The Girl from Station X (15 page)

Now, though, I was intrigued by those two diaries written in the summers just before the war, about Novi Knezevac, on the River Tisza, in the new Yugoslavia, which, before 1914 and the Treaty of
Versailles, and the other treaties that followed the end of the First World War, had been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. I looked up my mother and Jean’s routes of 1937 and 1938. I
stared at the unfamiliar place names – Cluj, Vecs, Radauti – and pored over the photographs in my mother’s albums, which my mother had meticulously labelled
: OLD SERBIA, MY
LITTLE RUMANIAN SHEPHERD BOY IN THE KING’S PASS
– I noted the personal pronoun, something she was fond of –
GYPSIES IN THE VILLAGE OF BETHLEN, TRANSYLVANIA, FERRI
– a shaven-headed boy –
FISHING IN THE TISZA
. I was fascinated by the beautifully mannered old uncle, Willibacci, who had been at the Spanish Riding School in Vienna, with whom
Anne communicated in faltering German. He showed her and Jean a picture of himself riding behind the Emperor and Empress at Godollo and told them how, at the time of the Bosnian occupation by the
Austro-Hungarian army in 1876, at only eighteen, he was the first Hussar to enter Sarajevo. Anne was bowled over by the romance of it all, and sympathetic to the situation of her new Hungarian
friends, who explained to her how Hungary’s territories had been drastically reduced after the First World War.
The flags were flown at half mast in Hungary as protest as well as
in mourning for the lost land.

In that diary of summer 1937 – Hitler had been Chancellor of Germany for four years – Anne had inadvertently described a world that was about to vanish. Novi Knezevac would be
occupied during the Second World War, first by the Germans, then by the Russians. The old uncle would have died by then, but the lives of Bertha, Tibor, Lala and Karolyi – not to mention the
gypsies and that little boy, Ferri – were irrevocably, tragically changed and my mother and Jean never saw any of them again.

Part 3

War

September 10th, 1939.

I never expected to have to start this diary again under these circumstances. It makes everything I wrote before seem pretty futile and war of course changes
one’s whole outlook.

The young woman had never made a cup of tea in her life. Left alone by the corporal – ‘I expect you’d like to make it yourself,’ he had said, mistakenly
– with a gas cooker, a huge kettle of boiling water and a canister of loose tea, Anne realised that she did not even know how to tell when the kettle had boiled. She went off to find a
handkerchief to lift its lid but by the time she got back, the water had all boiled over.

By some miracle, the first cups of tea that my future mother ever made turned out all right. Two officers came to drink it with her, out of RAF mugs.
On the mantelpiece was a large
photograph of a naked woman and one of the airmen rushed in, snatched it up and stuck it in his pocket. I couldn’t help laughing!

Anne had enlisted as early as March 1939; that year, the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, founded after the First World War but then disbanded, was re-formed. I found a letter she had kept
from a Miss Trefusis Forbes, saying that she was starting one of the first companies of the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS), at Kidbrooke, Dulwich, attached to No. 1, Balloon Centre, and that
she wanted one section composed of ex-pupils of Queen’s Gate School. Anne had written back at once, agreeing. Her WAAF number was 513. She would later be proud of that, as it showed how early
she had joined. She had, I was delighted to see, without hesitation, shown a sense of duty, a willingness to help and a readiness to experience a life out of her ken.

September 10th 1939.

I drove to Kidbrooke, with Mum, Nah and Aunt K in the morning . . . masses of refugee children, their gas masks on their backs struggling about the roads . . . lots
of soldiers speeding on motor cycles, although why the general standard of driving should have deteriorated to such an extent I can’t imagine.

On that day, a week after Great Britain’s declaration of war on Germany, Anne started in the ranks, in her first job, in ‘supplies’, at Kidbrooke. Here, in Dulwich College,
requisitioned as the headquarters of No. 1 Balloon Barrage, after a lunch in the mess of greasy meat, cabbage and potatoes followed by prunes and custard, she found that she was expected to wash up
her own tin, mug, spoon, knife and fork after each meal. This was a novelty, so much so that she even mentioned it twice in the diary.

The best side of Anne comes out in these early war diaries, her willingness to throw herself in, her curiosity and her sense of humour –
Someone said at breakfast this morning:
‘When we about turned this morning, Clayton didn’t ’arf go on my foot’!
Having to focus on the practicalities of life must in some ways have been refreshing;
Katherine had told me that each time the girl wanted to do something for herself at Knowle, Nah would step in and do it for her. My grandmother was also no help in this respect, advising her
daughter: ‘Never do anything if you can get someone else to do it for you!’ (My mother had told me this, seeming at the time to disapprove.)

Anne appears to have enjoyed Kidbrooke, where she did functional tasks such as making out a card for each man with his details, and filing – a more senior colleague was surprised by how
quickly Anne grasped the essentials of the job, without having had any business training. Anne in turn was admiring of the different personalities she encountered, in particular the two office
boys, Lewis and Perkins, Lewis just seventeen and from a mining family in Yorkshire, Perkins hoping for, but then not allowed, the day off for his own seventeenth birthday. She was also impressed
by Barola, a senior WAAF officer, twice widowed, who had driven ambulances in the First World War in France, for which she had been awarded the Légion d’Honneur and the Croix de
Guerre. Despite having then lived in America for nineteen years, when war was declared in September 1939, Barola had returned home at once to pitch in. And unlike Anne, who confessed in the diary
that she couldn’t sleep due to fear of air raids, Barola seemed to disregard any personal danger. Having offered to drive Barola to her flat to collect some personal items, Anne had waited
outside in the blackout, getting more and more nervous, only to see – and hear – Barola coming out singing,
completely oblivious
.

Anne differed in another respect from her female colleagues
: Everyone here is crazy about the men and they all dash about to pubs etc. with them and get clandestine notes from the
officers.
Indeed, it is striking that, in all the diaries so far, Anne, now twenty-five, had not fallen for any man – she had written of how she had been flattered and touched
when Fife fell in love with her in America, but did not really reciprocate. Since starting the diaries at fifteen, she had written every so often of romantic crushes on young women. But these were
never acted upon, probably because she perceived active lesbianism as shameful, even sordid. Indeed, in this early war diary, she tells of an incident at a party given by a senior WAAF officer, a
Colonel Barker, and the ‘friend’ she lived with,
a very pretty woman named Mrs M.
Mrs M was spotted through a half-open door hugging and kissing another woman
officer, Cameron (not Colonel Barker!), on the sofa. Anne wrote that such a woman as Cameron should not be in charge of girls, adding
it revolts and sickens me.
Her
disgust was, I think, genuine. Something as blatant as two women openly kissing shocked her, but, in view of her own romantic interest in females, there may have been some part of her that even
then found it erotic. Perhaps she loathed that aspect of herself.

In this very early part of the war, ‘The Phoney War’, Anne see-sawed between her two homes and her job – one of the two family chauffeurs, Clancy, who lived in the mews behind
40 Belgrave Square, drove her back to work after her first half-day off. Then, after only one week at Kidbrooke, she was summoned by Miss Trefusis Forbes, who told her that a Johnny Hearn had asked
for her to join his personal staff at Kelvin House, Cleveland Street, off the Tottenham Court Road; I imagine that he, like Miss Trefusis Forbes, was part of Anne’s ‘old school’
or family network.

Anne was sorry to leave Kidbrooke and her co-workers expressed reluctance to see her go. She certainly did not show any sign that she felt superior or destined for better things as regards her
work; instead, she seems to have been humbled by her new experience of working close to those who had not had lives like hers.

On 18 September 1939, eight days after she’d started at Kidbrooke, Anne became a WAAF driver, based at Kelvin House. Her new job, which she wanted to
make a
success
, required her to chauffeur officers to balloon barrage sites all over London and its outskirts, often in the blackout.

31st October 1939, Kelvin House, Cleveland Street. A new experimental balloon being put up . . . We were given lots of hot Bovril to drink . . . Cleaned the car for
hours – no hosepipe and no light, very difficult.

She was now performing tasks very similar to those of her family’s two chauffeurs. Was this young woman really my mother, whose only practical skills that I could recall were tying on
fishing flies and shelling peas – once a year – at Hope Cove? A few weeks earlier, in that same diary, instead of gratefully gulping Bovril and painstakingly washing a car, she had been
sipping champagne and water-skiing in the South of France. There, she and her friend John M had been arrested during a police raid on La Bastide, a Cannes nightclub frequented by homosexuals. My
mother found the incident amusing and was amazed at John’s naïvety in not having noticed the clientele when she and he, unknowingly, had first gone inside. Now, like so many others, she
was caught up in the war.

I was burning with curiosity about my mother’s life as a working woman, so that these early war diaries quickly became compulsive reading. I kept the first two with me,
glancing through them often at random, with children’s TV on in the background, skimming them at night and in the early morning before the children’s school. Very soon I was greedily
reading them everywhere: in trains, tubes and sometimes hospital waiting rooms. My mother, as she had never been in person, was quickly becoming, through her diaries, my closest companion. Still
half-fearful of what secrets I would discover, I was also longing to know.

December 2nd 1940, Bicester.

Physical love is what I have missed all these years. It is lack of it that has made me nervous, terribly emotional and restless. Now it brings me rest and harmony
and glorious oblivion and balance to the strained senses.

I was shocked – and excited – when I read this. How different were these sentiments from the previous year, when the inexperienced Anne had expressed disapproval of those two WAAF
women kissing, and of a WAAF officer having an illicit affair with her RAF boss. Now Anne was, for the first time, physically attracted to a man:

. . . Alan says that we should be happy married, that we are twin souls . . . I do not know how much David loves me, I do not know him so well as Alan and there is
always David’s family . . . Alan . . . satisfies me utterly, he is so tender and yet sometimes rough with passion so that I am quite afraid.

I cannot describe the weakness of my will to resist. The strain of the last months seems to vanish and for a moment one looks at the world with a happy face, as one used to do, long,
long ago in that other life. Glorious, glorious forgetfulness, glorious oblivion and peace.

I now know that I am a harlot, not for me all the rules I have observed so long through cowardice alone.

In her teenage diaries, Anne had reiterated that she didn’t like men. Now, it seemed, in 1940, she was romantically involved with
two
men – one passionately.

I knew that she had been engaged, long before she met my father, to a David Heber-Percy. Clearing Knowle with Katherine two years after my grandmother’s death, I had come across a
photograph of a clean-shaven young man: ‘We’d better keep this away from your mother!’ Katherine had declared. I had had the impression that it had been David who had jilted Anne,
rather than the other way round. Indeed, I remembered my grandmother saying that she had found her daughter in tears over it.

I had no idea when Anne became engaged to David. The Heber-Percys, I knew, were a distinguished landowning family. This would have pleased my grandmother, despite her own first marriage having
been to someone a notch down from the class that her ambitious father, Michael, had wanted for her. Her three sisters had all ‘married well’: Elisa and Lin’s husbands were titled,
and Dita’s was an American millionaire. Michael had even apologised to my grandmother, his youngest, for not being able to provide the large dowry demanded by some impecunious English lord.
‘I can find my own husband – you don’t have to buy me one!’ she had retorted. He had then suggested some other aristocrat, adding: ‘He has a great name.’
‘I would rather marry a great man!’ she had replied. In my grandfather, she told me, she had found one.

Anne did not have that confidence and, I suspect, still under her mother’s wing, had agreed to marry David partly to please her.

It was time to read the war diaries in their correct order, but this proved to be frustrating as far as David was concerned. Anne did not even state in her diary where they met and, during her
job as Duty Driver at Kelvin House, she wrote not of her fiancé, but of the minutiae of her life: a dropped treacle pudding served up again, now full of little bits of china; a drive to a
balloon barrage site at Felixstowe, where she waited in a seaside café nursing a cup of tea costing 1s and 6d; and the return journey, during which, having driven them an hour in the wrong
direction, she and her superiors stopped for drinks and a pie in a village called Hatfield Peverel:
Just like a play – locals with a wonderful Essex accent, sitting and drinking
beer out of huge tankards and playing dominoes. Everyone was very cheery.