The Girl from Station X (19 page)

She was intellectually convinced, certainly, but she still held off giving herself to Alan completely, also because Alan himself had abstained –
he says that it occasions so
much unhappiness that he would not do it to me and I do not know if he is right or not. On top of that we have done already, I cannot see that it would make much difference.

My mother, in my hearing, would always poke fun at couples who were physically affectionate in public. And, for as long as I could remember, each time my father put his arm round her, she would
push him off. This was certainly very different from the passionate way that she had acted with Alan and I felt cheated that she had always presented such a prudish front to me. Or was it simply
that she had changed unrecognisably from that young woman in her twenties – mad about a man for the first time?

Throughout the winter, the romance with Alan went on, alongside her engagement to David. Alan stirred her inner longings, spiritually and physically. The following passage
expresses fear, hope and a sense of something beautiful at the heart of life, even at its most grim. She was ripe for an affair:

The sky is dull grey and the smoke from the chimneys of the Mess is blown into little tufts into the air, to drift away towards the Hangars. In the distance the
engine of an aircraft roars and every little while there is a burst of machine gun fire from the range. Miraculously it seems in such a day as this, a bird is singing near my window, so sweetly, we
might almost fancy that it is Spring and if one shuts one’s mind to all but that, it is no longer an illusion. I cannot see my bird and I am glad I can imagine him to be what I will, decked
in gorgeous array, a Cardinal perhaps, flashing scarlet amidst the Palms, or a Kingfisher, a sapphire skimming over the water, there is no limit to what he might be and for me he is all of them.
The most magnificent, the sweetest and the most rare bird that exists in all the world for he brings all these untold visions into a winter day.

On 4 December, she and Alan went to the Trout for lunch, where they drank Scotch ale and talked beside a huge log fire –
pretty heavenly
. The following day, she
heard bad news – Alan had been transferred to Operations. Alan’s posting, to Swanton Morley, seems to have shocked her. Apart from her emotional attachment to him, he was a kindred
spirit – unlike David – and her closest companion at that time.

I felt awful all day, exhausted and so strung up. I hardly knew what to do. I felt I just couldn’t bear the war any more. It is so awful when people leave
here and the next thing you hear is that they have gone. It is the first two raids that are the worst, if they survive them, they have much more chance. You just come into the Mess here one day and
someone says ‘Have you heard old so and so’s gone, pretty bad show,’ and then no one is sad and one just has a kind of sick feeling inside and one sees their name still on lists
on the notice board and scribblings on the telephone box and their letters still arrive and lie on the hall table, no one quite knowing what to do with them. Sometimes, I feel awed by the awfulness
of it all, at others I feel I must rush madly somewhere shouting ‘Stop, Stop for God’s sake before it is too late and the people who are alive and who are decent and fine are all dead
in this madness.’ Alan left after lunch and I have never felt so lonely as I did for the rest of the day. Everything reminded me of him and of what we had said and done together in that
particular place, so that I thought I should go mad and could hardly bear the Mess. Every time the door opened I expected him to come in and instead, I sat down trying not to think. Thank God I am
going home on Wednesday.

After returning briefly to Knowle, she did not write the diary for eleven days. By the time she resumed it, her engagement to David had been broken off.

On 15 December 1940, she had received a message to telephone David’s parents. He had, at last, come home on leave, but instead of contacting her, had gone straight to see them. The
following day, it was his father who rang her, not David.
I went to Wotton and was rung up there by Capt. Heber-Percy from Hull, who told me that David arrived here yesterday and was at
Osmaston. I felt so hurt that he had gone there and had not even, the day after, tried to come and find me, but I couldn’t get through on the phone.
Finally, in the evening,
David did telephone, and two days later they met in London. He arrived late and the meeting was strained and cold. She conceded in the diary that it was partly her fault, as she felt
nothing much
. She drove him to the Admiralty, where he was then told that he was to get command of a new destroyer, the
Quantock
, around 1 January. He did not
seem enthusiastic about anything and said that he must go north that night to see his father.
I felt very depressed at him leaving again so soon and at his apparent lack of feeling for
me.

She motored back alone in the blackout, went to bed and was very sick. Alan, on short leave, came to see her at Bicester and the two of them dined again at the Trout. She could not get David on
the telephone, so decided to go home for her short leave.

At Knowle, she admitted in the diary to feeling
furious
with David. When he finally rang, she told him that she was tired of
following him round
England.
On 21 December, she sent a telegram asking him to meet her in London. She seems to have been uncharacteristically decisive, wanting to bring the relationship to a head.

She returned to London, travelling by Green Line bus, through the badly bombed areas of Lewisham and New Cross –
some of the houses look very pathetic with bits of furniture,
pictures etc., lying amongst the wreckage and I saw two old ladies wandering in the garden of a completely demolished villa.
When David finally arrived – his train was three
hours late – my mother, perhaps for the first time in her life, emerged as the stronger:
he told me how he was suffering from nerves which affected him so that he was only happy
at sea and wanted only to get back to the ship and to have no more ties. He seemed quite unable to make up his mind as to what to do and was like a child in trouble.

A woman who was more experienced with men, and more compassionate, might have been able to help David, but she could not. Also, to be fair, he may by then have realised that he was not in love
with her, but lacked the courage to say so. At least she was trying to get him to declare his real feelings.

They went together – again on the Green Line bus – to Knowle. There, David had a long talk with my grandmother, after which Anne wrote:
He is fast heading for a nervous
breakdown and is frightfully weak.

My grandmother sent for the local doctor, who said that David was in danger of a collapse but that his new command of the
Quantock
and the consequent change of scene might pull him
together.
We decided definitely that the only thing to do was to break our engagement. It is all v. sad . . . there is no bitterness on either side and we remain
friends.

Anne went on seeing Alan after that Christmas and in early 1941, but her broken engagement knocked the stuffing out of her; back at Bicester she recorded:
awful waves of depression .
. . I feel very futile and of no importance to anyone.
She must have been relying on that future marriage more than she realised. Her gaiety and youthful enjoyment of life, displayed
when she first joined the WAAF, were now not so evident. Also, once the obstacle of her engagement to David had been removed, she seemed unable to commit herself to Alan.

Incendiary raids on London continued, with enormous damage inflicted on the City; its fires, my mother reported, could be seen from Knowle, over thirty miles away. Retaining her diarist’s
curiosity, she went by tube to look at the bombed area round St Paul’s. Her depression – surely like that of many of her compatriots during that phase of the war – continued, and
she wrote of
lack of colour
, of
feeling nothing
, of being
terribly tired
, of having
no will
left
, and wanting
only to sleep and forget the war
.

In mid-January 1941, Alan rang to tell her that he had been promoted to Flight Lieutenant, which, she judged, was
pretty good
. By now, four men were attracted to her:
Alan, Peter (no surname provided), who came down to visit her and stayed at the Randolph Hotel in Oxford, John M and, finally, Joe, her senior at Bicester, who declared
he was
forgetting all this fatherly stuff and was falling in love with me himself
. None of this, however, seemed to cheer her up.

She was taken by Alan to meet his parents. She records feeling quite out of her depth,
very nice really, but a different world.
I suppose she meant that they did not
know the sort of people that she and her mother mixed with socially. She admitted then in the diary to being physically in love with Alan,
but again there are setbacks.
Her lack of confidence had returned:
What a muck I have made of my life . . . I should have someone to lean on, to cling to and admire . . . this ghastly invasion hanging over us is too
much to bear at times.

Anne was in a fragile state. That meeting with his parents seems to have been a turning point for her. She probably did not have enough confidence to marry someone who was not of a similar
background. Perhaps she was already falling out of love with Alan and looking for a let-out. Certainly, her broken engagement with David played a part; she must have felt guilty and blamed Alan, as
well as herself, for the termination of that prospect. After all, the marriage to David had symbolised a conventional life after the war, a secure future. Marriage to Alan would be something more
unknown.

A month after being introduced to Alan’s parents, she was posted to Hucknall, in Nottinghamshire, where she immediately met a young woman she liked, Babe Turnbull, who was half-American.
Alan is not mentioned so often now in her diary, but he was still madly in love with Anne, judging from what happened in late February 1941 at Knowle, when things came to a head dramatically at
what must have been, despite the war, a weekend house party. (It included John M and Anne’s friend Cynthia.)

Perhaps when he was staying at her family home, Anne decided for good that Alan didn’t fit into her world. Maybe she had already fallen out of love. At any rate, after that weekend she
wrote:
Alan now frankly bores me and I have never met anyone so introspective before. He is the way I used to be at the age of 18 or so and does nothing but talk about himself, the
entire time.

Poor Alan, it emerged, had left a note in her bedroom the first evening asking her to come down and talk to him alone; she refused. However, due to his
awfully nervous
mood
, she later felt obliged to comply.

Some of what followed was uncannily like what had occurred with David at Knowle only two months earlier – the local doctor was again summoned and Alan talked to him all afternoon. He later
confided to Anne that he was exhausted, needed weeks of rest, and she was the only person who could help him –
he became worse and worse and burst into tears two or three times.
Then he asked me to marry him all over again and I said No despising him terribly by this time, although I feel mean at having led him on in a way, except that when I did it I was genuinely in love
with him or at any rate thought I was.

Anne appears to have been unable to cope with the emotional young man, when, at 1.30 a.m., he appeared at her bedroom door in his cap and greatcoat saying: ‘Something has gone here!’
and pointing at his head. He told her that he was going away and had wanted to see her once more first, then rushed downstairs. Anne woke Cynthia and the two young women went down to find Alan
standing by a loaded revolver on Anne’s stepfather’s desk. Cynthia tried to be flippant, but Alan seized the gun and rushed outside. The women then woke John M, and the three discussed
what to do. They heard Alan come back into the house and all crept back upstairs, Anne moving into Cynthia’s room, from where she heard Alan go along to her empty bedroom.
I
suppose I am to blame as well, but we are all slightly mad these days and crave for affection of any kind. Life is such hell that one turns instinctively to love and friendliness and most
people’s nerves are all on edge as well.

She added that she doubted that Alan
had the guts
to shoot himself. This seems unfair, when for months he had been flying bombers over Germany, a feat that she greatly
admired. These young pilots were expected to go on their missions often with little or no sleep, and the likelihood of them being killed was high. Alan was probably suffering from nervous and
physical exhaustion.

The following day, she was even more unsympathetic, and seemed glad to get rid of Alan, refusing to go and talk to him despite a message from him imploring her. She was even more infuriated to
find his note saying:
It’s all right, darling, I missed.
She said goodbye to him in the company of the others on the lawn at Knowle, then John M drove him to the station, where, he
told Anne later, Alan had threatened to throw himself off the train. Alan had by then written her another note, apologising. She wrote coldly in the diary that it was
all very
unpleasant.

Trying to forget the experience, she went for tea with the others to Hastings, which was practically deserted, but they had
lashings of butter and chocolate (an untold luxury) to
drink in a café on the front and enjoyed ourselves quite enormously. There was barbed wire all along the front, on the way we crossed ‘The People’s Moat’ anti-tank ditch
and our fighters were making the most wonderful designs in smoke.