Also by Sophie Hardach
Confession with Blue Horses
The Registrar’s Manual for Detecting Forced Marriages
NON-FICTION
Languages are Good for Us
Of Love and Other Wars
Sophie Hardach
AN APOLLO BOOK
www.headofzeus.com
First published by Simon & Schuster in 2013
This paperback edition first published by Head of Zeus in 2021
An Apollo book
Copyright © Sophie Hardach, 2013
The moral right of Sophie Hardach to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN (PBO): 9781838939212
ISBN (E): 9781838939205
Head of Zeus Ltd
First Floor East
5–8 Hardwick Street
London EC1R 4RG
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For my dear Dan, who first listened to this story
outside a mountain hut in Georgia and
encouraged me to write it down.
Contents
Welcome Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
7 May 1945
Part One: Of a Slow Tongue
The Peculiar People
Adamantine Lustre
Worship
The Ladies’ Pond
Swords and Ploughshares
Part Two: Under the Noise
Café Brilyantn
The Teapot
Swarthmoor Hall
Press Barons
Pack My Unwanted Love into Bombs
Trapped Light
You, You, You
Letters from the Isle of Man
A Trembling Bathtub
Three Hundred and Fifty-four Rats
Swell
Of Love and Other Wars
The Triangle
Part Three: 1945 When All London Sparkles with Illuminations
Life Drawing
Hardness Ten
Boys, Girls and Soldiers
Three Ships
Maurice
Death Vomit
My Own
When All London Sparkles
Acknowledgements
About the Author
An Invitation from the Publisher
When after a victorious battle, all London sparkles with illuminations, when the sky is ablaze with fireworks, when the air is filled with the noise of thanks-giving, bells, organs, cannons; we wail in silence over the murders that caused the public rejoicing.
Voltaire, quoting the Quaker Andrew Pitt in Premiére Lettre sur les Quakers, 1734
7 May 1945
There was a tremendous noise outside, as if the four winds had come together and blown upon the dead. Mr Lamb put his finger between the chapters of Ezekiel he had been reading and pushed back the curtain. Instead of an army of bones, he saw only a brass band trailed by cheering women and children.
His wife called from the hallway and he shuffled towards her, still holding his Bible with the index finger between the pages. In the bright rectangle of the doorway there stood a young man, an airman. His feet were respectfully planted outside the threshold, which no uniformed man had ever crossed.
The Bible slipped from Mr Lamb’s grasp. It landed on the carpet with a soft thud. His visitor stepped inside, reached out, steadied him with a strong arm just as the brass band passed their front garden. Mr Lamb tried to say something, but the drums and tubas drowned him out with their triumphant song.
*
Mrs Morningstar watched the fireworks from her office at Bentham College in Bloomsbury. She switched off the Anglepoise, tore the old blackout paper from the windows and leaned out. Cheers and shouts drifted up from the streets. A green flare travelled across the sky and erupted in a shower of green and yellow light.
It was time, then. She pulled back into the room and walked to a shelf crammed with lab tools, where she carefully retrieved an opaque jar from the very back.
Outside, a golden chrysanthemum covered the fading green sparkles.
*
In a hospital in northern Germany, a British Army medic drew aside a curtain and asked: ‘Mrs Hoffnung, are you quite sure this is your husband?’
She nodded.
‘Well, he’s lucky you recognized him. Under the circumstances.’
She cupped her hands around her husband’s brittle fingers. Out in the corridor, some of the soldiers broke into song.
‘I didn’t,’ she said. ‘He recognized me.’
*
The boys in Paul Lamb’s unit were peeling potatoes and singing. There was going to be a feast. A bottle was going round and Paul already felt slightly drunk. The sergeant cook was chopping onions to the rhythm of the song, and when they got to the end he punctuated it by driving his blade into a whole bulb. Paul put down his knife and mumbled that he needed some air. Outside the tent, with the hoarse singing voices behind him, he kneeled down and wiped his hands on the damp grass.
PART ONE
Of a Slow Tongue
The Peculiar People
1
When Paul was a boy, he loved murder as much as any other healthy child. In the 1920s, during one of those cold winters when the ponds froze over so quickly that they trapped several ducks, he roamed across Hampstead Heath with his brother, Charlie, and a gang of local boys. They stabbed sticks into potato sacks and howled with pleasure when another German soldier spilled scraps of wool and paper under the assault. On the real battlefield, the bayonet was more of a nuisance because it often jammed; he learned this from a reliable source. One had to use a foot to lever away the body, which was a waste of effort, and some men solved this problem by switching their rifles for sharp-edged shovels.
‘Like so,’ Mr Boddington, the grocer, said, and halved a cabbage with a spade, sending one half flying across the shop. He scooped up the scattered cabbage leaves, pulled his collar to one side and patted the pale fleshy patch between his neck and shoulder. ‘Here. Splits your chap right down to the lung.’
Mr Boddington wore short trousers like a boy, even in winter.
Paul’s parents were unaware of the bayonets and the potato sacks until his mother caught the boys frogging by the pond in the back garden. Paul, for once a leader rather than a follower, had invited them. He had been the one to smash the ice on the surface and dig the frog out of the mud at the bottom, easily overwhelming it in its wintery stupor. He had been the one to deliver it to the chief torturers, who placed it between two wooden planks and counted down to the great jump, all of them together, just as the kitchen door opened and his mother stepped out in her brown dress. The boys scattered like fruit flies.
‘Oh, Paul.’ She lifted the top plank. ‘And I was so fond of that frog.’
They continued their rampage. Ants under a magnifying glass angled cleverly in the winter sun. Bee-on-a-string, in which a hibernating bee was dislodged from its bed of moss, dextrously belted, then released and warmed in a room or a shed until it spread its translucent wings and took to the air, one end of the string knotted around its waist, the other pinched between th
e grubby fingers of a boy, who reeled and steered it like a kite.
Perhaps Paul and Charlie would have continued on that path; perhaps they would have joined the Cadets and the Officer Training Corps and all those other organizations for energetic boys and young men, had not their father walked into the grocery shop one warm spring morning just as Mr Boddington was showing them how to trap a bee in his icebox, where it had to be cooled before it could be safely lassoed.
‘Mr Boddington,’ his father said. ‘Bullying defenceless insects again?’
‘Mr Lamb.’ Mr Boddington scratched his bare knee with the sharpened stick he used for bayonet practice. ‘Being a God-bothering pain in the neck again?’
Paul’s father calmly walked over, took the stick from the grocer and broke it in two.
With that, the games came to an end.
Opposition to bayonet games was not unusual then; there were several fathers in the street, some with missing limbs or persistent tremors, who could not bear to see a potato sack stabbed. But who could object to a robust and hearty game like frogging? Who could object to bee-on-a-string, which did not even result in the destruction of the bee, at least not always? It was this aspect of Paul’s family and their mysterious religious society, this readiness to detect malice in an innocent, traditional English game, that would later lead to a rumour, sowed by boys within minutes and nurtured by adults over many years, that the meek, mild Lambs at number nine were spies.
*
The Lambs were used to such accusations. Their ancestors had gathered on storm-swept northern moors to rail against the King’s Church and its priests, had crept into remote farmhouses, hands cupped around candles, to worship in the spirit of the early Christians. In the seventeenth century Lambs in bonnets and wide-brimmed hats had prayed in silent circles, waiting for the sound of galloping hoofs, for armed men who would jump off their foaming horses and yank down the reins with one leather-gloved hand while the other already pounded against the wooden door. In the wilting old books on Paul’s shelves, martyred Lambs were dragged across the Morecambe sands, branded with hot irons, gaoled on charges of treason; and when they defiantly told their judges to quake at the word of the Lord, they were mocked as Quakers.
The Lambs on Swains Lane in Highgate merely smiled at their suspicious neighbours, took their sons out of the local school and sent them to one run by their own people, the Religious Society of Friends, as the Quakers called themselves. It was a school where sticks were used to toast bread over a fire and Germans were pen friends who wrote postcards from Bad Pyrmont: ‘Dear Paul! How are you? I am fine thank you. The weather here is fine. Visit us soon! Yours, Ludwig.’
Unlike Paul, Charlie insisted on writing all his letters to Bad Pyrmont in the persona of a seventeenth-century elder striving to convert the fictional town of Snotsborough.
‘Upon the fifth day of the second month, the Lord called on me once more to spread his word to Snotsborough. Lo! No sooner had I entered the steeple-house than the harlots of Snotsborough fell upon me and beat me exceedingly, and bruised my face with a Bible, and strangulated my neck with their foul underthings. Woe is me, Brother Friedrich, for I truly believe the devil has besmeared the people of Snotsborough with his filth . . .’
In response to which Friedrich would write: ‘Dear Charles! Thank you for your letter. I did not understand all of it. Apparently you got into a ‘scrap’! Visit us soon. Yours, Friedrich.’
It was at the Quaker school that Charlie’s creative energy found a purpose. He smuggled boiled sausages into the vegetarian dining hall; switched the Temperance Society’s jugs of apple juice for cider; scattered itching powder on the pews where the entire school gathered in the morning for silent worship.
Paul played the delighted, terrified assistant to his brother’s pranks, stealing sausages from their parents’ pantry and crates of cider from the back of the pub. At dinner he gripped his knife and fork with the panic of a boy sliding down a coal chute as he waited for the nightly battle to begin, for Charlie to launch the first attack disguised as an innocent remark.
‘Father, I do often wonder why we call it First Day Meeting instead of Sunday worship.’
‘Because we believe in plain speech and simplicity.’
‘Thank thee.’ Charlie thoughtfully twirled his fork. ‘But I reckon it would be even better if we simply said “Day”. For simplicity. Or perhaps we could do away with speaking altogether. Perhaps we ought to simply grunt?’
Mother rapped her plate with her knife. ‘Charlie!’
‘Mother!’
Father frowned liplessly. ‘Don’t speak to your mother in that tone.’
‘I called her mother. Isn’t she my mother? Fine. Next time, I shall grunt.’
He pretended to be the Elder of Snotsborough until he was sent up to his room. Climbing the stairs, he laughed and shouted: ‘Woe! Woe to the people of Lichfield!’
Through the cheap thin walls they could hear him singing bawdy Georgian ditties. Paul had found the lyrics in a shop on Charing Cross Road, in a tea-stained pamphlet titled ‘The Quaker’s Opera’.
Oh how thy Beauty warms!
Good now, resign thy Charms
Into the glowing Arms
Of a stiff Quaker.
Their mother tossed her fork aside and went upstairs.
‘Charlie!’
‘Mother!’
‘That song . . .’
‘It’s for school.’
And he ran past her, down the stairs, out the front door, down the dark street, singing at the top of his voice:
Oh how thy Beauty warms!
Good now, resign thy Charms . . .
They could hear Mr Boddington chuckle as Charlie passed his house. Paul’s mother stood in the glowing rectangle of the door and waited for her errant son to come home.
Paul waited with her for a while. Then he went to bed because it was Seventh Day, and in the morning they would have to get up early for Meeting.
2
By the 1930s, Paul no longer bayoneted potato sacks and understood why his parents disapproved of the game. He had learned to wish his fellow worshippers a pleasant Third Month, though when he bought a bag of apples from the corner shop, where the now rather bald Mr Boddington still sat wearing his short trousers, he would mutter that it was sodding cold for March. He was happy to admit, when asked directly, that his family were Quakers, yet he cringed when he stood by the cricket field in the Highgate Woods, as some elderly lady from Meeting rustled up to greet him in her grey skirts and bonnet, and one chap could be heard whispering to another: ‘I say, is that his mother?’
His people had once deliberately referred to themselves as peculiar, the Peculiar People, peculiar in the sense of chosen. As a boy, Paul had wished over and over again that they were less peculiar – in the sense of queer and ridiculous – and more like other people. But years later, when he sat in a trembling bathtub and listened out for the sound of raiders overhead, he would wonder whether certain decisions might have been easier for him had the Friends in fact been more peculiar. Certain choices might have been clearer had they still shut themselves off from the world and lived in a community of people who cut all their clothes from the same pattern and spoke in their own language; where a cup of tea was accepted with a smile and a ‘thank thee’, and worship was always on First Day. In such a community it would perhaps not have been possible to muddle right and wrong, because everything was plainly named.
‘You’re a hopeless old sentimentalist,’ Miriam Morningstar would then say, and trail her hand through the cold soapy water in the bathtub. ‘And whenever you talk about those grey dresses I always picture that lady . . . Mary . . . Mary Rye?’
‘Mary Pye. She was actually not all that particular about plain dress. It’s just that grey was her favourite colour.’ He caught her fingers underwater. ‘She once told me I reminded her of Moses.’
*
‘Slow of speech, and of a
slow tongue.’ Mary Pye smoothed her grey skirt. ‘Exodus chapter four. Moses said he was not eloquent, but slow of speech, yet the Lord chose him as his messenger. Thee might take comfort in that.’
‘Thank you.’
Mary Pye was an elderly aunt who had been hauled out of her cottage near Preston and brought south to live in the Lambs’ attic; for her own health, Paul’s parents said. Paul suspected it was because they needed the moral reinforcement.
‘There are Friends who run pubs,’ Charlie muttered on the way home after Silent Meeting. ‘There are Friends who give lectures on birth control. And then there’s us, forced into Bible study with Mary Pye. We’re troglodytes, Paul! It is nineteen thirty-seven and we are the last of the troglodytes!’
Not troglodytes, thought Paul. We’re frogs in the lake of darkness. Which was another of Mary Pye’s little sayings.
That afternoon they bunked off Bible study. Charlie hopped on his bike and said he was going somewhere important, Paul could follow him or stay with the troglodytes, it was up to him. Paul overtook him on the Heath. Charlie overtook him on the road down to Camden. Paul overtook him in Regent’s Park. When he looked over his shoulder, Charlie had disappeared. He came at him out of nowhere just before Harley Street and they crossed Hyde Park side by side, colliding dangerously, laughing at the thought of their parents’ frowning faces.
Charlie was seventeen then. Paul was sixteen. It was a warm July day in 1937, with just enough rain to keep the roses happy. Pale girls in trousers sat on park benches, bit their fingernails and smoked. German refugees in long coats clustered around a thin young man on Speakers’ Corner.
That was what Paul and Charlie could see on that day in Hyde Park, but there was so much they couldn’t even imagine.
In an office in Whitehall, a man in a sweat-soaked shirt drew three lines across a map of Europe, rubbed one of them out, then covered his face with both hands.
Of Love and Other Wars Page 1