Homing (6 page)

“You’ll want something to eat before you go back to the office,” she said to him, her head down. “I’ll make scrambled eggs for everybody, while you dress. We might as well, we won’t sleep now.”

Lights came on ahead of her, down the stairs. Mab and Virginia followed her, getting into their dressing gowns as they went, with the spaniel pattering behind. Sylvia stayed in their room with Jeff while he dressed, and they were the last to appear, just after Bracken, both men shaved and immaculate and
composed
, if a trifle grim.

Mab had laid the table. Virginia had made the tea and toast. Dinah produced a platter of bacon and eggs. Unbelievably they all sat down and ate. Only Mab refused the eggs, nibbling at a piece of toast and sipping her tea with milk. Only Sylvia had to force the food down her throat against an aching lump which threatened to burst and choke her.

“They’re trying at the Shop to get through to Johnny in Berlin,” said Bracken as he ate. “No doubt he is trying to get through to us. This will have shaken ’em up at the Taverne, where the correspondents hang out. Of course as long as the British Ambassador is still in Berlin there’s some hope. The House is meeting this afternoon, and then we may know what his plans are.”

“Do you think he’ll confide in us all?” asked Virginia.

“My dear, when the British Ambassador to Germany asks for his passports, that will be news and we shall hear about it, never fear.”

Still understated and collected, Jeff and Bracken departed for Fleet Street, and their womenfolk trailed wearily back to the dishevelled bedrooms and lay down to wait, if not to sleep, while the windows greyed into another muggy dawn and the city of London awoke to its headlines.

Soon after that the telephone was ringing again, and Dinah stilled it, answering from her room. It was Irene, urging that Virginia start at once for Farthingale with the children. Dinah explained that Bracken would be in the House that afternoon, and would report home as soon as Chamberlain had spoken.

“You surely don’t think the P.M. can wangle
again
!”
said Irene crossly, and hung up.

While they sat round the table in Dinah’s dining room having a second breakfast, heavy-eyed and rather silent, but fully dressed now and tidy, Mona rang up to say that Michael had gone to join his ship without even time for more than a
telephoned
good bye, and Dinah asked her to lunch.

“I suppose the Navy is gathering at Scapa Flow,” she said, returning to her chair. “Last time it was submarines we worried about. This time it will be planes carrying bombs.”

“I can remember,” said Virginia eerily, “a day when they drew the flat outline of a battleship on the ground at the Hendon air show, and a plane going about forty-five miles an hour flew over and hit it with a plaster-of-paris bomb from a thousand feet up, and we all clapped and thought how clever it was.”

“Yes, well—” Dinah agreed vaguely. “I suppose now we had better start putting things together here. Ian says we shall be blacked out soon, no matter what happens. There’s a grim little Home Office pamphlet about A.R.P. in my desk—not that I don’t know it by heart, but we might as well run through it again—”

Unemotional and efficient, they checked the pamphlet’s
requirements
. There was no last-minute scurry, for Bracken had already had a comfortable refuge room built in a reinforced corner of the basement, equipped with electrical outlets, and furnished with bunks and bedding, heavy tables and easy chairs, storage for drinking water, even a rug. Then Dinah had
assembled
in it some useful extras such as candles, First Aid kit,
electric kettle and small spirit-stove, spare radio on a battery, books, tinned food, and bottled drinks.

It was time now, Dinah decided, to hang the dark draperies which were ready to go inside the fitted blackout blinds at the windows on all floors of the house. “I will not live like a mole,” she had said when they were ordered some months ago. “We must be able to have all the light we want inside.”

Virginia was leafing through the pamphlet for the hundredth time.

“What a swot these incendiary bombs are going to be,” she grumbled. “Have you got all the bits and pieces to cope with them?”

“In the cupboard in the passage.”

“‘Two buckets, one full of sand, the other with about four inches of sand in it, and a shovel with a pole or broomstick lashed to it to lengthen the handle’,” Virginia read out
ponderously
. “You throw the sand from the full bucket on to the bomb to smother it, and then—
‘with
the
shovel
lift
it
into
the
other
bucket!
’” they chanted in unison.

“It’s not possible, of course,” said Dinah cheerfully. “But here are the buckets and the sand
and
the shovel! Not to mention a stirrup pump as well.”

“But I thought you weren’t supposed to put water on them.”

“Oh, Virginia, how do we
know
? And if we’ve all gone down to the shelter who’s going to be mucking about with buckets and sand? Sylvia says it’s exactly like a first night without a prop rehearsal!”

Mab drifted about in Virginia’s wake, being as useful as she could, feeling an uncomfortable detachment. These preparations were for other people’s safety, after she had gone back to
Farthingale
. Children would be no use in London, she knew, but nevertheless it was a guilty knowledge that one was oneself exempt from the immediate emergency only by one’s lack of years. That is, if they got away in time, before it began.

She was humiliated to find that she wanted to go
now,
at once, that she dreaded being caught in the general evacuation
undertow
, and that she was—yes,
afraid
to stay in London. To discover that one was a coward, Mab thought, handing up curtain rings to Bracken’s manservant on a stepladder in the drawing room, was really the last straw. To know this sick churning in one’s insides, to long to start packing a bag, to watch the clock, to prevent oneself by main force from asking when they were going
to start— But Bracken didn’t intend to let them run any risk….

Her hands were cold and clammy, and she took great care not to touch Gregson’s fingers as she handed things up the ladder, lest he notice and suspect that she was afraid. Gregson had been in the last war—all through it, twice wounded and gassed. Gregson knew he could stand fire. Gregson was brave….

Sylvia looked in at the drawing room door with her hat on.

“Oh, there you are,” she said. “Would you like to come round to Cromwell Road with me and see about the animal A.R.P.? I’ve been talking to some nice woman on the telephone, and she says I can put my name down to be an Animal Guard. I thought it was worth looking into—”

Mab accepted with relief. It was always comforting to be with Sylvia.

As they walked through the streets on that Thursday
morning
they felt the tempo of London quickening all round them. Men were at work reducing the traffic signals at the corners to thin coloured crosses. Men were painting white lines along the kerbs and traffic islands. Museums were loading their treasures into vans which would take them to prepared hideaways in the country. Police notices in unemotional black and white had gone up on walls and windows about masking your house lights and screening your motor lamps. And—this brought a sinking
sensation
when they realized it—live ammunition was being stacked round the A.A. guns in the parks.

And yet London was strangely calm, they felt, watching the unhurried, methodical workmen. Not just resigned. Not hopeful that it was all just another false alarm, either. But steady. Not the desperate composure of will power, like last September. Now there was a deep, unreasoning, illogical serenity. The British had put their foot down. And only by the periodic, inevitable secret wave of nausea in each individual midriff, resolutely downed
unmentioned
, did their nerves betray them.

Sylvia bought the noon edition of the
Standard
and they read it in the bus. The American Ambassador was advising Americans to leave England at once, and there was a rush for bookings on the s.s.
Washington
sailing at midnight.

“I’m glad that doesn’t mean me,” said Sylvia. “They’ll pack in like sardines, the way it was last year before Munich.”

“But you are an American,” Mab said almost with envy. “And so is Jeff.”

“Foreign correspondents are a kind of maverick,” Sylvia
remarked
with a certain pride. “They’re hired to break all the rules. To break their silly necks too, if necessary. It says here that volunteers are still needed to take charge of children in the evacuation—which may be ordered at any time now. That’s the sort of thing I ought to be doing, you know—instead of fretting about mere dogs and cats.”

“The children will get along,” said Mab unsympathetically.

“That’s the way I feel,” Sylvia agreed gratefully. “They’ve been organizing to deal with the children for months, I tell myself. Well, anyway—we’ll see what’s going on about the pets before I give up on it.”

When the House convened that afternoon at Westminster, Bracken was in the Press Gallery, noting tension but not gloom. The Prime Minister in a quiet, rueful speech admitted that there was imminent danger of war, but reiterated the pledge to Poland. Winston Churchill was not in his accustomed place, which
indicated
that he had not yet returned from his holiday in France. They would have Churchill back in the Government, everybody said, if Anything Happened. The House, having met and issued its warning and its reassurances, adjourned till the following Tuesday the twenty-ninth.

Mab and Sylvia returned at tea-time to Upper Brook Street, full of information about the animal A.R.P., which was indeed glad of another volunteer, and enthused by an irresponsible detour to the Radiolympia Show, where they had been entranced by the miracle of television, which would be like having a tiny cinema theatre in your own living room, they explained, as easy to turn on and off as a radio. For only thirty-two guineas, said Sylvia, and not taking up any more room than a sideboard—and Dinah hadn’t the heart to remind her that all television entertainment would cease instantly once war was declared.

Jeff turned up for tea, having done his own tour of the London streets and handed in his story. There was the usual patient, undemonstrative crowd in Downing Street, he said, watching the Foreign Office and the Prime Minister’s residence. There was increasing activity at the War Office, where poker-faced generals still wearing mufti came and went. The King was back at the Palace from his holiday in Scotland. The Fleet was admitted to be at war stations. All leave was stopped, and everywhere key men were disappearing quietly from their offices and clubs and homes.

“Take it easy,” said Bracken again to Virginia, when he came in for dinner. “We’re all right over the coming weekend
apparently
. Somebody is still trying. Ambassador Henderson for one, in Berlin. We got hold of Johnny on the phone there, to our intense surprise—had quite a chat. He says the British Embassy has begun to burn its papers. Well, they did that last year, too, before Munich. Most of the British journalists have left for the Danish frontier. Warsaw is said to be gay and defiant, with beautiful weather—but Johnny thinks the big story is still in Berlin. It’s a very baffled Hitler—up against a fed-up world. The question is, Will he be able to take it in now that he cannot accomplish another Munich compromise?”

Jeff was broadcasting to America at midnight, and they were going to try for one of their three-way roundups, bringing in Johnny from Berlin and also the man at the Paris bureau. Beamed at New York, Jeff’s broadcasts were not received over the English wave-lengths, so Dinah always joined Bracken in the little studio at the BBC and heard Jeff through the
earphones
. She arranged to meet them there tonight as usual.

During dinner Jackson at the office rang up to say that a cable had just been received from Evadne in New York. After two postponements because of her enchantment with life in America while Stephen and his father worked on the new show, they were sailing at once for England—there was no difficulty to get passage in that direction. Bracken dictated a cable right back insisting that they wait for an American boat. Returning to the table, he met Virginia’s anxious eyes with a smile.

“That settles that,” he said. “They’ll be coming straight into it. I just happened to remember the Lusitania.”

Sylvia began to wonder if Evadne might be disappointed in her for trying to save the animals when children and old people would be in need of help. Evadne had the strength of character to come back from Williamsburg when she didn’t have to,
because
of her warden’s post in Bayswater. That brought Stephen into the war zone with her, and the new show would have to wait. Stephen wouldn’t just sit around while Evadne worked at the post, he would get that mobile canteen going, and, if there were no theatres in London, he would organize entertainment for the forces….

They were all in it, up to the ears, Sylvia was thinking. Dinah went every day to the WVS office in London, Mona had her ambulance, Jeff would be out chasing the fire engines—they
would all be on a job when the bombs started coming down and they would have a right to expect Jeff’s wife to do something constructive too. And the papers were saying that animals who had no place to go were better destroyed….

Midge could go to Farthingale with the children to be really safe, but he wouldn’t understand that, he would want to be with her, and she had to be with Jeff in London. The people at the animal A.R.P. had welcomed her, and she had committed
herself
for training and brought back their leaflets.

There were plans for animal ambulances, she had learned, which in most cases would consist of private cars dedicated to the task. There were to be shelters for pets, underground or properly braced, with two exits, and intelligent humans in attendance; separate pens for each dog and cat, space for separate birdcages, an identity tag for each inmate, registered and numbered so that it could always be traced…. Midge already had his luggage tag for travelling, with her address on it.
Everybody
must have a tag like Midge’s now…. There wasn’t to be any charge, because it was the people who couldn’t afford to pay who would need it most. There had to be free food—I could buy a stock of food, Sylvia thought, and they wouldn’t have to bring it with them—often there mightn’t be time—and there will be strays, the woman said. Even without tags, the strays must be fed. There was still so much to do before it started, before rationing began, and they needed contributions terribly, and fortunately she had some money of her own….