Bombs on Aunt Dainty

by Judith Kerr

  “I believe,” she said, “that it’s in Putney,” and announced that since the maharajah was with her she would bring him round at once.

  “Really,” said Papa when Mama told him, “couldn’t you have stopped her?”

  He and Max had been moving his belongings out of the wrecked room into another that was less badly damaged. The hotel had grown very cold and no one had had any sleep since the bomb had fallen. The prospect of having to cope with Aunt Louise on top of everything else seemed too much to be borne.

  “You know what Louise is like,” said Mama, and went off to warn Frau Gruber.

  When they arrived, the maharajah in his turban and Aunt Louise in a beautiful black fur coat, they looked like visitors from another world, but Frau Gruber received them with no sign of astonishment. Perhaps she felt, since the bomb, that anything could happen.

  “You are the first maharajah I have met,” she said in matter-of-fact tones and led him off to what remained of her office.

  “Really, Louise,” said Mama in the freezing lounge, “this is a mad idea of yours. She could never afford the sort of money he’d want.”

  “Oh dear, do you think so?” cried Aunt Louise. “And I thought it would be such a help. He really wants to sell the house, you know, because he’s going back to India at last. And he is,” she added, “only quite a small maharajah, so it might not be so expensive.”

  Then she went on to urge all of them and especially Anna to come down to the country for a rest, but Anna explained about her job and Mama said wearily that they must first find a home, as it was clearly impossible to stay on in the hotel for more than a few days.

  “Just when Anna had got settled,” she said. “Why does something always have to go wrong!”

  Aunt Louise patted her hand and said, “Don’t worry,” and just then Frau Gruber and the maharajah came back into the lounge smiling.

  “Well,” said the maharajah, tucking his hand under Frau Gruber’s arm, “shall we go and have a look at the place?”

  “What did I tell you?” cried Aunt Louise, and added quickly, “First we must have lunch.”

  They ate at a restaurant which Aunt Louise knew and even had a bottle of wine which made everyone feel more cheerful – in fact Frau Gruber became quite merry – and the maharajah paid the bill. Afterwards Max had to go back to his school, but the rest of them went to see the house in Aunt Louise’s car.

  Anna was surprised to see how far away it was. They seemed to drive past endless rows of little houses all looking the same, until they crossed the Thames to reach a narrow road lined with shops.

  The maharajah pointed fondly. “Putney High Street,” he said.

  It was a dark afternoon, even though it was nowhere near sunset, and the shops were lit up, which gave the street an almost peace-time look. Anna caught a whiff of frying as they drove past a chip shop, there was a Woolworth’s and a Marks and Spencer’s and people everywhere were doing their weekend shopping. There was far less bomb damage than in the centre of London, and as the car left the high street and drove up a hill flanked by large houses and gardens it began to smell almost like the country.

  The maharajah’s house was in a tree-lined side street – very big and spacious with about a dozen bedrooms and surrounded by a neglected garden. For a single person it must have been enormous, but for a hotel or a guest house Anna supposed it would be quite modest. It was empty except for the curtains on the windows and a few forgotten objects – a tall brass vase, a carved stool and astonishingly, a flight of plaster ducks carefully pinned above a mantelpiece.

  They walked slowly from room to room in the fading light and the maharajah explained the workings of the electricity, the blackout arrangements, the hot-water boiler, and every so often Frau Gruber would query something and they would go back and look at it all over again.

  “I must say, it all seems very convenient,” she said several times, and then the maharajah would cry, “Wait till you see the kitchen!” – or the scullery, or the second bathroom. All the downstairs rooms were dominated by the wild garden which lay outside the French windows, and when Frau Gruber said, for the third time, “I just want to have another look at the kitchen range,” Papa and Anna left the rest of them to it and went out into the wintry dampness.

  Mist was hanging like a sheet in the trees and there were fallen leaves everywhere. They clung to Anna’s feet as she followed Papa along a path which led them to a wooden bench at the edge of what had once been a lawn. Papa wiped the seat with his handkerchief and they sat down.

  “It’s a big garden,” said Anna and Papa nodded.

  The mist was drifting across the long grass and the bushes, making everything beyond them uncertain, so that it seemed as though there were no end to it. Anna felt suddenly unreal.

  “To think …” she said.

  “What?” said Papa.

  There was a clump of leaves stuck to one of her shoes and she removed it carefully with the other before she answered, “Last night must have been about the closest we’ve been to getting killed.”

  “Yes,” said Papa. “If that German airman had dropped his bomb a fraction of a second earlier or later – we wouldn’t be sitting in this garden.”

  It was strange, thought Anna. The garden would still be there in the mist, but she would not know about it.

  “It’s difficult to imagine,” she said, “everything going on without one.”

  Papa nodded. “But it does,” he said. “If we were dead, people would still have breakfast and ride on buses and there would still be birds and trees and children going to school and misty gardens like this one. It’s a kind of comfort.”

  “But one would miss it so,” said Anna.

  Papa looked at her fondly. “You wouldn’t exist.”

  “I know,” said Anna. “But I can’t imagine it. I can’t imagine being so dead that I wouldn’t be able to think about it all – the way it looks and smells and feels – and missing it all quite terribly.”

  They sat in silence and Anna watched a leaf drift slowly, slowly down from a tree until it settled among the others in the grass.

  “For quite a long time last summer,” she said, “I didn’t think we’d live even till now. Did you?”

  “No,” said Papa.

  “I didn’t see how we could. And it seemed so awful to die before one had even had time to find out what one could do – before one had really had time to try. But now …”

  “Now it’s November,” said Papa, “and the invasion hasn’t happened.” He put his hand over hers. “Now,” he said, “I think there’s a chance.”

  Then the gravel crunched behind them and Mama appeared through the mist.

  “There you are!” she cried. “Louise wants to leave, so as to get out of town before dark. But the maharajah is coming back tomorrow to fix the final details with Frau Gruber. She’s going to take the house. Don’t you think it’s a nice place?”

  Anna got up from the seat and Papa followed her.

  “We’ve been appreciating it,” he said.

  There seemed to be less room in the car on the way back. Anna sat squeezed between Papa and the driver, and it was hot and stuffy. Behind her the maharajah and Frau Gruber were talking about the house, with Mama and Aunt Louise chipping in. As the car crawled through the dusky suburbs, the street names mingled with scraps of conversation into a hypnotic mixture which almost sent her to sleep. Walham Crescent…St Anne’s Villas…Parsons Green Road…“…such a very useful sink,” said Frau Gruber, and Mama replied, “…and in the summer, the garden …”

  There was a spatter of rain on the windscreen. She rested her head on Papa’s shoulder, and the grey road and the grey houses sped past.

  Everything is going to be different, she thought. I’m going to have a job, and we’ll live in a house in Putney, and we’ll have enough money to pay the bills, and perhaps we’ll all survive the war and I shall grow up, and then …

  But it was too difficult to imagine what wo
uld happen then, and probably rather unlucky, too, she thought, with the next air raid not far away, and as the strain of the previous night caught up with her she fell asleep.

  PART TWO

  Chapter Thirteen

  Compared with the summer, the winter was almost cosy. For one thing, the air raids abated. There were several nights in December when the sirens did not sound at all, and when the Germans did come over bombs rarely fell on Putney. As a result you could sleep in your bed every night, and though some nights were noisier than others, the desperate tiredness that had been part of everyday life gradually receded.

  The house in Putney was friendlier than the Hotel Continental and it seemed a great luxury to have a garden.

  “In the summer we’ll get some deck-chairs,” said Frau Gruber, but even in the winter the Woodpigeon and the other Poles, Czechs and Germans walked admiringly among the dead leaves and on the overgrown lawn.

  The only thing Anna did not like was that she had to share a room with Mama. There were almost no single rooms in the house, and she could see that Papa, who was home all day, needed a place of his own to write in – but she still hated never being alone. However, there was nothing to be done about it, so she tried not to think about it more than she could help.

  Most of the time her mind was on her job. It was not difficult, but she was nervous about it to begin with. Her first day had been an agony – not only because she was afraid of making some disastrous mistake, but because she had discovered two days before that she had caught lice in the tube. This was not uncommon – there was an epidemic of lice among the shelterers and it was only too easy to pick them up. But just before starting a new job!

  Mama had rushed to get her some evil-smelling brown liquid from the chemist and she had spent the weekend trying to wash the lice out of her hair in the bombed hotel. At the end her hair had seemed to be clear, but just the same she had been haunted, the whole of her first day as a secretary, by the possibility that one louse – just one – might have escaped, and that it would emerge from her hair and walk across her ear or her neck just as the Hon. Mrs Hammond was looking at her. She was so worried about this that she kept rushing to the lavatory to examine her hair in the mirror, until one of the old ladies on the sewing machines asked her quite kindly if she had a tummy upset. Fortunately the Hon. Mrs Hammond put down her nervousness to the fact that she had so recently been bombed, and once Anna was convinced that all the lice had really been exterminated she was able to concentrate on the job and do it quite well.

  There was not really much to it. First thing in the morning she would go through the post, unpack whatever woollies had arrived and send off more wool to the knitters. Then she would put out the half-made pyjamas and bandages for the old ladies who came in about ten, and the sewing machines would begin to hum.

  She had to be careful about allocating the work, for the old ladies were quick to take offence. Different ones came on different days, but the most regular were Miss Clinton-Brown who was tall and religious, little Miss Potter who talked only about her budgie, and Mrs Riley who said she was a retired actress but had really been in music hall and who wore a frightful fringed shawl and smelled, causing the more genteel ladies to avert their noses.

  They were always trying to persuade Mrs Hammond to get rid of her, but she was too good a worker.

  “Bit niffy, I agree,” said Mrs Hammond, “but chaps in hospital won’t mind that. Pyjamas get washed before they wear them, anyway.”

  Mrs Hammond’s arrival about eleven was the high point of the morning. As soon as they heard her taxi draw up, the old ladies began to twitter and to preen themselves, and as she walked into the sewing room their heads would be bent over their work and the machines would be racing along at twice their normal speed.

  “Morning, ladies!” she would cry, and this was Anna’s cue to pour the boiling water on the Bovril and hand it round. Mrs Hammond’s mug went in her office, but to the ladies’ delight she often carried it back into the sewing room and chatted with them while she drank it. She lived at Claridge’s Hotel during the week – at weekends she went back to her estate in the country – and met all sorts of famous people and her careless mention of their names turned the old ladies quite dizzy with excitement.

  “Met Queen Wilhelmina last night,” she would say. “Poor old thing – quite dotty.” Or, “Heard Mr Churchill speak at a dinner – marvellous man, but no taller than I am, you know,” and the ladies would repeat the information to each other, rolling it round their tongues and enjoying the dottiness of the Dutch queen and the small stature of Mr Churchill for the rest of the week.

  After the Bovril she would call Anna into her office and dictate letters to her until lunch time, and Anna would spend the afternoon typing them. The letters were mostly to high-ranking officers in the Forces, all of whom Mrs Hammond appeared to have known since childhood, and who wanted her to send them woollies for the men in their command. She nearly always managed to give them what they wanted.

  Once or twice there was a note to her son Dickie who was in the Air Force, trying to become a navigator and finding it very difficult.

  “Poor fellow’s got enough to do working out sums without deciphering my scrawl,” she would say, and dictate a brief, affectionate message of encouragement, to be accompanied by a small gift like a pair of Air Force blue socks or gloves.

  Once he came to the office and Mrs Hammond introduced him to Anna – a stocky, open-faced boy of about nineteen, with a stammer. He was taking an exam the next day and was worried about it.

  “You’ll pass all right,” cried Mrs Hammond. “You always do, in the end!” and he grinned at her ruefully. “T-trouble is,” he said, “I have t-to work t-twice as hard as everyone else.”

  Mrs Hammond slapped his back affectionately. “Poor old chap!” she shouted. “No head for scholarship – but jolly good with animals, I can tell you. No one better than Dickie,” she explained to Anna, “with a sick cow!”

  At the end of every week Anna collected her wages and paid Frau Gruber two pounds five shillings for her room. Fifteen shillings went on fares, lunches and necessities like toothpaste and shoe repairs, five shillings to Madame Laroche to pay for the shorthand machine which had not been included in the tuition fees, and the remaining five shillings she saved. By May, she calculated, she would have paid Madame Laroche back and she would be able to save ten shillings a week. It seemed to her a wonderfully lavish income.

  Mrs Hammond was kind to her in an amused sort of way. Sometimes she asked Anna if she was all right, if she liked the new boarding-house in Putney, if Papa had any work. But she insisted on keeping her German background a secret, especially from the old ladies.

  “Old biddies wouldn’t understand,” she said. “Probably suspect you of sabotaging the Balaclava helmets.”

  Once, when Max was in London during the Easter holidays she took them both to a film.

  Afterwards he said, “I like your Mrs Hammond. But don’t you ever get bored?”

  He had had to wait for Anna at the office and had watched her typing letters and parcelling up wool.

  She looked at him without comprehension. “No,” she said. She was wearing a new green sweater, bought with her own money. She had nearly paid back the money for the shorthand machine, and that morning Mrs Hammond had introduced her to a visiting Colonel as “my young assistant – practically runs this place single-handed.” What could be boring about that?

  As the weather grew warmer the fear of invasion also grew again – until one day in June, soon after Anna’s seventeenth birthday, when there was an announcement on the radio which staggered everyone. The Germans had attacked Russia.

  “But I thought the Russians and the Germans were allies!” cried Anna.

  Papa raised one eyebrow. “So did the Russians,” he said.

  It was clear that if the Germans had opened up a new Russian front they could not at the same time invade England, and there was great rejoicing in the office. Th
e Bovril session was extended to nearly an hour while Mrs Hammond quoted a general who had told her that the Germans could not last a month against Stalin. Miss Clinton-Brown thanked God; Miss Potter said she had taught her budgie to say, “Down with Stalin,” and was worried whether this might now be misunderstood; and Mrs Riley rose suddenly from her chair, grabbed a pole used for putting up the blackout and demonstrated how she had posed as Britannia at the Old Bedford Music Hall in 1918.

  After this Anna and Mrs Hammond retired to her office, but they had scarcely got through half a dozen letters when they were again interrupted. This time it was Dickie, on unexpected leave, wearing a brand-new officer’s uniform.

  “P-passed all my exams, Ma,” he said. “Second from the b-bottom, but I p-passed. F-fully f-fledged navigating Officer Hammond!”

  At this Mrs Hammond was so delighted that she gave up all thoughts of further work and invited Anna to join them for lunch.

  “We’ll go home,” she said, which meant Claridge’s.

  Anna had only been there once before, to deliver some letters which Mrs Hammond had forgotten at the office, and then she had only got as far as the hall porter. Now she was swept along in Mrs Hammond’s wake, across the heavily carpeted foyer, through the swing doors and into the pillared dining room, where they were met by the head waiter (“Good morning, Mrs Hammond, good morning, Mr Richard”) and escorted to their table. All round them were people in uniform, mostly very grand ones, talking, eating and drinking, and the hum of their conversation filled the room.

  “Drinkies!” cried Mrs Hammond, and a glass of what Anna decided must be gin appeared in front of her. She did not like it much, but she drank it, and then the waiter brought the food and as she worked her way through a large piece of chicken she began to feel very happy. There was no need for her to say anything, for Mrs Hammond and Dickie were talking about the estate and about a dog of Dickie’s in particular (“Are you sure,” he was asking, “that W-Wilson has w-wormed him?”), so she looked around the room and was the first to notice a thin man in Air Force uniform bearing down on them. There was a great deal of gold braid about him and as soon as Dickie saw him he leapt from his chair and saluted. The man nodded and smiled briefly, but his attention was on Mrs Hammond.