The Dust That Falls from Dreams (17 page)

M
rs McCosh adored Folkestone. Every Whitsun she travelled down by train from Victoria to stay with her friend Myrtle, who liked to style herself Mrs Henry Cowburn, after the fashion of the day. Mrs Henry Cowburn lived in a dilapidated four-bedroomed house not far from Little Switzerland with her husband, a former yeomanry officer and local solicitor, who was infinitely more interested in playing golf than in practising law, and liked to play with Mr McCosh whenever he had reason to come up to London, and with Mrs McCosh when she came down to visit his wife. He had served in the South African war and his intestines had never quite recovered from the dysentery that had nearly killed him, and had, indeed, done for most of his comrades far more efficiently than the guerrilla tactics of the Boers. Before setting off to the golf course he would take great pains to ensure that nothing gastrointestinal was likely to happen to him. Fortunately the green of the ninth was near the clubhouse, and he could usually manage until then. He ate prodigious quantities of eggs and bacon, in the belief, current at the time, that they had a binding effect. This diet certainly made an outdoor life in some ways preferable, but now that eggs were fivepence and bacon was one and eight, he had discovered to his delight that a more normal diet actually improved the state of his bowels.

Folkestone had been greatly changed by the war, at first becoming somewhat dismal. It had been designated a prohibited area because of its proximity to France and its vulnerability to naval bombardment. All the Austrian and German waiters had been interned, and the hotels and boarding houses had fallen into desuetude. The Metropole and the Grand were barely ticking over, and the band no longer played its exuberant music on the Leas. The young men had gone into the navy or the Buffs, and
their place had been taken by abject Belgian refugees, with their tales of atrocity and rape, and their hopeless penury. Myrtle was on the Committee for Belgian Refugees, and her three spare rooms were taken by three elderly musicians from the same orchestra who had all fled together. Her house was filled with melancholy chamber music played on borrowed instruments that were not nearly as good as the ones they had had to leave behind, as they often reminded her. On three days a week she manned the soup kitchens at the fishmarket. Major Cowburn was on the Emergency Committee, and was one of those in charge of destroying anything useful to the enemy in the event of invasion. He had a list of everything useful in the town, and detailed plans as to how to destroy it. In his garden he had prepared a large ziggurat of kindling so that a bonfire might be lit at short notice.

Not long after the commencement of the war, Folkestone had begun to fill up with tens of thousands of Canadian recruits. On St Martin’s Plain were acre upon acre of tents, shops, huts, cinemas and canteens. Practice trenches reconfigured the landscape and became a hazard for drunks and unwary sheep. Millions of men had marched proudly down Slope Road, and many fewer were later to march wearily back up it.

Mrs McCosh’s luggage had been sent on ahead. When she left the station she was somewhat displeased by the present appearance of things, and wondered with whom she might have a stern word. She felt the onset of a letter to His Majesty. To begin with, the coming and going of so many military vehicles had turned the roads into a sea of chalky mud that clung to one’s shoes like treacle, and furthermore, the empty houses were already falling into disrepair, giving the town a forlorn aspect that Mrs McCosh felt was certain to be bad for the general morale.

Myrtle had come to meet her at the station, and they had exchanged embraces and delighted giggles as if they were still schoolgirls. Myrtle was slender, despite the approach of middle age, and her eyes were still bright with the humour and interest of youth. She always dressed, even in winter, in such a way as to give the impression that she was a fairy draped in diaphanous gauze. Mrs McCosh, on the other hand, dressed stylishly and expensively without in any way standing out from the crowd.

‘My dear, you look most scandalously well,’ said Myrtle to her friend. ‘It’s terribly unbecoming in wartime, don’t you think, to be so much in the pink?’

‘You’re becoming a poet,’ replied Mrs McCosh.

‘It’s so lovely to see you,’ said Myrtle, ‘I was inspired to rhyme quite accidentally. I do think you’re most frightfully brave to come. One lives in constant fear of a raid. It’s rather a jar.’

‘Oh no,’ replied Mrs McCosh, ‘in that, you are quite wrong. Everyone knows that Folkestone is perfectly safe.’

She was referring to the widely held belief that the Germans would never attack Folkestone because in the recent past the local people had saved hundreds of German sailors from drowning after a collision between two warships, and it was certainly true that even though Dover and Ramsgate and Margate had been bombed, Folkestone itself had been spared.

Myrtle was sceptical. ‘My dear, these people have invaded Luxembourg and Belgium, and think nothing of killing civilians. Why, I believe they even think it’s a good thing! And they invented that ghastly warfare with gas. I do hope you’re right though.’

‘I am always right, my dear,’ said Mrs McCosh drily. The two women set off gaily, receiving the respectful greetings of many a Canadian officer on the way. ‘I do love these Canadians,’ said Myrtle, ‘the way they sweep off their caps and even bow, and I don’t believe it’s the slightest bit ironical. And it’s amazing how many of them are sort of French.’

‘Sort of French?’

‘Sure, it’s quite like being in Brittany sometimes. They gabble away to each other in such a strong accent that it’s quite hard to follow. Of course, if one addresses them in proper Parisian French, they simply reply in English.’

‘Did you say “sure”? I do believe you are becoming a Canadian yourself.’

‘Oh, you should hear us all,’ said Myrtle. ‘Dear Henry almost has an accent. Oh, and I must tell you, I have three Belgian musicians in the house at present, so please don’t be alarmed if you come across poor shambling folk on the landing. They are nearly ghosts, but not quite. Two of them have very kindly agreed to
share during your visit, so you shall have your usual room overlooking the sea.’

‘How lovely,’ said Mrs McCosh with evident insincerity, a little worried about having to be in the vicinity of unknown foreigners. She had not bargained on any such thing. ‘Of course, I have been having Belgian ladies to tea quite a lot myself.’

‘Don’t worry, they are perfectly sweet,’ said Myrtle. ‘They have such a glum air that it makes one want to tickle them.’

It was a beautiful day in May. The sky was clear but for some tiny clouds, and the sea was Mediterranean blue and flat calm. A small breeze was bringing the aroma of kelp and salty water to the promenade, and Mrs Hamilton McCosh and Mrs Henry Cowburn walked along it in a daze of contentment and wellbeing. They had been friends for a very long time, despite being so far removed from each other temperamentally, and it had been Mrytle who had seen Mrs McCosh through that terrible period that the latter always thought of as her ‘Dreadful Disgrace’ or ‘Awful Scandal’ when it had been revealed in the press that the Lord to whom she was engaged already had a wife in a lunatic asylum in America. She had felt humiliated and shamed by it even though she and everybody else had known perfectly well that she had not been remotely at fault. She had destroyed all her personal diaries that covered that period, and moreover His Lordship had recently died, so that Mrs McCosh finally felt completely free of him. She had been utterly grateful and astonished when one day Hamilton McCosh had proposed to her, although she had been slightly mortified when he had added, ‘And I have nothing but cobwebs in the attic.’

They reached home at exactly the same time as Henry Cowburn himself, who was dressed in plus fours and was carrying one golf club and a new box of golf balls. He was returning from the monthly match of the Mashie Club, in which each player was only permitted the use of one club for the whole round. He had learned to putt left-handed so that the negative loft of the back of the club put a marvellous topspin onto the ball and sent it unerringly into the cup. The other members liked to josh him that he could only win by cheating, and win he did, every time. As the prize was always a box of half a dozen golf balls, he now
had a fair store of them in the cupboard under the stairs, and was hoping to send Mrs McCosh home with a box or two for her husband.

‘Welcome to Little Toronto!’ he exclaimed, and Mrs McCosh held out her hand.

‘Did you win again, dear?’ asked his wife.

‘Absolutely!’ he replied. ‘Or should I say “sure”?’

‘You could but you shouldn’t,’ said Myrtle in her best Canadian accent, ‘ ’cause it ain’t good English.’

That evening they and the musicians dined on the rabbit that Henry Cowburn had bagged himself from the rough on the fifteenth. They agreed that the war would already have been lost but for rabbits, and afterwards the musicians played the famous andante by Vinteuil. It was soothing and sad. Mrs McCosh retired to bed feeling serene, not missing her own family one little bit.

The following morning the elderly musicians convened in the conservatory, where they played Beethoven amongst the bromeliads and pelargoniums. Major Cowburn went to his office, where he intended to do as much work as possible in the morning so that he might be released to the golf course in the afternoon, and the ladies went for the first of the day’s promenades, firstly in Radnor Park, where they watched some girls playing tennis, and then to the cemetery, where Myrtle took her companion to visit the graves of her departed friends and acquaintances. She wiped her eyes at each, and told Mrs McCosh anecdotes about the occupants, all of which Mrs McCosh had heard many times before. ‘Just think, my dear, one day I shall be in here with them,’ she said, adding, ‘and on a beautiful day like this I don’t think I’d mind a bit. It’s such a nice place to rest in forever, don’t you think?’

It was indeed a perfect day. Despite the war and its losses, shortages and inconveniences, it was impossible not to feel a little joyful.

They lunched at the Grand Hotel where, because the sole alternative was whale meat, they had to eat rabbit again, spent the afternoon drifting amongst the shops, and stopped twice for tea and cake, laughing and chattering the whole time, even though the cake had almost no sugar in it, and was hardly up
to scratch. Certainly, her own daughters would have been much astonished to see their mother in such a frivolous, light-hearted and girlish mood.

It was at the second of these tea houses that an acquaintance of Mrs Henry Cowburn informed her in tones of breathless excitement that not only were Gosnold’s of Tontine Street selling fine lace at two shillings and three farthings a yard, but Stoke’s in the same street had a large supply of potatoes. ‘Oh, lace and potatoes,’ exclaimed Myrtle. ‘Goody-goody. How could one live without them?’ She turned to her friend. ‘Why don’t you go for a wander? There’s no point in both of us queuing for hours.’

‘There’s a little shop I’d like to visit in Dover Road,’ replied Mrs McCosh, who had never had to queue for vegetables in her life, and had no intention of starting now. ‘I’ll come and find you in half an hour and we can go to Gosnold’s together.’

‘I fear you might have to allow more than half an hour,’ said Myrtle. ‘The queues can become frightfully long. Luckily one always runs into friends, and it’s just like a party, but without the drinks and canapés, and with all sorts of delightful common people that one wouldn’t normally come across. It’s quite a leveller, I do declare.’

The friends separated, and Myrtle almost skipped to Stoke’s grocery shop, where she found a large, patient queue that included children playing football, babes in arms, dogs and even horses. There were very few young men, but plenty of elderly ones, all of them engaged in discussing how lovely the weather was, and saying how well it boded for Whitsun.

A series of explosions began in the near distance, coming ever nearer, and people reassured themselves that it was the Canadian soldiers getting into practice with their gunnery.

The twenty gigantic Gothas had set off with the intention of bombing London, but had been foiled by dense cloud. Although crudely built, they were magnificently invulnerable because they could fly higher than any Allied aircraft, and had a gun port in the rear that faced downwards so that it was impossible to attack them safely from below as one did with any other kind of bomber. None of the aircraft sent up against them were able to get within three thousand feet.

They were flying in diamond formation so as to maximise mutual defence, and intended to break it only to circle as they released their bombs. Their crews were brave and patriotic young men who loved the way that their engines sang, and deceived themselves into thinking that they were achieving military objectives when they had no very clear idea of what was beneath them and no way of accurately aiming their bombs. The Kaiser had in any case decreed that it was legitimate to bomb civilians because this reinvention of total war would demoralise the population and so bring about an earlier peace, which is what any civilised person would want. The thought did not occur to him that this might provoke the British to retaliate in kind. As he greatly valued
Kultur
, he magnanimously forbade his bombers to attack ancient monuments, and as he valued his family he sentimentally forbade any attacks on the property of the royal family.

Frustrated by the failure to attack London, the twenty bombers turned for home, and followed the railway line to the Cinque Ports. They killed a sheep at Marden, another one at Mersham, and an eighteen-year-old girl at Ashford. A dud landed in an open grave at Belsingham, and eighteen Canadian soldiers perished at Shorncliffe Camp. They killed a middle-aged man in his garden in Cheriton, Dorothy Bergin, who was sixteen, and Francis Considine, who was five.

Myrtle thought the bombers looked beautiful as they circled above her. The sun was sparkling off their white wings, and everyone in the potato queue was craning their neck upwards and pointing, confident that the planes were theirs. They still thought that the explosions were from the training camp, even though they were now coming from the West End, and Radnor Park and Bouverie Road.