Aunt Letitia Page 15

  But it was not forgetfulness that was her problem: just the opposite.

  Towards the end of the terrace was the gap where the bomb had fallen in 1941. That had been the worst moment of all, the closest she had come to death. She remembered clearly the horrible sensation of the suction and compression of the blast, and the way the windows had shattered. Scalding water from the kettle had burnt her. There was still a mark on her arm, but it had faded almost to nothing now. The ugly wound in the terrace had also been transformed. It had become over time a little wilderness. Grass grew there, and clover. To this green was added the red, white, yellow and purple of fireweed and plantain and Oxford ragwort. There was also a more exotic plant, name unknown, said to be an escapee from Kew. On a broken beam up-thrust from the rubble, a blackbird sat trilling, watching her with a glassy eye.

  If she closed her eyes, breathed in the scent of the grass and the flowers, let the song of the blackbird wash over her, she could almost imagine herself back in the days of her youth, walking in a summer meadow, a place she had often visited once upon a time. The sun had been hot there too, and she had waded through the long grass, her hat dangling, pollen tickling her nose. She had lain on her back looking up at the sky, bees buzzing, the grass rustling in the gentle breeze, the long chirping song of a skylark cascading out of the blue.

  Letitia opened her eyes, smiling at the memory, and began walking back towards her house. She cast a shadow before her now and, watching it move slowly along the pavement, she remembered how a similar shadow had fallen over her as she lay in the long grass. She had sat up abruptly, momentarily afraid, shielding her eyes against the sun. A young man had been standing over her, etched against the sky, his shirt tatty, his waistcoat frayed, string tied round his trouser legs below the knees, a scythe in his hand. To Letitia, dreamy-eyed, contemplating the beauty of the world, this sudden apparition had seemed the most beautiful thing of all – the essence of everything she had been thinking and feeling just moments before.

  Wicked! Immoral! Unregenerate sinner!

  The vision in her mind abruptly changed. Darkness engulfed her. The summer meadow had gone. She was kneeling in a black void, small and frail, looking up not at a young man with the sun in his hair but at a monstrous figure, a terrible demonic spirit wearing the robes and symbols of a bishop. There was no face beneath the mitre, just a fiery glow, like London aflame in the blitz. One twisted claw held a staff; the other gripped his pectoral cross. The image was so real, so terrifying, that it set her heart racing. She shivered, stumbled, jerked her stick out to stop herself falling, breathing heavily.

  It troubled her that she could not remember what her father looked like – as if being able to picture him as an ordinary man would diminish him, lessen the fear. Had there been any family resemblance, any facial hint of the bishop in Jocelyn or Arnold? Impossible to say. She had only the vaguest memories, had spent a lifetime trying to blot him out, was not sure now if he had been tall or short, thin or stocky, whether his nose had been aquiline like Jocelyn’s, or snub like Hugh’s, if he had had Arnold’s black hair, or Hugh’s mousy colour, now turning grey. The bishop had become a presence rather than a person, her father no longer.

  There was still a portrait of him in the chapter house at Chanderton, or so she believed, but she had not been back to Chanderton since the night she’d been being bundled into a furtive carriage and driven away, over seventy years ago.

  At last she was back by her own front door. She took the area steps one by one, clutching the rail. The house was quiet, most of the Mansells out. Peggy was somewhere about. The two girls aged four and two were no doubt in the old drawing-room which was now a play-room, where they made stains on the carpet and scratched the armoire and spread their toys all over the floor. Peggy rarely admonished her children, and never cleaned up after them. A lazy girl, Peggy. A slattern, Mrs Mansell had been known to call her, losing patience: young people today … she added bitterly, leaving the sentence hanging. Letitia sometimes felt nostalgia for the days when her house had been her own, but she knew that she would no longer be able to cope alone. She needed looking after in her decrepitude. Having the Mansells here made a virtue of necessity.

  Sitting in the kitchen, laying her stick aside, Letitia closed her eyes for her afternoon snooze, trying to recapture that feeling of walking through the long ago meadow as a girl who had known nothing of gout or arthritis or varicose veins.

  Letitia was in bed but not yet asleep when the alert sounded. It must be around midnight, she thought, staring round at the dark. It always set one on edge, the siren, bringing back memories of 1940 and 1941, cowering in the basement night after night as the Luftwaffe roamed the skies at will. More recently there had been the little blitz which had made everyone so jittery. Since then, nothing. Surely this must be a false alarm? But it drove sleep just that much further away.

  Sitting up in bed, Letitia switched on her bedside lamp and reached for her book.

  Mrs Mansell tapped on the door and popped her head round. ‘I’ll just check the blackout for you, shall I, Mrs Warner?’

  Letitia gave a wry smile: check up on me, is what she means.

  Mrs Mansell busied herself at the window. She looked, thought Letitia, rather tired and run-down.

  ‘Why don’t you come down to the kitchen, Mrs Warner?’

  ‘I don’t think so. I shall just sit here quietly and read. It will only be a false alarm.’

  ‘As you like.’ Mrs Mansell stopped fiddling with the blackout, come over to hover by the bed. ‘Feeling all right are you? Didn’t eat much of your tea.’

  ‘Somehow I can’t get used to sausages made from whale meat.’

  ‘No. I suppose not.’

  The screaming of a child interrupted them.

  ‘The Immaculate Conception.’ Mrs Mansell sighed. ‘No rest for the wicked.’ She departed.

  The Immaculate Conception: it was an old joke which to Letitia’s mind had worn thin long ago. She thought of it as Mrs Mansell’s way of reminding her of Ian’s culpability in the matter of Peggy’s daughter. Mrs Mansell could, at times, be somewhat acerbic, not to mention repetitive. On the other hand, she cooked, cleaned and foraged voraciously, and on top of all that she had taken a job in a munitions factory ‘to make ends meet’. Fractious grandchildren were the last thing she needed and this evening Peggy’s two had been particularly bothersome. ‘We don’t like these sausages, Granny,’ they had grizzled. ‘They don’t taste nice; we won’t eat them.’ One could hardly blame them. One might have blamed Peggy, who could do more to help; but to the young the war must seem to have been going on half their life. No wonder they got despondent at times.

  Letitia opened her book. Her eyes followed the words down the page but her restless mind was elsewhere. Where was Ian now, whose child would not eat whale meat sausages? Was he still in England, or was he over in Normandy in the thick of the fighting? It was a nasty business, over in Normandy: at least, that was the impression one got, reading between the lines in the newspaper.

  She looked up from her book, distracted from her thoughts by distant gunfire, the faint sound of explosions – yet no hum of aeroplane engines. It was unsettling. There had been nothing like this since April. One had assumed, with the advent of D Day, that the Germans would have too much else on their plate to think of mounting raids. One tended to forget what an ingenious and resourceful race they were. Tenacious, thought Letitia: like me.

  The book slipped off her bed as Letitia nodded in fitful sleep. The distant noises of war merged with her dreams. She was wading in her nightdress along a flooded First War trench just as Hugh had described them in his letters, guns booming all along the line. There were piles of corpses at all the traverses. Letitia picked amongst them with arthritic fingers, searching for Hugh, whom she believed was dead; but nowhere could she find his body….

  Next morning the alert was still in force. This was unusual and disquieting. Clive was of the opinion that it was a mistake: someone h
ad forgotten to sound the all clear. His father muttered darkly about the foolhardiness of venturing out of doors when there was a raid on, but to Mrs Mansell this was simply an excuse not to go to work. She gave him short shrift. Peggy was still in bed.

  The house emptied. The all clear sounded at last, only to be followed almost immediately by another alert. Nothing seemed to happen: no aeroplanes, no bombs; but hearing the siren in broad daylight was odd, giving a touch of the surreal to things, as if she was still dreaming.

  Alert or no alert, Letitia was not to be denied her daily constitutional. She struggled up the area steps with her stick after lunch to meet a grey, oppressive afternoon, the sound of the city muffled and distant. The very air seemed stale and heavy. Even the bomb-site wilderness failed to charm.

  Back in the kitchen, she sat listening to the raucous sounds of the children upstairs. The Immaculate Conception was exercising her young lungs vigorously. Peggy was no doubt lolling on the sofa taking no notice. Letitia turned on the wireless to drown out the noise. The news was on. There was no change in Normandy. Did this mean Ian was alive, dead, missing an arm or a leg? Or still safe in England? The BBC newsreader, sounding calm and disinterested, announced that reports were coming in of pilotless planes being used against southern England. Was this, then, the reason for the unexpected alerts: some new devilry on the part of the inexhaustible Germans? Have we not suffered enough? thought Letitia feeling suddenly very weary. Air raids, the blackout, rationing – and now this. It was interminable.

  She reached across, switched off the wireless, not wanting to hear about death in Italy, death in the Pacific, death in Russia; but there was no escape from it, even in the silence of her kitchen. The war seemed to permeate everything – even the air one breathed.

  By the time Megan called round on Sunday, the mysterious pilotless planes had become ominously familiar. After three days’ bombardment, Letitia had grown to recognize the sound of their buzzing engines and once, stepping out for a breath of evening air, she had seen a little flickering flame pass by overhead.

  Megan knew more. Pilotless planes, she said, had dropped on a hospital in Kensington and a convent in the Bayswater Road; that very morning one had hit the Guards’ chapel killing many of those attending matins.

  ‘There is no respite,’ said Letitia as they talked in her bedroom, away from the multitude of Mansells. ‘These things come indiscriminately, day or night.’

  ‘Why not leave London for the time being? It’s worth considering.’

  ‘Oh, tush. I’ve got by thus far in my own house. Do you think I’m going to be driven out now that the war is nearly over?’

  Megan smiled. ‘You are stubborn.’

  ‘It has been said.’

  ‘At the very least, you should spend more time in the basement, not up here, exposed on the second floor.’

  ‘If there is a direct hit—’

  ‘You would still stand more of a chance downstairs.’

  Letitia sighed, rubbing the arm of her chair. ‘The problem is, I can’t bear to be in the kitchen nowadays, listening to that girl going on and on, and her children caterwauling. I know that I sound like an old grouch. I don’t begrudge the Mansells finding shelter here, I really don’t; but my ears are more sensitive than they used to be. And there was I thinking that one went deaf in old age.’

  Since the advent of the buzzing bombs, Peggy had taken up residency in the kitchen and refused to budge for anybody. It was a very big kitchen, she said, with plenty of room for everyone. But it did not seem so big with the children running round shrieking and bumping into one’s legs. The kitchen had been a place of refuge since the early days of the blitz in 1940, but now there was no peace morning, noon or night. Letitia had been driven out.

  ‘If these pilotless planes keep coming,’ said Megan, ‘there may be a new evacuation scheme. That would get Peggy out of your hair. I shall keep my ear to the ground.’

  ‘That would be one solution. I really don’t want to fall out with Mrs Mansell because of her wretched daughter.’ Letitia sighed. ‘I joke about being crotchety, but I am not usually like that. I don’t know what’s come over me lately.’

  ‘The deprivations of war. Everyone is the same. And with this new menace….’ Megan shrugged. ‘It will get worse before it gets better.’

  ‘It’s the shortage of whisky I take exception to,’ said Letitia. ‘There’s none to be had for love or money, unless one is prepared to pay in gold. I had quite a good supply at the start of the war, but it has dwindled to nothing – dwindled, I might add, with the considerable help of Mr Mansell. I have never known such a nose for spirits. He sniffed out all my hiding places.’

  ‘I may be able to help there too,’ said Megan, getting up. ‘I have my contacts.’ She tapped the side of her nose as she departed.

  Letitia hauled herself out of her chair, went to stand by the window, watched as Megan bumped her bicycle up from the area, got on, pedalled away. The square looked decidedly dilapidated, railings missing, house fronts peeling, potatoes growing amongst the plane trees. But it was a wonder she could see anything, the window was so grimy.

  Letitia stretched out on her bed, thinking of Megan. Like Mrs Mansell, Megan was always on the go, but one knew so little about her. She kept her life compartmentalized. Who, for instance, were these ‘contacts’ she had mentioned? Who were her friends? One had not known her parents; she did not have a pedigree stretching back half a thousand years. She did not quite seem to fit anywhere. She was unique, a one-off.

  She is no better than she ought to be, Connie Lambton had said all those years ago. But Connie had judged by class, had used derogatory labels indiscriminately, woman of ill-repute and criminal being interchangeable with socialist and suffragette. But even Connie had been captivated by the girl Megan, before it was discovered she was not one of us.

  Megan had been married, one knew that much. A marriage of convenience, Hugh had said. Had she been much upset when, recently, her German husband had passed away in the internment camp on the Isle of Man? It was impossible to say. She kept things close to her chest. But then so did Hugh. One did not really know what was going on between them, Hugh and Megan. Anything or nothing? At times, Letitia had felt there was something tangible: friendship assuredly, affection most probably – and something more? Yet it seemed to lead nowhere. After three long years there ought to have been some progress made, if progress was ever to be made at all. One hesitated to interfere. One did not want to go blundering in only to find that one had trampled all the delicate shoots into the mud. With Hugh one was on slightly safer ground. One knew him as well as anybody. But Megan … who was she? Where had she come from? How had she come to be staying at the Manor all those years ago?

  One day, thought Letitia, picking up her book and searching for the right page, one day I shall pluck up courage and ask her.

  But one had to admit, whatever Megan’s origins, she contrived to look elegant as she cycled about a London drab in utility. Even Connie Lambton would have admitted that much.

  The pilotless planes, soon renamed buzz-bombs or doodlebugs, continued to rattle and roar their way over London as the summer of 1944 wore on. Peggy and her children were evacuated to the country, Mrs Mansell seeing them off at Paddington.

  ‘A nightmare,’ she told Letitia. ‘The place was in chaos, the trains full, people crushed like sardines in a can. I had to pass the Immaculate Conception through the window.’

  Letitia found some comfort in being able to reclaim her kitchen, but Mrs Mansell was sunk in gloom. A week’s holiday from the munitions factory had given her time to brood. However much she railed against Peggy, she hated to be parted from her – hated to be parted from any of her children. She was anxious about Clive, too. He had left school and found a job on the tube, but the day when he would be called up was getting nearer and nearer. Only the end of the war could save him. Hope had sprouted in the heady days after the Normandy landings, but then withered away when the doodlebu
gs began to arrive and the fighting continued unabated in France.

  ‘I couldn’t bear to lose them both – both my boys. This whole business should have been cleared up months ago. What are they playing at, these cabinet ministers and generals? If they think that bombing Germany will win the war, they’ve got another think coming. It’s a waste of time. We never surrendered during the blitz, and the Jerries aren’t going to now. Stands to reason. Not that I’ve any sympathy for them, those bastard Germans. I wish our bombers could flatten their whole blooming country. I hope they all burn. But our planes would be better off used to bomb them places where they launch the doodlebugs, so why don’t they do it? Tell me that!’

  ‘I expect they have tried,’ said Letitia circumspectly. She wished to see an end to the war as much as anyone, but she felt no hatred for the Germans as such. They were as much victims in this as anyone, to her mind. They weren’t all evil, they couldn’t all be tarred with the Nazi brush. And how many of the atrocity stories were actually true? Connie had repeated such stories in the first war; they had all turned out to be fabrications.

  Mrs Mansell herself had seen things differently once upon a time. Letitia recalled her saying – years ago, it seemed, now – I for one don’t get no satisfaction in thinking of the Germans being bombed. But that had been in the days before her elder son Bob had been killed aged twenty.

  ‘They’ve tried, you say. Well, they should try harder. I don’t know how they expect us to carry on as normal when there’s sirens going off all hours of the day and night, and the fighting in France going on and on. They’ll have our Clive in the end, you mark my words. And Mansell’s no help. What will be will be, he says. Huh! I wish a bloody doodlebug’d land on him and see how he likes it. What will be will be, my eye.’