Far Cry from Kensington (14 page)

‘It was a pity you had to call him that name,’ said Milly that night, when
I gave her a replay of the day’s events.

‘I can’t help it. Sometimes the words just come out and I can’t stop
them. It feels like preaching the gospel.’

‘Then you’re quite right, Mrs Hawkins. You’re quite right to speak
out.’

Next day Colin Shoe brought me a month’s pay. He said I could leave as soon as I
liked, ‘to our great regret, Mrs Hawkins.’

I signed for the money and said that I would be leaving almost right away, as soon as
I had cleared up a few minor things I had to do. I added, ‘And do not forget
that Hector Bartlet is a
pisseur de copie
.’

‘I won’t forget, Mrs Hawkins. None of us will forget. You are looking very
smart these days, if I may say so.’

I said good-bye to my colleagues; I sensed a sort of envy in Ann Clough’ s
good-bye, as if I were getting out of something she couldn’t. I went to say
good-bye to Abigail. Before I left her office, while I was still chatting, I saw,
lying sideways on her desk a typed list of about ten names. I looked at them while
talking, not really meaning to take them in. One of them was Wanda Podolak.

That cold March of 1955 was one of the strangest in my life. Milly
Sanders was away all that month in Ireland, where her daughter was ill. I lay long
awake at nights, listening to the silence with my outward ears and to a crowding-in
of voices with my inward ear.

There was the voice of Martin York, ‘Credibility, Mrs Hawkins, credibility is
everything. I am attempting to regain credibility for the Press,’ and of Ivy,
the typist at the Ullswater Press, whose ‘n’s sounded like
‘d’s: ‘Mr York is id a meeting. It is simply dot possible
…’ Came the shrill short phrases of Patrick’s wife, Mabel, thrown
at me like stones. ‘You, Mrs Hawkins. You, Mrs Hawkins. You sleep with my
husband, you make love with him in your bed. You, for your pleasure, Mrs Hawkins
…’ And now Mabel was dead, suddenly in her grave. Her voice was soft on
those occasions when her mood swerved, ‘Mrs Hawkins, you are so good to us. You
have been so kind to Patrick.’

Milly had said, ‘You should marry again, Mrs Hawkins. You’re a young
woman. Twenty-eight, twenty-nine, is too young to settle for life as a widow.’
I had told her part of the story of my brief war-time marriage. ‘It was hardly
a marriage,’ she said. This was objectively true.

During that March after I was pushed out of Mackintosh & Tooley I didn’t
think of looking for another job. With Milly away, I spent my days taking long rides
on the top of buses all over London, to the furthest outskirts and termini. Stanmore,
Edgware, Bushey, Chingford, Romford, Harrow, Wanstead, Dagenham, Barking. There were
few streets intact although the war had been over ten years. Victorian houses, shops,
churches, were separated by large areas of bomb-gap. The rubble had been cleared
away, but strange grasses and wild herbs had sprung up where the war-demolished
houses had been. While it was still light I rode past the docks and the railway
sidings, and the dark pubs not yet open, until it was time to go home again. London
was still sooty from coal fires in those days. Wembley, Hackney, Islington, Southall,
Acton, Ealing. And sometimes I walked round the City, soon to be reconstructed with
eloquent, rich high-rises. Sometimes I went to Richmond, to Greenwich, to Dulwich,
Hampton and Kew where I walked in the vast lonely parks on dry days and was solicited
at times by men in raincoats whom I thoroughly scared off. Surbiton, Ewell, Croydon
and as far as Orpington. So I spent my days after days on the top of the buses
staring out of the window and watching with discreet eyes my fellow passengers, most
of them shabby, and, if they were not alone, listening with half an ear to their
talk, mostly about their families and friends, their shopping and their jobs; and not
once in all those long rides did I hear a snatch of conversation about a general
topic.

At times I felt faces looming over me. The conductor, the passengers as they passed to
get on or off, shrill schoolchildren and burly mothers who had been unable to find a
seat on the lower deck. I felt like Lucy Snowe in
Villette,
who walked,
solitary in Brussels on a summer night, among the festival crowds; the faces pressing
round her, of people made hilarious by the occasion, were made even more grotesque by
her state of hallucination induced by laudanum.

There was no such hectic celebration in sober London but I experienced a throb and a
choking of hysteria in the London voices around me and in the bland and pasty, the
long and dour, the pretty and painted faces of the people. Barnet, Loughton, Hendon,
Northolt, Willesden, Camberwell, Plumstead, Kingston, Bromley. I had lunches in noisy
pubs, leaving half on my plate, to the consternation of many barmaids whose eyes
seemed to me too wild, their lips too red to be real. I had tea and half a bun in
tea-shops where no waitress cared what I didn’t eat. I was tempted to reflect
that my diet had the same effect as a drug, but I put the thought from me. I thought
about my life as Mrs Hawkins and came to no conclusion whatsoever. ‘Good
evening, Mrs Hawkins,’ said our next-door neighbour’s new wife, as I
turned in our gate at Church End Villas at the same time as she turned in hers.

I was married in 1944 at the age of eighteen to Tom Hawkins. I met him
in July and married him on the 28th August for which purpose he got special leave
from the army. Tom was a parachutist, a sergeant in the airborne troops. I had not
long left school and had joined the Land Army. It was as a land-girl that I first met
Tom. He was home on leave at the estate where I worked. I was a great, robust girl
but not truly fat as I had been lately. Tom was a tall fellow, with a long thin face
very dark of complexion; he was one of those dark Englishmen that make you wonder
where the darkness came from — the Romans? the wrecked mariners of the Spanish
Armada? maybe a Norman import from the remnants of the Gallic mercenaries? He was now
twenty-four and had been attending an agricultural college when the war broke out.

Tom’s father had some land in Hertfordshire. It was settled that Tom would be a
farmer when the war was over, and I would be a farmer’s wife. I wonder what
sort of farmer’s wife I would have made if Tom had lived? I had chosen to go
into the Land Army because I was big and strong, and because, after my years at
school, the idea of being out in the open in all weathers was one of freedom as
opposed to the office work I would otherwise have been sent to do in those war years
of total recruitment for all under the age of forty-five. But I had a bookish side,
which Tom didn’t live to see.

I had met Tom Hawkins at a dance, then we met again. Then, when he went back to his
unit, we wrote to each other, at first every week, then twice a week, then every day.
He phoned me when he could. I had no knowledge of where he was stationed; it was
secret like everything else of interest at that time; his letters had to be addressed
to a number, a division and some other rigmarole ending with HM Forces. Tom came on
leave again, for a weekend, and asked me to marry him. I thought it over for a
fortnight, but the interval was only a formality. For at this stage I was absolutely
in love, as much in love as Tom. My parents, Tom’s father and sister, and two
of my school friends who were on the land with me, came to my wedding on the 28th of
August. I wore my school-concert dress, long and white, which did very well, and
saved clothing coupons. Tom wore his uniform. We had four days in London, in a
borrowed flat. We had intended to go to theatres, but we never did. We were disturbed
only by a few incendiary bombs and V1s, for which there were air-raid warnings. The
V2s for which there were no warnings had not started. We went to Hampton Court and to
Kew. We walked in Hyde Park, round the Serpentine, almost every day, and on to
Kensington Gardens, and to tea with chocolate cake at Gunter’s in Curzon Street
at the extravagant price of two shillings and sixpence each, plus tip.

After that I was a land-girl again, looking out for my letters addressed to Mrs
Hawkins. I knew Tom would soon have to go into action on the Western front where the
Germans were toughly holding out. To steel myself and prepare for the worst, in those
weeks since our wedding, I used to secretly rehearse a telegram from the War Office
advising me that my husband had been killed in action. The personnel officer in our
group would say, There’s a telegram for you, Mrs Hawkins.’ And that would
be that. ‘I s there anything you would like, won’t you lie down? You must
be very brave, Mrs Hawkins. You aren’t the only one …’

Tom put in an unexpected appearance on Monday night, 11th September. He was to go back
next day. We took a tiny room at the local pub. Tom didn’t say so, but I
guessed he was AWOL, as we called ‘Absent without leave’. We were Mr and
Mrs Hawkins. I supposed he was going into battle very soon. What a fool he had been,
I thought, to join the parachuters.

After supper downstairs he left me and I went up to bed; he had said he felt he could
do with a drink. He had already drunk three double whiskies. They happened to have
whisky that night in the pub. It was a special consignment. Whisky was scarce at that
time. I was in bed by nine, reading a book and waiting for Tom. There was a
considerable noise downstairs in the public bar, but I had fallen asleep by closing
time, when Tom woke me up, bursting into the room wild and drunk.

Now, it is my advice to anyone getting married, that they should first see the other
partner when drunk. Especially a man. Drink can mellow, it can sweeten. Too much can
make a person silly. Or it can make them savage: this was the case with Tom. I
hadn’t seen him drunk before. He broke up the place, starting with the china
ewer and basin on the wash-stand and ending with the wall-mirror. I was on my feet
and had tried to stop him when he heaved the mattress off the bed and tried to push
it out of the window. This only had the effect of his hurling me across the room,
after which the mattress went out of the window. And all the time swearing and
shouting, while the landlord and his wife, first standing in the doorway, then called
their son to fetch the police.

Tom made off, back to his camp, without even looking at me before the policeman
arrived; I don’t know how he got transport; probably he got a lift. I helped to
put things straight in the room, with the landlady puffing and clucking; I settled
the bill for damage, and went back to my billet in the big old house where we were
quartered. The policeman was kindly in the circumstances.

I wonder if my marriage would have lasted? I thought, even then in my inexperience,
that this couldn’t be Tom Hawkins’ normal behaviour. It must be
war-nerves, or something like that. But then, I thought, Tom was one of thousands, he
wasn’t the only one. I think, now, that if I had shown the strong side of my
character right from the start, Tom wouldn’t have broken out like that. I had a
great bruise on my forehead where it had struck the wall, and others on my arms. I
had a cut on my neck. It is my advice to any woman getting married to start, not as
you mean to go on, but worse, tougher, than you mean to go on. Then you can slowly
relax and it comes as a pleasant surprise. I hadn’t shown Tom my strength, and
perhaps this also included my bookishness; I had been wifely, docile, in love, during
those brief days, and Tom didn’t know me at all.

I had no letter from Tom for eleven days. But in fact he was killed six days later, at
Arnhem in Holland, where the Allied airborne troops had landed and were surrounded. I
never knew if Tom was killed in the air while landing, or if he managed to reach the
ground to fight. Tom’s letter, eleven days later, came the day after the
telegram. There had been some delay in the handing over of Tom’s identification
by the Germans to the Red Cross.

We were having a lecture in the great hall on the subject of cattle-breeding. I was
called out. ‘Now look, my dear, there’s a wire for you …’
And the next day in the ordinary post, Tom’s letter, a short one, written
before he had left England. He made no reference at all to his wild outbreak. Had he
remembered it? Had he thought, perhaps, it was of no account, just one of those
things in married life? I will never know. His letter gave no hint. It was a love
letter.