She had discovered what mustard gas could do when he had finally been invalided home after Ypres in 1915. “I suppose I should be glad to be alive,” he told her wryly. Indeed, had he been older, he probably would have died. “These very young men have hearts that will take almost anything,” the doctor told her. But he was a shadow, grey and almost lifeless all the same. And so he had stayed all through the long years of the Great War, while others were dying in the huge futility of trench warfare. By the end, Violet scarcely knew a single family who had not lost someone.
The war brought one other great change. So severe was the shortage of men at home that women stepped in to do their jobs – and were welcomed. They worked in the munitions factories and on the railways, they served behind counters, worked the telephones, toiled and dug. The Suffragettes had given up their campaign for the duration of the war; their service, it soon appeared, made their case for them. As people saw what women were doing, even the most stalwart conservatives found their own opposition to women’s votes melting away. Violet knew her cause had finally triumphed when old Edward who had been taken ill and had to spend a few days in hospital told her: “The whole place was run by women, Violet! Porters, ambulance drivers, everything except the doctors. Very well run too.”
In 1917, with hardly a murmur against it, Asquith, the Prime Minister, gave women the vote, declaring: “They have earned it.”
The following year the Great War ended – and with it, Violet had supposed, the terrible loss of life.
Whether the great pandemic of Spanish ’flu at the end of 1918 was more dangerous than other influenzas, or whether it was just that, weakened after the long trauma of the war, people were more vulnerable, it was hard to know, but it spread right round the world with astonishing speed. The global death-toll in a six-month period was greater than that of the Great War itself. In England, more than two hundred thousand were estimated to have died. One of them was Henry.
Since then the memory of that winter had dissolved into a grey blur out of which his poor, pale, ravaged face arose to haunt her. And again and again over the years she had asked herself: should she have let the others do the marching? Why had she given such pain to the child who was gone?
As she sat alone in the house while Helen went for her walk it was hard to come to terms with the grim thought that she had not confessed to her daughter. Helen had not had her premonition alone. Violet had had it too.
Helen walked through Sloane Square then turned up Sloane Street towards Knightsbridge and Hyde Park. It still felt odd to look at the familiar streets which she remembered as a débutante and see all the windows taped against bomb blast and the piles of sandbags by every doorway. The place seemed strangely quiet, like a Sunday.
As she passed Pont Street, a few drops of rain began to fall. By the time she was nearing Knightsbridge it had turned into a shower. To escape it she dived left into the Basil Street Hotel where she waited, gazing out of the window as the raindrops streamed down it, feeling sad.
She had no wish to die. She did not think she particularly deserved it. Hadn’t she at least tried to serve some purpose all her life? She had always known that her mother was right to serve a cause, despite what the others had said. When she had been taken away to live at Bocton as a child her grandfather had tried to pretend that her mother was mysteriously called away, too, though she had known perfectly well from her brothers that she was in gaol. This had not detracted from the respect she had felt for the old man: she could see from the obvious respect that everybody had for him that apart from his disagreement with her mother his opinions were probably sound. Sometimes, having nobody else to talk to, he had discussed the issues of the day with the little girl as they sat in the old walled garden or went to look at the deer. And even now she could hear him, as clearly as if he were beside her, explaining gently:
“It’s the socialists who are the real danger to us all, Helen, far more than the Germans. Mark my words, that will be the battle you face in your lifetime. Not only in Britain either, but in the whole world.”
Had he lived just a little longer, to the end of the war, how right he would have seen his words to be. The Bolsheviks. The Russian Revolution. She had still been at school when these horrors occurred. The Tsar and all his children murdered. A wave of sympathy and disgust had passed across all Europe. As the horror of the war and the misery of the great flu epidemic receded, the Bolshevik menace was spoken of whenever people turned to serious conversation. Could such a thing, as the Bolsheviks themselves confidently predicted, come to Britain too, destroying everything she knew and loved?
In a way – her mother said so, everybody said so – a revolution in English society had already begun. The death duties introduced by Lloyd George had been cutting a swathe through the upper classes. There had been large sums to pay when old Edward had died at Bocton. Numerous gentry and aristocrats were being obliged to sell up. The coalition government during the war had been continued afterwards, on and off, but with the great difference that when the recently enfranchised troops returned demanding a better post-war world there had been a huge increase in the Labour Party supported by the Trades Unions. To many people’s astonishment, in 1924 the Labour leader Ramsay MacDonald had even briefly been called upon to form a government. “If it’s not a bloody revolution, we shall just be dispossessed,” Violet had predicted.
The answer for some, she knew, was to ignore the whole thing. For many of her friends, there had been a sense of adventure in the air. The war was over. Those who had survived were relieved to be alive; those, like her brother Frederick, who had been just too young to fight, were anxious to prove themselves by doing something daring. And parents, if they could, wanted to reassure themselves that the world was returning to something like normality. Helen had been a débutante. It was rather quaint really, but she understood that her mother’s sorrow about the death of Henry had made her determined to give her other children a good time if she could. She had wondered if her past as a militant might have put the other mothers against her, but it seemed all that was forgotten. Besides, handsome young Frederick Meredith was considered an asset at any party, especially with the shortage of men after the losses of the war. His little sister Helen therefore, as the saying was, “came out”.
What a time she had had! There had been the traditional balls of course, but the new generation of 1920s débutantes were less demure than their mothers had been. Young men were allowed to take liberties which would have been almost unthinkable before. Helen knew scarcely any girls who would go “all the way”, but that did not mean they wouldn’t go a very long way indeed. She was pretty – she had her father’s good looks, together with the bright blue eyes and golden hair of her Bull ancestors. She was vivacious and intelligent. By the end of her season she had received three offers of marriage, and two of them would have been very good matches indeed. The only trouble was that the young men didn’t interest her. “They’re insipid,” she complained.
“You could still do worse,” her mother had said weakly. “I just want you to be happy.”
“You chose an interesting man,” Helen had pointed out.
But where to find one? There had been the Frenchman. She had met him thanks to Frederick who had taken up flying. He had flown her across the Channel to an aerodrome in France, and it was there, one astonishing summer day, that she had met him. He had a plane. And a château. She had spent a wonderful summer. Then it had been over. There had been other interesting men, since then. “But the interesting men don’t seem to marry,” she had confessed to her mother sadly. What was she to do with her life?
“You’re still a flapper, Helen,” her brother Frederick would tease her affectionately. “Always looking for excitement.” A flapper – that was what they had called the bright young girls of the 1920s.
“Why shouldn’t I?” she demanded. “You obviously do.” Frederick, having gone into the army, looked every inch the dashing hussar, but she suspected that his occasio
nal disappearance to Europe might have something to do with a more secret life. But it was not only a question of excitement: she wanted a cause to which she could devote herself.
The General Strike of 1926 had seemed to offer such a chance. “This is the revolution that those Bolsheviks have been waiting for,” Violet had announced. “We’ve got to beat them.” Helen did not know anyone who thought otherwise. How they had all worked during those heady days! She had acted as a conductor on a bus driven by a young man from Oxford she knew. They had operated the 137 route from Sloane Square to Crystal Palace. Other people ran the underground and the other public services. Thank God, she had reflected, that this was Britain, where people behaved decently. There had been little violence. The strike had been broken. And the whole country, unions and all, had drawn back from the awful communist threat.
After that, she seemed to drift. She had found a job as a secretary to a Member of Parliament. It was hard work, but she enjoyed it and felt she was doing something useful. When it came to the larger issues however, she experienced a growing sense of disappointment. There were great tasks to be accomplished. She was inspired by the aim of the League of Nations to rid the world of war – but saw it crumble. She watched in admiration as America responded to the Depression with the New Deal. Yet no great initiatives for a new world were coming out of the Mother of Parliaments. Under the canny but uninspiring Prime Minister Baldwin, there seemed only one strategy: to muddle through and keep the British Empire – only held together by goodwill – out of trouble. Helen’s passionate nature secretly rebelled. “You had a cause to serve,” she would tell her mother. “I haven’t got one.”
It was Frederick who provided it
When Hitler had come to power in Germany, like many people in the western world Helen had supposed that it was probably a good thing. “His supporters are unpleasant,” they agreed, “but he does seem to be a bulwark against communist Russia.” As he strengthened his rule and ugly rumours about the character of his regime spread, she had chosen to discount them. As for his military intentions, when the rogue politician Churchill, still disappointed to be out of office, started his campaign for rearmament, she had believed her own MP. “Churchill’s insane,” he said. “Germany can’t fight a war for twenty years.”
During one of his fleeting visits to London, Frederick disabused her. He had been sent as a military attaché to the British embassy in Poland the year before and his assessment was blunt. “Firstly, Churchill is right. Hitler is rearming and means to go to war. Secondly, my dear Helen, this is news only to the English at home. Every embassy in Europe knows it perfectly well. Every military attaché, including myself, has been filing detailed reports which London is studiously ignoring. Our attaché in Berlin, a brilliant man, has just been sacked for reporting the German troop movements that he saw. Those politicians who know this either think the public won’t stand for the truth, or have persuaded themselves they’ve done a deal with Hitler. The whole thing’s a scandal!”
“The MP I work for says Germany won’t be ready to fight for twenty years,” objected Helen.
“That’s the received wisdom. It’s based on a first-rate report done by the War Office. There’s only one problem – the report was written in 1919.”
She had started to gather information after that. Friends in the army, a diplomat she knew, even one or two sympathetic people in Westminster had given her facts which corroborated her brother’s charges. She and Violet built up a detailed dossier. Some of their friends thought them a little mad; others, remembering Violet’s militant past, smiled and shrugged. Among the other secretaries in Westminster, most of whom came from families like her own, her cause became known as “Helen’s crusade”, and she soon discovered that several of them had relatives in the diplomatic corps who felt the same way. “You should talk to your boss about it like I do,” she would say. “After all, he is in Parliament and you see him every day.” Once she even tried to speak to the Prime Minister herself. When the abdication crisis of 1936 had come up, and everyone else was talking about the new king and Mrs Simpson, Helen shrugged. “I’m sorry for him, of course,” she declared. “But it hardly matters if Hitler is going to invade.”
It was not surprising that there were complaints. “You’re upsetting people,” her boss explained to her, “and agitating the other girls. I must ask you to stop.”
“I can’t,” she said.
She was out of a job. She looked for another in Westminster but found nothing. She decided to travel and spent some months touring on the Continent, in particular in Germany. She intended to write a little book about it, but within a month of her return, the great crisis of Europe had begun and, just as she had feared, the country drifted towards war.
When it came, she had volunteered to drive an ambulance. It was frightening, of course, and dangerous, but she did not mind. “I’m single, mother,” she had remarked the previous week. “So if someone has to get killed, it really may as well be me.”
London had never seen anything like Hitler’s terrible Blitzkrieg before. Many had predicted that a war with modern weapons would bring the world to an end and, she supposed, if it went on long enough the whole capital would be in ruins. But she did not think about that as she went about her work. She couldn’t.
As the rain slackened off she left the hotel and turned towards Hyde Park. Usually she liked to walk right across past the waters of the Serpentine, but today she decided to turn left and continue westward past the Albert Hall and into Kensington Gardens.
In many ways the park with its quiet avenues of trees and its wide open lawns retained its Stuart and eighteenth-century air. As she caught sight of the small brick palace of Kensington sitting so discreetly under the pale sun, with the lawns in front of it shining softly from the rain, Helen could almost imagine that at any moment a horse-drawn carriage might emerge from it and roll away into the trees. Yet looking around, the rude sights of twentieth-century war were all too evident. There were trenches everywhere. She passed an anti-aircraft gun. As she came on to the open ground by the Round Pond in the middle of the gardens, she could see barrage balloons by the dozen, tethered in the blue sky. Most incongruous of all, an entire section of the open lawn had been converted into an enormous cabbage patch. “Dig for Victory!” Londoners had been told. Food supplies would be ensured during the war, even if every inch of park had to be turned into a vegetable allotment.
It was time to turn back. Helen allowed her eye to run round the quiet scene, drinking it in for perhaps the last time. She sighed. She was sorry that she might not see it again.
EVENING
Though the huge glass palace itself had burned down four years before, the area was still called Crystal Palace. From Percy and Jenny’s little garden, you could see right over London. Now they stood with Herbert and Maisie, gazing across to the distant line of Hampstead.
The sky in the west was red, a presage of things to come. In the east, the dark shadow of night was spreading in from the estuary. As for the huge sprawl of the metropolis which filled the whole basin, the black-out was being rigidly enforced. The usual glimmering of a million tiny lights was absent. London was a vast blackness waiting to become invisible.
There were just the four of them. Herbert and Maisie had never had any children. Percy and Jenny’s son was in the army; their daughter married and living down in Kent. Although Maisie and Jenny had never been close, they had learned to get on together and that afternoon, to take their minds off the Blitz, the two women had gone to see Gone with the Wind. The previous night they had stood together in the garden, watching as the waves of planes droned over London again and again, and the red fires lit up, flickering here, bursting out there into great clouds of burning cinders that soared up into the blackness of the night sky. The East End had got it again last night. Where would the bombs land tonight?
“Will you be staying here?” Jenny asked.
“No, not tonight,” Maisie replied.
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p; “Time to be off,” said Percy.
He and Herbert, now in their sixties, worked at nights down at the little Fire Brigade substation nearby, helping out. “I couldn’t just wait around and do nothing,” Percy had explained. Maisie felt that Herbert should have stayed with her. “But it’s good for them to be together,” Jenny had told her.
“Right then,” said Herbert. “Let’s be going.”
At six o’clock sharp, Charlie was off again. Before he went, though, there was an argument. The subject had always been the same ever since the three older children had been evacuated, and Ruth had refused to leave Charlie. Every night he worried about her and the baby.
“Where are you going to spend the night, then?”
There were three places where Ruth could go. The first was the shelter. In central London this would probably have meant the tube or some other place underground. But out at Battersea it simply meant a converted building, well sandbagged, where people could go and share the danger. A near miss and you were protected; a direct hit and you all died together. “All according to preference,” as Ruth said drily. The second choice was an Anderson shelter. The Anderson shelters were quite effective. Essentially a semicircular tube of corrugated iron, just high enough to walk into stooped, it could be half buried in the garden, sandbagged, and covered with soil. So long as a bomb did not fall directly on top of it, the chances of survival in an air raid were rather good.
The narrow back garden of the house the Doggets rented below Lavender Hill had already been put on a wartime footing. First, beside the little concrete path, the grass had been dug up and a vegetable patch substituted. Next to that was a pen with three chickens which provided eggs. Beyond that was the Anderson shelter.
Ruth hated it. “I just can’t bear being cooped up in that little thing,” she complained. “It’s damp anyway, so it’s bad for the baby,” she insisted, though Charlie found it perfectly dry. But he knew Ruth: obstinate as could be. So that left the third choice, which was to stay in the house, under the stairs. Charlie had sandbagged the back door and window. It was as safe as he could make it. “If the bomb’s got our names on it, there’s nothing you can do anyway,” she had told him – and six out of seven Londoners felt the same way. But even so, he still tried to persuade her into the Anderson shelter each night before he left.
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