‘No. Not Smokey.’
‘Some strange old cat?’
‘Yes. A strange cat, Linda. Where were you last night? Your mother was so worried. Charlie was out looking for you.’
‘Miss Rhodes found me. I was locked in the cemetery.’
‘Miss Rhodes!’ exclaimed both women at once.
‘Miss Rhodes—the one that comes to see you. She took me home after she got me out—then she came on to tell you so you shouldn’t worry.’
Nonie and her grandmother exchanged looks. They understood now why Miss Rhodes had been in this neighbourhood again last night.
‘You told her about the soldier hiding over there?’ The child nodded.
‘You promised me you wouldn’t go in the cemetery again,’ said Mrs. Collins, severely.
‘I only went to find the key. I lost it there when I was getting the carnations in the afternoon.’
‘And you got shut in?’
‘Yes. It got awfully dark under those black trees—and so quiet.’
‘And you were frightened, darling?’
Linda nodded, and began a long garbled story about Miss Rhodes, a man and a bicycle. . . . ‘She’s a nice lady, but she looks sad,’ she finished. ‘Look! I brought you these.’ She held out the pink daisies.
The old woman regarded her intently, then looked meaningly from the child to the carnations which had been replaced in the pink swan. Linda shook her head violently. ‘No . . . No. . . . Not this time. I told Mother about the policeman and she gave me sixpence to buy you some flowers. But she said not to get white ones, Gran Collins. She said it was a shame to give you what made her think of what you’ll be getting soon anyway. I got these from the old barrow man. He smiled today. He really smiled!’
‘They’re lovely, my darling. Thank you very, very much,’ said Mrs. Collins taking the pink blossoms from her.
‘Oh! someone’s chipped the swan’s beak. Oh, what a shame! Did that strange old cat do that too? Was he after the swan?’
‘Yes. I expect so. It got knocked down, Linda.’
‘Shall I throw away those old carnations and put these daisies in him? He’ll feel better with the pink ones, and they’ll hide his broken beak. There! he’s much prettier like that! And the white ones are quite, quite dead.’
THE END
The following is a facsimile of the slip included in copies of The Fledgeling sent out for review by the publishers in 1958.
Afterword
I THINK I was about 11 when I realised my mother was becoming a writer as well as being a painter. I was home from my English boarding school for the summer holidays when my father suggested that I should not disturb my mother in the mornings as she would be working. … At the time I was upset as my mother had never seemed to worry if I disturbed her.
My mother was born and grew up in Plymouth, Devon. She was the fourth of five surviving children born to Anglo Scottish parents. Named Olive, she showed her innate independence at an early age by insisting she be called Olivia .She showed early talent as an artist and in her late teens won a scholarship to the Slade School of Art, then still under the direction of Henry Tonks. Her tutor, and later good friend, at the school was the painter Leon Underwood.
In 1930 she married her first husband, a Hungarian academic, whose work took him to first Holland and then India. But they separated while there (and later divorced). She then stayed on for three months in the Ashram of the great Indian thinker and writer Rabindranath Tagore. Travelling on her own, painting and sketching, she visited other parts of India including Assam and for a few weeks lived with the Nagas, a primitive indigenous people in northeast India .On her way back to England she travelled via Japan and then China – still painting and sketching – until she had to flee Shanghai when the Japanese invaded.
On her return to England she lived in Chelsea, then a haven for artists, and earned her living as a portrait painter. She met my father, who had recently resigned from the Indian Civil Service, in 1939, and they were married in 1940 after he had joined the Ministry of Information. Bombed out during the Blitz, as portrayed in her last book, A Chelsea Concerto, they spent the rest of the war, after I was born, in the Home Counties before returning to Chelsea in 1945.
When the war ended my father was recruited to the Control Commission of Germany and became a high ranking official in the British administration, first in Berlin, negotiating with the others of the four powers on the organisation of the city, later in the British zone of West Germany. We joined him in Berlin in early 1946 and it was here that my mother encountered the Altmann family. It was her experiences with them that inspired her to start writing her first book, The Dancing Bear, which movingly describes Berlin in defeat through the eyes of the defeated as well as the victors.
Each of her books, whether non-fiction or fiction, were inspired by an episode in her own life. By 1951 we had moved to Cologne and it was here that her second book, the novel A House on the Rhine, was conceived, based around migrant families (from the east of Germany) she had met and helped. Subsequently, she published another novel, Thalia, based on her own experience in France before the War when she was acting as a chaperone to a young teenager for the summer. Her final novel The Fledgeling, about a National Service deserter, was also based on an actual incident.
My mother was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1956 though I did not know at the time. At first radiotherapy seemed to have arrested the disease. But then two years later, it reappeared. She fought the disease with courage and humour, exhibiting the same clear sightedness with which she had viewed life around her as a painter and a writer. She died just after A Chelsea Concerto was published, in 1959.
In her books as in her life, my mother had an openness to and compassion for others and, when she saw an injustice or need, would not be thwarted by authority of any kind in getting something done. But as she always pursued her causes with charm as well as firmness, few could deny her requests for long.
John Richard Parker, 2016
About The Author
FRANCES FAVIELL (1905-1959) was the pen name of Olivia Faviell Lucas, painter and author. She studied at the Slade School of Art in London under the aegis of Leon Underwood. In 1930 she married a Hungarian academic and travelled with him to India where she lived for some time at the ashram of Rabindranath Tagore, and visiting Nagaland. She then lived in Japan and China until having to flee from Shanghai during the Japanese invasion. She met her second husband Richard Parker in 1939 and married him in 1940.
She became a Red Cross volunteer in Chelsea during the Phoney War. Due to its proximity to the Royal Hospital and major bridges over the Thames Chelsea was one of the most heavily bombed areas of London. She and other members of the Chelsea artists’ community were often in the heart of the action, witnessing or involved in fascinating and horrific events throughout the Blitz. Her experiences of the time were later recounted in the memoir A Chelsea Concerto (1959).
After the war, in 1946, she went with her son, John, to Berlin where Richard had been posted as a senior civil servant in the post-war British Administration (the CCG). It was here that she befriended the Altmann Family, which prompted her first book The Dancing Bear (1954), a memoir of the Occupation seen through the eyes of both occupier and occupied. She later wrote three novels, A House on the Rhine (1955), Thalia (1957), and The Fledgeling (1958). These are now all available as Furrowed Middlebrow books.
FURROWED MIDDLEBROW
FM1. A Footman for the Peacock (1940) ... RACHEL FERGUSON
FM2. Evenfield (1942) ... RACHEL FERGUSON
FM3. A Harp in Lowndes Square (1936) ... RACHEL FERGUSON
FM4. A Chelsea Concerto (1959) ... FRANCES FAVIELL
FM5. The Dancing Bear (1954) ... FRANCES FAVIELL
FM6. A House on the Rhine (1955) ... FRANCES FAVIELL
FM7. Thalia (1957) ... FRANCES FAVIELL
FM8. The Fledgeling (1958) ... FRANCES FAVIELL
FM9. Bewildering Cares (1940) ... WINIFRED PECK
Frances Faviell
A Chelsea Concerto
‘Take off your coat,’ said the doctor. I took it off. ‘And your dress,’ he said. ‘It’s too dangerous – the folds may catch in the debris and bring the whole thing down.’ I took off the dress. ‘Fine,’ he said shortly. ‘It’ll have to be head first. We’ll hold your thighs. Go down and see if it’s possible to give an injection. Can you grip the torch with your teeth?’
Frances Faviell lived in Chelsea before and during the London Blitz, having became a Red Cross volunteer when World War II began. Chelsea was particularly heavily bombed and the author was often in the heart of the action, witnessing or involved in fascinating and horrific events through 1940 and 1941. Her memoir evokes an unforgettable cast, Londoners and refugees alike, caught up together in extraordinary and dangerous times – not forgetting the ‘Green Cat’, a Chinese statuette, standing on the author’s window sill as the home’s talismanic protector.
Frances Faviell’s memoir is powerful in its blend of humour, tenderness and horror, including the most haunting ending of any wartime memoir. A Chelsea Concerto is reprinted now for the first time since 1959, with a new introduction by Virginia Nicholson.
‘Irresistible reading. There could be no more graphic account of what one first-aid worker and her small party witnessed and did during the London Blitz … while characters are sketched in with a novelist’s art, the impression left is one of stark truth.’ Birmingham Post
FM4
Chapter One
WE WERE HAVING a grand-scale Civil Defence exercise in Chelsea. It was June 19th, 1939. We all thought the idea very silly – we’d had one scare the previous year – and now it all seemed childish. We’d filled sand-bags, dug trenches, fitted thousands of gas-masks, only to throw them all away in an excess of relief when Chamberlain returned from Godesburg with a respite from Hitler. The scare of war had largely died away because the public had decided that it should die away. There would be no war – and the forlorn abandoned gas-masks on rubbish heaps, and the bursting sand-bags seeping over pavements and streets, were witnesses to the public’s decision.
And now, almost a year later, here we were in Chelsea having this full-scale exercise in our little borough. Mrs Freeth, my housekeeper, and I had both been given our parts to play. I was to be a casualty, she was to take shelter on a piece of pavement marked with white-painted lines to indicate that here (when built) would be the air-raid shelter for our area. I was living at No. 33, Cheyne Place in the Royal Hospital Road. In this exercise this was in District Sloane under Major H A Christie. Our group warden was Mr Paul de Laszlo. Air-raid wardens had called and instructed us in the parts we were to play – we had been thoroughly drilled.
The exercise was timed for twelve noon, and Mr Harold Scott [later Sir Harold Scott], the Commissioner for Police, had ordered that all traffic should be stopped for fifteen minutes – it was said that he himself would be present. Friends who had trained with me in first aid and who were acting as wardens appeared for the first time in uniforms. They caused a lot of ribald comment. Brown overalls with ARW in yellow on the breast pocket brought jeers from many onlookers. The uniforms, mass produced, did not fit – and some of the women’s seats were on a level with their knees. I felt sorry for some of my friends with trim, neat figures having to appear in public in them.
The sirens wailed – the anguished lament of a soul in torment – and we all took up our positions with combined grumbling and that fear of ridicule ingrained in us all. It did seem ridiculous to have to lie flat on a piece of marked pavement pretending to be a casualty, but it seemed to me that to do so was the easiest way out of an argument as to whether I was to be in the First Aid Post or in the Control Report Centre in the Town Hall, I having taken the training for both. Mrs Freeth, worried about some special dish in the oven, thought it a ridiculous way of wasting a morning. She had Vicki, my Dachshund, in her arms, being determined that if the dog couldn’t stand there with her in the allotted space she wouldn’t stand there either. It was a point on which our warden was not prepared to argue. Whether dogs or cats would be allowed in shelters he was unable to say, but to Mrs Freeth’s argument that as the shelter wasn’t yet built Vicki had just as much right to stand on the pavement as she had there was no answer. The rumour went round that many distinguished visitors had arrived to see our exercise, including Sir John Anderson, the Home Secretary, Sir John Gowers, the Regional Commissioner, and Mr Harold Scott. Everyone was on his or her mettle!
At the given signal I lay down on the pavement awaiting the attention of my fellow VADs in the Mobile Unit. I lay there staring up at a poster, which after the interminable wait for the exercise to begin I knew by heart.
‘Although we differ in many aspects of policy, we unite in urging you to volunteer for training – to protect yourselves and your neighbours.’ It was issued jointly by the Chairmen and leaders of Chelsea Communist Party, Chelsea Conservative and Unionist Party, Chelsea Labour Party and Trades Council, and Chelsea Municipal Reform Party.
Its impressive message that in unity lies strength was marred by a large swastika painted on it, and looking up at it made me chuckle happily.
The Oswald Mosley Party had been going round at night in their black shirts daubing posters with Hitler’s emblem. I had seen this particular one being done a few nights previously when out on Vicki’s nightly exercise. The young Blackshirt had been bent, absorbed in his task, with his pot of paint unattended on the pavement. I ran suddenly and quietly across the road with Vicki and kicked the pot adroitly so that not only did its contents upset all over the pavement but great splashes of it went over the dauber. Apologizing profusely for my dog’s carelessness in tipping over his paint, I left him swearing at me. ‘There’s a copper coming – hurry up!’ I shouted. He was still swearing – there was nothing political about his language. There were actually two policemen approaching, and the young Blackshirt vanished, leaving the upturned paint pot behind. From the windows of my studio a few minutes later, I watched them halt on their beat to examine the mess on the pavement and the freshly painted swastika on the poster. Then out came their note-books.
The Blackshirts sometimes held meetings at the top of Chelsea Manor Street near the coffee-stall. I loved to stop and heckle them. Their manners reminded me of their fellow Brownshirts in Germany. It was safer to be accompanied by a male when attacking them, Mosley’s followers, like Hitler’s, having scant respect for the fair sex.
I lay now on the pavement and looked up at the swastika and made up my mind to paint it over with white paint. I would go and buy a cheap pot of white paint for the purpose. I wasn’t unusually patriotic but I had seen what the swastika meant and did in Germany. I could just see Mrs Freeth and Vicki standing patiently in the imaginary air-raid shelter. Vicki was frantic because I was lying on the pavement, which she thought suspicious to say the least of it. The First Aid Party arrived. My leg (broken in two places) was strapped. My wounds were bandaged with many giggles and much chaffing, and I was taken in charge to await an imaginary ambulance. Vicki’s struggles became so frantic when she saw me being tied up that Mrs Freeth called out that she had better take her home. ‘Stay where you are, the raid is still on!’ shouted an authoritative warden. Mrs Freeth and Vicki stayed. Ambulance bells clanged, whistles blew, fire engines raced, rattles sounded – it was absolutely maddening not to be able to see what was happening. Only one eye was left free of bandages and my lowly position made visibility poor. The flurry of violent activity went on in the deathly silence of the trafficless streets. Comments, some jocose, some ribald, some angry, were being freely exchanged all round us. ‘Lot of tommy-rot, won’t be no air raids here. All this silly playacting!’ I heard fellow-casualties grumbling. Those in the imaginary shelters echoed their comments. They had voiced the thoughts of many who believed what they wanted to believe. There would be no air raids on England! It was unthinkable. Old Granny from Paradise Row left her allotted place and started away det
erminedly in the direction of her home. ‘Raid’s still on, come back!’ shouted a warden at her. ‘Call of nature, can’t do nothing about that, raid or no raid,’ she retorted, and marched resolutely away. At last the continuous flute-like voice of the All Clear sirens sounded. The exercise was over! With relief and more grumbling we could all go home.
Next day we read in the Press that it had been an unqualified success. Every section and service of the ARP had worked perfectly. Chelsea was praised everywhere, and other boroughs had learned from her foresight. The unstinted praise of the much scorned wardens made up somewhat for their frequent unwelcome visits to the homes of residents to obtain lists and particulars of their occupants. We resented this intrusion into the privacy of our homes – an Englishman’s home was supposed to be his castle!
In the sunshine, warm at mid-day, and very lovely in June, my upstairs neighbour, Kathleen Marshman, and I walked back to Cheyne Place. Kathleen was a widow, whose elder daughter Anne worked in the City. Upstairs in the flat with the Sealyham dogs was her younger daughter, Penty, playing records, her favourite ones being those of George Formby. Penty, of a happy disposition, and easily amused, was mentally retarded and would never be able to earn her living. I was trying to teach her to paint simple designs on lamp shades and trays, so that, at least, she could earn some pocket money. She showed distinct ability and interest in this. Kathleen and I had a drink after our exhausting experiences (she had also been a casualty) and we had a good laugh about it all.
Our opposite neighbour, Elliot Hodgkin, the painter, was also returning from the exercise. He was training with me in first-aid, and although disabled in one arm was, to my chagrin, much quicker and defter at splints and bandages than I was. From the windows of my studio I used to watch him at work on the opposite side of the street. He often painted right in the window, as I did. He was already well known for his exquisite flower pieces.
The Fledgeling Page 23