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The Summer House Party

Page 31

by Caro Fraser

‘My dear, we’re in such a state. I’ve spent most of the afternoon at the village hall. Daphne Davenport is the local billeting officer, and I’ve been helping her to organise the evacuees. Five hundred of them arrived today from some place called Lewisham. We have taken two boys, Colin and Sidney Jennings. Colin is eleven and Sidney is nine. They seem very lively, but they’re polite and clean. You wouldn’t believe the nonsense the village people talk about how London children are crawling with lice. I’ve put them in the nursery. I do hope Mrs Goodall and the other servants don’t make too much fuss about the extra work.’

  ‘It sounds as though you’ll be busy, certainly. I wonder if we shall have evacuees here? I haven’t heard anything.’

  ‘Not every place is getting them. You may be lucky. People seem prepared to do anything to avoid having them. Poor Daphne used to be a most welcome visitor in all the houses hereabouts, but being a billeting officer has transformed her into a figure of terror. She says that when her car approaches, people positively flee through side doors and gardens. The authorities have evacuated simply thousands of people, so they must be expecting bombs and gas raids any day. It’s all quite terrifying. I wish your mother could be persuaded to close up the house and come to the country. So much safer.’

  ‘Paul and I were just saying the very same thing. But she says she’s determined not to let Hitler disrupt her social life. It will take nothing short of a direct hit on Chelsea to persuade her to leave.’

  ‘Such changes. All the men seem to be joining up. Dan has taken a commission in some regiment or other. He can’t say where he’s being posted, of course, but I’ve told him if it’s anywhere convenient, he must come and visit whenever he’s on leave. I suppose Paul will be thinking of joining up?’

  ‘I imagine so. I suppose since he can fly a plane the air force will want him. Diana’s terribly upset because Roddy intends to train as a pilot. For some reason she thinks he’d be safer in the army or the navy. I can’t think why.’

  Sonia turned to see Colin and Sidney clattering downstairs, rucking the carpet and dislodging a carpet stair rod. ‘Oh dear, I’d hoped for a nice, long chat, but the boys are coming downstairs. I think I should go. Come over soon with Max, if you can. It’s been such an age. Goodbye.’ Sonia put down the receiver. ‘Boys, boys! You must not run everywhere. There are precious things in this house, and we must have no breakages.’

  Chastened, Colin and Sidney walked sedately through the house to the back, but as soon as they reached the rear door and freedom, they were off at a run, whooping and shouting.

  Lobb was in the kitchen garden, tending his tomatoes, when the boys appeared.

  ‘What’cher doin’?’ asked Sidney, in not unfriendly tones.

  Lobb straightened up and turned to look at Colin and Sidney. These must be the evacuees from London. Probably never seen so much as a lettuce growing in their lives. ‘I’m looking after these here tomatoes.’ The boys came closer to inspect the plants. Lobb picked two small tomatoes and gave one to each.

  ‘Thanks,’ said Colin. He indicated the tapering wigwam around which the runner beans had been trained. ‘What’s them?’

  ‘Beans,’ answered Lobb. ‘I expect you’ll be having some of them for your dinner tonight. I picked a whole basin for Cook not half an hour ago.’ Gratified to have an audience, Lobb led the boys along the beds, pointing out different vegetables. ‘Them’s radishes. Carrots. This here’ – he indicated a large area full of leafy green plants – ‘is potatoes. If you’re good lads, I might let you fork some up tomorrow. Like digging up treasure, nearabouts.’

  Colin and Sidney liked the sound of this. ‘What’s them ’uns with all the black stuff round ’em?’ asked Colin, pointing further down the garden. They moved along the path.

  ‘That’s celery.’ From the pocket of his overall Lobb produced his gardening knife with its keen, stubby blade, and bent down to saw off a couple of sticks. ‘The black stuff’s soot from the chimney. I piles it round the crown of the plant to bring it on.’ He handed each boy a stick.

  Gingerly Sidney bit off a tiny fragment, tasted it, and spat it out.

  ‘You won’t be spitting it out if the Germans come,’ said Lobb. ‘Might be all you have to eat then.’

  Colin, understanding the challenge, crunched reflectively. ‘Not bad. I never had that before.’ He eyed Lobb’s gardening knife. ‘That’s a nippy blade.’

  ‘Is that your dog?’ asked Sidney, who had caught sight of a small mongrel dog snoozing in the sun, tied to a fence post by a thin length of rope. When the dog saw Lobb and the boys it sprang to its feet, dancing about and tugging at the rope. Lobb looked at it mournfully.

  ‘Aye. My old dog died, and the farmer’s wife, she gave me one out of a litter they had. It was kindly meant, but my old dog was happy to lie in the sun and take his ease, and this ’un, he’s no more’n a pup, forever scampering about the garden and diggin’ and chasin’ things.’ He shook his head. ‘So I have to keep him tied up while I work.’

  ‘What’s his name?’ asked Colin.

  ‘I calls him Star, ’cause of the little mark he has – see there, just above his eye?’ Lobb cocked his head on one side. ‘Looks like a star to me, any roads.’

  ‘Star,’ breathed Colin. He crouched down and repeated the name coaxingly, and the pup leapt around in a frenzy of pleasure.

  ‘We could look after him for you,’ offered Sidney. He spoke casually, but his heart was beating hard. It had been the dream of his life to have a dog. His parents wouldn’t hear of it, not in their cramped two-up, two-down in south-east London.

  ‘Yes! An’ we could train him, an’ everything!’ added Colin.

  Lobb bent down and scratched the puppy’s ears. ‘You could, I s’pose.’

  Colin’s attention had been drawn by the sight of the barn at the end of the orchard.

  ‘Whose house is that?’ he asked.

  ‘Bless yer, that’s never a house. That’s the barn. Mrs Haddon’s husband – her husband as was – used it as somewhere to do his painting. He was a famous artist.’

  ‘Can we play in them trees?’ asked Colin, pointing to the orchard.

  ‘I don’t see why not,’ said Lobb. ‘Only don’t go climbing ’em. Them apples isn’t quite ready yet. You wait a week or two and you can help me pick ’em.’

  ‘Can we go in the woods, too?’

  ‘You can just about go anywhere, I guess. But stay away from the old well. That’s out of bounds for you lads.’

  Colin set off, shouting to his brother, ‘Bags I be the cowboy!’

  Sidney hesitated, feeling the need to consolidate matters regarding Star. ‘We’ll be back in a bit and take Star for a walk.’

  Lobb shrugged. ‘You can take him into the orchard with you, if you like. He can’t do much harm there. He needs a run about.’ He unfastened the rope from the pup’s collar, and Star bounded forward. Sidney laughed in delight and set off at a run towards the orchard, Star scampering at his heels.

  Lobb watched the boys and the pup haring through the orchard, dodging in and out of the trees. Then he shook his head and stumped back down the path to his work. Nice to have a bit of boy around the place for a change.

  Avril was in the nursery helping Effie pack her trunk for her return to school. Hearing shouting and laughter outside, she went to the window and saw Colin and Sidney playing in the orchard with the puppy from the farm. They were throwing him a stick, which he kept retrieving joyfully. It looked like fun. She regretted now having been horrid to the evacuees at lunch. She had thought she didn’t want strange children in her house, but she saw now that maybe it would be nice to have someone to play with.

  She turned to Effie. ‘I’m going outside to play.’

  She went to the boot room and fished around among the tennis racquets and galoshes until she found an old tennis ball, and then she went to the kitchen and begged Mrs Goodall for a bagful of the cherries which she had seen Lobb bringing in earlier.

  Colin and Sidney
’s laughter and chatter died away when they saw Avril approaching. They’d been told by their mum that they had to be polite to everyone in Mrs Haddon’s house, but so far Avril had been bossy and rude and they didn’t see any reason to be nice to her.

  Avril held out the bag. ‘Cook gave me some cherries. We can share, if you like.’

  Sidney regarded her mistrustfully, but gave a grudging nod. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘And I found this indoors. It’ll be much more fun for the puppy to chase than just a stick.’ She tossed the tennis ball to Colin, who grabbed it gleefully. He held it up, and Star began to jump for it. Colin threw the ball across the orchard, and Star took off at full pelt, hurling himself on to the ball and bounding back with it in triumph.

  ‘I’m gonna race him!’ exclaimed Sidney, and got to his feet. He glanced at his brother. ‘Ready?’

  ‘Ready!’ cried Colin, and launched the ball again. As soon as the ball left his brother’s hand, boy and dog raced after it, and a moment later both were tumbling on the ground, the ball bouncing between them, Star yapping excitedly.

  When the children had exhausted the pleasures of running through the orchard with Star, they cast around for other ways to entertain themselves.

  ‘Let’s go exploring,’ suggested Colin. ‘’There’s loads of places we haven’t been yet.’

  ‘What about that well?’ said Sidney, for whom any forbidden thing or place possessed inevitable attraction.

  ‘You’re not allowed to go there,’ said Avril.

  ‘D’you know where it is?’

  ‘Yes, but I’m not telling.’

  ‘If you don’t tell us, we won’t let you play with us no more.’

  ‘That’s right. And we’re looking after Star, so you won’t be able to play with him, neither.’

  Avril hesitated, then said, ‘All right. Come on.’

  She led them down towards the tennis court to the old well hidden by bushes near the path. Its stone sides were partially overgrown with ivy, and its mouth had been covered with a circular wooden lid which had been roughly nailed to two wooden battens on either side. Colin tugged experimentally at one side of the lid, and the rusted nails gave slightly.

  ‘Come on,’ he said to his brother. ‘Let’s find something to push it up with.’

  Avril watched as the boys searched around for something strong to act as a lever. They found a stout-looking stick and after much pushing they managed to prise one side of the lid from its batten. Then it was the work of a moment to unhinge the other. The three children slid back the cover and bent over, looking down into the dark depths.

  ‘Can’t see nothin’,’ said Sidney.

  ‘That’s ’cause it’s miles deep,’ said Colin. He picked up a stone. ‘I read in a book you can tell how deep a well is by counting how long it takes for a stone to reach the water.’ He held the stone up. ‘Start counting, but not too loud, or we won’t hear it.’

  He held up the stone, and as soon as he dropped it, Avril and Sidney began to count in hushed whispers. They reached six before they heard the distant, faint splash. They stared at one another with wide eyes.

  ‘See?’ said Colin.

  ‘But you still don’t know how deep it is,’ Avril pointed out.

  ‘Jolly deep,’ retorted Colin.

  They amused themselves by shouting into the depths of the well and listening to their voices echoing back, until the muffled tones of the gong could be heard summoning them to tea. ‘Come on,’ said Avril, ‘we’ve got to go in. We’d better cover it up.’

  They lifted the wooden lid and slid it clumsily back into place, then sped off through the trees to the house.

  *

  As autumn turned to winter, the anticipated German assaults did not materialise. There was no rain of fire, no poison gas attacks. A strange lull set in, during which people began to relax and wonder what all the fuss had been about.

  ‘To think I rushed out and bought all the things on the ARP list on the very first day,’ Helen complained to Sonia in a telephone call. ‘The blackout is a fearful bore – it’s so difficult to get about now that it gets dark early. Delia Compton was almost run down by a man on a bicycle with no lights the other night. There have been any number of accidents. And getting a taxi is simply impossible. Apparently there’s no blackout in Paris. It’s quite beyond me why we have to blunder about in the dark while the French don’t.’

  Sonia agreed that the blackout was a nuisance, but her main complaint was with the servant situation. ‘Dilys is leaving next week to work in a munitions factory, and Grace is going off to be a Land Girl. No doubt William will be joining up, too. That will leave me with just Effie and Mrs Goodall and the kitchen maid, and the whole house to run and keep clean. Mercifully Lobb is too old to be called up. All the houses around here are losing staff.’

  ‘That makes it difficult with your evacuees, I suppose.’

  ‘I doubt if they will be with us much longer. Mrs Jennings wants the boys back home for Christmas. To think we all thought bombs would come raining down on us first thing. I suppose we should be grateful.’

  *

  The first months of 1940 saw England’s worst winter in living memory. The cold was bitter, the ground frozen solid. In late January snow began to fall; not the usual picturesque inch or two adorning the fields and trees and mantling the landscape, but heavy fleets of thick, scudding flakes that blinded the eyes and stung the skin, piling in great drifts against houses and barns, blocking roads and lanes, burying sheep. Woodbourne House was entirely cut off. The snow, which was feet deep, made the road to the village impassable and brought the telephone lines down. The lorry delivering coke couldn’t get through, and so the boiler went out and the pipes froze. Without central heating the house became arctic, and its inhabitants piled on layers of clothes. Sonia wore her fur coat at all times. Domino and Rufus buried themselves beneath Sonia’s eiderdown and gazed out on the world with mournful eyes. The feeble electric heaters in the bedrooms scarcely made any impact on the chill.

  But with adversity came resilience and ingenuity. Sonia and Effie went out each day and broke off icicles, which they carried back to the house in pails to melt and boil in kettles and pans so that there was water for the household. Because the cisterns were frozen, jugs of melted snow had to be used to flush the toilets. In the kitchen, without Mrs Goodall and the usual deliveries of bread, milk and meat, and with Lobb’s vegetables frozen in the ground, Sonia’s culinary powers of invention were put to the test. She rose to the challenge with determined energy, and with the help of a cookery book and her own imagination managed to make loaves of bread with flour and dried yeast and condensed milk, and to create edible meals from bully beef and canned vegetables.

  The coal supply had not entirely run out, which was a blessing, for Laura came down with bronchitis and the nursery had to be turned into a sickroom, with a fire burning day and night. On one of her forays outdoors for icicles, clad in fur coat, headscarf, woollen cap and gumboots, Sonia came across a store of logs in a shed, put there by Lobb after he had felled two diseased apple trees in the orchard the previous autumn. She carried the logs back in armfuls, stacking them up in the kitchen porch, and in the evenings they made a bright, fragrant blaze in the drawing room.

  Sonia spent much of her time nursing Laura, sponging her hot little body and applying the mustard poultices which Mrs Goodall prepared and swore by. While the little girl slept, she would sit by her bedside, stroking the soft, fair curls of hair from her burning forehead, wishing with her whole soul that she could take the burden of her illness upon herself. How she longed for Dr Egan’s help. Damp compresses and Friar’s Balsam could only do so much. She was grateful that Avril was safe and warm in her boarding school in Kent.

  On the day that Lobb managed to make his way through the snow from the village with some bread and milk for the besieged household, Laura’s fever broke, her temperature came down, and everyone breathed a sigh of relief. She grew well enough to sit up and sup
the little dishes of porridge and honey which Mrs Goodall made for her, and Sonia read her nursery rhymes and fairy stories, to which Laura listened with grave, attentive eyes.

  *

  The long spell of snow had a transformative effect not just on the landscape, but on Sonia, one which lasted long after the weather broke and life returned to normal. Never again, she decided, would she ring for breakfast in bed. Not while the war lasted. The business of meals being taken in three different parts of the house – the nursery, the dining room and the kitchen – must come to an end. No one had the time or energy to maintain such a state of affairs. During the snow siege, when the dining room was too cold to be inhabited, they had all eaten together in the warmth of the kitchen at the large scrubbed wooden table, the same table on which vegetables were chopped, dough kneaded and pastry rolled on a daily basis, and for Sonia the arrangement had proved enlightening. When contact was resumed with the outside world, she decreed that henceforth the household would amalgamate and everyone would eat their meals together in the kitchen. The artisanal comfort and practicality chimed with the mood of the times, and she felt liberated by its informality. She was able to observe and appreciate at first hand the work Mrs Goodall did in grim circumstances, and the conversations they had over cups of tea together had given her a perspective on life which was both humbling and inspiring.

  At first Mrs Goodall was not entirely at ease with the arrangement. She had a sense of the right order of things; the mistress should reign upstairs in the drawing room and morning room, dictating the life of the household, and the servants below should put her orders into practice and ensure that all ran smoothly. The kitchen was her kingdom, and she did not welcome any intrusion, even that of her mistress. But when she saw that Sonia did not mean to interfere, and that the new arrangement meant less fetching and carrying and greater convenience for all concerned, she accepted it. Over the years she and Sonia had developed a relationship of mutual respect, and now to that appreciation was added the warmth of friendship. For the adversities of war and its effects on the household were something they had to deal with jointly.

 

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