Octavia's War (33 page)

‘A government white paper, published this morning,' the newsreader said, ‘advocates free schooling for all pupils up to the age of sixteen. This will be a major change in the education system.'

‘There you are, Em,' Octavia said. ‘I might not have been able to get us all back home yet, but I've done
some
good.'

‘Now then,' Tommy said. ‘Time to fix this wedding of ours. Your school breaks up in a fortnight – that's right, isn't it? – so that gives us three weeks to call the banns, fix the wedding, book the honeymoon and go ahead and enjoy it. All you've got to do is name the day.'

The two of them were on their own for once in the house at Ridgeway. The children had been fed, washed and put to bed, Emmeline and Edith had gone off to the pictures, and they were out in the garden strolling about between the bean poles and the herbaceous borders enjoying the colours of the evening and with the privacy to talk to one another more freely than they usually did. Not that Octavia really wanted to talk about a wedding.

‘Don't rush me, Tommy,' she said.

‘Rush you!' he said. ‘Oh, that's rich, Tavy! That's bloody rich! It really is. I've been asking you for months and months. I've been the soul of patience. Or haven't you noticed? No, I don't think you have. I can't wait about for ever.'

‘No,' she agreed. ‘I know that. It's just a bit awkward at the moment.'

‘That's what you always say.'

‘It
is
, though. I can't just rush off and leave everything.'

He was heavily patient. ‘That's what people do when they get married.'

‘I know they do but I can't. It would mean leaving Em and I can't do that. Not at the moment. She's really not well at all.'

‘She'll cope,' Tommy said. ‘She's a tough old thing.'

‘That's the trouble, Tommy. She isn't.'

He caught hold of her shoulders with both hands and looked at her for such a long time that she began to feel uncomfortable. ‘You don't want to marry me,' he said at last. ‘That's the real trouble. It's got nothing to do with Em or anything else. The plain fact of it is, you don't want to marry me.'

‘No,' she said, trying to be patient, ‘that's not true. I do. It's just that there are things in the way all the time. We're not free agents, either of us.'

‘That's what you always say.'

‘Because it's true, Tommy.'

He threw his hands in the air. ‘I give up,' he said. Then he turned and walked away from her, heading towards the house.

She strode after him, persisting and feeling foolish. His anger always made her feel foolish and really this was so childish. ‘It
is
true,' she called. But he ignored her and strode into the house. She found him in the drawing room, standing by the window, scowling at the gathering dusk.

‘It may have escaped your notice,' he said, ‘but we're in the middle of a war and, if the reports we've been hearing are accurate, things are going to get complicated. According to our spies, Mussolini's been summoned to attend the Fascist Grand Council and it looks as though they're going to get rid of him.'

It was a relief to hear him talking shop. That was safer ground altogether. ‘Would that shorten the war?' she asked.

‘It might,' he allowed. ‘The point is, if it happens there will be diplomatic repercussions and we shall have to cope with them. It wouldn't surprise me if the new leaders didn't sue for peace. It's on the cards. The Italians don't have much of an appetite for war, especially when they're being beaten. They prefer an easy conquest like the one they had in Ethiopia. Anyway, what I'm saying is I might not get another chance to arrange this wedding for a long time. I think we should go ahead now, while we can. But you don't. OK. You don't have to say so. It's written all over your face. Very well then, I give you warning. I shall ask you once more when we get our next opportunity and if you don't say yes then I shall give up on the whole idea. I can't go on for ever waiting for you to make up your mind. Now I'm going home.'

And he went.

Octavia stood by the window and listened until the sound of his car had faded away. She felt demoralised and irritable. It was all so ridiculous. She couldn't just walk off and leave Em, not while she was still in this peculiar state. Since her last outburst she'd sunk deeper and deeper into apathy, doing the housework in a leaden, miserable way and barely saying anything to anybody. She'd only gone to the pictures with Edith because Edith had told her to, not because she particularly wanted to. She wasn't herself and she certainly wasn't well enough to be left. After knowing us all these years, he really ought to understand how I feel about her. But that was the trouble with Tommy, this now familiar dichotomy in his nature, meticulous planning and extreme care at work and rushing at things in his personal life, like a bull at a gate. ‘
Time to fix this wedding of ours
' without thought. It wasn't as if there was any real urgency about getting married. They
were
married to all intents and purposes. He could see her
whenever he wanted to. They weren't exactly living together because he had to be in London and she was here in Woking but it was a marriage as near as, dammit. And now we're in the middle of another row and there's all that palaver to be got through before we can be normal with one another again.

Sighing, she left the window and walked across to her armchair and the coffee table where a pile of books lay waiting to be marked. It's just as well I've got work to do, she thought, as she opened the first one. But she still felt miserable and inadequate and there was still far too much to worry about.

It was an anxious summer. There were so many people waiting and worrying, as the Eighth Army battled its way across Sicily towards Messina, and Lizzie Meriton was among them.

‘Ben says they've got to cut Messina off before the Germans get there,' she explained to Poppy, as they called the cows in for milking, ‘otherwise they'll escape across the straits to Italy and live to fight another day, and we don't want that.'

Poppy agreed that they didn't. But that was what happened despite the most valiant efforts of the Eighth Army.

Ben was most upset about it.
Now they've got away to Italy, he wrote, and we shall have to fight them all over again, and they've taken all their equipment with them, which is almost as bad.

But at least he wasn't fighting them at that moment which was a relief to Lizzie. She and Poppy were kept hard at work from dawn to dusk, milking cows and mucking out horses and ploughing the fields, and it was even more difficult when she wasn't sleeping properly. Her respite lasted for seventeen days. Then two pieces of news broke within a week of each other.

After a massive bombardment of the coastal defences, what the newspapers were now calling ‘Allied forces' invaded Calabria on the toe of Italy and opened up the attack on the Italian mainland. Five days later, just as Tommy had predicted, the new Italian government surrendered. Within a fortnight, the Eighth Army had conquered southern Italy.

Ben's next letter was happily optimistic.
Not long now,
he said.
We're bowling 'em over like ninepins.

It was good to open a new school year with such positive news filling the papers, particularly as it was now the fifth year of the war and girls like Iris Forbes and Sarah Turnbridge, who'd been evacuated as first-formers, were now house officers and preparing for their general schools examinations. Standing before her assembled school in the hall at Downview, Octavia looked across to where her sensible fifth-formers were gathered and smiled at the memory of how they'd been then, traipsing out of the old school hall in their hot new uniforms, with their luggage and their gas masks. It's been such a very long war, she thought, but it really
is
beginning to end now. Even old Churchill would have to admit that.

In fact, old Churchill was making plans for a meeting with President Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin to discuss the next phase of the war. Tommy wasn't looking forward to it.

‘It's in Tehran for a start,' he complained, when he came down to visit, ‘and Tubby says that's a hell of a place, even in November. But there you are, needs must when duty drives and all that sort of thing.' He'd quite recovered from their latest row and had arrived that weekend with a hamper of food, which even made Emmeline smile.

Listening to him, as he charmed her family in his familiar
easy way, Octavia found herself wondering what he would say if she suggested that he should excuse himself from this conference so that they could get married. It was catty and petty even to think such a thing but there were times when she couldn't help it. Still, he was charming, there was no denying that, and extremely generous.

‘How on earth did you manage to get all this food?' she said, as she and Em unpacked the hamper.

‘Guile and globetrotting,' he told her happily. ‘I'll bring you back some Turkish delight next time.'

He came home in a foul mood, complaining that Joe Stalin was absolutely impossible. ‘Bully, bully, bully,' he said. ‘He never listens to a word anyone says. Marches in with a gang of armed thugs as bodyguards, all boots and machine guns, and then just ploughs on and on, saying the same thing over and over again. We had instructions that we were to host ‘relaxed dinner parties'. The idea was to improve relations between us and the Ruskies. Wine and dine 'em. That sort of thing. Total waste of time. He wrecked every single one. We shall have trouble with him when the war's over, you mark my words.'

‘But the war's going well,' Octavia said. ‘I mean his army's been pushing the Germans back for months and the campaign in Italy might be a bit slower now but it's going in the right direction. He must be pleased about that surely.'

‘He wants us to open the Second Front,' Tommy told her. ‘It's all he ever talks about.'

‘Well, so do we,' Octavia said. ‘I'm with him on that one.'

‘But we know it's got to be properly planned or it'll go off at half-cock. He just wants to bully us into obedience.'

It was a cold, slow winter. The troops in Italy were bogged down by rain and mud, their aircraft were grounded by fog
and in Russia the arctic winter brought tanks to a frozen halt. There were days when it seemed as though the very forces of nature were conspiring against them. To Lizzie, crouched over her inadequate fire after a day at work in a chilly library, the world was black and cold and hopeless.

‘I don't think this war is ever going to end,' she said sadly to Poppy, who'd come down to visit her for the weekend. ‘I think it's going to go on and on and on getting worse and worse and I shall never see Ben again.'

‘He's all right though, isn't he?' Poppy said, ever practical. ‘And that's the main thing.'

Lizzie stretched her neck which was aching after all the reading she'd been doing. ‘He was last time he wrote,' she said, ‘but that's days ago and there's been some terrible fighting at Monte Cassino.' It was worrying her sick even to mention the place, leave alone think about it.

‘Look on the bright side,' Poppy advised. ‘I mean it'll be Christmas soon. What say we go Christmas shopping? I want to buy something nice for my mum.'

But Lizzie was looking at the dull grey of the sky and the bare black trees that edged the damp grounds of the college like spectres and couldn't see any brightness to cheer her. ‘It just goes on and on,' she said.

‘I tell you what,' Poppy said. ‘Let's go to the pictures.'

‘We must pull out all the stops this Christmas,' Octavia said to her staff. ‘We need something really lively to keep us all going. Any ideas?'

‘Stars,' Phillida Bertram said, tucking the ends of her shawl into her belt. ‘Symbols of hope. We can use sheets of newspaper painted midnight blue and pin them up along the picture rails like a sky-scape and then the girls can design the
stars and cover the sky with them. Bright colours, of course, and as many as we can paint. Should look good.'

‘Do we have a sixth-form play?'

As sixth form mistress, Miss Gordon knew the answer to that. ‘In rehearsal,' she said. ‘Octavia Whittington and her Cat.'

‘And a bran tub?'

‘We shall need more bran,' Joan Marshall said. ‘I'll get the prefects on to it.'

Not for the first time, Octavia thought what an extraordinary group of women they were and how fortunate she was to be able to count them as friends. There can't be many women who cope as well as they do, living in digs all this time and that can't have been easy, coping with the loss of friends and in some cases members of their family – Morag had lost a nephew in the Atlantic and one of Joan's cousins had been killed at Dieppe – living on their monotonous rations, scrimping and saving. Yet they took everything in their stride, they never complained, they were always willing and cheerful. I wish I could give them something really special this Christmas, she thought, as a reward for all their good work and she thought longingly of champagne and chocolates. But of course there was nothing she could give them. Luxuries just weren't available.

‘How's the choir?' she asked Jenny Jones. And got the expected answer.

‘Coming along lovely, Miss Smith. We've got a barbershop quartet.'

‘That'll be a novelty,' Phillida laughed.

‘Wait till you see them,' Jenny told her. ‘They're all going to wear moustaches.' She looked round at the others and grinned. ‘It's for the sixth-form play.'

‘I can't wait,' Elizabeth Fennimore said, adjusting her pincenez. ‘Octavia Whittington and a cat
and
four sixth-formers with moustaches. The mind boggles.'

It was a hilarious play and the barbershop quartet performed to shrieks of delight and prolonged applause. And that Christmas Eve, like a timely Christmas present for all of them, there was an official announcement broadcast on the wireless. General Eisenhower was to be the supreme commander of the invasion of Europe with General Montgomery as his field commander. The Second Front was on its way at last.