Octavia's War

by Beryl Kingston

  ‘The wireless is still here,’ Morag Gordon said, stooping over it.

  ‘Does it work?’ Octavia asked.

  It pleased them both to find that it did although it took a little while to get it tuned properly and, while Morag was turning the knobs, listening intently, the school keeper arrived in his shirt sleeves, apologising for being late.

  ‘Not to worry,’ Octavia told him. ‘You’re here now. I’ve got a list for you.’ And she took it out of her file, shaking the ghosts away. The return had begun and they were all going to get on with it.

  They came home two weeks later, on a pleasant summer day, when the Americans had just captured Cherbourg, the British were encircling Caen and General de Gaulle was walking along the streets of a newly liberated Bayeux. Now, Octavia thought, watching as her pupils tumbled out of their train into the waiting arms of their mothers and aunts, we can get back to normal. There isn’t going to be any more bombing, the Allies are beating the Germans and driving them back, it’s all over bar the shouting.

  ‘What will you do now?’ Mary O’Connor asked, looking at Lizzie and Poppy.

  The three girls were sitting in a tea shop in Oxford enjoying what would probably be their last meeting in the city. They too had finished their exams and now they had to decide what they were going to do next. Mary, as a newly qualified SRN, had been offered a job in King’s College Hospital and was due to start work in two weeks but Poppy and Lizzie had to wait till August for their results.

  ‘We could go back to the farm, I suppose,’ Poppy said. ‘There’s always work for us there.’

  ‘But after that?’ Mary said. ‘When you get your results.’

  ‘I expect I shall get a job somewhere, teaching,’ Poppy told her.

  ‘What about you Lizzie?’ Mary asked. ‘I mean will you go to work or will you just be a housewife?’

  ‘I haven’t got a house,’ Lizzie said, ‘so I can hardly be a housewife.’

  ‘I thought you and Ben had a flat,’ Mary said.

  ‘That was just for a few weeks,’ Lizzie told her. ‘We let it go when he was sent to camp. There didn’t seem to be any point in it.’

  ‘Is he all right?’ Poppy asked.

  ‘He was the last time he wrote.’

  ‘It must be awful, not knowing,’ Poppy said.

  ‘It is. Don’t let’s talk about it.’

  It was peaceful in the tea shop and virtually empty. The elderly waitress smoothed her white apron, adjusted her white cap and sat down on a chair, there being nobody in the shop to tell her she shouldn’t. Now that all the servicemen were gone and the students were going, it was so quiet she hardly had anything to do. Nice-looking girl, the one with the wedding ring, she thought. Not a student of course, being married. I wonder where her husband is.

  The nice-looking girl was wondering that herself, and aching with the pain of not knowing. The terrible thing about being left behind was that there was nothing to keep your mind off what was happening. Since the end of finals she’d been drifting and worrying, listening to the news bulletins and trying to work out where his brigade would be and whether he was in a battle or, worse, whether he was hurt. Mary was right. What she needed was a job of work.

  ‘I shall go to the farm,’ she decided, ‘and keep myself occupied.’

  In Parkside Avenue, Edith and Emmeline were washing the bedroom curtains. They’d had the copper on the go since early morning and the green walls of the scullery were running with water. But the first two sets had been put through the mangle and were hanging on the line and a third set was washing and they were feeling very pleased with themselves. The roar of a distant explosion made them both jump.

  ‘What on earth was that?’ Emmeline said.

  ‘It sounded like a bomb,’ Edith said. ‘Can’t be though or they’d have sounded the sirens.’

  ‘It was a jolly big one, whatever it was,’ Emmeline said and went out in the garden to have a look.

  There was a column of black smoke rising into the blue sky somewhere to the east. ‘There you are,’ Emmeline said. ‘That’s a bomb if ever I saw one.’

  ‘Hit and run, I’ll bet,’ Edith said, remembering what her sister had told them. ‘Do you think we should go down the cellar?’

  ‘No point if it’s a hit and run,’ Emmeline said. ‘They’ll be gone long since.’

  But the next morning, their neighbour told them he’d heard it was a gas main exploding. ‘It was in the Evening Standard,’ he said.

  It was in the Evening Standard again the next day, when there was another even louder explosion and the same thick pall of smoke.

  ‘Two gas mains in two days,’ Emmeline said when she and Edith and Octavia were eating their dinner that evening. ‘What’s up with them? Are they all developing faults?’

  ‘It’s not very likely,’ Octavia said, helping herself to another spoonful of mashed potato. ‘Not one after another like this. If it weren’t for the fact that the sirens didn’t sound, I’d have said they were raids but it seems odd for a plane to come all this way and only drop one bomb. You’d have thought it would have been a stick at the very least.’

  The mystery was solved two days later at half past three in the morning.

  The family were all sound asleep but the sound of the explosion was so loud that it had them out of their beds and into their clothes in seconds. Octavia switched off all the lights, opened her bedroom window and leant out to have a look. This time there were flames in the sky as well as smoke and this time it was very close to them. There was no gunfire and no sound of a plane, just an eerie silence. ‘I should say it’s in South Wimbledon,’ she said. ‘Or Merton Park maybe. If it’s a gas main we shall know about it in the morning.’

  She was right. By breakfast time the news was spreading. The milkman told Emmeline when she went out to the step to fetch in the milk and his version was confirmed by the postman half an hour later. It was a bomb and a very big one and it had fallen in Cliveden Road. They were still digging people out of the rubble.

  ‘Right, that’s it,’ Emmeline said, taking her hat off the hat stand and jamming it on her head. ‘Damned Hitler.’ And she called into the house, ‘I’m going to see Mr Cadwallader.’ Then she was off, stomping through the front garden in a temper.

  Edith and Octavia ran out of the kitchen just in time to see the edge of her skirt disappearing out of the drive.

  ‘Well, at least she’s not screaming,’ Edith said. ‘That’s one thing.’

  ‘And at least we shall know what this is,’ Octavia said. ‘I knew it wasn’t a gas main. Maybe I’ll phone Tommy and see what he says. He ought to be awake by now.’

  He was awake and informative. ‘They’re pilotless planes,’ he told her. ‘Rocket propelled and packed with high explosive. Sort of flying robots. They’re launching them from the Pas de Calais. I can’t tell you much more than that for the moment. Information’s still coming in.’

  ‘Dear God,’ she said. ‘It’s like something out of War of the Worlds. Is there any way of stopping them?’

  ‘The RAF Johnnies are on to it,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry. There are contingency plans for another evacuation.’

  ‘I’m not worried,’ she told him. ‘I’m furious. I brought my school back to London because I thought it was safe. We all did. And now look where we are. It’s diabolical. We’ve had quite enough to put up with without robots being fired at us when we weren’t expecting it. Bloody Hitler. The man’s a scorpion.’

  ‘I’ll call in and see you on Saturday,’ he promised. ‘Chin up!’

  When Octavia cycled into school that morning the school keeper was setting up the benches ready for assembly and there were already several teachers waiting for her in the hall.

  ‘They’re saying it was a bomb,’ Elizabeth said. ‘Have you heard anything?’

  She led them into her study and told them what she knew. ‘We’ll have an after-school staff meeting tomorrow,’ she said to Maggie Henry. ‘I’ll phone Mr Chivers present
ly. He might have more information. We don’t have any girls from South Wimbledon, do we?’

  They didn’t, but that didn’t stop them worrying about the girls who might get caught in other attacks.

  ‘We didn’t bring them home to have them killed by a flying bomb,’ Barbara Trench said.

  ‘Exactly so,’ Octavia said grimly. ‘So we will have a decision to make.’

  It was upsetting to be sitting comfortably in her old staff room, with a cup of tea at her elbow and the familiar school grounds green and wind-tossed beyond the window, and have to face the fact that they might have to be evacuated all over again.

  ‘I’ve told you all I know,’ she said to the staff at the end of her report, ‘and now we must put our minds to it and decide what is the best and proper thing for us to do.’

  ‘It seems to me,’ Elizabeth Fennimore said, ‘that we have two options. We can’t disrupt the examinations. Not now they’ve begun. That would be unthinkable. So we either wait until the examinations are over and we all join the evacuation then, or we evacuate the rest of the school now but leave the fifth and sixth form here to finish their exams with sufficient staff to supervise them. Either way will be difficult.’

  ‘Or,’ Morag said, ‘we can stay where we are and not join the evacuation scheme at all.’

  That suggestion caused a palpable stir.

  ‘Is that wise?’ Barbara Trench said. ‘I mean, wouldn’t we be putting our girls at risk?’

  ‘Yes,’ Morag agreed, ‘we would. But not for long. If these flying bombs are being launched from the Pas de Calais, we shan’t have to endure them for more than a few weeks, a month at the most, just until our armies reach Calais and put paid to them. Besides that, they’re going to sound the sirens now to give us warning that they’re coming. So we ought to have time to take cover. I vote we stay where we are. I’ve had enough of being evacuated.’

  ‘It’s not a matter of taking cover,’ Barbara Trench said hotly. ‘They’re terrible things. They destroy whole streets. We wouldn’t stand an earthly. I think we should get out as soon as we can and not come back until they’ve been dealt with.’

  ‘But what about our exam girls?’ Alice Genevra said. ‘I think we should stay here and give them a chance to sit their exams without being driven from pillar to post. I mean, it’s not long. It’ll all be over in a week or two and now they’ve started… I mean, I don’t think we should uproot them in the middle of it all.’

  ‘Better uprooted than dead though, Alice,’ Elizabeth said.

  ‘I’m with Alice,’ Mabel Ollerinshaw said. ‘I think we should stay where we are and carry on as normal, at least until the exams are over. After all, this isn’t like the Blitz. It isn’t one bomb after another all night long. These things are dreadful but they’re few and far between.’

  ‘We mustn’t forget the others,’ Sarah Fletcher suddenly put in.

  ‘What others?’ Mabel asked her. ‘Do you mean ordinary bombs?’

  ‘No,’ Sarah explained. ‘The other girls. I mean the ones who came back. Some of them have been home for months – years even – and they’re over half of our numbers now. Are we going to take them?

  ‘Now that’s a good point,’ Elizabeth said. ‘I hadn’t thought of them.’

  ‘And will they want to go?’ Sarah said. ‘I mean they’ve been here a long time and put up with the Little Blitz and everything. They might want to stay where they are. I know I do. I think it’s lovely being home again, using my own cooker and everything, even if they do drop flying bombs on us.’

  ‘Me too,’ Phillida said. And sighed. ‘But what are we to do?’

  The three choices were debated until all of them had expressed an opinion. It was past five o’clock before they took a vote and by then they’d come to a compromise. They would stay where they were until after the examinations and then review the situation.

  ‘Thank you ladies,’ Octavia said. ‘I will inform the parents and the LCC and the governors of our decision.’

  She also had to tell Tommy, who arrived at Parkside Avenue at half past seven on Saturday evening with the details of the re-evacuation in his pocket.

  ‘July 11th,’ he said. ‘It’s all laid on.’

  She made a grimace. ‘We’re not going,’ she said.

  ‘What do you mean not going?’

  ‘What I said. We’re not going.’

  He was furious. ‘Don’t be so bloody ridiculous. Of course you’re going.’

  ‘No, Tommy. We’re not. We’re staying until our girls have finished their exams. We don’t want to uproot them.’

  ‘Get your hat,’ he ordered. ‘We’re going out. The supper can wait, can’t it, Em?’

  ‘Well,’ Emmeline said doubtfully. ‘It’s a pie.’

  He took that as a yes. ‘That’s settled then,’ he said. ‘Come on.’

  ‘Where are we going?’ Octavia asked, following him out to his car.

  ‘You’ll see,’ he said and his voice was grim.

  He took her on a tour of all the worst bomb sites in Wimbledon, all round Wimbledon Park to Church Road, down Wimbledon Hill and into the Broadway, to Hartfield Road where there were four bomb sites and where an air raid shelter had been hit, to Palmerston Road and Gladstone Road, and back across the Broadway to Stanley Road where two shops had been destroyed, to Effra and Evelyn and Faraday Roads, and on to Haydon’s Road, where there were more bomb sites than she could count, and finally south to Cliveden Road, where the first flying bomb had fallen. The road was still cordoned off, so they left the car and explored the site on foot, crunching through the brick dust and the splinters of wood and glass, with the strong powerful smell of the raid cloying their nostrils and wreckage all around them.

  ‘My God!’ Octavia said. ‘It looks like an earthquake.’ The devastation was so much worse than she’d expected that it took her a while simply to accept it. At least seventeen houses had been completely destroyed. There was nothing left of them but piles of broken brick and slate, wrecked doors and mangled furniture and jagged planks of wood. Four more were so badly damaged they were beyond repair. They still stood but they were like decaying teeth, jagged and blackened and broken. ‘My God!’ Octavia said again as they walked on. It was a sobering walk for there wasn’t a single house in the entire street that hadn’t been damaged.

  ‘Twelve deaths and fifty-three serious injuries,’ Tommy said, standing beside her in the rubble. ‘That’s what these bloody things do to you. Now do you want to stay here?’

  She knew she ought to say no. She knew how much he wanted her to say it. But she couldn’t do it. She had to tell him the truth even if it upset him. ‘We’ve made our decision,’ she said and was upset to realise how stubborn she sounded.

  ‘Then change it.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Of course you can. You’re the Head.’

  ‘That’s not the way we work,’ she told him. ‘It was a democratic decision and we’re going to stick to it.’

  ‘God damn it, Tavy,’ he said. ‘You’re not listening to me. Look at all this. Just look. We’re not playing games. People are getting killed.’

  ‘I know.’

  He grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her. ‘You don’t,’ he cried. ‘You’re not listening. Oh, for crying out loud! Have I got to lose you both?’

  His anguish was almost more than she could bear but she still couldn’t go back on her decision. And in the most peculiar way, seeing this terrible destruction had made her more determined to stay. Not that she could tell him that. ‘You won’t,’ she said, trying to reassure him. ‘Really. It’ll be all right. You’ll see. I’ve got a feeling about it.’

  It was the worst thing she could have said and she knew it as soon as the words were out of her mouth.

  He let go of her shoulders and turned away from her. ‘This isn’t about feelings,’ he said bitterly. ‘It’s about high explosives.’

  She tried to apologise. ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.’r />
  ‘I’m wasting my breath,’ he said, wearily. ‘Come on. I’ll take you home.’

  They drove back in silence and he left her at the gate, not offering to kiss her goodbye and merely saying, ‘I’ll phone you.’ She got out of the car feeling miserable and defeated. She hadn’t meant to hurt him, poor Tommy, but how could she have done anything else?

  Emmeline was in the kitchen sitting at the table reading the Evening Star. ‘No Tommy,’ she said and it was more a statement than a question.

  ‘No,’ Octavia said. ‘He’s gone home.’

  Emmeline folded up the paper and put it on the dresser. ‘Can’t say I’m surprised,’ she said. ‘I suppose it’s because we’re staying on and not being evacuated.’

  ‘Something like that,’ Octavia admitted.

  ‘Oh well,’ Emmeline said. ‘Come and have your pie. It’s more kidney than steak but it’s turned out lovely.’ And she called towards the dining room. ‘Tavy’s home, Edie. We can dish up now.’

  On Monday morning, as if to prove Tommy right, three flying bombs fell on Wimbledon in fairly rapid succession. The first one was at twenty to four in the morning and was preceded by an air raid siren which woke the house and gave them time to get down into the cellar; the second was at half past six and sounded very close; the third arrived at half past eight as Octavia was cycling to school. It was making a noise like a clapped-out motorbike and she looked up towards the sound and saw it quite clearly, a squat, black, evil-looking thing, belching fire and chugging towards South Wimbledon. As there didn’t seem to be anything else she could do, she stopped cycling and watched it, feeling oddly calm as if she’d been anaesthetised. Even when the engine cut out and it began its dive, she was still calm because it wasn’t anywhere near her. She watched until she heard the explosion and saw smoke and debris rising into the air. Then she cycled on to school.