Campari for Breakfast

by Sara Crowe

  Although I cannot visit the earth, because that is a rule of Heaven, I can still hear you, I listen with the ears of a spirit. It’s like when the clouds are very still and high, but low vapour is blown fast across them – I am the Eagle that’s coasting on the current between the two. I watch over you.

  I just wanted to let you know, as I know that you have been longing to, that although I do not suffer, I THINK OF YOU ALL THE TIME.

  Mum xxxxxx

  When he’d finished everyone was emotional, except the Admiral who must have still been thinking about the council.

  ‘Excell . . . rea . . . exce, w . . . done …’ said Aunt Coral. ‘Goodness . . . wel . . . do . . . S …’

  We disbanded early, as the group were too moved to continue. Aunt Coral had prepared a whole section on interpretation which would have to be postponed.

  I am lying in bed now, caressed by the heavy summer air which is laced with the scent of the buddleia from the trees down Clockhouse Lane, my thoughts drifting from Group to death and then to the loss of the eye.

  I can’t tell you how much I’d love to lie with it, to hold it in my hand. Until it was gone I never knew how much I’d miss it, or what a comfort it has been. Maybe I am as sad as Delia, building my future on something so small. But it’s surprising how little a thing you need to do it: a tortoise, an eye, a handbag. I dread to think what Icarus would say if he ever finds out that I kept his eye. He would think I was mad, but worse, he would think I was sad. Most girls my age have got real boyfriends’ eyes to look into, but I have been reduced to a relationship with a small piece of photo. Just what sort of woman am I to get excited over so little? But then I have never even been kissed. Aunt Coral says it’s because I am innocent, and I’m still young enough to be getting away with it. She makes me sound quite saintly.

  But there is no way on earth that I will ever let Icarus find out about his eye, so, short of stealing his eye back, I will have to pander to Loudolle. It has just occurred to me that the eye, which has given me so much joy and pleasure, has now become a source of evil. Hold on, there’s somebody at my door.

  How ironic. It was Loudolle, with another demand.

  Coral’s Commonplace: Volume 3

  Green Place, Aug 5 1946

  (Age 24)

  Green Place has been returned to us in a shocking state of repair. It seems the troops found it hard to keep warm, so they put a random mix of wood up the chimney, including some of the back stairs, wall panels, banisters, floorboards, some furniture, and a thirty-foot beech from the garden, which was the only giant beech in Egham. But we try not resent it; our home is as nothing compared to the millions who have died in the war.

  Despite that, F and M are naturally heartbroken and struggling to come to terms with it, and have been further crippled by the new taxes brought in by Mr Attlee. They have to pay ninety-five per cent on their savings and sixty-six per cent on their income, and if they die the government get sixty-five per cent. Britain is bankrupt. Father’s aristo friends the Oziases have had their assets stripped by two sets of death duties – poor Julius himself and now their eldest Julius Caesar. I don’t think Mr Attlee approves of the rich at all.

  Mother has not had a banana for seven years, and is now in the grip of a demoniac craving for one. A sure way to create a luxury item is not to be able to get it.

  ‘This war wasn’t fought so that you could enjoy a banana,’ said Father.

  It is one of his favourite ways of coining the greater perspective. And we do feel guilty, and lucky to be standing here, free and full and alive.

  Mother replied with poignancy, though it was after he’d left the room.

  ‘Yes it was.’

  Joy, pleasure and abundance are all part of freedom’s gift. But the lights in the world are still on, and there is a naked lady in red pen on my bedroom ceiling. There are also the following inscriptions on the walls:

  Arthur Marks, 8th United States Army Air Force. 400 days.

  Flight Lieutenant Dorian Campbell loves the WAF in the secret bunker.

  Sweet voice in the night.

  Squadron Leader Benedict Dunford. Balloon Squadron supreme.

  Pilot Officer, Colin Anderson, no 615 Squadron RAF.

  James Anderson, Royal Auxiliaries. RIP my brother.

  I have added two of my own:

  RIP Sayler

  RIP Daniel Morris

  It really feels in both a great and a small way that the old world has gone for ever.

  Earlier today Dr John looked in to pass on his condolences about Daniel and Sayler. It is believed that Daniel ‘had become separated from his unit’. Mrs Morris will not hear of anyone putting it another way. In the last Great War, desertion carried a maximum sentence of death, as did cowardice. Leniency is thankfully shown nowadays, except for treason and mutiny. Whatever has happened to him, Daniel is still lost, and so therefore is Mrs Morris.

  It turns out that Dr John’s unit was part of the team sent in to recover bodies on D-Day, and he spent thirty-six hours operating nonstop, one man after another after another. Not surprisingly he is even now a little done in.

  Mr D’Olivera has not come back. He is MPD, and my heart goes out to his family.

  But as the grim news trickled in about all our missing friends, thank God there has been some good news about Johnny. Although he has been held as a Prisoner of War, he was apparently liberated from a German Stalag. I didn’t even know he had been taken as a prisoner of war. But our only link with Johnny is his Father, Jackie Isles, and it was not until Mr Isles called in to the house that we knew a thing about it. Mr Isles was brimming over with pride and joy to have his son back. He said that when Johnny was sent to the front, he wasn’t expected to make old bones. So understandably Mr Isles is now unable to contain his relief. It is like a miracle. He has visited everyone he could think of. He wanted to tell the whole world.

  He told us Johnny is still weak and suffering greatly from shell shock. He’d been living on a bowl of gruel and a pound of bread a day – that is, if he completed his work. If he didn’t, his rations were diminished, and the hungrier he got, the less he was able to finish his work. Such tortures. And his feet are in a terrible state from jungle rot which took hold because he got too tired to take his boots off. If you don’t take your boots off, your feet are constricted and damp, and when sores develop they can turn to gangrene. The condition can occur with as little as one day’s exposure, so he is lucky to have any feet left at all. I hope they will be warm and dry for the rest of his life.

  Mr Isles said Johnny wakes in the night with a desire to end it all, because he feels he cannot recover from the horrors he has seen. It seems that even though he is home and safe, that still the danger threatens. I wonder if he ever got the letter I wrote to him while I was at Whistlers Corner? I hope that it gave him some cheer.

  Hundreds of children rescued from the camps have been brought to London. It was announced on the radio and makes a very harrowing story. Most of them were very weak, and some were close to death. The stronger ones carried the bags of the weak, tiny heroes supporting each other. They assembled at Victoria station and were taken to a nearby church hall, where they were lined up and instructed by gymnasts to do star jumps. This seemingly cruel exercise was a short cut, designed to determine which of the children needed emergency treatment, and the ones that collapsed were taken straight to hospital. But the remaining children began to cry, believing after their long journey that their friends were being taken away to be killed. Most had grown up in the camps, and did not know of any other reason for a person to be ‘taken away’.

  Rumours abound that the man responsible for all this terror, Adolf Hitler, is working as a waiter in Switzerland, though this probably came from the Department of Liars in an attempt to catch other criminals.

  With the economy on its knees odd things are happening. Photographic film and the metal it comes in has been reused and sold again, so you can get photographs of strangers coming up on yo
ur family shots. Dr John showed us some of his pictures of the war, and there are also some pictures of a pale stranger photographed holding a baby. They are under the trees in a forest; Dr John thinks it could be in Poland. She looks afraid. Was she in hiding? Could it have been from the Nazis? Could the picture have been taken by her husband, who feared they were close to capture? Is she still alive? And what of the baby? I dream of her being reunited with all her loved ones who may’ve been stolen away. How lucky I am to be here. But for an accident of birth, it could have been me.

  And I have nothing but respect for Winston Churchill, whatever his cost to the economy. His booting-out has shocked the whole of Europe, especially Mother. It was a sad day for the man who’s achieved so much. And I will never forget his talent for comedy either – ‘Hitler’s tattered lackey Mussolini’!

  But enough of war. I have got a degree! Although my class two did not meet with much approval. But I can say hand on heart that I tried. There are other things in life besides reductionism. You are reading the words of the woman who has read Anna Karenina three times.

  Some private news:

  In these days of shortage and austerity, Cameo’s cup floweth over. She got a job in a cigarette factory because she was heartsick about her American and needed a diversion. And at the factory she met and fell in love with a Major Jack Laine. He came on a private matter to meet with the owner. (Some sort of trade-off for cigarettes is my guess.) He is devilishly handsome, but unfortunately, already married.

  Nobody knows except me, and one close friend of his, who, I have it on good authority, has only told four hundred of hers. In spite of my inward misgivings, I expect I am possibly jealous, having no one to write home about but a salty academic who can’t keep his lunch off his shirt. Still, it’s reassuring to know I’m decent enough for a proposal. Gerald asked me to marry him, but I couldn’t countenance being a Podger.

  ‘I know it’s a secret for it’s whispered everywhere’ (Congreve)

  Sue

  Wednesday 9 September

  AT ABOUT SEVEN o’clock this morning, when we were all still in bed, there was a terrible crash. I thought a tree must’ve fallen into the house. It was ferocious, like a demolition gong, or a plane falling out of the sky, or a thunder clap that was strong enough to bring down an entire forest. I heard Aunt Coral run downstairs and the Admiral following after her. When I caught up with them, they were in the kitchen, as were the rest of the tenants – all that is except Admiral Ted, who slept straight through all the noise.

  ‘Maybe they left an unexploded bomb here,’ said the Admiral.

  ‘The house is falling down,’ said Aunt Coral. No one accused either of them of melodrama, just in case.

  Then there was a second crash, even louder than the first. We were so frightened that we all got down on the floor. A few seconds later came the sound of what I imagined to be a volcano. It so jangled our nerves, that it was ages after peace came before anyone dared to break the silence.

  ‘I’m going upstairs,’ said Admiral Little bravely.

  ‘I’m coming with you. Ted’s up there,’ said Admiral Gordon as he followed suit.

  And not wishing to be left alone, we women went up too, convinced we were going to find Admiral Ted splattered all over the floor. We edged in through each door as though we’d had special training, checking each room methodically; it took us quite a long time. Eventually we discovered the problem. The ceilings had come down in two of the East Wing bedrooms. But the knock-on effect looked perilous for the whole Wing.

  ‘I shouldn’t like to say, Miss Garden, I couldn’t put a figure on that,’ said Glenn Miller, arriving within ten minutes of Aunt Coral’s urgent call. ‘You’ve probably got some rot, or woodworm in those timbers. But I can’t understand for the life of me why it should fall,’ he said.

  He pulled at a bit of plaster that was hanging by a thread and a whole lot more fell down behind it and disappeared into powders. What I thought had been a volcano was in fact raining masonry.

  ‘Oh dear,’ he said.

  Aunt Coral was in pieces and was having to be given the Admiral’s gooney.

  ‘So what ball park figure would you say,’ said the Admiral, ‘to put it all back up again?’

  ‘Well, cor, I think …’ said Glenn Miller, ‘I think it’s going to be dear.’

  ‘Is it too early for a sherry?’ said Aunt C.

  The most chaotic morning followed. In between the ceilings coming down and our hasty retreat out of the East Wing, there were frequent visitors to the front door all bearing tortoises. Aunt Coral wasn’t coping, and Delia couldn’t identify Bertie. Emergency scaffold was arriving, and Glenn Miller called in his men, who came rushing like a boiler-suited cavalry. I was making tea for everybody, and trying to move my things out of the East Wing, and trying to get ready for work, knowing I was going to be late. Loudolle had already swalked off after her usual swim, having milked me the previous evening of a further £3.50.

  ‘You gonna be late for work, Sue? You want me to tell Mrs Fry?’ she said.

  ‘Tell her what you like. I hope you fall in a cowpat.’

  ‘Oh you’re gonna regret that,’ she said. ‘Don’t forget I know things …’

  ‘And I know you come from Ealing and not Alpen, Colorado,’ I said. But it made no impact. She has no humility about having reinvented herself, and was not to be out-embarrassed.

  I tried to comfort Aunt Coral, who was being assisted by the Admiral. Her main concern, as was mine, was the thought of having to leave Green Place.

  ‘This will wipe out the shoe fund completely,’ she said. ‘We won’t be able to do anything up.’

  ‘Let’s break the problem into small chunks, which they say you should do in a crisis,’ I said.

  But she was beside herself and had lost all sense of proportion, railing that we were all going to have to go into homes because the building was unstable.

  ‘Mrs Bunion won’t have to go into a home,’ I said. ‘I’ve never heard of a home for cleaners. She has a family she can go to. Besides, Mrs Bunion doesn’t even live here! Nobody’s going into a home Aunt Coral, except hopefully Loudolle. We might go to a hotel or somewhere. We could go somewhere nice.’

  This perked her up, and when the Admiral returned I went to phone in sick, which I knew would inflame Mrs Fry, but as Aunt Coral was in no fit state, I knew I had to prioritise her. When I returned she had been given an aspirin and the Admiral was kneeling by her chair.

  ‘There’s no need to upset yourself, Aunt Coral, there now, there we go,’ he said.

  ‘But I don’t want to live in a Tupperware, I love feeling the draughts all around me,’ she said, trying to be amusing.

  Slowly and gently under the Admiral’s care Aunt C was beginning to rally, but then the moment was gone, to be replaced by a mystery development. Above the suites where the collapse happened there is an attic space, which has been the store for a surplus of boxes and old toys. It is accessed by a pull-down ladder through a hatch in one of the bedrooms, (one of the nooks and hidey holes for which Green Place is famous). Anyway, in amongst the debris Glenn Miller and his team had found an unusual gentleman’s hold all. It was packed with a few items of clothing, which Glenn felt looked ‘too ragamuffin’ to belong to a resident of Green Place. His team had made enquiries among the male residents of the building, and even telephoned Badger to check that the hold all wasn’t his, (at which point Aunt Coral became momentarily mortified), before they came to the conclusion that the hold all didn’t belong to any official inhabitant of Green Place. And so, putting two and two together, ‘and making ten’ according to Aunt Coral, Glenn and the team came up with a theory. They were convinced it was the mystery owner of the hold all, a stranger, who had put his foot through the ceiling when he was rummaging in the attic. So by lunchtime, Green Place was crawling with policemen.

  ‘What I think you’ve got here, Ms Garden, is either a trespasser, or a tramp,’ PC Pacey told us. ‘There’s no sign of bre
aking and entering, you see, so it’s unlikely to be a burglar. You’ve got a tramp I ’speck. We do see a lot of them out here in some of the larger houses. But the finding of a hold all of clothing on the bed doesn’t necessarily mean that the trespasser damaged the ceiling. From the looks of those timbers those ceilings could’ve come down on their own. If you were to manage to catch him, we could charge him with civil trespass. But, unless you catch him red handed, there’s not a lot we can do.’

  ‘I see,’ said Aunt Coral. ‘Do you mean by civil trespass that the trespasser’s more polite?’ A poor attempt at a joke, but it showed her indomitable spirit.

  ‘No, it doesn’t mean that the trespasser is more polite, it just means that they haven’t broken and entered.’ PC Colin Pacey was without a sense of wit.

  ‘Are you telling us that the law considers it acceptable for someone to walk into a house and sleep here, as long as he keeps the place tidy?’ said the Admiral, shaking his head in appaulment at this loophole in the law.

  ‘No Sir, the law doesn’t consider it acceptable for someone to walk into this house and sleep here, but it happens all the time on the borders and people don’t even know it. He might have been here a while.’

  Wednesday 9th September, in the evening

  By this evening, we were all quite stressed and tired from the events of today. The sultry day led to a sticky night without a breeze to release it. We sat together on deck chairs beside the pool, the Daddy long legs were in the hedgerows and the martinis were on ice. If we hadn’t been in a crisis, it would have been blissful.

  ‘How are we going to catch him?’ said the Admiral pacing around the terrace.

  ‘With a trap?’ suggested Delia.

  ‘With a trap!’ The Admiral was getting excited.