Bombs on Aunt Dainty (15 page)

One night she was packing up her things at the end of the class. She had worked with a kind of despair all evening
and had managed at last to produce a drawing that bore some faint resemblance to what she had in mind. In the struggle, a lot of pencil had got on her hands and somehow from her hands on to her face.

Welsh William looked at her with interest.

“Did you get any of it on the paper?” he asked.

“Certainly,” she said, and showed him.

He was quite impressed. “Very forceful,” he said. “We may make something of you yet. Why don’t you wash your face and come and have a coffee?”

She scrubbed her face at the sink and they walked a few doors down the road to a café. As they opened the door there were welcoming cries from inside. She blinked in the sudden light and saw Mr Cotmore and his regular crowd of students looking back at her. They were sitting at two tables pushed together, with coffee cups in front of them, and occupied most of the narrow room.

“It’s the little girl who gets pencil all over herself,” cried one of them, a small man of about Mr Cotmore’s age.

“But to good purpose,” said Mr Cotmore before she had time to blush. “It’s Anna, isn’t it?”

She nodded, and they made room for her and Welsh William at the tables. Some coffee appeared before her and, half-excited and half-apprehensive, she buried herself in the cup, so that no one else should ask her any questions. Gradually the conversation resumed around her.

“You’re wrong about Cézanne, John,” said the small man and John Cotmore rounded on him with “Nonsense,
Harry, you’re just trying to start something!”

Two girls at the other side of the table laughed, but Harry had evidently been trying to do just that, for soon everyone was disagreeing about the French Impressionists, the Italian Primitives, Giotto, Matisse, Mark Gertler, Samuel Palmer – who on earth were they all? thought Anna, listening in silence for fear of revealing her ignorance. On one side of her Harry was waving his arms in argument, on the other Welsh William was absently drawing something on the edge of a newspaper. A pale man with a pale tie whispered intensely about form and content, one of the girls ordered a portion of chips and passed them round, everyone drank more coffee, and John Cotmore with his warm deep voice somehow kept the whole thing going. He spoke only little, but whenever he did everyone else stopped to listen.

Once he addressed her directly. “What do
you
think?” he asked. They had been talking about styles in drawing, some students extolling the sensitive line of someone Anna had never heard of and others defending another painter with a more chunky approach.

She stared at him, horrified.

“I don’t know,” she stammered. “I just want to draw it the way it looks. But I find it very difficult.”

What a stupid answer, she thought, but he said seriously, “That’s not a bad start,” and she noticed that the others looked at her with new respect.

Later, when everyone else was talking, she plucked up
courage to ask him something that had worried her for weeks.

“If someone was going to be any good at drawing,” she said, “surely they wouldn’t find it so difficult?”

“I don’t think that follows,” he said. “It might just mean that they had high standards. In your case,” he added, smiling a little, “I would say that the situation looks very promising.”

Very promising, she thought, and while he was drawn back into the general conversation she turned his answer over and over, inspecting it for alternate meanings. But there were none. He must really mean that her work was very promising. It was unbelievable, and she sat hugging the thought to herself until it was time to go home.

They sorted out how many coffees had been drunk by whom, and then stood for a moment in the cold outside the café.

“See you on Thursday, Anna,” said Welsh William, and several other voices echoed, “See you on Thursday.” They sounded strangely disembodied in the dark. Good night, Harry. Good night, Doreen. Then the sound of footsteps as unidentifiable figures melted into the blackout.

Anna buttoned up her coat against the wind when a voice, deeper than the rest, called out, “Good night, Anna!”

“Good-night…John!’ she called back after a moment’s hesitation, and as the happiness welled up inside her she broke away from the group into the invisible street beyond.

John Cotmore had said good night to her. And her work
was very promising. The pavement rang under her feet and the darkness shone all about her, like something that she could almost touch. She was surprised to find Holborn tube station looking just as usual.

Something tremendous, she felt, had happened in her life.

When Anna arrived at the office a few weeks later she found Mrs Hammond already there. It was embarrassing because Anna was late as usual – there seemed no point in hurrying to work when there was so little to do – but luckily Mrs Hammond had not noticed. She was standing in the disused hospital ward, examining dusty shelves and cupboards, and as soon as she saw Anna she said, “Got a new job for you.”

“What?” asked Anna.

Mrs Hammond was looking more positive than she had done since Dickie’s death.

“Sad job, really,” she said. “But jolly useful. Officers’ clothing.” And as Anna looked puzzled, she suddenly said, “Dead men’s shoes! Can’t call it that, of course – upset people. But that’s what it comes to. Pass on uniforms – all sorts of clothes – from chaps who’ve been killed to chaps who are still alive and need them.”

Anna noticed for the first time that on a dustsheet in a corner of the ward was a pile of garments. There were suits, shirts, ties, bits of Air Force uniform. A used kitbag had
P/O Richard Hammond stencilled on it in large white letters. Mrs Hammond followed her glance.

“Silly to hang on to them,” she said, “when there are other boys who’d be glad of them.” Then she said, “After all, he wasn’t the only one.”

It turned out that she had a partner in this new enterprise – a Mrs James who had lost both her sons, one in the Army in the African desert and the other in the Air Force over Germany. Anna met her briefly later that day, a gaunt, elderly woman with huge tragic eyes and an almost inaudible voice.

She had brought with her a little pug-faced man of great energy who proceeded at once to turn the empty ward into a storeroom for the clothing they hoped to receive. He cleaned and hammered and moved furniture and by the end of the week it was ready, with a little office for Mrs James in one corner.

This consisted only of a table and chair behind two screens, and there was no heating in the whole freezing place except one bar of an electric fire directed at her feet, but she did not seem to notice. She just sat there, staring into space, as though it was as good a place to be as any other.

Mrs Hammond had kept her office next to the sewing-room but spent a good deal of time running in and out to see how everything was getting on. It was she who composed the advertisement in
The Times
, appealing for clothes to the wives and parents of the young men who had
been killed. Anna typed it out and by the following week the clothes began to come in.

They varied from single, pathetic garments to whole trunkfuls and they all had to be acknowledged and sorted. It was strangely distressing work. Some trunks, arriving directly from Service stations, seemed to contain nearly all the dead men’s possessions, and there were golf-clubs, paperbacks and writing-cases which no one knew what to do with. Once when Anna was pulling an RAF tunic out of a suitcase a ping-pong ball flew out with it and bounced all over the floor of the empty ward. For some reason this upset her more than anything else.

At the same time, the old ladies still needed attention – more than before, for they were jealous of Mrs Hammond’s new interest – and the wool still had to be sent out to the knitters, and suddenly Anna found that she was very busy. She no longer arrived late in the mornings and barely had time for lunch. Sometimes when she finished at six o’clock she wondered if she wasn’t too tired to go on to art school, but she always went in the end.

In the meantime, Mrs Hammond had informed all the generals, admirals and air marshals she knew of her new scheme to help servicemen, and at last, less than three weeks after its inception, the first young man arrived to be kitted out. He was a naval lieutenant who had lost all his possessions when his ship had been sunk by a U-boat, and Mrs Hammond and Mrs James vied with each other to give him everything he wanted.

Mrs Hammond had been all a-bustle since the new scheme had started, so it was not surprising to see her turning over stacks of clothes to find trousers exactly the right length or a cap with the correct insignia. But it was astonishing, thought Anna, to see the change in Mrs James. For the first time her huge eyes stopped staring into the distance, and as she questioned the young man, gently and sensibly, about his needs, it was as though he were providing some kind of vitamin of which she had been deprived. She smiled and talked and even made a little joke, until Mrs Hammond led him away to try on some shoes, when she relapsed into inactivity like a wind-up toy that had run down.

After this there was a steady stream of young men in need and an equally steady supply of clothes from the relatives of other young men who had been killed in action. Anna sometimes wondered how it would feel to wear these garments, but the young men seemed to look on them in purely practical terms. Since rationing had been introduced the previous summer every kind of clothing was hard to come by, and it did not do to be too sensitive.

They were surprisingly cheerful on the whole and sometimes, intoxicated by the money they had saved, they asked Anna out for the evening. They took her to films and theatres and to West End restaurants. It was fun to dress up in Judy’s and Jinny’s more elegant cast-offs for these grand places, just as though she were really the nice English girl they took her for. Afterwards, they usually wanted to kiss
her, and this, too, was exciting. I must really be quite attractive, she thought in wonder, but she did not find any one of them more interesting than the rest and she never went out with them on her art school nights.

“Why not?” cried Mama. “It’s much better for you than those old evening classes!”

Anna shook her head. “It’s an awful waste of time, really,” she said in the special knowing-her-own-mind voice she had recently acquired. “And, honestly Mama, they seem so
young
!”

“I hear you’re living in a social whirl,” said Max. “Well, it looks as though the war is going to go on for ever, so you may as well enjoy it.”

He was depressed again, for although he had come out top of his course and was now a Pilot Officer, the Air Force had decided that he could fly neither bombers nor fighters.

“Just because of my background,” he said. “They’re afraid that if I was shot down and the Germans found out about me they wouldn’t treat me as a prisoner of war. So I’ve got to be a flying instructor.”

“Surely that’s important too,” said Papa, but Max was too annoyed to listen.

“You don’t understand,” he said. “Nearly everybody else is going to fly on operations. It’s the same old thing – I’m always stuck with something different.”

At this Mama, normally so sympathetic to his longing for equality, blew her top.

“For God’s sake, are you determined to be killed?” she shouted, and added incongruously, “As though we hadn’t got enough to worry about!”

“There’s no need to get excited,” said Max, “especially as I’ve got no choice.”

Mama had been increasingly nervous of late, and a few days later Anna discovered why. It was when she came home from work. Nowadays she did not have many evenings at home, and she planned this one exactly. First she was going to paint over the cracks in her shoes with some brown dye she had bought in her lunch hour. Then, if there was any hot water, she would wash her hair, and after supper she would mend her two remaining pairs of stockings, so as to have some to wear the following day.

As she passed Papa’s room she heard voices and went in. Mama was half-sitting, half-lying on the bed and Papa was holding her hand. Her blue eyes were swimming, her mouth was dragged down at the corners, and her whole face was soaked with tears.

“What’s happened?” cried Anna, but Papa shook his head.

“It’s all right,” he said. “Nothing terrible. Mama has lost her job.”

Mama at once leapt into a sitting position.

“What do you mean, nothing terrible,” she cried. “How are we going to live?”

“We’ll manage somehow,” said Papa, and gradually Anna found out what had happened. It was not that Mama
had been sacked, but that the job had simply come to an end.

“Of course I hated it anyway,” cried Mama through her tears. “It was never meant to be more than a stop-gap after Lord Parker died.”

Anna remembered once going to see Mama when she was still Lady Parker’s social secretary. Mama had sat in a pretty, white-painted room with a fire, and a footman had brought her tea and biscuits, returning with an extra cup for Anna. Mama had never seemed to have much to do except answer the telephone and send out invitations, and in the evenings she and Anna had marvelled at the way Lady Parker lived.

“Her stockings cost a guinea a pair,” Mama had told her. “And they can only be worn once because they are so fine.”

Since Lord Parker’s death, Mama had worked in a basement entirely filled with his papers – such stacks and stacks of them that it had not occurred to her until recently that the task of sorting them could ever come to an end.

“What shall I do?” she cried. “I have to get a job somehow!”

“Perhaps you’ll find something more interesting,” said Anna.

Mama brightened.

“Yes,” she said, “I suppose I might, now that so many people have been called up. And since you’ve been self-supporting I’ve been able to save a little, so we can last a
while – I could pick and choose a bit.” But then despair overcame her again. “Oh God!” she cried, “I’m so sick of always having to start again!” She looked at Papa who was still holding her hand. “How much easier it would be,” she said, “if the BBC would only use some of your stuff and broadcast it to Germany.”

Papa’s face tightened. He had not been able to sell anything to the BBC since that first piece, and though he sat at his table and wrote each day, he was earning almost no money at all.

“I’ll ring them again,” he said, but they all knew that it would be no use.

The weekend after Mama had gone to her office for the last time she was quite cheerful. It was summer weather and everyone was sitting in the garden. The Woodpigeon had cut the grass with an ancient lawnmower he had discovered in a shed, and the Czech ladies both wore triangles of stiff white paper over their noses to protect them from sunburn.

Mama was sitting in a deckchair with a pile of newspapers beside her. She was checking through the “situations vacant” columns and writing letters of application for any that seemed possible. Every time she had finished one she would say, “Do you think that’s all right?” and show it to Anna and Papa. The jobs were all secretarial, and as Anna and Papa read through them, Mama would say, “I didn’t mention that I can’t do shorthand because once they gave me the job I’m sure I could manage,” or “I know it says British-born, but I

thought if they just saw me …”

She looked so determined, sitting there in the sunshine with her blue eyes frowning at the paper while she attacked it with her pen, that it was easy to imagine her talking anyone into giving her any job she wanted.

However, by the following Thursday she had only had one request for an interview. This turned out to be with a little man in the City who said that actually they were looking for someone younger – just a girl, really – and sent Mama home in deep depression.

She wrote another batch of letters and waited for replies, but nothing happened. The weather continued lovely and hot, so she sat in the garden and wrote more letters and read books from the library. After all, she said, she had earned a holiday.

When the weather changed and the garden became chilly Mama cleared out her wardrobe. She walked down to Putney High Street with Papa to spend the shilling and sixpence they had allocated for their joint lunch and then they ate it together in his room. In the evening she played bridge with the Woodpigeon and the Poznanskis and, on special occasions, with Miss Thwaites, a new arrival in the hotel. In fact Miss Thwaites did not play very well, but since she was English – not just half-English or naturalised English or English by marriage, but real, genuine born-and-bred English – she was the most sought-after person there. She was a withered-looking spinster with a grey pudding-bowl hair-cut who worked in the local bank, and she
accepted the respect accorded to her as her due.

It was not until Mama had been out of work for four weeks that she became really frightened. She calculated that in that time she had had only four replies to her letters, and two interviews, and when she checked her savings she found that, as always, they were dwindling faster than she had expected. She began to haunt the telephone and hang about the hall, waiting for the postman. When Anna came home in the evenings she would say, tight-lipped, “I still haven’t heard anything,” before Anna had even had time to ask, and at night she tossed and turned in her bed, unable to sleep.

“What are we going to do?” she cried one Sunday when the three of them were sitting in Papa’s room after lunch. Papa had been reading them a poem he had written the previous day. It was addressed to his sister who was now somewhere in Palestine, and in it he remembered their childhood together in Silesia and wondered if they would ever meet again except perhaps in Paradise. If there were such a place, thought Papa, it would probably look rather like the woods and meadows among which they had grown up. It was a beautiful poem.

When Mama asked him what they were to do he looked at her, full of affection and confidence.

“You’ll think of something,” he said.

Mama who had been nervously clutching a newspaper suddenly flung it on the floor.

“But I don’t want to have to think of something!” she
cried. “Why should it always be me? Why can’t you think of something for a change?”

Papa, one hand still holding the poem, seemed to be considering deeply and for a moment Anna thought he was going to come up with the solution to the whole thing. Then he put his other hand over Mama’s.

“But you’re so much better at it than I am,” he said.

At this Mama burst into tears and Anna said, “I’m sure I could manage five shillings a week or even seven-and-sixpence,” but Mama shouted, “It wouldn’t be enough!” Then she blew her nose and said, “I’ll try and talk to Louise.”