As Little As Nothing, page 21
Edmund pricked his finger on a raspberry thorn and the trickle of blood got mixed with the grease from the bands he put around the branches to capture invading insects, the wound stinging a bit until he could wipe his hands. He was tired, exhausted really—the long hours in the store and his evenings in the garden were catching up with him. He wasn’t sleeping well either. The news a drip-feed of things out of his control and so far away. He could do something here that saw results, prune and plant with a simple counteraction of growth and harvest.
He leaned against the fence, wondered why he hadn’t seen anything of Miriam yet, then smelled the smoke from his neighbour’s pipe.
“Nigel,” he called out to him, getting to his feet.
“Edmund.”
“I was thinking my wife and I would go down to the pub again, you’re welcome to join us.”
“Yes, of course. But you have heard, haven’t you? Hitler’s gone into Poland.”
3 September 1939
Audrey in London
The war, two days old. Not the war officially, but the invasion everyone was talking about. Audrey trapped in London, in a hotel room that felt like she was living in a cupboard. The train pulled into the station two days ago with the news that Poland had been invaded. Shouts on the platform “Hitler’s taken Danzig” like a tidal wave that pushed them all back to their seats, eyes searching to others as they tried to figure out what this meant. They’d known for months this would come, and yet had not known. The not knowing had been encased in hope, a blind eye, a faint denial of what was really going on.
What was going on? Audrey wondered. She had not planned to be here, in this public place, on a train of all things, when war came. She wanted to be home, reading the newspaper with Frank or talking to Miriam, someone to help divert the fear that kept darting into her thoughts, pushing, demanding attention.
The speech had been poorly attended, of course, the fervour she’d experienced in Manchester burst as if it were its own form of barrage balloon.
The barrage balloons. Frank had told her of flying over them. A spectacle, he’d called them, and she couldn’t tell if he were in favour or not. She’d heard there would be two thousand of them up now. She’d seen a few earlier, leaning into her window, saw them bunched up against the clouds that hung over the city like cotton batting.
Two hours till her return train, and she dared not leave her room. Unable to since she’d arrived several hours after her speech had ended the night before, the city in darkness so black she could barely see in front of her. With cars running with just sidelights and no way to find a taxi, she walked for miles feeling as though she’d already signed up for service, that all the work she’d been doing for the rights of women was now like so many minor irritants that amounted to nothing.
She’d finally hailed a taxi, but the driver, too, was lost, so they drove around Piccadilly and back again before finally getting to the hotel after midnight. Then she stayed in bed till well past breakfast, listening to the storm that raged outside, rain washing the streets of London as though a cleansing were needed, as though an acknowledgement of all the stress they’d been mired in all these months, the storm just part of the greater drama that was unfolding.
Her suitcase was at the door, ready for the porter, who would take it to the taxi she ordered for 11:30. Her notes sprawled across the bed for the lecture that she would give in Tonbridge next week, but she had no heart for her work at the moment. A knock at the door pulled her from her malaise, and she scrambled to put things into her satchel though her watch read 11:08.
“Sorry to bother, ma’am,” the porter at her door making no attempt for her case. “I thought you’d like to know. War’s been declared. Chamberlain’s been on the wireless. No choice, it seems. We’re at it now.”
Audrey had no chance to respond. The prickles in her head went unnoticed, for at that moment the air raid siren sounded. The porter, also shaken, grabbed her arm, then let go and motioned for her to go ahead.
“There’s a shelter.” He ran behind with her suitcase, not skirting his duties even under duress. The shelter was the hotel wine cellar, and as the guests gathered, a kind of awkwardness thickened the air as if this were a party and not a matter of survival. A few of the women perched on cases of wine, and the maître’ d’hotel actually jested they were in the best shelter in London as he waved his corkscrew in the air. But this was all too new to them and their uneasy titters faded quickly as they listened for bombs, explosions, having taken the prophesies of devastation and disease that would follow the first air raid to heart. They pictured St Paul’s in ruins, a cavity in the ground where the Houses of Parliament stood. The quiet offered no relief at all.
After an hour they returned to the surface, and Audrey dashed off to the train station, eager to catch the next train, her eyes peeled to the glass as she looked for signs of attack.
“Not a sausage,” the taxi driver told her. “Just stirring us up they were.”
“Indeed,” Audrey replied, but she was hardly listening, for she was barely there. Staring at the streets of London, her mind in the river halfway up to the point where the branch had fallen in. She’d learned to dive deep under it so that she could come out on the other side. It was a game she played, a challenge she set herself, how quickly she could dive without worrying about her lungs bursting, her bathing costume getting caught in the twigs. Farther and farther each time, even the rook, who followed her along, seemed impressed, resting on the branch as if waiting for her to surface.
4 September 1939
The Manchester Guardian
A Feeling of Determination and Relief
Saving World from Pestilence of Nazi Tyranny
Peace in our Hearts —Mr Churchill
In this solemn hour it is a consolation to recall and to dwell upon our repeated efforts for peace. All have been ill-starred, but all have been faithful and sincere. This is of the highest moral value—and not only moral value but practical value—at the present time, because the wholehearted concurrence of scores of millions of men and women, whose cooperation is indispensable and whose comradeship and brotherhood are indispensable, is the only foundation upon which the trial and tribulation of modern war can be endured and surmounted. This moral conviction alone affords that ever-fresh resilience which renews the strength and energy of people in long, doubtful and dark days. Outside, the storms of war might blow and the lands may be lashed with the fury of its gales, but in our own hearts this Sunday morning there is peace. Our hands may be active, but our consciences are at rest.
We must not underrate the gravity of the task which lies before us or the temerity of the ordeal, to which we shall not be found unequal. We must expect many disappointments, and many unpleasant surprises, but we may be sure that the task which we have freely accepted is one not beyond the compass and the strength of the British Empire and the French Republic.
8 September 1939
Frank Packs His Bag
Frank’s bag was sitting in his room, ready for him to join the war. He was waiting for instructions from ATA headquarters in White Waltham, waiting to be told what to do, where to go. Waiting. It seemed that was what they were all doing, waiting for the war to start in earnest. So far it was the most mysterious war. Mysterious because no one knew what was happening. A scarcity of news on the wireless, no cheering crowds, no drafts leaving Victoria, no indication if they were to send an army abroad.
Frank sat in the library drinking his tea, thinking of the war, knowing he would lose his home, at least temporarily. He saw a double-decker bus filled with children driving through the village two days ago. Where would they take them, these lost and timid children? The countryside? Would that be safe? He imagined hordes of them taking over Wentworth House, a small band of matrons to keep them in order. And where would he be? Hiding in his room?
An air raid in Dagenham over the Ford Motor Works, the first true sign of war. Rumours of a plane brought down in flames. Traffic queues, too, as they’d been told to pull over to the side of the road should an alarm sound. Everyone angry that they hadn’t done anything yet, hadn’t wreaked havoc on Berlin as expected. The only thing was tons of leaflets dropped on north Germany. Cartoonists were having a field day depicting Hitler on his knees, begging them to rain famine, bombs, even gas on Germany, but not the truth. Perhaps the new mode of warfare was persuasion.
The theatres were closed, his old schoolmate Stephen Cochrane, a director, suddenly out of a job after ten years, now driving a delivery van. The television station closed, so, too, the cinema. The entire country appeared to have come to a halt.
He, too, had come to a halt. Rescued by his aunt upon her return from London. What had she said to rouse him from his bed? Don’t be like your father. What did she mean by that? Any comparison a shock, but it did get him out of bed, did get him dressed and down for tea and to the chiding of his aunt. “This war will come,” she’d told him. “It will come in ways you will not expect.”
And then she talked about love.
“Our lives will now be marked by extremes,” she told him. “Everything that you experience—pain, fear, triumph, even love will be felt with such intensity you’ll think it will break you. If you become broken by it, then you’ll know your heart is still beating. None of this will feel comfortable, and none of it is sustainable, but for the time we must live in the extremes because the alternative is to live in the shallows, and that is not a place we can survive.”
Peter. Where is he now?
He’d been gone almost two weeks, those last few days a blur Frank had been trying to piece together since the night of Audrey’s birthday. The sparkling afternoon by the river, dissolved when Peter arrived. Frank’s pulse quickening as he watched Peter walk down the hill to join them. He’d come. This thought like an affirmation of love in Frank’s mind. Then the news. Crushed. Miriam looking haunted, lost. The champagne had made them happy so Frank wanted more of it, as if it might erase this news, the splendid awkwardness of this moment. Then Peter at his arm as they trudged up the hill. He’d felt cogent, questioning Peter on his decision to join the RAF as if they were discussing it over tea (there would be no choice in the end, Peter had argued), and yet dreamlike, as if all the words they spoke disappeared into the night air the moment they were uttered, leaving only impressions of Peter next to him, his arm guiding him back to the house.
In the hallway, the day’s light bringing long shadows, and it felt like a moment of departure, as if they were at a platform, but this one private—no departure could have offered the freedom they had in this moment. There was a vague attempt at making plans, for when it was over—we could go away, New Zealand, Canada, the Hebrides—but standing in the fading light, their faces drifting closer, the smell of booze, cologne, the fresh summer air a tonic that drew them closer until Frank’s lips brushed against Peter’s cheek, an embrace that fell into a kiss. Frank reliving that moment in the days since, polishing it like sea-washed glass, so that he could carry it with him, the weight like that of his heart.
The kiss, he remembers.
He imagined what might have happened if Michael hadn’t come back at that moment, and he fantasized the possibilities hinted at, those that took him to some point in the future, when this chaos that had just begun was over and done with.
But that was looking too far ahead when he could only see the now of his tea, and his bag that sat waiting in the corner.
1 November 1939
Miriam in the War
Miriam stood at the back door of the shop smoking a cigarette. It was an indulgence, this cigarette, just as everything seemed to be these days. The twopenny bars of chocolate were to be made smaller and restricted to standard lines—milk or plain, with or without nuts. The price of sausage was up, as was bread, and Lyle’s Golden Syrup was now unobtainable.
She should go home and have her tea, but she was a bit heady with the smoke, feeling as though she’d had a glass of sherry, the evening air sharp with the faint smell of bonfires and chrysanthemums. She let this mood take her where she wanted to be, up in the cobalt blue, staring down at the horizon that was ablaze at just this moment, a match for the actual fires that had started up across the village when the frost moved in a few nights ago. Edmund had caught a few revellers lighting a bonfire in their garden, their excuse an early celebration of Guy Fawkes Day. “They don’t have a clue,” Edmund had said to her later. “A bonfire! Why not call Hitler himself and give him our co-ordinates?”
Edmund, his role as warden taken so seriously, but she knew it was all for show, for she understood that he was worried about being called up, and between his duties as postmaster and warden, he was doing his best to make himself indispensable.
“I’m a coward,” he’d said to her after they’d gone to the pub a few weeks ago. He’d had a few pints and talked to Nigel about what he’d done as a warden, not mentioning names of course, but there had been infractions, he’d had to issue warnings. Not fines, but now that war was on there would be no excuses. “I’m a coward,” he’d said, later. “When it comes to it, will I be able to fine Mrs Webster when she tells me she’s doing her best for the fifth time?”
She knew he lay awake at night worried that he would fail.
They all had to be extra careful. This is what he’d told Nigel at the pub, and later when she questioned Edmund about why he’d been so insistent with Nigel, he told her their neighbour could be a spy for the government, sent out to villages like theirs to seek those who were working against them. They’d argued about this, Miriam telling him he was getting paranoid, his job as warden causing him to lose judgment.
Three days later, when they found a note from Nigel telling them he’d been transferred in his job and was moving to Sheffield, neither knew what to think.
“I signed up to the Air Transport Auxiliary,” she told him on the way home that night. Frank had told her they would start taking women in January. She was not trying to frighten him, it’s just that everything had changed, and though she still loved Edmund, she had become someone other than the person he’d married. She had stepped out of herself, out of her role in the relationship, and she knew that he had to test himself for them to continue in some way, so that he could fit alongside her. He’d kept the pond, not willing to give it up for the Anderson shelter. That she gave him for all that he didn’t object, at least outwardly, to her time away from the shop, the time she spent flying. It was as though he understood that sometimes the sense of duty must be to oneself.
Edmund’s gaze, usually darting like a fly around her, locked on hers, and she could see that he was truly frightened, not of having to go to war himself, but of what her joining would mean.
“Ah, Edmund, I’ll be all right,” she told him. “It’s not like I’m signing up to war.”
“What are you signing up to then?” he’d asked.
A question she couldn’t answer, and by this time they were home and she was making them a cup of tea, just as she’d done every night since they were married. But strange things were happening all over the place. Edmund’s cousin who worked for the London council had called in on his way to visiting family last week and spoke of people leaving London in droves. He’d been going all around the neighbourhood collecting council rates and said there were a number of well-to-do people who had just up and left. A back door left open, breakfast things unwashed, and a half-smoked cigarette dipped in tea, fruit going mouldy in a bowl.
Everything strange.
The cigarette singed her fingers, so she took a quick drag and dropped it, crushing it under her foot, but she didn’t move from her spot. This time of night, with the shop closed and the evening ahead of her, was her stolen time. A few moments to be still and not in service to others. Tomorrow she’d see Audrey, just back from Cambridge. They’d sit in the caravan and tell each other how awful things were getting, and then they would settle into talking about their own lives. Miriam knew that her flying was a kind of selfishness, but she also thought that everyone was selfish in some way, otherwise how would anyone see through to their desires.
She was worried about Audrey. The crowds for her lectures were diminishing; the war that wasn’t visible turned men’s and women’s attentions elsewhere, their efforts going in different directions. Duty. That was the only passion that mattered these days, and it did seem a form of passion as she watched men sign up, or grow crops, stockpile, conserve, preserve, look for ways to do without, and the women alongside them coming to grips with rationing, tending to kitchen gardens, mending clothes. They knew so little of what was to come, as little as nothing. This was something that made them greater than they were as individuals.
