The FitzOsbornes at War

by Michelle Cooper

  Anyway, I expect the government knows what it’s doing (about arresting people who might be dangerous, that is). It’s no wonder they’re worried, with the war going so badly on the Continent. The Germans have advanced almost all the way to the English Channel. Yesterday, King Leopold of the Belgians surrendered to Germany (without the agreement of his government), leaving the Allied forces in an even bigger mess than they already were. The RAF planes have flown back home now, but I don’t know about the British soldiers. I suppose they’re still fighting there, alongside the French, who haven’t surrendered. Not yet, anyway.

  I wonder why the Germans are winning all the battles so far. Is it because they have those enormous tanks and thousands of aeroplanes, or is it just that they’re better at military strategy? Not that they’d have to be all that clever to outmanoeuvre the French. Look at the Maginot Line, for example. A supposedly impregnable fort stretching along France’s border with Germany – except the French forgot to build it all the way to the coast. So naturally, rather than trying to break through it, the Germans went around the end of it. And the French army was surprised by this! I suppose the Germans have also had far more battle experience, what with all the fighting they’ve done in Spain and Poland and Norway . . . and they do seem more passionate about winning. Is it because they all worship Hitler and are desperate to please him? I can’t imagine any British soldier ever wanting to worship droopy old Chamberlain, or even King George (who’s always struck me as rather feeble).

  Well, perhaps Mr Churchill will be a bit more inspirational for the troops. It seems to me they need all the encouragement they can get.

  9th June, 1940

  WRITTEN AT MILFORD PARK, to which Veronica and I were urgently summoned by Aunt Charlotte on Friday. The government has decided to requisition the house for use as a military rehabilitation hospital and, of course, our aunt is vehemently opposed to the idea. She claims she needs the whole house to accommodate her family (hence our presence), but the fact is, it’s far too big for just her and Barnes and a couple of servants to manage, and most of the family is scattered now. Even Henry will be back at school after the summer holidays, assuming we can find a school willing to take her. In any case, there’s nothing much Aunt Charlotte can do about it – one can’t argue with the War Office. However, when Veronica said all of this, Aunt Charlotte drew herself up in a very familiar way.

  ‘It is the principle of the matter,’ she declared in strident tones, as the poor gentleman appointed by the government to survey the house tip-toed past the doorway with his measuring tape. ‘At the same time that my only nephew is risking his life in service for this country, I am being forced out of my home!’ She leaned towards the door to make certain the gentleman had heard. ‘A poor widow, being tossed out on the streets!’

  Aunt Charlotte owns the entire village of Milford, as well as properties all over the country. I doubt she’d have any difficulties finding another place to live, although I quite understood that she’d want to remain close to her stables.

  ‘Can’t you just move into the gatehouse?’ I asked.

  ‘The gatehouse!’ exclaimed Aunt Charlotte, as though I’d suggested a dirt-floored hovel in some remote fen, instead of the large brick residence visible from where we sat. ‘No, no, that would be quite impossible. Where would Tobias stay when he comes home on leave?’

  ‘It has five bedrooms,’ said Veronica.

  ‘Three,’ said Aunt Charlotte, ‘and only one bathroom!’

  ‘There are the two attic rooms as well, Your Highness,’ murmured Barnes, as she handed round the scones. ‘And the Ministry might be willing to refurbish the house to make it habitable, if Your Highness were to explain the matter to them . . .’

  Aunt Charlotte pursed her lips and glared out the window at the terrace, and beyond that, at the lawns that had been ploughed up to plant potatoes. ‘This is entirely the fault of this new government,’ she said. ‘Attlee and those other Socialists who’ve wormed their way into the Cabinet. I know their game. They’re determined to destroy the aristocracy, to snatch away our houses and dig up our rose beds and deny us petrol for our motor cars. We might as well be living in Russia. This sort of thing would never have happened when Neville Chamberlain was Prime Minister.’

  ‘We are at war,’ Veronica reminded her. ‘And you’re not the only one being asked to turn over part of your property to the government.’ I knew that the clothing factory owned by Daniel’s family had been requisitioned months ago, and was now churning out barrage balloons and army tents. ‘Anyway, if you’d agreed to take in those schoolchildren from Stepney, the government wouldn’t even have considered using Milford Park as a hospital.’

  ‘Evacuees!’ said Aunt Charlotte, with a shudder. ‘Stepney! Heaven forbid! I think I’d rather have wounded soldiers. So long as they were from the officer class . . .’ She accepted a teacup from Barnes and heaved a sigh. ‘It’s not that one minds doing one’s bit for the war effort, you understand,’ she added, rather plaintively. ‘It’s just that it’s very disagreeable when certain others aren’t being required to make similar sacrifices.’

  ‘Lady Bosworth is running a first aid centre at her house,’ I pointed out to Aunt Charlotte. (One would think an international war might take priority over their personal rivalry, but clearly not.)

  ‘And I thought you said Lord Bosworth had cleared out his study to make room for the Local Defence Volunteers headquarters?’ added Veronica.

  ‘Local Defence Volunteers!’ sniffed Aunt Charlotte. ‘Another one of this government’s ridiculous schemes, pandering to all those old men wanting to play at soldiers! They wouldn’t last five minutes if the Germans did invade.’

  We lapsed into silence as we considered this frightening prospect. Anything seems possible now, following that desperate evacuation of British forces from northern France. More than two hundred thousand soldiers, starving, exhausted, some of them badly wounded, forced to abandon their tanks and cannons, sometimes even their rifles and boots, as they queued in the sea at Dunkirk. Then the navy ran out of ships to rescue them, and so ordinary people raced across the Channel in their fishing trawlers, their yachts and cabin cruisers and leaky rowing boats, hoping to save as many men as they could. Even the Canterbury, that luxury ferry we took to Calais last year, was pressed into service. And all the while, the Luftwaffe was bombing the boats and strafing the beach with machine guns. Tens of thousands of men died.

  ‘Have you had any news of Harkness yet?’ asked Veronica at last, referring to Aunt Charlotte’s former butler. He’d been posted to France, the last we’d heard.

  ‘Oh yes, I meant to tell you,’ Aunt Charlotte said. ‘Barnes had a postcard from him, didn’t you?’

  ‘That’s right, Your Highness,’ said Barnes. ‘He and his brigadier returned from France last week. Both are well, and he sends his regards to everyone.’

  ‘And I heard Billy Hartington and his battalion got back safely, too,’ said Aunt Charlotte.

  ‘Oh, Kick will be relieved,’ I said. ‘She’s been so worried about him.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Aunt Charlotte absently. (I could tell she hadn’t been paying attention to me, because she hadn’t responded to Kick’s name by launching into a diatribe about ‘vulgar Americans’ or ‘Catholic conspiracies’.) ‘Of course,’ Aunt Charlotte mused aloud, ‘if one could be sure that gentlemen such as Lord Hartington were the sort of convalescents being sent to Milford, one would quite willingly offer up one’s house. It would be one’s patriotic duty to help men such as them . . .’

  And they’d also provide Aunt Charlotte with some opportunities for matchmaking, I thought. She still seems to cherish a faint (and quite futile) hope that Billy Hartington will propose to Veronica. Oh, how Aunt Charlotte would love to be able to drop phrases like ‘my niece, the Duchess of Devonshire’ into conversations with Lady Bosworth!

  ‘Still, one would hope the best families would be spared having to hear that their sons had been wounded,’ Aunt Char
lotte said. ‘Or even worse news. When I think of that poor Pemberton boy . . . So terribly brave and so tragic! Although I suppose there’s always a chance he’ll turn up as a prisoner of war.’

  ‘What?’ said Veronica. ‘You mean, Geoffrey Pemberton?’

  ‘Yes, his regiment was stationed at Calais,’ said Aunt Charlotte. ‘Ordered to fight to the death, apparently, to draw the Germans’ attention away from the evacuation at Dunkirk.’

  Veronica and I exchanged horrified looks. Geoffrey Pemberton is – was – a rather awful boy who’d been at school with Toby and had fallen briefly in love with Veronica. But just because neither of us had liked him, didn’t mean we’d wanted him . . . Well, he might not be dead. But oh, how his poor father must be feeling now!

  ‘That’s terrible,’ I said, blinking back tears. ‘Even if Geoffrey was taken prisoner . . . Imagine being a prisoner of the Nazis!’

  ‘There are rules about how prisoners of war have to be treated,’ Veronica assured me, but her voice was far from steady. ‘The Geneva Convention and so on . . . ’

  ‘Oh, do you really think the Nazis care about those rules?’ I said. ‘What about what Mr Churchill said, about the Germans’ treachery and brutality, about their “originality of malice”?’

  ‘Well, I prefer to concentrate on the other parts of his speech,’ said Veronica, raising her chin. ‘Where he says we’ll defeat them. “We shall defend our island”, that’s what he declared, and I believe him. “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills –”’

  ‘“We shall never surrender”,’ chorused all of us, even Barnes.

  Mr Churchill may be mad, but he certainly gives inspiring speeches.

  15 June, 1940

  I AM SITTING IN MY KITCHEN, having just finished reading a very unhelpful booklet called If the Invader Comes. According to the government, if the Germans invade, my duty is to ‘stay put’. I also have to follow any orders the authorities give, except ‘when you receive an order, make sure you know it’s a true order and not a faked order’. How on Earth are we meant to tell? The Times says the Germans could drop English-speaking parachutists, dressed in civilian clothes, all over the countryside under cover of darkness. Apparently the German soldiers who parachuted into the Netherlands were dressed as nuns and nurses! Well, what if the Germans landing here disguise themselves as British policemen, or ARP wardens, or BBC announcers?

  Then, if one does encounter an unambiguous German, the advice is: ‘do not tell him anything’ and ‘do not give him anything’. Right. Presumably, once I’ve refused to say or do anything to help the Nazi storm troopers who’ve arrived on my doorstep, they’ll just turn around and go meekly on their way. Then they’ll get completely lost, because all the signposts and railway station names have been taken down (I expect this will make them even more hostile, out of sheer frustration). But perhaps I’ll be at work when they march into London – in which case my manager is supposed to have organised ‘some system by which a sudden attack can be resisted’. Clearly, the writers of this booklet haven’t met Mr Bowker. Miss Halliday, on the other hand, would make a formidable opponent . . . except ladies aren’t even allowed to be proper members of the Local Defence Volunteers, as Henry pointed out indignantly in her most recent letter.

  Aunt Charlotte, not having found another school yet, has suggested Henry join the hundreds of British children being evacuated to Canada and the United States, but Henry refuses to be separated from the rest of us (‘and anyway, I’m not a child!’). There are also rumours that the British princesses are being sent to Canada, and Henry says she’s not getting on any ship if there’s the slightest chance ‘that stupid Princess Margaret’ is on it (the two of them are old adversaries). Henry also claims she’s far too busy at Milford to be able to leave, what with grooming the horses, feeding the pigs, helping Barnes pack up the house, and running messages for the Milford unit of the Local Defence Volunteers. It’s headed by her friend Jocko’s father, who was a sergeant in the last war, and all the village men (those too old or too young to have been called up for the regular army) are currently occupied making bombs out of old jam jars filled with petrol, constructing roadblocks from logs nailed to bicycle wheels, and dragging hay wagons into the middle of fields so the Germans can’t land their planes there.

  Actually, the planes could just as well be Italian, because now Italy has declared war on the Allies, too. So Veronica hurriedly drafted a Montmaravian declaration of war on Italy and sent it off to Toby for his signature. She says Mussolini is a sneaky little coward, waiting till he was certain France would fall to Germany. Yesterday, the Nazis marched into Paris. How horrible to picture Hitler strutting down the Champs-Élysées, surrounded by a lot of fawning Nazis (Gebhardt probably amongst them). The French government has collapsed and the new President seems likely to sign an armistice with Germany within days . . .

  Oh, it’s all too depressing. I simply can’t write any more.

  20th July, 1940

  I ARRIVED HOME FROM WORK yesterday to find Veronica cramming clothes into a suitcase.

  ‘What’s happened?’ I cried, fearing the worst. The Germans had landed on the beaches! They were swarming across the fields and the hills, converging on our street!

  ‘I just have to go away for a few days, that’s all,’ Veronica said. ‘A work thing. Which dress do you think for evenings, the black silk or that red one with the gold ribbon?’

  It was only then that I saw she’d been up to the house to collect some of her old evening gowns – definitely not the first items Veronica would snatch up during an emergency evacuation. ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Well, it depends. Where are you going?’

  ‘On second thoughts, that red dress would take up half the suitcase,’ she said. ‘It’ll have to be the black.’

  ‘You’ll need at least two evening gowns, if you’re staying more than one night,’ I pointed out. ‘Take the blue chiffon. And our big trunk.’

  ‘I’m only allowed a small suitcase.’

  I frowned at her. ‘Veronica, you’re not . . . You aren’t going abroad, are you?’

  Her gaze flicked up from the gown she was folding, but she remained silent.

  ‘You’re going to Spain, aren’t you?’ I said. ‘I don’t believe it! There’s a war on and you’re flying straight into the middle of it!’

  ‘Oh, Sophie,’ she said. ‘I’ll be fine. It’s only for a few days, and I won’t be going by myself.’

  ‘Why would anyone from the Foreign Office need to go there at all?’ I demanded, my hands now on my hips. ‘Isn’t there a British Embassy in Madrid?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, with a sigh, ‘but only the British would appoint a new Ambassador who knows nothing of Spanish history or culture, and doesn’t speak a word of Spanish. Anyway, the Embassy staff are rushed off their feet trying to draw up a new trade agreement, whereas we’ll be –’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing.’ Veronica concentrated on tucking rolled-up stockings into the corners of her suitcase.

  ‘Oh, I see,’ I said, ‘it’s a secret mission! You do remember that Spain’s right next to France, don’t you? And France is crawling with Nazis now, and I can just imagine how they feel about you after that speech of yours at the League of Nations!’

  ‘Spain is neutral in this war,’ Veronica said. ‘Or at least, non-belligerent. Besides, I’m travelling on a British diplomatic passport, so I’ll be perfectly safe . . . Oh, all my handkerchiefs seem to be in the wash. Can I borrow some of yours?’

  ‘No,’ I said, but I went off to fetch some. ‘What’s the difference between “neutral” and “non-belligerent”?’ I asked, on my return.

  ‘“Neutral” means they’re not on anyone’s side except their own. “Non-belligerent” means they aren’t going to drop any bombs on Britain, but they’re secretly doing everything they can to help Germany win.’

  ‘Oh, good, now my mind
is completely at ease.’

  She gave me a fleeting smile as she snapped her suitcase closed. ‘Sophie, why don’t you go and stay with Julia till I get back? It would stop me worrying.’

  ‘How come you get to worry, when I’m not allowed to?’

  ‘Because I’m older, and there’s a far greater chance of air raids here than in Madrid – or wherever it is I’m going to be.’

  ‘You really can’t say why you’re going?’

  She bit her lip. ‘Not at the moment. Anyway, I don’t know all the details. But . . . well, I can tell you that it’s important.’

  ‘Change-the-course-of-the-war important?’

  She hesitated, then nodded. ‘I think so. I’m not sure it’ll work, but the stakes are so high in this particular game that anything’s worth trying.’ She heaved her suitcase off the bed, then added, ‘If it makes you feel any better, the Colonel knows all about it.’

  ‘The Colonel!’ I stared at her with renewed dismay. ‘Why would that make me feel any better? I thought your trip was some sort of . . . of diplomatic peace mission! Now I find out it’s one of his spy schemes!’

  ‘Sophie, please go and telephone Julia.’

  ‘I’m going to have a word with him, the next time I see him,’ I muttered. ‘Dragging you into his ridiculous cloak-and-dagger business . . .’

  I stomped off to telephone Julia, who said she’d be delighted to have me as a house guest for as long as I cared to stay. So, after I’d waved Veronica off in a taxi this morning, I cleaned the entire flat, did a week’s worth of ironing, packed my own suitcase, then took myself off to Julia’s house.