Octavia's War

by Beryl Kingston

  ‘We wanted to buy a drink at the sweet shop by the station and you wouldn’t let us. Do you remember?’

  ‘Iris cried.’

  ‘I did not!’

  ‘You did and Mary O’Connor’s mum gave you a humbug.’

  ‘I remember the humbug.’

  ‘We all had to wait on the platform for the train to come and it took ages and ages.’

  I’ve lost them, Lizzie thought. It was just the very thing she’d been afraid of. She’d lost them and she didn’t have the faintest idea how she could get their attention back unless she shouted. And she couldn’t shout at them. That was unthinkable. And particularly not to Iris and Sarah. They’d been in her house group.

  ‘Do you remember that awful hut where they took us? Right out in the middle of nowhere.’

  ‘And those terrible old coaches with the prickly seats.’

  ‘And the Nitty Nora with her comb.’

  ‘And here we are and you’re teaching us,’ Sarah said. ‘Who’d have thought it?’

  It was a chink of light. An opportunity. ‘But I’m not, am I?’ Lizzie said.

  ‘Not what?’ Iris said.

  ‘Teaching you,’ Lizzie said, grinning at them. ‘I mean, I’ve got the text books, but I’m not teaching you.’ Give them out quickly while they’re listening. Keep them listening. ‘Let me tell you what we’re going to do. We’re going to study Geoffrey Chaucer. And you’re going to love him.’

  ‘Are we?’ Margaret said dubiously. ‘The others said he was difficult, didn’t they, Iris?’

  Is that what all the gossip was about? Lizzie wondered. Were they using delaying tactics? ‘Then they were wrong,’ she said firmly. ‘He isn’t difficult. He’s great fun. He tells a good tale and he tells it well. And he’s very rude.’

  Now they were interested. ‘Rude?’ Margaret said.

  ‘Very. Downright naughty sometimes.’

  Iris had opened her book. ‘It’s in a foreign language,’ she said.

  Tackle it head on. ‘No,’ Lizzie said. ‘It just looks like a foreign language, that’s all, because the spelling is different. Don’t try to read it for yourselves yet. Just listen while I read it to you.’ And she began to read the opening lines of the Prologue, getting as near to modern English as she could without disturbing the word order or the rhythm.

  ‘When April with its showers sweet, the drought of March has pierced to the root, and bathed every stem with that juice whose virtuous power engenders the flowers, when Zephyr too with his sweet breath has inspired in every holt and heath the tender crops and the young sun has run its half course in the sign of the Ram, and small birds make melody…’ Then she paused. ‘Spring you see,’ she explained. ‘April showers, spring flowers, young crops, birds singing. We’re off to a sunny start.’

  And so to her great relief they were. But it had been more by accident than design.

  At the end of the afternoon she walked slowly through the hall on her way back to the staff room, deep in thought. She didn’t notice Smithie’s approach until they were almost toe to toe. Then she glanced up to find herself looking straight into her headmistress’s eyes.

  Octavia knew at once that her star pupil was troubled and that whatever it was would have to be tackled delicately. The droop of her shoulders was a disquieting sign. ‘How did everything go?’ she asked.

  ‘I like my first form very much,’ Lizzie told her. ‘They’re dears.’ Then she paused, not quite sure whether she ought to confess her doubts or not. She didn’t want to look a fool. Not on her first day.

  ‘But?’ Octavia prompted. And waited patiently.

  Her patience and concern provoked an admission. ‘I’m afraid I made a mess of my first lesson.’

  ‘Come in and tell me about it,’ Octavia said and led the way to her study.

  It was a searching interview but not an unpleasant one. Octavia took her through the lesson step by step, listening and prompting, and when they’d finished she sat back in her easy chair and smiled at her new recruit. ‘It seems to me,’ she said, ‘that you handled a potentially difficult situation extremely well.’

  ‘It didn’t feel like that to me,’ Lizzie told her.

  ‘That’s because you were in the middle of it. I’m telling you how it looks to me. You made your first mistake and you learnt from it and that’s fine because that’s what mistakes are for. Your pupils will have come out of your lesson aware that Chaucer is worth studying, which is no mean feat. They also know you’re fond of them, which is the secret of all good teaching. And you’ve learnt that you’ve got to have your opening move ready and organised before you enter the classroom. If I can offer you a bit of advice, I’d start the next lesson with a look at ‘The Wife of Bath’. I’ve never met a class yet who didn’t warm to her. There’s an excellent picture of her in the collected works in my teaching room.’

  ‘I remember it,’ Lizzie said. ‘You showed us all of them one after the other as soon as we’d read Chaucer’s description and we had to compare and contrast.’

  ‘Exactly so.’

  It’s all right, Lizzie thought. I am going to be able to do this. But she was noticing how much older her Smithie looked and how tired.

  ‘She’s an extraordinary woman,’ she told her father at dinner that evening. ‘There she is in the middle of a war with a school to run and God knows what to attend to and yet she takes the time to put me on my feet again. Extraordinary.’

  ‘She always was,’ Tommy said. ‘Even when she was a mere slip of a girl.’

  He sounded wistful, which seemed rather peculiar. Why should he be wistful about Smithie? ‘I didn’t know you knew her when she was a girl.’

  ‘Eighteen,’ he confirmed. ‘I was at school with her cousin. But that was in the dark ages. How did you get on with your form? Are they nice?’

  The term continued and, once she’d got into the habit of planning exactly how her lessons would begin and gathering all the material she needed to make them run the way she wanted, Lizzie began to enjoy it. The sixth form were highly taken with ‘The Wife of Bath’, admiring her red stockings and her hat as big as a shield. ‘Can’t you just see her?’

  ‘Five husbands,’ they said and quoted, ‘withouten other company in youth.’

  They were happily comparing the portrait with the description when there was a distant explosion.

  ‘Doodlebug?’ Iris wondered.

  ‘They haven’t sounded the sirens,’ Margaret pointed out

  Seconds later there was another explosion, marginally louder.

  ‘Should we go down to the cloakrooms?’ Sarah asked. And while Lizzie was wondering what to say, the question was answered by the arrival of a fifth-former with a ‘message from Miss Smith’ to say they were to stay where they were unless the alarm went.

  ‘Very odd,’ the staff said to one another in the staff room. ‘Why didn’t they sound the alarm?’

  ‘Maybe they forgot,’ Joan Marshall said.

  They forgot all through the next day and the day after that, when there were really rather a lot of explosions, some at a distance, others uncomfortably close.

  ‘If these are doodlebugs,’ Phillida said, ‘it’s funny they don’t sound the sirens. I think they’re something else and they’re not telling us.’

  ‘I’ll ask my father,’ Lizzie told them. ‘See if he knows.’

  It was the first time in her life she saw him being diplomatic and the sight struck ice-cold into her brain.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘they were bombs. We’re not entirely sure what kind so I can’t say very much about them at the moment. I’ll let you know if and when we get any more information.’

  Lizzie watched his guarded face and felt suddenly and terribly afraid. If he can’t tell me, she thought, and he obviously can’t, they’re keeping it hushed up, and if they’re keeping it hushed up, that means it’s something too horrible for us to be told, in case they alarm us. Don’t they know how our imaginations work?

  ‘In oth
er words,’ she said, ‘you know but you’ve been given orders not to tell anyone.’

  He looked shamefaced. ‘Well, I wouldn’t go so far as to say that.’

  ‘I would,’ she said. ‘It’s obvious. Oh, come on, Pa, I’m not a child. I’ve got a husband in Belgium and God alone knows what could be happening to him out there and I have to face that every day of my life. I think I’ve got a right to know what might be going to happen to me. I don’t believe in secrecy. I think it’s much better to know the worst than to imagine it. It’s all right. I understand about careless talk. I shan’t pass any of it on if you tell me not to, but I need to know and you need to tell me.’

  ‘I can’t, little one,’ he said. ‘Official secrets and all that.’

  ‘Official secrets, my aunt Fanny,’ she said angrily. ‘I’m your daughter. You can tell me. Nobody has official secrets from their daughter.’

  Her insistence made him laugh and laughter loosened his tongue. She was right. It was unkind to keep her in the dark. ‘It’s another flying bomb,’ he said, ‘only worse than the doodlebugs. It carries the same amount of high explosive so it’s just as destructive as they are, but it’s not a pilotless plane, it’s a rocket. It flies at speeds greater than the speed of sound, so we can’t see it coming – or hear it coming for that matter – and the gunners can’t shoot it down. The Germans can launch it from small transportable rocket pads almost anywhere, it’s got a much longer range than the doodlebug and they’ve got thousands of the things in stock. Now can you see why the authorities want to keep quiet about it?’

  ‘My God,’ she said. ‘It is bad.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It is. But keep it under your hat until it’s official.’

  * * *

  It was official nine days later, when so many rumours were going the rounds that it was deemed less harmful for people to know what was actually going on than to keep them guessing and speculating. It surprised the authorities that Londoners took it phlegmatically.

  ‘It’s just one damned thing after another,’ Emmeline said to Octavia, when the news broke. ‘But what did I always say? If it’s got your number on it it’ll get you. No good worrying about it. We must just try and look on the bright side. At least we haven’t got to keep jumping in and out of the cellar. I’ll tell you one thing though. When this lot’s over and we’ve caught the monsters who’ve been doing this, we should put a bullet through their rotten heads and string them up from the nearest tree.’

  ‘She’s so fierce,’ Octavia said to Tommy when they were in bed that Saturday night. ‘She doesn’t have hysterics any more, she just gets angry.’

  ‘That’s a healthier reaction,’ he said. ‘She’s got every right to get angry. We all have. It’s an evil war. Which is why we’ve got to make damned certain the new League of Nations, or whatever we’re going to call it, has a military arm this time and can insist on its decisions being carried out.’

  ‘When do you go?’ Octavia asked.

  ‘Wednesday, for my sins.’

  ‘I shall miss you,’ she said. ‘Just make sure they make the right decisions.’

  ‘Yes, Miss Smith,’ he said, giving her a mock salute. ‘And if I do all the right things and they make all the right decisions, will you marry me?’

  ‘When the war’s over,’ she said and sighed. ‘I can’t look after the school and cope with the rockets and arrange a wedding. I should buckle under the strain.’

  She’d tried to speak lightly, as if it was a joke, but he was so keenly attuned to her that night that he sensed the anxiety behind what she was saying. He propped himself up on his elbow and looked down at her, lying beside him, her face silver-edged and serious in the moonlight. Oh, how he loved that serious face. ‘What’s up, Tikki-Tavy?’ he said. ‘What are you worrying about?’

  The tenderness of his voice provoked an honest reply. ‘It’s those bloody rockets,’ she said. ‘I keep thinking, what if I’ve made the wrong decision? What if one of them falls on the school and my girls are killed or injured, or on their houses, which they easily could, couldn’t they, because there’s no knowing where they’re going to fall. Bloody awful things. It’s my responsibility to care for my girls and my teachers. That’s what I was appointed to do. And I do care for them. They’re like my family. I love them dearly. And what have I done? It was my decision to keep them here. I’m the one who’s supposed to protect them and look after them and what I’ve actually done is expose them to danger. Oh, I know the staff had a part in it. You don’t have to tell me that. I mean I know it was a democratic decision. But I could have overruled them. I had the power to do it. And I didn’t because I wanted to stay here too. I was being selfish and not thinking straight. And now we’re entrenched. They keep saying “We’ve got to see it through” and it makes me feel absolutely dreadful every time they say it. Anything could happen, Tommy, and if it does it will be my fault.’

  ‘That, if you don’t mind me saying so, is illogical,’ he told her. ‘You didn’t start the war and you didn’t design the rockets.’

  ‘No but…’

  ‘What you’re suffering from, my darling, is the weight of command. There isn’t a leader alive who hasn’t felt like that at some time or other. Except Hitler and you can’t count him. And it’s worse if your decisions mean that someone is going to get killed. Monty and Eisenhower face it every day and on a large scale. You think of all the men who were involved in the invasion and how many of them were killed. We have a decision to make, we weigh up the consequences, we make the decision. Then we have to watch the men under our command get shot and die in agony. Weight of command.’

  Hearing the bitterness in his voice and watching the anguish on his face, she knew he was talking about the first war and his part in it. It was something she’d never heard him do before. ‘You too,’ she said.

  ‘I’ve never forgotten it,’ he said. ‘It stays with you for the rest of your life. Watching men die. I remember the first one as if it were yesterday. Only a kid. Couldn’t have been more than seventeen. If that. He did as he was told and he had both his legs shot away. His guts were spilling out of his body and he was trying to push them back in with his hands and there was blood everywhere. He kept crying for his mother. I shall remember it to my dying day.’

  ‘Oh, Tommy,’ she said, putting a hand on his arm, ‘my dear, dear man.’

  ‘Never told a soul till now,’ he said gruffly. There were two moon-silver tears running down his cheeks. ‘Couldn’t face it.’ He brushed the tears away. ‘Anyway, I know what you’re feeling, Tavy. We all feel it. That’s the thing.’

  ‘Were you afraid?’ she asked. They were talking so freely now and with such honesty it was possible to ask him.

  ‘Terrified,’ he told her. ‘We all were. Shit scared. Only you couldn’t show it, of course, not if you were an officer. You had to keep a stiff upper lip. All that sort of thing. Keep up morale. Bloody stupid because we’re all afraid under fire. Me, you, all of us.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You’re right. We are. I certainly am. Only I’m like you. I can’t show it. I have to keep up a bold front, especially to the girls. It does help, you know. It’s necessary but it’s bloody hard to do.’

  ‘The weight of command,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I suppose so. Have you got a cigarette?’

  He found his cigarette case, and lit up for both of them and for a few minutes they smoked and recovered.

  ‘I haven’t talked like that since Pa died,’ she told him.

  He drew in a lungful of smoke. ‘I’ve never talked like that before,’ he said. ‘Not to anyone.’

  ‘Then I’m honoured,’ she said.

  ‘Don’t keep things from me, Tavy,’ he said. ‘Tell me when things are bad. I might not be able to help much but I don’t like to think of you battling on and feeling alone.’

  She took the last drag on her cigarette. ‘I love you very much,’ she said. And kissed him.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine


  Being under fire from a weapon as implacable and powerful as the German V2 bred a weary fatalism in the beleaguered citizens of London. There was no way they could defend themselves against an invisible attacker and nothing to be gained by worrying about their lack of defence. All they could do was get on with their lives and enjoy whatever pleasures came their way. The pubs did a rollicking trade and the cinemas were crowded with people watching the latest Hollywood musical and luxuriating in a technicoloured world where heroines were always beautiful and never smudged their lipstick, heroes were always square-jawed and impossibly handsome, good always triumphed and there was no such thing as war. ‘Load a’ cobblers,’ they said to one another, as they emerged into the grime and dust of their down-trodden world, ‘but it cheers you up a treat.’

  Tommy confided to his old friend Tubby Ponsonby that he’d be quite glad to be out of it for a few days. ‘I shall worry about my Lizzie, naturally,’ he said, ‘but I couldn’t do anything to protect her even if I was here.’

  ‘Make the most of the great US of A, old fruit,’ Tubby said. ‘That’s my advice.’

  Her father’s departure left Lizzie in a quandary. It had been very good of him to offer her a home when she came back to London and she was grateful to him, of course she was, but the house was too full of ghosts to be a comfortable place for her to live in. The garden and the old nursery were particularly difficult places, for although they triggered cheerful memories of all the stupid games she and her brothers used to play when they were young, they were a daily reminder that they were in France now and in danger, just like Ben, and that brought that awful scrabbling anxiety back into her belly again. The stairs and the parlour were even worse. Every time she looked up at the stairs she could see her mother drifting down them in that flowing, fluid way of hers, wearing one of her lovely evening dresses and looking young and alive, and the memory was so painful it made her ache with grief all over again. The parlour had been shut up, according to Mrs Dunnaway. ‘I polish it now and then,’ she said, ‘but he never goes in.’ Lizzie could understand why. On one poignant occasion she’d gone into the room herself to look for one of her father’s books and it had been painful in the extreme. The minute she opened the door, she could see her mother in the sharpest and cruellest focus, sitting in her easy chair beside the fire with Pa facing her, just the way they used to do when she came in to kiss them goodnight as a child, when the world was peaceful and sunny and there was no such thing as a Blitz. She was overwhelmed with a grief as tearing and terrible as it had been when her mother was killed. She fell into the chair as if she’d been thrown there and cried for a very long time. No, she thought, as she passed the safely closed door on her way to the kitchen each morning, I can’t stay here. Not without Pa anyway. I must find somewhere else. It wouldn’t be easy, she knew that, because so many houses had been bombed and weren’t fit to live in, but she would try. The next morning she put cards in the shop windows of all the tobacconists within walking distance of the school and on the spur of the moment wrote a shorter appeal and pinned it to the staff notice board at school. Then she waited.