The FitzOsbornes at War (10 page)

23rd November, 1939

A
NOTHER LONG AND TEDIOUS DAY
at the Ministry of Food, made bearable only by the thought that it’s Thursday, rather than Monday. Sometimes I can’t understand why Veronica and I argued so fervently to be allowed to work in London . . . No, I do. It was to help the war effort. Which
is
important, even if nothing very war-like seems to be happening. I’m just in a grumpy mood because I spent the entire day removing apostrophes where Mr Bowker had erroneously added them, then retyping all the pages, then putting them in his tray, then having him summon me to his office so he could deliver yet another lecture about punctuation. This from a man who can’t tell the difference between possessive
its
and contracted
it’s
, who gets
affect
and
effect
confused, who spells
necessary
without a
c
! Why on Earth is
he
in charge of editing the food information sheets, anyway?

Well, I suppose it’s the same reason
I’m
working at the Ministry – because we both have friends in high places. Apparently, Mr Bowker is the son of a Very Important Parliamentarian, and
something
needed to be found for him to do. He used to work as an advertising copywriter, and he hasn’t been called up because he has flat feet. He tells everyone how
unusually flat
his feet are (I once got in a lift with him, and he told a complete stranger standing next to us). I’m not even sure what flat feet
are
. Not that I’m planning to ask him about it – I’d have to suffer through hours of explanation if I did.

The others in my department are nicer, or at least, more competent. There’s a brisk lady called Miss Halliday, who does most of the work that Mr Bowker is supposed to do, as well as her actual job, which is liaising with the people in the Ministry of Food kitchens and the scientific staff. Miss Halliday owns a dozen near-identical navy-blue suits and crisp white blouses, and her hair never moves at all – it looks as though a sheet of corrugated iron has been curved over her head and nailed into position with hair pins. There’s also Mr Bowker’s secretary, Miss Thynne, who is rather fat, and two other editorial assistants, Felicity and Anne. They are all what Aunt Charlotte might call ‘our sort of people’ if she were in a generous mood – that is, Mr Bowker went to Marlborough, and the others to finishing schools. Felicity and Anne keep crêpe de Chine evening dresses and silver dancing shoes in their lockers downstairs, so that they can race off to Claridge’s straight after work to meet their boyfriends for dinner, and then spend the rest of the evening careening from nightclub to nightclub. They’ve invited me along, but so far, I’ve always said no. They’re a few years older and far more glamorous than I am, and it’s a bit worrying when they say they’ll get their boyfriends to bring along a ‘spare man’ for me. I usually go home to cook dinner and do some laundry and labour away at my shorthand, but Felicity and Anne are convinced I’m sneaking off to meet a secret lover, and they take great delight in teasing me about him.

I suppose I ought to describe my work in more detail. Well, the day I started was the day that Mr Morrison, the Minister of Food, announced what
Picture Post
called ‘the most unpopular Government decision since the war began’ – that is, that food rationing will start in a few months. Britain imports a lot of its food, you see, and the German U-boats are doing their best to sink all our supply ships, so we’ll soon run out of things to eat unless the government takes action. Most of the people working at the Ministry are engaged in sending out ration books to householders, or having meetings with shopkeepers and farmers about the new regulations, or setting up Local Food Offices all over the country. However, my department is in charge of Food Education. It’s our job to inform housewives how to cook a week’s worth of meals with only four ounces of butter and twelve ounces of sugar, and to convince the British public that turnips and carrots and brown bread are far more delicious (and patriotic) than steak and bananas and chocolate cake. There is still debate about how we are to achieve these seemingly impossible goals, but the plan is that there will be official ‘Food Facts’ articles printed in the newspapers, and recipe booklets, and a poster campaign. Today, I spent the morning proof-reading a pamphlet extolling the virtues of oatmeal, while Felicity and Anne worked on a booklet about the vitamin content of various root vegetables. Mr Bowker sits in his office, supervising us editorial assistants and (more enthusiastically) unleashing his creative energies on potential publicity campaigns. Yesterday, he showed me a sketch of his ‘Potato People’, who had little legs and round, cheery faces, and were singing a song about how ‘delicious and nutritious’ boiled potatoes are. I’m not sure that making vegetables more human-like would motivate
me
to eat them in greater quantities, but at least it’s keeping Mr Bowker occupied. The more time he spends drawing spats and top hats on dancing potatoes, the less time he has to mess up my pamphlets with random apostrophes.

Veronica’s job at the Foreign Office sounds more interesting than mine, but also more challenging. At her interview, they asked her actual questions (that is, questions other than ‘When can you start?’), and she had to do a written and oral examination in Spanish. The gentleman in charge told her she had an ‘aristocratic accent’ – apparently that is a good thing, now that the Fascists have taken over in Spain. Officially she’s a ‘clerical assistant’, because it’s against regulations for women to do anything but typing, but she actually translates letters and documents. Her boss, an old friend of the Colonel’s, has lots of long luncheon meetings at expensive restaurants, and sometimes he’ll say, ‘Miss FitzOsborne, I’ll need you to accompany me as an interpreter’, even though he speaks perfectly good Spanish. Then it always turns out that the Spanish businessman or government official whom they’re meeting either knew Veronica’s grandfather (who was a Spanish duke), or her mother, Isabella (who seems to have been the Spanish equivalent of Debutante of the Year, with a dash of Tallulah Bankhead). The lunchtime conversations never appear to have anything to do with the war or the government, but her boss says that maintaining amicable relations with influential Spaniards is helping keep Spain away from the Germans and out of the war. I asked Veronica if the Spaniards were all ardent Fascists, because I couldn’t imagine her being polite to them if they were, but she said they don’t seem to be. Although perhaps they’re simply toning down their Fascism while they’re here, so the British will agree to help them rebuild their country? Things must be in a dreadful mess over there, after three years of civil war. One wouldn’t think Spain would be in any position to join another war, just yet. Anyway, Veronica says that she enjoys her work because there’s always some fascinating political argument raging about the office, as well as interesting archives to read in her spare moments.

The other advantage of her job is that her office at Whitehall is just down the road from Daniel’s. One of the first jobs his department did was to translate some propaganda into German, informing the German people that their Nazi leadership was corrupt, insane, bankrupt and doomed to lose the war. Then the RAF dropped millions of these leaflets all over Germany. I’m not sure what this was meant to achieve. Dampen general morale? Inspire the population to rise up and overthrow Hitler? I expect the Germans are using the leaflets as loo paper. Still, Daniel’s colleagues must have done good work, because when Goering gave a speech about the ‘laughable flyleaves’ that Britain keeps dumping on his country, he had to admit they were written in excellent German. Goering said they must have been produced by Jews and ‘other scoundrels’, which made Daniel laugh. Daniel also found it amusing that when the newspaper reporters here asked what the pamphlets said, the British government refused to tell them. The government spokesman claimed it was classified information, and that to tell the British press about it would be to risk valuable knowledge reaching the enemy – even though about six million of the pamphlets had just been dropped on Germany.

Apparently, it also benefits the enemy if the government tells British citizens where their recently arrived relatives are being imprisoned, because Daniel still doesn’t know where his cousins are, or when they will be released. Daniel keeps saying truth is the first casualty of war, which I
think
is a quote from someone important, but could simply be his own Socialist cynicism coming to the fore. I
am
beginning to see his point, though.

5th December, 1939

T
HE
C
OLONEL CAME TO SEE
me at work today. I think he’s the only person in the world, with the possible exception of the Minister of Food himself, who could have persuaded Miss Halliday to let me start my luncheon break fifteen minutes early. Felicity and Anne pricked up their ears and craned their heads towards the door when they heard, subsiding (only slightly) when they saw the Colonel was old enough to be my father. Perhaps I ought to have explained to them that he very nearly
was
my father. Although I suppose if he’d married my mother, I’d be an entirely different person – not a FitzOsborne, perhaps not even a Sophie.

I waited till he and I had signed ourselves out at the Ministry desk and stepped into Portman Square before I said, ‘Well?’

‘Well, what?’ he said. ‘I just happened to be passing by and thought we might go for a stroll in Hyde Park. As it’s such a lovely day.’

I glanced around. It wasn’t actually raining, but the sky was the colour of tarnished silver, and the gentleman in front of us had just had his hat snatched off his head by a cruel wind. The hat was rolling along the footpath and the gentleman, trying to preserve his dignity, was walking very fast rather than running, bending down at intervals with outstretched hand only to watch his hat get tugged out of reach, yet again. Then an especially strong gust made us all stagger, and when I’d refastened my coat, I saw the hat had blown onto the road and been squashed flat by a motor car.

‘Yes, lovely weather,’ I said, shaking my head at the Colonel.

He smiled, took my arm and led me across the road. ‘Tell me, how’s your job going?’

I explained I’d spent the morning toiling away at the Carrot Campaign. ‘Here’s the slogan my boss has produced, after working on it for an entire fortnight. Are you ready? “Carrots keep you healthy and help you to see in the blackout.” Brilliant, isn’t it? And he keeps putting an apostrophe in “carrots”.’

‘
Do
they help one see in the dark?’ asked the Colonel, looking as though he were trying not to laugh.

‘I don’t know. They’ve got vitamin A in them, and I think a deficiency of that causes night blindness. But that doesn’t mean nibbling on a carrot makes one instantly able to see in the blackout. If that were true, I’d be devouring them by the bucketful.’

‘Well, I’m sure it’ll be very worthwhile, this campaign.’

‘Yes, absolutely
vital
to the war effort,’ I said. ‘Hitler will be shaking in his boots when he realises our secret weapons are Carrots, No Apostrophe. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if my work is the one thing holding him back from invading the rest of Europe.’

‘So,’ the Colonel said, ‘you feel you ought to be doing more?’

I stopped, directly under Marble Arch, and stared at him. ‘I knew it. I knew you had some scheme in mind.’

‘Oh, Sophia, what a suspicious look!’ he said, steering me towards the park. ‘You act as though I were about to ask you to parachute into Berlin! No, no, I was simply going to enquire how your friend Kick was doing.’

‘Kick Kennedy?’ I said. ‘She’s all right, I think. She’s studying art and design now, at a college in New York. Why?’

‘Ah, you
do
write to her, then. I don’t suppose you ever drop in at the Embassy these days?’

‘No, why would I? I only ever went there to meet Kick.’

‘Hmm,’ he said. We’d wandered quite a way into the park, off the main pathway. ‘Well, perhaps – and this is mere speculation on my part, of course – perhaps you’ve bought her a Christmas gift. But the postal services are awfully slow these days, and you’re not entirely sure it will get there in time, so you’re planning to deliver it to her father and ask
him
to send it off in the next diplomatic bag.’