“It’s so very difficult to believe it can happen again,” she said. Her eyes were huge in her haunted face. I hugged her. What could I say? By then, it was all so inevitable and so inexplicable at the same time.
We heard later that the air raid sirens went off in London just as Chamberlain was finishing his speech, sending people scurrying to the shelters. It must’ve seemed quite exciting that first time, although one person apparently died from a heart attack. The whole thing turned out to be a false alarm – a plane had been spotted over Maidstone in Kent but it was finally identified as French. We were all novices then. We would get better.
I signed up to the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force in late October when I realised the only way to get through the days was to fill the hours with mind-numbing duty so that missing Robert would feel like a luxury. When I told Charlotte, her lips tightened but all she said was: “You realise that this is not a game, don’t you Lina? You’ll be in the armed forces. You’ll have to obey orders. You’ll have to drill and… and make your bed properly and whatever else it is they do. Peel potatoes and shine shoes, I suspect.”
I pretended to be deeply offended but truth be told, I was worried and scared. I had enjoyed almost total freedom in Oxford and I was not at all sure I was military material. I feared I would not be strong enough, not fast enough, not obedient enough and my worries seemed to be confirmed by the secret knowledge that I chose the WAAF because I liked the uniform more than the others. I have always had a vain streak, my dear.
I tried to persuade Evelyn to come with me but she chose the Auxiliary Territorial Service instead.
“I’m not bloody peeling potatoes or pushing bits of paper around for the next however long,” she told me. “They say women can join the ack-ack batteries now. If the Germans are going to threaten my life, I want to be able to do something real to stop them. They’re saying London could be wiped out. Wiped out, Lina! Well, they’ll have to do it over my dead body.”
Her fighting words rang out like a phone in church in her girly bedroom with its rosebud-patterned bedspread, pink curtains and china dolls looking down at us from a shelf. Evelyn was always strong enough to bear her own contradictions. She seemed larger-than-life with her ginger hair, green eyes and loud laugh. She was a Daddy’s girl but fiercely independent in all other aspects. She was patriotic but had no time for government meddling in our lives. I wondered how she would cope with being in the army.
“You’ll go mad, Evelyn. You hate doing what you’re told,” I said.
“Talk about the kettle calling the pot black,” she giggled. “I can do what I’m told when I think it’s worth it. So can you. We’ll be fine, Lina. And maybe it’ll be fun. Look, I’ve checked it out. I just need to do the basic training, show some gumption in the exams and then push really hard to be assigned to the anti-aircraft mixed batteries. Of course, if I do badly in the exams, I could well end up cleaning latrines or cooking potatoes. But I won’t be the only one suffering then. If they think the Germans are bad, just wait until they taste my cooking,” she said, punching me playfully on the shoulder and laughing again with the full-throated chuckle that always made it seem like she was being in some way indecent.
I admired Evelyn’s gusto. We knew this war would be fought mainly in the air and it stood to reason that those opposing the planes, both in the skies and on the ground, would be in permanent danger.
“Why don’t you join with me?” she said.
“I can’t. I promised Robert that I would stay behind a desk if at all possible. He says him risking his life is enough of a gamble. We’ll be asking for too much luck if we deliberately put both of us in harm’s way. He thinks if I keep my head down, the gods of war might find it in their hearts to spare him. He’s a funny old thing.”
Evelyn smiled. “He’s right. There’s two of you and one sacrifice is enough.”
“Will you actually shoot at planes?” I asked.
“No, they won’t let women do that. Not yet anyway,” Evelyn said. “But who knows? If this damn thing goes on long enough, anything could happen. And you never know, maybe everyone else in the battery will get killed during an attack and I’ll be allowed to get my hands on the guns.”
I loved Evelyn like a sister and I was more upset than I cared to show that I would have to brave the WAAF on my own. But Evelyn would not be swayed, not even by my assertion that WAAFs were widely viewed as the classiest girls in the service.
“The ATS already has a rather fruity nickname,” I told her. She nearly fell off the bed when I told her it was “Any time, Sergeant.”
“That makes me even keener to join,” she spluttered.
We spent the next hour thinking up lewd expressions for WAAFs, burying our sorrow at parting in vulgarity and bravado. We were learning fast: the war hadn’t even properly started but we were already greasing and oiling our coping mechanisms. Over the next six years, vulgarity and gallows humour were among the few things that thrived in Britain.
A few weeks later, I travelled to London for a medical and after that I was sent to Cheshire for three weeks’ training. It was everything you would expect: tedious, bureaucratic and frustrating. The saving grace was the friendly banter. Although I hate to say it, we did all feel we were in it together. That’s a powerful sensation, as the government well knew. We slept in dorms, we drilled at dawn and we followed the rules, mostly. Afterwards, we were assigned our duties and on the basis of my university studies and, I suppose, early signs of my facility with words, I was sent to be a secretary at the Ministry of Information in London. It was a bizarre but useful start to my writing career. At the Ministry, I quickly learned that nothing could beat reality for sheer absurdity. This lesson has stood me in good stead.
I was lucky with my assignment; some WAAFs did became cooks and cleaners while others were assigned to the Accounts units, where their lives were governed by impenetrable and illogical form-fuckery, as I like to call it. We often forget the sheer, mind-numbing bureaucracy involved in killing so many people on a daily basis. We all know that the Germans kept meticulous, eventually damning records. It helpfully reinforces the common stereotype of Teutonic mania for order. But it was the same here. When I joined the WAAF, I got a glimpse into a sinisterly ludicrous system where the horror of state-sanctioned murder was distilled into tilting stacks of forms where everything, from staplers to engine parts, was given a number and a delivery code. The backroom banality of carnage was chilling. There were presumably similar forms with ridiculous code numbers for the dead, the dying, the brutalised and the irreparable. Today, I wonder what Robert’s code number would have been? Or was he what they called NIV, or not in vocab. In non-form parlance, did they have no clue how to describe what happened to him?
The Ministry was the high temple of wartime absurdity and obfuscation. It was created to control the news and to keep morale high but it went about this task in the most ham-fisted way imaginable.
It managed to annoy the newspapers, the public and its own government. Thank God for Churchill. I think his speeches were sometimes the only thing holding the country together. Today they sound absurdly pompous, bombastic, even messianic. All that vaulting rhetoric with Biblical resonances. Thinking back on it, I wonder how we accepted that strident, know-it-all tone, but the truth is we needed a leader to tell us what to do in a terrifying world where everything seemed to be upside down.
At first, my duties were fundamentally secretarial: mostly typing up pamphlets, advice sheets and press releases. I must have pleased someone because after a few months, they let me draft a few of those releases. I suppose those were my first real articles, although thankfully my name was nowhere to be seen. I was told what to write, what to leave out and how long the piece should be. No argument was brooked. I was not expected to have an opinion. There was no place for free thinking, for verifying, for questioning. Loose lips sink ships and all that jazz. But I was happy enough. I enjoyed writing and whenever I could I snuck colourful adjectives into th
e text. Sometimes, I was even tasked with dreaming up quotes from real soldiers and everyman families. I began to realise the true power of words, that you could build worlds that even you, their creator, could believe in. This was a delightful discovery.
In early 1940, I was assigned to the Publicity Producers group, ostensibly still as a secretary but even the dimmest secretary stereotype could have seen straight away that most of the men had no clue what they were doing. Things improved slightly after Churchill took over from Chamberlain in May and the office was reordered. I was then assigned to the Home Publicity Emergency Committee. Today we might call it Nanny Comms. Our job was to help Chicken Licken figure out what to do now that the sky was falling in. I edited and typed up pamphlets on what to do during an air raid, how to black out your home and how to fight back in the event of an invasion. We had advice on rationing and the need to keep mum so that nothing one said could help moustachioed Foxy Loxy and his dastardly schemes. I have to admit, I did have some fun playing my part in the “war of nerves”.
Here’s an example of the gems we came up with: Don’t Listen to Scaremongers. You will always find scaremongers about. Just treat them as you would a smallpox case – move on quickly.
Another of my personal favourites: Don’t Lose Your Head. There’s nothing to be gained by going about with the corners of your mouth turned down and it has a bad effect on people whose nerves are not so good as yours. So even if a bomb falls in your street – which is unlikely – keep smiling.
It is the “which is unlikely” that cracked me up then and still cracks me up now.
In fact, it was relatively easy to keep smiling through those early months. After years of fearful anticipation, the war started and everything seemed to stop. Not for men like Robert, who were already in France, but on the Home Front, the war was nothing more than an enforced period of restrictions and killjoy regulations. We called it the Bore War. All through that freezing January, when even the Thames was so bored it froze over and stopped moving, we plodded through our new duties, cold and hungry and hideously bored.
Evelyn wrote to me from near Hull, where she had been stationed early in the New Year.
Dear God, would it ever start already! Never have I been so cold and so stupid with boredom. Our Nissen huts were clearly designed for war in a desert, not in northern England. We heat bricks in the stove and put them in our beds but it barely puts a dent in the cold. I swear to you, Lina, I can’t feel my fingers right now. And that’s with gloves on, which explains the scrawl. Sorry. I hope you can decipher it. I’ll pluck my own eyes out if I have to spend any more time staring at pictures of all those bloody German planes – Messerschmitt, Junker, Dornier, Heinkel and Focke this, that and the other. I just wish the bloody Fockers would come already. We are so rigid with idleness now that we’ve started playing pranks on each other. Last week, I pulled Sandra’s bed into the yard and left it there. She was so mad when she came back from the parade ground. How I laughed but I’ll have to watch my back now. You’d never know what she might do. You’d like her. She’s phenomenally pretty, the boys turn into slack-jawed fish when she passes by, and she’s very naughty too. We’re in the same unit together and we work out the height and range of the incoming aircraft. Well, we would if they bothered to come. God, I wish it would start already. Write to me, Lina. Send me bright stories from London. I’ll take anything to add some cheer to these endless days.
So I sent her long letters full of funny stories from ‘the Ministry of Misinformation’. The ministry’s very creation was based on deception. I found out later that planning started in 1935, but of course it could not be admitted. To have done so would have been to acknowledge the inevitability of war and in 1935 I do believe some of us still gave peace a chance.
So, in answer to that old chestnut: ‘what did you do in the war, Mummy?’ I can say this: I fabricated, I lied, I misled. I imagine you are smiling, Diane. A fitting start to a life of deception, you’ll think. But remember dear, I was not yet lost. I still had ideals, I still had the man I loved, I still believed in an integral future that would extend the narrative arc of our lives. It pained me to collude in the lies being told to cover up the war, but I had signed up for this and I could see the merit of keeping morale up. And so, like a good soldier, I wrote despicably false press releases. For generals, I wrote speeches that depicted victory as a given, even as the bombs started to rain down on London and Hull and all the other cities. I even helped coin some of the more ridiculous slogans. You may have seen this one: Make do and mend says Mrs Sew-and-Sew. I had a hand in that. A colleague came up with this one: We beat ‘em before. We’ll do it again. I have to admit I felt a reluctant admiration for this statement’s blatant refusal to take war seriously. The same stiff-upper-lip-and-head-in-the-sand mentality could be found in the posters exhorting us to be more can-do, more thrifty, more stoic. It was as though war was just a particularly tough mountain climbing expedition that anyone with a bit of gumption and an ounce of common sense could get through.
I laugh at some of those slogans now but it used to madden me so much, I would have to excuse myself from the office to stand shaking in the alley outside, desperately dragging on a cigarette, willing myself to calm down so that I could go back and do my job. Do My Duty. But there was actually merit in the madness: the Ministry could hardly tell the truth, especially as the skies darkened and the prospect of losing the war became increasingly likely through 1940 and 1941. If we had called a spade a spade, the whole nation would have run screaming off the nearest white cliffs. Morale had to be boosted because in the end, it was such a powerful force. Intangible, insubstantial and more potent than anything else in the dark days of the Blitz and after Dunkirk. Our biggest mistake was thinking we didn’t need to boost morale when it was all over, when our men came back to a cold and hungry land.
CHAPTER 10
It is a glorious Sunday here in Lion-sur-Mer, Diane. I have taken my writing out into the garden and I am sitting recklessly in the full glare of the sun, listening to the muted shouts and cries from the beach. It will be throbbing later with parents and children and grandparents, wholesome families with their pain buried deep. I may go and sit at the gate and watch them. But I may not. Sometimes I can lose myself in the happiness of others. I am content to be an observer, to file little snippets of description or conversation away in my brain for use later on in my work. But sometimes, and increasingly, I feel like the little match girl, looking in through the frosted window at the beautiful people sitting down to their sumptuous holiday feast. Most people my age must feel a similar isolation but my pain is magnified by the fact that I had a family and I could not hold it together. I was inside and I walked deliberately out into the cold.
Sharpening my desire for solitude is the knowledge that I do not plan any more books and so whatever I see is for me alone. It feels odd to watch idly after so many years of deliberate, calculated observation. I feel useless, bereft of purpose. I also feel deliriously free.
I should address the issue of your name now. I imagine you are furious that I have been calling you Diane throughout this letter. But that is the name Robert and I gave you and that is who you will always be to me. Please allow me this indulgence and if you cannot do it for me, do it for your father. I don’t know when you chose to start using your middle name or why. You’ll have had your reasons and who could blame you. That day in Brighton, the last words you yelled at me as you stomped up the beach were: “My name is Maria. I am not your Diane. She doesn’t exist.”
You were so utterly gorgeous, your hair whipping around your head, your arms outstretched, your feet planted firmly on the pebbles, girl-queen of all you surveyed. I have never seen a woman more fully embody the spirit of Diana, goddess of the hunt and the moon. I would have called you Diana but Robert preferred Diane. When you were born, he said you looked too gentle for Diana, but that’s men for you: always underestimating us. I gave in to him because to be honest, I was so grateful he was showing
interest. He had gone so far away by the time you were born. You pulled him back, for a while. You should know that. Maybe, if I had been stronger, we could have saved him together.
So I will continue to call you Diane here because we do what we must do. I don’t dislike Maria – a name suggested by the nurse because we hadn’t thought of one – but it cannot fit my memories of you, as few as they are. It is precisely because of this scarcity that I will do nothing to threaten their survival. All the things I imagined happening to you over the years happened to Diane. No matter that they were never real, these fantasies. They are all I have. I hope you can understand.
You might be wondering where I got my own unusual name. It’s a sweet and sad story and one I reworked in The Land Beyond. I doubt you’ve read any of my books so let me tell you the original story here. Of course, you may not be curious at all right now but one day, you might wonder and I won’t be around to tell you.
When Charlotte was a child, there was an Italian man who sold ice creams from a stall on Saturdays in St Albans. He had a white-and-brown spaniel called Lina who would sit at the front of the stall, as quiet as a mouse, her clear blue eyes tracking people as they passed by.
I’ll let Charlotte tell you the rest, as she told me when I was about six years old. I had run home from school in floods of tears after a boy said my name was stupid and foreign. Charlotte pulled me onto her knees and brushed the damp hair from my cheeks.
“What a silly boy, Lina. Why don’t I tell you how you got your name and then you can decide if it’s stupid. Does that sound fair?”
The Reckoning Page 10