Octavia's War (29 page)

He answered by return of post.
Your Smithie is a giddy marvel. We' ll do it. I will book us a room at Weston-super-Mare. That is the place, isn't it? See you ASAP.

So the new school term began. Joanie went to school and returned home with her shoes scuffed and an ink stain on her jersey saying it was OK and she was Joan now ‘'cos they don't call you Joanie at school', and two days later Edith started work at the factory. She found it a great deal more tiring than she was prepared to admit although she did her share of the cooking when she got home and was careful to clear the table and sweep the kitchen floor just as she'd always done. Emmeline grumbled to Octavia that she looked like a little ghost, but after a week she got used to her new lifestyle and began to pace herself better and didn't look quite so drawn.

Emmeline went on complaining nevertheless. ‘It's
never-ending
change,' she said. ‘You just about get used to one thing and another turns up. I don't know how we're supposed to manage.'

‘By taking it in our stride,' Octavia said. ‘Isn't that right,
Edie?' She was privately congratulating herself at how well she was striding over difficulties that summer. Only that afternoon she'd given Lizzie permission to be absent for the next ten days and now she was wondering how Tommy would take it when he found out about it – and rather looking forward to his anger.

It exploded upon her in a telephone call the following morning.

‘I've just had a card from Lizzie,' he said. ‘What's all this nonsense about her going on holiday?'

Octavia's heart constricted. Surely she hasn't told him? she thought. She wouldn't be so silly. Not after all I've said to her. Fortunately he was still complaining, which gave her a chance to catch her breath and think.

‘I left a message with that matron of yours. Said I'd be coming down on Wednesday, and what do I get? A postcard! A postcard! I ask you. Says she's going on holiday with some silly friend. Do you know about it?'

‘Yes,' Octavia said, calmly. ‘I gave her permission.'

‘You did what?'

‘I gave her permission.'

‘For God's sake, Tavy. It's not up to you to give her permission. She should have asked me. I
am
her father, in case you've forgotten.'

‘And I'm her headmistress,' Octavia said, thinking
checkmate
, ‘in case
you've
forgotten.
In loco parentis.
'

‘And what about her Entrance Exam? Or have you all forgotten that?'

‘She's well prepared,' Octavia told him, ‘and she'll be back in plenty of time to take it. There's no need for you to worry.'

There was a pause and then he changed direction. ‘And where the hell did you get to after the reception? I searched
all over the place for you.'

‘I was looking after your daughter,' Octavia said. ‘I took her home. Do you have any idea how much you upset her?'

‘Don't tell me how to treat my own daughter,' he said furiously. ‘She had to be told. You can't let your children do whatever they like. You ought to know that.'

‘She's not a child, Tommy. She's a woman.'

‘She's a child.'

‘She's the same age as we were when we met.'

‘You're so bloody aggravating,' he said and hung up.

And you only know the half of it, Octavia thought, as she put the receiver back on its hook. There are times, Tommy Meriton, when you are really quite insufferable. It's just as well I have to go to school or I'd have lost my temper too. And she wondered how Lizzie was, out there in Weston-super-Mare on her ‘honeymoon'.

She was in bed, of course, and she wasn't going to get up for hours. She and Ben had promised one another right at the start that they would do whatever they wanted to, whenever they wanted to, and, as their landlady rather liked the idea of having a tankie and his wife honeymooning under her roof, they'd been given plenty of latitude. For, as the permissive lady explained to her neighbour, ‘He's off to that dreadful desert in a week or two and he could be killed, poor boy. We owe it to them really, don't we?'

The weather was kind to them that first week, with plenty of sun to warm them as they strolled beside the sea or walked on the Grand Pier, and balmy evenings to enjoy on their way to the pictures or the local dancehall.

‘I wish this could go on forever,' Ben said as they strolled back to the boarding house through the salty darkness on
their last precious evening. ‘Ten days is too little. They should have given us a month.' Now that the moment of parting was so close he was torn by the anguish of it.

‘Next time,' she said, trying to comfort him.

He was sinking under the weight of an impossible sadness. ‘If there is a next time.'

She put her hand over his mouth. ‘Don't say such a thing,' she said fiercely. ‘Don't even think it. There
will
be a next time. And we
will
get married. I promise you.'

He put his arms round her and held her so tightly she could barely breathe. ‘Darling, darling Lizzie,' he said. ‘I love you so much. I'd go AWOL if you asked me to.'

‘I don't ask you to.'

‘I would.'

‘I know,' she said, and offered the best comfort she knew. ‘Don't let's stand out here. Let's get back and go to bed.'

It was three weeks before Tommy rang Octavia again and then it was to apologise ‘for losing his rag' and to offer to take her to the West End. ‘Might be the last chance we get for a while,' he said. ‘I'm off to Washington again.'

Octavia was quite glad to hear it. Lizzie had come back from her ‘holiday' looking drawn beyond her years and had spent the next week either doggedly sitting examinations or hidden away in her room, supposedly revising. It was Octavia's custom to be there as the candidates went in, to wish them luck and see that they were all right, and the sight of Lizzie's pale face made her ache with pity. It must be peculiarly difficult to have to say goodbye to your lover and watch him go off to war and then come back to school and sit examinations. In one way at least, Tommy's trip to Washington was opportune. It would give his daughter a chance to recover her spirits a little before
she had to face him again.

But the trip to the West End was a temptation, besides being a chance to kiss and make up, so she took it and used it. She was beginning to understand that there was a pattern to his outbursts – first fury in which he said all sorts of silly things, then a long silence, then repentance and apology and  finally a treat of some kind – and although it seemed pretty childish, at least she understood it. And his repentant tenderness almost made up for it.

They went to see the latest Hollywood musical which was showing in Leicester Square. It was called
Me and my Girl
and was an anodyne confection starring Judy Garland. It was pleasant enough although not exactly thought-provoking. Afterwards he took her to dinner and made a great fuss of her.

‘Sorry about all that earlier on,' he said, when the meal had been served. ‘You know, with Lizzie and the holiday.'

She was stern with him. ‘So you should be.'

‘I've always been a bit obsessive when it comes to Lizzie,' he confessed. ‘Silly I know, but I can't help it. I want the best for her, that's the trouble. Always have. Elizabeth was forever on at me about it.'

There was so much that ought to have been said but Octavia forbore. It wasn't the right moment. Not yet. She felt sure a better one would present itself, sooner or later, and there was no point in quarrelling with him needlessly. So they enjoyed their meal and spent a loving night together and the next day he took flight to Washington, quite his old cheerful self, promising to bring her back ‘some goodies from the land of plenty'. Which, she thought, will at least please Em.

Emmeline had had a difficult few weeks. She'd travelled to Tonbridge Wells every other day and grieved because Johnnie never seemed to be getting any better.

‘He's as bad now as when we first saw him,' she confided to Octavia. ‘He's marginally better when that nice nurse is with him – the one he calls Gwyneth – but his hands are in a terrible state and now they say they're going to operate on him, which seems dreadful to me. I mean what can they do, when his fingers are all curled up like claws?'

Octavia didn't know what to say to cheer her, especially as she tossed every scrap of offered comfort aside as if it made her angry. Eventually all she could find to say was ‘Well, we shall see, won't we?' and that seemed pretty fatuous.

‘This damned awful war!' Emmeline growled. ‘How's Lizzie's young man? Is he there yet?'

He was there, and he'd written home, once to his aunt and uncle and three times to Lizzie, telling her what a foul place the desert was,
like an oven and when the wind blows the sand gets everywhere, in your food and your hair and up your nose, everywhere
. In the second letter he told her how depressing it was to hear the old hands saying they hadn't got a cat in hell's chance of beating the Germans. In the third he reported that everything had come to a halt at a place called El Alamein.
It's a difficult terrain to fight in. You can't go north because you' d be in the Mediterranean and you can't go south because there's a line of cliffs there and a huge depression called Qattara, which is actually a salt marsh and not the right place for tanks, and there are minefields everywhere. Although I don't know why I'm writing all this because I bet it' ll be blue-pencilled.

She wrote back to him after every letter, telling him how much she loved him and how much she missed him and
urging him to look after himself. She didn't say anything about the examination or about her life in school. It didn't seem appropriate somehow, not when they were as good as married.

The summer term ambled away. Her father came back from the States and took her out to tea, but seemed a bit put out because she didn't have much of an appetite. Ben wrote a letter every week although, as he reported,
There's not much to say. Jerry's keeping quiet for the moment. The sand is sand.
Smithie took her final assembly and most of her senior pupils either went out to work or back to London for the summer. By the middle of August, Lizzie and Polly were the only two prefects left in the building. They entertained themselves with organising picnics and going to the pictures and telling stories to the juniors. And then there was a sudden flurry of news. Churchill had decided to replace General Auchinleck with another general called Alexander, and another one called Montgomery had been given command of the ‘forces in the field'. Within a week Ben was writing to tell her what an extraordinary man he was.

He's not much to look at, he said, bit on the short side,
funny-looking
face, big hooter, not exactly what you' d call prepossessing, and he's got the most peculiar voice, sort of high-pitched and nasal, but I tell you, he came down here and stood on a tank and talked to us and you could have heard a pin drop. I've never heard anybody in the army talk to us like that. He says we're the best army the world has ever seen and the most highly trained and we're going to hit the Germans for six. He says there's no doubt about it. Rommel's had a good run for his money, he says, but all that's going to stop. Our campaign is going to be planned to the last detail, we've got powerful new tanks coming, we're going to train and prepare until we're in tip-top condition, and there' ll be
 
no stopping us. What do you think of that?

It sounded extraordinary to Lizzie and not particularly likely. After all, the Germans had been having everything their own way ever since the war began so one speech was hardly going to turn it all round. Was it?

Poppy was of the same opinion. ‘I mean, anyone can say things,' she said. ‘It doesn't necessarily mean they can do them.' Nevertheless, she sat in the window seat holding the letter reverently, like something special and from another world. It thrilled her to be on the edge of Lizzie's love affair and to think that Ben was a fighter. ‘I wonder what will happen next.'

What happened next was that Rommel's army attacked, and for the first time in the campaign they couldn't press their attack home. After five days of heavy fighting they were forced to retreat and, eventually and ignominiously, ended up back in exactly the same position they'd come from. The British newspapers were cock-a-hoop and called it a splendid victory, and even Ben, who knew the territory better than the news editors, said it was a good show, although he admitted that they'd taken a lot of casualties,
but don't worry. I've come through without a scratch. Monty's right. Next time we' ll push them out of Africa altogether.

Lizzie couldn't show this letter to Poppy because as well as reporting the battle it spoke too movingly of remembered and private delights. But she read out the bits about the battle and Poppy said he was very brave, which was perfectly true. Then, since the new term was about to begin and they couldn't stay in Downview, they put their minds to what they were going to do until they went up in October.

Poppy was all for taking a temporary job as a land girl. ‘It'll be jolly hard work,' she said, ‘but it's a healthy sort of life and the pay's not bad and it's only for six weeks.'

‘I'll phone Pa,' Lizzie said. ‘See what he thinks.' She'd barely seen him since the wedding, except for when he took her out to tea, but this sort of request was possible and might be a sort of olive branch. Not that he deserved one but she couldn't stay angry with him for ever.

She was right about it being an olive branch and pleased by how happily her father accepted it. ‘Jolly good idea,' he said and asked if she needed funds, ‘for travel and so forth.'