Henrietta's War Read online

‘Good morning, Henrietta. Have you got your gas-mask?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Have you got your identity card?’

  ‘No.’

  In his Special Constable’s uniform, Colonel Simpkins looked at me and sighed.

  ‘Colonel Simpkins,’ I said, ‘what exactly are the soldiers doing?’

  ‘Now, there’s no need for you to worry about that sort of thing,’ he said soothingly, patting me on the shoulder. Then, his field-glasses trained on the horizon, he went on his way.

  Presently Lady B and Mrs Savernack came by and sat themselves down, one on each side of me.

  ‘What’s the matter, Henrietta?’ said Mrs Savernack. ‘You look like a sick monkey.’

  ‘I think,’ I said, ‘that the “there-there-little-woman” attitude adopted by the Special Constables does little to inspire confidence.’

  ‘Damned old fools!’ said Mrs Savernack. ‘I suppose they think we’re afraid.’

  ‘But I am afraid,’ I said.

  Lady B and Mrs Savernack turned blank faces towards me. ‘Henrietta!’ they said in shocked tones.

  ‘Yes, I am,’ I said stubbornly. ‘I wasn’t afraid yesterday, and I hope I shan’t be afraid to-morrow, but to-day I am paralysed with fear.’

  ‘What you want is a drink,’ said Lady B.

  ‘Aren’t you ever frightened?’ I said, looking at their round, placid faces with astonishment.

  ‘Well, yes, of course I’m frightened,’ said Lady B. ‘Nobody wants to be blown sky-high; but not paralysed with fear, I am glad to say.’

  ‘If they hadn’t taken away my guns, I should be perfectly happy,’ said Mrs Savernack angrily. ‘From my bedroom window I could have picked them off as they came up the beach as easy as winking. It makes me sick, it really makes me sick!’

  ‘I was thinking to-day,’ said Lady B dreamily, ‘that if all we useless old women lined up on the beach, each of us with a large stone in her hand, we might do a lot of damage.’

  ‘The only time I saw you try to throw a stone, Julia, it went over your shoulder behind you,’ said Mrs Savernack. ‘Then I would have to stand with my back towards the Germans,’ said Lady B comfortably.

  Mrs Savernack got up. ‘Well, I must go,’ she said with a sigh. ‘I’m due at the Bee. But it’s dull work just turning the handle of a sewing-machine when you’d like to be at a machine-gun.’

  ‘What about that drink, Henrietta?’ said Lady B kindly; but I shook my head.

  ‘You’re too thin,’ said Mrs Savernack, not for the first time. ‘If you had some padding, your nerves would be better.’

  I watched them walk away, and reflected that Charles was probably right when he said that it was the old women of Britain who will break Hitler’s heart in the end.

  The old women of Britain who will break Hitler’s heart in the end

  Always your affectionate Childhood’s Friend,

  HENRIETTA

  July 24, 1940

  MY DEAR ROBERT

  Our Summer Visitors are with us once more. We are resigned to them coming down every year and cluttering up the place, putting up the prices in the shops, parking their cars in front of our garden-gates, keeping us awake at nights with moonlight picnics on the beach, and wearing trousers when nature designed them for skirts.

  We have even schooled ourselves to withstand, without flinching, the patronising attitude they adopt towards us – poor, simple yokels that we are.

  Charles and I, every summer, even go so far as to play a game called ‘Insults’. It is a simple pastime which amuses us and does the Visitors no harm. Every time we are insulted by a Visitor, separately insulted, I mean, we score a point. Charles always wins; partly because he meets so many more people than I do, and partly because his profession exposes him to insults of the juiciest variety.

  They are continually saying to him: ‘Can you give injections?’; or ‘Have you ever heard of a drug called “M and B”?’ and things like that. But somebody did once say to me, after I had recounted a modest anecdote, ‘And how did you come to be having lunch in the Savoy Grill?’

  It sometimes seems we can do nothing right.

  If we are cheerful, they say: ‘Of course, you people down here simply don’t realize there is a war on.’ If we show anxiety, they are moved to laughter, and say that to hear us talk anybody would think this was the one spot Hitler had his eye on. But last week, when the soldiery arrived and began their activities, a good many of them packed their boxes and went away again.

  Not all, because some of them have taken furnished houses for the duration, and the relentless march of time is already beginning to change them from Visitors into Residents. Only yesterday I heard one of them say angrily: ‘Really! All these strangers make shopping impossible!’

  The soldiery continues its activities, and pill-boxes spring up all around us like mushrooms. Writing one’s name, and a little Hitler abuse, in the concrete before it is dry has provided many of us with a lot of quiet fun, and Perry shows just what he thinks of the Nazi régime every time he passes them.

  Lady B’s house is now completely surrounded by impedimenta. I met her yesterday struggling up the hill with her shopping basket. ‘Look!’ she cried, waving her hand towards a mass of barbed wire and concrete. ‘I never thought I’d be in the front line. I’m so proud!’

  ‘Look!’ she cried

  I have been pasting strips of linen on the windows, an absorbing occupation, and one that I recommend to anybody who feels an attack of the jitters coming on.

  First you make some paste according to B.B.C. instructions. That in itself induces a feeling of smug satisfaction, and tearing up material and pasting it crossways on the panes of glass completes the good work.

  After putting pale-blue on the bathroom window, I was so flushed with success I started hunting all over the house for pieces of material which would tone in with the colour schemes. Yellow in the kitchen, green in my bedroom, pink in the Linnet’s, it was all too fascinating, and the results exceeded my wildest dreams.

  Faith, who dropped in during the afternoon and had already done her own windows expensively with adhesive-tape, stood transfixed.

  ‘I really can’t compete with that, my dear Henrietta,’ she said enviously.

  (But she did, because she went home and did the whole house with lingerie silk in pastel colours, each strip coming from a half-circle in the corner, like the rays of a setting sun. People go miles to see it.)

  It was the duck’s-egg-blue for the dining room which stumped me finally. I searched the house for something suitable, and it was a long time before I found it.

  Charles, sitting down to dinner that evening, looked towards the windows and suddenly stiffened with dismay.

  ‘Oh, Henrietta!’ he said reproachfully. ‘My nicest pyjamas!’

  Always your affectionate Childhood’s Friend,

  HENRIETTA

  July 31, 1940

  MY DEAR ROBERT

  We were all thankful when Faith gave up her job in London and came back here to be an A.R.P. warden. Partly because we felt that running out into the streets and collecting stray animals during an air raid was not suitable work for her, and partly because the Conductor, whose passion seems to continue in one long crescendo, made our lives a burden during her absence with his yearnings and lamentations.

  Even Lady B and I, who are devoted to him, took to hiding behind the counters in shops when we saw him coming and putting large ‘NOT AT HOME’ notices on our doors whenever we were alone in our houses. Not that they kept him away, for he used to stand outside, looking wistfully in at the windows until, for very shame, we invited him in.

  I knitted nearly a whole Balaclava helmet while he opened his heart to me, and Lady B said his voice was so soothing she found it almost impossible to keep her eyes open and slept solidly through most of his visits.

  Slept solidly through most of his visits

  One evening, when Charles had been called out to a case, I felt so sure of an
impending Conductor, and so unable to cope with him, that I crept quietly up to bed at nine o’clock. I had hardly settled myself comfortably with my book when there was a timid knock, and the Conductor’s face, with a distraught expression on it, peered round the door.

  ‘You don’t mind if I come in, do you, Henrietta?’ he said hoarsely, and without waiting for an answer he seated himself at the foot of my bed and began –

  ‘I don’t bore you, do I?’ he said about half an hour later, and I opened my eyes with a start. Lady B had been quite right about the soothing quality of his voice.

  What a good plan it would be, I thought sleepily, if the Conductor could be employed as a conducer of sleep. Charles, I knew, had many patients who lay awake worrying about the war, and the Conductor was continually complaining that Faith didn’t love him, because his weak chest prevented him from doing useful war work. Well then – well then –

  The next thing I remembered was the Conductor’s voice, still tolling like a beautiful bell, and Charles in his pyjamas standing at the door of his dressing-room.

  ‘Hullo,’ he said mildly, ‘what’s going on here?’

  ‘It’s Faith,’ I said sleepily. ‘She doesn’t love him.’

  ‘Tell me about it,’ said Charles kindly, but unwisely, as he clambered into bed.

  ‘You see, it’s like this, Charles,’ said the Conductor, getting off the end of my bed and transferring himself to the end of Charles’s and beginning all over again.

  In the morning, when we woke, he had gone . . .

  Always your affectionate Childhood’s Friend,

  HENRIETTA

  August 7, 1940

  MY DEAR ROBERT

  Ever since the soldiery arrived in this town a patriotic fervour has been sweeping it like a prairie fire, and everybody is getting an immense amount of fun out of it.

  The Admiral appealed through a loud-speaker in the street on Saturday night for people to go and dig trenches, and there was a fine response on Sunday afternoon, and a still finer crowd to watch the fun.

  The Big Moment was when Mrs Savernack arrived, in shorts, and leaping into the trench began to wield her pick with such fury that the people on either side of her moved quietly away. It warmed our hearts to see her, for she has been sadly out of sorts ever since they took away her guns and refused her for the L.D.V.

  But it was the aluminium appeal which finally restored her to her old form. As soon as she heard it she rushed and borrowed a hand-cart from the Boy Scouts, and never, except possibly during the days of the Great Plague and its grisly cry of ‘Bring out your dead!’ have people dreaded a house-to-house collection more.

  ‘Rat-a-tat-tat!’ goes the door-knocker, worked with gusto by Mrs Savernack’s strong right arm. ‘Rat-a-tat-tat!’ And the housewife, after peering through the curtains, runs with a smothered cry to hide her new three-decker steamer under the bed in the spare room.

  ‘Is anybody at home?’ shouts Mrs Savernack, opening the back door, and unless she gets an immediate answer she walks in and finds her way to the kitchen.

  ‘You don’t want this,’ she says firmly, taking a saucepan out of the cupboard.

  ‘I do! I do!’ cries the housewife, wringing her hands. ‘It’s what I make the coffee in!’

  ‘You should make it in a jug,’ says Mrs Savernack, and retires with her prey.

  ‘Rat-a-tat-tat!’

  Everybody has given willingly and generously, but that is not enough for Mrs Savernack, who holds the opinion that any woman with an aluminium utensil in her house is a Fifth Columnist. After a few days her collection became so enormous she had to hire an empty shed to house her spoils, and fixed on me to guard them during her absence.

  I agreed, for it is better to give in to Mrs Savernack at once, and now I spend most of the day sitting in the Aluminium Depôt worrying about the things I ought to be doing in my own home.

  Did I tell you, Robert, that I am beginning to know the difference between the noise our aeroplanes make and that of the enemy?

  Always your affectionate Childhood’s Friend,

  HENRIETTA

  August 14, 1940

  MY DEAR ROBERT

  Do you remember Barton’s Bell? It is the old ship’s bell which used to ring at regular intervals during the day for the workmen to knock on and knock off their work.

  Its sonorous and mellow tones were very dear to us all, and when they stopped ringing it at the beginning of the war our lives immediately became horribly disorganized. Nobody ever knows quite what the time is now, and a lot of people, who had managed quite comfortably up till then, have been forced to buy watches.

  Charles says the general public nowadays is far too ready to use expressions such as ‘sub-conscious’, ‘inferiority complex’, and ‘escape neurosis’ without understanding their meaning, but the only way I can think of to describe what happened when Barton’s Bell began ringing the other afternoon is to say that it took several minutes for the sound to penetrate from our sub-conscious to our conscious minds.

  I was doing a little ironing at the time, and looked at my watch to see if it was right for six o’clock, and found it was half-past four. Then it suddenly dawned on me that I hadn’t heard the Bell for about nine months.

  ‘Parachutes!’ I cried, and rushed out on to the roof expecting to see the sky full of white mushrooms with gentlemen in pale-blue overalls dangling from them. It was empty.

  Then for one ecstatic moment I thought the war was over, for Barton’s Bell was rung hilariously in November 1918. But on second thoughts I decided that this was just wishful thinking, and that reminded me of Charles, for wishful thinking is another of the expressions which irritate him on the lips of the ignorant. So I rang him up at his surgery and asked why Barton’s Bell was ringing.

  ‘I don’t know, I’m sure,’ said Charles rather crossly, and rang off.

  Determined not to miss any excitement which might be going, I hurried down to the end of the garden and looked over the wall just in time to see the Fire Brigade go by. After it came a crowd of people. Everybody who had a uniform, an armlet, or a badge seemed to have put it on, and was surging along the road with a do-or-die expression on his or her face.

  The Home Guard was there, carrying rifles and looking happy; V.A.D.s, A.R.P.s, W.V.S.s6, A.F.S.s7, and a sprinkling of Girl Guides, Boy Scouts, and St John Ambulance Workers. The Transport Drivers were grinding along one behind the other in bottom gear.

  ‘What’s happening?’ I shouted over the wall.

  ‘We don’t know!’ they shouted back.

  ‘Is it an Invasion, Admiral Marsdon?’ I said, for I felt he would know if anybody did; but he only looked mysterious and put his finger to his lips.

  Faith, lovely in her siren suit, was walking hand-in-hand with the Conductor. They looked too happy to be much use to anyone. I couldn’t see Lady B anywhere, but Mrs Savernack, wearing Mr Savernack’s 1915 tin-hat, was marching with the Home Guard. She had got hold of some sort of blunderbuss and was carrying herself proudly. The Home Guard looked a little uncomfortable, but none of them liked to tell her to go away.

  The Home Guard looked a little uncomfortable

  I watched this cavalcade out of sight, and was reflecting wistfully that I seemed to be the only person without a badge or a uniform, when Lady B came trotting round the corner, looking unusual in V.A.D. uniform and her head tied up in a towel.

  ‘I was having a perm,’ she panted, ‘when the bell started, and Madame Yvonne said, “I’m afraid that is the signal for Invasion, Madam, but don’t be frightened.” “I’m not frightened,” I said, “but get me out of this or I shall miss all the fun. ” ’

  The last person to arrive was Colonel Simpkins, in a state of exhaustion. He had been caught inspecting the defences on the beach, the wrong side of the barbed wire, and had to run a mile along the pebbles before he could get back to the parade.

  In the end it turned out to be the railway embankment on fire, and the Fire Brigade, with speed and ef
ficiency, dammed the brook and put it out. The owners of the house near by, who, fearing for their thatched roof, had not unnaturally rung up for the Fire Brigade, looked a little dazed when they saw about two hundred people and seven motor-cars pressed into the lane outside their house.

  ‘It was the sparks we were afraid of,’ they said apologetically to the silent crowd at the gate.

  Perhaps next time it will be the real thing . . .

  Always your affectionate Childhood’s Friend,

  HENRIETTA

  August 21, 1940

  MY DEAR ROBERT

  There has been a sad falling-off in garden sherry-parties this year. We usually have a great many, because M practically everybody here is garden-proud, and when summer comes it is their delight to give parties, in the touching belief that other people who are garden-proud too will enjoy drinking sherry and wandering up and down the paths saying ‘Beautiful! Beautiful!’

  Well, they probably do enjoy the sherry, but to say that they enjoy the beauties of another person’s garden is just silly, because nothing fills the Garden-Proud-Person with such insane hatred and rage as witnessing results which he has been unable to achieve himself.

  Colonel and Mrs Simpkins, who are as garden-proud as anybody, generally give two garden sherry-parties: one in June to admire the roses, and one in July to admire the antirrhinums. Of course, there are other flowers in their garden, but the roses and the antirrhinums are the plats du jour, so to speak.

  One year, flushed with success, they gave two more: one in September to admire the dahlias, and one in October to admire the chrysanthemums. But there was a good deal of ill-feeling about it in the place, and, anyhow, it was cold and wet on both occasions and Mrs Simpkins caught two chills.

  This year they gave the antirrhinum one only. A lot of people said they had no right to do such a thing in wartime, but Mrs Simpkins made it all right with her own conscience by having a collecting box for the Red Cross to catch the departing guests at the gate.