The FitzOsbornes at War

by Michelle Cooper

  ‘Religion has nothing to do with it,’ Aunt Charlotte said. ‘It’s about respect for tradition. Julia did it all properly for her first wedding.’

  ‘At least no one got shot at this one,’ said Veronica.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ said Aunt Charlotte distractedly. ‘It’s all been so sudden, that’s the problem. If only they’d had a longer engagement, then perhaps one might have been able to – Oh!’ She glanced about, then lowered her voice till it was nearly inaudible. ‘Julia isn’t . . . That is, she’s not in a delicate condition, is she?’

  Veronica gave Aunt Charlotte an incredulous look, then said she had to be getting back to work.

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t mind if Julia were,’ Aunt Charlotte said to me later. ‘I’m sure they’ll have very attractive children. After all, Tobias used to be a very handsome young man.’

  Then, just as I was about to snap at her, she added, ‘Oh, but Sophia, how I wish your dear sister could have been here to see this! She was always so fond of Julia. She would have been delighted by the entire thing – even that horrible little man at the town hall.’

  So I couldn’t feel cross at Aunt Charlotte then.

  The following week was Kick and Billy’s equally sudden wedding, held only two days after their engagement notice appeared in The Times. They’d hoped to avoid publicity, but no such luck. All the newspapers, here and in America, went wild – and that was nothing compared to the reaction of Kick’s parents after she told them of her decision. They’d bombarded her with letters and telephone calls and telegrams, alternately cajoling and threatening – but Kick refused to budge. I didn’t go to the actual wedding (another registry office affair), but Veronica and I attended the reception in Eaton Square. Kick looked radiant in pink and kept exclaiming, ‘I couldn’t be happier!’ Billy seemed pleased, but rather overwhelmed by the hordes – Kick had invited all the Red Cross girls and GIs from her club, plus apparently everyone she’d ever met in England. However, the only member of her family in attendance was her brother Joe. I’ve never really liked him, but I have to admit he’s been absolutely wonderful these past few months. He assured Kick that he’d stand by her, whatever she decided, and he did. When we saw him at the reception, he told us he’d grinned like mad at the newspaper photographers outside the town hall, ‘because they were going to snap away no matter what, so I figured I might as well look like I was having fun. My name’s ruined in Boston now, anyway!’ He was very funny about it. Then he went and fetched us a piece of wedding cake, and it was real chocolate cake. I hadn’t tasted anything like it for years. There was champagne as well, and some beautiful speeches, and then Kick came over and showed me what Billy had had inscribed on her wedding ring: ‘I love you more than anything in the world.’

  Oh, I nearly cried! Even though weddings are such happy occasions, they can be a bit sad, too, for the people not getting married. When I arrived home, I felt quite flat. Veronica had gone off to the Foreign Office to catch up with some work, which made me feel even more useless. What was I doing here in London? I didn’t have a paid job any more, and I wasn’t really needed to help Toby. Julia had found someone to come in four days a week for the housework, and said that she was teaching herself to cook out of Mrs Beeton. She also told me I was welcome to stay with them whenever I liked, but their cottage is tiny – only two bedrooms, each about the size of a shoebox – and it’s even more crowded now that Aunt Charlotte’s sent over all Toby’s books and gramophone records and so on from Milford. I know Julia and Toby aren’t exactly typical newly-weds, but I’d still feel in the way. I really ought to go back to Milford to help Barnes and Aunt Charlotte, but I confess, I keep putting it off. It’s mostly because if I were there, I’d never see Rupert at all. He spends most of his time travelling up and down the coast, but has the occasional meeting at Whitehall, and on those days, he can sometimes get away for an hour or two, after a bit of complicated rearranging of his schedule.

  That’s what happened today. We had luncheon at a little restaurant near Piccadilly, and then he came back to the flat. I dragged him onto the sofa (somehow, the sitting room seemed more respectable than my bedroom, even though we were what Aunt Charlotte would have called ‘completely unchaperoned’) and there was kissing. If truth be told, there was quite a bit more than kissing, although no actual clothes were shed. It’s a good thing Rupert’s such a gentleman, because there were moments when I felt really bold and reckless. At one stage, Rupert grabbed my hand, which had wandered a fair way, and gasped, ‘Have you done this before?’ And I snatched my hand back and turned scarlet and mumbled, ‘Sort of.’ I felt absolutely mortified, but he just said, ‘Oh, thank God one of us knows what to do,’ and put my hand back where it’d been. Soon after that, though, he had to leave, because he needed to be in Portsmouth by four o’clock. Which I suppose was all for the best – for the sake of his virtue, and whatever’s left of mine.

  Oh, I am so lucky to have found him! It’s true that things are a bit complicated because we hardly ever have any time together at the moment. But then, life is complicated – and at least being in love with Rupert is an enjoyable complication.

  16th May, 1944

  JULIA CAUGHT THE TRAIN UP to London yesterday morning to have her hair cut and make sure her house hadn’t been demolished by bombs in her absence. Then she came over to the flat so I could show her how to make a Spanish omelette out of dried eggs.

  ‘Hmm, I see,’ she said, studying my every move as though I were a Cordon Bleu chef demonstrating how to debone a quail. ‘Yes – I believe I’ve got it now.’

  ‘The most important thing is to remember to hold your breath when you open the tin of eggs, because they smell absolutely disgusting,’ I said. ‘But they don’t taste too bad, as long as you mix them properly. Next time, I’ll show you how to do scrambled eggs.’

  ‘That would be lovely,’ she said, as we sat down to our luncheon of Spanish omelette and salad. ‘One would think that reading the recipes ought to be enough, but the problem is, they’re written for people who already know how to cook. Still, it keeps Toby amused, watching me floundering about the kitchen. And then he gets to guess what his dinner is supposed to be, which is even more entertaining.’

  ‘I’m sure you’re not that bad,’ I said, ‘and he’s perfectly capable of making a sandwich if he doesn’t like it.’

  ‘Oh, he never complains,’ she said. ‘And you know, he’s much tidier than I am, and awfully good at washing up and things like that. And then dear old Mrs Bunn comes in to help with the cleaning and do the laundry, so there really isn’t all that much I have to do except cook . . . well, learn to cook. Toby’s far busier than I am, actually – appointments at the hospital at least twice a week, and exercises to do at home, and he tries to go for a walk each day. He was even talking about digging up the garden beds and planting some vegetables, although there’s not much point unless we’re going to be there to pick them.’

  ‘Won’t you be?’

  ‘Well, the doctors say he’ll probably only need one more set of skin grafts on his arm. Once they’ve decided they’ve done as much as they can, he’ll get his medical discharge from the RAF. Then we can come back to London. Or go to Milford, or Astley, or wherever he wants – I don’t mind.’

  ‘Has he talked about that? About his plans for the future?’

  ‘Oh . . . not exactly. I mean, it’s hard for anyone to plan anything, really, when this ghastly war just keeps going on and on. I know the Second Front is supposed to start any minute now, but who knows how long the fighting will go on after that.’

  ‘Does he talk at all?’

  ‘Oh, yes! Yes, we chat about the books we’re reading, and what’s in the newspapers, and Mrs Bunn always has some scandalous bit of village gossip to tell us . . .’ Julia trailed off, then glanced over at me. ‘Actually, I wanted to discuss that with you.’

  She put down her fork.

  ‘He does talk, but not about anything important – not about how he feels or abou
t what happened to him. And I can understand why he wouldn’t want to think about that, but Sophie, it’s festering inside him. He has the most awful nightmares – talks in his sleep, wakes up screaming, the lot. I’m afraid he’s going to start sleepwalking and really hurt himself. It’s not as bad when he takes sleeping pills, but it can’t be healthy to take as many as he does. I really believe he needs to have a good long talk to someone. Not me, it’s obvious he won’t talk to me. He sometimes gets these notions that he’s a burden – which is utterly ridiculous, I keep telling him that – so I think he’d feel reluctant to offload anything else upon me. But he’s always trusted you, Sophie. And he could tell you things, even horrible things, because you aren’t living with him all the time. You wouldn’t be constantly around afterwards to . . . to judge him, or whatever it is that he’s worried about.’

  I was reminded of Rupert saying Toby needed to ‘confess’.

  ‘Of course I’d be willing to listen to him,’ I said. ‘But I don’t think he wants to talk to me – or anyone else, for that matter. And we can’t force him to speak.’

  ‘Ah, but I’ve got a plan!’ said Julia eagerly. ‘You come down and tell him the Colonel desperately needs an account of what happened. Make up some reason – the Colonel’s trying to prove a certain group in Belgium is working for the Resistance or something. Tell Toby you’ll write everything down in that secret code of yours, and no one but you and the Colonel will ever know who said it.’

  ‘You want me to lie?’ I said. ‘To my own brother?’

  ‘It won’t be a lie if you do send it to the Colonel! He’ll back you up, you know he will. And you don’t have to tell me or anyone else any of the details. You can burn your notes afterwards if you want – although you’d be the only person who could possibly read them. The important thing is that Toby gets an excuse to talk about the whole thing.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said uneasily. Apart from the dubious morality of lying to someone for their own good, I wasn’t certain it would make Toby feel better. ‘I mean, even if he were to confide in me . . . I don’t think he’s ever going to revert to the cheerful, carefree boy we used to know.’

  ‘Oh, I’m not expecting the old Toby to return,’ she said. ‘I’m not even sure I want that person back –’ She caught my look. ‘And no, it’s not because I like having him all helpless and dependent on me. What I meant was that he used to be a beautiful, funny, self-centred child – well, I wasn’t much different – and now he’s grown up. I keep catching glimpses of how he might have turned out, if he hadn’t been tangled up in this horrible war. He still has a sense of humour, and he’s far more perceptive and considerate than he might have been otherwise. He has the potential to be such an interesting, compassionate man. But he’s been so terribly wounded, inside and out, and it’s only his outside scars that anyone’s tried to fix. Not that he’d ever consent to seeing a psychiatrist or someone like that –’

  ‘No, he wouldn’t,’ I agreed.

  ‘But he might speak to you,’ said Julia. ‘Please just think about it, Sophie. Even if all it might do is give him a decent night’s sleep, it’s worth trying.’

  She left that piteous note to reverberate around the kitchen for a minute, then changed the subject. Of course, after she left, I could think of nothing else but Toby. Still, I wasn’t at all sure I could persuade him to cooperate. He’d seemed so angry at me for so long, and if he found out I’d deceived him in this, he might never forgive me.

  On the other hand, was there really any danger of being discovered? Julia would never tell. And I did have a reputation within the family (not entirely deserved) for being scrupulously honest in all the little things in life, which made it easier for me to get away with the occasional whopping lie. And of course, I’d do anything to help Toby . . .

  So this morning, I came down here to the cottage and told my carefully planned story to Toby – and he believed me. The weather has been lovely, so we sat out in the garden, I with my shorthand notebook, he in a wicker armchair, under a flowering cherry that kept shaking its incongruous pink confetti across my pages. I’d deliberately made the Colonel’s ‘request’ vague, telling Toby to say anything he could remember, no matter how trivial, in any sequence he liked. But he seemed to find it easiest to start at the very beginning and go on in chronological order from there – in fact, after the first few halting sentences, the words began to pour out and he seemed to forget all about the Colonel. Apart from occasionally asking him to slow down, I didn’t interrupt, so the following is entirely Toby’s story, in his own words.

  Toby's Account of Events from May, 1942 to January, 1944; transcribed 16th May 1944

  I DON’T SUPPOSE THE COLONEL needs to know much about the plane? There wasn’t anything wrong with my Spit. It was just me. I was too slow. We were over Belgium, nearing the Channel, when a couple of Messerschmitts caught up with us. There was a tremendous bang and suddenly I was covered in glycol – that’s what they use to cool the engine. All I could think about was getting out before the whole thing blew up. I shoved back the cockpit hood, flipped the plane over and fell out. I’d never bailed out of a plane before, but I knew I wasn’t meant to pull the rip cord of the parachute straight away. I had to get clear of the planes – also, the longer I waited, the faster my drop would be, which would give me more time to hide on the ground before the German patrols arrived. I might have waited a bit too long, though. The chute opened with a horrible jolt, and what seemed like a few seconds later, I looked down and there were green fields looming up at me and then I hit the ground with an almighty thud.

  I think I was knocked out for a minute or so. When I came to and rolled onto my hands and knees, I could see a boy running towards me across a field. I unhooked my parachute and started gathering it up, and he dashed around, helping me. He was about ten, a little freckled towhead – he reminded me of Henry. He kept saying ‘Deutscher’ and pointing over at the road, and I heard dogs barking in the distance. The Germans were looking for me – for us, I suppose, because I knew at least one other plane in my squadron had been shot down. We hid the parachute under a hedge, and the boy tugged me away from the road, towards some houses on the other side of the field. But as soon as I put some weight on my right leg, I realised I’d done something to my ankle. Just sprained, I hoped, rather than broken – anyway, I found a stick and limped after the boy as fast as I could. We finally reached a little shed behind a farmhouse, and I sat down and took off my boot and my scarf and bandaged my ankle as tightly as I could. The boy ran off and came back with his older sister, who said the Germans were doing a house-to-house search, so I had to move. There was a ditch running alongside the shed, half full of stagnant water, and she told me to get into it and follow it till I reached the barn on the other side of the field, then hide in there. She thought that might throw the dogs off the scent.

  So I climbed down into the ditch and crawled all the way to the barn, and buried myself in a pile of hay in there. My ankle wasn’t looking too good by then and it hurt like hell, but then I remembered my brandy flask – you know, the one Henry gave me for my birthday. I’d been saving that brandy for an emergency, but I figured this qualified, so I drank the lot. Felt much better then. Just before it started to get dark, the boy arrived with an old shirt and some trousers, which was wonderful, because all my gear was wet through and reeked of ditchwater. He also said he’d found an RAF pilot lying dead outside the village, and showed me a silver charm and a letter he’d retrieved from the man’s pocket. Well, I didn’t need to read the letter – I recognised that four-leaf clover at once. God, poor old Alfie! He’d just got engaged, you know . . .

  Anyway, the boy said the Germans had driven off with the body, and that someone from the Resistance would come and collect me soon, to take me to a safe house. He was such a brave little boy – and it was a stroke of luck his family spoke French. The next morning, I was picked up by a farmer in a pony cart. I’d landed somewhere near Zeebrugge, but I’m not sure
which direction we travelled that day. I was starting to feel rather queasy. At the time, I thought it was all that brandy on an empty stomach, but it turned out I was coming down with something. Perhaps I’d swallowed some of the water in that ditch, or maybe it was sitting about for hours in wet clothes, I don’t know. The pony cart took a long, meandering route to avoid the main roads, and by the time we got to the safe house, I was shivering too hard to talk. Which didn’t exactly endear me to the poor people who lived there – they might have wanted to resist the Nazi occupation, but that didn’t mean they were willing to nurse some stranger through a bout of typhoid, or whatever I might turn out to have. They had a noisy argument about it in Flemish, while I sat in the attic, throwing up into a bucket. In the end, they decided to move me on.

  I don’t even know how we got to the next house, but I woke up in a cellar. I had a fever and couldn’t keep any food down. At one stage, a nurse came and gave me some medicine and strapped up my ankle. I think I was there a week, and then I was moved again. By then I could eat, and sit up, and must have been showing some signs of intelligent life. A man from the Belgian Resistance came and asked me some questions – who I was, which squadron I was from, that sort of thing. He said they’d have to wait till I could walk properly before moving me along their escape line to France. I gave him my watch to sell, because I was feeling pretty bad about these people having to look after me for so long. That was the only thing I had left. I’d given my silver flask to the boy who’d found me, and of course, my uniform had been taken away and destroyed. I remember thinking I’d be in real trouble if I got picked up by the Nazis. They’re supposed to treat any Allied servicemen they find as prisoners of war, but they just shoot any locals they don’t like . . .

  Well. I’d lost track of the date – it was June by then, I think – but I got moved again, to a farm outside Bruges. The stables had a hiding place under the floorboards, just big enough for a man to lie down in, but mostly I stayed in one of the stalls. The Germans had taken away all the horses. I practised walking up and down with a stick and I started to think I’d be on my way home soon. The Resistance people didn’t tell me any details of their plans and I never knew anyone’s real name – thank God – but I guessed this family was an important part of the escape line. There was a middle-aged man who’d been wounded in the last war, and two young women who I think were his daughters – one of them had a baby – and a nice old grandmother who brought me my food each morning.