Octavia's War (32 page)

‘Has she been crying again?' Octavia asked.

‘No,' Edith said. ‘Just quiet and not saying anything.'

‘We'll leave it a day or two and see,' Octavia decided. ‘There's no point in dragging him out if she's just tired.' Doctors worked long enough hours without being called out unnecessarily.

So they waited and although Emmeline didn't seem to be getting any better and was still far too quiet and unsmiling, at least she was listening to the children when they came home from school and cooking the meals in her usual way.

‘Nerves,' Dora said, when she rang for the second time to see how she was. ‘I thought that at the time. Women do get nerves, especially at her time of life.'

‘She's fifty-nine, Dotty,' Edith protested. ‘She's long past that.'

‘Nerves,' Dora said firmly. ‘You mark my words.'

‘I think it's the change of life,' Poppy Turner said. ‘Women go ever so peculiar at the change. You should see my mum.'

She and Lizzie were in the British Restaurant in Oxford, eating meat pie, dehydrated mashed potatoes and overcooked cabbage, and setting the world to rights. The person whose behaviour they were analysing at that moment was the cook at Poppy's hall of residence, who had taken to muttering to herself and throwing saucepan lids about.

‘I don't think my mother ever reached the change of life,'
Lizzie said. ‘She was only forty-two when she died.'

Poppy changed the subject at once, alerted by the sadness that was dragging her friend's pretty face. ‘How's Ben?'

‘Cheesed off, so he says,' Lizzie told her. ‘They're waiting to invade Sicily and he says it's non-stop bull.'

‘What's bull?'

‘Unnecessary spit and polish, drill, that sort of thing. They all had to have a bath last week because Monty was coming to inspect them and apparently when he says “Have you had a bath, soldier?” they have to be able to answer “Yes, sir”. He said it was absolutely ridiculous. I mean it must have been if you think about it, having a bath in the desert. He said it was ten men to a small tin bath, so the last one got out dirtier than he went in.'

‘Heavens!' Poppy said. ‘When's he coming on leave?'

Lizzie sighed. ‘When they've conquered Italy, as far as I can make out.'

‘Heavens!' Poppy said again. ‘But that could be ages.'

‘Yes,' Lizzie said. ‘It could.' And every single day he was fighting she would worry about him and feel afraid. It was an anguish to wait for news when he was in the middle of some attack somewhere. It gave her a nasty scrabbling knot of fear in her belly nearly all the time and at night when she was on her own she wanted to howl. Even when a letter did finally come, it was still dreadful because although she knew he'd been all right when he'd posted it, anything could have happened to him while it was being sent to England. In one way this long wait for news of the invasion was better. She was lonely and missed him achingly but at least she wasn't frightened all the time.

She looked at her empty plate and sighed again. If only the war could be over and done with and they could be together.
But it went on and on and the news was dreadful, even if there were more victories now. The only respite from it was to disappear into her reading and live in the easier delights of romantic poetry, Elizabethan drama and the
nineteenth-century
novel, or to give herself over to the provocative stimulus of being taught by Helen Gardner and Dorothy Whitelock. She was well aware that, had it not been for the war, her life at Oxford would have been extremely pleasant, a bit like life at Downview really, each of them with their own carefully doled out rations of butter and jam and their own scuttleful of coal. The conversations in their rooms at night, when they drank cocoa and huddled over their inadequate fires, were a trifle more learned – they talked about sex and Shakespeare, politics and Priestley, deplored the deliberate elitism of Ezra Pound and T S Eliot, discussed the news. Of course they kept their most private thoughts to themselves. It was only when Poppy or Mary came to Oxford to visit her that she was able to talk about Ben, and even then there were a great many things she couldn't tell them, all of them censored in one way or another.

‘What's for afters?' Poppy was asking the waitress.

‘Apple pie and custard.'

Poppy made a grimace. ‘Why is it always apple pie?'

‘Search me,' the woman said. ‘I suppose we en't run out of apples.'

‘Two,' Lizzie told her. ‘We've got to have something to keep out the cold.' It was a wintry sort of day and she'd left her gloves in her room. ‘Now then, Poppy, tell me how you're getting on with your course. Last time you were here you said you weren't learning anything that Smithie hadn't taught you already.'

‘Actually,' Poppy said, ‘we had a very good lecture only last
week from a woman called Miss Ellis. All about what schools are going to be like when the war's over.'

‘And what
are
schools going to be like?'

‘Well…' Poppy said. ‘According to this Miss Ellis…'

Emmeline's ‘nerves' kept her quiet and unresponsive until the third week of April, and by then Edith and the girls had grown used to the change in her and didn't pay much attention to it. Octavia had been watching her more closely and she was still worried. It was so unlike her competent, outspoken cousin to be subdued and quiet. She wasn't crying any more, which was one good thing, but there was something about her that was, well, disquieting to say the least. If Octavia had been asked to describe what it was, she'd have said she wasn't herself. Not that anybody did ask her opinion. They were all too busy getting on with their lives. So she watched and worried and was careful to hide the newspapers when the news was bad, just in case it provoked another outburst. And the news was bad, particularly that week.

The first sign that something terrible was happening was a report that somehow or other the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto had managed to get hold of some guns and were actually fighting the Germans. An SS officer called General Juergen Stroop had been sent to the ghetto with two thousand troops to ‘subdue' them with machine guns, mortars and
flamethrowers
. As more details began to emerge it was obvious that the Jews were being massacred. Some of them had tried to escape by taking to the sewers, so the sewers had been flooded to flush them out. There was talk of thousands of deaths and of dead bodies lying in the streets covered in newspaper.

But it wasn't until Tommy came down for a long weekend that she found out exactly what had happened and by then
she'd had an anguished letter from Mr Mannheim telling her what little he knew about it.
What a wicked world we live in,
he said,
that such things can be done.

‘All quite true, I'm afraid,' Tommy said. ‘We've had some truly appalling reports coming out. There were over three hundred thousand Jews in the Warsaw ghetto when the Nazis set it up and now it's down to fifty thousand. A lot have been sent to concentration camps, of course, but a lot more have died of starvation. This uprising was sheer desperation.'

‘It's too dreadful to think about,' Octavia said passionately, ‘so what it must be like to be living there and enduring it and seeing it happening every day…'

‘The
Mirror
says the Germans are going to kill them all,' Edith said.

Tommy sighed. ‘That seems to be their intention, yes.'

Emmeline had been sitting at the table listening without saying a word. Now she stood up, her face wild. ‘Those wicked, wicked Germans,' she said. ‘Haven't we had enough of them? Killing and killing and killing. There's never any end to it. My poor dear Cyril gone and Podge gassed and Dickie and my poor Eddie and my Johnnie with his leg amputated and now all these Jews being burnt and gassed and all for what? That's what I want to know. All for what? It's evil. Don't you see? It should be stopped before we all go mad. That's what'll happen. We'll all go mad. I can't bear it. Why doesn't someone make it stop? I can't bear it.' She was crying so much her words were slurred. ‘Bear it…' she wept. ‘I can't…It's not fair…I can't.'

Edith and Octavia put out their hands to her, begging her to stop. ‘Mum! Please don't.' ‘Em dear, please…' But she shook them away and turned from them wildly. Then she ran headlong out into the garden, banging the kitchen door after her.

They looked round at Tommy, neither of them quite sure what to do. ‘Leave her be,' he advised. ‘She won't come to any harm in the garden.'

Edith was embarrassed that he should have seen such an outburst. ‘I'm so sorry,' she said. ‘What must you think of us?'

‘I've seen men go off like that in the trenches,' he said. ‘They used to babble and cry too. They called it shell-shock in those days.'

‘Shell-shock?' Edith said in disbelief. ‘But she's not been shelled. I mean, it's peaceful here. She hasn't even been bombed. She should try that if she wants to be shell-shocked.'

‘Quite possibly,' Tommy said mildly. ‘It looks the same to me, that's all.'

Octavia was remembering some of the things her cousin had been saying. ‘Perhaps it's a not a matter of what happens to your body,' she said, ‘but what happens to your mind. She lost your uncle Cyril in the first war, Edie – that was what she was talking about – and your two little brothers in the flu epidemic and both your grandparents in that road accident. Maybe she's just had more than she can take. Maybe that's what shell-shock was too. The thing is, what are we going to do about her?'

‘If we move into the kitchen,' Tommy said, ‘we can see what she's doing. Keep an eye on her sort of thing.'

So they moved to the kitchen and Edith made a pot of tea and Octavia watched her cousin pacing up and down in the vegetable garden. She seemed to be talking, because she was waving her arms in the air and stamping her feet and, after a long time, she sat down on the garden seat and put her head in her hands.

‘You stay here,' Octavia said to Edith. ‘I'll go and see how she is now.'

She was moaning as though she was in pain, and she didn't stop or look up when Octavia sat down beside her and put her arm round her shoulders. The physicality of the comfort she was offering reminded her of all the weeping girls she'd held in the same way and without even stopping to think about it, she started to say the same comforting things. ‘You cry, my darling. Cry all you want to. It's all right.'

And Emmeline cried in the same way and with the same abandon. ‘Oh, oh,' she wept. ‘I want it all to be over, Tavy. I don't want to be in this awful house, scrubbing that awful floor and standing in queues all day. I want to go home.'

Now that's better, Octavia thought. That's practical. That's something I can arrange. ‘Dry your eyes and come in and have a cup of tea,' she said, ‘and I'll see what I can do about it.' After all, London was very rarely bombed these days. It might be possible for them all to go back. I'll write to Mr Chivers and see what he thinks.

She wrote her letter before she went to bed that night, even though Tommy complained that he couldn't see why it couldn't wait till morning. And the answer came back almost by return of post. Mr Chivers quite understood her point of view and, as she had pointed out, there
were
very few bombing raids nowadays, but he was sorry to have to tell her that the LCC didn't consider it safe enough for schools to return yet and he would strongly advise against it, at least until after the Second Front was underway and the airfields in France had been cleared. It should be safe enough then. As soon as it
was
possible for the school to return he would let her know.

It was a disappointment, there was no denying it, but not an unexpected one. When she'd thought about it calmly, which wasn't until after she'd posted the letter, she'd known
what the answer was going to be.

By that time, Emmeline had dropped into apathy again but she read the letter when Octavia offered it to her. ‘Well, thank you for trying,' she said and sighed. ‘That's that, I suppose.'

‘I'll try again, Em,' Octavia said. ‘I'll keep on trying. I'll get you home just as soon as I can. I promise.'

But it was obvious that that would depend on the Second Front, and they hadn't even invaded Italy yet.

The news of the invasion came in a BBC bulletin four days later. Speaking in his usual calm and measured tones, the newsreader said that troops of the British 8
^th
Army under General Montgomery had landed in Sicily in conjunction with the United States 7
^th
Army under General Patton. They were attacking on a front one hundred miles long. The advance was swift. The next day the bulletins were reporting that the 8th Army had captured the port of Syracuse. Twenty-four hours later, Augusta surrendered to them and three days after that the Americans took Agrigento and Porto Empedocle.

Lizzie and Poppy followed the news in the farmhouse, standing by the kitchen table and holding hands for comfort. The familiar terrible fear was scrabbling in Lizzie's belly every time she thought of where he was and what he might be facing and the bulletins made it worse, although she had to hear them.

‘He'll be all right,' Poppy said, squeezing her hand. ‘You'll see. And it's ever such good news.'

That was true, Lizzie thought. But she did so wish he wasn't part of it. Please don't get hurt, she willed him. Please come through it.

Octavia heard the bulletins sitting in the kitchen in Ridgeway with a cup of tea at her elbow. And at the end of the seventh bulletin there was a piece of ‘news from home' that pleased her almost as much as the ‘news from abroad'.