Octavia's War (5 page)

‘What on earth would we do?' Emmeline said.

‘The children are going to be evacuated,' Octavia said, thinking aloud. ‘They've had plans drawn up for years, according to Tommy. He told me about it ages ago. Very well then, once I know where we're going, I shall rent a house big enough for all of us and evacuate you too.'

‘And leave this house?' Emmeline said.

Octavia's answer was brusque with the distress she was hiding. ‘If it's likely to be bombed, yes, of course.'

‘It would be a load off my mind if I knew you were out of it,' Johnnie said.

‘Oh dear,' Emmeline said. ‘You're all talking as if it's bound to come.'

‘It is bound to come, Ma,' Johnnie said, brown eyes serious.
‘In fact…' Then he paused and gave thought to what he was going to say. He knew it would hurt her but it would have to be said sooner or later and this seemed as good a moment as any. ‘The fact is…I was going to tell you this in a day or two anyway. The fact is, I've joined the RAF.'

The silence that followed his announcement was complete and intense, all three of his relations watching him with total attention. Then Emmeline began to howl. ‘Oh, my dear, good God! Don't even say such a thing, Johnnie. You can't do it. You simply can't. What were you thinking of? You'll get killed.' She picked up the paper and waved it at him. ‘You see what they've done. They kill people.' She was weeping in earnest now, the tears streaming down her cheeks. ‘Tell him, Tavy. He can't do it. Oh, I can't bear it. Not with the baby and Arthur in the army and everything. Didn't we have enough last time? Tell him, Uncle. Oh, please somebody, tell him.'

Johnnie got up, walked round the table, sat beside her in Octavia's empty chair and tried to hold her hands, but she shook him away, weeping terribly. ‘Don't touch me!'

He was very upset but he tried to be reasonable. ‘The bombers will come, Ma,' he said. ‘There's no doubt about that now. You must see that. They will come and we've got to be ready for them. I knew it would upset you but I had to do it. I couldn't just sit by and leave it to other people.'

‘I don't see why not,' Emmeline wept. ‘Why does it have to be you?'

‘I'm going to learn to fly one of the new fighters,' he told her patiently. ‘Look, I shall be called up eventually, Ma, we all will. You do know that, don't you. You must. It's been in all the papers. We'll all get called up. We shan't have any choice about it. So I thought if I've got to go anyway I might as well go now under my own terms. This way I can get to do the job
I really want, instead of being drafted into something I might not like. It's all right, really it is. I shan't take risks.'

‘Oh, oh, oh,' Emmeline wept. ‘I don't want you to go at all. You're my only son. Can't you see that? The only one I've got left. I don't want you to go at all.'

He looked across the room at Octavia. ‘Aunt?' he appealed.

‘I don't want you to go either,' she said. There was no criticism in her voice, only admiration. ‘None of us do, if we're honest, but I can see that you must. I think you've done a very courageous thing. And so does your mother. It's just a shock to her at the moment, isn't it, Em?'

But Emmeline was drowned in tears and couldn't answer.

‘It's the only thing I could do,' he told Octavia. ‘I can hardly go on designing buildings when they're going to be blown up. That would be nonsensical. Still, I'd better go and do it now or I shall be late and that won't please Mr Carmichael.'

Emmeline managed to stop crying long enough to kiss him goodbye, but when he was gone, she sat in her chair and cried most bitterly. ‘It's just like the last time all over again,' she wept. ‘Why can't those stupid fools in Geneva do something to stop it? They must have seen it coming. That was supposed to be the war to end all wars. They kept on and on about it. The war to end all wars. And now look where we are. First Squirrel, and then my poor little boys, and now my Johnnie. And baby coming along so well too. And Arthur in the Territorials, and God knows what will happen to him either. I don't think I can bear it.'

‘The trouble is nobody's asking us whether we can bear it or not,' Octavia said. ‘They're just assuming we will.'

Emmeline raised a tear-streaked face to her cousin. ‘I don't think I can, Tavy.'

‘Whatever happens,' Octavia promised, ‘we will bear it together. All of us. And now I
must
go to school or I shall be late and there's a lot to do. We'll put our minds to all this as soon as I get home. Ah now, here's Janet come.' What a relief to have that sensible girl to look after Pa and her poor Em. ‘More tea I think, Janet. We've just heard the news about Guernica.'

‘I'll have it on the table in two shakes of a lamb's tail,' Janet promised, putting on her apron. ‘Doan't you worry, Miss Smith.'

The advice was unnecessary, for Miss Smith was not a woman to worry. She was a woman who took action. If there was a problem she would deal with it. By the time she got back to the house that afternoon, she knew what had to be done and set about doing it at once.

First she wrote a careful letter to
The Times
. She described the attack on Guernica as cruel, callous and totally unjustified, and pointed out that the Spanish people were no threat to Germany, and that to allow a military power to bomb an open city and kill and maim its inhabitants was completely intolerable. ‘Something must be done to deter Herr Hitler,' she said. ‘The man is a bully and needs to be stopped.'

Then, since she was fairly sure that her letter and others like it would be ignored – how could it be otherwise when the League had no military power with which to respond? – she turned her attention to matters which were within her competence. She picked up the phone and asked for Tommy's number.

It was a relief to hear his sensible voice. ‘Tavy, my dear. What an unexpected pleasure.'

‘It might not be quite such a pleasure when you hear what I want,' she warned him.

‘I presume this is about Guernica.'

‘Yes,' she said, ‘it is, although not directly. I need some information.'

‘Fire away,' he said. ‘If I can give it to you, you shall have it.'

Straight in, blunt and to the point. ‘Where is my school going to be evacuated to?'

There was a pause while he gathered his thoughts. ‘That may take a bit of finding out,' he told her. ‘It's all very
hush-hush
at the moment.'

‘But they've made plans for it, haven't they?'

‘And they want to keep them secret. It wouldn't do for the Germans to get wind of them. We wouldn't want them
dive-bombing
the trains.'

‘No,' Octavia said, shuddering at the thought. ‘We would not. But I don't need to know the details. It's nothing like that. Just where we would be going. A hint would be enough. I'd keep it to myself.'

‘I'll see what I can do,' he promised. ‘You'll have to be patient though. I can't rush it. How's the family?'

‘Johnnie's joined the RAF. He wants to fly a Spitfire. Em's in a terrible state.'

‘That's two of them then. Mark joined up last week.'

Octavia could feel her heart sinking. ‘I thought he was going to Oxford.'

‘So did we. But apparently not. He says it's something he's got to do and Oxford will have to wait. Foolhardy, of course, but admirable.'

‘Like father like son,' she said. ‘I can remember what you said when you joined up.'

He laughed. ‘It's more than I can.'

‘You said it was the done thing. It was expected of a chap.'
She could remember his voice saying it.

‘
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose
,' he said.

‘Heaven help us all,' she said and meant it.

Her letter was published in
The Times
the next morning and so were several others from some rather eminent people. But, just as she feared, nothing came of it. The League of Nations deplored the attack but went no further, the British Government discussed it but decided that nothing could be done, the newspapers continued to print letters about it for a day or two and then dropped it and after that, to her annoyance, everything went quiet and the horror seemed to be forgotten. The people of Guernica buried their dead, General Franco, encouraged by the unchecked power of his German ally, redoubled his attacks on the government army in northern Spain, convinced that his rebellion would soon be successful and that he would be the next European dictator, and the British press turned its transient attention to the coming coronation.

‘And what good that will do to anyone,' Octavia said, ‘I really can't imagine. All this silly flummery. We should be concentrating on the things that matter.'

‘It won't stop our young men joining the Forces,' Emmeline said bitterly. ‘And that's all I care about.'

Johnnie got his expected letter two weeks later and passed it to his mother at the breakfast table. She took it better than Octavia had feared and only wept in private where none of them could see. Tommy and Elizabeth came to dinner with the news that Mark had already gone, and the two mothers commiserated with one another when they were all walking in the garden afterwards. Octavia was glad they had one another for comfort and company, and besides, it gave her the chance
to ask Tommy if he'd found out what she wanted to know.

‘I have tried,' he said. ‘But nothing yet, I'm afraid. I can't push it or they'd smell a rat.'

‘I only need to know the name of the town,' Octavia told him. ‘That's all. Uprooting a Dalton school is going to take a lot of organisation. We need more space than most schools and better timetabling. We need to start planning it now.'

He smiled at her urgency. ‘Yes,' he said. ‘I know. I've seen Lizzie's timetable. Couldn't understand a word of it. Don't worry, old thing. I'll persevere. You'll get your name in the end.'

But it was very unsatisfactory and her face showed it.

The summer progressed as though the world was still normal. The much vaunted coronation was held – despite her poor opinion of it – in May and exactly as planned only with a different king and queen, both archaically grand in state crowns and velvet cloaks. The two little princesses wore cloaks and crowns too, to Margaret's intense interest, and although rain was threatening all day, it held off until after the ceremony which the papers said was ‘a good omen'.

‘Good omen my eye!' Emmeline said when she read the newspaper accounts at breakfast the next morning. ‘Still, at least it's over and done with. I was getting heartily sick of it. All that fuss. Now I suppose his silly brother will marry that awful woman of his.'

‘I don't think it matters what he does now,' Octavia said, buttering her toast, ‘providing he keeps quiet.'

‘No,' Emmeline agreed, ‘you're probably right. Personally, I shall take the children to Eastbourne, as soon as Johnnie goes. They could use a holiday and Arthur's going to be away with the Territorials, so Edie says. You and Uncle can manage
without me for a week or so, can't you? You've got young Janet.'

In fact she was away for a month and, during that time, Tommy and Elizabeth came to dinner again, Johnnie wrote to report that flying was an absolute joy and, down in Sussex, Barbara and David celebrated their sixth birthdays and wore paper hats and had a special party at the boarding house.

According to Edith and Dora, who sent their aunt a daily postcard, all four children were enjoying the seaside very much and were being very good. ‘It might be the last holiday we get,' Dora wrote, ‘so we're making the most of it.'

It might be the last holiday I get to organise this evacuation, Octavia thought, and I can't even start. Oh, come on, Tommy. Buck your ideas up!

But September came and the new term began and she was still waiting. And to make matters worse, Hitler seemed to be starting up again. At the end of the month, the papers were full of pictures of him at his annual Nuremburg rally, posturing and shouting on a stage backed by an enormous swastika, and all of them reported his boast that the Third Reich would last for a thousand years. Then, as if he hadn't made his point abundantly clear, he appeared again, in the Olympic Field of May, dramatically spot-lit, with the hideous Mussolini pouting like a toad beside him and an audience estimated to be almost a million strong. Both men talked about their countries need for an empire. ‘Without colonies,' Hitler said, ‘Germany's space is too small to guarantee that our people can be fed safely and continuously.' Germany needed
Lebensraum
and he was determined to give it to them. ‘The attitude of other Powers to our demands is simply incomprehensible.'

Octavia wrote a postcard to Tommy that evening. ‘This
war is rushing down upon us at a rate of knots,' she said. ‘I need that information.'

Four days later he rang her at school. ‘Tavy,' he said, ‘I believe you were thinking of taking a holiday in one of our country towns.'

‘Yes,' she said.

‘I could recommend a trip to Woking.'

Octavia drove to Woking on the very next Saturday. It was a warm October morning and, once she'd cleared Kingston and was out in the country, the roads were bordered by shorn fields wreathed in smoke-blue mist and trees and hedgerows in a blaze of autumnal colour. It quite lifted her spirits to see them. Whatever this town was going to be like, she would do everything she could to make it a comfortable refuge for her girls.

It turned out to be a small, rather sleepy place. It had a sizeable railway station (which is where we shall arrive) facing an imposing Victorian hotel called the Albion – (I'll get something to eat there later on) – a small narrow High Street and a longer street called Chertsey Road which ran at a sharp angle from the square in front of the station and was full of shoppers. She parked the car in front of the hotel and set off to explore. Small shops, and lots of them. She noticed a MacFisheries, Boots the Chemist, Woolworths, Timothy Whites, Burtons, several good butchers (that'll please Em), bakers, grocery stores, even a bookshop, library and stationers run by one WA Elton, where she stopped to buy a map of the town. It struck her as she walked along the pavement that this was a gentle sort of place and that the people she was passing
lived at an even quieter pace than the one she was used to in Wimbledon. Groups of women stood on the pavement passing the time of day with their neighbours, errand boys cycled and whistled along the middle of the road, women pushed prams with their toddlers trailing behind them and there was hardly any traffic at all. She watched two cars driving by at a sedate pace and there was a horse and cart waiting patiently outside the fishmonger's, but, except for a gang of small scruffy boys who were obviously on their way to the Saturday pictures, nobody was in a rush. Yes, she thought, we could enjoy life here.

But where was the school? That was the important thing. I'll go back to that hotel, she decided, and have a pot of tea and take a good look at my map.

She was impressed by the Albion Hotel, which was spacious and comfortable, with Turkey carpets on the floor and armchairs to sit in while you drank your tea and a waitress in neat black and white to serve you. The map wasn't anywhere near so helpful, for although various schools were marked on it, there was nothing to indicate what sort of schools they were. The waitress said she didn't know, explaining, ‘I've only been here three weeks, ma'am,' but suggested asking the barman. That worthy wiped the counter dry, gave it a final polish with his sleeve and then spread the map out to take a good look at it.

‘What sort of school were you after, ma'am? If I may make so bold.'

‘A grammar school.'

‘That would be a private school, I daresay?'

It amused her to think that he saw her as a prospective parent. ‘No,' she said. ‘It's a county school I'm looking for.' They'd hardly be likely to expect a small private school to
share its premises with a large London county school.

‘Well, we've got two of those,' he said. ‘A boys' and a girls'. Which would it be, ma'am?'

‘The girls' one.'

‘That's in Park Road,' he said, tracing the road on the map with a finger so broad that it totally obscured it. ‘It's a fair old walk.'

She smiled at his concern. ‘I've got a car.'

‘Ah, well then,' he said. ‘Park Road, that's what you want. Over the other side of the station. You can't miss it.'

What she missed wasn't the road, but the school. She'd driven from one end of the road to the other, following it uphill and round several bends, admiring the new detached houses with their neat front gardens and their large windows and their carriage drives, noticing what a lot of fine trees there were, passing a long holly hedge and thinking that there must be a particularly big house behind that, but she'd seen no school. He
had
said Park Road, hadn't he? So it must be here somewhere. Sighing, she turned the car and drove slowly back the way she had come, looking carefully to the right and left. Then she saw what was behind the long holly hedge and realised her mistake. She'd been looking for a school building, thinking vaguely that it would probably be something like her own at Roehampton. What she'd found was a line of huts. There were five of them and they stood in considerable grounds, but they were just huts!

Oh dear, she thought, staring at their inadequacy. There'll never be room for all my lot in five huts, even if we have the whole place to ourselves, never mind if we have to share it. And she parked the car and went to take a closer look. She was peering in at the window of a science lab, feeling relieved that at least they had one of those, when someone walked up
beside her. It was a man in his shirt sleeves, carrying a mop and a bucket. ‘Can I help you?' he said.

He thinks I'm trespassing, she thought, and assumed her headmistress's voice at once. ‘Ah, good morning,' she said. ‘Are you the school keeper?'

He was and looked at his bucket to prove it.

‘Then you're just the person I want to see,' she told him briskly. ‘You would know how many pupils there are in this school.'

‘Three hundred and ten,' he said promptly, ‘as of this September.'

Two forms a year, she thought, calculating swiftly. It
is
small.

‘Were you thinking of sending a girl here?' he said. ‘If I may make so bold as to ask.'

‘Yes,' she said and added, ‘actually I was thinking of sending more than one,' wondering what on earth he'd say if she told him it would be somewhere between four and five hundred.

‘Oh well, in that case ma'am, perhaps you'd be better to come in again on Monday and see the headmistress.'

He's easing me off the premises, Octavia thought. ‘I shan't be here on Monday, I'm afraid,' she explained. ‘I'm only here for the day, getting my bearings so to speak. I shall be moving to Woking some time in the future.'

The explanation satisfied him but he watched her until she was back in her car. She approved of his vigilance. He's a good school keeper, she thought. He takes his duties seriously. Fancy mistaking me for a parent! I must look more motherly than I thought. But there was no time to consider her appearance, motherly or not. Now she had to find an estate agent and see what properties were available for rent.

By the time she finally drove home late in the afternoon,
she was tired and hungry but well pleased with herself. She had the details of seven large houses in her handbag, and there were pictures of all of them in her camera, three that would suit her family and four that were big enough to be turned into schools. If the school they were evacuated to was too small, the LCC would have to be persuaded to rent a house for them as well. Or two if need be. Now, her next task was to tell the staff. This war was coming and it was her job to see that they were all prepared for it.

Emmeline had spent a happy afternoon with her grandchildren. She hadn't had any refugees since the middle of September, so it really looked as if Mrs Henderson was right and Hitler had closed the borders. She felt sorry for the poor things who hadn't managed to get out but she'd been glad of the chance to get her house back into some sort of order just the same. She and Janet and Mrs Benson had given the place a late
spring-clean
and now everything was spotless, which was just how she liked it, and that afternoon it had been so warm they'd had tea in the garden, which had been another treat. She and the three older children had played croquet on the lawn while Edie was indoors feeding the baby, and they'd all enjoyed it very much. It had been so normal, as if there wasn't a war coming, and Arthur wasn't in the Territorials and Johnnie wasn't in the RAF. So when Tavy came home with details of the sort of houses they would have to stay in if they were evacuated she was none too pleased.

‘Yes,' she said crossly, flicking a glance at them. ‘I'll look at them later when I haven't got a dinner to cook.'

‘Would you like a hand with it?' Octavia offered.

‘No thank you,' her cousin said, stiffly. ‘I can manage.' And retreated to the kitchen as though it was a fortress.

‘Oh dear,' Octavia said to her father.

‘She can't face it, Tavy,' he sighed.

Octavia sighed too and sat down in her chair rather heavily. ‘It's been a day for disappointments,' she said and told him about the hutted school.

He listened with his usual quiet attention but without the concern he'd been feeling for poor Emmeline. The one thing he could be sure of with Octavia was that, however hard the difficulties she might have to face, she would press on until she found an answer to them. It was a great source of pride to him. ‘So what will you do?' he asked.

She put her bundle of specifications on the coffee table between them. ‘Get the LCC to rent one of these,' she said.

He smiled at her. ‘Of course,' he said and leant forward to pick them up and look at them.

By the time she held her next staff meeting, Octavia had her plans in order. She plunged straight into them as soon as the more mundane matters had been dealt with.

‘Since the bombing of Guernica,' she said, ‘I don't think there's much doubt that we are heading for a war with Germany. I wish I could say otherwise but I'm afraid I can't. Mr Chamberlain may speak of appeasement but behind the scenes the fact is we are preparing for war. Plans are already drawn up to evacuate the children from London, as I daresay several of you know.' Many of her colleagues nodded at that, for they were following events as closely as she was. ‘Very well then. You won't be surprised to know that I spent Saturday in the town that our school will be evacuated to. I can't tell you where it is because it's all very hush-hush, as they say, but as soon as I'm officially notified you will know too. For the moment, all I can tell you is that it's a small, quiet town not really all that far from London and the school
whose premises we shall be expected to share is extremely small. So we have some detailed planning to do. We shall all need to know exactly which books in our subject libraries are essential and which could be temporarily left behind, we shall need to have syllabuses for the next year written and run off and stored because we could find printing them difficult – at least for the first term or so – and we shall need to choose our prefects with particular care. They will have a considerable burden to carry.'

The staff were nodding at that too, for the house officers and prefects ran the school house system and that could be a cohesive force if the girls were going to be dispersed in strange homes all over a strange town. But their newest entrant, a quiet and rather diffident young woman called Mavis Brown, who taught History and Geography, was worried. She looked up at her headmistress, mutely requesting permission to speak.

‘Mavis?' Octavia encouraged.

‘I realise I probably shouldn't say this, being the newest – um – the most recently appointed…' Mavis said, blushing, ‘but what I'm wondering is, are we going to continue with syllabuses? I mean it's going to be very difficult, isn't it? Maybe we should try something a bit easier. I mean with a war coming and evacuation and everything.' She was finding the famous Dalton system very hard going, much worse than she'd expected and, from what Miss Smith had just said, it looked as if being evacuated was going to make it ten times harder.

Octavia was rather taken aback. She knew there were bound to be reservations and worries and that some of the staff would find it hard to produce a year's worth of syllabuses because they were used to working a term at a time but she hadn't expected the system to be questioned. ‘What do the rest of you think?' she asked, looking round at her team. She
could have answered Mavis herself but it would come better from her colleagues.

Morag Gordon spoke first, after adjusting her long cardigan and pushing her glasses up her nose while she got her thoughts into order. ‘This is all perfectly true, Mavis,' she said. ‘Preparing syllabuses of all the work we propose to do for every pupil in every subject for a full year, maximum and minimum, will take a bit of doing, but syllabuses are the key to the system we run here. If we are going to go on expecting our pupils to take responsibility for all the work they do, we must provide them with syllabuses. They must know exactly what the work is to be well in advance of the lessons that will, if we've planned them well enough, trigger the interest that will set their research going. That is the essence of the system.'

‘We can't let Herr Hitler bully us into changing our system,' Phillida said. ‘It's bad enough the way he bullies the Jews. We saw that when we were in Berlin, didn't we, Helen?'

‘Yes, we did,' Helen Staples said firmly, ‘and it was absolutely appalling. We need to stand up to the man. I don't think we should change a thing.'

‘Even if it means a lot more work?' Octavia asked, smiling, because she was so sure of the answer.

Helen and Phillida replied with one voice. ‘Yes. Of course.'

‘We shall need young women who can think for themselves more than ever if we're going to war,' Mabel Ollerington said. ‘There is a regrettable tendency for governments to tell us what to think when we're combatants. I can remember that from the Great War. It is understandable but nevertheless regrettable. We must nourish the critical faculty in every way open to us.'

‘I don't write syllabuses,' Joan Marshall said, which was true because she taught Games and PE, ‘but I'm with the system every inch of the way. I don't think we should change a thing.'

And no more we will, Octavia thought. Not if I have anything to do with it. But she spoke calmly. ‘Is that the general opinion?'

It was and even Mavis agreed with it when she saw how strongly it was being supported.