‘Look here, Grace, you’re not yet sixteen, but maybe you could help out at Hassett Manor for a while. Lady Neville’d be glad to have you.’ And you’d be looked after and supervised, he thought, by a sensible woman. The only remaining man on the staff was an ancient butler that Lady Neville kept on out of the goodness of her heart. Grace would surely be safe there.
Seeing that there was no alternative, Grace shrugged and agreed to accompany her mother to an interview with the lady everybody respected, and by mid January she had become a general housemaid and kitchen assistant, resident at Hassett Manor but allowed to go home on Saturday afternoons, returning on Sunday evenings.
It was certainly a change. The other staff consisted of stout Mrs Gann the cook, Flossie the other housemaid, old Mr Standish the butler and a worried-looking woman who came in to help with the heavy scrubbing and sweeping. Grace was not required to sleep in the attic, but shared a second-floor room with Flossie, a plump country girl who slowly and painstakingly read romantic stories, and frequently sighed for the absent Mr Cedric – ‘’E’s ever so nice, Grace, we don’t ’alf miss ’im!’
Her lament reflected the general atmosphere of Hassett Manor, with Sir Arnold and young Mr Arnold Neville away in India, Cedric at the front, and only Miss Letitia and four regular servants left. A few rooms had been closed and the furniture covered with sheets – like shrouds, thought Olivia Neville with a shudder. Shocked by the long lists of dead and wounded, she visited not only the homes in mourning, but also those with a family member at the front, such as Mr and Mrs Bird, both of whose sons were away. She shared with them her own fears for Cedric, and encouraged them to be hopeful. Partly to ease her own loneliness, she made an effort to draw closer to her remaining servants, and in response to Flossie’s oft-repeated sigh of ‘It ain’t ’alf quiet ’ere now’, her ladyship invited them to join her and Miss Letitia in the drawing room after dinner each evening. Accordingly, Mrs Gann, Mr Standish, Flossie and Grace sat in a half-circle, facing the mother and daughter.
‘It’s important that we all keep our spirits up,’ she told them. ‘Miss Letitia is happy to play the piano for us, so perhaps some of us would like to sing to her accompaniment. If any of you volunteer, I’m sure the rest of us would enjoy it.’
Her ladyship and Miss Letitia led the way with a duet, ‘Where E’er You Walk’, and Grace had to bite her lips to stop the urge to giggle. After a while she joined in the singing of ‘Love’s Old Sweet Song’, and ‘Home, Sweet Home’. Lady Neville complimented her on her clear soprano voice, and asked what else she would like to sing. ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’ was thought to be more suitable as a marching song than for a musical evening, and Grace knew better than to suggest any of Marie Lloyd’s ditties; she chose ‘A Wand’ring Minstrel, I’ from Mr WS Gilbert’s largely unsuitable repertoire, but felt her talents to be wasted on this audience, though Flossie was quite overawed and breathed, ‘I say, Grace, you ain’t ’alf clever!’
It was a far cry from the saucy exchanges at the Railway Hotel.
The turn of the year was overshadowed, as Christmas had been, by the lack of progress of the British and French against the Germans, who seemed to be better equipped for warfare, and January brought a new terror to the population at home: the Zeppelins, great balloon-like airships that crossed the Channel and dropped explosive bombs on towns, killing indiscriminately wherever they landed. The east coast was the first to be attacked, and this gave a boost to the recruitment drive; Ernest and Aaron were once more faced by their consciences, the fact that they were not fighting for their king and country. A pacifist society had been formed, the No-Conscription Fellowship, which opposed the killing of fellow men of whatever nation, and its members were known as ‘conscientious objectors’. Ernest wanted to join the movement, but Aaron held back.
‘I’ll only join the NCF if conscription’s made compulsory, Ernest. There’s no need to become voluntary targets for abuse and ridicule while it’s still a matter of personal decision. Besides, think how it would reflect on our families, especially yours – your parents and sisters, if you were pointed out as a conscientious objector! You might as well wear a placard with ‘coward’ round your neck. No, my friend, let’s wait a while and see how these Zeppelin raids go.’
And after a few weeks with no further Zeppelin attacks, Ernest agreed. It possibly meant that the Germans were getting ready to negotiate for peace, said Aaron – but Ernest shared his father’s view that the January raid had been an attempt to scare the nation with a foretaste of what was to come: warfare in the air. Tom Munday saw it as a sign that the English Channel was no longer the effective barrier against enemy attacks, as it had been from time immemorial.
Suddenly, on a windy day in March, Hassett Manor was thrown into a turmoil of excitement and a certain amount of dread. The news came through that Cedric had been wounded and sent back to England. He was in London’s Charing Cross Hospital, one of the clearing stations where injuries were assessed and the patient sent to another hospital or to his home; and Cedric was considered fit to travel by train to Everham. He was coming home!
Lady Neville went to meet him at Everham station in her carriage, with old Mr Standish acting as coachman, ready to take Cedric on the last lap of his journey. Grace and Flossie eagerly joined in the general welcome to the wounded hero who was pale, thinner, and looked very tired, though he managed a smile and a handshake for them all, and embraced his sister. His right arm was in a sling, and Dr Stringer was sent for to inspect the deep flesh wound on his shoulder and change the dressing. He was ordered to bed for at least three days, and a light, nourishing diet was prepared for him by Mrs Gann. On the fourth day his mother asked if he would like to join in the regular music entertainment held in the drawing room, and he came in to sit between his mother and sister.
‘Oooh, yer can see ’e ain’t ’alf glad to be ’ome, poor Mr Cedric!’ said Flossie, but it was Grace who caught his eye and smiled demurely, which he acknowledged with a wink. This was more like it! She gave a pretty rendering of ‘Sweet Lass of Richmond Hill’, and to her great satisfaction he joined in her next song, ‘Barb’ra Allan’, taking the bass part and holding out his left hand to her and then to Letitia the pianist as the small company applauded. Things were definitely looking up at Hassett Manor!
Overjoyed as she was to have her son home, Olivia Neville was willing to indulge him in a little harmless flirtation with the Munday girl. She sensed that Cedric had changed; as his wound healed, he was slow to regain strength. He was nervous and wary, called out in his sleep and was unable to hold a conversation for any length of time. He would sit staring into space, and when his mother gently tried to question him, he would tense up and seem unable to speak, his face an expressionless mask with eyes that looked beyond the four walls of the room. Sometimes he raised his left arm to his face and turned his head away, as if to blot out what he saw. He was at his best during the ‘entertainment hour’ each evening, and introduced some jollier songs, such as when Grace stood up and lamented:
‘There was I, waiting at the church…’,
wiping her eyes and boo-hooing until Cedric came in at the end with:
‘Can’t get away to marry you today,
My wife won’t let me!’
‘Oooh, yer don’t ’alf sing together well!’ sighed Flossie. ‘I don’t ’alf wish I could sing.’
When Lady Neville suggested inviting former friends of Cedric’s to join the musical evenings, he firmly shook his head.
‘I’m not ready to meet other people, Mother. I can’t put up with their stupid questions. You people at home have got no idea – no idea at all. Only the chaps who went through it can possibly…’ His voice faded into silence.
When she realised that he could not talk of the war and what horrors he had seen and heard, Lady Neville made an important decision: she would open Hassett Manor as a convalescent home for wounded officers. No sooner was the idea born than she began to act upon it: the War Off
ice was informed that Hassett Manor could take a dozen men, dust sheets were removed from the closed rooms, and Tom Munday was summoned to make some modifications to the house. Local people were asked to donate or lend single beds, and North Camp rose to the occasion with offers of help: two nurses, Miss Payne and Miss Beaty, were sent from Everham Hospital to assist with caring for the injured men, and several women offered to come in daily to help with the cleaning, cooking and washing of bedlinen.
Grace was in her element, pushing furniture around and making up beds to receive the new arrivals from clearing stations. By the end of March all the beds were occupied, and from a melancholy silence the manor was transformed into a hive of activity and animated voices.
‘It ain’t ’alf noisy ’ere now,’ remarked Flossie, ‘but I like it, don’t you?’
Grace was at first directed to housework and assisting Mrs Gann in the kitchen, but she found frequent reasons to visit one or other of the three rooms which had become wards, with four men in each. Lady Neville ordered her sharply back to her own domain, but it was soon obvious that the pretty young girl had a beneficial effect on the men – as one of them remarked, she was ‘just what the doctor ordered’. These men were convalescent, so although there were a few remaining bandages, sticks and crutches, they were in fairly good general health, and less reticent than Cedric at speaking of their experiences at the front, though mainly to each other. Cedric found that he could go among these men who’d shared his own experiences, and talk freely with them; it was like a brotherhood which bound them together in a way not understood by their families and friends at home.
Grace was therefore the first of the Mundays to hear, or rather overhear, at first hand of the horror of the trenches, frequently half-full of freezing water, the constant noise of shelling and machine gun fire, the rats, the lice, the all-pervading mud – and a memory of one man’s brother hanging dead on a barbed wire fence bordering on No Man’s Land, the gap between the two opposing sides where to walk was to invite the fatal bullet. The latest terror had been poisonous gas released from canisters in the enemy trenches, attacking eyes, throats and lungs.
Grace took these stories home on her free Sundays, and this was how Ernest Munday came to hear them, passing on his knowledge to Aaron. It was no incentive to enlist and go the same way, yet Ernest’s mind became more troubled every day, and he imagined that every neighbour, every client and everybody he met was pointing an accusing finger in his direction.
‘I’m not ready to die!’ he almost shouted at Aaron one evening after the office had closed, and his friend had no answer except to repeat that they should continue to wait. But he held out his arms to Ernest and held him in a silent embrace so close that they could hear each other’s hearts beating.
The end of April brought news of a big Allied offensive against Turkey, which for some obscure historical reason had joined the conflict on the side of Germany. It became known that several divisions of troops, augmented by Australian and New Zealand forces, were to make a series of landings along the Gallipoli Peninsula from the straits of the Dardanelles, and force the Turks back to Istanbul.
‘Sounds warmer and drier than the trenches in France,’ commented Aaron, as once again the question of military service came up, but it was not until the seventh of May that the die was cast, with the sinking of the Cunard liner Lusitania by a German submarine just off the west coast of Ireland, with a loss of more than a thousand lives. This appalling incident gave rise to a further recruitment drive, and there was another consequence of the tragedy: a surge of anti-German feeling spreading like a fever, notably in London’s East End, and anybody with a German-sounding name was likely to have their homes attacked, likewise their shops and offices.
Aaron looked sombre as he and Ernest arrived in the office one morning in the following week, and sat down at their desks. That fateful morning, as Ernest was to remember it.
‘It’s been terrible,’ Aaron confided. ‘My own family’s windows in Tamarind Street have been smashed, and they’ve been subjected to threats and abuse. That family tailoring business where my father worked has been attacked and looted. They’ve lost their three sewing machines, and that was their livelihood.’
‘Oh, my God. And your mother and the children?’ Ernest tentatively asked.
‘The name of Pascoe has saved them from direct harm, though my father was treated as badly as his employers. And we’ve all decided that my mother and the two girls should leave Tamarind Street and come to stay with us at Everham, so they’re arriving on Friday. My father and Jonathan are staying in London.’
‘Heavens, your uncle’s house will be crowded! Does it mean you’ll have to give up your bed?’
Aaron did not answer at first, but looked his friend straight in the eyes; Ernest felt a shiver go down his spine.
‘Soon I shan’t be needing a room,’ said Aaron quietly. ‘This business of the Lusitania…’
‘Yes?’ Ernest prompted, though he already knew what he was about to hear.
‘I’m going to enlist, Ernest. I’ve got to. Since the Lusitania, I can’t go on dodging the issue, I’ve got to go.’
He spoke with conviction, and their eyes met. ‘I’ve got to go,’ he repeated.
‘I can’t let you go,’ replied Ernest with equal conviction. ‘Not without me.’
‘My dear chap, you don’t have to join up just because I do, and I wouldn’t dream of asking you. You must make your own decision, speak to your father, ask yourself if you really need to risk your life—’
‘Don’t talk to me as if I were a child, Aaron,’ interrupted Ernest, almost sternly. ‘Can’t you see, can’t you understand that you’re dearer to me than my life? Where you go, I must follow, so we’ll go to the recruiting office in Everham and enlist together.’
There was a short silence, and Aaron passed a hand over his eyes.
‘Ernest, we’ve never actually spoken of…of this before, but of course I’ve known about how you feel. I’m the same, except that…well, you know how the law stands on this, and society in general. I don’t want you to enlist just to be near me. And in any case we’d probably be separated.’
‘If we get separated and ordered to different divisions, I shall at least be with you in spirit, knowing that we’re in the same war together, and you’ll know that I’m not skulking around at home as a conscientious objector. No, Aaron, don’t say any more, if you’re prepared to fight and kill men in the name of freedom, then so am I.’
Ernest’s face was so grim that Aaron smiled. ‘So, if I cannot get rid of you, my friend, I shall have to enlist with you and go out to fight together. Thank you.’
‘And thank you, Aaron,’ Ernest said solemnly. ‘I couldn’t bear to be left behind.’
Seeing that they were in the office of Schelling and Pascoe, where at any moment they might be interrupted, they continued to sit at their desks as if their conversation had been mere trivia.
It was what Tom Munday had been expecting, but it still filled him with dismay. He hardly knew what to say to his son.
‘It’s not going to be easy telling your mother.’
‘I know, Dad, and that’s why I’m leaving that to you. I’m sorry.’
‘All right, son, it’s better coming from me. And it’s not only her that’ll worry, you know that.’
‘I do know, Dad. It was because of the Lusitania that we finally made up our minds.’
‘We? You mean you and young Pascoe?’ Tom’s voice was sharp.
‘Yes, Dad, we’ve thought the same all along, and we’re of one mind.’
‘Which one o’ you spoke first? One o’ you must’ve led the other.’
‘No, we’ve always been of one mind. And neither of us would want to leave the other behind,’ Ernest told him steadily. ‘In a way I feel a sort of relief.’
‘Because your mother would hit the roof if she thought you’d followed after him,’ Tom said bluntly.
‘There’s no need for Mum to think tha
t, Dad. At least she’ll be able to look Mr and Mrs Bird in the face.’ He smiled. ‘She’ll have her ladyship coming round to visit! Mum’ll appreciate that, I know.’
‘Huh!’ was the only response. Even a visit from Lady Neville would hardly compensate Violet Munday if Ernest was at the front – or fighting the Turks at Gallipoli, either way facing death or serious injury.
That same afternoon, when Ernest and Aaron walked along Everham High Street on their way to the recruitment office, a well-dressed young woman approached them boldly.
‘And what might you two healthy young fellows be doing here, taking your ease at a time like this?’ she demanded melodramatically. ‘Why aren’t you defending your country? Shame on you!’ Opening her handbag, she took out two large white goose feathers and handed them to Ernest and Aaron. Ernest bemusedly took the feather she offered, but Aaron waved her aside.
‘You should think twice or three times before you make public accusations, madam,’ he told her, and snatching the white feather out of Ernest’s hand, he threw it on the ground. ‘Come, my friend, let’s get our business done!’
Though Aaron’s tone was contemptuous, Ernest was silently thankful that the white feather of cowardice had come too late to accuse him; it was something he’d been dreading.
Violet Munday went chalk-white, then red as she burst into angry tears.
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