A Footman for the Peacock

by Ferguson,Rachel

  Was it a pity that England couldn’t have a reshuffle and join up with the Germans, so sterling, so kindly and so tedious? But there it was. The nations had picked sides as in party games and had apparently got struck so for good. But then, of course, there was Hitler, who prevented everyone from thinking clearly or fairly. While Hitler lived and flourished it wasn’t safe to value Ortrud in public. . . .

  And would there be wars any more if all girls and boys all over the world were sent abroad to finishing schools? Already, one was not mentally at war with one German in the person of poor old Ortrud. Multiply that instance by millions — and the citizens of the future would be at peace. But finishing schools, and therefore understanding, were costly, and so still the perquisite of the middle and upper classes, which virtually left tolerance in the hands of the already educated.

  And would it answer? Wouldn’t it perhaps tend towards keeping the masses from knowing their place? A British footman who took to shrugging his shoulders and spreading his hands at guests at the front door would be quite awful, so would a Devonshire cook who cried ‘Corpo di Bacco!’ instead of ‘drabbit it!’ and dieted one on spaghetti instead of roast beef. And if there were no wars it would throw the Services out of work. . . .

  There was one Italian girl at the Villa Cyclamène, a luscious creature with gummy brown eyes, who ate salted melon seeds that were sent her in large envelopes bearing the Florentine postmark. But at seventeen, Cecilia (pronounced Chaychillia) had looked so mature and was so very nearly about to become engaged by her parents to an officer on the staff of the Count of Turin, that as a contemporary pupil it became impossible to believe in her, let alone make friends. Cecilia was lazy, vehement and noisy. She kissed the most improbable people on the mouth when she wasn’t lying on sofas in Hogarthian décolletage and abusing them in a loud, manly baritone, and her taste in dress was only to be equalled by Ortrud’s, and ran to immense earrings in sky-blue mosaic, while Ortrud had once gone all Scottish on the Villa, and made herself a synthetic tartan skirt, well pleated round the stomach, ending in a flounce, and dipping two inches in front. (That was the term they had been reading Walter Scott.) Impossible to classify Cecilia. As an Italian, she belonged to one of those rather betwixt-and-between nations which were, by rumour, decorative and tourable, and not of quite sufficient importance to give any trouble to anyone. Garibaldi, apparently, had been Italy’s full-stop in high endeavour, and the rest was tickets at Cook’s. There was Mussolini, of course, but somehow, for at least a year, he had begun to assume the proportions of an understudy, in spite of the way in which he stood in Italian excavations for The Movietone News and made strong-man faces and flap-mouths, and designed himself headgear that reminded one of The Chocolate Soldier.

  ‘My dear Lieu—ten—ant Bu—mer—li’

  hummed Margaret Roundelay reminiscently.

  2

  Elbows on table, Margaret gazed out of the window.

  Wars and rumours of wars, and as far as the rested eyes could see, green-ness, of lawn and topiary work, of paddock and walled garden, browning leaf, tangle of michaelmas daisy and dewfilled dahlia, and apple trees (which needed spraying and pruning) the life of the place broken like a drowsy sentence by the sudden exclamation of pigeon, gunshot, or mowing-machine, by the screech of a peacock or Hasty’s excited bark that meant a sighted squirrel flicking up a tree, or the raucous proclamation of a cock. How one loved every inch of it. But that must not be spoken of. Instead, to interested parties, one drew attention to the house’s limitations and inconveniences, gratefully sheltering behind the undeniable.

  3

  Margaret abandoned for further consideration her letter to Ortrud and began to express herself to Claudine Vernet. She hoped it wasn’t going to be too risqué, but you never knew, in French, and found yourself, according to Claudine, becoming quite brilliantly improper over such unpromising material as the news that, yesterday, you had tried in Norminster market to buy a mackerel for your cat — and if one had wanted to be that sort of person, thought Margaret laboriously, one couldn’t have achieved it in a lifetime. She had been too proud to query the answering scream of laughter with which Mademoiselle Vernet had received this domestic detail, and it would be no good asking anyone at Delaye what Margaret had said because Roundelay French was too straightforward to know the answer, and if it were too awful, and they should know it, they mightn’t tell one. Well . . . if Margaret was now rated as an improper wit in Versailles, it was too late to do anything about it. But one could at least keep off the subject of animals. And fish.

  ‘On parle,’ [wrote Miss Roundelay, for she had been to a first class Swiss finishing-school,] ‘encore d’une guerre, et je me doute point que vous avez aussi entendue parler de cette dommage. Si c’est possible, j’espère vous revoir en Angleterre whenever you want to come over. (Faire la traversée?) Mon frère qui est au Lycée Agricultural nous assure que les nouvelles d’une guerre sont un canard, et que nous avons étés fooled (blagués?) trop longue depuis le dernier Crise. (He means that if there’d been going to be a war there would have been one months ago and that this is all bluff.) Apart from that, on ne dirait qu’il y a de malheur, chez nous, et la vie passe en paix. Pour moi, je suis maîtresse de Guides au village, et nous rencontrons à l’Institut des Femmes. Le travail est interessant, et j’ai dix-sept enfants et jeunes filles dans mon bataillon. Pour la reste, je m’occupe au jardin, etc:, ou il y en a toujours beaucoup à faire, à cause que nous manquons un (sufficiency) des jardiniers . . .’

  A distant, vibratory booming came to the ears of Margaret. Musgrave, sounding the dressing gong. She rose instantly, stacking her papers with system. It was a dull letter, and she knew it; she had been about to tell Claudine that sometimes she and her father went out shooting rabbits, but that suggested the cat and mackerel, and probably meant something you didn’t speak about, as well. Claudine said the English had no humour, and that the Englishman’s idea of seeing Paris was to buy rude post-cards in the gutter, and the Englishwoman’s to buy pink suspenders at the Galleries Lafayette, and eat, whenever possible, at English tearooms, when they had finished getting lost and being rescued by taxis.

  As she dressed before a heart-shaped Chippendale mirror, which presented her reflection as a steely blur upon which were super-imposed mysterious brown smears (father would know how to treat that), Margaret wondered what Claudine would have made of her own younger sister.

  Angela had missed boarding- and finishing-school life. Too sensitive, they said. Yet she seemed to be physically up to standard. Angela was a Roundelay, with a misleading appearance of fragility, whereas Margaret herself was a Calcott, like the aunts, mother’s sisters, tall and stock size, with good figures.

  4

  The sensitive mechanism of Angela was a cloud upon the unemotional happiness of her mother and father, and against which they had fought for years, admitting at last a partial defeat by sending her on visits to other counties, and to relations, though never, thanks to her great-aunt Sapphire’s spirited and still untarnished account of that ménage, to Crystal Dunston, in Kensington, a decision in which Maxwell Dunston gloomily but unhesitatingly concurred.

  Angela at the moment was at the Cloudesleys, which seemed to be considered suitable for her, possibly because she was not overhandled with solicitude at Cloudesley Hall. Nobody expected grandparents to understand their grandchildren. The older generation had inevitably skipped important points about the younger, and there could be, Margaret quite saw, some restful element in the kindly obtuseness of age. Sending Angela about to stay with relations, whether in London or the next county, was a parental shot in the dark, and quite a successful one. And Angela wasn’t missing very much, except Delaye itself. The Roundelays in these days could no longer entertain on a large scale, and though the country tradition of keeping open house remained, the doors were not so much open as perpetually ajar, which just meant stray requests from London friends who’d lost their way or were wanting to be put up or were ‘p
assing through’, or near neighbours whose boilers had burst or cooks walked out on them. Even now, at Delaye, luncheon and tea were anybody’s meals, and neighbours put their heads in for a cup from four o’clock onwards, if, in the summer, the Roundelays were eating in the lounge hall for its coolness. What with these, and the inevitable motor out of water or petrol, plus ignorant or impertinent trespassers to whom a notice of Private on gate or pale meant anything on earth (including the hope of satisfying every one of their bodily requirements) but its actual significance, the avenue and drive were seldom deserted for long.

  . . . Of course, if there should be a war, Angela would come back for good. And it wasn’t, her sister thought, as though there were anything the matter with her. Doctor Elmslie had said himself that, physically, he could find nothing wrong . . . it would be interesting to see what a war was really like. Margaret had been one year old in 1914, and even Stacey only three. But she had found that, however accurate ‘the survivors’, they were no real good, because everybody saw events from their own angle.

  5

  For two years, while Europe simmered, Margaret Roundelay had set herself, coolly and impartially, and with that efficiency which, combined with her standing in the neighbourhood, had made her a successful District Superintendent of Guides who must be addressed as ‘Madam’, to discovering what she could about the last war.

  She emerged at the end of all her study of war literature, whether horrific (My home was in Hamburg), scandalous-revelatory (The Guards Want Powder) or sentimental (Sergeant Sally) with the conviction that only the experienced could give an idea of those times. Horrors, tactical blunders, and sentiment were of every epoch . . . and all these books and publications were probably just as unreliable as history books.

  She was to find that all the ‘survivors’ coloured their accounts by the way they themselves had been affected. The great-aunts, for instance: aunt Jessie’s version of the Great War was that it had almost caused her to lose her faith, and it was no good asking her if there’d really been food queues at the Norminster shops, because God, so to speak, stood in every one of them. To aunt Sapphy, on the other hand, the 1914-18 affair was centred in the considerable amount of ‘attention’ that she herself received at regimental dances at the Assembly Rooms. Aunt Kathleen Calcott’s impressions had consisted mainly of boredom.

  ‘You see, my dear, aunt Helen and I were still girls, at a pinch, and we weren’t the type of young woman who made capital out of the situation, and gold-dug officers on leave and wangled presents, and so on. To heaps of girls the war was the time of their life, but it was usually the wrong type of girl. We just saw fewer men than ever, and wound bandages at depots and went to working parties at friends’ houses, just as my mother did in the Boer War. I think we all resented the war and the way it was crabbing our chances. Only, there again, that was a thing we were too decent or too stupid to discuss openly. Then, too, we didn’t feel really “of” the war because we had no near relatives at the front. That gave most women some standing and dignity; but all we got was the petty, obstructive, limiting side of it; we just had a rather thin time that wasn’t the least ennobling or heroic — things like not having enough sugar, and people bringing their own saccharine to tea-parties. Oh, it was deadly, seeing nothing but brownish stodge in the bakers and not a piece of icing to relieve it! We were never in much danger, though we did get a piece of shrapnel through our little conservatory window in Hereford Square, and we were never hungry, only dissatisfied and bored with our vittles — a most ignoble state of being, and even that wasn’t a voluntary sacrifice, but rationing, though many of us would have gone without far more, as a gesture. Only it was a gesture that wasn’t necessary, and one didn’t want to be holier-than-thou.’

  Aunt Helen Calcott, always more direct and pungent, wrote to her niece:

  ‘Yes, it was boring. I’ve got to admit that I’ve forgotten huge quantities of what really did happen. Can’t even remember any eminent deaths except poor little Prince John, and some actor-managers you never saw, two of whom were a national loss and one a blessed release! (never believe his biographers: he was terrible, poor heart!) The theatres havered about opening because of the man-shortage, and then all opened with a bang, got on somehow, and remained open for the duration. Can’t remember one single war play, but only several revues, including Business as Usual (one of the then catchwords) and The Bing Boys series at the Alhambra.

  ‘We were in the upper circle on the day Peace was signed and Violet Loraine made a speech, ending, “This is the most wonderful day since the world began”, which struck me as slightly excessive even at the time, though we all cried a bit and everyone was shouting.

  ‘It’s extraordinary, but I can’t remember one single war Christmas; we must have had turkey, and been somewhere, but it’s a complete blank. Auntie K. thinks Brighton, once, but I do remember running out into Hereford Square in my nightdress to see a Zeppelin at 2 o’clock, a.m. and they did look like the descriptions you’re wading through. Large aluminium cigars. And we had a houseparlourmaid who always hid under the side-board, in raids.

  ‘My memories of Mafeking Night are far more vivid than they are of Armistice Day, though I was only in my teens, then. But I do remember a lorry going down past South Kensington station full of yelling workmen and girls, and digging out bunting from the boxroom left over from God knows when (Queen Victoria’s Jubilee, I should think!) and that, as I unfurled it on the balcony, almost weeping with emotion, a blizzard of moth’s eggs fell out of it on to a tradesman, and that he looked up and called out, “Oh well . . . they say blessings come from above”, as he dusted off his joints, which made me laugh till I cried.

  ‘Yes, I dimly remember there was a scandal about the Panjandrum you mention — tendency to sit about longer than time allowed with Mdlle from Armunteers — and of course one can never forget or forgive that the income tax was 6s. in the £. Everyone said the country couldn’t stand it, but of course we cursed, paid and did. N.B. Are we the most splendid and adaptable people on earth or just bovine and minus initiative?

  ‘I think the worst features of the war were the jokes, some of the songs (including “Tipperary”) and the female hearties in uniform. They were an innovation, and the plague of the newspapers for quite eighteen months or more. They were largely led by elderly horrors and horse godmothers with cropped hair, whose fronts were so flat that at a distance you didn’t know if they were coming or going. The Press was all over them: Brave Women, Our Gallant Girls, etc.

  ‘I have a retrospective suspicion that quantities of ’em went that way as an opportunity to express a latent masculinity, and that the fluffy-wuffies jumped at the chance of getting away from Home and Mother. I think they were all perfectly harmless, only offensive. I saw three of the typical ones at close quarters, and they made their girls, whom they called ‘The Men’, address them as ‘Sir’. To me, this completely cancelled out the good they were doing (if any), the example they were setting to England (if any) and their public spirit (as before). Most of them weren’t gentlewomen — they seemed to gravitate more to the Red Cross and the V.A.D.’s.

  ‘About the air-raids: I frankly enjoyed them. I felt that, for once, we were really taking a hand in the game. I don’t mind admitting that the first three went to my knees, but after that I was stimulated. They weren’t very numerous, as they will be, next time, or very serious, though the Press did what our cook calls “create alarming” at women and children being killed — as though the Germans could see what they were aiming at, at that height! But it was a popular bit of anti-German propaganda, of course.

  ‘Don’t think, by the way, that I object to women in uniform. I don’t. And in the next war you’ll find that the old exhibitionists will have been largely weeded out and a fresh crop arisen which takes the service idea more as it should be taken, and not as a maladjusted challenge or an ogle to men.

  ‘Yes, it’s perfectly true about women giving white feathers to men (including Staff
officers in mufti and commissioned ranks home on leave!). The officious bad taste and worse manners of it as coming from a sex which by its numbers alone is completely surplus makes me curdle to this hour!’

  Lady Roundelay told her daughter: ‘Well, you see, I hadn’t been married very long and was too busy having all of you to take much notice of what went on. There was, I believe, a shortage of potatoes, but of course we didn’t feel it, here.’

  Margaret’s cousin, Major Dunston, contributed: ‘Well, I was all through it, and the thing I remember most clearly was being unable to open a tin of veal loaf from Fortnum and Mason’s when I hadn’t had a bite for fourteen hours because the field kitchen bogged down in a turnip field. Hated it all? Of course I did, but I never had wanted to go into the army. I should have joined up in any case, but only for the duration. I’ll kick a fellow in the backside with the best, but doing him in out of a chemist’s shop isn’t my idea of a scrap. What the world needs badly is a return to the good old hand-to-hand combat: it’s cleaner, gives men a chance to prove themselves as individuals, and will make towards a survival of the fittest elements.’

  Musgrave, cleaning ‘his’ silver in the pantry, dusted a chair for Miss Margaret and told her: ‘The war years, for me, chiefly meant the death of my mother, Miss. We was very attached, very attached indeed, and when she went, I didn’t seem to care much what ’appened, except that I naturally wanted our side to win. I shall never forget Sir Edmund’s goodness in lettin’ ’er come to Delaye to be near me and to end ’er days in comfort, nor the constant kindness of ’er ladyship . . . you see, I wasn’t by no means a young man. I was forty-three, in ’fourteen, and under the Derby Scheme they didn’t call up the older men not for some years later and as a last resort. I went to the recruitin’ office, with Sir Edmund’s permission, before actually called up, being wishful to do my bit, as the saying went, and they rejected me for active service, but drafted me to an officers’ mess. I did put in for transfer to the Major’s regiment — I should’ve liked to have looked after the Major, ’e was only a Captain at the time — but that fell through. Well, I was with the —th for the duration, and never ’eard a shot, as you might say. The young officers was a very pleasant, affable lot, high-spirited and full of their jokes and what not, but I thought it a mistake to be so free with commissions as what the War Office was. ‘Temporary Gentlemen’ we called them, and it didn’t answer. They was uncomfortable, the N.C.O.s and privates didn’t like it, being very quick to note the difference, an’ averse to being ordered by one of themselves, and we upper servants don’t like it. They ’avn’t the manner, or the ’abit of authority: too stiff one minute, too free an’ easy the next. . . .