The Girl from Station X (32 page)

Anne went on being cheerful and, in her last two weeks at Bomber Command, took herself on cycling tours of the countryside surrounding High Wycombe, once going to Disraeli’s former house,
Hughenden. On 14 November, she even knocked out some rhyming verse as a farewell to ‘the clots’ which included the lines:

At Bomber Command, there’s a place called ‘The Hole’

And it’s here that Intelligence play the main role,

The atmosphere’s shocking, there’s often a fight –

But
one
end of the room is ‘A bit of All right!’

I was rather proud of my mother’s being able to knock out this doggerel with such merry insouciance.

She had her fortune told again, this time by a colleague, Doc Mackay. Anne seems gullible, interpreting Doc Mackay’s forecast of how she would do better abroad as a sure sign that she
would soon go to a new job in Washington, something that Lettice was trying to engineer. Anne therefore wrote that Doc Mackay’s seemingly prophetic words
shook me
rigid
!

Millie, meanwhile, had sent a postal address. The receipt of her letter inspired Anne to praise what she perceived as Millie’s rare sensitivity, great courage and sense of humour:

She gave me all I needed, restored me to sanity and feeling again. Why can’t I feel like this about John or Mervyn? . . . Someone (a man presumably!) has got
to restore me to sanity, someone who understands my mental moods, who is wild and temperamental like I am, no one else can help me . . . I cannot say this to people, so I write it all but to not
arrive at any answer thereby.

It is clear that she feared she would never feel for any man what she felt for certain women. Millie’s mother, she noted, had said that Anne was the most ‘alone’ person she had
met out of her generation.
How did she recognize it
? . . .
I am unstable as hell & yet never get the credit (or discredit!) for it, because I do not show
my feelings.
I felt sorry for my mother when I read this. At the same time I wished that she had shown
more
restraint, towards us, and had concealed her instability from me,
my father and my brothers.

The day after Doc Mackay’s fortune-telling, much of it came true:

November 15 1944. The most amazing thing has happened. Was in the office as usual this morning when was told that John Lodge (The John of my ADIO Ode!) wanted to
speak to me. He said that he had been talking to Humphreys and H asked him to find out from me whether I was ‘happy in my work’ – If not, he would like to have me back again to
work for him. He is i/c of ‘Disarmament of Germany’ whatever that means. Suspect that is merely a pseudonym for something quite different as is usual with H’s
activities.

Would like me to do a spot of his Admin. And write up some Intelligence data as well – They are going to Brussels in six weeks and will move on as the armies advance –
Lettice of course will be there too. Nearly fell over backwards was so surprised and asked him if I could possibly let him know on Saturday morning. He said he thought it would be O.K. & has
promised to ring me then. It would not mean that we should be forced into the Army of Occupation but would be demobbed according to our Groups as usual. Can’t collect my thoughts as yet, but
it seems too good an opportunity to miss. To be right in at the start and in RAF uniform besides in Europe where it means so much. Brussels is v. uncomfortable, no heating whatsoever, being buzz
bombed and rocketed besides, but to have the chance to see Europe now when it is 1st liberated and when almost no one can get over there seems worth these 5 years in the RAF.

Anne at once saw this job’s potential:

It will be seeing history at first hand and perhaps may be the thing that will restore me to sanity again, besides which, Lettice being there would make all the
difference in the world. Rang her up at once and she seemed thrilled to bits. Am going to London with her on Friday and will get
all
the dope I can
re H’s activities, conditions etc. The more I think about it, the more it seems too good to be true, perhaps I will come alive again.

I was excited by this and wished that I too had been able to witness post-war Europe. My own life seemed dull in comparison.

B
y January 1945, Anne had had four jobs in Intelligence and received over twenty offers of marriage. Having just turned down another ex-public
schoolboy, she wrote:
January 13th 1945. Can no longer get on with the people of my own world whose ideas have not changed with the war. How have they managed to stay the same and not
be shaken to their very foundations with new ideas, new ways of life and a wider viewpoint?

Earlier in the war, when Anne had been less sure of herself, she had often written of how she really only felt ‘at home’ with those from her own world. Now she decided that the
colonial (American, Canadian etc.)
outlook was more balanced and less prejudiced. She had always felt comfortable with Americans, finding their men warmer and more gallant.
(She had observed that the serial proposer John M treated her like his dog.) American troops were now much in evidence in Britain. There was an American car park in the garden in the middle of
Belgrave Square, the smoke from the bonfires there like
a Red Indian encampment
.

Most of her female friends were now wed, and Anne, at thirty, must have feared that she might never be married or have children. She did not wish to marry a man she did not love and her
independent means meant that she was not under pressure to marry for long-term financial support. But she still felt confused:
Why can’t I be like other people who are contented
with the routine order of life without questioning everything . . . Can’t I find a man with my own ideas, broad minded and poetical in spirit, gentle and with quiet charm . . . If there is
such a one, he does not come my way.

Anne was now working at Bushy Park, a GI station near Hampton Court. One American officer, of Croatian descent, invited her back to his flat and played the balalaika to her:
gypsy
tunes, showing the subtle differences between Russian, Polish, Serbian, Hungarian and Croatian music.
She was intrigued, but refused to go away for a weekend with him partly for fear
of appearing
cheap
and also due to
lack of sex knowledge
. At thirty, she was still a virgin.

On 21 February, Anne first mentions in her diary a Major Joe Darling, who took her to lunch at the Churchill Club, near Dean’s Yard, Westminster, then on to an afternoon concert at the
Albert Hall. (She had almost certainly met Joe at Bushy Park, but does not say.) They returned to 40 Belgrave Square for tea, where Joe discussed
Russia and the Polish
question
with Bill Sydney, who would inherit the beautiful old house of Penshurst in Kent and his father’s title of Viscount De L’Isle. (My grandmother, always on the
lookout for a good county marriage for her daughter, told me that she had hoped he would marry Anne; no doubt she and Anne were also impressed by his winning the VC, for his bravery in the Battle
of Anzio in January 1944 – he was in the Grenadier Guards.)

The same month, the 9th US Army Air Force had launched a huge aerial assault on Berlin, in an attempt to prevent a German counterattack against the Russian army, which was pushing on fast to the
banks of the Oder, only fifty-five miles to the east of Berlin. On 13 and 14 February 1945, Dresden had been bombed by the Allies; 25,000 people were killed and the city was in ruins. The Germans
had almost certainly lost the war.

Anne now heard that the first of her units would go overseas imminently, and her whole headquarters, minus WAAFs, would follow them to Europe within a month. Some weeks later, her own unit would
proceed to Germany. Typically, Anne now wrote that she
not
pleased to be going abroad, and did not look forward to being with an army of occupation. She was, however, taking compulsory
German lessons, in preparation, and also learning Russian independently.

Anne’s job at Bushy Park involved trying to obtain Intelligence Publications from various places in London – this sometimes proved frustrating. Attacks from the German V-2s on
Britain had increased, sometimes as many as eight or nine a night on London. In late March, during a weekend at Belgrave Square with Nah, they both heard the
terrific
explosion
of a V-2 falling at Marble Arch. Anne rushed up there that evening:
2 or 3 trees and lamp posts uprooted and earth all over the place . . . 3 people
killed.

The following day, she was back at Bushy, working hard, with only ten minutes for lunch and for tea, having to issue
all
Intelligence
Material to all the newly mobilized units (8 of them)
.

She was soon seeing Joe Darling regularly. In late March she lunched with him at Hampton Court. Joe had already fallen in love with her, and kept telling her so, adding that he relished her
joy of life.
(It is odd that my mother always appeared like this, given the tortured inner life that she exposes in her diary.) If he had not been married already, Joe
insisted, he would have proposed to Anne immediately. He added that he would like to take her to bed with him, but only when she was ready, and he went on to describe a gentleman as ‘one who
knows how to wait’.

Anne must have been tempted, because, two weeks earlier, she had visited a female gynaecologist,
to get the low down on sex.
Presumably, she had gone to enquire about
contraception. She then booked herself in for two more visits. On 25 March, Joe left England for France, where he was working for the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Forces
(SHAEF), under General Eisenhower. Anne found that she missed him,
more than I thought possible – his light touch and his enjoyment of life and way of making things rather
charming. Feel deserted and terribly unhappy . . . Never knew how much I had begun to count on his company
. Bushy Park was now almost empty and Anne found she also missed the other
American soldiers.

On 12 April, President Roosevelt died, giving
one a tremendous sense of personal loss in a strange way
.

The war was clearly winding down; in London the blackout was lifted for the first time in nearly six years. Andy, from Bomber Command, was with her at Belgrave Square and in celebration they put
on every light in the house, then walked round the garden:
a lovely moonlight night and it was rather beautiful to suddenly come into the house and see all the windows a blaze of
light.

Stationed in Versailles, Joe Darling wrote many letters to Anne over the following weeks. My mother kept them all and I was thus able to experience his devotion almost first hand. In one he
writes of how ‘
the charm of your friendship greatly mellowed my outlook, softened the harsh outlines of existence, put a patina on everything associated with you. It’s strange how
rarely one comes upon a really congenial person . . .
’

Joe was a more subtle seducer than her younger suitors; he wooed her gently and genuinely appreciated all her qualities, not just her looks. I could not help thinking how different this was from
my father, who, the first time he met his future wife, had been struck by her décolleté: ‘Your mother was showing her charlies!’ he told me triumphantly.

Despite the somewhat over-serious phraseology in some of Joe’s love letters, I could not help liking him, and, as I read more of his correspondence, I came to appreciate his sincerity, his
tenderness towards my mother and his appreciation of her intelligence. He wanted her as a companion, not just as a lover.

On 30 April 1945, Anne went with her unit to Brussels, taking off from Croydon airport in a Dakota. Sadly for Anne, Lettice was now not going. Anne recorded that she was a
sport about it, and it was thanks to Lettice that Anne was given a few extra days off just before leaving, during which she had gone to the society wedding of her friend Rosemary Bowes-Lyon,
attended by the Queen and
the two princesses
– the future Queen Elizabeth II and her sister, Margaret.

Anne and Joe Darling were now both in Europe – he in France with ‘Ike’ – though many miles apart. Anne’s unit was billeted at the Residentz Palace Hotel in
Brussels. On her first night she went
screaming round the streets in Lewington’s jeep with Ken Hollen and Betty Wickham-Legg, first to the café, where there was a floor
show, the women here wear very high hats and which look rather idiotic to us and shoes with built in high heels . . . we have become dowdy since the war.
Later she found herself in a
nightclub, the Lancaster, with ‘Lew’ – Squadron Leader Lewington – where they danced.
One Belgian offered us some coffee and another asked us to join their party
for a cognac.

Her first impression of Brussels was that it was like peacetime; the people looked well fed and, except for the masses of British soldiers and a few Americans, it seemed extraordinary to her
that there had been a German occupation there for four years. She was flabbergasted by the amount of goods in the shops:
all kinds of handbags in the best taste, watches and scent (all
the best Parisian varieties), drink etc. . . . I felt like a child at a Christmas party
– she sent
millions
of presents home. She looked up the two racy
Belgian women – Titi and Gigi Jacquet – that she and Chow had met on a pre-war skiing holiday and was out every evening in nightclubs:
it is a much more lighthearted and
carefree atmosphere than at home and London is far more war-scarred and weary than Brussels.