Homing (11 page)

“No, silly, see it again! Jeff used to promise I could go there some time—but now the war has upset everything,” Mab sighed. “I suppose it will end eventually, and we can do as we like again.”

“But when we suggested last year that you might go to Williamsburg
because
of the war you—”

“Oh, I couldn’t do that,” Mab said positively. “That’s cheating. Not while you and Jeff and Mummy—everybody that matters—stay here, anyway. It’s only—before the war
began there seemed to be some sense in hoping to see Williamsburg for myself. And now you can’t count on anything, can you!”

“I see what you mean,” Virginia said gently, flooded again with pity for the young, trapped as she herself had never been in the old days, between uncertainty and despair. And she added with what she felt was base compromise with her own caution, “Williamsburg has been there a long time, through a lot of wars, hasn’t it. It will still be there, when this one ends.”

“Well, yes, I suppose we can count on that!” said Mab, more cheerfully.

To Virginia, who had not been in Williamsburg since she was a girl, whose life and love had been lived in Gloucestershire, and who at present was face to face with the second great war of her lifetime, what Evadne called Mab’s Williamsburg complex did seem a trifle fantastic and remote. Some day, when Hitler had been disposed of, it might be possible to look further into this lifelong obsession with a background which Mab knew only through her bloodstream, the involuntary recognition of a tie which went back through Virginia herself to her mother who had married a Yankee and whose father was Julian’s grandson. It was a hundred and fifty years, more or less, back to Julian’s marriage with the woman in the portrait, only dimly recalled by Virginia, which had so startled Evadne by its resemblance to Mab. And even now, at the beginning of Hitler’s war, Virginia found herself anxious to talk to Evadne about it, anxious to ask her—well, what?

The travellers were expected at Farthingale by tea time, having arrived at Southampton the night before, and disembarked into the blackout and a drizzling rain. Tripping over sandbags, running into policemen, biting their tongues by stepping off kerbs they didn’t know were there, falling into friendly taxi-cabs, reduced to whispers in the train under the light of the spectral blue bulbs which were all the railway allowed, they finally reached London and their flat in Bayswater, where they found Jeff and Sylvia waiting, with the blackout done and all the lights on and hot food ready.

Everybody asked questions at once. What sort of voyage was it, had they heard about the Athenia while they were at sea, how had the passengers reacted, did they see any submarines—had there been any raids in England, what did Bracken think about Poland, could they still reach Johnny in Berlin….

“We heard Chamberlain’s speech over the ship’s radio on the second day out,” Stephen said. “And then we got the news about the Athenia. And then they cut off the radio and even took away the portables from the passengers, which I think was a mistake.”

“Nobody was going to panic on an American ship so long as we were still neutral,” said Evadne. “The Germans wouldn’t have dared to touch it.”

“If they knew it was an American ship,” Jeff reminded them.

“They could hardly make any mistake about that! The crew painted American flags on the sides and the hatch covers as we went. The flag at the masthead was spotlighted at night and we ran with all our lights blazing!”

“Weren’t you scared anyway?” Sylvia asked.

“We said we weren’t. We promised each other that no submarine would fire into a neutral ship, much less one that wore that flag. But the bar was a pretty busy place, I thought, and there was a certain tendency to sit around with lots of company. And when we got to Southampton and couldn’t see a thing—I
listened.
Every taxi motor cocked my ears like a bird-dog’s!”

“Buses are the worst,” said Sylvia. “I think they do it on purpose.”

“And you’ve really not had any raids in England?” Evadne sounded almost disappointed, for the war was a week old.

“Wait,” Jeff said. “Wait till Poland is finished. It won’t be long now.”

“But surely the Germans can’t be doing all they claim in Poland,” Stephen objected, having read the evening papers. “Nazis are only men. They must be dead beat, hot and tired and hungry. And their machines must run down. What are they using for petrol?”

“We’ve stopped talking like that over here,” Jeff replied wearily. “They don’t run down, neither men nor machines, they keep on going. They are at the gates of Warsaw. It’s for real. They’re
doing
it.”

“Verdun held out,” said Stephen, still arguing by the book of rules. “And Madrid. And there was the Marne, too.”

“And Wellington won at Waterloo,” Jeff agreed. “But all that was before Hitler.”

“Aren’t we doing
anything,
on our side?”

“Look, it’s eight hundred and fifty miles by air from England
to Poland,” Jeff pointed out with patience which was a little overdone. “And you have to fly across Germany to get there. And the Polish aerodromes are already destroyed. No plane that got there could refuel and get back. Somebody should have thought of that.”

“Then why don’t we bear down on the Western Front?” Stephen insisted.

“That’s for General Gamelin to say. He’s in charge there.”

“But the British are in France now—”

“Just arriving. And quick work too.”

“Maybe General Gort will start something.”

“Gort is under the French command. It’s still Gamelin’s show in France,” Jeff said.

“Is he any good?”

“I ask myself,” Jeff said.

On that Sunday morning Evadne and Stephen went round to the warden’s post where she had trained last autumn, and found it occupied by the same tweedy Miss Piggott and her nephew Mr. Tilton, a dour young man with enormous spectacles. They seemed very glad to have her back, and their greeting was a little extra cordial to make up for having entertained doubts as to whether she would have the guts to return to England when she didn’t have to.

For an hour or so they briefed her on the A.R.P. developments while she was away, and discussed the strange exhilaration, which one must not give way to, of
not
being bombed. Miss Piggott was of the dark opinion that They Had Something Up Their Sleeves—with Something Worse implied. Mr. Tilton thought that London was sure to catch it as soon as Warsaw fell, which would be any day now. And when the Post Warden came in, a stout jolly type who might not have been quite sober, they boiled a kettle on the spirit-stove and had cups of tea all round and told funny stories—mostly apocryphal—about the blackout and the several dud warnings which had occurred in London.

Evadne was advised by the Post Warden, whose name was Smedley, to pop down to the country at once, before petrol rationing began, if she wanted to see her mother. The war would still be here when she got
back, he promised.

It was nearly lunch time when they borrowed Jeff’s two-seater, as their own car had been left at Farthingale, and made a quick tour of the West End before starting for Gloucestershire.
The Sunday morning parks were full of relaxed people in deck-chairs, reading the Sunday papers, with their gasmasks in their little brown boxes on the ground beside them. Nearby, industrious people were filling sandbags from great craters dug in the turf. The A.A. gun emplacements were fully manned inside their tidy sandbag redoubts, and the ground crews of the barrage balloons sunned themselves in their little encampments on the broad green lawns beneath their serene silver charges. The paper strips which had been pasted on the plate glass windows of the big stores to absorb concussions made ingenious designs which had been planned and executed at some expense of time and labour. There were yellow gas detectors at the street corners, and the Palace Guard had come out in khaki, their towering bearskins and scarlet coats laid away for the duration. All of Whitehall, and the Cenotaph, and the entrances to hotels and clubs and stores were banked high with sandbags like the wardens’ posts.

“You feel as though it’s just a movie,” said Evadne suddenly. “The whole of London has turned itself into a set for
The
Shape
of
Things
to
Come
.”

“The theatres are closed!” Stephen suddenly realized it. “I knew I missed something! No cinemas, even. What will they do for work, all these people? Besides—everybody needs shows. They went to the theatre all through the raids in the last war.”

“I bet they aren’t going to shows in Warsaw now.”

“We’re not in Warsaw. Anyway, Hitler can never get at London to bomb it the way he can Warsaw. The Channel is between, and a lot of neutral territory, let alone our own defence system.”

“You don’t think we’ll catch it, then?”

“Sure we’ll catch it! But we’re not set down in the middle of a flat plain at Germany’s doorstep. England is still an island. That’s bound to make it harder.”

And England had never looked more English than when they drove to Farthingale that sunny afternoon. Petrol rationing was due at the end of the month, but today every roadside tea-house was busy, especially those with tables set outside in a garden. As they neared the end of the journey Evadne raised the question they had not yet solved.

“What are we going to do about Mab?” she asked at last. “She is going to ask a lot of queer questions about Williamsburg. Your mother was afraid it oughtn’t to be encouraged.”

“Let’s see what your mother says.”

“I suppose we must just give her the books and pictures we brought, and see what happens,” she sighed.

“It’s a harmless sort of game—I hope,” said Stephen. “Give her something to dream about. Every kid needs that, especially now. How about the pictures of the portraits, though? Should she see those?”

“We’ll ask Mummy first.”

They had had the portraits of Tibby and Julian photographed in order to bring the disturbing likenesses home to Virginia, who had been away from Williamsburg so long. But they doubted the wisdom of allowing Mab to identify herself with Tibby Mawes, and the reproduction had been kept separate from the parcel of souvenirs they had brought for her collection, to which Jeff and Sylvia had been adding for years.

When they saw her again, running to meet the car as it pulled up at the front steps of the house, her knitted jumper and tweed skirt and her childish animation a little dispelled the look of Tibby which they had anticipated. It was when she was silent and thoughtful that the likeness to the painted face was most noticeable, and now her excitement at their return made her seem quite the usual kid of fourteen.

At first all her questions were about immediate matters such as what Jeff thought about the war now, and how was Sylvia, and had they seen any submarines, and when was Jeff coming down for a weekend’s rest—and what was it like in London now, and had they heard any sirens, and was Evadne really going to be a warden with an armband and a helmet, and had Jeff stopped looking worn to a frazzle—

They told her about Jeff going up to Glasgow to see the Athenia survivors, and about Sylvia’s job with NARPAC—the National ARP for Animals Committee—and how recklessly people had been having their pets put to sleep without waiting to see if it was necessary, and how bitterly many of them already regretted it. And they tried to tell how London looked, sandbagged, paper-stripped, and blacked out for the raids that had not yet begun. They comforted Virginia with a description of the cosy warden’s post in Bayswater, in the reinforced basement of a solid-looking house, its entrance padded against blast, furnished inside with some old but useful chairs and tables, an electric kettle, plain crockery, and a tin biscuit box—even a private lavatory, which was very posh for that neighbourhood—and
the jolly old Post Warden who didn’t throw his weight about and didn’t object if somebody happened to drop in at tea time, and was himself perhaps not always quite sober….

And they in turn heard about Mona, sleeping with her ambulance nowadays, she said, and not hearing a peep out of Michael since he joined his ship, but not seeming to worry about that in her shining confidence that nothing could possibly happen to a man who was so much loved as he was—and about Nigel’s dull warden’s beat at the Temple, and about the evacuees in the village, and about the Bank girls in the house, who had proved to be not such a nuisance as you might think….

Then Evadne produced the presents and pictures they had brought Mab and they watched with curiosity and dismay her complete absorption. Snapshots of a family picnic at Jamestown just before Stephen and Evadne left for New York she returned to again and again. The presence of the stone wall between the water and the grassy shore seemed to bother her.

“It spoils it,” she said more than once. “You can’t hear the river now. It’s spoiled.”

“Hear the river?” Virginia repeated, watching her, and Evadne glanced at Stephen and he shook his head.

“Yes, when the wind is up you could hear the river against the bank,” said Mab, as though they ought to have known that without being told, and now Virginia’s eyes met Evadne’s, and they both looked away quickly as though Mab might read their thoughts.

“We couldn’t find a trace of the Green Spring house you wrote about,” Evadne remarked then. “We saw the ruins of Jamestown church, but—”

“Green Spring isn’t on the Island,” Mab said quickly, and they all noticed the unconscious present tense. “It’s over the other side of the road, before you come to the ford—” She hesitated, and frowned. “No—after you pass the turning to the ford. I can’t be sure. The wounded were all over the lawn there after the battle,” she added casually, and Evadne said, to test her, “What battle?”

“Jamestown,” said Mab matter-of-factly. “It was the last before Yorktown, you know. Lafayette was there.” Again she paused with a slight frown, her eyes resting on the pictures spread out before her, seeming almost to read from them the words she spoke. “Julian was riding courier for him. General Wayne made a fool of himself, it was almost an ambush—we
had to fight and fall back, up the Neck after dark, and they moved the wounded in anything that would carry them—even wheelbarrows—the lanterns were like fireflies—the aides clanked about looking for each other and swearing—there was a smell of gunpowder over everything, and bloody bandages, and horse—it was hot, and some of the horses fell down and couldn’t get up again, and the wounded in the wagons groaned and cursed and begged for water—there weren’t enough surgeons, and they were all over blood, like butchers—it was a miracle how the officers kept themselves so neat, no matter what happened in the field—Lafayette’s lace was always fresh—Julian was always shaved and tidy—the British wore powder in their hair, even on the march—the French uniforms were all white, with coloured pipings, and their flags—the French regimental flags were beautiful—when the French came to Williamsburg before Yorktown it was like a garden party, everyone wore their best clothes all the time—the day Washington’s army marched out at dawn to begin the siege we heard the drums as they went through the streets—”