by Betty Burton
Whenever Connie thought of her daughter, she had a sketchy mental picture of a pink, plump eighteen-year-old in a dirndl skirt and a straw hat on pale curls, walking at the slow pace of her pekinese dog. Suddenly she was confronted by this stranger, a strong, blonde woman in grey and red uniform with her hair scooped into a large knot, wreathed in tobacco smoke, knowingness and confidence.
‘I… My dear child… I meant nothing. Take no notice, I’m not with it half the time. My work, you know… but that’s no excuse. I really am frightfully sorry about how you feel. I had no idea – none.’
‘It doesn’t matter now. Forget it, forget it, forget it.’
As far as Eve could tell, Connie herself seemed to be content with complete celibacy, for in the flat there was never any sign of men except for those Eve brought there. Connie seemed to be fulfilled, living only to receive her instructions to collect or deliver an aircraft.
Sometimes she was away for days, returning pale-faced, burning-eyed and exhilarated. When Eve saw her like this, she was reminded of some of the ever increasing number of outpatients she encountered who were brought in in a drugged stupor after a ship from the Far East had docked. But Connie did not take even gin these days – she did not need it. Nothing could surpass the sensations she achieved from her secret and dangerous missions which often took her to the other side of the English Channel.
* * *
Late in 1943, when she was nearing the end of the first part of her training, Eve was called into Matron’s office and told that if she would like to volunteer, then she could have the rare opportunity of training as an auxiliary in the nursing of psychiatric patients. Several small hospitals were being opened in suitable locations away from large centres of population. These training hospitals were looking for girls of a certain intelligence and calm disposition.
‘Only suitable candidates are being selected, Hardy, level-headedness and attitude being of prime importance. Psychotherapeutics!’ She fired the word at Eve, who waited for her superior to continue. ‘Have you heard of it?’
‘Treatment of madness?’
‘Of psychiatric illness, yes. It is a fairly new and special branch of medicine. Many have ill-informed knowledge of its value. I value it highly. There will be a great need for trained personnel when men are released from captivity. In the last war, many men were shot as traitors or cowards for presenting psychiatric symptoms. We have come far since then.’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
‘You are the right type. I have put your name forward as a volunteer for training. I’m sure that you will not let me down.’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
‘Good. There are three new training centres. I have volunteered you for one intending to specialize in the effects of long-term incarceration and the effects of extreme physical abuse.’
Eve pulled her brows together questioningly.
‘Torture, and solitary confinement, Hardy. Our enemies are evil in the extreme. The personal rewards in terms of promotion will come swiftly to those willing to put a year’s training into a month. The wards must be fully ready to receive patients within six months.’
‘Ma’am?’
‘Ask ahead.’
‘Does that mean that they are expecting to be bringing back POWs in six months?’
‘I have no idea, but you may draw as many conclusions as I.’
‘May I ask where and when I begin training?’
‘As soon as your transfer and travel documents arrive. As for where… the Oaklands Centre – I’m told that Lord Palmerston once owned it – located in a place called Markham.’ She smiled a rare and lovely smile. ‘I believe you know it.’
Oh Lord! She thinks she’s done me a favour.
‘Yes, ma’am.’
‘Always nice to have a spell close to home.’
* * *
Connie said, ‘Turning Oaklands into a nuthouse, Eve? I am sure that it must be quite unsuitable. Of course you will refuse the posting.’
‘Of course I shall not refuse. Have you ever refused an order? And it’s not a nuthouse. And for goodness sake, Connie, you aren’t to mention what sort of nursing home it is because you aren’t supposed to know.’
‘Oh don’t worry on that score. I know no one who is likely to be the slightest bit interested in an insane asylum in the wilds of Hampshire. Poor Oaklands, though. What a shame, they’ll probably destroy all the lovely friezes and use the orangery for something dreadful.’
‘Depressed patients aren’t likely to destroy friezes.’
‘But Oaklands! It does seem so… inappropriate.’
‘Inappropriate! For God’s sake, Connie. To what better use can an uninhabited country house be put? It’s not as though they won’t have a roof over their poor heads – they have at least three mansions, a sea-front house in Southsea and a London flat.’
‘It is still their home, even though it has been visited by kings and princes.’
‘And Nazis – Ribbentrop visited in thirty-six. No worse psychotic illness than Fascism. Oaklands is very appropriate, if you ask me.’
But Connie was not really seriously perturbed about the fate of Markham’s great estate; she was preparing to travel to an isolated aerodrome from where she guessed she would be flying a small plane which she would land in a field the other side of the Channel. In any case, Markham was in her past. She had cleansed herself of Freddy and, as far as she was concerned, he could bang himself to death. But she had made up her mind that she would never divorce him.
‘Once the war is over it won’t matter, Connie. All the estates will come under common ownership.’
‘Not you too, Eve? Everybody you meet these days is a damned Red. I can’t stand them, they’re all so damned fair.’
‘Good. And I should have thought you’d had enough of the other sort to last you a lifetime.’
Connie shrugged. ‘He is opportunist, not capitalist.’
‘Is there a difference?’
‘Eve! I suppose the next thing you will do is to join some union.’
‘I already have.’
‘Don’t tell me, I don’t want to hear. It’s everywhere, like some damn disease. It is one thing I agreed with your father about; he would allow none of that in his factory. Can you imagine that great Welsh Bevan and his wife running this country? Too ridiculous for words. The country would never be the same again.’
‘Well good for it!’
Connie, uncharacteristically ramming her change of clothes into a grip, altered her tone. ‘Who cares anyway? Live for the day. Listen, darling, I’m off… shan’t be back for a few days. Take care.’ She brushed Eve’s cheek with her lips. ‘I dare say you sometimes wonder… well… I did want you, you know… you’re the one thing that’s been worth while.’ She zipped the bag. ‘And look, it’s your affair, but these men… they aren’t going to take the place of the man who has gone, you know. Nobody can. You really do have to put it behind you and start again.’
She kept flicking short, shy looks at Eve, then suddenly she took her daughter’s hands and drew her to her slim, girlish embrace. ‘Darling girl, I’m not much to go on, except as a lesson on not wasting the best part of your life hanging on to something in the past long after it is dead.’ And then she was briskly gone.
Until then, nothing, even David Greenaway being posted Missing, had pierced Eve’s placid armour quite so much as that unique moment of real contact with her mother.
1989
‘Ladies?’ Used to senility and deafness, the Wardress raised her voice so that it echoed round the glass span of the conservatory.
Hand over deaf-aid microphone, Mrs Partridge said, ‘No need to shout, we aren’t deaf.’
Good-hearted beneath it all, the Wardress smiled at her pair of celebrities. She propped open the double doors. ‘It’s like an oven in here. Hottest day for a hundred years; hottest summer since ’76.’
‘Going to get hotter,’ said Dolly.
The Wardress fanned her neck with h
er collar. ‘Ladies, The Press is here again. It’s The Independent this time. Aren’t you suddenly the famous ones?’
‘I preferred it when I was notorious and they weren’t all so damned patronizing,’ Ursula said. ‘Shall we go to them, Dorothy, or summon them to our rooms?’
‘I’ve emptied the small sitting-room for you,’ said the Wardress.
‘Let’s go there and make a grand entrance together, Ursula.’
They progressed at their own pace from the conservatory, where they had been tending their coffee and banana plants, towards the house.
‘The Independent,’ Mrs Partridge said. ‘Isn’t that the heavy black-looking one?’
As it turned out, the feature-writer was Charlotte, a slip of a girl in a silky suit and ear-rings like bunches of grapes and she was from Independent Radio. ‘I understand from the matron that you have had other meeja people here recently.’
‘That woman has a big mouth,’ said Dolly. ‘It’d be all the same if we didn’t want you to know. She could take up broadcasting on her own account, without a microphone.’
Charlotte, having smiled her way through getting her equipment tuned to the pitch of her interviewees, explained that she had been given a half-hour slot and she wanted to do something on older women that would make Woman’s Hour sit up. ‘I’m hoping it will get me noticed – nobody does anything serious about the really, really aged as real people; and when I read the piece in the Guardian I thought te-rrific! Centenarians and friends of Giacopazzi. It will make a smashing piece.’
When Charlotte had got her piece about the really, really aged real ladies and gone, Dorothy made a pot of tea which Ursula carried to the conservatory, a building which they considered theirs and which few other residents cared for because it was about the only room in the home where there was no television set.
‘What about that then, Ursula? Fancy my film coming to light – after all these years.’
‘And she made the connection between the mention of Niall in the Guardian interview and the film in the archives. She’s a clever girl, she’ll make a good journalist.’
Like many who went through the years and years of shortages and economies, the two old ladies poured their tea carefully and drank it sugarless, not talking too much as they savoured flavour and caffeine.
‘Shall you accept her offer to go and see it again, Dorothy?’
‘I think I might, so long as you come too. Will you mind?’
‘No, of course I should not mind. Why should I?’
‘I wondered – when you said that you weren’t sure that you wanted to see it again.’
‘That’s not because of you and Niall – you know that never bothered me greatly.’ She laughed her almost silent laugh. ‘I’m not likely to start after fifty years.’
‘I would have stolen him from you if I could have.’
‘I can’t say that I should have blamed you for it: he knew how to make a woman feel exceptional.’
‘He was the sweetest man, wasn’t he?’
‘Dorothy, let’s be honest… he was a libertine.’
‘That’s a word you don’t hear much these days.’
‘He screwed around.’
‘And you married him. After all those years, you got married. I never thought you would. Thought your feministy side would have put the mockers on marrying.’
Ursula smiled, deepening the deep vertical lines of her mouth. ‘The flaw in many a good feminist, loving men… a man. I never much enjoyed women in that way.’ Switching off for a minute or two, the old women lapsed into dozy contemplation. ‘Trix did. Did you know that? It was Trixie, wasn’t it, whose mother cut the flies out of her father’s best trousers? Or was that Pammy? Remember Pammy from those days?’
‘It was Trixie. If it hadn’t been for the war, she would have ended up as knocked-about and unhappy as her Mum. If I remember right, it was her sergeant in the ATS that fell for her. Didn’t they set up home together when they were demobbed?’
Ursula said, ‘She had never heard the word lesbian until she joined the WAAF.’
‘Well, you didn’t in those days, did you – well, not in our sort of circles; but I’ll bet your lot knew all about it. I knew that there were men like that, you used to see them in Southampton – especially round by the docks – old chaps with long hair and wearing lipstick. Lord, it’s no wonder they got called queer the way they used to go about. I just always thought it was men like that.’
She drifted back to the sub-world where she saw the past in such detail, where, more and more often these days, she discovered interesting facts she had never had time to notice at the time. Dolly Partridge could sit for hours roaming about there. Eventually she said, ‘There used to be a couple of ladies lived in Markham – before you came here – when I was a girl – they was getting on in years. One was tall and thin, walked like a stork, the other was tiny and very sweet-looking. They was real lavender and old lace. They had lived together donkey’s years, since they were girls… never went out without hats. Had high boned collars. Never wore anything except cream and fawn, fashions that was about fifty years before… a lot of scenty powder the same colour. It’s funny when you look back, I don’t think nobody ever thought anything about them living together. They were Sunday-school teachers. Nobody thought twice about it. You see what I mean… nobody much knew about women then…’
‘Or cared.’
‘…Just as likely they was just friends but you know, once you find out a thing and that they got a name for it, you begin to think about things you never thought about before. It’s like what you just said about young Trix. I can see now. She was very against her Dad… and her brothers… and men. She never blamed her Mum for going off and leaving them all. The war didn’t have all bad consequences.’
‘Here.’ Ursula tipped a small shot of whisky into each of their cups. ‘Drink before you start getting maudlin. You always do when you start thinking about the old days.’
‘Why do you always make out you are so tough? It’s why I never thought you’d get married.’
‘Because I am tough… and your batteries must be running down, you’re raising your voice. I married Niall because I couldn’t have coped with being the Other Woman to you. One can only sustain being the Mistress if one despises the Wife.’
‘You never said that before.’
‘The film never saw the light of day before.’
‘All the years we’ve been together and you never said you was jealous of Niall’s little fling with me.’
‘I never meant that I was jealous; what I meant is that I could never despise you. You are the best of all people. I guessed what would happen if you and Niall got together: you are the kind of woman men like. You look after their creature comforts.’ She spoke quietly, watching her friend twiddling the volume of her hearing-aid. ‘Oh Lord, Dorothy, why don’t you carry a spare battery – I shall never repeat all that if I live to be a hundred.’
The plump old lady peered. ‘What’s so funny, Ursula? This thing’s on the blink again.’
‘I said, Georgia Giacopazzi…’
Dorothy Partridge winced, ‘Ah, that’s better.’
‘Georgia Kennedy didn’t know everything that was going on.’
‘You’re right there. If she had a known we should be getting ourselves interviewed by the Sun.’
‘Or the Sport.’
Dorothy looked blank.
‘It’s a dirty paper… likes three-in-a-bed stories. You are behind the times, Dorothy.’
Turn of the Tide
1944
When Eve got her transfer to the Oaklands Centre, she had been working in London for eighteen months or so. In spite of the fact that she had wanted to get away from Markham, she missed the place more than she had expected whilst she was living in London. It was a time when the harsh sound of the pilotless V1 rocket bombs was straining the population unbearably during the day, and depressing them by forcing them to return to sleeping underground at nigh
t. The London Blitz had long been ended, but once again these new weapons were filling the mortuaries and casualty wards with civilians.
Although she was apprehensive at going into an unknown field – nursing men who had experienced deprivation, brutality and torture – Eve was glad to be going from London; except that she worried over Connie.
‘Darling, I am indestructible, and I am more away than actually in London.’ Even so, Eve had seen the blast destruction and the terrible injuries that could be caused by the missiles.
Before going into weeks of virtual isolation from the outside world at the Oaklands Centre, Eve arranged to spend the weekend split between Georgia and Mont Iremonger. Her foster-sister and foster-grandfather, as she jokingly referred to them. She and Georgia had not seen one another since the Christmas after Eve’s home had broken up and she had lodged for a while in Station Avenue.
‘I often think of it, wasn’t it super, Georgia?’ Eve said when they were comfortably settled with tea and cigarettes in armchairs in the front-room at Georgia’s, which was now a comfortable clutter of books and pictures, unpolished furniture and fluffy debris.
‘Talk about self-indulgent, we ate our entire month’s sweet ration in bed on Boxing Day morning.’
Instead of a nurse and an administrator, twenty-five years old and serious about their work, they became for a few minutes the sort of excitable, giggling girls that neither of them had ever been.
‘And you made that great soufflé instead of Christmas pudding.’
‘Oh, and what about Christmas Eve afternoon down at the kitchens, didn’t you just love it?’
‘I never thought to see Mrs Farr wearing a tinsel crown… and what about Marie’s party with all those Americans?’
Since the upheaval of Eve’s mother leaving and the installation of a WAC from Texas into The Cedars, the already friendly relationship between Georgia and Eve became more confident. They talked openly with one another, each of them discovering the unexpected joy of having an intimate woman friend who neither made judgements nor expected faultlessness.