Night of Triumph
First published in 2013 by
Duckworth Overlook
90-93 Cowcross Street, London EC1M 6BF
Tel: 020 7490 7300
Fax: 020 7490 0080
[email protected]
www.ducknet.co.uk
© 2013 by Peter Bradshaw
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
The right of Peter Bradshaw to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBNs
Hardback: 9780715645017
Mobipocket: 9780715645642
ePub: 9780715645659
Library PDF: 9780715645666
For Dominic
‘Should we do anything? Should we do everything?’
Red Cross nurse in Portsmouth, upon hearing the news of VE Day
Contents
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
One
It was not the King’s custom to listen to wireless broadcasts in the presence of his family, but on Tuesday May 8th 1945, at 3pm, he was to be found doing so in a State Room in Buckingham Palace, along with Her Majesty The Queen, Her Majesty Queen Mary, the Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret, and his Private Secretary Tommy Lascelles, who stood throughout, having personally brought in the radio and adjusted it. The speaker was the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill:
Our gratitude to all our splendid Allies goes forth from all our hearts in this island and throughout the British Empire. We may allow ourselves a brief period of rejoicing, but let us not forget for a moment the toils and efforts that lie ahead. Japan, with all her treachery and greed, remains unsubdued. The injustice she has inflicted upon Great Britain and the United States, and other countries, and her detestable cruelties call for justice and retribution. We must now devote all our strength and resources to the completion of our task both at home and abroad. Advance, Britannia! Long live the cause of freedom! God Save The King!
The Prime Minister was succeeded here by a Home Service announcer, and at a nod from the King, Lascelles stepped forward and turned off the set. There was silence. The Princesses were clear-eyed, waiting for their father to speak: only Margaret’s girlish, inattentive swinging of a foot signalled anything other than a solemn awareness of the occasion. Finally, the King grunted amiably and said to his wife:
‘Spoke well, eh?’
‘Oh yes.’
‘Cadences. Such cadences. Forms of speech. Never heard anything like it before him.’
‘Oh you have. His style is taken from Lloyd George.’
‘Is it?’
‘Bertie, don’t be an ass, of course it is.’
Ping!
The weather was seasonable, and yet what Queen Mary felt in her hands and fingertips to be a coldness in the air caused one of her rings to slide off and hit the floor, before rolling away who knows where. On a less glorious day, she might have thought it ominous.
‘Oh, oh dear,’ Mary said in vexation. Lascelles stepped forward, but hesitantly, unsure if his help would be impertinent, conscious of a potentially catastrophic lowering of dignity on both his part and the Sovereign’s, should she, through an awful sense of politeness, actually feel constrained to forestall him by going down on her hands and knees herself.
Both Princesses jumped up, grateful for something to do; they were soon scurrying about the floor as their parents talked calmly of the continuing war in Japan, and the coming years of peace. Margaret scampered along, in a showy way, as if childishly chasing a small kitten that she did not really want to catch. Often she would stand up, her fists on her hips, with a theatrical frown of concentration and annoyance. Mary herself had resumed her seat, apparently content that the girls would find her ring. A footman had been inaudibly called by the Queen, but at a gesture of dismissal from Mary, had vanished again.
Elizabeth looked for the ring in a far more methodical way, trying to judge the angle of departure from her grandmother’s hand, lightly raking the floor with her fingers, remaining at ground level, looking along the carpet like a golfer judging the angle of a crucial putt. Where was it? The childish hide-and-seek impulse had come to her easily enough, heaven knows, and yet now she felt it burdensome. Something about being in the family – what her father had soppily called ‘we four’ – always caused her to revert to childhood, although she was fully nineteen years old, and as much of a grownup as any. Quite alone in this group, Elizabeth was in uniform: she was in the Auxiliary Territorial Services, the ATS. She wore the khaki belted tunic and skirt, khaki stockings and the cumbersome flat brown shoes. Not entirely unflattering to her figure, as she had had her dressmaker take in the tunic so that it was more waisted. In fact, Elizabeth privately believed that her uniform made her look more curvaceous than any of her civilian clothes, and this was an important part of the pride she took in it, though she would naturally never dream of admitting this to a living soul.
Yet Elizabeth glimpsed her profile at the bottom of a long mirror, and now feared that she looked merely a little girl playing some sort of dressing-up game. She was nineteen!
‘Ha! Very good!’
The last speaker was Mary, because Margaret had now more or less forgotten about her ring, and was doing an impression of Charlie Chaplin’s splay-footed waddle, having borrowed her grandmother’s furled umbrella as a cane.
‘Awfully good!’
Now her parents had noticed, and both applauded. Was Elizabeth expected to applaud too? If she continued to look for the ring and failed to clap, would she be told off for being grumpy and a bad sport?
Wait. There it was! Elizabeth could see it at the point of Margaret’s Chaplin-cane, the umbrella, as if speared to the floor. Margaret had placed the point of the umbrella directly into it. She darted over and grasped the shaft of the umbrella and tried to pull it off. Margaret looked down, glanced at Elizabeth’s annoyed face, knelt, flicked the ring into her left palm with one adroit movement and stood up.
‘Grannie! I’ve found it!’
‘Oh well done, Margo!’
‘Jolly well done, Margaret Rose!’
Her parents joined in the exclamations, and her pretty face was showered with kisses. Elizabeth could tell, instantly, that her father loudly exaggerated his compliments to Margaret through irritation at Elizabeth’s failure to congratulate her sister on finding the ring. Too big for her boots, was it? Lascelles, into whose ear a footman had just whispered, trundled the radio on castors over to him, and then stepped over to murmur something to Their Majesties. It was while they were all distracted that Elizabeth reached across and with the thumbnail and fingernail, both filed to an asymmetric point, nipped the loose, puckered flesh behind Margaret’s right elbow. She did not draw blood, but pressed hard enough to make two red lines, like a tiny number eleven, visible on the flesh.
‘Ow,’ yelped Margaret, and at the same moment Elizabeth snapped ‘Ow’ herself, woundedly holding her own wrist, as the King and Queen sharply glanced in their direction. This was a piece of strategic cunning Elizabeth had developed in the nursery, in order to obscure the question of guilt, and to overwhelm the grownups with a weary reluctance to sort out who had start
ed what.
‘Come now, girls,’ said the King, and allowed his sad, undeceived glance to rest on Elizabeth. To behave like babies, at their age. On this day, of all days. His eldest daughter was ashamed of herself, but vexed as well. When would they believe that she was a grownup? She had had military training. She had done her bit. And, though she hardly dared even to think about it, she would soon be engaged to be married.
No one dared think about it. A great number of influential people in Parliament and the Empire did not even know about it. Elizabeth’s romance with Philip had been something which had first bemused her father, then worried him. He considered that an affair of the heart with a man she had first met when she was just thirteen years old signalled her naivety and vulnerability. Perhaps this romance, like so many of his subjects’, had been dangerously accelerated by the war, and there had moreover been the unspoken possibility that Philip would be killed in action. But now the war was over; Philip had survived, and thinking about Elizabeth’s marriage was something else that could no longer be put off.
The two girls lowered their eyes and dropped a tiny, propitiatory curtsey.
‘Sorry, papa.’
Philip was still at sea in his ship, the Renown; Elizabeth had received another letter from him just that morning, full of baffling and yet inordinately sweet enthusiasm about the men and the ship, and what he imagined his future naval career to be. Philip would with great simplicity and directness use the words ‘we’ and ‘us’ in relation to all this. Elizabeth knew that she should feel her heart swell with joy.
And yet it did not.
She had actually quarrelled with Philip at their last meeting, and it was the thought of this that caused Elizabeth’s tummy to contract with anxiety.
They had been at her cousin Marina’s house, walking in the garden. Marina and the staff delicately withdrew to allow them some privacy. They were, of course, intensely, secretly excited. Could this be the conversation which would include a certain question?
Philip instinctively walked on ahead into the grounds. Elizabeth, just as instinctively, walked a pace or two behind. It was just the same when she went for walks with her father at Sandringham. She would allow him to forge ahead, to breathe, to think. Then she would find some pretext to catch up, to show him something she had found, to begin a conversation.
That day Elizabeth had not been able to think of anything, and just scampered up and tried to hold his hand. Philip allowed this easily enough, but did not interlace his fingers with hers.
They had walked on, to within sight of the old tennis court, with its sagging net and hulking roller.
‘I say,’ said Philip, ‘shall we have a tennis court when we are married?’
Elizabeth’s heart turned over, both with delight at the suggestion, and disappointment that Philip had still not actually proposed.
‘Well, I don’t know,’ said Elizabeth, ‘do you want to get married?’
Instead of playfully shaming him into going down on one knee, as she had hoped that it might, the question appeared only to irritate Philip.
‘Well of course I do!’ he said sharply. ‘Don’t you?’
‘Yes,’ said Elizabeth plaintively. ‘But you might ask a chap properly.’
Philip stopped, lightly took both her hands in his, and even cleared his throat.
‘Lilibet,’ he said, ‘marry me.’
Not quite the question she had been hoping for, more a command from the bridge, but it would do. Without waiting for a reply, however, Philip raised a finger to forestall any other remark. For a moment, Elizabeth listened in the utter quiet.
‘Listen,’ he said. ‘Do you hear that?’
‘What?’ asked Elizabeth, baffled.
‘That. Do you hear that?’
Again, Elizabeth listened in the complete silence.
‘It’s a nightingale, isn’t it? Or is it a lark?’
‘Philip, what on earth are you talking about?’
‘Well, I like that!’ Philip suddenly exploded. ‘Just when I’m being romantic, you ... you can’t even hear.’ Philip pressed his lips together, and his great handsome head jerked across to the right, looking dismissively away, presenting her with his profile. Then he stormed back to the house.
Had there been a nightingale? Or a lark? Had there been something? Had she failed to hear something at this vital moment? Elizabeth felt that she would never cease to reproach herself. How awful.
All this was weeks ago. Of course, they had agreed to meet since then. There was no difficulty with their engagement, or as she preferred mentally to term it, their ‘understanding’, but she was still rather mortified. All this was difficult for Philip. He was, as her father put it to her, a ‘man’s man’ and so a courtship would always be delicate. Their marriage itself would be delicate. And perhaps there had been a bird. Perhaps he had heard a bird. Perhaps she should have just said, yes, I hear a bird. To agree, to be agreeable, wasn’t that the secret of marriage, of life itself? Oh, she hoped she hadn’t ruined everything! And yet, it wasn’t her fault.
Was it?
Two
... has inflicted upon Great Britain and the United States, and other countries, and her detestable cruelties call for justice and retribution. We must now ...
Mr Ware turned over in his single bed, half-listening to the wireless, entirely audible from the room next door. His pleasant drowsiness was marred only by the puffy, greasy eiderdown coming into scratchy contact with his unshaven face. Somehow the surface of that eiderdown stayed very cold, no matter what body warmth was available to it. Mr Ware sank back down into sleep.
He was dreaming that there was still a war on. It was a happy dream. He was dreaming of horseflesh. He was dreaming of his own flesh, and that of dozens of others. He could feel an unevenness under his feet: a roughness caused by rubble, bomb damage, dislodged bricks, great shards of shattered glass, cables, fire tender hoses. He could feel the soles of his boots on all this, and for him it was solid ground: it was where he could thrive. If the surface of the ground was going to become smooth again, well, that was a poor lookout for Mr Ware. There had been chances for him, these last six years. Opportunities. Already, at the age of twenty-six, he was richer than his father had ever been.
Mr Ware was not afraid of the war: he was not afraid of dying. On the contrary. Other people were afraid of dying when they saw him. He was not a violent man, but he carried a miasma of violence and chaos around with him, like the slipstream of a speeding, badly laden truck – the sort of truck, in fact, which was going to have its contents systematically looted when stationary at a depot.
Mr Ware smiled, at the water-level of waking.
... all our strength and resources ...
Yes, that was it. All his own strength and resources had been substantially deployed over the past few hours. But tonight was going to be his last chance. VE Night. A final bacchanal of wrongdoing. Mr Ware had never hated the Germans or the Japanese: it was a conviction that he had semi-seriously considered declaiming to the conchie board. But it was more, of course, that he didn’t hate them any more than any other foreigner, or any more than men from Liverpool, or Glasgow, or people from south of the river, or people from the other side of the Kilburn High Road, or his wife.
The sharp contact of one of his vertebrae with that of someone else reminded Mr Ware that he was actually in bed with his wife. She had her back to him; they were curled foetally, away from each other, or as foetally as they could manage in such a narrow bed.
Mr Ware had had sex with three people in the past week, and none of them was his wife. She was always pestering him for conjugal relations. She’d wanted to get married when he got back from Italy. He had obliged. Now she wanted a baby. He had said all right. This theoretically meant refraining from all contraceptive procedures, but they had never used any in the first place, and this decision in fact coincided with the dwindling of their actual marital relations to zero. The business of trying for a baby seemed in practice to m
ean simply raising their levels of fretful resentment.
He was properly awake now: gazing at the ceiling, which bulged downwards like a shallow hammock, or, turning, he could look over at the wall, from where he could hear the wireless, or down at the floor’s uncarpeted boards, where he could see the chamber-pot, with some sparkling droplets at its rim. Or over at the window dressing table where, in deference to his wife, Mr Ware had placed a stately three-glass mirror, a sort of hinged triptych, whose outer glasses could be swung in and out at various angles so that her hairdo could be objectively scrutinised. Mr Ware sometimes used it to inspect his bald patch. Like everything else in this flat, it was stolen.
Grumpily, he pulled the greasy, cold eiderdown over to his side some more, which disclosed his wife’s naked legs, which had thin scars from where she had had to wear splints as a child – to cure rickets, she’d told him. He had never minded those.
Sleeping during the day had felt luxurious and dissolute at first. Now it was simply part of his working life. Working nights. Coming home in the gleaming dawn with full pockets, or a full car-boot. Caked with dust. Torn clothing. Off with the gear. Her job was to mend it. Part of her job anyway. Not that she was much good at that.
Mr Ware fell to wondering what the future held for them now. Perhaps London was no good. They could go to Brighton. Or Norwich. Mr Ware wondered, incuriously, what his wife felt about any of this: the possibility of her being obstructive, making trouble. He would want to do something, she would want something else. She would get in the way.
And of course she would still be on about this baby business.
Over the dressing table was his wife’s collection of newspaper clippings about the Royal Family: George V, Mary, the current King and Queen, their two daughters. It was a mild obsession of hers. A piece of silliness. But it had sprung from something real enough. Ten years or so ago, Mrs Ware had been a girl, working in a canteen in the YMCA on Great Russell Street, a place with a sign outside saying ‘Teas’. It was decent enough. Her mother, now late mother, had served behind the counter, and Mrs Ware had been allowed to help out, which she had loved – another part of her past Mr Ware didn’t like, incidentally. It seemed to mean he was going to be expected to help her set up some similar joint after the war.
Night of Triumph Page 1