The Girl from Station X (18 page)

Alan took her to Oxford where she met some of his stage friends. They attended a party with the then popular writer and journalist Godfrey Winn and Felix Hope-Nicholson, who would be my future
husband’s landlord in Chelsea, twenty or so years later.

On 4 November, there was a farewell party for Smithie – Donald Smythe – one of the Bicester pilots, whom Anne would make my godfather. I was surprised to read that Smithie kissed
Anne in his car after the party. On duty that night in the Signals Office, she discovered, rather too late, that her mouth was smeared with lipstick.

She wrote ecstatically of that earlier Oxford party with Alan, after which they had had long talks about literature and the stage. This atmosphere, she confessed, was harmonious to her and she
had always
secretly longed for Bohemianism which . . . now, I suppose, will never have.

Presumably she thought that she would have to eschew ‘Bohemianism’, because she was marrying David.

Meanwhile Steeles Road, off Haverstock Hill, Hampstead, where Aunt K and her artist husband Matthew did live a somewhat bohemian life, was badly damaged by bombs. Anne went to see her aunt that
November at her house, number 39. The street’s main sewer had been hit and sewage ran everywhere. Anne recorded that her aunt and other locals had no gas or phone lines, the animals were
still in the Zoo nearby, which she thought cruel, and there was a large bomb crater near the BBC headquarters. Aunt K had even heard that eighteen bombs had fallen on Knowle, but she and Anne could
not get through by telephone to verify this.

That day, Anne went on to lunch at the Cordon Bleu restaurant, where several women, she observed, were smartly dressed. She saw a car with the new pre-Christmas warning sign,
‘
Tree lights for all at your own risk’
, and visited Woollands store, where she was pleased to see her friend Mr Wright, still selling spectacles.
Everyone is tired but they carry on just the same.
She then returned home, to Belgrave Square. West Halkyn Street nearby had been badly damaged, and one house had had its
entire centre removed, leaving the top floor suspended in mid-air, attached to the houses each side of it,
forming an arch resembling the Ponte dei Sistii in Venice
, while
in Belgrave Square number 4 had been hit, as had the houses of the Duke of Norfolk and the Howard de Waldens – the latter family’s whole house-front had gone. Anne, recalling the
house’s magnificent staircase, thought nostalgically of how she had danced at a pre-war ball there with an Austrian archduke.

When she arrived at the other side of the square, at number 40, the house where she had been born, she was shocked. The glass above the front door was smashed, and so was that of one of her
sitting-room windows. There was no glass left in any of her, or her mother’s, bedroom windows and there were no shutters. She hastily packed some things into a suitcase,
moving as
though in a kind of trance, steeled against what might be to come and yet listening and looking as one always is these days, never wholly at rest.

On her way south to Knowle by car – she almost ran out of petrol but managed to get some near Sydenham – she saw more wreckage, of countless little houses and streets. One village
had its walls and roofs bespattered with earth from a bomb that had fallen in a garden, and another village, which she had watched being built over years of travelling that route, had lost several
of its dwellings. She spotted a German bomber flying off in the direction of the coast, then eight RAF Hurricanes flying back towards Biggin Hill,
black against the reddish
sky.

She reached Knowle at teatime, thanking God that it had not been bombed as Aunt K had thought, though an Italian plane had dropped one bomb near the big Shernfold Lake in the woods, and in the
Lost Field there was
an H.E. bomb crater, 30ft. by 10ft.
The following day, she was getting out of bed when she heard shouts and saw from her window Tash the butler and
some of the evacuees from London gazing at the sky.
I rushed out and saw a trail of black smoke over the trees towards Mayfield and there was a parachute miles up right above the house,
coming down quite slowly. There was a very high wind and the man was swept from side to side, swinging about 40 ft, while the parachute twisted and turned in the air. We thought he was coming right
down onto the house.

The following morning, they heard that that German pilot’s plane had been shot down near Heathfield, about forty minutes’ drive away. Later, Anne observed a large twin-engined bomber
making off towards the coast, in and out of the clouds,
with one of our fighters right on its tail
. The previous week, on the Manor Farm estate, which my grandmother and
Chow had bought some years earlier, only a short walk through the woods from Knowle, 160 incendiaries had been picked up, and in the county of Sussex 12,000 bombs had been counted.

My mother recounted in her diary how she walked with Gig to look at the bomb crater in the Lost Field. They searched the woods for shrapnel but found none.
The colours of the trees
down here are simply wonderful and they have not begun to fall yet, as they have in Oxfordshire. It is much softer air here too, it was raining this afternoon, but Mum and I went for a walk all
round the woods.

Even in wartime, Knowle was a place of beauty and stability. But it provided only a temporary respite, for Anne was now enmeshed in her new and complicated emotional life.

Soon, despite being engaged to David, she was sorely tempted by Alan’s advances. At first she sought to excuse her susceptibility:
a tremendous urge fills one to create as much
happiness as is in one’s power, especially for men in the RAF, who go straight from here to operation work, and stand an even chance of being killed.
She mentions again how much
she and Alan share, books and
all the artistic and beautiful things of life
. Had she anything in common with David, apart from a love of dogs? I wondered. She states,
surely correctly, that in wartime they were all slightly unhinged and goes on to admit that she finds her admirer physically attractive, something that she had never said about David, then the
proof: that at Woodstock one night,
I let Alan make love to me.

Despite ‘make love’ not meaning what it does now – Anne was still a virgin – the situation between her and Alan had progressed beyond a point that was seemly for a young
woman engaged to another man. Anne was aware of this, but tried to justify it to herself:

Is this wrong, I began to wonder. All my upbringing says; you are engaged to someone else and you betray him when you flirt with Alan and let him make love to you
and yet do I really do so? I think not, because David is all the time the centre of my life and this is only an interlude, giving pleasure to Alan and giving peace to me while it
lasts.

I have cut love out of my life almost entirely and it has been the biggest mistake that I could have made. It has made my life, instead of being united and evenly balanced, abnormal
and dissatisfied and I know am sexually starved, which in its turn even affects my mind. I think it altogether wrong, that women should not sleep with men now and again, without having to marry
them and I suppose most people do it. That is an entirely different matter from giving oneself freely to right and left. There is a lot to be said for living with people now and again if one is in
love with them and were I to go away for a weekend with Alan, I believe it would do us all the good in the world. How David would view this I have no idea, but obviously I do not expect him to
remain celibate when he is away from me. Our upbringing is all wrong, a wicked travesty, left over from puritan days and unreasonable and does not fit me for life as it really is. After all, why
draw such a line between actual physical love and the platonic side? That in itself is a grave mistake. I admit that I do not know the answer to this problem, nor that I have gone so far, it is
difficult to draw back without being a fool and I am carried away too. Being in love with David has made other sensations even more poignant to me and I feel sensitive, far more than I ever did
before.

Let her go on deceiving herself about loving David, I thought, but I did not blame her. I was sure that I would have had an affair with Alan myself. He sent her books, a love letter when she had
a cold, then they attended a birthday party which ended with Alan getting covered in her lipstick. But then she received
marvellous news
, via David’s mother, who had
received a letter from her son saying:
I am on my way home.

At this, Anne seems content, albeit briefly, to play once again the part of the dutiful young fiancée. However, the diary reveals her conflicting emotions:
I have always been
an escapist . . . murmuring ‘manana, manana’ to myself whenever a decision appeared over the horizon, too weak and too stupid perhaps to see that failing to take that same decision when
it presented itself, a decision far larger and far more difficult would arise, that might cause much sadness.

This self-description was all too familiar to me and I marvelled at her sudden perspicacity.

‘You must make a decision!’ I recall her saying helplessly, many times, to me or to one of my brothers, tacitly admitting how difficult this was – for her.

Now she had to make a choice between the two young men, Alan, the handsome RAF pilot, and David, her sailor fiancé. She is harsh on herself, accusing herself of
having no life
pattern
, of
wafting hither and thither
, of being
unsure and unequipped
and of having
no discipline to face
life.
‘The one thing I regret is that my mother never taught me self-discipline!’ I recall her saying to me, and I felt, impatiently that, yet again, she was letting
herself off the hook. But now, knowing how my grandmother had arbitrarily removed her from Queen’s Gate, then given in to her about that finishing school in Paris, I understood a little more
what she meant.

I realised also that my grandmother’s expectations of life had been different from those of her daughter, less complicated. She had hardly ever wanted to experience another world from the
one in which she was brought up. Anne was not like this.

December 1st 1940. Bicester.

At times too, I have been driven by an insane desire to experience things . . . I have failed lamentably, as I was always held back by the fear of what my mother
might think. The Bohemianism in my nature was at war with my upbringing . . . For the first time in my life, I was really living . . . there was some point to my existence. That alone made life
worthwhile, together with the kindness and cheerfulness of everybody I worked with. Being part of the WAAF too was a great help, as I felt that we were all working together and the spirit of the
Balloon Barrage crews all through that first terrible cold winter and deadly job was magnificent.

This passage surely showed my mother at her best. She really had tried hard, she had indeed been
really living
.

At least she had stood firm in one aspect. David’s parents wanted her to give up the WAAF, so as to be available each time their son returned on leave. But, she put in her diary, she had
promised to stick to the service when she first joined. Also, she could not bear to have someone dictating to her, and certainly did not intend to be regarded just as David’s
fiancée.

I had great sympathy over this. My mother was an instinctive feminist; she really believed that women were capable of doing everything as well as men, or better. She was so unlike her own mother
in this respect. My grandmother, an agnostic, was independent in thought – ‘I don’t know if it’s true but it’s such a sad story!’ she once said of the
Crucifixion – but in her actions, like so many women of her time, she was happy just to be a husband’s helpmeet. My mother, despite her frequent lack of confidence, was not.

And at Bicester, she enjoyed being treated as an equal rather than as an ex-debutante, an upper-class girl on a pedestal. And she admired the men’s courage, and found it attractive.
If they want to make love to me now and again and are going straight from here to an operational station, where the chance of getting killed is so high, who is one to refuse them at
such little cost to oneself?

I had not before heard my mother express such generosity towards the opposite sex. She tried hard to understand those young pilots and to adapt to her new life with them –
I
began to see a bit below the surface and got fond of the people, who were so good-hearted and gay!

But she remained inexperienced, frightened of a full sexual relationship with Alan. She agonised:
What was morality except a safeguard for women? One does not think much of the woman
who is not prepared to give, especially in such times of stress . . . I was utterly inexperienced in the ways of love . . .
She wrote of how she
had
almost given in to Alan,
of his first ‘making love’ to her in the moonlight among
the silvery trunks of birch trees
, of how she was powerless,
and abandoned myself to its
delights.
She stopped short of sleeping with him, however, particularly after he had burst into tears and told her that he was past flirtation and wanted to settle down and have
children. She realised then
how unfitted I was to deal with such affairs . . . This sex business is impossible, it is this urge that I am unable to fight against and it is such a
natural thing and should be satisfied, I am convinced.