The Cazalet Chronicles Collection

by Elizabeth Jane Howard

  When Lydia was told in the morning about her grandmother, she burst into racking sobs which Polly and I thought was rather affected as she never seemed to like Grania very much. When we confronted her with this, she said, ‘I know, but you ought to cry when people die – they like it.’ I said how on earth did she know that, and she said that if she died, she’d want everyone who knew her to cry like mad. ‘To show how sad they are that I’m not there,’ she said. This was at the beginning of lessons, and Miss Milliment said there was something in what she said. She’s always sticking up for Lydia and making excuses for her because of her being younger than we are. Nobody ever stuck up for me when I was Lydia’s age. Except for Dad: he did.

  The funeral is to be in Tunbridge Wells. Uncle Raymond is coming, and Nora from her hospital, but Christopher can’t, and I’m not sure about Angela. Judy is coming from her boarding school where, thank God, she is all through terms. We are allowed to go as well, although it isn’t our grandmother. It is to be a cremation, but I don’t think you actually see that.

  22 May. We went yesterday and it was horrible. A horrible little chapel with Grania on a kind of table at the end, and someone played an organ and the clergyman got her names wrong. She is Agatha Mary, and he called her Agartha Marie, and suddenly some curtains beyond the table opened and poor Grania simply slid away to be burned to smithereens. Then we all stood outside for a bit, and then we came home. The only person who wasn’t family was someone called Mr Tunnicliffe who was Grania’s lawyer. Apparently you go back and collect the ashes and strew them somewhere that you think the person would like. But I don’t imagine anyone asked her where she would like her ashes strewn – it isn’t an easy question to ask people, because I suppose it sounds a bit as though you might be looking forward to them being dead. But it did feel sad to think that someone who talked and was about the place is suddenly turned into ashes. I keep remembering her in the nursing home, all wild and muddled and unhappy, but still alive, and it has made me feel extremely sorry for her.

  3 June. It is exactly a year since Commander Pearson rang up and told me about Dad. Three hundred and sixty-five days, eight thousand seven hundred and sixty hours, five hundred and twenty-seven thousand six hundred minutes since I have ceased to know where he is. But he is somewhere – he must be. I’d know, I feel, if he wasn’t. If he is working as a spy, someone must know it. The English might not, but I’ve suddenly thought of General de Gaulle. He’s the head of the French: I bet, even if he doesn’t actually know offhand, he could find out. So I’ve decided to write and ask him. I’ve also decided not to tell anybody, except possibly Poll, because I don’t want them trying to stop me. I feel very excited to have thought of such a good thing to do, but as it is going to be a very important letter, I’ll practise it, and only put the final version in this journal. It’s a pity I can’t write it in French, but I’m afraid I’d make too many mistakes, and General de Gaulle must have learned a good deal of English by now, and anyway, he’d have lots of secretaries and people who could translate it for him. I’ll write a very polite, business-like letter, and not at all long, because I feel that Generals probably don’t like reading much.

  Clothes coupons came in yesterday. Polly is lucky, because Aunt Syb bought her a lot of clothes last year, and masses of material to make things. Luckily I don’t mind about clothes much, but I have been growing a lot, so the trouble is I soon won’t be able to wear a lot of things, although there is nothing wrong with them except for size. Oh well, I can’t see this family letting me go about naked, so there’s no need to worry.

  My letter (I think).

  Dear General de Gaulle,

  My father, Lieutenant Rupert Cazalet, got left behind at St Valéry when he was organising troops to be evacuated onto his destroyer last June. He has not been reported as a prisoner of the foul Germans, so I think it very likely that he is working with the Free French as a spy on our side. He is a painter, and he lived in France quite a bit when he was young, so his French is so good that the Germans might easily think he was French. Possibly some kind French people are hiding him, but he is awfully patriotic, and he would be more likely to be working than just hiding. As you must have an unrivalled knowledge of the Free French, etc., I wonder whether you could find out if that is what he is doing? He might be pretending to be French, but I expect the people he is working with would know that he was secretly English and his name. If you do know, or could find out for me, I should be profoundly grateful, as naturally I have been worried. He wouldn’t be able to write letters, you see, but I just want to know that he is all right and not dead.

  Yours sincerely, Clarissa Cazalet.

  Of course I didn’t do what I said; when it came to the point, I wanted to practise the letter in my journal. I think I should put ‘My dear General de Gaulle’ or just ‘My dear General – like ‘My dear Manager’ when you write to the Bank, according to Aunt Villy. And perhaps I should put yours faithfully, as I should think the General must be keener on faithfulness than sincerity in his position.

  Then I had to find out where to send it to, but I did, by asking a few casual questions of Miss Milliment, and there is a Free French headquarters in London. I put private and personal on the envelope and I read the letter to Polly, who thought I shouldn’t say ‘foul Germans’ but that is just Polly not wanting to be horrible to anybody so I didn’t change it. He must loathe them just as much as he loathes Field Marshal Pétain who is doing awful things – particularly to Jews in France. He handed over a thousand of them in Paris to the Germans and, according to Aunt Rach, who seems to know this kind of thing, he’s arrested many thousands more. I really do think it is filthy to go for people because of their race.

  Louise’s repertory company has come to an end. They’ve run out of money, and two of the boys in the company have been called up, so they’re stuck without enough actors. Aunt Villy is very pleased, and says that perhaps now she will get down to doing some sensible war work. Polly and I don’t think she will at all. We agree with Aunt Villy about her being completely selfish, but Polly says that she thinks artists are supposed to be. Miss Milliment said it wasn’t that: it was simply that serious artists tended to put their work first and a lot of the time this was inconvenient for them, but other people only noticed when it got in their way. I must say, Miss Milliment is far broader-minded than our family, as Polly said, she’s altogether broad – we fell about laughing until Polly said how horrible it was of her to refer to Miss Milliment’s physical bulk. Then I remembered Dad talking about a charwoman he had before he was married. Whenever Dad wanted her to do anything serious, like scrubbing a floor, she said she was bulky, but frail and then he felt he couldn’t ask her to do it.

  July, I think it’s about the 4th. I still haven’t had a reply to my letter. Polly says think how long it takes us to write our thank-you letters at Christmas, and General de Gaulle must get letters on a scale that we can hardly imagine. I can’t see why he would. His own friends and family in France couldn’t write to him, and I shouldn’t think there are many people in my position.

  Louise is back. She has stopped wearing quite so much make-up so she looks better, but she’s remote from us somehow. She spends hours writing letters to get a job in a theatre, and also to some man in the Navy she met. She’s also writing a play that has a rather good idea. It’s about a girl who has to choose between marrying someone and going on with her career as a dancer. That’s the first act. In the second act we see what would happen if she went on with her career, and in the third act what happens when she marries the man. She’s calling it Outrageous Fortune which personally I think is rather pretentious. But I do think it’s a good idea. She reads bits of it to us, but she only wants us to say how good it is. She told me one thing of great interest. Angela has fallen in love with a married man about twenty years older than she is. He works in the BBC with her and he’s called Brian Prentice and she wants to marry him, but of course she can’t as he is already. I said how sad, but th
at was that, but Louise said no it wasn’t because Angela has started to have a baby and the aunts J. and V. are awfully worried about it. Louise saw her in London at poor Lady Rydal’s old house because each of the grandchildren (the girls) had to choose a piece of Grania’s jewellery. They chose in order of age, so Angela got Grania’s pearls, and Nora had the huge long crystal necklace, and as the aunts were keeping the diamond rings, there was only some gold filigree ear-rings left for Louise. I don’t know what Judy or Lydia got – they weren’t even given the chance to choose. But that was when Louise saw Angela, who she said looked awfully pale and was completely silent. What can happen I wonder? I suppose she must have gone to bed with him – obviously a bad thing to do – it must be terrifically enjoyable if that’s what happens. She might not have known that he was married, in which case it must be entirely Brian Prentice’s fault. But, as Polly says, faults don’t make things nicer for people, or change them. Louise says there is something call Volpar Gels that means you don’t have babies. And even Dutch caps help, she said, but when I asked what they were and what you do with them, she simply wouldn’t tell me. ‘You’re too young,’ she said. There must, thank God, be a diminishing number of things I’m too young for, but then, I suppose, before you can turn round there start to be an increasing number of things you are too old for. You can’t win. I’m looking forward to being thirty, which I should think would be the brief interval between those horns of dilemma.

  Why doesn’t General de Gaulle answer my letter? I think it’s really thoughtless of him, and actually quite rude. The Duchy says you should answer letters by return of post.

  Poor Aunt Rach has spent an awful morning cutting the great-aunts’ toe nails. I heard her saying that they were like the talons of old sea birds – all curving and frightfully tough. Apparently that’s one of the first things you can’t do when you are really old because you can’t reach them. I warned Polly about this, because it really means she’d better not live in her house entirely alone. She said what did hermits do, because they were nearly always old and had to be alone. I should think they end up with claws like parrots.

  For lunch today we had rissoles from the butcher made to a new formula that means they have hardly any meat in them. Neville said they were like a field mouse after a car accident: they were actually just extremely boring to eat, but the Duchy said they were only eightpence a pound, and we should be grateful. I don’t think anyone was.

  One interesting thing. A friend of Dad’s is coming to stay! He is on sick leave from the Army: he was at the Slade with Dad, and they went to France as students together. He’s called Archie Lestrange and I do vaguely remember him, but before the war he was mostly in France so Dad didn’t see him much. It will be nice having a friend of Dad’s to stay because not being family, he might talk about him a bit. I hope he really does come, unlike the Clutterworths who never seem to get here. Now I’m going to bath Jules, because it’s Zoë’s day – or one of them – at the nursing home and Ellen has a tummy upset – rissoles, I shouldn’t wonder. I bath her, and I give her her bottle and put her on her pot and then into her bed and I read to her from Peter Rabbit. She keeps interrupting but she minds if I stop.

  I got interrupted then and a good thing too – re-reading the above has made me yawn with boredom. Why is it that so much of ordinary life is crammed with trivial routine? Does it have to be? Is it the war that makes everything so deeply grey? What on earth will change it? Polly thinks that being grown-up will make all the difference, but I honestly think she is wrong: it seems to me that the grown-ups have, if possible, even greyer lives. I am sure if I had a more interesting mind I should be less bored, and had a talk with Miss Milliment about that, as she has been in charge of my mind for some time now, so she must be partly responsible. She did at least listen to me which is more than most people do, and then she didn’t say anything for a bit and then she said, ‘I wonder why you’ve stopped writing?’ and I said I was writing this journal, but it was pretty boring, and she said, ‘No, I mean the kind of writing you were doing a year ago. You were writing stories. Now you only do whatever homework I set you, which isn’t at all the same thing.’ I hadn’t thought about that, but it’s perfectly true. I haven’t written a single story – since Dad went away. I said I hadn’t felt like it, and she answered quite sharply that she hadn’t thought I wanted to be an amateur, but a real writer. ‘Professionals do their work whatever they are feeling,’ she said. ‘I am not surprised that you are bored if you are idle with a gift. You are boring yourself and that is a dreary state of affairs. Doing the least you can do is extremely boring.’ But her small grey eyes were quite kind when she said this. I said I didn’t see how one could write if one couldn’t think of anything to write about and she replied that I would think of something if I disposed myself to do so. She ended by saying that if I hadn’t thought of anything within a month, she would start teaching me Greek, which would at least be a new exercise for my mind.

  It’s funny. The moment I began to think about writing, I didn’t feel bored at all. I simply felt how difficult it would be to find the time. I made a list of all the things I am expected to do in a day. For instance, not only are we supposed to tidy our rooms, which we’ve always been supposed to do, we have to make our own beds because there aren’t enough housemaids to do it any more. And we have to iron our clothes sometimes because Ellen gets too tired to do it all. Polly is a beautiful ironer, but then she minds about her clothes; I loathe ironing and I wouldn’t actually mind if my clothes weren’t ironed at all. Then we have to help clear the table after meals. Then we have to do some outdoor job in the afternoons – whatever Heather or McAlpine or the Duchy says, and believe me, between them they think of pretty dull things. We have to collect water in bottles from the spring at Watlington (I like that unless it’s pouring with rain). Then we have to mend our beastly clothes with Bully or Cracks or Aunt Syb or Zoë seeing that we do it properly. One of us is supposed to go round every single window in the house in the evenings making sure that the blackout is properly done. We take turns. We have to do all these things on top of lessons every morning and homework after tea. There is some time after homework and after supper, but I’ve decided to tidy up my share of our room and that’s going to take several days, because I haven’t really done that for years: I mean shelves and cupboards and things since I got my stuff from London. It might take weeks. Polly says I’ll love it when it’s done, but that sounds to me like what people say about cold baths. Starting writing again is a bit like that as well or perhaps that’s more like swimming in the sea – awful getting in and lovely when you are. Anyway, apart from doing all these things, I have to try and think what to write, but when it comes to writing I find I can’t think at all – it’s only when I’m apparently not thinking about anything, that any sliver of an idea slips into my mind, and even then I don’t seem able to think about it. It seems to be a mixture of remembering things and feeling – sometimes just remembering a feeling, and that often happens when I’m doing something quite unconnected. All the same, even not thinking about it seems to make it easier not to think about the other thing. What I do now, is have a think about Dad every morning when I wake up. I just wish him a good, safe day and send him my love, and then I stop. It is a tremendous relief arranging it like that. Of course I worry about the General not answering my letter, but that is somehow a different sized worry. Polly got very worked up about my having to face the fact that he might write something about there being no trace of Dad and that meaning that there was no hope. She doesn’t understand: it wouldn’t be that. Either the General will know something about him, or he won’t. But his not knowing only means he doesn’t know. It won’t mean that Dad is dead. It simply will not mean that.

  POLLY

  July – October, 1941

  ‘It’s too far for you, even if you got there, you’d be too tired to come back.’

  ‘No, I wouldn’t.’ She looked angrily at Simon, who was, she felt, simply
echoing Teddy in the most irritating way. ‘But if you want to be on your own—’ she said.

  ‘It’s not that,’ Teddy said quickly: it was against family law deliberately to exclude anyone from an outing. ‘It’s just that I can’t see you bicycling nearly forty miles.’

  ‘Camber’s not twenty miles!’

  ‘Jolly nearly. And we’ve got three-speed bikes.’

  ‘OK. I can see you don’t want me.’

  ‘They don’t want me either,’ Neville said, ‘which is much more serious.’

  ‘I tell you what,’ he said to Polly when the boys had made an uneasy escape. ‘When they’re old and wrinkly and beg me to take them out in my racing car, I simply shan’t. Or my aeroplane, which I’ll probably have for long journeys. I shall just tell them they’re too old for anything nice – silly old farts.’

  ‘I don’t think you should call them that.’

  ‘It’s what they are or jolly soon will be. Stupid chaps are farts and stupid girls are tarts. A boy at school told me. Farts and tarts, you see?’