When I Was Yours

by Lizzie Page

  ‘What do you think I do out there, Uncle Toby?’

  Perhaps it was me who would take it out on Uncle Toby. He shrugged. ‘I have absolutely no idea.’

  Olive had begun to sob copiously next to me, face in her hands, making her fingers wet with tears. Until that moment, I don’t think I had realised how much she loved the Fords – how much she loved Walter. I supposed they had been perhaps making plans for a life together. Now that I saw it, I clutched her close.

  ‘My dear girl.’

  * * *

  The whole road was closed off now. There were visitors and reporters within the lines, and crowds without. Uncle Toby said in an excited voice, ‘Isn’t that the Princess Mary?’ And Olive made a whining sound, and I said, ‘Sssh,’ and grabbed her hand but it was as much to keep her under control as to soothe her.

  This was a major event. London had been targeted before but never so successfully. Flags were at half-mast, and little wreaths of flowers had appeared.

  The Irish girl who had been pulled free had later perished in hospital. An entire family had been wiped out. It was as bad as anything I had seen in Lamarck.

  Olive half-walked, and I half-pulled her, through the rubble where the houses had been. I found it hard to breathe. Horrible, distressing discoveries everywhere. A shoe. A magazine. A gymslip.

  ‘You will be all right, Olive,’ I told her firmly.

  I didn’t hear her reply at first; I had to ask her to repeat it. She did, wearily, loudly.

  ‘What other way is there to be?’

  It wasn’t until that evening, as I packed to return to France, that I realised with horror that the Lowe family bracelet had gone. I must have lost their precious heirloom in Warrington Crescent, somewhere in all that mess.

  37

  1941 – Now

  They are talking about Pearl Harbor on the radio now. They don’t have exact numbers for casualties, but they believe it to be in the thousands. Thousands dead. A number too big to contemplate. My Pearl listens attentively at the breakfast table, rapidly spooning the porridge into her mouth because I always tell her to do it quickly before it gets cold. The heat disguises the fact that it’s disgusting without milk: we’ve had hardly any recently.

  ‘What’s happening?’ she asks, petrified. ‘They keep saying my name.’

  ‘Oh, darling, it’s nothing to do with you,’ I reassure her. ‘It’s a very different kind of Pearl.’

  I should switch it off, to shield her, but I am mesmerised by the announcer’s words. I am both attracted and repulsed by the horrors unfolding.

  Isn’t this what we wanted? America would surely enter the war now! But not like this. So many dead. Sons, husbands, fathers.

  We talk about it at Mrs Burton’s. On big news days Mrs Burton keeps the wireless on and we speculate about what it means.

  More enemies. The other side is winning.

  Trust Winny Churchill, we all agree. He’ll keep us going. We all have faith in him. I can’t quite work out if it’s because of him, or because there is no one else around. Maybe the reason doesn’t matter.

  But ultimately, I remember Pearl Harbor Day not for Pearl’s confusion or the cold porridge I couldn’t scrape out of the bowl, but for the unmistakeable sight of Mr Shaw, dragging himself up to the Burtons’ front door as I gaze out of their front window. I so rarely see him outside the post office and, at first, it’s difficult to comprehend that he is here.

  ‘It’s Mr Shaw!’ I call brightly. ‘What’s he—’

  But Mrs Burton has opened the door. Mrs Shaw is leaping up, running to the hall, and has collapsed into his arms.

  38

  1918 – Then

  I saw out the rest of the war at Lamarck. I was the number-one driver, even Daisy conceded that. I missed Olive dreadfully, but was happy to get frequent letters from her.

  The Vivi who worked in her father’s carpet business and dreamed of being a civil servant’s dutiful wife was now long buried. This Vivi drove wounded men for hours and dreamed mostly of a gin and soda and a cigarette at the end of a long shift.

  And then the war ended and, as quickly as we had got stuck in, we were sent home.

  * * *

  Father said it was like we’d never been away. Olive and I looked at each other. Maybe it felt that way to him, but for both of us, everything had changed. Olive had maintained her strange accent, but she was more placid than she used to be. She went out less – where would she go now the Fords were finished? – and I thought she was less interested in her appearance than was seemly.

  I thought Olive should go back and finish art school – hadn’t she been her happiest at Goldsmiths? – but she was surprisingly averse to the idea. She didn’t fit the place any longer, she said. It was like a pair of stockings she’d outgrown.

  ‘All the new ones coming through, with no idea about what we did and what we saw. The war affects everything. You can’t even paint a pear without it being there in the background. But the new ones, they don’t know about all that.’

  Aunt Cecily had arranged voluntary work for Olive just one day a week in a recuperation centre for wounded soldiers near Liverpool Street station. She did ‘creative arts’ with the men, which as far as I could work out meant anything from weaving and sketching to working with clay, from basket-weaving to paper-folding. She admired her students awfully.

  ‘You should see them, Vivi. Painting with their fingers, feet. One of them even puts the brush between his teeth. These are brave, determined men and their pictures, you know, they’re really not all that bad,’ she said.

  Olive seemed lost in other ways though. Restlessly looking for something to do, looking for something to pin her down, yet railing against anything that did. When she painted there was harmony in the house, but she said she had lost her drive for it.

  Three mornings a week, I was helping Father with the carpet business. Is this what family is? I pondered. To sit here in this windowless office with a notebook and pen, checking Mrs Webster’s figures? Once, I found a rare error. Gleefully, I raised the alarm but, of course, it was later revealed that it was a miscalculation of my own, and not the fault of the impeccable Mrs Webster.

  It was odd to be spending so much time with my father. We had always had a tender, open relationship, I had thought, but now a wall of resentment seemed to have built itself between us. It was difficult to explain why. Perhaps I couldn’t help but remember his former support for the war and the way he used to talk about foreigners. This was completely unfair because I had talked that way too, but I suppose I had lost some of the respect I once had for him – and for myself.

  * * *

  Edmund’s unit were involved in clear-up operations in France and Belgium so he wasn’t demobbed until spring 1919.

  I read up on derangement, the thousand-yard stare, shock and madness. Violence is rare, the encyclopaedia assured me, and I shivered, remembering what had happened to me in the back of the ambulance in France. In fact, those who suffered were more likely to be the victim of violence! I leafed through the encyclopaedia, looking for chances of recovery. No one seemed to know, but it suggested that love might work.

  I decided I could do that.

  Our reunion took place at the Lowes’, on the first of April, in front of everyone. Everyone laughed fondly as I walked in and called out: ‘Oh, Ed!’ I’d never once said ‘Ed’ in my life, nor even thought of him as an Ed, but the ‘mund’ just wouldn’t come.

  He didn’t get up from his chair. He was thin, his hair wispier, but he hadn’t lost his good looks. I was used to transporting soldiers with no teeth – and no hair – and compared to them, his teeth were impressive.

  I stared at him. I wanted a sign that my waiting, my sacrifices, had been worth it. I needed a sign.

  He did look grateful to see me so I began to feel relieved. It was going to be fine. He had a stick, but he didn’t really need it, he just loved the design, he said. It had a little owl carved at the end. He asked if we’d all be
en looking after Charles, and everyone laughed. Trust Edmund!

  As lunch went on though, and he talked more to his parents and to my father than to me, my heart sank. This was not what I remembered or had hoped for. I felt like I was performing, I was performing delight at the return of my fiancé when I was feeling rather dead inside. Did he have an illness of the brain? Now I had seen him, I doubted it.

  Perhaps it had been military intelligence after all.

  Relationships can be hard work, I reminded myself. We can do this. Think of our families. I had never been afraid of hard work in France, and I wasn’t going to be afraid of it now. That night, I would remember that it was April Fools’ Day, but I thought nothing of it.

  * * *

  However impressive or not their war record was, it was very tough for the returning soldiers. Mrs Webster’s son, Harry, was now profoundly deaf, but he had found work as a carpenter. Of course, Edmund was cushioned more than most, but his parents were not as wealthy as they used to be – something about stocks and shares – and neither were they generous people. He had to do something. His long-ago ambitions of a career in the Indian Civil Service had faded. I tried to be positive, but he darkened at the mention of old dreams.

  ‘They won’t want me now,’ he told me, and when Edmund shut a conversation down, it was well and truly finished. And anyway, he couldn’t go away because of Christopher – ‘How would my parents cope?’

  Fortunately, Uncle Toby came up with a job for Edmund managing a bank and so we celebrated, but it was only the Lowes, Aunt Cecily and Uncle Toby, Father, Edmund and me (Olive was occupied at the recuperation centre) and it felt like a thin party. Everything that once seemed solid now seemed insubstantial. I felt like we didn’t have much to hold onto.

  Edmund didn’t touch me in those months of our long engagement – well, how could he? We were most always with the parents. Occasionally, we walked alone in the garden, but not often and not for long. If we sat on the bench, there might be a hint of his suppressed passion, but he would always push me away.

  ‘When we’re married,’ he promised. I suppose that, much as it annoyed me, I also quite admired his restraint. Edmund was a gentleman, a churchgoer. He was a man of desire – yes, I knew this from the picture I had found – but he knew how to behave appropriately. One day, I told myself, it will be appropriate. One day, we will be husband and wife and mother and father.

  My father caught the flu, not too badly, then my sister, then finally I went down with it. It was called the Spanish flu (Edmund’s mother said, ‘That figures.’). It was going around everywhere, but in a bizarre twist, it didn’t seem to hit the feeblest or the elderly – its main targets were the strong. The Angel of Death passed us over, but Olive lost two friends from art school who’d both been struck and died overnight, foam on their lips, and a colleague of Edmund’s became very ill and barely managed to pull through. Edmund didn’t catch a thing.

  Olive told me that the newly formed women’s work subcommittee at the new Imperial War Museum wanted to display her paintings. She flushed, explaining they had been in touch before – quite regularly, in fact – but she had been determinedly ignoring them for some time.

  ‘But Olive, this is wonderful,’ I began. ‘Your art in a museum? What an honour!’

  ‘I don’t know… I don’t have anything very good to show.’

  ‘Of course you do!’

  My darling Olive was losing her confidence, and I couldn’t understand what it was. I knew she had lost some of her favourite paintings at the Fords’, but there were others that she loved that hadn’t been there. Her work in Italy, for instance – that had been at the Lowes’ the night of the bombs – even her cartoons.

  ‘What about the one… you know the one I mean?’ I asked shyly. Please don’t display it, please don’t.

  In an Ambulance: a VAD lighting a cigarette for a patient.

  ‘It’s gone.’

  ‘I see.’ I squeezed my hands together. I wanted to know if it had definitely been destroyed by the bomb at the Fords’ that night, but I couldn’t bring myself to ask.

  * * *

  Finally, Olive agreed to meet the committee, but only if I would come along. It was a hot summer’s afternoon and there were too many flies. The committee were, as you’d expect, all keen and persuasive and they loved Olive’s work. I couldn’t identify the exact source of Olive’s reticence, but eventually, she agreed that her work would become part of an exhibition of women who’d served in the war.

  Olive wouldn’t go to the opening party, but she did greedily read the newspaper reviews of it.

  ‘A controversial selection. Wastelands. Uncompromisingly bleak. If you are looking for solace –’ Olive snorted; perish the thought – ‘you won’t find it in Olive Mudie-Cooke’s unrelenting landscapes.’

  One critic wrote: ‘It is the exact opposite of celebration. In no way could Mudie-Cooke’s work be described as glorification. These pictures portray tragic waste. A warning might be helpful for those less stout-hearted.’

  With glee, Olive pored over the coverage. ‘Bellissimo! Not bad for a girl who didn’t get to finish college.’

  * * *

  Sometimes, it felt like Olive was fine, everything was bella, she was the same old Olive Mudie-Cooke, the same little sister. Other times, during that first hard year of peace, it felt like she was slipping away from me. I couldn’t put my finger on it. She was retracting more and more into herself. I’d ask her a question and she’d take an age to answer. I’d point something out and she wouldn’t comment. Sometimes, she would airily say to me, ‘Do you remember that man with the disease of the lungs?’

  ‘Yes…’

  ‘I think about him sometimes.’

  Or, ‘The man who cried for his daughters, do you remember him?’

  ‘Yes, O.’

  ‘He visits me every night.’

  ‘Perhaps the doctor could give you something to help you sleep?’

  She smiled at me, a curiously unhappy smile. ‘Do you think I’m going mad, Vi?’

  ‘No,’ I said sternly, ‘I don’t.’

  I had enough on my hands worrying if Edmund was crazy. I didn’t think I could cope with her too.

  I didn’t tell Olive, because I knew it wasn’t the same, but I felt like I saw Sam everywhere. I’d see men in a similar uniform, the same height or head shape, and I’d have to catch my breath. Once, I followed a delivery man down the street until he looked up, frowning quizzically. ‘I’m sorry,’ I murmured. ‘I thought you were someone I used to know.’

  It’s grief and it’s normal, I told myself. I distracted myself by sewing, but every stitch brought me closer to Sam. I dreamed I was wearing a skirt and I asked him to fix it and he made me stand on a stool, pins in his mouth, and he folds up the hem and… But Sam was most likely dead and I and everyone else was grieving. Lost family, lost friends, lost dreams.

  And that’s what Olive was feeling too, but at the same time her grief did not seem normal. Or it seemed normal, but with a bit extra on the side.

  I didn’t know what it was.

  * * *

  About six months after her exhibition at the Imperial War Museum, Olive and I went to the National Gallery to see John Singer Sargent’s brand-new painting. It had only been on display for a few days and already there were reports of fainting and wailing among the terrified onlookers.

  ‘Excellent way to stir up a crowd,’ Olive said cynically.

  We had to stare at it from behind a rope, and although it was only 9 a.m., there were a good thirty or forty people already there. My sister wasn’t cynical once we were in front of it, though. We stared at it open-mouthed for a good few minutes.

  ‘Oh God!’ Olive sank down onto the cold stone gallery floor. ‘I don’t know whether to curtsey or bow.’

  ‘Get up, Olive.’ I looked around quietly. Had anyone noticed her behaviour? A couple in black shuffled away from us. The woman was shaking her head angrily.

  Yes, I’m
afraid they have.

  ‘It’s a masterpiece, isn’t it, Vi, can you imagine?’

  ‘Yes, but get up, darling, it’s embarrassing.’

  It was called Gassed and showed an army of men, each with their hand on the shoulder of the next. It called to mind the artist Bruegel. Such suffering, pain –incomprehensible.

  Outside, despite the chill in the air, we sat on a bench and we couldn’t stop talking about it. I said that although it was a brilliant representation of what we had seen, it wasn’t realistic-looking. Olive was pale-faced. First, she argued that it was realistic, and then that it wasn’t.

  ‘Sod realism!’ she shouted, waving her programme around. ‘This is more honest.’ She looked around at the people coming down the steps. ‘This is the truth, you know that. Dirty, ugly, desperate truth. Such a waste, a tragedy.’

  There was a tea van, and I went over to buy us some. I said it was to warm ourselves up, but mostly it was to give myself time to regroup my thoughts. I couldn’t decide if Olive coming here had been a good idea or not. It certainly seemed to have set her off.

  ‘To think,’ she kept saying, ‘I thought I was making an artistic contribution.’

  ‘You are, O. Your contribution is important.’

  Her chin jutted out angrily. ‘I didn’t do much. You were always the better ambulance driver.’

  ‘You’re the far better painter, darling.’ I laughed. She could be ridiculous.

  A massive man crammed into a modern-fitting suit came towards us. I thought he was going to tell us off, maybe make a point about how unladylike Olive was – people did so much like to point it out – but instead, he shook our cold hands enthusiastically:

  ‘Remember me? It’s Johnny, Johnny Wardle… I saw you admiring the Singer Sargent. So impressive, isn’t it?’