The Girl from Station X (20 page)

She does not appear to have connected those fighters with Alan’s own dashing achievements in the air. She again wrote cruelly:
He bores me
.

Anne does not come out of the episode well. She was unable to offer sympathy to Alan, on the brink of suicide. As seemed to be her wont, she retreated into trivia, to escape dealing with
difficult emotions. Her account of that outing to Hastings only an hour or so after Alan had left Knowle, reportedly threatening to throw himself under a train, describing
lashings of
butter and chocolate
, does seem callous.

There are many examples in her childhood – indeed, throughout her life – of my mother turning to treats and possessions for solace. I read again some of those earliest memories:
Nah had bought a sweet woolly dog for her nephew Freddy for Christmas and she lent it to me to play with one day. I loved it so much that she had to give it to me instead of the donkey
brooch which she had got for me . . . my cousin David had a real Jaeger dressing-gown which I envied.

And I read in another, later diary how, soon after Grandmoods had died in 1930, Anne was taken to 40 Belgrave Square to look at her grandmother’s possessions, which were to be divided:
Aunt Lin has marked 6 Inca pots for herself including the bird one, I
did
want it, I
must
GET IT, I
will
get it.

That acquisitiveness was something that I disliked in my mother. However, now I tried to understand it. She thought that toys, possessions, gadgets – special bottle openers,
battery-operated wasp swatters, which she used to acquire in America before such things came to this country – would save her, would lessen the hard blows of life. And indeed, when her newly
widowed mother had abandoned Anne, removing her from her home, Knowle, and sending her to live with her Aunt Lin, the child, by her own later account, had, each evening, envied her cousin
David’s Jaeger dressing gown. Was it surprising that the little girl, fatherless, temporarily motherless, and whose only brother had just died, had turned to possessions for comfort?

I visit my mother at Camelot. It has just started to rain. As I get out of the car, I can see her through the window sitting in her armchair. She looks more alert than usual.
Through the glass I signal to Fiona, her carer from Scotland, that I’m going in through the kitchen.

My mother has already walked into the kitchen by the time I’ve got there. She is led by Fiona, who is holding my mother’s hands and arms out straight, walking backwards, to stop her
falling. My mother looks delighted to see me. Her old charm is back. I recall other occasions when I’ve been pleased to see her – on the beach at Hope Cove when I was with my small
children, and she would unexpectedly appear over the sea wall with her fishing net, crinkling her blue eyes, waving to us. How much of my life has been spent trying to awaken that magic, to get my
mother to smile again, to laugh happily with me like she used to in Spain, in our garden with the apricot tree, to dance with me as she did long ago in that other garden at North Heath –
‘Grey Lady dancing! Boop boop-a-doop!’

Back in the bedroom, in her armchair beside the TV, she keeps putting out her right hand and grasping mine. Her toys – another woolly dog, a donkey, the pink teddy bear that she handed to
her cousin Dita placatingly that day after trying to hit her with a walking stick – are on the bed. Fiona says she’s having ‘a very good day’ and has been mentioning her
cousin Peggie a great deal. I tell Fiona that I’ve been reading my mother’s diaries. As we sit there, it begins to snow, very thick flakes. Fiona says it won’t lie, but it does,
just for a few minutes.

I suggest ringing up Peggie in America. I get Peggie on the line and my mother grabs at the telephone’s cord, missing the receiver, which I then hand to her. I worry that Peggie might be
put off by her talking gibberish, but she doesn’t seem to be. I then take the telephone myself and say that my mother wants to visit. Peggie says: ‘Let her come!’ I explain that
my mother might panic in the plane. Also, she wouldn’t be able to communicate with Peggie when she got there.

My mother is very excited and has understood it was Peggie. She seems in a very good mood altogether. Fiona says she sometimes sings to her, Scottish songs. Probably she recognises some of the
tunes, I tell Fiona, as Gig sang them to her when she was a child. Perhaps Fiona’s soft Scottish voice reminds her of Gig’s. Then I look out of the window and see that the snowflakes
are about one inch wide. They look odd beside the flowering tree with its white blossom. I do not have the feeling of dislike towards my mother that I sometimes have and I wonder whether this is
because I’ve been reading her diaries.

February 26th 1941.

It is 12.30 a.m. and I have the impulse to write. As I came up the stairs tonight, a wealth of memories seemed to envelop me, making me feel unreal, as though I was
a stranger surveying the scenes which someone else had lived and felt. Suddenly, I did not know which was real, me or these familiar scenes. How could they be reconciled with what I had become? And
yet was I not as much the real person than the being who had lived her life, who was but half alive, being a life of pleasant unreality?

My mother has called her fifth war diary ‘STILL MORE WAR’, instead of just giving it a number. Eighteen months now into the war, these diaries were proving a unique
source of comfort to her.

Weeks into her recent posting at Hucknall, with the dramas of David and Alan behind her, she was ready to meet new people. One was George Widowski, a Pole brought up in the Ukraine:
These foreign men have minds like women and yet they are not effeminate.
She adds that it is difficult to find an Englishman on a woman’s emotional wavelength,
unless he is Jewish, physically unattractive or homosexual.

Maybe she
would
have been better with a more feminine man. She may have often found my father’s relentless masculinity exhausting. Her entry about preferring men on a
woman’s emotional wavelength also suggests that perhaps she really yearned, even then, for the emotional closeness of other women.

WAAF Officer’s Mess. RAF Station

Hucknall, Nottingham

No. 1 Group Headquarters

February 23rd 1941.

In the sky, which was absolutely clear blue, The Fighters were up very high and all we could see were these trails of white smoke twisting and curling about as
though drawn with a pencil across the stratosphere . . . this war has the strangest effects on one and I enjoy almost anything now, and yet when I am not working for long, or have some point to my
existence, I feel rather lost, and the very fact, whatever we may feel about the WAAFS at times, of belonging to a service is a great help.

Apart from the stability of being in the WAAF, she also enjoyed the companionship of the other women in it; at Hucknall, her new friend, Babe,
makes me laugh till I
cry.

Babe Turnbull – married, half-American, half-English upper crust – was yet another female friend who was more confident than Anne; indeed, Anne was even unsure at first whether Babe
liked her for herself, or was simply being friendly because they had ended up in the same posting.

Her new friendship with Babe, and the change of location, undoubtedly gave Anne a new lease of life. She began taking Italian lessons, and on 1 March wrote happily of the sun shining despite the
cold and of birds singing in the woods behind the house. She slept much better, though admitting that she sometimes dreamed of dive bombers –
one gets the feeling when one is half
awake that there is something rather unpleasant in the background but one can’t remember quite what it is.

She added that she had made three decisions: one, she did not want to marry John M, who had proposed to her again, as
he did not understand women
; two, she did want to
get married, to
someone
; and, three, she desired a job requiring more initiative and with less routine – she had not grasped that getting a more exacting job would
be incompatible with marriage.

My mother also noted in her diary one of Babe’s remarks that pleased her:
You and I ought to have been journalists!
Sadly, it did not occur to her that this might
still be a possibility.

The German air attacks on London went on. Anne learned of the bombing of the Café de Paris on 8 March, where thirty-four people, including the jazz performer ‘Snakehips’
Johnson, were killed and another eighty or so injured. She had often enjoyed herself there. She wrote that now she could understand, vaguely, what it must be like for people such as the Poles who
had lost everything – their country and the people they loved.
To me, the world of imagination has always been more near than that of reality itself and I am therefore a fool when
it comes to practical things. Only since the war have I been forced to come face to face with reality and to live in a way that I never did before.

Despite her sympathy for the Poles, her reaction to a letter from her Hungarian friend Tibor Tallian seems insensitive. He had written from Novi Knezevac in December, but she did not receive his
letter for three months. Tibor, his wife Bertha, his sister Lala and Bertha’s brother Karolyi were, like the Poles, now under threat, from the Germans in the west and the Russians in the
east.
I don’t envy them their position, but they are so used to a life of sheer hell and misery, that perhaps it doesn’t affect them much any more.

This, considering that she and Jean had visited Tibor and the others for two years running, and travelled with Bertha and Karolyi, seems almost on a par with her callousness about Alan’s
and David’s near breakdowns.

Her affectionate feelings towards her cousin Peggie, however, were consistent. Peggie’s concerned letter from America, received soon after that one from Tibor, reduced her to tears and on
1 April 1941, after noting that Roosevelt had seized all Italian, German and French boats in US waters, my mother was able to write triumphantly about the country of which she was so fond:
America is awake at last!

She also appreciated the effects of the war on ordinary Londoners. There was the old lady in the newspaper shop in Soho who had lived there through the last war.
There is something
pathetic about all the people and they are so courageous. She was awfully pleased to see me and asked me to come in, whenever I was passing by.

My mother often had problems with intimate relationships but had genuine warmth and sympathy towards those whom she met casually. And I was pleased to read that on that same afternoon she and my
grandmother, then seemingly good friends, had walked together through Soho trying to buy Player’s cigarettes. Anne had also bought a typewriter, perhaps dreaming of becoming a writer, and
they had lingered outside Vaiani’s Italian restaurant, which had a notice on its door stating:
The proprietor is a British subject.
Anne wanted to have a meal there, to show that
there was no ill-feeling towards the Italian owner.

The German bombing went on. In late April, after what was said to be the worst raid on London so far, Aunt K’s house in Steeles Road in Hampstead was hit for the second time, so badly that
it was rendered almost uninhabitable; sixty people nearby were killed.

Three weeks later, my mother recorded shocking changes to the area where she was born.

May 17th 1941.

I wandered round Belgrave Square. The garden gates are no longer locked, for fear of incendiaries, and the grass is all overgrown, the centre greensward is now
planted with vegetables and the tennis court is ruined too. I wondered what had happened to the gardener who used to take such a pride in his garden there. In Eaton Place, there was a house on the
corner which had had the whole of one side removed by a bomb. On the sidewalk lay pieces of furniture, of sofas, curtains, and other things and a gold winged chair looked out rather forlornly from
the midst of the rubble. The stairs were intact and lead up and up into nothing at the top. In the rooms the mirrors, unsmashed, were still hanging on the walls, with a sheer drop to the street
below them and the lift was still there with its criss-crossing plating. A bookcase stood rather sadly with its side removed but all the books still in place inside and looking through a door into
what had obviously been the kitchen, I could see all the cooking utensils and china standing on the table ready for use. It was this that seemed to bring home to me suddenly what it all meant and I
felt quite sick and hurried away feeling somehow that it was indecent to expose people’s private lives and their things and not daring to think about the people themselves. I was only to be
confronted by the damaged St Peter’s, Eaton Square, where the clergyman was killed, and which, although all the walls still stood, was labelled as dangerous
.
It seemed really like a
nightmare and I was glad to leave.

Her parents had married in that church on 12 December 1912.

These accounts of the devastation of London occurred more and more frequently in the diary. It was as though my mother was handing me a pack of cards, one by one, each illustrated by her own
highly coloured images. Unwittingly, she was enabling me, over fifty years later, to experience history in the raw. Indeed, sometimes I felt, or hoped, that she had written the diaries for me.

At the end of April 1941, Anne left Hucknall for a new job. Just before that, Smithie, her pilot friend from Bicester and my future godfather, paid her a visit. He had been
awarded the George medal for pulling someone out of a burning aircraft.