Bombs on Aunt Dainty (12 page)

Compared with the summer, the winter was almost cosy. For one thing, the air raids abated. There were several nights in December when the sirens did not sound at all, and when the Germans did come over bombs rarely fell on Putney. As a result you could sleep in your bed every night, and though some nights were noisier than others, the desperate tiredness that had been part of everyday life gradually receded.

The house in Putney was friendlier than the Hotel Continental and it seemed a great luxury to have a garden.

“In the summer we’ll get some deck-chairs,” said Frau Gruber, but even in the winter the Woodpigeon and the other Poles, Czechs and Germans walked admiringly among the dead leaves and on the overgrown lawn.

The only thing Anna did not like was that she had to share a room with Mama. There were almost no single rooms in the house, and she could see that Papa, who was home all day, needed a place of his own to write in – but she still hated never being alone. However, there was nothing to be done about it, so she tried not to think about it more than she could help.

Most of the time her mind was on her job. It was not difficult, but she was nervous about it to begin with. Her first day had been an agony – not only because she was afraid of making some disastrous mistake, but because she had discovered two days before that she had caught lice in the tube. This was not uncommon – there was an epidemic of lice among the shelterers and it was only too easy to pick them up. But just before starting a new job!

Mama had rushed to get her some evil-smelling brown liquid from the chemist and she had spent the weekend trying to wash the lice out of her hair in the bombed hotel. At the end her hair had seemed to be clear, but just the same she had been haunted, the whole of her first day as a secretary, by the possibility that one louse – just one – might have escaped, and that it would emerge from her hair and walk across her ear or her neck just as the Hon. Mrs Hammond was looking at her. She was so worried about this that she kept rushing to the lavatory to examine her hair in the mirror, until one of the old ladies on the sewing machines asked her quite kindly if she had a tummy upset. Fortunately the Hon. Mrs Hammond put down her nervousness to the fact that she had so recently been bombed, and once Anna was convinced that all the lice had really been exterminated she was able to concentrate on the job and do it quite well.

There was not really much to it. First thing in the morning she would go through the post, unpack whatever woollies had arrived and send off more wool to the knitters.
Then she would put out the half-made pyjamas and bandages for the old ladies who came in about ten, and the sewing machines would begin to hum.

She had to be careful about allocating the work, for the old ladies were quick to take offence. Different ones came on different days, but the most regular were Miss Clinton-Brown who was tall and religious, little Miss Potter who talked only about her budgie, and Mrs Riley who said she was a retired actress but had really been in music hall and who wore a frightful fringed shawl and smelled, causing the more genteel ladies to avert their noses.

They were always trying to persuade Mrs Hammond to get rid of her, but she was too good a worker.

“Bit niffy, I agree,” said Mrs Hammond, “but chaps in hospital won’t mind that. Pyjamas get washed before they wear them, anyway.”

Mrs Hammond’s arrival about eleven was the high point of the morning. As soon as they heard her taxi draw up, the old ladies began to twitter and to preen themselves, and as she walked into the sewing room their heads would be bent over their work and the machines would be racing along at twice their normal speed.

“Morning, ladies!” she would cry, and this was Anna’s cue to pour the boiling water on the Bovril and hand it round. Mrs Hammond’s mug went in her office, but to the ladies’ delight she often carried it back into the sewing room and chatted with them while she drank it. She lived at Claridge’s Hotel during the week – at weekends she went
back to her estate in the country – and met all sorts of famous people and her careless mention of their names turned the old ladies quite dizzy with excitement.

“Met Queen Wilhelmina last night,” she would say. “Poor old thing – quite dotty.” Or, “Heard Mr Churchill speak at a dinner – marvellous man, but no taller than I am, you know,” and the ladies would repeat the information to each other, rolling it round their tongues and enjoying the dottiness of the Dutch queen and the small stature of Mr Churchill for the rest of the week.

After the Bovril she would call Anna into her office and dictate letters to her until lunch time, and Anna would spend the afternoon typing them. The letters were mostly to high-ranking officers in the Forces, all of whom Mrs Hammond appeared to have known since childhood, and who wanted her to send them woollies for the men in their command. She nearly always managed to give them what they wanted.

Once or twice there was a note to her son Dickie who was in the Air Force, trying to become a navigator and finding it very difficult.

“Poor fellow’s got enough to do working out sums without deciphering my scrawl,” she would say, and dictate a brief, affectionate message of encouragement, to be accompanied by a small gift like a pair of Air Force blue socks or gloves.

Once he came to the office and Mrs Hammond introduced him to Anna – a stocky, open-faced boy of
about nineteen, with a stammer. He was taking an exam the next day and was worried about it.

“You’ll pass all right,” cried Mrs Hammond. “You always do, in the end!” and he grinned at her ruefully. “T-trouble is,” he said, “I have t-to work t-twice as hard as everyone else.”

Mrs Hammond slapped his back affectionately. “Poor old chap!” she shouted. “No head for scholarship – but jolly good with animals, I can tell you. No one better than Dickie,” she explained to Anna, “with a sick cow!”

At the end of every week Anna collected her wages and paid Frau Gruber two pounds five shillings for her room. Fifteen shillings went on fares, lunches and necessities like toothpaste and shoe repairs, five shillings to Madame Laroche to pay for the shorthand machine which had not been included in the tuition fees, and the remaining five shillings she saved. By May, she calculated, she would have paid Madame Laroche back and she would be able to save ten shillings a week. It seemed to her a wonderfully lavish income.

Mrs Hammond was kind to her in an amused sort of way. Sometimes she asked Anna if she was all right, if she liked the new boarding-house in Putney, if Papa had any work. But she insisted on keeping her German background a secret, especially from the old ladies.

“Old biddies wouldn’t understand,” she said. “Probably suspect you of sabotaging the Balaclava helmets.”

Once, when Max was in London during the Easter holidays she took them both to a film.

Afterwards he said, “I like your Mrs Hammond. But don’t you ever get bored?”

He had had to wait for Anna at the office and had watched her typing letters and parcelling up wool.

She looked at him without comprehension. “No,” she said. She was wearing a new green sweater, bought with her own money. She had nearly paid back the money for the shorthand machine, and that morning Mrs Hammond had introduced her to a visiting Colonel as “my young assistant – practically runs this place single-handed.” What could be boring about that?

As the weather grew warmer the fear of invasion also grew again – until one day in June, soon after Anna’s seventeenth birthday, when there was an announcement on the radio which staggered everyone. The Germans had attacked Russia.

“But I thought the Russians and the Germans were allies!” cried Anna.

Papa raised one eyebrow. “So did the Russians,” he said.

It was clear that if the Germans had opened up a new Russian front they could not at the same time invade England, and there was great rejoicing in the office. The Bovril session was extended to nearly an hour while Mrs Hammond quoted a general who had told her that the Germans could not last a month against Stalin. Miss Clinton-Brown thanked God; Miss Potter said she had taught her budgie to say, “Down with Stalin,” and was
worried whether this might now be misunderstood; and Mrs Riley rose suddenly from her chair, grabbed a pole used for putting up the blackout and demonstrated how she had posed as Britannia at the Old Bedford Music Hall in 1918.

After this Anna and Mrs Hammond retired to her office, but they had scarcely got through half a dozen letters when they were again interrupted. This time it was Dickie, on unexpected leave, wearing a brand-new officer’s uniform.

“P-passed all my exams, Ma,” he said. “Second from the b-bottom, but I p-passed. F-fully f-fledged navigating Officer Hammond!”

At this Mrs Hammond was so delighted that she gave up all thoughts of further work and invited Anna to join them for lunch.

“We’ll go home,” she said, which meant Claridge’s.

Anna had only been there once before, to deliver some letters which Mrs Hammond had forgotten at the office, and then she had only got as far as the hall porter. Now she was swept along in Mrs Hammond’s wake, across the heavily carpeted foyer, through the swing doors and into the pillared dining room, where they were met by the head waiter (“Good morning, Mrs Hammond, good morning, Mr Richard”) and escorted to their table. All round them were people in uniform, mostly very grand ones, talking, eating and drinking, and the hum of their conversation filled the room.

“Drinkies!” cried Mrs Hammond, and a glass of what Anna decided must be gin appeared in front of her. She did
not like it much, but she drank it, and then the waiter brought the food and as she worked her way through a large piece of chicken she began to feel very happy. There was no need for her to say anything, for Mrs Hammond and Dickie were talking about the estate and about a dog of Dickie’s in particular (“Are you sure,” he was asking, “that W-Wilson has w-wormed him?”), so she looked around the room and was the first to notice a thin man in Air Force uniform bearing down on them. There was a great deal of gold braid about him and as soon as Dickie saw him he leapt from his chair and saluted. The man nodded and smiled briefly, but his attention was on Mrs Hammond.

“Boots!” he cried, and she answered delightedly, “Jack! How lovely! Come and sit down!”

She introduced him to Dickie and Anna as an Air Chief Marshal of whom even Anna had heard, and ordered another round of gin, and then the Air Chief Marshal ordered a third, to celebrate the news about Russia.

“Best thing that’s happened in the war,” he said, “since we beat the bastards off last September,” and plunged into a long conversation with Mrs Hammond about the effects of this new development.

Anna’s feeling of happiness had increased with each gin, until now it was like a vast smile in which she was entirely enveloped, but Dickie was looking at her and she felt she ought to say something.

“I’m so sorry your dog isn’t well,” she brought out at last, a little indistinctly, and immediately found a wave of
pity sweep over her for the poor animal which perhaps hadn’t been wormed when it needed to be.

Dickie looked at her gratefully. “B-bit of a worry,” he admitted, and started to tell her about the dog’s lack of appetite, the state of its coat (why does it have a coat? thought Anna, until she remembered that he must mean its fur), and his lack of confidence in Wilson’s judgement. Then there were the horses, too, and the cows. It was difficult, nowadays, to find chaps who looked after them properly. He sat there in his new officer’s tunic, fretting about it all, and Anna listened and nodded and thought how nice he was and how nice to have lunch at Claridge’s with an Air Chief Marshal, and how nice that the Germans had attacked the Russians and would not now be invading England.

And when the Air Chief Marshal, on leaving, congratulated Dickie on his attractive girlfriend, that was nice too, and rather funny, but an even funnier thing happened after he had gone.

“Ma,” said Dickie reproachfully, “That m-man is in charge of a third of the Air F-force. Why does he call you Boots?” And Mrs Hammond answered in an astonished voice, “Always has done. Ever since we went to dancing classes together when we were five and I used to trample all over his feet.”

At this Anna laughed so much that she found it difficult to stop and Mrs Hammond said, “Good God – we’ve made the poor child tight!”

She gave her some black coffee and then she drove her to Bond Street tube station, where she told her to take the afternoon off.

“My apologies to your Mama,” she said. “But what with the Russian front and Dickie getting his commission …”

The rest of the sentence seemed somehow to have escaped her, and Anna suddenly noticed that Mrs Hammond’s speech, too, was less precise than usual.

“Anyway,” cried Mrs Hammond, retreating a little unsteadily into the car, “It was a damned good party!”

Anna still thought the story about the Air Chief Marshal quite funny even after the effects of the gin had worn off, and she told Max about it the next time she saw him. By this time it was July and Max was in deep gloom. The summer term was nearly over and he did not want to embark on a second year’s teaching, but all his enquiries about getting into the Forces had brought only discouraging replies.

The Army and the Navy had firm rules forbidding the acceptance of foreign nationals. The Air Force, being a younger Service, had no such rule but didn’t accept them anyway. Max had more or less given up hope, but when he heard the Air Chief Marshal’s name he pricked up his ears.

“If I could talk to him –” he said. “Do you think Mrs Hammond would give me an introduction?”

“Well, I could ask her,” said Anna doubtfully, but in fact
Mrs Hammond did much more.

On the following Monday, after Anna had explained the situation to her, she rang the Air Chief Marshal in her presence, cutting through secretaries, adjutants and personal assistants as a ship cuts through the waves.

“Jack,” she said. “Got a rather special young man I want you to meet. Can you have lunch?” Then, in answer to a question from the other end of the telephone, “I should think very bright indeed.” This was followed by some chat about the war, a reference to Dickie who had just been posted to his first operational squadron, and a joke about the dancing class, until the conversation ended with a laugh and an inexplicable shout of “Tally-ho!”