by Josa Young
In Brazil’s world, the Dulcies and Irenes with their breathless enthusiasms and excitements, plans and pranks, made her feel normal. Constantly being hushed by her grandmother or told she was talking nonsense gave her an itch under her skin, a desire to break free and run away or – shockingly – to slap someone hard. The world of boarding school seemed like liberation and she longed for it. By the end of the holidays, Sarah was begging her parents to send her away too. Jemima had converted her to the joys of female company and the pain of her lost boys began to recede.
Now she was home again, seventeen-years-old and having passed her Higher School Certificate, which surprised everyone given her earlier lack of education. It hadn’t been quite like Angela Brazil, she had never attained the status of Monitress or House Captain at St Cecilia’s School for Girls. She’d made good friends, learned that lacrosse was not her kind of thing, surprised everyone by enjoying some of the school food (it was the contrast with Mrs Jones’s offerings) and the pleasures of the adult world were just coming into focus.
Her parents had a vague idea that she might be presented in 1939, which at least meant she could leave Abbots Bourne for a bit. William’s sister Phyllis was willing to do the honours as Claire had never been presented herself, even after her marriage. Aunt Phyllis had brought out her own daughters and knew the form to Claire’s relief, and there was a plan that Sarah should go and stay with her aunt in London, and go to a few parties in the summer after the Drawing Room where she would perform her curtsey. There would be men at the parties and she might possibly have to marry one of them. That would be one way of escaping from Abbots Bourne but she wasn’t enthusiastic.
That wasn’t for a few more months. In the meantime Sarah was bored and lonely again, as her mother sporadically tried to interest her in arranging flowers and other ladylike ways of spending her time. There was some new freedom. Her bicycle, brought home from school, allowed her to cycle into Framham five miles away and go to the pictures. She did this regularly, devouring films that revealed to her a very different world from the one she inhabited. Every week she was drawn deep into a monochrome swirl of beautiful women taking control of their lives in exciting ways. They spoke with staccato certainty, ran ‘automobile’ factories, were writers and musicians travelling the world. They might fall swooning into the arms of the hero in the last reel, but before they got there they did a great deal more than arrange flowers and write letters. She was restless, wondering how she could grasp this new kind of life that seemed so impossible to achieve in England, when rumours of war started to penetrate even the self-sufficient world of Abbots Bourne.
She could see from the faces of the older generation how much they dreaded going through it all again. But for her at last it meant something was happening, and it wasn’t to do with putting some ostrich feathers on your head and curtseying to a stuttering monarch. It might be like the last war when women had proper jobs. Even Aunt Phyllis had worn a uniform and sat behind a desk.
As the possibility of war began to manifest itself, they gave over the vast and hideous Bachelors’ Wing to be a convalescent home for officers. It was unused for many years as the rooms were too small for the better class of PGs that Lady Elbourne preferred. For the family life went on pretty much as it had before.
The Red Cross started a First Aid course in the village hall, and Sarah volunteered, going on to the advanced level and considering joining the Voluntary Aid Detachment, so she could nurse casualties if and when she was called up. She was proud of her bandaging skills and enjoyed getting involved with the village and meeting up with the girls who, as children, she must have seen and envied playing on the village green. There was still a distance, and she felt shy, but when someone was bandaging you up as you lay on the floor, it was impossible not to giggle together.
One Monday morning in 1939 she found her mother in the drawing room pretending not to cry. Cook had just been in as usual to ‘discuss menus’ but she hadn’t wanted to go through her usual dirge of rissoles, cottage pie, steak and kidney. She had simply resigned instead. She’d been offered a job cooking for the garrison at the new anti-aircraft artillery battery that had been set up on the coast.
‘Poor soldiers,’ thought Sarah, rejoicing at the opportunity. Her voracious reading and domestic science at school had taught her that there was more to life than eating the same menu every week.
It was clear to Sarah that her mother had no idea what to do, not even how to get the next meal on to the table, let alone feed a man properly.
Gaining access to the kitchen was a brief moment of great excitement and liberation for Sarah although, having studied hygiene, she was disgusted by the dirt and squalor she discovered below stairs. She couldn’t understand why they weren’t all dead from botulism long since. The Aga, purchased in a moment of enthusiasm by her parents five years before ‘to make Cook’s life easier’, was caked in grease. The worn brick floor was slimy and damp. In the evening, when you turned on the light, numberless reddish cockroaches flowed like unwholesome fluid into the shadows. In drawers she found ancient butter papers, stinking and rancid. Most telling was the complete absence of any kind of cookery manual. Mrs Jones had simply applied the same principle to everything that came through the back door. Get the scullery maid to chop it up, bring to the boil, add plenty of salt and leave in the bottom oven until convenient.
Quickly before he was called up she asked Jim Collins the odd-job man to take the green baize door that separated the servants’ realm from the family off its hinges and put it away in the old stables. Her mother didn’t notice for a while but when she did said nothing. It was clear she’d decided to ignore it as she did anything uncomfortable.
By that time Sarah had taken the household’s food requirements in hand. The war was still phoney and there were no officers in need of a convalescent home just yet. She started by scrubbing every inch of the kitchen with the help of the daily women. After a week of eating omelettes, cooked on an electric ring, every surface was as clean as they could get it smelling faintly of Jeyes fluid pinched from the cow sheds.
Instead of going up to London to be fitted for her Presentation gown, ball dresses and cocktail frocks – that was all cancelled now – she went to Charing Cross Road to buy cookery books. In the dim depths of a second-hand book shop she flicked through a weighty Mrs Beeton published in 1912 that exhausted her with its pages of napkin folding and vast buffets. She seized upon a copy of Escoffier with excitement but was bewildered by the very short and undetailed recipes. An old copy of Eliza Acton’s Modern Cooking for Private Families struck her as a practical first step. On her way home she dropped in at Penrose & Quinn, the smart grocer and florist at the bottom of St James’s, and bought spices to make Mrs Acton’s curries, a brown paper bag of peppercorns and a French cheese.
P&Q as it was known was a revelation of deliciousness and she had to rein herself in hard to stop herself squandering her allowance. She could not resist a small chocolate cake topped with a crystallised violet and stood, her mouth watering, while a haughty young lady in regulation full-skirted black dress and mob cap, placed it in a small gold cardboard box and tied it up with scarlet ribbon. She scurried as fast as she could into St James’s Square and sat down on a bench. Taking it out she bit off a corner guiltily, Mummy’s words about ladies never eating in public ringing in her ears. The chocolatey sweet intensity was astonishing to her deprived palate and she vowed that she would make something similar very soon.
She went home on the evening train, and made a chocolate cake the next day, flavoured with cocoa. Baking in the Aga was much harder than she had imagined. She missed the convenient gas stoves in the domestic science labs at school. Realising that she needed something more modern than Mrs Acton for baking, she found in the Abbots Bourne library a pre-Great War promotional booklet written for Bourne’s Golden Rise, the coloured raising agent had been the making of her family’s brief fortune.
Her father had told her that Big George had
taken his product to the Crimean War in 1853, like so many entrepreneurs of the time. He’d toured the front line with a mobile kitchen supplying fresh, hot, bright yellow bread to the grateful troops. It was so much easier to make bread quickly with a chemical raising agent as they did in Ireland instead of yeast. The Army contracts for Golden Rise that had followed had raised not only the nation’s cakes but Big George himself from the Cheapside dry salters where he had been born to the dizzy heights of the House of Lords.
The booklet was illustrated with golden cakes and breads and introduced slyly with the words: ‘Cakes are no longer considered too rich for daily consumption. In fact, cake is now known to be an exceedingly well balanced food product.’ There was an advertisement on the back showing a neat cook looking thrilled with her improbably bouncy yellow sponge which she’d just taken out of the oven. The steam whispering from the cake spelled out No surprise it’s Golden Rise!
There was no stopping Sarah after that, although Bourne’s was no longer available and she was forced to use its original and deadly rival Grinwald’s Baking Powder. After Big George died, his only son Young George, having been brought up to be a gentleman and despising ‘trade’, had handed over the running of Bourne’s Golden Rise to people who managed to destroy the family’s golden goose within a couple of years. Something to do with cutting costs by selling it in paper packets – where it rapidly became damp and useless – instead of in airtight tins. A flop in all senses of the word.
Sarah’s first properly raised Victoria sponge was a triumph, oozing with strawberry jam and cream from the farm dairy.
Her father was delighted with the upturn in his diet. He’d never complained in Sarah’s hearing, but the gusto with which he attacked every Irish stew, beef curry, roast chicken and cottage pie fragrant with bay leaves, convinced Sarah that he had not been happy. Just the revelation of butter on vegetables that had not been boiled to sludge was enough to lighten the atmosphere of meals in the vast and gloomy dining room.
Within days, she started attempting something more haute cuisine, and her chicken à la crème, with mushrooms she had picked in the park, sent her family into raptures. All through the remains of 1939 and well into 1940 she cooked. Rationing didn’t affect them so much as they produced their own butter and bacon but Sarah had to cut back on the baking when the sugar ration came in. There were no more tennis parties, impromptu dances or trips up to London and she didn’t miss them. War rolled ever closer. Her father looked gloomier except during meals.
German troops marched into Belgium again and the tuning up was over, the opening bars of war began to sound. Now there was a clear and distinct route out of Abbots Bourne and into the wider world. As she was nineteen, and had done her Red Cross training and become a skilled cook, she decided to volunteer immediately for the Voluntary Aid Detachment as a nurse, even if it meant abandoning her hard-won kitchen. She had some hope that Mademoiselle was beginning to rediscover skills long left behind in her native land, handing over her beloved Eliza Acton before she went.
Her father looked crestfallen, and asked when was she coming back?
Two
Sarah
May 1940
Bumping along an unmade back road Sarah worried about the stretcher cases behind her in the ambulance. The roads were in terrible condition, not much more than farm tracks, deeply rutted and grooved by the tanks and armoured vehicles that had gone before. She had to keep moving north as fast as she could, map spread over the dashboard so she could plan the route using a compass. The last detachment of British troops she had encountered told her the Germans were moving rapidly as the Maginot Line had ripped like rotten muslin and there was no hope of holding France. It was vital to get casualties on to the boats and away before the Germans caught up.
She could hear distant gunfire from time to time and the odd plane roared overhead. So far the huge red cross on the roof of the ambulance had protected her but rounding a corner she saw a road block up ahead just in time to pull off the track into a small copse. She knew they would have seen her. Impossible not to in the vast flat expanse of Flanders. Heart sinking she turned off the engine, got out and went round to the back. She opened the doors to check her patients and make them as comfortable as she could. She rummaged for the piss bottle at the same time.
‘OK, lads, how are we?’ she enquired as cheerily as she could manage. ‘Sorry about the bumps. These French roads are terrible. Now, does anyone need to piss? Also I’ve got water and glucose tablets, and we’ll soon be at a station. You’ll be much more comfortable on a train.’
Separated from the medical orderly and her fellow VAD earlier in the day, there was just her driving and making routine checks, which slowed her down. There were six stretchers in the back, strapped on to shelves up the sides of the ambulance. The men were quiet, two of them dozing. She didn’t want to administer morphine syrettes unless their suffering was unbearable.
‘Got a gasper, nurse?’ said one, his arm in a sling and one leg heavily bandaged.
‘Sorry, I’ve run out. When we get to the station and catch up with the rest of the convoy, I’m sure rations will be issued.’
Checking all their pulses, she was worried about the case top left. His pulse was racing, he felt hot and wasn’t fully conscious. She heard another vehicle draw up behind the ambulance. Turning round, she saw a German officer in black climbing out of a camouflaged Mercedes and walking towards her. She moved across to block his view of her wounded.
‘Get down from the ambulance,’ he said.
‘Oh dear God,’ she thought. ‘Give me strength.’
He turned to the two men who were with him, and issued orders in German. They came up smartly at a trot, and one of them seized her arm and pulled her down off the step, thrusting her away from the ambulance.
‘What are you doing?’ She stumbled and tried to shrug them off, brushing at her arm.
They didn’t answer but had already seized hold of one of the lowermost stretchers, and were undoing the straps that held it to the shelf, pulling it on to the floor and towards the door. The man on the stretcher had been sleeping but woke and started crying out.
‘You can’t do that,’ she yelled, running back towards them. ‘Leave them alone.’
They pushed her away, and had already pulled one stretcher out and on to the ground. The man was firmly strapped down, and remained on it however roughly they handled him. Sarah turned on the officer.
‘You cannot treat my men like this,’ she shouted. ‘Stop it.’
‘We are going to requisition your ambulance,’ he said. ‘No need to worry about your wounded. They won’t know anything about it soon enough.’
He stood there looking at her, his black jodhpurs so tight around the knee, his stupid cap with its arrogant rearing front on his head. Boiling rage roared through her, and she marched straight up to him and slapped him as hard as she could across the face. His men stopped to watch. Her patient was lying still strapped to his stretcher, sobbing with pain. The officer laughed, whipping a silvery blade out of the scabbard at his belt, holding it in his fist with the blade pointing downward. With a swift, vicious movement he jabbed the knife at her, stabbing her in the upper thigh. She wore a British Warm overcoat that a friend had given her and the blade did not get far through the thick woollen fabric, but there was a hot sting and she clutched at her leg, biting her lip. She was damned if she would cry out.
The German soldiers were inside the ambulance, and she limped as fast as she could back towards it, stopping for a moment to comfort the man on the ground. As she bent over him, someone grabbed her hair through her cap and heaved her up and backwards.
There was a sharp crack in the air, and her head was free. She lost her balance and fell forward, trying to avoid landing on her patient. Instead she found herself face down beside the stretcher. There was another shot. She wriggled closer to her patient on the ground and flung an arm across him.
‘Can you see what’s happening?’ s
he said, her face close to his.
‘I think we’re going to be OK. It’s those crazy Scots,’ he whispered. ‘There’s some troopers coming out of the trees. The other Germans have scarpered.’
‘You all right, Miss?’
She rolled over on to her back and looked up into a kind face.
‘Yes, absolutely fine, thanks. What about everyone else?’
‘The German who was grabbing you is dead, Miss. Sandy got him. Crack shot, our Sand.’
She glanced up and saw one of the troopers, still holding his rifle under his arm, bending over the German officer. Oddly the first dead soldier she had seen so far in this muddle of a retreat.
She sat up, and her rescuer turned his face away as she lifted her coat and skirt to look at the damage. A little red mouth had opened in the front of her thigh but it was only oozing blood. He hadn’t hit her femoral artery. She snapped off her suspenders and pushed her ruined lisle stocking down over her knee.
‘Must get this cleaned,’ she muttered, as she saw purple bruising where the knife had thudded into her. ‘Can you pop into the back of the ambulance and grab my First Aid box? Better do something about this, before I get on with driving these men up to the station.’
‘Will you be able to do that, Miss?’
‘Oh, it’s nothing. Just a puncture. It isn’t even bleeding much, just aching a bit.’ One of the other troopers handed her the kit. She popped out one of the glass phials of iodine, snapped off the top and poured the contents into the wound. Gasping, she felt her vision cloud over as the pain was worse than the stabbing.
She wasn’t going to make a fuss when her men were so gravely wounded and hardly complained at all. She applied a pad dressing and quickly wound a bandage tightly around her thigh, pinning it and pulling up her stocking. She snapped the suspenders back on, and then pinned the bandage again several times to the thick cotton lisle to keep it in place. Then she sucked on a couple of aspirins, packed everything back in the box and asked the young trooper to help her to her feet.