Nothing to Report, page 1
Carola Oman
Nothing to Report
“I have told Rose that there will be a chauffeur for dinner,” she ended, frowning slightly at the cannibalistic sound of her sentence.
Unmarried and nicknamed “Button” by her friends, Mary Morrison is a (very mildly) distressed gentlewoman. She no longer lives in her family home, but remains at the very centre of village life, surrounded by friends including carefree, irresponsible Catha, Lady Rollo, just back from India and setting up lavish housekeeping nearby with her husband and children—socialist Tony, perfect Crispin, and Elizabeth who’s preparing to be presented at Court. Then there’s Marcelle, Mary’s widowed sister-in-law, and her challenging daughter Rosemary, who may soon be planting themselves with her to escape London bombs, Miss Rosanna Masquerier, a historical novelist who might just be a wry self-portrait of the author, and an array of other Sirs and Ladies who rely on Mary’s sympathy and practicality. And perhaps there’s just a hint of romance as well . . .
Known for her bestselling historical fiction, in Nothing to Report Carola Oman delightfully evokes E.M. Delafield’s Provincial Lady in her portrayal of an English village cheerfully, hilariously, and sometimes bumpily progressing from obliviousness to the war’s approach to pulling together for king and country. Dean Street Press and Furrowed Middlebrow have also reprinted Oman’s Somewhere in England, a sequel to Nothing to Report.
FM30
Contents
Cover
Title Page/About the Book
Contents
Introduction by Sir Roy Strong
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
About the Author
Fiction by Carola Oman
Furrowed Middlebrow Titles
Copyright
Introduction
“Lady Lenanton, last Friday I eloped and married your niece.” With that telephone conversation Carola Oman (1897-1978) entered my life more forcefully than before as the aunt of my wife, the designer Julia Trevelyan Oman. Carola was by then a formidable grande dame in her mid-seventies, whom I had first encountered as a Trustee of the National Portrait Gallery, of which I had become Director in 1967. What I only discovered years later was that she first woman trustee of any national collection, the other being the National Maritime Museum, the consequence of her acclaimed biography of Nelson (1946).
The Omans were a Scottish family from the Orkneys which had sought its fortunes in India in the late eighteenth century. Ann Chadwick (1832-1907), one of the heiress daughters of the builder of the Great Western Railway, had married one of the numerous Charles Omans, an indigo planter in Bengal who died early. She returned to England with her only son who became the great historian Sir Charles Oman (1860-1946), Fellow of All Souls and Chicheley Professor of Modern History. In 1892 he married Mary Maclagan (1866-1950) and Carola was their second child, the name a reflection of her father’s frustration that their second child was yet another daughter.
Much of her childhood was spent in Frewin Hall, Oxford in a household which still had maids and morning family prayers down to the death of her father in 1946. She was educated at Miss Batty’s and then Wychwood School, Oxford, although denied knowledge of Latin by her father. She grew up to be a striking young woman with an abundance of flaxen hair and blue eyes. Already by 1914 she had taken part in the long series of Oxford pageants which were such a feature of the Edwardian period. With the outbreak of the First World War that idyll came to an end and she became a VAD nurse serving in both this country and France. Her contribution to a book of verse, The Menin Road (1919) is increasingly recognised as significant as female writers of the twentieth century are reappraised.
In 1922 she married Gerald Lenanton (1896-1952), a timber agent who was knighted for his services in the Second World War. His wounds, sustained in the 1914-18 conflict, curtailed any possibility of children. Carola inherited a fortune from her Oman grandmother enabling them to settle at Ayot St Lawrence close to Bernard Shaw in an Elizabethan red brick house, Bride Hall. She lived there until her death, apart from the war period which was passed at Flax Bourton near Bristol.
Carola had close links with two other female writers. One was Joanna Cannan (1896-1961) whose father was Dean of Trinity College, Oxford and whose literary fame depended on a steady stream of books for children focusing on ponies as well as over thirty adult novels. The more significant friend was Georgette Heyer (1902-1974), the creator of the historically accurate dream world of the Regency romance novel as well as a steady stream of thrillers. Carola too was prolific, writing over thirty children’s books, historical biographies and fiction. She was hugely patriotic responding fully to the challenge of the Second World War with novels, Nothing to Report (1942) and Somewhere in England (1943) among them, and more fully in historical works like Britain against Napoleon (1942) and culminating with her prize-winning biography of Admiral, Lord Nelson (1946).
Already in the 1930s she had begun to write historical biography working through a succession of Queens, Henrietta Maria, Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia and Mary of Modena. After the war came larger, more ambitious biographical projects including Sir John Moore, David Garrick, Eugène de Beauharnais and Sir Walter Scott. Although well researched, most would strike the modern reader as ponderous and lacking a sharper critical insight and analysis. She was awarded a CBE in 1957.
The Omans had a strong sense of identity and belonged to that group we now designate as the intellectual aristocracy but whose life was not in her case passed in academe. Her brother Charles (1908-1982) became Keeper of Metalwork at the Victoria & Albert Museum and a distinguished antiquary. The furnishing of the mind with an abundance of historical fact and wide reading in terms of literature was taken for granted. She wrote during a period when, for women of that class, servants were a given and ‘work’ in the sense of what happened after 1945 was totally foreign to them. Right until the very end Bride Hall depended on a cook and a butler-chauffeur. The world of Bloomsbury would have been also totally alien to her as indeed what we now categorise as that of the ‘bright young things’ and the smart set of the twenties and thirties. Much of Carola’s life can be explained as demonstrating to her father that she too was capable of writing history. She inherited from him too his deep Conservatism. In his case so extreme that as an MP for the University he was nicknamed ‘Stone Age Man’.
What of her papers that survive I have given to the Bodleian Library, Oxford. Some of her travel diaries, I am told, are of interest. She left me half her library and in the dissolution of Bride Hall following her death I came eventually to inherit the desk at which she wrote. For over forty years I have written all my books at that unpretentious Victorian partner’s desk which I remember so well in what was her writing room off to the right as one entered Bride Hall. Carola was also a formidable needlewoman and her memory remains encapsulated here in one of a series of tapestry chairs that she worked. On the back she has etched a view of Bride Hall against which, in the foreground, one of her beloved Dalmatians scampers after a bird. It is a tiny vignette recording a once secure world that has gone.
Roy Strong
PART ONE
1939
CHAPTER I
FEBRUARY 22ND
(i)
The moment that Miss Morrison woke up she felt that something pleasant was going to happen to-day. The hour was close on seven-thirty, she knew, for from the parlour below came the unmistakable sound of a fire being raked out to the accompaniment of heavy breathing. The day, said the calendar, showing the likeness of an Alpine meadow, secured to the wall by a drawing pin, was Wednesday, February 22nd, 1939.
Converted seventeenth century cottages, rich in oak beams and elm floors, have their disadvantages, reflected Miss Morrison drowsily. At Willows, Westbury-on-the-Green, for instance, it was absolutely impossible to say or do anything in the parlour that was not thrillingly audible in the bedroom exactly above. Nearly all the furniture, itself somewhat crooked with age, had to be pegged, because the walls and floors were uneven. Quite often, when she tugged out her glove drawer, the Jacobean tallboy gave an affronted grunt and moved off its pegs, to subside heavily into a threatening attitude. “I got that at that little shop in the Cotswolds, when I was motoring with Marcelle and Rosemary, that wet Easter,” remembered Miss Morrison, staring at the piece of furniture facing her bedfoot. It certainly was a little big for the room, but she had never regretted it. The tallboy from the Cotswolds had six large and two small drawers. Its pretty acorn-shaped drop handles, and key-shields with a design of cherubs with blown-out cheeks, gleamed warmly, although the curtains were still drawn. Both brass and oak were well polished. Turning her head to look at her bedroom curtains, which were of a glazed apple-green chintz patterned with Victorian moss-rose buds surrounded by a plague of dots, Miss Morrison realized that at last the sun must be shining outside. A thrush was talking. There was a flood of rosy light around the short curtains, which were lined with shell-pink casement cloth. She remembered, in the same moment, with a rush—“It’s the 22nd, and Catha’s coming!”
The thought that to-day she was going to see again, for the first time in five years, one of her oldest friends, caused Miss Morrison to sing as she performed her toilet. Down in the small oak-panelled room where she took her meals, she could scarcely give her full attention to her boiled egg or her newspaper. The newspaper bore signs of having been pushed under a freshly-washed doorstep by a village urchin on his way to school. “I must speak to his mother, and to Doris,” thought Miss Morrison, as she unfolded the damp sheet. “This is the second time this week that he’s spoilt the Births column.” Since Miss Morrison was, as everyone in Westbury knew, in her forty-third year, that column was not often of particular interest to her nowadays. Most of her contemporaries had already achieved their families, and few of their children were yet of an age to open nurseries on their own account.
“Marriages” was as a rule even less likely to contain news of interest. Miss Morrison scanned “Deaths” cautiously, opened to the centre page, and from what she read there was only reminded that her Anti-Gas lecture was at seven to-night. She gathered up her letters, satisfied herself that they would keep until after her friend had gone, and stowed them away in an already overfull pigeon-hole of the desk in her parlour.
Before she set out on her morning round, she rang the bell, and while she waited for it to be answered, picked up and read again a telegram in an envelope labelled “Confirmatory copy.” “Tuesday, please,” it ran. “Arriving by car, one, leaving five-thirty, Catha.”
When Miss Morrison looked up again, a solid form blocked the doorway. Doris always reminded her mistress of Shakespeare’s Audrey, with a dash of an old Dutch Master thrown in.
“I am going out now, Doris,” said Miss Morrison in clear tones. “I may not be in again until almost lunch-time, so I want you to be sure that there is a good fire burning in here by then. Light it at twelve, and keep on making it up. Don’t just put a match to it, and go away hoping for the best. Lady Rollo has come straight from India, and will be feeling the cold.
“I have told Rose that there will be a chauffeur for dinner,” she ended, frowning slightly at the cannibalistic sound of her sentence.
“Yes, miss,” said Doris, who was fifteen and nine months, and whom Miss Morrison had first encountered lying in the scales at the local Infants’ Welfare Centre. Less than her usual airy confidence seemed to mark Doris’s extraordinary countenance, as she added in a gabble, “If you please, miss, on May 27th, might I have Saturday instead of Sunday?”
Miss Morrison picked up an engagement block entitled “Lest We Forget,” and said, puckering her brow again, “That’s Whitsun week-end. I am sure to have people staying. Do you want to do something special?”
Doris’s orbs swelled. “I’ve been asked to be a bridesmaid, miss,” she said.
(ii)
The hired car from London, bringing Lady Rollo to spend the day with her best friend, went through all the contortions usually performed by a large, strange vehicle arriving at Willows.
Miss Morrison had time, while the chauffeur reversed, baffled, into the lane, to run upstairs and fling off her outdoor clothes. She had a bird’s-eye view, as she combed her springy fair hair, of a dark shining bonnet nosing its way cautiously through her scarred white gate. As she descended the stairs again, she perceived through its open door, that the windows of her dining-room were now totally obscured by the vehicle which had trembled to a standstill. She heard a familiar voice, which caused her heart to leap, and she caught a glimpse of a tall, unknown woman in a long brown coat, issuing some order about a bundle of papers.
The friends met in the narrow hall.
“Catha, darling!” cried the hostess, three minutes later, holding her guest at arm’s length in front of the good parlour fire, “how impossibly London-ish you look! It’s not to be believed that you landed from a storm-tossed vessel five days past.”
“Don’t remind me of it,” begged Lady Rollo with a shudder. “I never knew an easy moment until I set foot on English soil, and then I was plunged in woe simultaneously by having to send my four trusting, beloved bull-terriers into six months’ quarantine. However, here I am, and I put on my most becoming outfit partly for your sake, and partly in hopes of producing a good first impression on my future home. I could not tell you in my telegram, but all those papers which the man has dumped on your best petit-point chair are not my preparations for making the tail of a kite. Tim and I have definitely settled to be your neighbours. You and I are going to look at twenty-two houses this afternoon. By the way, Button, what has happened to hats at Home? Tim says that this one is a Fool’s Hat. No thinking citizen could put such an object on her head. I’ve told him that it was much the most sensible of the lot I saw, and I went to five places in deepening incredulity. Elizabeth has brought back one from Paris consisting entirely of a bunch of flowers and a scrap of veil, lashed to her brow by a single strand of ribbon. But she’s seventeen and a little monkey-face.”
“I’ve got one upstairs, I’ll show you later, which still gives me a shock when I see myself sideways in a mirror,” Miss Morrison assured her friend. “They are like that, nowadays. Go on about the Orders to View.”
But Lady Rollo could not desert her other subject immediately.
“This one is ghastly sideways too, now that I look at it in your glass,” she murmured. “I should never be able to wear it down here, should I?”
“Well,” said Miss Morrison with characteristic candour, “not this year, perhaps. But next year, for weddings and big sherry parties, certainly. And the year after that—no difficulty at all.”
“I see,” said Lady Rollo. “Still,” with rising spirits, “after all, we’re not decrepit yet, Button.”
“We’re not chickens,” pronounced Miss Morrison in her clearest voice, at the same moment that Doris opened the door to announce that luncheon was served.
Miss Morrison’s dining-room, which seated eight at a pinch, looked its best this sunshiny day. Before she had departed to the village, she had found time to arrange a bowl of aconites for the centre of her circular walnut table. The room was filled with linen-fold panelling, painted pale sea-green. “I had the same colour throughout the two cottages,” she explained, “for economic reasons. It was a complete success, except in the parlour, where I found it killed my flower arrangements. I set to work to scrape it back to the oak, with old kitchen knives, last Bank Holiday. Your Tony—my Tony—turned up suddenly from Oxford, bringing three friends. They all slept in the summer-house on mattresses, as there was a heat wave, and scraped all day. It was a riot.”
A slight shadow appeared on the fine brow of Lady Rollo at the mention of her first-born. She said hesitantly, as Doris departed for an inner fastness, bearing a loaded tray, “Button, you’ve been such a saint, keeping in touch with Tony. Do tell me honestly what you think about him. Tim, of course, feels strongly, so strongly that at times I scarcely dare mention the poor lamb’s name.”
“Oh well,” began Miss Morrison, sounding large-minded. Doris had reappeared, and was semaphoring from the sideboard. “I don’t think that there’s much harm in a young man being a bit ‘Left’ when he’s still learning, so to speak,” pronounced Miss Morrison, rising to dissect roast chicken.
“Sometimes,” said Lady Rollo, regarding the portion set before her with unseeing blue eyes, “I simply can’t believe that I have a son taking finals at Oxford, and a son, six feet high, at sea, and a daughter ready to come out.”
“I know,” agreed Miss Morrison, hitching her chair sympathetically. “And it does seem a joke when one looks at you, for you’re a sylph. We red-heads certainly score when it comes to tresses too.”
“Button!” exclaimed Lady Rollo urgently, “have you seen poor Violet lately?”
“No,” said Miss Morrison.
“She came to meet the Boat Train,” said Lady Rollo. “I must admit, I was touched. She brought a large gilt basket of orchids tied up with shaded ribbon, and her hair is tomato-colour now, much, much brighter than ours was even when we were in our teens. She didn’t bring the new husband. Have you set eyes on him?”
“Indeed, yes, I’m the baby’s godmother,” replied Miss Morrison firmly. “They’ve been here several times. He’s a frightfully affable little bloke—Rinaldo, I mean. His looks are against him. But I believe—I trust—that he has a heart of gold. I really hope that poor Violet is going to be happy this time.”
