by C. J. Sansom
The London Unemployed Aid Committee had been founded in the early forties to provide food parcels, clothes and holidays for the children of the four million unemployed. Sarah was on the sub-committee that organized Christmas presents for needy children in the North. Sometimes she wondered how the parents must feel, passing on presents from unknown do-gooders; but otherwise the children might get nothing. Sarah was good on committees, and occasionally she deputized for the Chairwoman, Mrs Templeman, a redoubtable businessman’s wife. Mrs Templeman was firmly in charge today, though, a little round hat perched on her permed grey hair, a roll of thick pearls on her stout bosom. She nodded encouragingly as Sarah reported on her correspondence with the big toy stores about discounts for bulk orders. Sarah said it was important to try to ensure the children got a variety of toys – they didn’t want every child in a Yorkshire pit village to end up with the same teddy bear or toy train. She explained that ensuring variety was a bit more expensive, but would make a difference to the families. She smiled at Mr Hamilton, a plump little man with a carnation in his buttonhole who was Charity Officer of a large toy store. He nodded thoughtfully, and Mrs Templeman watched her with approval.
After the meeting Mrs Templeman came over to Sarah, thanked her in her fulsome, patronizing way for all she had done and asked if she would like to come to lunch. She was wearing a heavy coat and, round her neck, a fox-fur stole, a horrible thing with glass eyes that stared at Sarah, tail in its mouth. Mrs Templeman looked disappointed when she declined; Sarah knew that like her she was bored and lonely, but when she had lunched with her before, Mrs Templeman talked endlessly, about her husband and her committees and her church activities – she was a committed Christian and Sarah always felt she looked at her as a possible convert. Sarah didn’t feel she could put up with it today.
She didn’t want to go home, though. She had lunch on her own in a Corner House, then went for a walk; the weather was cold and clear, an icy tang in the air. Quite often, since Charlie died, Sarah had gone into central London, to escape the loneliness of the house; usually she walked around the old streets of the city, with its warehouses and offices and the tiny narrow streets Dickens had written about, the lovely Wren churches like St Dunstan’s and St Swithin’s where she would sit in quiet, if secular, contemplation. Today Sarah decided to walk to Westminster Abbey; she hadn’t been there in years. She turned down Gower Street, past the great white tower of Senate House, the second-tallest building in London. The former London University headquarters now housed the largest German embassy in the world, two giant swastika flags hanging halfway down the building from poles on the roof. Grim-faced Special Branch policemen with sub-machine guns stood on guard all along the high railings with their covering of barbed wire in case of a Resistance attack; inside, an official in brown Nazi Party uniform stepped from a limousine. He was being welcomed by a group of men, some in suits, a couple in military field-grey, one in the glistening black beetle’s carapace of the SS uniform. Sarah hurried past. When uniformed German officials had started arriving in England in 1940 Sarah had been astonished by the vibrant slashing colours, the black swastika armbands with the bright red hooked cross worn in its white circle; before, of course, she had only seen the Nazis on film, in black and white and grey. They knew how to use colour.
Walking along she thought, by contrast, how tired and cold and grey most people looked. A one-legged man sat on the pavement playing a violin, a cap at his feet, 1940 Veteran Please Help scrawled on a piece of cardboard. The police would move him on presently; beggars had been a growing problem in London until a few years ago, when after a Daily Mail campaign they had been forcefully removed to the ‘Back to the Land’ agricultural settlements Lloyd George had set up to grow food on wasteland in the countryside. She dropped half a crown in the man’s cap. She noticed the depressing signs of poverty and oppression more and more these days. For years she had shut her eyes. When she had met David her days of political activism were already over, it was too dangerous. She and David both thought, after they returned from New Zealand, that there was nothing to do but wait until things changed, as surely, eventually, they must.
She walked on towards Westminster, noticing again that there were a lot of Auxiliary Police around. Several times she saw a new poster advertising Mosley’s Fascists; it was garish and horrible, a woman in the foreground shielding a baby from a gigantic, King Kong-like ape with the long nose of a cartoon Jew, a helmet with a red star on his head. Fight Bolshevik Terror! Join the BUF Now! She passed down Whitehall, looking up at the windows of the Dominions Office where David would be working. She had been growing more and more angry with him in recent weeks, but her talk with Irene had made her realize the depth of her love, how much she feared losing him.
She went past the Palace of Westminster, down to the abbey. Inside it was cool and dark, her footsteps echoing. There were few people around. The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier was still piled high with wreaths from Remembrance Day. She looked around the vast spaces. They would hold the Coronation here, some time next year. She pitied the Queen, young and alone in the middle of this mess. She had a sudden memory of the Christmas broadcast by her father, George VI, in 1939, that one wartime Christmas. The family had been sitting round the radio, wearing paper hats but in sombre silence. The King, struggling , quoted from a poem:
‘I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year,
“Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.”
And he replied, “Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the hand of God.
That shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way.”’
The poor King, she thought, who had never wanted the throne, had had to take it after his brother, the irresponsible Nazi sympathizer Edward VIII, had abdicated. Edward and Wallis Simpson still lived an easy life in the Bahamas, where he was governor. King George, over the years since 1940, had seemed, like so many figures from the thirties, to fade away, seldom appearing in public, looking sad and strained when he did.
Some chairs had been set out for a service and Sarah sat down. In the cold half-light, she found herself praying for the first time in years. ‘God, if you do exist, give us another child. It would be such a little thing for You but it would be everything to us.’ She began, silently, to cry.
Sarah had had a happy childhood. She was the baby of the family, a pretty blonde girl adored by her mother and elder sister, though she knew that for all of them her father came first: Jim, whose disfigured face had sometimes frightened her when she was small.
Jim was an accounts clerk at the Town Hall, and spent much of his spare time working for pacifist causes, the League of Nations Union and later the Peace Pledge Union. He was devoted to preventing another war, convinced humanity could not survive a next time.
What she learned at home was different from what they taught at school. She would argue it out with her sister. ‘Irene, Mrs Briggs at school says the Kaiser started the war, he had to be stopped.’
‘Well, she’s wrong. It’s not fair to blame Germany for everything. And the Versailles Treaty was unfair, ceding parts of Germany to other countries and making them pay reparations. They can’t afford them and that’s why their economy’s in such a mess. Daddy was in the war, a lot of his friends were killed, and it was all for nothing in the end. We have to stop it happening again.’
‘But don’t we have to have an army to defend ourselves, in case someone attacks us?’
‘Nobody’ll be able to defend themselves if there’s another war. All countries will get bombed, the planes will drop gas. Don’t cry, Sarah, it won’t happen, good people like Daddy will stop it.’
As Sarah grew older she became as passionate a peace campaigner as her father and sister. In her teens she signed the Peace Pledge and joined the meetings that often took place round the table in their home, though if she were honest she found many of the Peace Pledge folk argumentative and boring. Sarah’s mother always played the par
t of the busy hostess, boiling kettles and bringing plates of cakes and sandwiches. Her father didn’t speak much during their meetings, but sat smoking his pipe, his ravaged face sombre.
There was one evening, though, when he did speak and Sarah never forgot it; if ever she doubted the pacifist cause it always came back to her mind. It was just before her eighteenth birthday, a sticky summer evening in 1936. There was a campaign on to get more signatures for the Peace Pledge, and people sat round the table busily putting leaflets into envelopes. Sarah was tired and irritable, wondering what teacher-training college would be like – she had just left school – and was feeling flustered over a boy who wanted to take her out but whom she didn’t really like.
The Spanish Civil War had just broken out, and people who had opposed war for years were finding it hard not to take sides. A young man, a Labour Party member, said, ‘How can we blame the Spanish people for fighting back against these militarists who are trying to overthrow an elected government?’
Irene spoke up hotly. ‘Well, the Spanish army say they’re trying to stop chaos and bring order. Anyway, we can’t support violence on either side. We have to hold to our principles.’
‘I know,’ the young man said. ‘But – it’s hard, seeing these Fascists trampling down ordinary people.’
‘So what do you want us to do, build up armaments against Hitler, like that beastly warmonger Churchill does?’
He shook his head. ‘I don’t know. It’s so hard, but – it’s terrible, these Fascist and nationalist parties taking power all over Europe. 1914 was an orgy of nationalism and flag-waving and you’d think people would have learned from that, what it led to. But now . . .’ His voice trailed away, full of sorrow.
Jim spoke then: ‘In the trenches, at night, sometimes it could get really quiet. People don’t realize that. Then the big guns would start up over on the German side, somewhere down the line. And I used to sit there, wondering if the sound would get closer, if the shells would maybe land on us. I used to think, there’s some young fellow just like me over there, sweating to load one big shell after another. Just a young chap like me. It was nights like that which made me understand war is totally wrong. Not in the heat of battle, but during the quiet moments when you had a chance to think.’
There was silence in the room. The young man looked away.
Things were never the same for the peace movement, though, after the Spanish war began. Sarah, like most pacifists, had always thought of herself as progressive, but now some people were accusing pacifists of being blind fools, reactionaries, even. War was coming, fascism was on the march and you had to choose sides. She and Irene went to see H.G. Wells’ film Things to Come and the images of rows of bombers filling the sky, the clouds of gas, the ragged groups of people living afterwards in an endless bombed-out wasteland, haunted her. She remembered, when Germany annexed Austria, trying to explain Mr Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement to a class of thirteen-year-olds at the girls’ school where she worked, now a student teacher. ‘I’m not saying Herr Hitler is a good man, but Germany has some right to feel aggrieved. Why shouldn’t she join with Austria if both countries want it? Appeasement means trying to settle grievances, calm things down, not stir them up. Isn’t that the sensible way?’ Yet looking at the newsreels of Austrian Jews being thrown out of their homes and made to scrub the streets while soldiers kicked them, she felt, not doubt yet, but anguish.
It was easier for Irene; she had always been one to go wholeheartedly one way or the other and now she had joined the League for Anglo-German Understanding. She had met Steve there and become, like him, a Hitler enthusiast. Sarah asked how anyone who believed in peace could possibly see anything good in fascism. Irene answered, ‘Hitler’s a man of peace and vision, darling, you mustn’t believe the propaganda. All he wants is justice for Germany and friendship with Britain.’
Sarah turned to her father for advice. ‘You’re right, darling,’ he said. ‘Hitler’s an evil militarist. But if we go to war with him we’re just using the same methods as his. Mr Chamberlain is right.’ He spoke quietly, sadly. There were fewer meetings now and often Jim would sit in the lounge staring into space, his misery palpable.
Then came autumn 1938 and the Munich crisis. Men were digging up parks and lawns, making trenches where people could hide when the bombs fell, crosses of tape were stuck on the school windows so that splinters of glass would not slice into the children. Sarah thought, this time the civilians are in the trenches too. The school took a delivery of gas masks, horrible things of rubber and glass, large ones for the adults and small ones with Mickey Mouse faces for the children. When she went into school and saw the table piled with those blank, staring goggles, Sarah had to grip a chair to keep from fainting. The other teachers were staring at the masks in horror. The headmistress said they would have to show the children how to fit them. One teacher asked, tears streaming down her face, ‘How do we tell those little tots what those things are for, that people in aeroplanes will drop gas bombs on them? How do we do it?’
‘Because we bloody must!’ the headmistress shouted back, her voice breaking for a second. ‘Because if we don’t they’ll be dead. You think these are bad, you should see the maternity ward where my sister works! They’ve got bloody gas suits for babies there!’
But it didn’t happen. There was a miracle, Chamberlain came back with the Munich agreement giving Germany part of Czechoslovakia. ‘Only where Germans live, not Czechs,’ Irene said triumphantly. Steve said that if a war had come it would have ruined the country financially; all the businessmen and bankers had been terrified by the prospect. ‘One in the eye for that warmonger Churchill!’ When she heard the news Sarah felt relief course through her body like a drug. But then, a year later, in August 1939 it all happened again over Poland, trenches and gas masks and evacuation plans, and this time war was declared, Chamberlain’s heartbroken voice announcing it on the radio. The horrible wail of the air-raid siren sounded for the first time, only in practice but the next time it might be real. All over London you saw people, grim or tearful, taking their dogs and cats to be put to sleep because they would be defenceless against the bombs. In the first week of September Sarah led a sad crocodile of children, carrying gas masks and little suitcases and accompanied by mothers with haunted faces, down to Victoria Station for evacuation.
The switchback of hope and horror took another turn. For months after the evacuation nothing happened, no air raids, no fighting after Poland fell to Germany. Parents began bringing their children home. The phoney war, people began calling it. Some asked what point there was in continuing the war; it had been fought to help Poland but Poland was defeated, gone, divided between Germany and Russia. During the cold winter of 1939–40, watching the children throwing snowballs in the playground, Sarah began to hope again. But in April Germany suddenly invaded Denmark and Norway and British forces were thrown effortlessly back.
Chamberlain resigned and was replaced by Lord Halifax, just before the Germans attacked the Low Countries and France. Again the Germans swept all before them, shattering the French armies and sending the British army home, minus their equipment, from Dunkirk. The newscasters’ voices on the BBC became increasingly serious, and people once more began looking fearfully up at the skies above London, now dotted with barrage balloons. The French army retreated further and further. Then, in the middle of June, news came that France and Britain had sued for an armistice. A month later the Treaty of Berlin was signed, a peace which the newspapers and the BBC said was surprisingly generous on Hitler’s part; no occupation, no reparations, Britain and the Empire and the navy left intact, no colonies surrendered; the Belgian Congo the only European colony lost to Germany. And there was to be no German occupation apart from the large military base on the Isle of Wight. German Jews who had fled to Britain since the Nazis took over were to be repatriated, but nothing was said about British Jews. Sarah remembered seeing on a cinema newsreel, Lord Halifax returning from Berlin, Butler and
Douglas-Home beside him on the airport tarmac, and the emotion in the aristocratic voice as Halifax declared, ‘The peace we have signed with Germany will last, God willing, for ever.’ Clapping and shouts of ‘Hurrah!’ broke out all over the cinema. Sarah had gone with her family; Irene cheered louder than anyone and their mother cried with relief. Sarah glanced at her father, but the good side of his face was turned away from her, and she could not see his expression.
A year later, just after the Russian war began, Halifax resigned – for health reasons they said, although his emaciated face was a mask of sorrow as he left Downing Street, and it was rumoured he had been against the German ‘crusade’. He was replaced by the ancient but cheerfully aggressive Lloyd George, who had called Hitler the greatest German of the age. People said he was little more than a stooge. He looked like a living relic on television, his false teeth clattering noisily during his broadcasts, his white hair wild. After his death in 1945 the newspaper proprietor and Cabinet Minister Beaverbrook took over, callously dismissive of the atrocity stories from Europe, his lifelong dreams of Empire free trade finally realized.
When Sarah left Westminster Abbey she was surprised to see how late it was. The sun was already beginning to set and the hundreds of windows in the Palace of Westminster sparkled with reflected light, making her blink. The sky to the west was like a Turner painting, a haze of reds and purples. She felt better for her prayer and the tears, though she did not believe any God was really there to listen.
She crossed the road to the Underground. It was busy outside the tube station; a costermonger, wrapped in a thick muffler, was selling vegetables from a stall. A newsvendor called out ‘Evening Standard! Beaverbrook meets Laval!’ She decided to buy a paper. Beaverbrook had stopped in Paris on his way to Berlin and there was a photograph of him with President Laval; like Britain, France was governed now by a right-wing newspaper proprietor.