‘I wish I had a similar version for my parents – that I’m in charge of a general’s vegetable garden, perhaps.’
‘Letters home are difficult,’ she said.
‘They certainly are. But we’re here – in Paris. Let’s make the most of it.’
They had a perfect week together. Then they returned – he to the lines, she to the hospital. And the war continued.
Month after month she told herself that Harry could stand no more. How could he? How could she, for that matter? But she was a mile from the Front, and the convoys of wounded kept on coming in. She nursed amputees with gangrene, men who had been gassed, dying eighteen-year-olds calling out for their mothers.
The war should end, she declared to herself, before all the young men of Europe were dead or maimed. She could not go on helping to mend the results of this massive folly, looking after men whose only fault was that they were ready to carry out orders which should never have been given. Her heart was broken, so was her spirit and her nerve. Now she wanted what they all wanted, a quiet place to flee to, away from the sounds of guns, the smell of disinfectant, the pain of the wounded, the grief of men who had seen their comrades die. Sometimes, hopelessly, she saw all the soldiers, whether picking up girls in bars, or marching solidly up the road into battle, as so many walking dead. She had to fight these thoughts; she was a nurse, an Angel of Mercy, not the Angel of Death. Yet, as time wore on, she became, under a veneer of professionalism and cheerfulness, more hopeless for all of them, and increasingly desperate for Harry’s life. She knew from his eyes that he did not believe he could go on.
At night, lying in the hut which she shared with another nurse, she would tell herself that someone must survive this war. But so many she knew had died: Gerry Fitzgerald and so many, many more. Nearly every family had suffered a bereavement. Yellow telegrams from the War Office still came remorselessly into homes all over the country, announcing casualties and death. Elizabeth, watching the trucks of wounded coming in, knew that for each man who reached the clearing stations, then was brought on, and still survived, there was another left behind, dead. She feared for Harry; sometimes she found it impossible to believe he would survive.
Chapter Thirty–Eight
1916
Lily Strugnell and Elizabeth Armitage met again under a table in northern France during a raid on Amiens. Elizabeth was in her nurse’s uniform; Lily was in a pink chiffon dress and full stage make-up. She was a regular turn with a kind of semi-permanent concert party based at Amiens. She would arrive for a week, then go back to play in London theatres. The concert party had been the idea of Sybil Brace, formerly a London actress. It operated out of a series of huts, where Sybil, a kind of unofficial military impresario, organised tours of the base camps on the line. Initially the military had been very cautious about Sybil Brace – they distrusted a woman who always wore breeches, had been a suffragette and gone on two hunger strikes in prison. And yet – she was an officer’s daughter, the army knew, and evidently brave. They were also cautious about the prospect of her bringing attractive women – actresses, dancers and singers – near the troops. They feared loss of morale, or disorderliness, among the men. However, Sybil had intelligently negotiated her way through all these objections by the military. She managed to mount her concerts, which were a wild success.
It was December. Lily had been on stage in a hut in Amiens before a big audience of officers and men when the air raid began. The lights went out. The hut shook. There was a roar of alarm and fury from the men, who saw this attack behind the lines as an outrage. For the German attempt to blow up the railway line would involve, inevitably, the bombing of civilians. As the enraged shout went up, there was the crash of chairs overturning. Some broke out of the hut where the concert was taking place, while others instinctively flung themselves flat on the floor. That was when Sybil Brace dragged Lily under a table at the back of the stage. Harry and Elizabeth had been in the audience, and when the raid started this was where they had bolted for cover.
The bombardment continued shaking the building. A window shattered. There was dust everywhere. Elizabeth stared anxiously at Harry through the gloom, lit by flashes. He had rolled over to make room for Lily and Sybil in the shelter of the table.
Harry shook his head. ‘Only wood,’ he mouthed, pointing at the ceiling. It was true that if a wooden ceiling fell on the victims it would be less dangerous than masonry. Though it might catch fire, thought Elizabeth, still looking at Harry through the darkness. She heard Lily flat on the floor murmuring, ‘Oh God, please spare me. Spare us all, please God.’ Then she turned her head and said clearly, ‘Elizabeth Armitage, as I live and breathe – I hope. We can’t go on meeting like this.’
The bombardment ended. After a pause, what remained of the audience got to their feet and dusted themselves down. A soldier looked up at the ceiling, still intact, saying, ‘The bastards – there’s women and children out there.’ The men went off to look for them. Lily, Elizabeth, Harry and Sybil stood up and, still on the platform, stared round at the empty hut, the overturned chairs. It was very quiet.
Sybil broke the silence. ‘I’m relieved that’s over,’ she said firmly.
‘So am I,’ said Lily. ‘I was in danger of wetting my drawers.’
Elizabeth put her arms round Harry. He was white, and rigid with nerves. Lily was staring at them. Sybil muttered in her ear, ‘He’s had enough, poor fellow, he’s been at war for nearly two years.’ Then she raised her voice: ‘I’ve got a bottle of brandy in my desk.’
‘Get it quick, and give us one,’ Lily urged.
They sat on chairs on the stage, in candlelight, the dust of the bombardment settling round them. Elizabeth still had her arm round Harry, who sat, stiff as a ramrod, staring into space. The women, distressed for him, did not want to draw attention to his state. There was no shame in his condition, yet they knew he was ashamed by it. They talked, partly to give him time to recover himself.
‘Well, Elizabeth,’ Lily said, lifting her glass, ‘we meet again. It must be fate. How long have you been here?’
‘Since July nineteen fifteen,’ she said. ‘This is a little different from our last meeting at Chivering, you the gracious hostess, me the barely tolerated gaolbird.’
‘Or the meeting before that,’ Lily said. ‘You the innocent schoolgirl, me the sacked sweatshop worker – and now we both end up here.’ She pointed at the debris and overturned chairs, the broken glass. ‘I suppose you haven’t written any more plays, or been to gaol again?’
‘That seems like another world,’ she answered.
‘We’re even getting the vote, and scarcely notice,’ Sybil remarked. ‘But I suppose that struggle toughened some of us up, in a small way, for this one. Elizabeth and I are old lags. We met in prison,’ she explained to Lily. ‘And I acted in one of her Sunday plays once, in the old days.’
All the women noticed that Harry was beginning to relax. Sybil pretended to ignore his tension. There was pity on Lily’s face. Sybil spoke, to cover the silence. ‘When it’s over, women will have the vote. It might seem pointless now, but I suppose one day life will make some kind of ordinary sense again.’ It was a brave attempt at diversion but it brought many thoughts in its train. To all of them, except perhaps Lily, the war had now become an eternal present, like a stopped clock, the hands of which might never move on. When it ended, if they won, what would then be left for all of them?
Elizabeth asked quickly, ‘So you came out of retirement, Lily? I’ve been reading about your tours of the army camps, and that long season at the Coliseum.’
‘It seemed the only thing to do,’ Lily said, uncomfortably. She had told her husband that she couldn’t go on sitting at ease in the country when she felt her duty was to help in the only way she knew, by entertaining the troops, trying to keep them cheerful, showing them that she and the other civilians cared. But secretly she’d been pleased to have an excuse to get back to the stage.
Digby was being tak
en care of by the nanny, who had a nursemaid to assist her. Even the nanny’s deputy had a deputy, another girl from the village. This Lily pointed out bluntly to her husband when he tried to persuade her not to return to the stage. ‘Anyone can look after a baby,’ she said. ‘But there is only one Lily Strugnell.’ Gordon retaliated that she was not Lily Strugnell any more; she was Lady Stillwell.
Lily returned, ‘I was Lily Strugnell for a lot longer. If I’m going to help our boys in the forces, it’ll have to be as Lily Strugnell again. There’s no point in me rolling bandages or knitting socks when I can cheer up our brave boys by going back to the stage.’ She added piously, ‘We’ve all got to do what we can. There’s a war on.’
Gordon, ashamed of staying at home while others fought – and his two brothers had fallen – looked at her wearily. He did not want her to go back to the stage but could not produce a good argument against it. He felt very weak while Lily, desperate to get back to the stage again, was strong. She wanted to escape from Chivering. And she did, genuinely, want to show her concern for those ordinary young men, from ordinary streets like the ones she had grown up in, who had joined up and, in the grim phrase they used in those streets, ‘found out all about it’.
So Lily left Chivering. Since then she had played vast khaki-clad houses in London theatres, and toured the military posts of France and Belgium. She had heard plenty of gunfire; but never yet been under bombardment. Until now, at Amiens. Needless to say, she didn’t like it.
Lily, Harry, Sybil and Elizabeth left the entertainment hall after the raid and found a small estaminet in the town. They sat at the back, well away from soldiers getting drunk on rough red wine at the bar at the front of the café. Harry was silent, crumbling his bread on the red-checked tablecloth.
Lily and Elizabeth exchanged the news of the three years since they had met at Chivering House. ‘Well, I had the kid, the son and heir,’ said Lily. ‘Not an experience I’d recommend, by the way, in case you’re curious. Then, after a stint as the gracious hostess and lady of the manor, just as the county was slowly learning to overlook my past and deciding I was trying hard enough to deserve their support, if not their friendship, war broke out, as I suppose you noticed. So Lady Stillwell left the web and left the loom and took three steps across the room, phoned for a cab to the station, and suddenly there was Lily Strugnell again, wearing greasepaint and showing plenty of leg. A pint of stout and a paper of fish and chips to keep you going between houses, and oh my God, what a bleeding relief after all those sheep and cows and ladies telling me about the best way of putting lavender between the sheets.’ She paused. ‘I’m not cut out to be a lady, Elizabeth. I could do it all right. It was getting so you could hardly tell me from the real thing. But who wants to be the real thing? Not me, for one.’
Elizabeth smiled. ‘Everybody always loved you as you are.’
‘“I’m going to be an artiste”,’ Lily mimicked. ‘No – but a lot of artistes have married well and made a go of it,’ she said. ‘Look at Vesta Tilley. It just didn’t suit me.’
‘How did Gordon feel about your going back to the stage?’ Elizabeth asked.
‘He couldn’t say much about it. It was only patriotic to let me go. Not that he could have stopped me.’
‘And your son?’
‘He’s not mine,’ said Lily promptly. ‘He belongs to the Stillwells. He’s more of a commercial proposition than a boy – he’s got to be trained up to be a Stillwell, so that when he inherits the lot, he knows what to do. That’s even more important now Gordon’s two brothers are dead. Gordon will be Lord East when his father dies. Then Digby comes next. In his position, what will he want with a mother who’s a low, common music-hall star and doesn’t give a damn for the whole thing anyway? If,’ she added, ‘this war ever ends. If we win.’
The group at the table looked sadly at the soldiers at the bar. Elizabeth said soberly, ‘If we win. Then what?’
‘Then what, indeed?’ said Lily. ‘I wonder if things will ever be the same again. What about you, Sybil? And Harry? It’s a big question, isn’t it?’
They turned to eating a thin chicken stew. The noise from the bar end of the café increased. Some Irish soldiers began a sad song. A glass broke. ‘That’s the question all right,’ Harry said. His pallor was terrifying. There were black marks under his eyes. His nose was pinched.
Oh God, thought Sybil Brace, he already looks almost like a corpse. She said quickly, ‘Then – let’s answer it.’ She shouted, ‘More wine,’ continuing, ‘for myself, I see a country cottage in Surrey, where I was born. I shall have a cat, a friend, a garden with roses, marigolds, a lilac bush. There will be frost on the hedgerows in winter. In summer we’ll have tea on the lawn, under the apple tree. From there,’ she went on steadily, ‘I shall work, I shall act, often with Elizabeth, who will return to the stage. I shall write my memoirs. I may write a biography of Peg Woffington, the famous actress, you may or may not know, of the time of Charles II. That was the first time women were permitted on the stage.’
As she talked, she used all the charm and stagecraft she could muster to distract from Harry’s desolation. ‘Once this is over,’ she went on, ‘Constance Albury will put Elizabeth back in the company. But she may choose to write another play. Then another – aren’t I right, Elizabeth?’ She turned to Lily. ‘And you, Lily,’ she said, ‘what’s it to be – lady of the manor, star of the halls, or both?’
‘Lucky to have the choice, aren’t I?’ Lily said gaily. ‘One, or both, or something else – who cares? I don’t believe the halls are going to go on. I’d better get myself a gang of American jazz players and start singing jazz, jazz, jazz.’
‘Do you like jazz, Lily?’ asked Sybil. ‘I hate it.’
‘Well, I expect you’re more of the classical persuasion,’ Lily said tolerantly. ‘Yes, funnily enough, I love it. You wouldn’t think it, but I do.’
She began to sing: ‘Come on and hear, Come on and hear, Alexander’s Ragtime Band…’ Soon there was a figure in uniform at the badly tuned piano in the bar. The proprietress’s son, a boy of about fourteen, appeared with an accordion and threw himself into assisting with the accompaniment. After a while they were all singing, and they went on until two in the morning – two Welshmen sang ‘Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring’, Lily did another turn, some Australians sang ‘Charlotte the Harlot’. The boy with the accordion played ‘Tipperary’, and they all joined in. Three small men from the Lancashire Fusiliers sang ‘On Ilkley Moor Baht ‘At’. And, at last, Harry’s taut face began to relax.
Chapter Thirty–Nine
1917
Sam Stackpoole introduced Lily Billy Webber over lunch at his favourite Café Royal. ‘If you’re serious about working in nightclubs,’ he said before Billy arrived, ‘Webber’s the man you want to meet. He owns two. He’s a boxing promoter as well. And he owns a couple of racehorses. He’s done well. He comes from our part of the world, started out as a boxer. His parents used to run a boozer in Bethnal Green.’
‘You don’t like him, do you?’ Lily asked.
Sam stared at her. ‘Liking doesn’t come into it,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid of him, that’s what. People are.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘He’s got a smart way with the opposition,’ Sam reported. ‘But if you want to get nightclub work, he’s your man. Be nice to him.’
Lily had done two tours in France now, in huts, small theatres, once in the open air on a stage built the day before. She and the others – comedians, trick cyclists, actors in sketches – had entertained rows and rows of young khaki-clad men, some readying for battle, others who had just returned from it. She had grown accustomed to an audience of drained faces and tired, shocked eyes, which slowly forgot and yielded into smiles, welcome, acceptance.
At night, after the performance, she wondered often about warming the hearts of young men before yet another battle, or making them forget the last, when all of them, all too soon, would find themselves back at the Front
. Was she deceiving them, merely palliating the unbearable, making them think for a moment that everything was all right, when it was not all right, it was very wrong indeed? Those young, pale faces haunted her. Close to a million British troops had died in the futile static war along the Front.
Lily normally finished her act with the plangent ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning’. The men joined in, enthusiastically, but later, sometimes Lily wept. If Eddie had lived, she thought, might it only have been to die here? Though mercifully Lennie and Dan were alive. She was doing her duty. And the men were doing theirs. So why did it sometimes feel so wrong? Her courage now began to fail her. She had only had enough strength for two trips this year, each lasting three weeks. The rest of the time she took engagements in London theatres, a sea of khaki, interspersed, alas, with much mourning black.
She was intrigued, as she had told Elizabeth at Amiens, with the new music coming from America, and she wanted nightclub work, where she could sing ragtime and the new, faster, more complex rhythms. It was a move to escape from the old songs, the old world, this war, which went on and on. And that was why she had asked Sam Stackpoole to find her someone who could help her launch a new career, and why she was meeting Billy Webber. Though she might not have done it so soon after her recent return from France, had it not been for a very unpleasant visit: from Gordon’s Aunt Caroline.
Lily had hardly been back to Chivering since 1915. She kept a huge, warm, luxuriously furnished flat in a handsome building overlooking Regent’s Park. She did not spend the comparatively meagre allowance Gordon still gave her, but banked it in her three-year-old son’s name.
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