Bombs on Aunt Dainty

by Judith Kerr

  “I hear you’re living in a social whirl,” said Max. “Well, it looks as though the war is going to go on for ever, so you may as well enjoy it.”

  He was depressed again, for although he had come out top of his course and was now a Pilot Officer, the Air Force had decided that he could fly neither bombers nor fighters.

  “Just because of my background,” he said. “They’re afraid that if I was shot down and the Germans found out about me they wouldn’t treat me as a prisoner of war. So I’ve got to be a flying instructor.”

  “Surely that’s important too,” said Papa, but Max was too annoyed to listen.

  “You don’t understand,” he said. “Nearly everybody else is going to fly on operations. It’s the same old thing – I’m always stuck with something different.”

  At this Mama, normally so sympathetic to his longing for equality, blew her top.

  “For God’s sake, are you determined to be killed?” she shouted, and added incongruously, “As though we hadn’t got enough to worry about!”

  “There’s no need to get excited,” said Max, “especially as I’ve got no choice.”

  Mama had been increasingly nervous of late, and a few days later Anna discovered why. It was when she came home from work. Nowadays she did not have many evenings at home, and she planned this one exactly. First she was going to paint over the cracks in her shoes with some brown dye she had bought in her lunch hour. Then, if there was any hot water, she would wash her hair, and after supper she would mend her two remaining pairs of stockings, so as to have some to wear the following day.

  As she passed Papa’s room she heard voices and went in. Mama was half-sitting, half-lying on the bed and Papa was holding her hand. Her blue eyes were swimming, her mouth was dragged down at the corners, and her whole face was soaked with tears.

  “What’s happened?” cried Anna, but Papa shook his head.

  “It’s all right,” he said. “Nothing terrible. Mama has lost her job.”

  Mama at once leapt into a sitting position.

  “What do you mean, nothing terrible,” she cried. “How are we going to live?”

  “We’ll manage somehow,” said Papa, and gradually Anna found out what had happened. It was not that Mama had been sacked, but that the job had simply come to an end.

  “Of course I hated it anyway,” cried Mama through her tears. “It was never meant to be more than a stop-gap after Lord Parker died.”

  Anna remembered once going to see Mama when she was still Lady Parker’s social secretary. Mama had sat in a pretty, white-painted room with a fire, and a footman had brought her tea and biscuits, returning with an extra cup for Anna. Mama had never seemed to have much to do except answer the telephone and send out invitations, and in the evenings she and Anna had marvelled at the way Lady Parker lived.

  “Her stockings cost a guinea a pair,” Mama had told her. “And they can only be worn once because they are so fine.”

  Since Lord Parker’s death, Mama had worked in a basement entirely filled with his papers – such stacks and stacks of them that it had not occurred to her until recently that the task of sorting them could ever come to an end.

  “What shall I do?” she cried. “I have to get a job somehow!”

  “Perhaps you’ll find something more interesting,” said Anna.

  Mama brightened.

  “Yes,” she said, “I suppose I might, now that so many people have been called up. And since you’ve been self-supporting I’ve been able to save a little, so we can last a while – I could pick and choose a bit.” But then despair overcame her again. “Oh God!” she cried, “I’m so sick of always having to start again!” She looked at Papa who was still holding her hand. “How much easier it would be,” she said, “if the BBC would only use some of your stuff and broadcast it to Germany.”

  Papa’s face tightened. He had not been able to sell anything to the BBC since that first piece, and though he sat at his table and wrote each day, he was earning almost no money at all.

  “I’ll ring them again,” he said, but they all knew that it would be no use.

  The weekend after Mama had gone to her office for the last time she was quite cheerful. It was summer weather and everyone was sitting in the garden. The Woodpigeon had cut the grass with an ancient lawnmower he had discovered in a shed, and the Czech ladies both wore triangles of stiff white paper over their noses to protect them from sunburn.

  Mama was sitting in a deckchair with a pile of newspapers beside her. She was checking through the “situations vacant” columns and writing letters of application for any that seemed possible. Every time she had finished one she would say, “Do you think that’s all right?” and show it to Anna and Papa. The jobs were all secretarial, and as Anna and Papa read through them, Mama would say, “I didn’t mention that I can’t do shorthand because once they gave me the job I’m sure I could manage,” or “I know it says British-born, but I

  thought if they just saw me …”

  She looked so determined, sitting there in the sunshine with her blue eyes frowning at the paper while she attacked it with her pen, that it was easy to imagine her talking anyone into giving her any job she wanted.

  However, by the following Thursday she had only had one request for an interview. This turned out to be with a little man in the City who said that actually they were looking for someone younger – just a girl, really – and sent Mama home in deep depression.

  She wrote another batch of letters and waited for replies, but nothing happened. The weather continued lovely and hot, so she sat in the garden and wrote more letters and read books from the library. After all, she said, she had earned a holiday.

  When the weather changed and the garden became chilly Mama cleared out her wardrobe. She walked down to Putney High Street with Papa to spend the shilling and sixpence they had allocated for their joint lunch and then they ate it together in his room. In the evening she played bridge with the Woodpigeon and the Poznanskis and, on special occasions, with Miss Thwaites, a new arrival in the hotel. In fact Miss Thwaites did not play very well, but since she was English – not just half-English or naturalised English or English by marriage, but real, genuine born-and-bred English – she was the most sought-after person there. She was a withered-looking spinster with a grey pudding-bowl hair-cut who worked in the local bank, and she accepted the respect accorded to her as her due.

  It was not until Mama had been out of work for four weeks that she became really frightened. She calculated that in that time she had had only four replies to her letters, and two interviews, and when she checked her savings she found that, as always, they were dwindling faster than she had expected. She began to haunt the telephone and hang about the hall, waiting for the postman. When Anna came home in the evenings she would say, tight-lipped, “I still haven’t heard anything,” before Anna had even had time to ask, and at night she tossed and turned in her bed, unable to sleep.

  “What are we going to do?” she cried one Sunday when the three of them were sitting in Papa’s room after lunch. Papa had been reading them a poem he had written the previous day. It was addressed to his sister who was now somewhere in Palestine, and in it he remembered their childhood together in Silesia and wondered if they would ever meet again except perhaps in Paradise. If there were such a place, thought Papa, it would probably look rather like the woods and meadows among which they had grown up. It was a beautiful poem.

  When Mama asked him what they were to do he looked at her, full of affection and confidence.

  “You’ll think of something,” he said.

  Mama who had been nervously clutching a newspaper suddenly flung it on the floor.

  “But I don’t want to have to think of something!” she cried. “Why should it always be me? Why can’t you think of something for a change?”

  Papa, one hand still holding the poem, seemed to be considering deeply and for a moment Anna thought he was going to come up with the solution to the whole thing.
Then he put his other hand over Mama’s.

  “But you’re so much better at it than I am,” he said.

  At this Mama burst into tears and Anna said, “I’m sure I could manage five shillings a week or even seven-and-sixpence,” but Mama shouted, “It wouldn’t be enough!” Then she blew her nose and said, “I’ll try and talk to Louise.”

  “Louise?” said Papa and made a face, but then he caught sight of Mama’s expression and said, “very well, then, Louise.”

  Aunt Louise willingly gave Mama fifteen pounds to help eke out her savings.

  “I’m sorry it isn’t more,” she said, “but I don’t like to ask Sam at the moment.”

  The Professor had become anxious about money since his sister had unexpectedly returned to him with her two boys. He spent each meal-time watching expensive food disappear down the throats of his many impecunious relatives.

  “And he worries,” said Aunt Louise, “what is to become of us all.”

  “Anna insisted on contributing her five shillings a week and Max sent a cheque for ten pounds from his RAF pay, so they were safe for a while at least. But Mama’s anxiety continued. It was difficult to be in her company, for as she sat with her hands clenched in her lap and her blue eyes staring the tension was like a physical presence in the room and nothing could alleviate it.

  “Do you really think so?” she would cry when Anna suggested that some particular application for a job looked hopeful and, five minutes later, again, “Do you really think they’ll give me that job?”

  The only thing that took her mind off her worries was playing bridge in the evenings. Then her fierce concentration would switch to the cards and as she argued about Culbertson, overtricks and bungled grand-slams the anxiety about her job receded.

  Anna occasionally got dragged into these games – Papa couldn’t tell a club from a spade – but only if there was no one else at all, for she was so bored by them that she cast a blight on the other players. She would sit there, making mistakes and drawing all over her scorepad, to escape gratefully at the end, irrespective of whether she had won or lost. She felt sorry for Mama and wished to help her, but she also found it a strain sharing one small bedroom with her and so was guiltily relieved whenever there was a reason for her to stay out late.

  One morning just as Anna was leaving for work Mama caught her at the door.

  “Miss Thwaites wants to play bridge tonight,” she said. “The Woodpigeon is free, but we need a fourth.”

  “I can’t,” said Anna. “I’ve got my evening class.”

  Mama had slept badly and the morning post had failed, yet again, to produce the job she was hoping for.

  “Oh, come on,” she said. “It won’t matter if you miss it just once.”

  “But I don’t want to miss it,” said Anna. “Can’t the Poznanskis play?”

  Mama said that they couldn’t, and Anna could see the tension rising in her, like a kettle coming to the boil. She said, “Look, I’m sorry, Mama, but I really don’t want to miss my evening class. I’m sure you’ll find someone else.”

  She edged nervously towards the bedroom door, but before she could reach it Mama exploded.

  “Surely,” Mama cried, “you could do this one little thing for me! I don’t ask you much! God knows if one of your boyfriends asked you out you’d give up your evening class quick enough!”

  “That’s not true!” cried Anna. She had always refused invitations on art school nights. But Mama was now in full flood.

  “It’s my one pleasure in life,” she cried. “The only thing that takes my mind off the endless worrying about money. And it’s not as though anyone else in this family ever worried about how we’re going to live. You just go off to your nice little job each morning and Papa sits in his room writing poems, and I am left with everything – everything!”

  “Mama …” said Anna, but Mama cut straight through her.

  “Who went and asked Louise for money?” she cried. “Did you? Did Papa? No, as always, it was left to me. Do you suppose I enjoyed that? And who arranged for you to learn shorthand-typing and found a way of paying your fees? And who got Max out of the internment camp? It wasn’t you or Papa. Don’t you think that in the circumstances you could give up one evening – just one single evening – to make my life a little easier?”

  Anna looked at Mama’s desperate scarlet face and had a curious, panicky sensation of being sucked into it. She backed away, feeling pale and cold.

  “I’m sorry, Mama,” she said, “but I must go to my evening class.”

  Mama glared at her.

  “After all,” cried Anna, “it’s only a game of bridge!”

  “And you, I suppose,” yelled Mama, “are going to produce a masterpiece!”

  Anna made for the door.

  “If I did,” she heard herself yell back, “you wouldn’t even know that it was one!”

  Then she escaped, trembling, into the corridor.

  She worried about it all day at the office. She thought of ringing Mama up, but there always seemed to be someone near the telephone and, anyway, she wouldn’t have known what to say. At six o’clock she still had not made up her mind whether to go home or to the art school. She decided to leave it to chance. If a tram passed her before she reached Victoria she would go home – otherwise not. The tram came almost at once, but she ignored it and took the bus to Holborn, arriving just in time for the class.

  And why shouldn’t I? she thought. After all, it wasn’t as though she’d been out a lot lately. Two of the young men who most frequently invited her had been posted away from London, so she’d had almost no social life at all. I was absolutely right, she thought, but it did not help, for she could not concentrate on her work and produced a drawing so poor that she crumpled it up and threw it away. At the end of the class she did not go to the café but made straight for the tube. If I get home quickly, she thought, there might still be time for a game or two of bridge.

  Suddenly, on the train, she had a vision of Mama crying on the bed after she had lost her job. How could I? she thought, and was overwhelmed by pity and guilt. As she hurried down the street she thought of Mama in Paris, Mama helping her buy her first pair of slacks, Mama taking her out on her sixteenth birthday.

  “Mama!” she cried as she burst into the lounge – and there was Mama playing bridge with Miss Thwaites against the Woodpigeon and Mrs Poznanski.

  “You’re early,” said Mama, and Miss Thwaites added, “Mrs Poznanski found she didn’t have to go out after all.”

  “But Mama …” cried Anna.

  Then rage filled her and she turned on her heel and walked out of the room. “I couldn’t help it,” she said later to Papa. “I’ve got a right to my own life. I can’t just throw it all up to play bridge whenever Mama wants me to.”

  “No, of course not,” said Papa. He was looking tired, and Anna realised that the day could not have been easy for him either.

  “Mama is having a difficult time,” he said after a moment. “I wish we could all live very differently from the way we do. I wish I could be more help.”

  There was a pile of closely-written sheets on his desk and Anna asked, “What are you writing?”

  “Something about us – a kind of diary. I’ve been working on it for a long time.” He shook his head at Anna’s look of hope. “No,” he said, “I don’t think anyone would buy it.”

  He had some bread left over from lunch and as Anna couldn’t face her cold supper he made her some toast. He suspended a slice of bread from a large paper clip and Anna watched as he held it over the gas fire at the end of a stick from the garden.

  “It’s so difficult,” she said, “sharing a room.”

  Papa looked worried. “I wish I could …”

  “No,” she said. “I know you need yours to write in.”

  Outside on the landing a door slammed and there were voices and footsteps on the stairs. The bridge game must have broken up.

  Suddenly Papa said, “Be nice to her. B
e very, very nice to her. She is your mother and it’s quite true what she says – life is not easy for her.”

  “I am,” said Anna. “I always have been.”

  As she got up to leave him he said, “Try to forget all about today.”

  But she could not quite forget and nor, she suspected, could Mama. There was a carefulness between them which had not been there before. One side of Anna was saddened by this, but another secret, steely side, whose existence she had never even suspected, half-welcomed it for the increased privacy it brought her. All because I wanted to go to art school that one night, she thought. How complicated life became if there was something you really wanted to do.

  The following week at the café she said to John Cotmore, “Do you think art, if one takes it seriously, is bad for personal relationships?”

  She had never used so many abstractions before in one sentence, and his mouth twitched as he looked at her.

  “Well,” he said at last, “I think it probably makes them more difficult.”

  She nodded and then blushed, overcome by embarrassment. She had just remembered what someone had told her – that he did not get on with his wife.

  Chapter Seventeen

  In the autumn, the National Gallery put on an exhibition of French Impressionist paintings. It was a great event, for all valuable pictures had been hidden away since the beginning of the war to save them from being bombed. But there had been only few air raids on London recently – the Luftwaffe must have been too busy fighting in Russia – and so it was considered worth taking a chance to show them again.

  Anna had never seen them. There was a book about them in the library, but it had only black and white reproductions and you could not really tell from them what the paintings were like. So, on the first Sunday after the opening of the exhibition, she went along to look at it.

  It was a brilliant cold day and she was feeling happy because it was the weekend, and because she had done two good drawings during the week, and because Mama had at last got a job – not a very good job, but after the worry of the past few months it was a relief for her to have got anything at all. As she crossed Trafalgar Square the stone lions cast hard shadows on the pavement and there were more people than usual milling round Nelson’s column in the sharp air. The fountains had not worked since the beginning of the war, but as she passed between them a cluster of pigeons took off at her feet and she watched the spatter of their wings turn dark as they rose up into the shining sky. Suddenly she felt a great surge of joy, as though she were flying up with them. Something marvellous is going to happen, she thought – but what?