by Alec Waugh
He spoke with an air of authority that was not unimpressive.
That night shortly before dinner a call came from the Vicarage. The Vicar was in charge of air defence. He had received an assignment of unassembled gas masks, he was most anxious to have them delivered on the following day. He was collecting volunteers to help in the village hall after dinner. Would the Colonel and his guests be so very kind. . . .
In the village hall, twenty or so parishioners, some in dinner-jackets, some in corduroys, were gathered round a long trestle table on which was laid out a heap of rubber masks adorned with goggles, a pile of perforated metal cylinders and a jumble of thick rubber bands. First of all you fitted the mask over the cylinder; that was simple. Then you had to clamp the mask into place with a rubber band. That was not so easy. The band was tight you had to stretch it first. Then you had to roll it over the nozzle of the mouthpiece as though it were the rubber handle of a tennis racket. To fit the clamp in the correct position you had to slip your finger under the rubber band, and run it over the metal rib. It was difficult. It was also painful. The ioints of Guy’s right hand middle fingers began to ache.
Rex was delighted with the whole performance. It all made capital sense, in his opinion, like the digging of those slit trenches in the Park: “An attempt and a highly successful one to get the country rattled. Look at that rumour about the thirty thousand casualties in the first air raid, and all the beds got ready in the hospitals. Nonsense of course, all of it: but most effective. The Left Wing are trying to work up a war hysteria because they know that if there is a war, the whole social fabric may collapse; then they’ll come into power: as they did in Russia. That’s what we have to avoid. We’ve got to get the public worried, then they’ll accept a settlement without feeling loss of face.”
Guy did not contradict him. Perhaps Rex was right; he didn’t know. The one thing of which he was sure was his own ignorance. He kept hearing men talk with high authority as though they had access to secret information. For all he knew they might have. But he had noticed on the few occasions when he himself had accurate, inside information, that those same men talked with the same air of authority although they were completely misinformed and their conclusions were based upon false premises.
“We’ve got to realize,” Rex was saying, “that the issue in. the world to-day is not between one nation and another, but between opposite philosophies. It isn’t Germany against France, but the revolutionaries, the incendiarists in France, Germany, Italy and here against the constitutionalists, in Italy, in France, in Germany and here. We have more in common with certain Germans than we have with many of our compatriots. You’ve heard talk about a federated Europe. This is a first step to it. The men at the top know what they are doing.”
“Are you suggesting that our constitutionalists have been using Mosley as a front?” Guy asked.
“No, we don’t need that kind of front. We haven’t reached the same danger-levels that Italy had and Germany was about to. But the men who matter here are watching out: when the need comes, they’ll have their front: and the right kind of front. Each country needs a special type. Mussolini for Italy, Hitler for Germany.”
It sounded convincing enough the way Rex put it. But it wasn’t, Guy was very certain, as simple as all that. He had been listening to this line from Rex so long: ‘When the time comes’; and at the back of it all there was the same persistent belief that when the time came, it would be his type of man that would be in control.
The headlines next day were gloomier still. Even the Daily Express was hedging on its bet. Lucy’s two boys leapt on it. “There’s going to be war. Even the Express thinks so.” Their voices were raised excitedly. They were sixteen and fourteen years old: about to start their second and third years at Fernhurst. To them war was the supreme adventure. For all the pacifist propaganda of the ’twenties, the adolescent mind still welcomed war. Was that why the Germans were so inflammatory—political adolescents who had only been a nation a few years?
How long would the war last, the boys were wondering; long enough for them? It had been four and a half last time. It might be longer this.
“I’m going into the R.A.F.,” the elder one was saying. The young one was going to be an engineer. “I’m going to lay mines. I’ll sit on a hill and watch a whole town explode.”
“There’s one thing you forget,” Guy warned them. “If there is a war, you’ll play much less football. You’ll have two corps parades a week instead of one: and endless squad drill.”
“Shall we, oh.” Their faces dropped. They hadn’t thought of that. They pictured war in terms of the high spotlights; swooping aeroplanes and exploding hillsides. They had not bargained for the boredom of preparation: the weeks in barracks, the endless T.E.W.T.s. They disliked corps parades, drilling, musketry and marching as much as nearly everyone except Germans did; the Germans with their passion for being dragooned and wearing uniforms.
Guy switched the subject. “What chance do you think you have of getting into the Colts this term?” he asked. They were going back to Fernhurst on the following Wednesday. They were in the School House. As an old International he was almost as much of a hero to them as their father was. “Your photograph’s among the house groups in the reading-room. You haven’t altered as much as Daddy has.”
“I’m a good deal younger, and he’s got a moustache.”
“When Granpa was there, they wore whiskers.”
“And they didn’t wear shorts either to play football. They had breeches fastening below the knees.”
“Were only house caps allowed to put their hands in their pockets in your day: or could the sixth-form table?”
“We now have a special thing called house privileges. They hadn’t those, had they, in your day?”
‘In your day’. The same kind of question, the same kind of conversation that he had carried on with his own father.
Margery had to be at work on Monday: they left on the Sunday evening, directly after supper. The six o’clock news had been even gloomier than the morning papers. “It almost looks as though it will come,” Guy said.
Margery laughed, a short bitter little laugh.
“It would solve quite a few problems if it did. I don’t suppose I’d be the only one to welcome it.”
“So it’s still ‘no reply’.”
“And looks like staying it.” She said it on a weary note. She stayed silent, as they drove through the night. Then suddenly in a rush, it all came out. “Oh I’m so tired of it. Never being able to ring him up at home. Always having his secretary explain that he’s in conference. Probably his wife’s got at her. You should hear the gloating expression in her voice; the way respectable women combine against a girl who’s on her own. Such a salve of virtue for their consciences. If one’s outside their club, how they sharpen their claws on one.”
He had never heard her speak on such a note before. It was probably because they were driving through the night that she found it easier to speak.
“In the long run it gets one down,” she said. “Never being able to go anywhere where I might meet him. What a welcome I should get from all those women: having to refuse invitations that I’d enjoy because she might be there: if only we belonged to a different world; if I’d been some pick-up he could fit into a back street of his life, who wouldn’t have her own personal life of family and friends messed up. I’ve never read a novel that showed, in the way that I see it, the kind of frustration that comes to girls like me—to know that any single friend of mine can see him, ring him, any hour of the day, while I, just because I’m I, can’t.”
“So you’re all that much in love?”
“In love: that’s not the phrase for it. Not after all this time. It’s all too involved: it’s gone so deep. He’s woven into the fabric of so many things.”
Guy did not answer. He had no idea who the ‘he’ was, nor how long it had gone on. It was easier for brother and sister to talk openly when they did not know too much
.
On his return to London he found in his mail-box an unstamped letter in Renée’s handwriting. “Dear one, you have been in my thoughts so much these last three days. I hope that I have been in yours. If this terrible trouble does descend on us, it is something, no, it is everything to know that I have you to share it with. I’ll drop this at your house on my way back from church. I want it to be there to welcome you.”
The crisis passed. Hysteria broke loose when Chamberlain drove back from the airport through cheering crowds, to wave from his window a document on which England was promised ‘Peace in our time, Peace with honour’. Then the reaction came; the suspicion that England had been fooled, that Europe had been fooled; that the powers of darkness had pulled their trick again. Within six weeks everyone had recognized that Munich was only an armistice; a momentary truce.
“I’m enlisting in the territorials,” Norman told Guy. “I don’t want to have to be kept waiting when the balloon goes up.”
“You’re very wise.”
He could remember the confusion last time. Personally he had been lucky. He had been gazetted by mid-August; but others had had their papers held up in orderly rooms for months; others on enlistment had found themselves without uniform and arms. Everything was to be said for getting oneself semi-mobilized.
Himself now over forty, he was too old, he suspected, for very active service. He wrote to ask Rex’s advice. ‘Thirty-eight,’ he was told, ‘is the maximum age for a commission in the territorials. But there is a special Emergency Reserve commission designed for men like yourself who are either too old for active warfare, or have particular specialist qualifications; I should apply for this. In the meantime I am writing on your behalf to a friend in Military Intelligence who might be able to fit you into something. As I told you when you were down here, I am convinced that all this nonsense will blow over soon, but I am glad that you should feel the need of action. Perhaps when this particular tension has died down, I shall be able to interest you in a project of my own.’
There was no immediate sign, however, of the tension dying down. In Rome Fascist deputies were raising their perpetual catcall ‘Corsica, Tunis, Nice’. In Berlin there had been another Jewish pogrom. In London there was an increasing insistence on rearmament: on one front only was there a slackening of urgency—it was now clear that Franco had won his coup d’état, that it was only a question of time before Madrid was cut off from Barcelona. The clamour for intervention gradually subsided: it was time to switch the Party line.
Soon Franklin would be coming home, Guy thought. Would there be a general disbanding of the International Brigade? Would a ship be sent for them: the English could of course be brought back home, but what about the Germans and Italians? There could be no return for them. Would they cross into France? How would they be received there? How would Franklin feel when he came back to safety while his brothers-inarms were crossing a frontier, expatriates, without passports? That was his brother’s problem. Anyhow he’d soon be home; perhaps for Christmas.
He wasn’t though. Early in January the news came through that Franklin had been killed in action.
Guy could not be sure whether it was cowardice or kindness that made him send the news by letter to his mother. Daphne had asked him to do the breaking. She couldn’t face it, she wouldn’t know what to say. They were practically strangers to each other,
Guy wrote the shortest of short notes. ‘Dearest Mother, this is to bring you the tragic news that Franklin has been killed in action. If I may I will come out to dine with you on Thursday.’
She was completely composed when he went out to see her, carrying herself with pride and dignity.
“This proves, doesn’t it,” she said, “how wrong you all were about him? None of you believed in him. I always did, didn’t I, Guy, always, all the time?”
“Yes, Mother darling: all the time.”
“Now he’s a hero: now you all admit he’s that. Everything I ever said in his defence is justified.”
“Yes, Mother darling, everything.”
She spoke with pride, almost with happiness. Perhaps, inside herself, in the last analysis, she was relieved. She had loved Franklin more than anyone had loved him, but she had not been unconscious of his weaknesses. Perhaps she had been even more conscious of them than the others had: she had fought so hard to prevent his being sent abroad, not because she had trusted but because she had mistrusted him. She could not tell what he might not do, away from her supervision. Perhaps she was in her heart of hearts relieved that he should have had this kind of end, have passed now beyond blame and censure. Her last years would not be haunted by the fear of what might happen to Franklin when she was gone.
His mother wanted to have the memorial service in Highgate, in St. Michael’s. Daphne was not likely to object. Guy did not think she ever went to church. He called to discuss it with her. He was received by Julia. Her mother wouldn’t be long, ten minutes at the most, she said. Julia was now a very modish lady.
“How’s your mother taking it?” he asked.
She smiled. “In her stride, as she’s taken everything.”
It was not said unkindly; but with an affectionate, amused respect for the life her mother had led, a life that made it possible for her to take a husband’s death as ‘just another thing’. A curious upbringing for a child, trailing along as part of her mother’s luggage, from one world’s playground to another, with the tune set in each new playground by a different bandmaster. How much had Julia realized of what was going on? For that matter what and how much had been going on? Appearances had been preserved in any case. Julia was starting her adult life under no less favourable auspices than Margery and Barbara had.
“I’m afraid this means that we shan’t see much more of you,” she said.
“I don’t see why it should.”
She shook her head. “One says now it won’t; and probably it won’t for a year or two. But there won’t be a link any longer: no daily give and take. I’m sorry. I shall miss you. You won’t remember it, but you made a great impression on me that first time you came out to Mougins. You were the first person who’d talked to me about poetry, in a grown-up way; who asked me my opinion. Yes, I shall miss you.” She paused: she looked sad and thoughtful; then her face brightened. “Shall I tell you what I think’ll happen?”
“You tell me.”
“One day I’ll be in a jam: I’ll be in love and not know what to do. I’ll want to talk it over, and I won’t know who with. I’ll wish I were a Catholic and could tell a priest: I’ll feel so lost; then suddenly I’ll remember you. ‘Why, Uncle Guy of course.’ I’ll ring you up; and your voice will be so warm and welcoming; the way it always is. Have you any idea how putting-off some voices can be on the telephone? You’ll say, ‘Why of course come round.’ And I’ll curl up on your divan among your cushions and I’ll gabble away and you’ll listen and nod and make an occasional comment, ask an occasional question. And somehow as I sit there talking, it’ll suddenly become quite clear to me, simply through having you to talk it over with, and I’ll know exactly what to do.” She checked: there was a dreamy confident expression on her face. “It’s nice to be able to think that anyhow.”
It was a small congregation for the memorial service. So much of Franklin’s life had been spent abroad. Only the family, a representative from the Spanish Embassy, one or two strangers. Pamela had been notified, but was abroad. Standing by his mother’s side, Guy remembered all the times that he had stood here beside Franklin; remembered all the different Franklins that he had stood beside. Franklin in a sailor suit, Franklin in an Eton collar; Franklin as an undergraduate; Franklin in striped trousers and a morning coat; always in each new manifestation elegant and easy-mannered; with that effortless effect of charm: never spiteful, always even-tempered; a constant source of anxiety, of irritation, yet in himself never anything but gracious. He would leave many happy memories.
They had had no details of his death. There had been a
Falangist attack; a retreat; then a counter-attack; his body had been found in a recaptured trench. They did not know, they would never know whether or not he had died instantly, or whether he had lain there in the cold and rain, under a grey sky, chilled and in pain and numbed, remembering . . . remembering what? Thinking perhaps in pictures: Fernhurst and its courts and cloisters, the gold-brown Abbey; the green grass and white seats of Lord’s; London on a November afternoon with the daylight fading and the line of a late Georgian square showing between leafless branches: London from Highgate Hill, the dome of St. Paul’s showing through a grey-blue mist; the South of France in April, the twin towers of Antibes and the long line of Nice and the snow-capped Alpes Maritimes behind . . . picture after picture, with perhaps as his last conscious thought, ‘This settles my account with Rex.’
24
In February Guy received a letter from the War Office, stating that the application made on his behalf was being considered and requesting him to call for an interview. A date and time were given; the letter was signed C. R. Otway.
It was the first time he had been inside the War Office. As he walked through its imposing portals, he remembered all the first war jokes sponsored by Ian Hay about the practical joke department. He also remembered Siegfried Sassoon’s satires about ‘scarlet majors at the base’. Apparently he was going to be one of them this time. He filled in a form and was taken by a messenger up a flight of stairs, and down a passage. He was shown into a sparsely furnished sitting-room. Expecting to be kept waiting, he had taken the precaution to bring a book with him. He had read twenty pages before the door was opened and a cheery and familiar voice said, “Hullo, old boy, fancy seeing you here.” It was Jimmy Grant; bald, gargantuan, red-faced; but with an extremely well-cut suit that had only just ceased to be brand new. Guy had not seen him for several years.