Octavia's War

by Beryl Kingston

  And of course it was Elizabeth, lying under a small white sheet – what were they covering up? – her hair matted with great clots of blood and her beautiful face so gashed and stained it was almost impossible to recognise her. In fact he might not have done, had they not drawn that awful sheet back to reveal one long white perfect hand for his inspection. He stood looking down at it obediently and was cut to the heart to see that there wasn’t a mark on it and that she was still wearing her engagement ring. He controlled himself with a superhuman effort. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘This is my wife.’

  Chapter Thirteen

  Lizzie and Mary and Poppy were in their dormitory discussing their academic futures. The three of them were sitting in the window seat in their dressing gowns, which strictly speaking they shouldn’t have been doing, because it wasn’t long before breakfast and they ought to have been down in the hall, dressed and ready. But as Mary said, ‘There’s no lessons and if you can’t take a few minutes off to plan your life in the holidays, when can you?’

  ‘The thing is,’ Lizzie said, ‘Miss Gordon will keep telling me I should be making my mind up about what subjects I want to study at Higher Schools, and I haven’t got the faintest idea. I mean, how are you supposed to know what your favourite subjects are when you haven’t taken them? I like French but I might hate it if I fail it. And the same with Maths.’

  Mary said it wasn’t such a problem for her. ‘There’s only two subjects I’m any good at,’ she said, ‘and that’s English and Art, so I suppose that’s what I shall choose, providing I get Matric.’

  ‘What do you want to do when you leave school?’ Poppy asked her.

  ‘I’d like to be a nurse,’ Mary admitted, ‘but you have to have Biology for that and I don’t suppose I’ll pass that.’

  ‘Yes you will,’ Lizzie told her firmly, ‘if you want to. You just have to put your mind to it.’

  ‘What about you, Lizzie?’ Poppy said. ‘Do you know what you want to be?’

  Lizzie gave it thought. ‘Something adventurous,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to teach or anything like that. Or work in an office. I’d be bored stiff in an office. I mean, imagine typing letters all day. And I don’t want to be a nurse. I might like to be a doctor if it didn’t involve too much blood. But not if there was a war on.’

  ‘What about getting married and having children?’ Mary asked. ‘I’ve always thought it would be nice to work for a little while but I wouldn’t want to do it forever. I think it’s more important to get married.’

  ‘I’d like to have someone madly in love with me,’ Lizzie said. ‘Like Rhett Butler.’ They’d seen Gone with the Wind three times when it came to Woking. ‘I’m not sure I’d want to marry them, though.’

  Mary was surprised and rather shocked. ‘Why ever not?’ she asked. ‘I mean if someone loves you and you love them, you get married. I mean, that’s only natural.’

  ‘In some jobs you have to leave work if you get married,’ Lizzie explained, ‘and that’s not natural. I think it’s ridiculous. Imagine getting a really good job, something you really enjoy, something that’s valuable and worthwhile, and then falling in love and getting married and being told you’ve got to resign.’

  ‘But they don’t do that now, do they?’ Mary asked. ‘I mean look at all those advertisements in the paper asking for women to do war work. They’re always on about it and they never say anything about not being married, do they?’

  That was true but Lizzie didn’t have time to consider it because someone was knocking at the door to their room. ‘Come in!’ she called. ‘Don’t be shy.’

  It was Miss Henry. ‘Aren’t you coming down to breakfast you three?’ she said. ‘It’s bacon and tomatoes.’

  That was temptation. Bacon was a rarity.

  ‘We’re not dressed,’ Lizzie pointed out.

  ‘Come as you are,’ Maggie Henry said. ‘Cook won’t mind. It’s holiday time.’ She’d been making a special fuss of Lizzie Meriton since Miss Smith told her about her mother. It was awful to look at her pretty face and to know that she was going to be told that her mother had been killed. Miss Smith had said it was just possible the person they’d found wasn’t her mother but if they’d sent for Major Meriton to identify the body there didn’t seem to be much doubt about it. ‘I’ll tell them you’re on your way.’

  Tommy Meriton drove to Woking as slowly as he could. It was miserable and cold and the roads were icy but his mind wasn’t on his driving, as it would have been in any other circumstances. He was trying to find the right form of words to break his dreadful news to Lizzie. He was still in shock, although he wasn’t prepared to admit it, still unable to absorb what had happened, although he knew with the reasoning part of his mind that it had and that he’d accepted it.

  Woking was virtually empty and the few people in Chertsey Street were swathed in scarves and had their hats pulled well down over their foreheads and were skulking along as though they were actors in some awful American thriller. He looked at them with loathing, thinking, why are you alive and walking about when my Elizabeth is dead? Then he felt ashamed of himself because he was being unreasonable and cruel and his thoughts went spinning off into an uncomfortable mixture of anger and regret and grief. I can’t do this, he thought, as he reached the entrance to Downview and turned in at the drive. How can any man tell his daughter that her mother is dead?

  There was nobody out in the grounds and it took far too long for someone to answer when he rang the bell. He stood under the porch shivering and miserable and when the door was finally opened by a rather small girl, he walked in and followed her up the stairs to the matron’s room without saying a word. Now that he was here the sooner he got this over with the better.

  Maggie Henry was standing just outside her room talking to a group of little girls. ‘Come to see Lizzie,’ he said gruffly. ‘Is she in?’

  One of the girls was sent to find her and he was ushered into Miss Henry’s room and the door was discreetly closed.

  Maggie gestured towards her easy chair and he sat in it feeling horribly ill at ease. ‘Am I right in thinking you will need to be private when you talk to Lizzie?’ she asked gently.

  He admitted it, staring at her carpet. Her voice was so full of sympathy he was afraid it would unman him.

  ‘You can use this room,’ Maggie said. ‘You’ll be quite private here. I’ll hang my ‘Do not disturb’ sign on the door for you.’

  Then there was nothing either of them could say and they waited in silence, as the noise of the school racketed beneath them and a lone bird chirruped in the branches of the tree outside the window and the clock on the mantelpiece ticked the seconds away.

  A knock, a whispered voice, a rush of cold air, and Lizzie was in the room, looking at him anxiously. And Miss Henry was gone. He stood up, gathered his courage, held out his arms to her.

  ‘Oh Lizzie, my little love,’ he said, ‘your mother’s been killed.’

  She put her arms round his neck and stood for a long time holding on to him, cheek against cheek, not speaking. Tears rolled out of his eyes and fell on her hair. He simply couldn’t stop them.

  She was murmuring to him, comforting him the way Elizabeth used to do, kissing his cheek, his tears salt on her lips. ‘Poor Pa! Poor, poor old Pa!’

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ he said.

  She drew away from him so that she could look up at him, her arms still round his neck and those grey eyes dry. ‘It’s not your fault,’ she said. ‘You didn’t kill her.’

  He was shaken by how calm she was. ‘It’s just…’ he said. But there were no words to tell her how he felt.

  ‘I know,’ she soothed, wiping away his tears with her fingers. ‘I know, Pa. It’s terrible. The worst.’ (Wasn’t that what Miss Henry always said?) ‘But you’ve still got me. I’ll look after you.’

  It wasn’t until he was driving away that he realised that she’d been comforting him when it should have been the other way round.

  Lizzie walked back
up the stairs to her bedroom in the attic, sat in the window seat, took up her book and went on reading where she’d left off. It was Robert Browning’s Men and Women and before her father had arrived she’d been reading One Word More, wondering whether she would ever find someone who would love her as much as Robert Browning had loved his Elizabeth. Talking about Rhett Butler that morning has set her thinking. Now it was as if her thoughts had congealed. She was surprised by how coolly she was accepting this death, almost as if it hadn’t happened to her mother but to someone else, like poor little Iris’s mother or Penny’s, or Dorothy Brown’s father who’d been torpedoed in the Atlantic. Not a real death at all. Just something you heard about and then said how sorry you were. For a few minutes she wondered whether she ought to tell her friends and decided against it. What was the point? It wouldn’t bring her mother back to life. It was all very simple. She’d been in a house that had been hit by a bomb and she’d been killed. It happened all the time.

  Then she put her head in her hands and howled with grief, overwhelmed by it, aching with it, out of her depths in it.

  Tommy had been driving round Woking for more than an hour, hardly aware of where he was going or what he was doing. It was as if he’d lost all volition, as if the car was going its own way, with no more substance than thistledown. He’d driven down the same road twice before he realised where he was. Then he understood that it was Ridgeway and that he’d come to a halt outside Octavia’s house. He turned in at the drive and switched off the ignition. Then he just sat there, staring through the windscreen. He had no idea what he ought to do next.

  Janet was setting the table for dinner when she became aware of him and she went off at once to report to Emmeline.

  ‘I think it’s wor Major Meriton,’ she said. ‘Onny he’s not movin’, like. He’s just sittin’ there.’ And Emmeline, who wasn’t in the least surprised, put on her hat and coat and went out to speak to him.

  She had to tap on the window for quite a long time before he became aware of her and rolled it down.

  ‘Tommy, my dear,’ she said. ‘Aren’t you coming in?’

  ‘No, no,’ he said. ‘Thanks all the same. Can’t stop. Things to do. Reports to write. That sort of thing. Regards to Tavy.’ And before she could persuade him, he put the car in gear and drove away.

  Emmeline stood in the moonlit garden flanked by the dead twigs of winter, with the gravel hard under her slippers – why hadn’t she thought to change her shoes? – and the night air chilling her lungs. She was fraught with pity for him. What a terrible time this is, she thought. There are so many deaths and so much misery. And she wondered how Tavy would cope with that poor child.

  At that moment she was sitting in the window seat with Lizzie in her arms, holding her while she cried. ‘It’s the worst,’ Lizzie sobbed. ‘The very, very worst. Life will never be the same again.’

  ‘No,’ Octavia agreed, ‘it won’t. It will be different from now on. You have to face that. We all do when we lose someone we love. But I can promise you that there will be good things as well as bad.’

  ‘How can you possibly say that?’ Lizzie said, raising her head. Her eyes were bloodshot with weeping and her face wild with grief. ‘How can you possibly, possibly say that?’

  ‘Because it’s true,’ Octavia told her. ‘I know you can’t believe it now, but it is true.’

  Chapter Fourteen

  Spring was a long time coming that year. It was as if the trees were shrinking into themselves, as if their trunks had grown tough-skinned against so much brutality and their blossom had been blighted by the dust of so much destruction and the fury of so many fires. Even the songbirds were subdued, their calls delicate and hesitant. We have broken the natural exuberance of the season, Octavia thought. There is too much death. And she set herself to think what could be done about it. We will paint this spring, she decided, to remind ourselves that it’s coming and we’ll fill our classrooms with the colour of it, and celebrate it in poetry and song in every way we can. We mustn’t let this war defeat us.

  But it was a difficult time no matter what she tried to do about it. There was a battle going on in North Africa between the British and the Italians, which didn’t make sense to her because they seemed to be fighting over a few hundred miles of desert. The newspapers were full of it, with stories of how the Italians were surrendering in droves to the ‘Aussies’ and there were newsreel pictures of long columns of Italian prisoners, with the occasional Australian soldier to guard them, trudging through the sand waving at the cameras. It was all a little unreal. Hitler’s campaigns on the other hand were as swift and ruthless as ever. In April, when the lilac was just beginning to put out a few delicate buds in Octavia’s rented garden, he launched a massive invasion of Yugoslavia, entering the country simultaneously from Hungary, Rumania and Bulgaria, and at the end of the month he invaded Greece, drove out the British army and marched in triumph through Athens. There didn’t seem to be anything anyone could do to stop him, although the RAF, as Flight Lieutenant Mark Meriton reported to his father, ‘did their darnedest’.

  Tommy Meriton drove down to Woking every other weekend to see Lizzie, once with Mark, who caused much head turning when he stepped out of the car in the Downview drive. Tommy and his children were beginning to establish some sort of family pattern and although Lizzie was always much too quiet, he felt she was glad to see him. At home in Wimbledon he was lonely and taciturn, in Woking he did what he could to cheer his little girl, in the Foreign Office he worked. Sometimes he wished he could visit Tavy for an hour or two – she was the one person who would understand what he was feeling – but it didn’t seem proper without Elizabeth and in any case she had quite enough to do without him imposing on her.

  It wasn’t until May, when there was another massive air raid on the City of London, that anything was to change and then it was because of Lizzie’s anxiety.

  The 10th of May was one of the coldest May nights on record and, once again, there was a low tide on the Thames and a bombers’ moon of terrifying brightness. All the German bombers had to do that night was to follow the white ribbon of the Thames until they reached the familiar basins of the docks. Once they were above their first target, they dropped incendiary bombs in such numbers that the warehouses were rapidly set ablaze. Then, guided by moonlight and their own fires, they turned their attention to Central London and the mainline railway stations which they bombed with high explosives. The attack went on all night and the bombers came over in continuous waves, returning to their bases in Northern France simply to refuel and then setting out again.

  It wasn’t long before the fires stretched from Romford to Hammersmith, east to west, and from Hampstead to Norwood, north to south. The City had never withstood such a long, concentrated attack nor seen so much damage. Seven Wren churches were gutted, the Tower of London, Westminster Abbey and the Chamber of the House of Commons were on fire, and seven hundred gas mains were fractured and burning like torches to light the way for their tormentors. Hospitals were hit too, just when they were most needed. St Thomas’s Hospital was very badly damaged and so was the Greycoat Hospital. And of course, hundreds of factories were destroyed and thousands of homes. Everything was on an apocalyptic scale. The LCC had over twelve hundred fire engines in use that night but they were overwhelmed by the number of fires and the lack of water and radioed for help to the outlying suburbs, who sent another seven hundred and fifty engines to assist as soon as they could. Even they weren’t enough and the fires continued to spread. Cast-iron water mains cracked in the heat, six of the city’s telephone exchanges were out of action, all the main railway stations were closed, every bridge across the Thames was blocked and so were over eight thousand streets. By the early hours of the morning seven hundred acres of London were on fire, and some of the fires went on burning for eleven days and nights. It was the worst raid anyone had ever seen.

  News of the scale of it percolated slowly, for the papers played it down and so did the wi
reless. But the next day, people all over London could see the fires and smell the sugar that was still burning in the docks, and all day long small scraps of charred paper fell on them like an ominous black snowfall. And the sun was red.

  ‘We’ve had the most dreadful raid,’ Dora said, when she finally managed to phone her mother. ‘They hit the docks. It’s been raining bits of black paper all day.’

  Emmeline wasn’t interested in bits of black paper. ‘Are you all right?’ she said.

  ‘Yes,’ Dora told her, serious about it for once. ‘I’m fine. It was all in the docks and the City. Our AFS boys went up to help. They said it was a nightmare. The City was on fire from one end to the other.’

  Lizzie didn’t hear about it until the following morning, when one of her old school friends sent her a letter with a graphic description of the height of the flames and the extent of the fire. She’d been working in the City ever since she left school and had seen it all when she tried to get into her office. I walked over London Bridge because the Tubes were shut, she wrote, but then I couldn’t get any further because all the roads were covered in debris and blocked off and lots of places were still on fire. I’ve never seen anything like it. The wardens told us to go home because we couldn’t do any work in that mess, so we did. Lizzie noticed that she didn’t say anything about how many people had been killed and injured but there must have been hundreds in a raid like that. What if Pa…?

  No, no, he simply mustn’t. Suddenly, she needed to hear his voice, to know he was all right. Oh Pa, she thought, as she ran down the road towards the phone box, dear, dear Pa. Don’t you be killed too. I couldn’t bear it. By the time she reached the box her fingers were sticky with sweat and it took her a few fumbling minutes before she could get her pennies into the slot. And then the number rang and rang and nobody answered.