‘Anthony?’
‘Yes?’
These last weeks Anthony was nearly always to be found in his small library, reading one book or another, making notes for something or other. Meriel never quite knew what, and hadn’t thought it her business to ask, whilst always hoping against hope that his reading matter would turn out to be something practical, something to do with the farm. She was not to be disappointed.
‘There will be a petrol shortage. One doesn’t have to be a prophet in the wilderness to predict that.’ Anthony put down a large closely written tome and stood up as his wife advanced towards his reading table. ‘And just as well we took so many to market in the spring and started to sow crops, Meriel, because I hear everything is to be given over to cereal and potatoes, even the London parks. It will not be long before we lose Smith, I am sure of it. He is quite determined to do his bit, and who can blame him?’ He smiled, a rueful expression crossing his face. ‘I dare say when winter comes I shall be glad that I learned to lamb all those years ago with old Wentworth, much as I grumbled about it to my poor father.’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Now what can I do for my beautiful wife?’
‘I hate to disturb you, Anthony, but both Trixie and Betty have handed in their notice, one on top of each other, which is only rather to be expected, after all. But given that what you have just told me is true, I think I should start to prepare our cottages to take in evacuees from London.’
‘Yes,’ Anthony agreed. ‘How many could we take, do you think?’
Meriel considered. ‘I would think about ten, always provided they are not too big, of course!’
They both laughed even as they tried to avoid the thought that would keep coming into their minds, that would not be turned away – that they might be about to lose their whole world, and to a situation that should never have happened.
Anthony tapped a letter to the side of his book.
‘Do you know old Tankerton told me the other day that Cynthia Asquith was warning everyone – her old friend Winston Churchill, the Liberals, the Conservatives, everyone – that Germany was rearming as far back as l923, and what was the end result? No one took the slightest notice of her.’
Meriel touched her husband lightly and sympathetically on the arm.
‘Well, why would they, Anthony dear? She is a woman.’
‘They listened to Nancy Astor.’
‘Because she is an American, and she frightened them. American women are very good like that,’ Meriel stated. ‘Besides, frightening women always go far. It is just a fact.’
She left Anthony then, because any further discussion on that particular subject was a backwards glance, and backward glances were always a melancholy, useless business.
Anthony returned to his books. Somehow, at this time of indecision, of no one quite knowing which way to turn and therefore unable to start making real plans, besides Meriel, and of course Smith, his books were his only source of comfort and escape. He just wished they could all get on with it. They had enough shelter, God knew. The cellars that ran under the house, as well as the vast old ice house, precluded the need for building anything new. Sometimes he woke in the night, after only a few hours, and found himself staring into the darkness, wondering, how soon, how soon?
The young officer had called out her name.
Robyn stepped forward, instantly, and understandably wondering what she had done wrong.
‘Follow me, please.’
Robyn glanced back over her shoulder to Caro and pulled a little face. Their friendship had already ruffled feathers among the other girls training at the camp, despite the fact that they, in their turn, had already formed their own little cabals.
‘Caught smoking in the la-la, was she?’
‘She doesn’t smoke.’
The tall, stunning redhead who had posed the question gave a short laugh. ‘If she doesn’t smoke now, she soon will.’
Caro turned. ‘Why do you say that?’
‘Because I’ve been here longer than you, Shorty, and because I know what is going to happen, that’s why? I am not just omnipresent, I am omniscient.’
Caro held out her hand as the speaker – green eyes, white, white skin, perfectly sculptured features – looked down at her.
‘Caro Garland.’
The titian-haired beauty smiled. ‘Pleased, I am sure. Edwina O’Brien, late of the Republic of Eire.’ She shook Caro’s hand. ‘Shall we go for a cup o’ tea?’
Caro fell in beside her new friend, feeling decidedly flattered that this stunner with the languid manner should have adopted her so readily. As they walked along to the canteen, Edwina glanced back at Robyn, who was being marched smartly off to one of the newly acquisitioned buildings that housed the offices.
‘My father’s told me about the last war,’ Edwina went on in the same languid voice, which held more than a hint of a lilt to it. ‘You have to smoke to stop the old tummy rumbling, d’you see? I bet you half a crown,’ she pretended to spit on her hand and extended it to the surprised Caro to shake, which she promptly did, ‘that we’ll all be smoking within the month. It’s only normal, d’you see? Mind if I call you Shorty, Shorty?’
Caro shook her head then nodded distracted as she looked back to see that Robyn had now disappeared. Caro followed Edwina into the canteen.
What had Robyn done? Or, to put it another way, what had Robyn done that Caro hadn’t done? Nothing that she could think of at that moment. They had trained, they had changed wheels, they had driven, they had done everything that had been asked of them. Still, of one thing she could be sure, and that was that Robyn could take care of herself. There were few situations from which she could not extricate herself with a snap of her long, elegant fingers.
‘What’s worrying you so, Caro Garland?’
‘I’m not worried exactly, I’m just curious as to why they should march my friend Robyn Harding off to headquarters. Mind you, if anyone can take care of herself, she can.’
‘And just as well, I would say.’
Edwina O’Brien rolled her eyes as they both joined the queue for tea and rock cakes. They sipped and nibbled in silence, each one wondering individually how anyone could make tea taste so disgusting, or bake cakes so hard.
‘Take the varnish off your toenails, wouldn’t it?’ Edwina asked cheerfully, holding up her cup. ‘Cheers! And as for the rock cakes, I think we should store them for ammunition. “Kill two Jerrys with one cake” – something the government could promote on the Underground.’ She bounced hers on her plate and then rolled it up and down the table before continuing, ‘Now your friend – Robyn, is it? – you say she can take care of herself? I hate to disabuse you of that notion, but when it comes to the Black Dame who is currently visiting us, not even Beelzebub would take her on, believe me. The Black Dame is one of the original forces behind women’s recruitment. She has the reputation of gnawing her way through the opposition in a way that a deathwatch beetle would envy. And as for anyone taking her on – they are merely flies on the windscreen of her private plane, which, by the way, she still races at weekends, when she is not racing her motor car, that is. I can’t remember which race she beat most of the men in, but beat them she did. Not taken well, as you can imagine.’
‘Why is she called the Black Dame then, if she’s so brilliant?’
‘Because she always sports a black cane, has a bit of a limp, doncher know? Fell out of her plane at a thousand feet, and broke her fall by destroying a house, I dare say. But, at any rate, she is a dame. Happily for most of us we will never be given the privilege of more than a glimpse of her on parade, but it would seem that your friend Robyn is the exception, and the Dame is doubtless, even now, interrogating her.’
‘Interrogating?’
‘Mais certainement, mademoiselle. You don’t think the Black Dame invites you into her office to ask for a tip for the Cheltenham Gold Cup, do you?’
Caro’s eyes searched Edwina’s face, longing to see something that would tell her that sh
e was only teasing. She found no such look.
‘I hope that you will remember my words of wisdom when I am proved triumphantly right.’
Edwina sighed with pleasurable anticipation as Caro finished her tea, and left her rock cake.
As they stood up Edwina glanced down at the cake. ‘Put it in your pocket, Shorty. We may well, as I just indicated to you, find we need it for civil defence.’
Robyn saluted. She knew it was a good salute, she had practised it in the mirror for long enough.
‘Miss Harding?’
‘Ma’am?’
‘Sit down, please.’
They were alone, her commanding officer, and Robyn, a mere pipsqueak recruit of a few weeks’ training. Despite a calm exterior, Robyn’s insides started to turn to ice, as they tended to do when there was, as Aunt Cicely would put it delicately, ‘something afoot’.
She sat down on the chair in front of the desk, feet together. She didn’t know why, but to cross your ankles was considered absolutely horrendous. She made a mental note to ask Aunt Cicely on her next leave.
‘Miss Harding, before you joined the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry you had cause to report to someone at a Victoria office some kind of sighting, was this not so?’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
‘Why was that?’
‘It was on the advice of my aunt, Cicely Harding—’
‘Ah, yes, yes. I knew Cicely Harding very well in the old days.’
A brief affectionate smile crossed the face of the feared woman behind the desk. Encouraged by this, Robyn relaxed a little, although not as far as allowing herself to smile back.
‘It was like this, ma’am. On hearing what I had noticed in the back of a civilian plane piloted by a German gentleman, my aunt gave me the address of a certain officer who runs a government department based in Victoria.’
‘Precisely so, and it is for this reason that the officer in question has put forward your name to work undercover for us.’
Robyn stared at the Black Dame, and found herself immediately wishing that she had not taken Aunt Cicely’s advice, and had not visited the officer in Victoria, and was not being asked anything other than to stay with Caro in Dorset, drilling and driving, and doing all the other tasks that she had fully expected to be doing, while all the time waiting to meet up with Eddie Napier and have a cracking evening out once again.
She could not bring herself to speak the words that she would have liked to have uttered, namely, ‘Why me?’ As it turned out she had no need.
‘I expect you are wondering, why me?’
‘I was rather.’
‘Well, I will tell you. You have already shown initiative. Reporting the pilot’s photographic equipment showed that you are alert to danger, but you are also discreet. For example, I notice that you did not disclose the name of the officer you went to meet in Victoria, even to me. After all, I might not be trustworthy. That is commendable. Then you have a good service background – aunt in the FANYs, papa in the cavalry – and are, I believe, a more than competent driver, not to mention already knowing your way around basic mechanics, such as changing wheels, when you arrived here. Not, I think, that you will be doing much changing wheels in the kind of work we have lined up for you.’
‘I can’t say that will cause me to lose much sleep.’
This time they both smiled.
‘We shall not require you quite yet, but we shall require you to, let us say, behave in a way that is out of order, only in a minor way. Say, for instance, do you smoke?’
‘No.’
‘Do you go to nightclubs?’
‘Not regularly, no, although I have been to the Grafton Galleries.’
‘Are you easy, as the expression has it?’
Robyn cleared her throat. ‘Good heavens, no!’
‘No, of course not. Nevertheless I think we shall have to ask you to take up smoking, if you don’t mind, and after that we will transfer you and the Bentley, back to London, where the fun will begin, if it can be termed as such.’
Robyn nodded. She didn’t mind the idea of going back to London. It would make it easier to see Eddie and go to the Grafton Galleries, and even Ciro’s and the Savoy, but the idea of taking up smoking was less appealing.
The Black Dame opened the drawer in her desk and took out a packet of cigarettes.
‘Start in on these, after lights out, behind the sheds, and I’ll make sure one of the officers catches you in a few days’ time. You should have stopped feeling queasy by then.’
She stood up, extending her hand. ‘We will be in close touch, but not through the usual channels. I don’t need to say any more.’
Robyn went to leave, but the Black Dame stopped her. ‘One more thing. If anyone asks you why you were interviewed, I was trying to recruit you for the nursing service, but you refused.’
Robyn nodded. ‘I understand.’
But of course she didn’t. She marched smartly across the green that divided the office from the sheds and the huts, all the time wondering what on earth she had let herself in for. She wished to God that she had not reported to that officer in Victoria on Aunt Cicely’s advice. She wished she’d kept her mouth shut. She wished so many things, most of all that she did not have to take up smoking. Her father smoked, and she hated it. He had taken up smoking in the First World War to keep midges away, hunger at bay, and his spirits up. He had not stopped since, and of course she would never expect him to, but the idea that she would now have to take to nicotine was repellent.
A week later found Edwina O’Brien holding out her hand for the half a crown she now claimed Caro owed her.
‘I told you it wouldn’t be long,’ she said to the astonished Caro. ‘War and smoking go hand in hand, just as my old da told me.’
That was two days before the Sunday broadcast of September the third, when at long, long last, Great Britain ‘got off her backside’, as Edwina put it in her usual pithy way, and declared war on Germany, and just after Robyn had duly been caught smoking behind the sheds in the early hours of that fateful morning, and even as Meriel Garland led the small band of children who had been allocated to stay at Chevrons for the duration of the war towards their new homes, trying not to notice their bedraggled appearance, their tear-stained faces.
Chapter Five
It didn’t matter that when the first siren blew it was afterwards found to be a mistake. It didn’t matter that they had all started to say not ‘if the war begins’, but ‘when the war begins’, the sound of the air-raid siren wailing was enough to encourage everyone to run towards some place of refuge.
‘I never thought I’d find myself willingly in a church on a Sunday,’ Eddie whispered to Robyn, before he glanced down at his watch. ‘I’ll have to leave you here, I’m afraid. I must get back to camp.’
He leaned forward and kissed her briefly and lightly on the lips, which was really an outrageous thing to do in a small country church, and caused a stir among their fellow worshippers, but Robyn couldn’t care less. She was definitely in love with Eddie Napier and, what was more, she didn’t mind who knew it. They had not yet made love, but she knew she would make love with Eddie, before he climbed into his aeroplane, and flew off into the skies. She knew it with complete certainty. She also knew it would be quite the right thing. Not that she was easy, not that she had ever thought of love in that way before, only now it was war, everything was immediately quite different – most of all love.
Caro had returned to Dorset, after spending the weekend at Chevrons, to continue with her training. Upon hearing that they had at last declared war on Germany, Bill had immediately telephoned Caro and asked to marry her, ‘before it is too late’. It seemed that suddenly everyone wanted to marry someone, and all for the right reasons. Several girls in their unit had already announced that they intended to get pregnant, no matter what, simply so that they could guarantee the next generation.
It was all too much for Caro, who, much as she liked Bill, did not want to marry him, or
even make love to him. It was enough to have dinner and go dancing with him.
‘You know you will have to one day,’ Robyn announced to her some days later.
‘Will have to what? Take up smoking?’
‘No, you know what I mean. It.’
Caro turned away. She did not see why she should. Why should she do something just because they were at war?
‘I’m taking a test today, can’t think of anything else, big lorry type. I shall probably die if I crash it like I did that van,’ Caro murmured, quickly changing the subject to avoid any more discussion of It.
‘You’ll pass with flying colours,’ Robyn stated shortly, because she had just mentally made a note to tell their senior officer that a certain young lady in their ranks must be encouraged not to go home.
‘Look, Caro. Sit down.’
Caro sat down on the edge of her bed.
‘War is not just about bombs dropping and being invaded, it is also about being wet behind the ears, and you’ve had a pretty protected time of it, you know?’
‘Well, so have you!’
Robyn shook her head. ‘No pigeon pie, not like you. You were kept under wraps by everyone at Chevrons. Brothers, sister, mummy and daddy, even Smith and Mrs Grant. You were the baby of the family. I was an only child with a maiden aunt. I had to protect her, and look after Daddy, who as you know is quite incapable of remembering where he’s left his spectacles, while Aunt Cicely suffered from what I can only describe as intermittent attacks of the Florence Nightingales.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘All that nursing in the Boer War and driving ambulances in the Great War had their effect, as they were bound to do. Gracious heavens, you can’t go in for all that and not have some sort of after-effect. Aunt Cicely used to get prone for weeks on end, couldn’t move. All those memories, you know, plus the fact that she never found love, as I think I have,’ Robyn finished quickly.
‘Eddie?’
‘Yes.’ Robyn was silent for a second. ‘Remember Aunt Cicely’s little black book? Well, Eddie’s father, he was killed at the Somme. And now look.’
Goodnight Sweetheart Page 12