The FitzOsbornes at War

by Michelle Cooper

  ‘He is a bit dull,’ admitted Anne. ‘But his father’s terrifically rich, Sophie . . . No? Definitely not?’

  ‘We’ll just have to find you someone else to dance with, then,’ said Felicity breezily. ‘There are hundreds of men here.’

  There were, but nearly all of them had arrived with their glamorous girlfriends. Anyway, once I decided to disregard Nigel’s silently brooding presence, I found it quite enjoyable sitting there at our table, sipping my champagne, tapping my foot to the swing band and watching the couples swirl past. Most of the men were in uniform (the navy officers looked the most impressive, with their glinting buttons and gold lace), while the women wore a gorgeous array of floating chiffons and clinging satins. I could see that an evening at a nightclub would be awfully romantic with the right person. There aren’t many other social situations (actually, there aren’t any) where a man can press himself against a woman for hours on end, in very dim lighting. One couple were so entranced with each other that they’d long given up any pretence of dancing. They simply stood there, her arms locked around his neck, his hands at her waist, staring into each other’s eyes, until finally, he lowered his face to hers and their lips met. I looked away, half wanting to fall in love with someone myself. But then I saw the miserable intensity of Nigel’s gaze as he tracked Felicity around the dance floor, and considered I was far more likely to end up a Nigel than a Felicity, loving and yearning and aching without the other person even noticing, or caring much if they did notice. I suddenly felt dispirited and very, very tired. So I was glad when Anne’s boyfriend announced he was on duty at five the next morning and had to go.

  ‘You’ll see Sophie back to her flat, won’t you?’ said Felicity, batting her eyelashes at Nigel. Of course, she just wanted a taxi ride alone with her boyfriend.

  ‘Actually,’ I said, glaring at her, ‘I can see myself home –’

  ‘Of course I will, Felicity!’ interrupted Nigel, although she was already turning away. ‘Well, er, good night! See you soon, I hope . . . Felicity.’

  She didn’t reply. She was too busy giggling with her boyfriend, who was taking a very long time to wrap her in her cloak.

  Nigel handed me awkwardly into a taxi, then proceeded to ignore me for most of the journey. It was only as we neared the end of what seemed to be Kensington Road (it was rather difficult to tell in the blackout) that he turned to me and drew in a breath. I thought he was going to make some sort of clumsy apology for his behaviour. Instead, he pounced. There is no other word for it. I shoved him off fairly easily, and got the impression he was as relieved as I was. I wasn’t even sure which part of my body he’d been aiming for. Did he imagine this was the usual manner in which one concluded an evening out with a young lady? (Perhaps it was. How would I know?) Fortunately, it had all happened too fast for me to feel frightened.

  ‘Mostly, I was baffled,’ I told Veronica, ten minutes later. She was still up, writing a list of provisions for our air raid shelter. ‘He barely said a word to me the entire evening, and he’s obviously in love with Felicity. Why on Earth would he want to kiss me? Or whatever it was that he was trying to do.’

  She shook her head and got up to pour out the cocoa she’d been warming for me on the stove.

  ‘Perhaps he wanted to make Felicity jealous?’ I mused aloud, wrapping my hands around the cup. ‘Or perhaps he wanted to get over his feelings for her, by kissing me?’

  ‘Perhaps he’s an obnoxious little worm,’ said Veronica. ‘Who cares what he was thinking? It doesn’t excuse his vile behaviour.’

  ‘Oh, it wasn’t that bad – not really. Nothing very terrible could have happened anyway, with the taxi driver sitting there.’

  ‘And he didn’t even apologise? The boy, I mean, not the taxi driver.’

  ‘He did mumble something as I got out, but I think it was just “Good night”. He might have been too embarrassed.’

  ‘So he ought to have been!’

  ‘I don’t think he’s used to girls,’ I said. ‘He doesn’t have any sisters, and he went to a boys’ school, and he’s only twenty. He probably thinks of girls the same way I think of . . . of llamas.’

  ‘Think of what?’ Veronica stopped washing out the cocoa pan to stare at me.

  ‘Well, I like llamas, from what I’ve seen of them, but I don’t understand the way they think or how they’re likely to act, so I might make a mess of things if I were to –’

  ‘Catch a taxi with one,’ said Veronica, with a snort. ‘Firstly, llamas are a different species to you. Secondly, they’re native to the Andes, not London, and you aren’t a zoologist, so one wouldn’t expect you to be familiar with their ways. Thirdly . . .’

  She went on to make several more – very logical – points. I drank the rest of my cocoa, thinking that men might as well be a different species. Even Toby, whom I’d known all my life and most of his, could behave in strange and unpredictable ways. And as for Simon – he was a complete enigma.

  13th May, 1940

  THE TROUBLE WITH KEEPING A record of the war is that either nothing whatsoever is happening in the world, which makes one’s journal entries very boring, or else so much is going on that one doesn’t have time to comprehend it, let alone write it down. It’s the latter situation at the moment. However, I have the day off work today, and I think writing things down will help me make some sense of it all.

  First, Norway. Well, what a disaster – not that Chamberlain would admit it. He gave a pathetic speech in Parliament informing us that we must not ‘exaggerate’ the losses.

  ‘There were no large forces involved,’ he claimed. ‘Not much more than a single division.’

  Such a comfort to all the British soldiers who were wounded or killed, I’m sure! And Simon, who came over for dinner last week, said things were even worse for the RAF squadron sent over there. The pilots were told to use an ice lake near Trondheim as their base, but the promised fuel supplies and communication equipment didn’t arrive. Then they discovered that their planes’ wheels had frozen to the ground overnight and all their controls were iced over, so when the Luftwaffe turned up, every single RAF plane was bombed to smithereens exactly where it sat, stuck to the lake. Simon said the only consolation was that the planes were ancient and probably wouldn’t have lasted five minutes in battle anyway, and at least the navy managed to rescue the pilots. The awful part is that they are sending those same pilots back there, and probably others, as well. (Not Toby, though, Simon assured us. Otherwise Toby would have been posted to Scotland instead of Sussex. But it’s still worrying that Anthony is stationed up there. What if they send him?)

  Anyway, as Chamberlain clearly didn’t have any grasp of the situation at all, even his own Conservative Members of Parliament became fed up with him. During a ferocious debate in the House of Commons, one of them said:

  ‘You have sat too long for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!’

  Veronica especially enjoyed that bit, because it was what Cromwell said to the Long Parliament, and she likes politicians to have a sense of history. But then, while Chamberlain was dithering about whether to resign or not, the Nazis invaded Luxembourg, Belgium and the Netherlands! The poor little Low Countries, who hadn’t even declared war on Germany, or on anyone else! Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands and her family have already been rescued by a British ship, and the Grand Duchess of Luxembourg is meant to be coming to London, too. (Very soon, one won’t be able to walk five steps down Piccadilly without bumping into an exiled royal.) The French and British have sent troops and planes to help the Low Countries, but things aren’t going very well for the Allies so far, which doesn’t actually surprise me, given the Norway fiasco.

  At long last, Chamberlain resigned, and now the British have a coalition government, which means they can choose the best people from each political party to be in the War Cabinet. That sounds very sensible to me. Winston Churchill is their Prime Minister, but I don’t kno
w what to think about that. We had tea with him a couple of years ago during our Montmaray campaign, and he was a very generous host, but didn’t seem terribly good at listening to other people. I suppose if one were marvellous at oration, then one would want to talk a lot, rather than listen. He gave a speech today about how he had ‘nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat’, which was more uplifting than it might seem (written down, it actually sounds quite revolting). He reminds me of Lady Bosworth’s fat, charming but rather temperamental bulldog. Chamberlain is a droopy old basset hound, so we’re probably better off with Mr Churchill.

  I asked the Colonel, who paid one of his whirlwind visits yesterday, for his opinion on all this, because he’s Winston Churchill’s cousin. He said Mr Churchill was ‘mad as a March hare’ and ‘drank like a fish’, but that at least he’d wake up the Civil Service and keep the general population entertained while we lost the war.

  ‘We’re not going to lose the war!’ I said.

  ‘Perhaps just this battle then,’ the Colonel said. He thinks the French army and air force are in a total shambles, and that it’s only a matter of time before the Germans occupy the whole of France. Then he asked me if I’d ever met, at the American Embassy, a Member of Parliament called Captain Archibald Maule Ramsay.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘I’d remember a name like that.’

  ‘Or a Russian lady named Anna Wolkova? Or Anna de Wolkoff?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Anyone from the Italian Embassy?’

  I shook my head ruefully.

  ‘Never mind,’ he said.

  I didn’t even bother asking what that was all about.

  ‘Oh, and by the way,’ he said, as he was leaving, ‘do you recall that page of Kernetin you wrote down for me? Well, I gave it to a friend of mine, one of our best cryptographers, and he couldn’t make head or tail of it.’

  ‘Really?’ I said. Either I was cleverer than I’d imagined, or the British Secret Service employed some very incompetent cryptographers.

  ‘Mind you, he said it was only because the sample was so small, and I didn’t mention it was boustrophedonic. Still, it’s useful to know the code’s so difficult to decipher. Just in case one ever needs to write a letter to someone. At some stage.’

  Well, that’s nice and specific, isn’t it? Typical of the Colonel . . . Oh, the telephone’s ringing. Why does that always happen whenever I sit down to write? Good, Veronica’s getting it . . .

  IT WAS HENRY’S HEADMISTRESS.

  ‘Henry’s been expelled,’ Veronica reported, coming back into the kitchen.

  ‘Oh, no!’ I cried, dropping my pen (although it wasn’t exactly a tremendous shock). ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s unspeakable,’ said Veronica.

  I stared at her. ‘It’s what?’

  ‘No, I mean, that’s all the headmistress would say when I asked. “It’s unspeakable.” Anyway, they’re putting Henry on a train with her luggage. We have to meet her at King’s Cross Station at 3:20.’

  ‘Poor Henry, I hope she’s not too upset,’ I said, although, of course, she looked absolutely delighted when we met her on the railway platform.

  ‘I can’t wait to see your flat!’ she exclaimed, after hugging us both. ‘How long can I stay with you? I know how to cook now – I made scones in Domestic Science – and I sort of know how to sew, if you have any mending to be done. Oh, are we getting a taxi? Do you think we could possibly stop at Madame Tussaud’s on our way? I’ve never been, and I hear it’s very educational and historical, especially the Chamber of Horrors –’

  ‘We are going directly to the flat, and then you’re returning to Milford tomorrow morning,’ said Veronica. ‘Aunt Charlotte’s livid. What on Earth did you do?’

  It transpired that Henry’s ‘unspeakable’ act had been to explain the Facts of Life to one of the girls in her dormitory.

  ‘But I had to!’ Henry said earnestly. ‘She’d been bleeding for a whole day and was too scared to tell anyone. She didn’t know anything about it at all! She thought she was dying.’

  ‘Couldn’t you just have taken the poor girl to Matron?’ I asked.

  ‘No, because Matron’s about two hundred years old and absolutely horrible! She would have yelled at me for leaving the dorm after bedtime, and then yelled at Cecilia and made Cecilia cry even more. And I bet Matron still wouldn’t have explained anything. I doubt she even knows.’ Henry peered at Veronica with some anxiety. ‘But honestly, Veronica, it wasn’t my fault the headmistress found out. It was that tattletale Loretta!’

  Veronica had been shaking her head furiously, but it wasn’t directed at Henry. ‘Can you believe this?’ Veronica said to me. ‘Girls being sent off to boarding school in a state of complete ignorance! And then the school failing to teach them anything useful about human reproduction, and punishing them for discussing it!’ She turned back to Henry. ‘You were quite right to put that poor child’s mind at ease!’

  Henry looked surprised but gratified, although I couldn’t help wondering how comforting (or accurate) Henry’s version of the Facts of Life had been. I also noticed the back of our taxi driver’s neck growing redder and redder.

  ‘Well, perhaps we can finish talking about this at home,’ I said, indicating him with meaningful looks.

  ‘Why should we?’ said Veronica, even louder and more indignantly. ‘Menstruation’s a perfectly normal event! It’s simply because women do it that the whole subject’s treated with shame and disgust. If a man bleeds, he’s awarded the Victoria Cross and gets an article in The Times explaining what a valiant hero he is!’

  ‘Only if he were on a battlefield at the time,’ I protested weakly. ‘It’s a bit different.’

  ‘Yes, one situation’s about perpetuating the human race; the other’s about annihilating it. It just demonstrates what our society really values, doesn’t it?’

  It was difficult enough to win an argument against Veronica before she joined the Foreign Office. Now, it’s impossible.

  ‘Oh, and Sophie, I nearly forgot,’ said Henry, digging in her pocket and pulling out a crumpled envelope. ‘Here’s a letter from the headmistress for you. I had to open it because I thought my train ticket might be in there. She says she couldn’t allow me to stay till the end of term, because I’m such a bad influence on the other girls.’

  ‘She’s the one who’s a bad influence on girls,’ said Veronica, still fuming. ‘You’re much better off out of that place, Henry.’

  ‘Although I expect Aunt Charlotte will find it pretty difficult to find another school for me after this,’ Henry said, trying to look mournful and failing utterly. ‘I’ll just have to stay at Milford, I suppose, and help with the horses. And look after Carlos and Estella and all the dear little piglets.’

  Then she settled back in her seat with a sigh of satisfaction, looking, at that moment, exactly like Toby.

  29th May, 1940

  I HAVE HELPED CATCH A SPY! Several spies, in fact. What a good thing my abbreviated Kernetin is (probably) indecipherable, so I can record all the details here!

  Well, it turns out I was right about Tyler Kent being a very suspicious character. Or, at least, the Colonel was right when he took note of my vague misgivings and investigated the man in more detail. Apparently Mr Kent had already attracted the attentions of the police, because he’d been seen with someone they suspected was a German agent. He’d also become friends with a lady called Anna Wolkoff, whose parents run the Russian Tea Room, near the Natural History Museum. I’d walked past it several times with Henry; what I didn’t know was that it was the meeting place for the Right Club, a secret Fascist organisation set up by Archibald Maule Ramsay. He is a Member of Parliament, but a fairly deranged one, by the sound of things. He thinks all the Jews should be thrown out of Britain, and that Bolsheviks are plotting to bring down the government, and so on.

  Anyway, it seems that Tyler Kent copied hundreds of confidential telegrams and letters at the American Embassy, and showed them t
o Captain Ramsay and Miss Wolkoff. Then she sent the important ones off to her contacts at the Italian Embassy. I know we are not actually at war with the Italians, but they are Fascists and very much on Hitler’s side, and it appears that they sent the information on to Berlin. I remember that Mr Kent applied to be transferred to Berlin earlier this year, but had his request turned down. Perhaps that’s why he had to send the information via Miss Wolkoff – who, by the way, used to make dresses for Wallis Simpson, now the Duchess of Windsor and also (according to Veronica) a good friend of several high-ranking Nazis.

  I wonder how Mr Kennedy reacted, when he found out what had been going on at the Embassy, right under his nose! Obviously, I’m not allowed to know what was in any of the documents, but I think they must have been something to do with America joining the war. Officially, the United States is neutral and a lot of Americans want to keep out of the conflict, but President Roosevelt seems quite keen on helping the British. At any rate, the documents must have contained extremely important information, because all the people involved in the plot have been arrested. The Colonel says they’ll be charged with betraying their country and helping the enemy. I don’t see how they could charge Tyler Kent with that when he isn’t British – although he did steal things that were the property of the American government, and that’s certainly against the law.

  But there is even more to this story! Oswald Mosley has been arrested, too! He didn’t have anything to do with stealing the documents, though. He hasn’t even been charged with a crime. I asked Veronica how Mosley could be imprisoned without any charge, and she explained that a new amendment to the Emergency Powers Act had been passed in Parliament the day before. This means the government can now detain not only anyone who is ‘hostile’ to the ‘defence of the realm’, but also any person who has associated with, or is ‘sympathetic with’, any government that’s at war with Britain. That definitely applies to Mosley, who thinks the war is a ‘quarrel of Jewish finance’ and says Britain should sign a peace treaty with Hitler. Still, when I think of all the people I’ve heard deriding Jews and praising Hitler at debutante balls and dinner parties, it seems to me that half the English aristocracy could be locked up. Of course, quite a few of them changed their minds as the war approached – Lady Bosworth, for example, and poor old Lord Redesdale, who’s Unity Mitford’s father.