Octavia's War

by Beryl Kingston

  ‘And what about your schooling,’ Tommy asked.

  ‘Starts tomorrow,’ Lizzie told him. ‘In Smithie’s house.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear it,’ her father said. But privately he was wondering whether ‘Smithie’ would be there.

  Octavia and Emmeline sat up half the night talking and grieving, remembering all the good things J-J had done in his long life, from his long teaching career and his involvement with the Fabians to the patient and loving way he’d accepted his new life in Wimbledon when what he’d really wanted to do was to go on living in Hampstead. They told one another over and over again how much they would miss his good sense, how glad they were that he’d died without suffering and finally they agreed that it was a mercy that he didn’t have to endure another war.

  ‘We had quite enough of it the first time round,’ Emmeline said, as the hall clock struck three. ‘And a fat lot of good it’s done us.’

  ‘Shall you come back with me tomorrow?’ Octavia asked.

  Emmeline thought not. ‘I’ll stay here till after the funeral,’ she said. ‘I ought to know where Arthur’s going to be sent by then. I wouldn’t like to leave my poor Edie with all that hanging over her. When he’s gone wherever he’s going and she’s taken Joanie off to Guildford I shall feel better about things.’

  So Octavia left her early the next morning and drove back to Woking alone with her thoughts, in a pearly dawn. The roads were almost completely empty which was just as well for her brain was fuzzy and she was driving badly. It simply wasn’t possible that Pa was dead. It was unnatural, unacceptable, like losing the roof of the house. Oh dear, dear Pa, she thought, it’s going to be very hard without you.

  But there was no time for tears. They might be streaming down her cheeks at that moment but she would have to dry her eyes when she reached Woking. There was a school to run and houses to be rented and adapted to provide the extra classrooms she needed, and the fourth-formers had to be started on their examination courses. And a war to be endured, whether she wanted to endure it or not.

  In fact the war didn’t seem to be beginning. A week went by and nothing much happened except for a couple of stern government directives. All windows were to be blacked out and headlights on all vehicles were to be covered with cardboard so that only two small bars of light were left to light the way. That was followed by a warning from the new Ministry of Food that butter and bacon would be rationed by the middle of December.

  ‘Just so long as they don’t put us on short commons before Uncle’s funeral,’ Emmeline said. ‘I’d like to give him a good send-off.’

  The funeral was a very big affair, attended by so many of his ex-pupils that Emmeline said she couldn’t count them and Tommy told her it was a sure sign of the value of the man. Three weeks later, Arthur was sent to France along with 158,000 others and a quarter of a million young men over twenty were called up, among them Dora’s quiet John. Emmeline took a train to Woking and Edith went to Guildford with her baby and got lodgings for herself and all three of her children in a local farm. She wrote to her mother to report that everything was much better for them now they were all together. And Roehampton Secondary School finally moved into the huts and the girls were educated there on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday mornings.

  But still nothing much was happening in Europe. After over-running Czechoslovakia and Poland, Hitler was keeping uncharacteristically quiet and there were no new German invasions for the Allied forces to withstand. By the end of October the newspapers were calling it the phoney war.

  Preparations for it went ahead notwithstanding. Everybody was given a National Identity Card and a ration book, and every street had an air raid warden whose job was to enforce a total blackout and who was considered an unnecessary busybody in consequence. The darkness led to a very marked increase in road accidents and falls, and after a while every other kerbstone was painted white and letter-boxes and pavement trees were given a bold white ring in the hope that this would reduce the number of collisions in the total darkness of a moonless night. And the wait went on.

  It wasn’t long before Octavia’s pupils were asking their form mistresses if they could go home and see their parents at the weekend.

  ‘I don’t see any reason why not,’ Octavia said, when the matter was brought up at one of her weekly staff meetings. ‘Providing they don’t travel in the blackout and providing staff don’t mind them missing Saturday lessons. They’re sensible girls and it’s not a long journey.’

  ‘What are we to tell them about the Christmas holiday?’ Miss Bertram wanted to know. ‘Some of them are asking about that too.’

  ‘We’ll make a decision nearer the time,’ Octavia said. ‘It’s six weeks yet and we don’t know what might happen in six weeks. The war might start. London might be bombed. I don’t think we should commit ourselves to anything yet.’

  What happened was that it started to snow.

  Lizzie Meriton woke early that morning and for a few seconds she couldn’t think why. Then she glanced at the window and realised that the light was odd and that the sky was completely white. No, to be accurate – and Miss Bertram said you should always be accurate when it came to colour – it wasn’t exactly white because white was denser and this sky wasn’t dense at all. It looked delicate with a faint touch of very pale yellow and an odd sort of sheen to it, as if there was a light shining on it from a mirror somewhere. But there couldn’t be, could there? And lying there all warm and snug under the blankets, she suddenly thought of HG Wells’s novel The War of the Worlds, the one they’d read in the third form, and remembered with a shiver of horror that the space ship had arrived right here in Woking. What if a space ship had landed during the night? But it couldn’t have, could it? There were no such things as space ships and she was a sensible girl. Wasn’t she? Yes, of course she was. She had to be. She was on her own now. She got up, put on her slippers and her dressing gown and went to the window to see exactly what was happening.

  The world was completely white. The reflecting mirror was snow. ‘Come and have a look at this,’ she said to Poppy.

  ‘What fun!’ Poppy said. ‘Is it a school day?’

  Edith didn’t think it was any sort of fun at all. She bundled her two little girls into the warmest clothing she could find and sent them off to school looking as fat as snowmen. They came home at the end of the day soaking wet and glowing because one of the local boys had let them have a turn on his toboggan.

  ‘You should’ve seen us, Mum,’ Maggie said. ‘You come down the hill at a hundred miles an hour. Geoff said.’

  ‘Well, don’t go breaking your legs, that’s all,’ Edith told her. ‘It’s bad enough being here without broken legs.’ She was finding life in a farmhouse extremely difficult, and sharing a kitchen with her landlady was a nightmare. ‘Look at the state of your gloves.’

  ‘That was the snowballs,’ Barbara said happily. ‘I like being off school when it’s snowing. D’you think we’ll be off tomorrow? Geoff said they close down when it snows because of the boilers.’

  ‘I hope the snow goes on for ever and ever,’ Maggie said, handing her sodden gloves to her mother.

  ‘Heaven help us all,’ Edith said.

  The next day the snowfall was so heavy and prolonged that the school did close down, to the girls’ delight. They went tobogganing again and built a snowman that Maggie said was ‘big as a house’.

  ‘It looks as if it’s set in for the winter,’ Edith wrote to her mother. ‘And my poor Arthur in France.’

  ‘Look on the bright side,’ Emmeline wrote back. ‘At least there’s no fighting.’

  Which was true, for apart from occasional reports of running battles between the Russian Red Army and the Norwegians in the much deeper snows of Norway, the war continued to be more phoney than real.

  Lizzie and her friends were thrilled with the cold weather. The canal had frozen solid and now they had an ice rink and could go skating whenever they wanted, and as Poppy said, ‘This is the lif
e! I hope it goes on for ever and ever.’ And sure enough the cold weather continued. After a week or two, Woking WVS arranged to take over the gym in the boys’ grammar school on Sunday afternoons so that visiting parents would have somewhere warm where they could meet their children and have a cup of tea. It was much needed for by that time the snow wasn’t quite so pretty. The pavements had been cleared so many times that there were perpetual mounds of frozen slush at the pavement edge, much pitted by discarded cigarette ends and streaked yellow by the local dogs, and rather too many people were hobbling with chilblains and complaining that they didn’t know how much more of this awful weather they could stand.

  ‘Fat lot of good talking like that,’ Emmeline said. ‘The weather’s like the war. We’ve just got to get on with it.’

  ‘Christmas is coming, Em,’ Octavia said. ‘Look forward to that.’ Her school was fizzing with preparations for it. The sixth form were rehearsing their customary Christmas play – and that always cheered everybody up – Miss Bertram and her art classes were making paper chains and Christmas decorations and cards, and nearly all the girls were going back to London to spend the holiday with their families. They might be evacuated but the school traditions hadn’t changed. Despite everything, Christmas would be celebrated in its usual joyous style.

  ‘Just so long as we don’t have to cope with rationing, that’s all,’ Emmeline said. ‘I’d like to ask the girls to join us – that’s all right, isn’t it, Tavy? – and I can’t do that if they won’t let me buy any meat.’

  She was cheered when she managed to order a goose and a sirloin of beef from the local butchers, even though he warned her to make the most of it because it could be the last. And her life improved even further when Edith wrote to say that she and the girls would love to come and to ask if they could stay for the holiday, and Dora wrote that she and David would be all on their own because John couldn’t get back, so they would love to come too.

  ‘We shall have a house full,’ Emmeline said.

  ‘Just as well we’ve got all those bedrooms,’ Octavia said.

  ‘We can use Janet’s too, of course,’ Emmeline said, happily making plans. ‘She’s going back to Gateshead for Christmas. She asked me this morning if it would be all right.’

  So the beds were made up, a cake was baked and iced and a pudding was steamed, presents were bought and wrapped, and a Christmas tree hung with baubles was set in the window so that they could be piled beneath it in the traditional way, and finally the dining room and the drawing room were draped about with paper chains so that, although Octavia’s map still dominated the main wall, by dint of framing it with tinsel it was reduced to just another decoration.

  ‘Now,’ Emmeline said, surveying the room with great satisfaction, ‘we’re ready.’

  Edith and her three little girls arrived surprisingly early on the first morning of the school holiday. They’d caught a bus to Guildford and come on by train from there. When they rang at the bell, Octavia and Emmeline were still in their dressing gowns drinking tea by the fire.

  ‘We’ve been on a toboggan,’ Barbara told them, as she was ushered into the hall. ‘It went a hundred and twenty miles an hour.’

  ‘Fancy,’ Emmeline said. ‘Let’s have you out of that coat and then you can come and sit by the fire. I expect you’d like some tea, wouldn’t you? Or a cup of cocoa. What do you think, Edie?’

  ‘I don’t mind what we have,’ Edie said, hanging up her coat and hat, ‘just so long as it isn’t old Mother Hemmings cag-mag. I’ve had that woman up to here. You’d never believe how bossy she is.’

  Emmeline grimaced. ‘Oh dear.’

  ‘You know how Joanie likes her little bottle to settle her at night,’ Edith said, peeling the baby out of her woolly coat. ‘We’ve had ructions about that from the first night. She’s on and on at me the whole time. How I’m spoiling her and I’ll deform her mouth and how I should make her grow up. It’s more than flesh and blood can stand.’

  ‘Well, you’re here now,’ Emmeline said, ‘and she can have as many bottles as she likes, pretty dear. We’ve got a little cot for her in your room. And two little camp beds for Barbara and Maggie.’

  ‘Which will be a darn sight more comfortable than what they’ve been sleeping in at old Mother Hemmings,’ Edie said. ‘I tell you, Ma, if I have to stand much more of that woman, I shall put on my hat and coat and walk out.’

  ‘I hope you won’t go doing anything silly,’ Emmeline warned. ‘You don’t want to end up back in London.’

  Edie looked mutinous so Octavia moved to intervene. ‘Come and sit by the fire and get warm,’ she said, taking Maggie’s hand, ‘while your Gran makes that cocoa.’

  It was a wise suggestion for the fire soothed them. And so did helping Gran prepare the lunch. By the time they’d had their first meal together, sitting round the table in a well-warmed dining room, Edith seemed to have forgotten her grievances.

  She remembered them again when her sister arrived on Christmas Eve, but there was so much going on by then that there wasn’t time to dwell on the behaviour of old Mother Hemmings. The cousins hadn’t seen one another since they were evacuated and they all had tales to tell.

  ‘We went on a toboggan,’ Maggie said, ‘and it went a hundred miles an hour. Geoff said.’

  ‘That’s nothing,’ David told her. ‘Me and Martin went skating. On a pond. An’ if the ice had cracked we’d have fallen in and been drowned dead.’

  ‘Just as well it didn’t then,’ Octavia said.

  ‘But it might’ve,’ David said. ‘And we’d have been drowned dead.’

  ‘Anyway,’ Barbara said, determined not to be outdone, ‘it wasn’t a hundred miles an hour. It was a hundred and fifty. An’ if we’d fallen off we’d have broken all our legs.’

  ‘Who’d like a mince pie?’ Octavia asked.

  ‘Oh, it is good to be back together again,’ Dora said.

  * * *

  Despite the cold and the war, they had a happy family Christmas and ate well and sat around the fire afterwards to play all the old family games and tell one another all the old family stories. And although the adults were privately wondering where they would all be in a year’s time, Edie kept quiet about old Mother Hemmings and nobody mentioned the future at all. What was to come would come and they would have to endure it as well as they could. For the moment, it was enough that they were enjoying themselves together.

  Chapter Eight

  The war began in earnest on the 8th of April, to Emmeline’s consternation. ‘If this isn’t bad timing, you tell me what is,’ she said to Octavia, pushing that morning’s Daily Herald across the kitchen table towards her. ‘That wretched man’s invaded Denmark. Just look at it. And just when Edie’s gone back to London.’

  Octavia put down her tea cup and glanced at the headlines. She was due to meet the Chairman of Governors at half past eight to inspect the house they’d finally decided to rent for the school and she was running late. There wasn’t time to read the paper. Not that it mattered. The news was what everyone was expecting. It was alarming and unwelcome but it wasn’t a surprise.

  ‘Wouldn’t you just know it,’ Emmeline mourned. ‘Just when my Edie’s taken those poor little children back to London. I knew it was stupid. I did warn her.’

  ‘I know,’ Octavia said, putting on her hat. She was torn by her cousin’s anguished expression but she couldn’t stay and let her talk. She couldn’t even say a few commiserating words or they’d be stuck in the kitchen for hours.

  ‘I told her over and over again.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘They never listen.’

  ‘I’ll be back as soon as I can this afternoon,’ Octavia said, ‘and then we’ll see what we can do. I daren’t stop now, Em. I’m late already.’

  Emmeline sighed heavily. ‘This damned war,’ she said. ‘I did so hope it wouldn’t start.’

  There wasn’t the faintest chance of that, Octavia thought, as she took her bicycle out of the g
arage. Never has been. Not once we allowed Hitler to invade Czechoslovakia and Poland. We should have stood up to him then, instead of kowtowing to him all the time. It’s a bit late now. And she went pedalling off towards Horsell Rise and the steep incline of Kettlewell Hill. I hope to God our Mr Chivers has found us something suitable, she thought, as she pushed uphill. We’re going to need a good roomy house more than ever now. If they bomb London it’ll have to be school and home rolled into one.

  Mr Chivers, the Chairman of Governors, was a quiet, unassuming man in his early fifties, not much more than five foot six in height, with a round pale face, round pale eyes, rather sparse grey hair which he kept tidy with Brylcreem and a tendency to stoutness that gave him a rather barrel-like appearance, especially from a distance. He was waiting by the gate of a large house on the corner of Grange Road, gazing out over Horsell Common, and from the patience of his stance it looked as though he’d been waiting a long time.

  ‘I’m so sorry I’m late, Ralph,’ Octavia said as she cycled towards him.

  ‘Not to worry, dear lady,’ Mr Chivers said. ‘You’re here now. This is Downview. Shall we proceed?’

  They proceeded into the front garden and stood looking up at the house. It’s a sizeable place, Octavia thought, Victorian of course and built to last. The three windows on the first floor were flanked by white shutters, which was a pretty touch, and there was a Venetian window in the slight bay between them which probably marked the turn of the stairs. Downstairs there was a wide bay window to the left and a line of lesser windows to the right and beyond them an extension that was almost as wide as the original house and looked as though it had been added later.

  ‘Is the front door at the side?’ she asked.

  It was and although it had an elegant porch it stood rather incongruously between two very tall brick chimneys, both of which were embellished with a coat of arms and one of which was marked by the date of its construction – 1888.