimbledon was bitterly cold. The sky was colourless and threatening snow and there were frost ferns on the bedroom windows when they woke. Edith lay on her back with the covers pulled up to her chin and watched her breath steaming before her, loathe to leave the warmth of her bed, but Emmeline was up as soon as she was awake, dressed and active, down in the cellar filling the coal-scuttle as if she'd never been away.

‘I'll soon have this stove lit,' she said, when Edith joined her in the kitchen, shivering in her pyjamas. ‘Go and find a dressing gown for heaven's sake, child, or you'll catch pneumonia. There's one in my wardrobe. And put some socks on. The geyser's working so we've got warm water. You have to let it run through for a little while, that's the only thing. It's a bit rusty. I'll get the breakfast presently. You go and see to the girls. Make sure they put on plenty of clothes. This house is going to strike chill for a day or two.'

‘It's absolutely extraordinary,' Edith said to Dora when she and David came over that afternoon to see how they were getting on. ‘It's as if she's stepped back in time. She's been on the go all day, down to the shops to register the ration books, scrubbing the kitchen floor and the larder. She's even made a
pie for supper. I can't keep up with her.'

‘Maybe the doctor was right,' Dora said. ‘Maybe she just needed to get home. Where is she now?'

‘Checking the blackout,' Edith said.

‘Very sensible,' Dora said, ‘or she'll have the warden after her.'

‘But you don't have raids nowadays, do you?' Edith said.

‘We get the odd hit and run,' Dora told her. ‘Nothing dreadful. Shall I put the kettle on? You could do with a cuppa, couldn't you, kids.'

But she was wrong. That night they had a real raid and a very alarming one.

When the sirens went they were all in bed and asleep, worn out by the exertions of the day. Edith woke at once, her heart pounding, feeling frightened and confused. Then she realised it was a raid and moved straight into her old Blitz-time routine. She got up and put on every item of clothing she could find, working as quickly as she could although her hands were too cold for speed. Then she went in to see to the girls. It pleased her to find that they were reacting in the same calm way as she was and were already dressing.

‘Good girls,' she said. ‘Put on all the clothes you can find.' And she picked up Joan's jersey and pulled it over her head. ‘That's the ticket.'

‘We're going in the cellar,' Margaret told her. ‘Gran said. She says it'll be safe as houses there. Just like the underground. She's taking down the chairs and we're to bring our eiderdowns.'

So they brought their eiderdowns and Edith carried a blanket too, just in case. She found her mother shovelling the coal aside to make room for them. The cold air was full of coal dust and her hands were black with it. But she wasn't crying or
even looking anxious. She was just her familiar practical self.

‘What a to-do,' she said, ‘waking us like that. Damned Hitler. Just when we were having a good sleep, too. I brought the deck chairs down, Edie. I thought we could sleep in them better. There's two more in the conservatory.'

They were settled in twenty minutes. Edith timed it. Then they waited. The girls dozed. The time passed. They could hear gunfire in the distance and the drone of the German bombers. The wait lulled them. When the first bomb fell it made them all jump.

‘That was close,' Emmeline said. ‘Wrap yourselves up warm, girls. We don't want you getting cold. Put your little hands under the eiderdown, Joanie.'

The next two explosions were so close they made the light bulb jump about on its dangling wire and they were followed by the alarming noises of falling glass and crashing walls.

‘High explosives,' Edith said remembering. ‘Big ones.'

‘Yes, but we don't need to talk about it,' Emmeline told her. ‘I brought some cards down. Who'd like to play Snap?'

The girls were too frightened for card games but, because their mother and grandmother were calm, they made the effort. No more bombs fell near them although they could hear the raid going on further away, and presently they heard an ambulance bell.

‘There you are,' Emmeline said, listening to it. ‘Now we shall be all right. They've come to look after us.'

The all clear sounded at a little after three o'clock.

‘Thank God for that,' Emmeline said. ‘Now you can get back to bed and have a bit more sleep.'

‘What about you?' Edith said. ‘I hope you're going back to bed, too.'

‘No, not just yet,' Emmeline said. ‘I'm just going to pop
down the road and see if I can lend them a hand.' And when Edith looked astonished, ‘It's all right. I shall wrap up warm.'

‘Is that wise?' Edith asked.

‘Probably not,' her mother admitted, ‘but it's necessary. This is a wicked war and we've all got to help one another.'

She didn't get back until four hours later and then she came shivering into the kitchen with her boots covered in mud and brick dust and a tin hat on her head

‘It's snowing quite hard,' she said. ‘Terrible to be bombed in the snow. Makes it all so much worse. Poor things. I've been helping them out of the wreckage and finding their things for them.'

Her granddaughters were impressed. ‘You mean actually pulling people out?' Barbara asked. ‘We saw them doing that last time, didn't we, Mum. When we came out the underground.'

‘Me and the rescue teams and the nuns from St Teresa's,' Emmeline told her. ‘You never saw such comedy turns as those nuns. They were all wearing tin hats and rubber boots and they'd tucked their habits right down into the boots. Splendid women. They gave me this.' And she took off her hat and put it on the kitchen table. ‘The old people's homes were hit,' she explained to Edith. ‘You know, the Catholic ones on The Downs. Nothing left of one of them. They're still lifting off the rubble. It's going to take hours, so Mr Cadwallader was telling me. I shall go back again when I've had some breakfast. Is there any tea?'

‘I don't know when I've ever been so surprised,' Edith said to Octavia when she rang that evening to find out how they were. ‘When the sirens went I thought we'd have screaming and crying and I don't know what all, but no, off she went as
cool as a cucumber. Can you credit it?'

‘What's she doing now?' Octavia asked.

‘In bed asleep,' Edith told her. ‘I'm the only one awake.'

‘Well, look after yourself,' Octavia said. ‘It's worrying to think of you being in the middle of an air-raid.'

‘We'll be fine, Aunt,' Edith said. 'We've got Queen Boadicea to look after us.'

Queen Boadicea took them down to the cellar the following night when the sirens went again. This time she made a pot of tea and brought that down with her too. ‘Cup that cheers,' she said, pouring it out for them. ‘Drink it up while it's hot.' She did the same thing two nights later when they had their third raid and by the following night it had become part of their routine. And then, as abruptly as they'd begun, the raids stopped.

‘Well, thank God for that,' the royal lady said when a week had gone by and nothing had happened. ‘Now perhaps we can get down to cleaning the house and then we'll have a special tea to celebrate because you've been such good children. I must see if I can make a fruit cake. How would that be?'

They told her it would be smashing and Joan wanted to know if Aunty Dora and David were coming.

‘We'll all be coming,' Edith said. ‘Now eat up your breakfast, like good girls, or you'll be late for school and we don't want that.'

‘There's the post,' Barbara said. ‘I'll get it.'

It was a most exciting post and kept them all happily occupied for the next ten bubbling minutes. Margaret had passed her scholarship and was hugged and patted and praised until she was breathless. And then just as the girls were finally putting on their coats and getting ready to leave the house,
the phone rang and it was Dora with the news that David had passed too.

‘Well, aren't you all the clever ones,' Emmeline said. ‘Now we have got something to celebrate. I've got to make a fruit cake now, haven't I? It only needs your Aunt Tavy to come home and everything will be right back to normal. Won't she be pleased when she hears!'

In fact, their Aunt Tavy was lonely, and hearing their good news made the loneliness worse. Of course, she told herself it was silly to be feeling like that when she was in a house full of friends and colleagues and pupils but it was true no matter how sternly she took herself to task about it. During the day it wasn't so bad because she was too fully occupied with the needs and emotions of her pupils to pay attention to what she was feeling herself but at night, when she'd retreated into her small cramped room and lay in her unfamiliar bed looking round at the boxes full of books and papers that she hadn't had time to unpack, loneliness washed her to weeping. It felt unnatural to be staying in the school building at the end of the day and not going home to Em and her ‘nice cup of tea' and she missed the chatter and closeness of her family, especially now when they had something to celebrate. And then of course there was Tommy, who'd been quite cross when she'd rung to tell him what she'd done and had seen at once that it would make difficulties.

‘I mean, it's not exactly convenient, is it,' he'd said. ‘I can hardly come down and stay with you in a school house.'

She supposed not. ‘But I can come back to Wimbledon now and then.'

‘Now and then?' he'd said crossly. ‘We need more than now and then.'

‘I'm sorry about it, Tommy,' she'd said, ‘but I had to do it. I couldn't let Em go on the way she was.'

‘Well, I don't think much of it,' he said.

He'd changed his tone by the time he rang again. ‘Don't even think of coming up to Wimbledon,' he warned. ‘The Blitz has started up again.'

‘I know,' she said. ‘Edith told me.'

‘We caught a packet round here,' he said. ‘Are they all right?'

She told him how well Emmeline was coping.

‘Doesn't surprise me,' he said. ‘I told you she was tough. But you stay where you are. You mustn't come up. Not under any circumstances. I don't want
you
getting bombed.'

‘I shan't get bombed,' she said.

‘No, you won't,' he said sternly, ‘because you'll stay in Woking. You will won't you, Tavy?'

He's remembering poor Elizabeth, she thought, and promised to stay where she was, ‘for the time being anyway.'

‘Good,' he said. ‘I'm glad to hear it. Now, I've got a bit of news for you. I'm going to be a grandfather. Joan and Mark are expecting.'

That made her smile, as much with relief at his change of tone as amusement at his change of status. ‘I can't imagine you as a grandfather.'

He laughed. ‘Nor can I but that's what I'm going to be.'

‘When's it due?'

‘Beginning of March, so he says. He reckons it'll just about be born before the Second Front begins and they send him off to France.'

‘Is it so close?'

‘Yes, it is, according to the most reliable estimates. They're bringing the Desert Rats home to spearhead the attack.'

Octavia thought of Ben and Lizzie. ‘All of them?' she asked.

‘Quite a contingent, I believe. Crack troops, you see. Experienced.'

I wonder if Lizzie knows, Octavia thought.

Lizzie had known even before the news filtered through to the Foreign Office.

It's still only a rumour,
Ben had written,
and we've had these sorts of rumours before but this time I really think we're being sent home. Fingers crossed.

She'd lived in a state of exquisite tension ever since, watching for the post and quite unable to concentrate, waking early every morning to sit by her window and look out over the dark trees and the dew-grey lawns and think and hope. Let it be true, she prayed. Please God let it be true. Let me hear today.

She heard a fortnight later. He was coming home and, even better, he was being posted to Abingdon, a few short miles away.

I' ll see you at the station as soon as I can get a pass,
he wrote.
And then I shall put in for some leave. God knows I've earned it. Love you, love you, love you.

She was waiting at the station for half an hour before his train came in. She'd cut a lecture and excused herself from a tutorial and washed her hair and put on her lipstick and when his train finally chuffed in, she was hopping from foot to foot with impatience. And then suddenly, there he was, jumping out of the train, still in uniform and looking darker and older, holding out his arms to her.

‘Oh Ben!' she cried as she ran. ‘Darling, darling Ben. I thought I'd never see you again.'

He kissed her fiercely and hungrily. ‘Nor did I,' he said. ‘Do you have a room somewhere?'

The question put her into a panic. We can't go there, she thought. It's not possible. Men aren't allowed. It was one of the strictest rules. But he was looking at her with such urgency and she loved him so much and she hadn't seen him for such a long time. And anyway rules were made to be broken, weren't they? It would be running a terrible risk but what was that compared to the risks he'd been running all this time? ‘You'll have to say you're my cousin or something,' she warned. ‘And we'll have to be really quiet.'

‘I don't care what I have to say as long as I'm with you,' he said and kissed her again. ‘Come on.'

She knew it was a bad idea when they reached the lodge and she had to tell her first lie to the porter and felt absolutely dreadful about it. And when they were in Hall and passing her friends and acquaintances in the corridors and on the stairs and she was telling the same lie over and over again, it got worse. This wasn't the sort of place to bring your lover. It wasn't the sort of place to
have
a lover. Once they were inside her room she put the chair against the door so that they'd have a bit of warning if anyone tried to walk in, but by then her anxiety had reached trembling point. He didn't seem to notice the state she was in and started to unbutton her blouse as soon as she'd shut the door, kissing her neck and fondling her breasts. But it wasn't any good. She was far too worried to respond to him and although she kissed him back and put her arms round his neck the way she'd always done, she didn't feel a thing. It was miserably disappointing. She lay on her back on her uncomfortable bed and wanted to cry.