I asked if she had left a letter or anything. Nothing, it seemed. Nothing at all. She must have gone straight back from me and done this thing. I thought of our conversation. Had I been impatient, unsympathetic? True, I had been anxious to get away – because of the theatre. Probably I hadn’t been sympathetic enough. I often spoke without thinking. What had I said? But Ruth had been in a terrible state when she had arrived because of Sir John Anderson’s statement on the refugees and because of the fall of France.
We all went in a taxi to the hospital, where we were told that she had not yet recovered consciousness. We were not allowed to see her.
I collected what Carla needed for a few nights and we went back to Cheyne Place. I had a small spare room, large enough for a child, and Mrs Freeth had already fixed it up and put flowers and some of my porcelain animals in it. ‘I knew you’d bring her back,’ she said, giving Carla a warm greeting. The child didn’t say anything about what had happened until I went to say good-night to her. She was sitting up in bed with her hair hanging over her eyes. ‘She shouldn’t have done it – it was beastly for me finding her like that. She was bright red as if she’d been boiled. It was beastly of her. And if she had died what about me? What would happen to me?’ and she burst into terrible sobs.
I kept her with me for some weeks and the Belgian and French children came to play with her. She was delighted when she found that she could understand Flemish words, which were not unlike German. When I told her that I’d invited the Belgian and French children, she said, flushing bright pink, ‘Would you mind telling them that I am Czech? You see lots of Czechs speak German and they’ll like me better then.’
Ruth recovered slowly. She was not charged with attempting to commit suicide, but she had to enter a nursing home for treatment for a time. At the convent school which Carla attended the nuns were most kind and helpful. They said that the whole school would shortly be moving to join the section already in the country. The Mother Superior thought that the best possible thing for Carla would be for her to get into the country and forget what had happened. I saw her off with the nuns and their charges, promising to write to her and to visit her very soon. She was excited at going to boarding school for the first time in her life – she had always wanted to be a boarder, she said. I had just sold two paintings unexpectedly in an exhibition and so modest was the sum asked by the convent for Carla that this windfall would keep her there for a year.
Ruth was by no means the only refugee from the Nazis who had tried to commit suicide. The policeman told me that there had been many. Anguish, misery, fear, and bitterness amongst German and Austrian refugees now interned alongside their Nazi oppressors was such that the Archbishop of Canterbury had written to the Home Secretary about their plight, and many MPs were indignant.
After the calamitous events in Belgium, Holland, and France, a statement was put out by the Ministry of Information on June 18th which was headlined in the newspapers. Mrs Freeth brought to me in scorn a paragraph she had cut from a newspaper headed ‘What to do if Parachutists should come’.
1. If the Germans come by parachute, aeroplane, or ship you must remain where you are. The order is to stay put. (Germans made use of the population by spreading false rumours.)
2. Do not believe rumours and do not spread them. When you receive an order make quite sure that it is a true order and not a faked one. Most of you know your policeman and ARP wardens by sight and you can trust them. If you keep your heads you can tell whether a military officer is really British or whether only pretending to be so. If in doubt ask the police or the ARP. Use your common sense. Be calm, quick, exact.
3. Keep watch. If you see anything suspicious note it carefully and go at once to the nearest policeman or the nearest military officer. Do not go rushing about spreading a vague rumour. Go quickly to the nearest authority and give him the facts. When parachutists come down near homes they will not be feeling very brave. They will not know where they are or where their companions are. They will have no food and will want you to give them food, means of transport and maps. They will want to know where they have landed, where their comrades are and where our own soldiers are.
4. Do not give any German anything. Do not tell him anything. Hide your food, your bicycles, your maps. See that the enemy get no petrol. If you have a car or a motor cycle put it out of action.
Kathleen produced a photograph from The Times of German parachutists. Tough, brutal, and armed. How exactly would housewives prevent them taking any of those things listed by the Ministry? In thousands of homes there were only women now, the men were in the Forces. We were not allowed weapons, what did they expect us to use against these tough shock-troop parachutists? Did they think that if we said sweetly that we were not allowed to give them anything, they would salute, click their heels, and depart?
The wording of the pamphlet which we knew was designed to try and avoid the same panic flight as in Belgium and France caused such hilarity everywhere that every current show included some skit on the arrival of parachutists. In the FAP we went about chivvying one another with the words of the clauses about seeing anything suspicious and Be calm, be quick, be exact became a joke in every place of work or exercise which we had to carry out with the Civil Defence.
Perhaps it was that the idea of a Ministry of Information was alien to us after our free Press, but everything done by this new Ministry seemed very comic. We British do not like scraps of advice and information handed out to us as pamphlets. We like to read them in the paper which we choose to read. I stuck the pamphlet on the wall and it never failed to amuse me when I was depressed
On the morning of June 25th when hostilities ceased in France we had the first air raid warning since the false alarm of the previous September. Alert and ready in the FAP, we were all sorry when nothing happened at all and presently the All Clear sounded. The sirens were the signal for the preparing of instruments, bandages, splints, stretchers, and all the paraphernalia for sterilizing. Although we had had so little to do that everything was always in apple-pie order, the Alert was an excitement which put everyone on their mettle again.
I think we were all heartened after the brutal air attacks on Jersey and Guernsey by photographs of large numbers of Australians and Canadians arriving in Britain. The Canadian Army had been withdrawn intact and with all its artillery equipment from France. The men had been bitterly disappointed at this withdrawal.
The French disaster hastened the Government’s plan to evacuate children to the Dominions and they decided that twenty thousand should leave at once. The first group were to be those between the ages of five and sixteen. Ten thousand were to go to Canada, five thousand to Australia, and the remainder to New Zealand and South Africa. They were to go with escorts, but no parents. Many Chelsea friends who had relatives or friends in America and Canada were trying to make up their minds as to whether or not they should send their children away. The young South Africans whose portraits I had painted had written warmly offering homes to my young niece and my nephews in Bristol. My sisters had decided against it. They thought that families should stay together.
We received more refugees in Chelsea, for refugees were still pouring into Britain. We had Czechs, French, Dutch, and Belgians, now came thousands of Poles, Polish soldiers, aircrews and aircraft in addition to subjects from Jersey and Guernsey. The announcement that we were not going to defend the Channel Islands upset everyone. Those beautiful islands which so many of us knew and loved as holiday resorts were just to be left to their fate. The islands had been demilitarized and already twenty-five thousand of their civilians had arrived in Britain with all troops and their equipment. Everything of value to the enemy had been removed – including most of the potato and tomato crop.
The Ministry of Information’s announcement on July 1st that German troops had landed in Jersey and Guernsey and that all telephonic and telegraphic communications had been cut off fanned everyone’s fury.
The gloating of The Giant beca
me unbearable when I went to take an English lesson and found the class all assembled in the front room. ‘See, Marraine,’ he greeted me, ‘I told you so. France phui!’ he raised his hands in the air. ‘And your little Channel Islands. That’s the first bit of Britain to be occupied. You see? The water is no barrier to Hitler! Just wait, he’ll get here!’
I told him to shut up. The Flemish words for that are very ugly and expressive. He was surprised that I should use such a vulgar expression but I didn’t care. It was infuriating to see his great brown grinning face mocking at us while at the same time he was enjoying our hospitality and he and his family were being provided with everything they needed.
One of the young girls in the class went up to him and said furiously, ‘If you won’t shut up we’ll make you…’ and with a youth of about sixteen she stood menacingly over him while two older and smaller men rolled up their sleeves. The Giant’s wife struck her in the face, telling her to leave her husband alone. The girl responded by pulling the wife’s black hair and egged on by the women. A horrible battle started, the men attacking The Giant, and the women, his wife. Instead of ignoring his twitting I had fallen for the bait and lost my temper and this disgusting broil was the result. Through the window of the front room in which this scene was taking place I saw my policeman friend, whom the refugees called Young Bobbie (this to distinguish him from Old Bobbie), walking past. I signalled to him to come in. ‘You needn’t do anything,’ I told him when he obeyed. ‘Your appearance will be enough for that great bully.’ ‘Same one as always gives trouble?’ he asked, smiling, and straightening himself up and putting on a very stern face he tramped into the hall and into the room where the fight was in full blood. All the objects I had taken for the lesson had been hurled all over the room, and as they were vegetables and fruit the mess was indescribable, pictures on the walls had been knocked down, noses were bleeding, hair dishevelled, faces red and furious. ‘Now then,’ said Young Bobbie in stentorian tones, ‘and what’s all this?’
At once there was a dead silence and as his stern regard went from one face to another the class sheepishly began brushing themselves down and tidying their hair. ‘Tell them all to take themselves off and go back to their own rooms,’ he said, ‘and say I don’t want to hear any more noise from this house.’ They went, abashed and shamefaced, and leaving them I walked with Young Bobbie along Tedworth Square. ‘You’ll see a lot of me if those are any sample,’ he said laughing, when I thanked him. The Giant caught us up. He was almost weeping with mortification. All the others were blaming him for the loss of the English lesson. ‘Come back, please, Marraine,’ he begged. ‘I promise you all will be as good as angels!’ These last words and ‘Please’ were said in his best English, with such a shame-faced engaging smile that it was difficult to resist him. ‘They’d whistle for their lesson if it were me,’ commented Young Bobbie, and saluting me smartly he walked off while I returned with The Giant.
The room had been tidied, the chairs arranged in rows, but the blackboard had been knocked down and the stand broken in the fight. We propped it up on the mantelpiece and the men promised to mend it if I would lend them a hammer and some nails.
‘It is the First of July,’ I wrote on the board. ‘The Germans have landed in the Channel Islands,’ and then I turned to The Giant. ‘Translate into Flemish, please,’ I said. He repeated the sentence perfectly in Flemish and added, ‘Curse them, damn them, damn them, I say!’
‘Don’t swear before ladies,’ reproved his wife, whose tear-stained face was scratched right across from the battle. The lesson went on all afternoon and the most zealous pupil was The Giant.
Chapter Nine
FRANCE, occupied by the conquerors, was already being used as a base for attacking her former ally, and air raids on the south and east coasts now began to intensify – the German Air Force no longer had to fly such distances with their deadly loads. Air raids and aerial battles over the south coast were increasing not only in intensity but in frequency, and an RAF aerial photograph of Rotterdam after its ruthless bombing by the Germans depressed and frightened people. The headlines in the newspapers always bore the number of enemy planes shot down. Much smaller print was used for what the mothers, wives, and sweethearts all looked for first – the number of British planes lost. On the BBC the velvety voice of Bruce Belfrage or Alvar Liddell (who had to announce their identity as a precaution after the seizing of the Dutch radio by the Nazis) would first tell us of some magnificent aerial battle – and in glowing terms state the number of enemy planes shot down. We soon got very accustomed to the quiet, ‘One of our aircraft is missing’ or ‘Eight of our aircraft failed to return…’ which ended the announcement.
A storm of public opinion was being aroused at this time over the question of the evacuation of children to the United States and the Dominions. The Government had postponed its scheme because of the need for convoys to escort them. Naturally there were people with relatives or friends there and the money to send their children privately, and the news that several hundred children had reached the United States in the liner Washington caused much resentment.
The Overseas League and the English-Speaking Union had offered to raise funds for poorer children to go, but the Government were reluctant to send thousands of children without escorts.
Class feeling was noticeable everywhere now that rationing had begun the levelling of standards for everyone. ‘She can’t get no more than I can,’ was very comforting to some families who had subsisted on bread and margarine for a very long time, and ‘Well, the Princesses aren’t going so why should they go?’ was another.
More and more women were finding independence and happiness working in munition factories for the war effort. Thousands of young women were enlisting in the ATS and in the WAAF, as well as working in factories. Domestic servants, already on the decline before the war, were rapidly disappearing, and owners of large houses were closing them and moving to hotels. It was still possible to obtain a good meal in restaurants without surrendering any meat points from the ration books, and the news that Lord Woolton had ordered that after the middle of July only one course, either fish, meat, or game, was to be served at a meal gave great satisfaction to housewives, who had to rely entirely on their ration books. Tea rationing, the news of which followed soon after the Oran incident, caused a tremendous outcry. Two ounces a week per person for the tea-loving nation was not considered enough over which to gossip and discuss their grievances!
We had begun to listen nightly to ‘Lord Haw Haw’ (William Joyce), whose English broadcasts, far from terrifying his listeners, became a source of vast and unfailing amusement. According to him Britain was disintegrating, collapsing under the weight of the German attacks, and extraordinary accounts of the lengths to which we were driven were given by this ardent follower of Hitler. As it was, the ridiculous affectation and inaccuracy of his broadcasts became the butt of music halls and his latest blunders the joke of the day.
In the German news one could detect the same wishful thinking. Mingled with the stream of threats and abuse from the propaganda chief, Dr Goebbels, was an obvious desire to reassure his own country – and possibly himself – as to the wisdom of what they were doing in the Third Reich. Once when I was listening to this late at night with the window open, a warden knocked at the door. I thought he had come about a light showing – but he had come to see ‘why I was listening to the German news’. The campaign against despondency and despair was being encouraged, and several people had been prosecuted for it. Had it been our own warden all would have been well, but this was one unknown to me. He seemed suspicious and asked to see my identity card and so I told him that we had been advised to make sure that a warden was really a warden and not a fake. I showed him the pamphlet about parachutists on the studio wall. He was most indignant and couldn’t see that I was pulling his leg. Finally when I told him that I often listened to Germany last thing at night because it never failed to give me a laugh, he seemed reassured a
nd accepted a whisky and soda before he left.
Two days later it was announced that the Arandora Star had been torpedoed on her way to Canada whither she was carrying a large number of enemy aliens for internment there. Amongst the 470 Italians on the ship was Joseph Caletta, of the King’s Road, Chelsea. I was very upset about this and went at once to see Madame Caletta when I was told that her husband was missing. She was still at her desk in the restaurant, calm and dignified as always. She bore no resentment or bitterness about her loss. ‘It was war,’ she said, spreading out her hands in a helpless gesture, ‘it is no one’s fault.’
The Arandora Star had been a smallish luxury ship on which I had once enjoyed a cruise round the Greek islands. It seemed extraordinary to think of it as being an internment ship for all those husbands and sons – some of them famous West End restaurateurs known by nicknames to their fashionable clientele. There was much indignation over the whole matter. The Germans had torpedoed not only their own nationals but those of their ally. Madame Caletta’s calm acceptance of the ironic situation had something stoic and noble in it. When I expressed my indignation and disgust she said, ‘It is far worse for the mothers of all those boys who didn’t come back from Dunkirk. They had all their lives before them. My husband had had a good life. We have worked hard and we have been very happy. I have my children.’ It was Mrs Freeth who reminded me that German mothers must be suffering too when I was expressing myself violently about the torpedoing atrocities. She was the mother of three sons herself.
When some details of the sinking of the Arandora Star given by the survivors were released everyone was horrified. The ship, before she sank, had been the scene of the most horrible panic, in which Germans had fought and pushed away the gentler Italians, who were no match for them, in a mad scramble for the boats. They were all in their night clothes for the ship was torpedoed at 6am without warning. Almost all the Italians perished. They all cursed the German U-boat but none so heartily as the Germans. Madame Caletta’s husband was amongst the Italians lost.
A Chelsea Concerto Page 9