Henrietta's War Read online

  Mrs Savernack sighed, but showed no fight. It was sad to see her so unlike herself.

  A little farther on we found some scribbling in chalk on the asphalt path, and paused to look at it, – a nice robust Union Jack with ‘hooray for good old England!!!’ in chunky letters underneath.

  That set us both up, and we had quite a jolly tea, but I had to stop Mrs Savernack smuggling a small piece of cherry cake home for Muriel, the Dachshund.

  Always your affectionate Childhood’s Friend,

  HENRIETTA

  February 12, 1941

  MY DEAR ROBERT

  We are going to keep five hens. This news will surprise you a good deal, knowing as you do Charles’s peculiar phobia about touching birds of any kind, and my deep affection for ducks.

  The desperate venture has been forced upon us by our newly acquired lodger, who used to be a fellow art-student of mine somewhere about the Regency period, and has come to live in our attics.

  She used to live in Birmingham, and when she wrote to say that she found the air-raid shelter lonely now her husband had joined the R.A.F., and shopping was difficult as there always seemed to be a time-bomb outside the grocer’s, Charles and I looked at each other and said, ‘The attics.’

  You see, we have felt for some time that we ought to offer our attics to the Bombed, but she is practically the only person we know who is small enough to stand upright in them without bumping the head. We wrote a tentative invitation, received an ecstatic telegram in reply, and shortly afterwards the lodger arrived with a vanful of furniture.

  And there she is, living a secret, mouse-like life, cooking on an electric griller, and creeping down between Matins’s exit and Evensong’s entrance to wash a few tiny dishes in our sink. She has the same passion for privacy as I have, and we bow gravely to each other when we meet on the stairs, and only visit each other after receiving written invitations.

  I must say I enjoy visiting the lodger. There is something very piquant about sitting comfortably and romantically in what used to be your box-room. The electric radiator (installed by lodger) gives out a fierce heat very much to my liking, and we talk of the old days when we used to go about dirty and untidy because we felt that otherwise we would never make our mark in the world of Art.

  The only flaw in this admirable arrangement is that the woman insists upon being grateful. Why? She has made our attics look lovely, and is prepared to cope with incendiary bombs, so surely it is we who should be grateful to her.

  Staggering down the garden path

  And that brings me to the hens, for it is the lodger who is going to keep them. She seemed to want to do something to help us and impede Hitler, so we gave her the Bad Bit at the bottom of the garden. The gardener was annoyed, of course, as gardeners always are, and said he was about to dig it up for potatoes, but as he has been saying that for years, we didn’t take any notice, and any morning now the lodger can be seen staggering down the garden path with a hoe several sizes too large for her, and a few days ago she came to us with a light in her eye and said, ‘Hens.’

  ‘I hate hens,’ said Charles hysterically. ‘I can’t bear touching them!’

  ‘You won’t have to touch them,’ said the lodger, with a steely look; ‘and you know you like an egg for your breakfast.’

  ‘Who’s going to shut them up at night?’ said Charles.

  ‘We’ll take it in turns,’ I said, being definitely in the hen camp and burning to give them our scraps.

  ‘And supposing you have one of your coughs?’ said Charles fretfully.

  ‘Then I shall shut them up every night,’ said the lodger.

  ‘Well, if you must, you must,’ said Charles, ‘but I intend to offer nothing but destructive criticism.’

  This is as far as we have got up till now:

  One roll of wire-netting,

  obtained with incredible difficulty.

  One old hen-house,

  obtained with less difficulty from Faith’s loft.

  Destructive criticism from Charles.

  Still more destructive criticism from the gardener,

  who is incensed because the lodger has succeeded in clearing quite a large patch of bindweed from the bottom of the garden.

  Advice from Matins,

  who says hens like their scraps hot.

  Advice from Evensong,

  who says they like them cold.

  One old-hen house

  Advice from Colonel Simpkins,

  who says we must get a government grant for their food, but fails to specify how.

  Advice from Lady B.

  ‘My dear, don’t. They darken your whole life.’

  Advice from Mrs Savernack.

  ‘Five? Good heavens! I keep fifty!’ (But she doesn’t look after them herself.)

  I keep on being sorry for the Evacuated Mothers all this winter with no excitement. More and more of them keep on arriving, and you hear nothing but cockney in the street nowadays.

  When Charles came in last night, hung his hat up in the hall, and said, ‘How be yu, my dear? Pretty peart, seemingly?’ it was like music in my ears.

  ‘Charles,’ I said, ‘what has happened to the Devonians?’

  ‘Cowering in their homes, probably,’ said Charles.

  ‘Nonsense,’ I said. ‘It takes more than a few hundred Londoners to make Devonians cower.’

  ‘Assimilated, perhaps,’ said Charles.

  ‘Speaking as one Devonian to another, now is that likely?’

  Charles thought for a moment. ‘Perhaps they persuade the evacuees to go out and do their shopping for them,’ he said.

  ‘Ah,’ I said. ‘Now you’re talking.’

  Always your affectionate Childhood’s Friend,

  HENRIETTA

  February 19, 1941

  MY DEAR ROBERT

  Lady B was perfectly right when she said that hens darken your whole life. They began darkening ours before they even arrived, and the first shadow which fell across our path was a nasty little buff Form. Now, there is something about a Form, no matter what colour, which renders me incapable of answering the simplest questions.

  ‘Charles,’ I said brightly at breakfast, ‘here’s a little Form to fill in about the hens.’

  ‘Those beastly hens!’ said Charles bitterly.

  ‘It’s quite a small Form, Charles.’

  ‘I’m a very busy man!’ said Charles, and cramming his hat on to his head he rushed from the house.

  I mounted the stairs to the attics and knocked politely on the lodger’s door.

  ‘They’ve sent a Form to fill in about food for Les Girls,’ I said.

  The lodger turned pale. ‘Oh, Henrietta!’ she said, ‘I can’t fill in Forms.’

  ‘Nor can I,’ I said sadly. ‘You know, there are times when I feel that our Art School training didn’t fit us for the Battle of Life.’

  In the end I took it to Mrs Savernack, who is always pleased by the exhibition of inefficiency in others, and therefore willing to help. ‘Good heavens, Henrietta!’ she said. ‘What a fuss you are making about your five miserable hens! It’s perfectly simple. Now . . . How many hens did you keep last year?’

  ‘None,’ I said, and Mrs Savernack gave me a Look and wrote down five.

  ‘Now, let me see,’ went on Mrs Savernack rapidly. ‘Four ounces per bird per day, that’s twenty ounces a day. Multiply by thirty for the month. Twenty times thirty?’

  ‘Er – ’ I said.

  ‘Six hundred,’ said Mrs Savernack. ‘Divide by sixteen to make it into pounds. Quick, Henrietta!’

  ‘Have you got a pencil?’ I said wildly.

  ‘Thirty-seven and eight over,’ said Mrs Savernack, writing it down. ‘Now you sign your name here. I suppose you can sign your name? That’s right. Now, all you’ve got to do is to post it.’

  ‘I’ll just run home and get a stamp and an envelope,’ I said, in what I hoped was a bustling and efficient manner.

  ‘Divide by sixteen—quick, Henrietta!�
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  ‘You don’t need a stamp or an envelope,’ said Mrs Savernack patiently. ‘You just fold it up and put it in the letter-box.’

  On my way home I met the lodger coming out of our gate. ‘The Form’s gone,’ I said.

  ‘Gone?’ said the lodger, looking at me with a good deal of respect. ‘Do you mean actually posted?’

  ‘I’ve just dropped it into the letter-box myself,’ I said. ‘I had a little help over filling it in.’

  That same afternoon Lady B came to tea. She brought her knitting.

  ‘How do you feel about the Invasion?’ I said to her.

  ‘Calm,’ said Lady B. ‘How do you?’

  ‘Calm too,’ I said, ‘and nobody could be more surprised, because as a rule I am terrified of practically everything.’

  ‘I think we are being Given Strength,’ said Lady B. ‘Like when people are going to have babies, and everybody goes about with white, drawn faces except the Expectant Mother, who is perfectly calm, because she knows everything is going to be all right. It is Nature’s Way.’

  ‘Great Britain as an expectant mother is quite a new one,’ I said.

  ‘And America is the Expectant Grandmother, worrying like mad because she is afraid it is all going to be too much for us,’ said Lady B.

  ‘And Mr Churchill is the Nurse, very calm and confident, and saying, “You’ll be worse before you’re better.” ’

  I wonder the cartoonists haven’t thought of it before now, don’t you, Robert?

  Always your affectionate Childhood’s Friend,

  HENRIETTA

  March 12, 1941

  MY DEAR ROBERT

  I think the British Housewife is having a confusing as well as a difficult time just now. Not very long ago we were urged to fill up our store-cupboards with enough food to last us for a fortnight in case of Invasion. ‘Up, Housewives, and at ’em!’ was the slogan of the day, and, burning with patriotic zeal, we all rushed to the grocer’s.

  Filling up a store-cupboard is, of course, the greatest fun, and Matins and I spent a happy morning stowing away tins of tongues and soups and milk and fruit and a popular beef stew with veg in a very, very secret place, which I won’t write down here in case this letter were to fall into Hitler’s hands.

  Charles raised his eyebrows rather at the weekly housekeeping cheque, until it was explained to him that it was all part of the Victory Campaign.

  The glow of our pride and self-satisfaction had hardly had time to die down when I read in the paper one morning that a Power at Whitehall had made a speech in which he had said that he had been shocked – yes, shocked – to find that the British Public was Hoarding Food. The rest of his speech rather gave one the impression that he would take pleasure in personally and publicly horse-whipping anybody who had so much as a tin of pineapple chunks stowed away under the stairs.

  Blushing hotly, Matins and I rushed to the secret hiding-place and unearthed our treasure. For the next fortnight Evensong and I fed Charles, who has a prejudice against eating tinned foods of any description, on mysterious and highly seasoned dishes.

  ‘Curry again, Henrietta?’

  ‘Well, yes, Charles. It’s warming this weather, don’t you think?’

  ‘What’s this made of ?’

  ‘Oh, just bits, you know.’

  ‘It looks a little like tongue to me,’ said Charles, peering closely at his plate and dissecting a small piece in an unpleasant surgical manner.

  ‘There might be one or two little bits of tongue in it, Charles.’

  Next week was Invasion Week, and on opening my morning paper I read that the Housewife also could play her part by Staying Put, and doling out, with forethought and economy, those stores which she had wisely collected while the Germans were still on the other side of the Channel.

  I gave a low groan and dropped the paper on the floor. ‘What’s the matter?’ said Charles.

  ‘I’m afraid the books will be rather high again this week, Charles.’

  ‘Never mind,’ said Charles kindly. ‘They’ve been very low for the last fortnight.’

  ‘I bet they have,’ I said to myself, but I didn’t say it aloud, as I am a firm believer in letting sleeping dogs lie.

  Isn’t it funny the way the initials ‘B.O.’ always stand for something rather awful? In the chemists’ advertisements before the war, of course, they stood for something so humiliating that it could only be alluded to by initials, and even then with shame. When Bill and the Linnet were small they used to mean ‘Buzz Off ’. Now they stand for Billeting Officer and Black-out, two of the biggest Bogeys of our lives.

  The other day, when I was having my hair done, I composed a 1941 Folk Song called ‘Black-outs Hey’, which began –

  Oh, come, my Love, come away, come away,

  And do the B.O. with Me-O.

  While I was under the drier I worked out a rather engaging little Folk Dance to go with it, in which the couples advanced, each holding two sticks with a piece of black cloth suspended between them, changed partners, set to corners, and, after a little Olde Worlde stamping and circling, advanced down the room in a long line, the black cloth held high above their heads like a long, dark ribbon.

  I was so pleased with my idea that I took it to Mrs Whinebite, who is the Folk Dance and Song queen down here; but I am sorry to say she didn’t think much of it.

  ‘If you don’t mind my saying so, Henrietta,’ she said, ‘I think it would look rather silly, and all that black stuff would quite spoil the brightness of the print frocks and sun-bonnets.’

  ‘They might wear tin hats and gas-masks.’

  ‘God forbid!’ said Mrs Whinebite, closing her eyes.

  ‘But Folk Dances are supposed to represent the spirit of the age, aren’t they?’ I said, for I was loth to abandon my idea without a struggle. ‘In a few hundred years the gas-mask will probably have evolved into something quite quaint, such as a wreath of wild flowers worn round the nose and chin, and tied to the head with ribands gay.’

  I thought it would please Mrs Whinebite to hear me say ‘ribands’ instead of ‘ribbons’, but by that time she wasn’t even listening.

  Something quit quaint

  Always your affectionate Childhood’s Friend,

  HENRIETTA

  April 9, 1941

  MY DEAR ROBERT

  Charles held a stirrup-pump practice on the lawn after lunch on Sunday.

  ‘Now, you, Henrietta, had better be on the hose, which is practically foolproof,’ he said kindly. ‘All you have to do is to crawl along with the dustbin-lid in one hand and the hose-pipe in the other, taking care to keep your head not more than three inches from the ground, and with your gas-mask ready to be put on at a moment’s notice.’

  ‘It sounds too easy,’ I said.

  ‘As a matter of fact, it’s perfectly simple,’ said Charles. ‘You use the spray on a bomb and the jet on burning wood-work. Just press this brass thing, and it changes from one to the other.’

  ‘How do I know which is the spray and which is the jet?’ I said.

  ‘Try both,’ said Charles patiently, ‘and then you can see for yourself.’

  ‘Oh, yes; of course.’

  ‘The lodger had better pump,’ said Charles, ‘ “for though she’s little, yet she’s fierce”.’

  ‘Like Hermia,’ said the lodger.

  ‘You’ve been educated,’ said Charles admiringly.

  ‘And what are you going to do, Charles?’ I said.

  ‘I shall probably be at the hospital, so it’s no good counting on me,’ said Charles. ‘You women have got to stop the place burning down somehow. Now then, Henrietta, down you go.’

  ‘It’s very damp,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t be a coward. Down you go.’

  ‘What shall I do?’ said Charles’s mother, who is staying with us just now, and had come out to see what was happening.

  Charles looked at her thoughtfully. ‘You’d better run to and fro with refill buckets of water,’ he said.


  ‘O.K.,’ said Grannie, and trotted off.

  ‘Perhaps you’d better bring half a bucket at a time,’ shouted Charles. ‘After all, she is eighty-four,’ he added to himself in an undertone.

  Suddenly my spirits soared up like a rocket. How could Hitler ever dream for one single moment that there was the slightest chance of defeating people like us?

  Last Wednesday I found Lady B in her greenhouse, repotting chrysanthemums. ‘I am enjoying myself so much,’ she said apologetically. ‘Of course, one oughtn’t to take one’s attention off the onions for one single minute, but I couldn’t bear to see these poor things suffering any more. Look at that!’ she said triumphantly, as she heaved one out of its pot and held it up for me to see.

  I found Lady B in her green house

  It was indeed a sorry sight. The roots had pressed on a hopeless quest for freedom all round the sides, and had even grown, in a pathetic cascade, out of a hole at the bottom of the flower-pot.

  ‘That’s just exactly how I feel,’ I said, deeply moved by the spectacle.

  Lady B looked at me for a moment, and then began putting fine mould into the large and spacious pot which was to be the chrysanthemum’s new home.

  ‘It is awful, never getting away,’ she said. ‘But, after all, it’s better to be bodily pot-bound than mentally pot-bound, like the Germans. Mentally and spiritually pot-bound,’ she said, enjoying the expression, and we went in to tea strangely comforted.

  Always your affectionate Childhood’s Friend,

  HENRIETTA

  April 23, 1941

  MY DEAR ROBERT

  Ever since last October I have been trying to make Charles buy a new overcoat. Every time I suggested a visit to our Cathedral Town Charles said he couldn’t spare the time, and what was the matter with his old one, anyway? It had cost enough, goodness knew, and he’d only had it six years.

  I said it was a nice coat, but rather shiny. Charles said he liked it shiny, and there the matter rested for a time. But last week, when Faith ran into Charles just as he was stepping into his car, and stopped and got out her lipstick and pretended to use him as a looking-glass, it began to dawn, even on him, that perhaps it really was time he got a new one.