Campari for Breakfast (21 page)

Dr John’s based nearby. He’s part of a Medical Corps Royal Air Force Regiment, who make up mobile units that perform operations on the injured as close to the front as possible, which greatly increases their chances. The wounded are then sent back to Oxford by air. This is at great risk to the doctors, though Dr John says they are lucky to be ‘three steps back from the front’.

‘Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few.’ (Winston Churchill after the battle of Britain.)

Copy of letter sent to Johnny:

Aug 12 1944
Whistlers Corner, Somerset

Dear Johnny

I hope that this letter brings you cheer as you go to war. I’m sitting in the kitchen at Aunt Fern’s. The sheep outside have made a den in the hollowed-out tree trunk of a giant oak brought down by the weather.

Love of the warmth and cover must drive them to run inside it. But how funny they look when they’re running. After all, if you were a sheep, what on earth would be your hurry?

You will be glad to know we are all well, and very much hope that you are. I hope that your dreams keep you safe. I hope they protect you from harm.

Come hell or high water we must have hope, mustn’t we? It’s the little things that keep me going. Like a group of birds I am watching, who’ve just taken off from the road and flown up into the hedge, like a tiny fleet of torpedoes.

Back in Oxford they stay well away from civilisation. Even the birds and the bees are afraid at the moment. I miss Green Place.

Home is where the heart is, though it looks very different now. The garden is a boggy veg patch; the drive is lined with trappings of warfare.

To say that I miss my home would be such an understatement, for I would miss it anyway, even if I were a person living in an ordinary time. I was stopped the other night a minute after curfew; the guard asked me where I was going.

‘Me? I’m on my way back to the hall,’ I said. ‘Please let me go on my way.’

May God bless you dear Johnny as you go on yours.

With my love and my hopes for your good luck and protection.

Coral Garden

Sue

Tuesday 1 September

‘D
ON
’
T YOU THINK
you are over-reacting?’ said Aunt Coral.

But Delia was already on her way to the post office in a state of devastation. Bertie had stolen her heart. Until I met Delia I thought Aileen was the saddest person I knew, but Aileen was a child when she had the pet brick, whereas Delia is a full grown woman.

She has started spending two hours in the attic every Tuesday evening; when Aunt Coral asked her what she was doing, she said she was teaching Admiral Gordon Italian. Maybe he feels sorry for her, with her self-letter bonfires and her endless search for funds to keep Loudolle up to date. Aunt Coral raised her brows, but I do believe they aren’t up to anything other than what they say. Admiral Gordon wouldn’t presume, he’s not a Don Wan type, and Delia has been badly hurt, so I think if lie-down loving is on the cards, they will have time to learn Italian first.

Talking of lie-down loving, Badger and son are gardening
every
morning at the moment, and Tornegus (the son) is quite something. He is a tanned boy with a pony tail, hoop earring and tattoos. Amongst his other attributes, he can talk and he can wink. Aunt Coral told me that prior to the 1960s she’d never seen a young man with an earring, and as a result she can’t see in him what I do.

Before I left Titford my only boy experience was Pete. He used to walk me home sometimes and we attended a couple of parties. Aileen called him ‘Dead Pete’ because he was so quiet, but I knew he was only quiet because he wasn’t confident enough to speak. But Aileen was super confident and so
open
when her bosoms came in, whereas the moment mine did, that was it, duffle coat on.

Anyway it still didn’t make her an authority on men. She went to Australia with a boy called Jonathan who, before he left, had business cards printed which said: ‘Jonathan Chardeley, Actor’. But in her last letter, she said they were in the Northern Territory working with sheep.

It didn’t last with Pete. For some reason I couldn’t quite bring myself to kiss him. I think you have to like someone a lot to do that.

Thursday 3 Sept

There was a ‘Late Summer Tasting’ given by Mrs Fry at the Toastie last night, as she wants to expand into Bistro. She held it in what she now calls ‘The Function Room’ and invited the whole of Egham, including Aunt Coral, thinking that she might be an investor!

The night was particularly humid. Everything was drooping with moisture – my hair and make-up, the food, and the flowers outside, which hung limp on their branches, smouldering with fragrance. I was feeling much better after a good night’s sleep, and Michael wore a pinafore and foot-loss tights in homage to me, which was such a great compliment as I’m hardly ever copied.

Mrs Fry had spent all day creating a Bistro-inspired theme, the tables were all dressed in gingham and the walls hung with straw dolls crowned with garlic pigtails. On every available surface flickered a hundred tiny candles, just like in the picture she’d cut out of a magazine which had been hanging in the Toastie all the previous week.

Her hairdresser Stacey was there when I arrived to aid with last-minute décor. ‘I’d like it more sweeping and bouncing and the heaviness cut off the front,’ said Mrs Fry.

‘I thought we were growing it,’ said Stacey.

‘We are, but I just want more bounce,’ she said.

‘OK. So more bounce and sweep and the heaviness off the front.’

They must have spent an hour going over the details.

Guests were to be given a Hollandaise crumpet on arrival and chocolate roses when they left and I must say that Mrs Fry showed tremendous Bistro flair. There were special menu cards featuring a photo of Loudolle posing with a fake smile, pretending to serve a customer.

Joe looked quite different when he walked in. Gone were the turnups and specialist shirts and in their place were jeans and a T-shirt that showed off a lot of his muscles. Michael nudged me as he wandered by and I had to acknowledge it was quite a transformation.

Aunt Coral came with the Admiral and was having problems with her sandals. He had to keep putting his hand out to steady her, which of course she was enjoying.

‘I am not giving in to the gravitational pull of the slipper,’ she had told me in private earlier, mournfully demonstrating her swollen joint which I was not allowed to call a bunion. She is in total denial about being a Nana; it is marvellous and sad at the same time.

But I can’t deny her efforts have made a new man of Joe. He was by far the man of the evening, and when he gave Charlie a lift home on the back of his bike, I have to admit I was disappointed to have missed out on the excitement of travelling pillion. Excitement, for the sake of my writing, is something I am extremely keen to get into.

Icarus and Loudolle swalked off early to a party, which was a mercy because every time Loudolle caught
my eye
, she pointed to
her eye
with a nasty circling finger, and I had to operate quite hard to keep my cool.

All the adults said they thought that Michael and I looked sweet, referring to our pinafores, which made me feel quite a wally. At seventeen you’re not quite a woman; neither something at once not the other. It’s one of those difficult ages where you fall between two stools. I long to be twenty, which is the reverse of Aunt Coral who longs to be thirty. Neither of us can speed up or reverse the process, and neither of us really likes it. She always quotes Oscar Wilde on the subject: ‘The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young.’ Sounds to me like he was in denial.

Later on, when I was back in the privacy of Pearl’s room, I got my own back on Loudolle by drawing a full moustache and bogies on her face in the photo on the menu card. Revenge is sweet – I slept like a light.

Monday 7 September

Last Friday Mr Tsunawa went back to Japan, so Aunt Coral decided that on his last few nights, we should give him a haunting to remember. We began by moving objects around the Grey Room so that he couldn’t find things where he’d left them when he returned home from work. Then we took it in turns to go and knock on his door every night at midnight and then, before he answered, we’d run away. As a consequence, he became more and more excited, and proudly began to refer to himself as the clairvoyant of Hong Kong.

On his very last night I dressed up in a maid’s costume and stood in his wardrobe with my face partly obscured, so that when he opened it to pack he saw a ghostly maid in there hiding. He ran off to fetch Aunt Coral, at which point I escaped. It all worked like clockwork.

But then something strange happened. On my way back, I noticed that the shower was running in the Admirals’ bathroom, which was strange, because Mrs Bunion had left for the day, the Admirals G and T were abroad and the Admiral was at his club. Delia was out at a real dinner with Loudolle and Aunt Coral was in the drawing room with Mr Tsunawa, which accounted for everyone. So who was in the shower?

If I’d had the nerve I would have gone straight in to have a look, but I didn’t. Instead I went back to Pearl’s room, changed out of my costume, then went to fetch Aunt Coral and Mr Tsunawa. We all went to the Admirals’ bathroom together to see if anyone was there, but there was nobody, and the shower was off. But the floor was wet and steaming. It only further agitated Mr Tsunawa who suggested that it might have been the maid who had gone in to clean.

Aunt Coral was nonchalon as always and said that there have been leaks in that bathroom for years. I suppose that when you have lived somewhere like Green Place on your own for a long, long time, you have to develop a way of explaining strange things otherwise you’d be too frightened to stay there.

‘Maybe it was the badger,’ I said.

‘Maybe it was,’ said Aunt Coral.

‘I was joking,’ I said.

Aunt C has withstood far more mysterious things at Green Place than freak running water. She used to find Cameo sleepwalking into East Wing cupboards, and would have to go and wake her, and she’d have no idea where she was. And Great Nana Pearl often complained about an old lady looking back at her when she looked in the bathroom mirror. But Aunt Coral, as usual, was adamant it was just Nana Pearl’s own reflection, joking that if there wasn’t an old lady looking back at her, there’d be a dead one and this cheered Nana P up no end.

Whatever the spiritual activity here, be it supernatural, natural, or other, there are certainly mysteries mounting on mysteries, what with the thud and the sausages and the shower. Maybe they are
all
messages from the other world and maybe I just can’t translate them?

This advert appeared in
Reuters
after Mr Tsunawa left: