August paused before answering, ‘At first, it was pretty unpleasant. My heart was beating very fast and I felt rather faint. I was forced to lie mostly in darkness, in a space not much bigger than a coffin. I had only a daily plate of porridge for warmth and nothing to do except listen to the wind roar and the tent creaking and groaning under the weight of ice, hoping it wouldn’t cave in on me.’ A candle sputtered, dripping wax onto the tablecloth, but nobody paid it any mind.
‘I was scared that I might be poisoned by fumes from the stove,’ August went on. ‘And in my darkest moments, I imagined all the things that could go wrong to stop the relief party reaching me. Perhaps they would fall into a crevasse, or the dogs would catch distemper, or a fire at the base camp would consume the sledges. Perhaps they wouldn’t find the buried station. I couldn’t help thinking I might die.’ He shook his head, as if trying to dispel the memory. ‘I hoped my end would be peaceful. I had saved four slabs of chocolate to eat before that eventuality.’
Mollie shuddered and Ginie gave her a sympathetic look. The poor girl must have been in hell for all those months, not knowing whether August was dead or alive.
‘But the tent didn’t collapse,’ he said, with a small smile, ‘and the air stayed breathable. I began to hope that as God had looked after me this far, perhaps He would see me the rest of the way.’
There was something electric in the air around the table. They were sitting very still, transfixed by August’s low, unassuming voice.
‘Slowly, with lack of exercise and malnutrition, a dreadful torpor crept over me,’ he said, his eyes roving from person to person. ‘In its way, it was every bit as merciless as the cold. My light and fuel were running low, as were my rations. I could only lie in darkness, wondering what was happening in the outside world, waiting to be rescued. I had ice in my sleeping bag and painful frostbite in my fingers and toes. Sometimes, I’d try and cheer myself up by singing. It was an awful din, but there was no one around to hear.’
He closed his eyes for a moment. ‘As each day passed without relief, I grew closer to the limits of endurance. Yet a strange thing happened: I felt more and more certain that my friends wouldn’t let me down. I can’t explain, but it was clear to me that although I was helpless, some higher power was on my side. God didn’t want me to die alone on the ice cap. Twice, quite clearly, I heard my name being spoken, and the voice was Mollie’s.’
Wallis gasped.
‘On May the fifth, his primus stove died,’ Mollie said. ‘Within an hour he heard a loud noise outside and a hole of blinding daylight appeared in the roof. It was the rescue party who had found the station.’
‘It was a miracle!’ exclaimed Ginie.
‘Yes,’ August agreed, his eyes on Mollie. ‘It was a marvellous moment. The whole world seemed tipped upside down. One minute I was trapped in a dark hole under the snow, wondering if I would ever see another human being or ever get home, and the next, home and Mollie were within my reach.’
They gazed at August in admiration. ‘What an extraordinary story,’ said David.
‘You have the most amazing courage,’ added Wallis.
After the meal, there was dancing under the hammerbeam roof and a firework display. Cries of pleasure rang out as the multi-coloured lights burst against the night sky. A brilliant flare danced above the hall, illuminating the stained glass windows. David stood beside Ginie.
‘It really is a magnificent building; you’ve done a wonderful job restoring it. My sister-in-law, Elizabeth, would like to come and see it. She’s something of a history buff.’
‘We would love to have her,’ Ginie answered at once. ‘We will write to her tomorrow.’
‘Don’t mention me,’ Wallis whispered in her ear. ‘Elizabeth always had her eye on David, but he wouldn’t look at her.’
She put a finger on her lips and winked. Ginie gave her a surreptitious smile back. A rocket exploded, sending showers of sparks tumbling like a scarlet waterfall, and happiness bubbled up inside Ginie, but it felt fragile, fleeting. She wanted to grasp the moment and keep hold of it. At this exact point in time, I am glad to be me.
Stephen wrote to Elizabeth, Duchess of York, asking if she would like to look at the renovations at Eltham Palace and she wrote back to accept his invitation. Ginie was nervous, for she had a feeling that Elizabeth would look with less forgiving eyes than David and Wallis. There had recently been a correspondence in The Times about the suitability of juxtaposing old and new buildings and the restoration of Eltham Palace was discussed in it. Some called it a marvellous example of a rarely-used form of architecture, ‘A shrine to the Art Deco style.’ But Sir Herbert Baker listed examples of architects who had, in his view, shown exemplary taste in adding to old buildings, implying that this had not been the case at Eltham. G.M. Young even went so far as to call the modern extension ‘An admirably designed but unfortunately sited cigarette factory.’ John Seeley and Paul Paget felt compelled to challenge these remarks and a heated debate ensued. Elizabeth would almost certainly have seen the letters and it made Ginie all the more anxious about her arrival.
On the day, the royal car arrived at precisely four o’clock and Elizabeth stepped out, plump and pretty in a floral dress – the antithesis of Wallis. She had an attendant with her, a young girl with pale skin and straw-coloured hair, who hardly said a word.
The Courtaulds were on the drive to welcome them. They began a tour of the great hall almost immediately, Elizabeth revealing her considerable knowledge of history. There was not a carving, not a painting or ornament that she failed to notice. She knew that Geoffrey Chaucer was Clerk of the King’s works at Eltham and could quote Shakespeare’s lines from the opening of Henry VI which mentioned the palace:
The king from Eltham I intend to steal,
And sit at chiefest stern of public weal.
Ginie let Stephen do most of the talking. He walked ahead with Elizabeth, while she followed with the attendant. She noted with amusement that Elizabeth was mildly flirtatious – a hand on Stephen’s arm, her head tilted to one side as if to say, I find you fascinating.
Afterwards, they had tea in the dining room, which had black, Belgian marble-edged floors and a silver ceiling with concealed lighting. The chairs were pink leather and there were silver animals etched onto the black doors, copies of Narini’s drawings of the creatures in London Zoo. Elizabeth accepted a shot of brandy in her tea, assenting that it was much more agreeable than milk.
‘Perhaps I should introduce it to Buckingham Palace,’ she chuckled. She was so jovial and pleasant that conversation was flowing and Ginie was able to relax. After tea, they showed her the modern part of the house.
‘It’s not really like an English home,’ she remarked. ‘It’s much more comfortable.’
She bent to pet Jongy, who had left his cage and was running round them in circles. ‘Hello there, little fellow,’ she said gently. He let her stroke him while he chittered softly with pleasure and to her amusement, he tried to grab the royal nose.
Stephen asked if she would do them the honour of signing their window, but the diamond stylus wasn’t in its usual place. The Courtaulds went off to search for it, leaving Elizabeth in the dining room.
Luckily, it didn’t take long to find, it was buried under a pile of silk cushions on Ginie’s bed, by Jongy probably. She took it back to their guests. Just outside the half-open door, she heard Elizabeth say, ‘It’s exactly like a film set. I thought they were staging a production of some sort.’
Ginie stopped dead. Her face turned red and her palms were clammy.
‘He’s involved with Ealing Studios,’ replied the attendant. ‘He has financed films like Whom the Gods Love and The Show Goes On.’
‘Well, then it makes perfect sense.’
Ginie took a deep breath, straightened her back and forced herself to walk into the room before anything else was said.
Stephen abhorred gossip. He refused to speculate about whether David would marry Wallis, even afte
r the silence of the press had broken and the whole country was shocked that their King could hesitate between his duty to the throne and his love for an American with two divorces under her belt, whom they believed to be an adventuress.
Ginie felt terrible for the couple. She wished the public could see how charming and wise and sympathetic Wallis was, and how good she was for David. His abdication, when it came, was no surprise. They listened to his speech on the radio.
‘I have found it impossible to carry the heavy burden of responsibility and to discharge my duties as King as I would wish to do without the help and support of the woman I love,’ he said. Once it was finished, she gathered the animals to her and went to bed. Her chest ached with their loss.
Now Wallis was ‘de-crowned,’ almost an untouchable. Ginie could hardly bear to contemplate the emptiness of her and David’s future, the terrible waste of their talents. The Courtaulds wrote a letter of commiseration to Wallis and a letter of congratulation to the new Queen Elizabeth, but neither replied. People with connections to the Court began to turn down invitations to Eltham Palace and Ginie realised that the abdication had caused the tide to turn once more against divorcees.
At the time, the ball for David and Wallis appeared to open a door for Ginie. It seemed to promise that she was finally on the brink of the recognition and validation she craved. But as months passed and the world started to darken with the threat of war with Germany, she realised that the ball was the supreme moment. Nothing else would come close.
22
The Courtaulds, Eltham, 1940s
Ginie sat on a bench, taking a break from gardening. Her back ached, there was earth jammed under her fingernails and painful blisters forming on both palms. She sipped tea from a flask and watched fleecy clouds drift across the sky. They were strange shapes: submarines and punctuation marks, fins that could have belonged to fish or aeroplanes. The random doodles of a capricious deity.
She wished that they’d had more time to enjoy Eltham. The few years between getting settled and the outbreak of war had disappeared so quickly, leaving almost nothing to hold on to. They had a few tinselly parties and a social position that was tenuous at best. And now, life had changed utterly. The parties had stopped. Several of their friends had joined up and it felt inappropriate, if not downright unpatriotic, to carry on entertaining. Besides, most of the staff had gone, either to fight or to work on the ‘home front.’ Before the war, there were eight live-in staff and fifteen gardeners. Now, only the cook, the butler and one cleaner were left and the grounds and garden had the services of two old men, helped by Ginie.
They were doing a pretty good job of keeping everything going. A large section of the garden had been given over to growing vegetables, which thrived. They produced more than they could eat and the cook bartered what they didn’t need for extra eggs, and sometimes meat or chicken.
Ginie shivered and pulled the belt of her coat tighter. She was always cold these days. Fuel rationing made it hard to heat such a large house – Jongy’s cage was the only snug room in the whole palace. In the distance, she could hear the drone of an approaching aeroplane. They were used to planes passing overhead, but as this one grew nearer, she realised that it sounded unusually low. She sat forwards, scanning the horizon and saw a Hawker Hurricane flying not more than fifty feet above her head.
It seemed to be going slowly and when it was almost directly above her, she could see the pilot quite clearly. She saw his brown helmet and goggles. She couldn’t make out his eyes, but the determined set of his shoulders expressed fierce concentration. The plane passed. She listened to the sound of its engines fading and dwindling to nothing. Anxiety tugged at her belly. It was the same feeling she’d experienced on one of her rare visits to church last Sunday, during the vicar’s sermon.
‘According to the Press, we are threatened with attack,’ he had announced. ‘There is a very real danger that Hitler and Mussolini will send troops to land on our beaches. Will they succeed in smashing our defences? Who knows, but if they do, we ordinary civilians shall have our parts to play, young or old, man and woman. We shall not lose faith or courage, but instead put our trust in our Lord and calmly carry out the instructions of the Government.’
At this point, he’d paused, looking earnestly at his congregation, and it seemed that his eyes met Ginie’s and he carried on speaking to her alone. ‘Have you got your gas mask ready? Have you a bucket of sand in your house? What about your soul – do you pray for your country every day?’
Talk of invasion wasn’t new, but since Italy had entered the war, Ginie felt doubly insecure. Although she was protected by the Courtauld name, she was working hard for the war effort, running a branch of the Women’s Voluntary Service from the palace – knitting for the troops, making clothes for the homeless who had lost everything in the bombing, driving the wounded and sick to hospital – she was still Italian, her ex brother-in-law a high-ranking official in the Italian marines.
She could see it in the faces of acquaintances. There was no overt hostility, but people who had waved to her on the street now looked in the other direction when she passed, or melted away after church. Marrying Stephen had solved nothing after all. She was still drifting without an anchor, blown from culture to culture, belonging nowhere. There was a hurt inside her that was never allowed to heal and a slow-burning anger that nothing could allay.
Eltham was close to the river on a German bomb path and the raids came at seven o’clock every night, regular as clockwork. The Germans were going for the docklands and London.
One cold, clear night, they were more active than usual. A continuous drone of planes flew overhead, seeming to get louder and nearer all the time. When the air raid siren sounded, the household moved to the basement, which they had fitted up as a dormitory with camp beds. The staff settled themselves in for the night. Ginie sat up with the animals, holding them close to her body, trying to keep them calm as the bombs began to fall. Even in the basement, they could feel the house rattling with the reverberations of each blast.
Stephen collected his tin hat and gas mask and checked them thoroughly as he got ready for his shift with the Home Guard. He was a Chief Air Raid Precautions Warden and he wore the uniform: dark blue linen trousers, topped by an army-style blouse jacket in the same fabric, with a belted waist and epaulettes. It wasn’t skilled work for a man of his ability, but active service was out of the question because of his age.
Generally, there wasn’t much to do on ARP duty, unless a bomb fell in his area, the two square miles around Eltham Palace. Occasionally, he helped the fire brigade, holding hoses and so on, or he inspected air raid shelters, enforced the blackout, or chatted to the older people to keep their spirits up. There were rare meetings where they discussed the progress of the war and checked their first aid equipment.
A huge explosion sounded directly above them, a deep rolling crump. The house gave a hard jolt and the vibrations slammed into Stephen’s body. He went numb for an instant, instinctively bracing himself for the sight of men horribly lacerated by shrapnel, and the mix of earth and rot. Little by little, the fog in his head cleared. He was in England; in Eltham. The first thing he became aware of was the animals’ distress, and Ginie struggling to collect herself and comfort them at the same time.
Kais was in the worst state, quivering and crying, wanting to burrow into her side. She was whispering in his ear, as though he were a child. Jongy was on her lap, shivering against her stomach. Caesar emitted short, sharp howls of distress. If the locals could see Caesar now, they would realise he was soft as cake.
‘I think we took a direct hit,’ said Stephen. ‘Wait here, I’m going to have a look.’
‘I’ll telephone the fire service,’ Ginie shouted over the noise.
Five minutes later, he was back. ‘It must have been a Molotov cocktail,’ he said. The others were out of bed now and gathered round Ginie, anxious but unharmed. ‘The hall roof’s on fire.’
‘The AFS wil
l be here in ten minutes,’ said Ginie.
Stephen didn’t answer, biting his lip, deep in thought. The Auxiliary Fire Service had a mobile bus which towed pumps the size of car wheels. Stephen allowed them to use the moat for practice. The memory of it made him burn with irritation, for despite their repeated efforts, they could barely shoot water halfway up the building. They’d succeeded in giving the windows a good washing, but they didn’t have the power to reach the roof. Anyhow, he couldn’t wait ten minutes. The fire couldn’t be allowed to burn through the tiles and reach the beams beneath.
He told Ginie and the staff to stay where they were. He filled buckets with water, grabbed his Home Guard stirrup pump and climbed up the stairs, through the silent and ghostly house, much of which was packed away or covered in dust sheets. By the time he reached the roof, the blaze had taken hold. The scene possessed a terrible beauty; pillars of changing, swirling smoke silhouetted against the glow of fire, the clouds reflecting the flames in dull red. He could hear the heavy drone of planes and the occasional thump of bombs some distance away. Sharp, slim bursts of light showed the AA guns in action. Ambulance bells and fire engine bells rang everywhere.
He saw at once that the pump was completely inadequate, but because there was no other option, he stuck the nozzle into the bucket, put his foot in the stirrup and began to push. The smoke made him cough and choke. With one hand, he operated the T-bar to get the water pressure up, while his other hand directed the jet onto the fire. It was rather like working a giant bicycle pump and it was difficult to coordinate everything and keep the pressure going. His eyes stung and streamed. The water pressure was weak and had no discernible effect on the flames. The roof might easily collapse beneath him, and he would fall to his death amid a shower of burning timbers.
He thought about Ginie in the basement, trying to master her fear so as not to pass it to the others. He gritted his teeth in determination and licked his cracked lips, pumping furiously and ignoring the pain that had started shooting up his calf. His face was black with soot and inflamed by the heat. When the buckets were empty, he ran downstairs to refill them, then worked until he had no breath left. Pulling his foot out of the stirrup, he doubled over, trying to take in gulps of smoke-laden air. He forced himself to straighten up and carry on pumping. With agonising slowness, the flames began to subside and lose their strength.
The Dragon Lady Page 12