The Secret Rooms: A True Gothic Mystery (34 page)

Xenophon, Violet assured John, was ‘Bouche’s best’. Having found him the horse, she bombarded him with letters asking him if there was anything else he needed for the Front: ‘Darling, I wish you would give me commissions to do for you. Tell me anything,
anything
you need. Please, darling, do your men want anything? I am still buying blankets and socks and shirts for the 20,000 army at Grantham. Bless you beloved. Give me
something
to do for you. Mother.’

Violet was not equipping the ‘20,000 army at Grantham’ out of the kindness of her heart. General Hammersley, their commander, was one of the generals in charge of training troops for the Front. Stationed in England for the foreseeable future, there was a chance that at some point he could be prevailed upon to give her son a job. While she kept her true motive hidden in the letter she wrote to John, she revealed it in a letter written coincidentally to her brother: ‘I bought 2260 blankets for General Hammersley’s army at Belton yesterday! I curry favour with him,’ she informed him bluntly.

There was one further piece of information Violet concealed from John. She had finally heard back from Lord Grenfell. He was suggesting they meet in London in the first week of October. To her relief, as she confided to Charlie, it would be possible to see him on a day when Henry was not expecting her to attend a recruitment meeting:

Lord G spends Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday in London, so
Wednesday
is my day. I shall go to London
Monday
evening from Melton Mowbray probably, if Henry’s meeting is in the afternoon. He wants me to be at Loughborough on
Thursday
evening for a meeting – so I can fit it in. I feel full of hope in Grenfell, so let’s keep up our spirits.

Keep strong.

Yr loving VR

At Luton, unaware of his mother’s manoeuvrings – and his uncle’s complicity – John’s thoughts were focused on the items of clothing and pieces of kit he would need in the trenches. Having no time to go to London to get them himself, he preferred to rely on Charlie, rather than Violet, to supply them.

Top of his list was a warm winter coat. In a telegram to his uncle, he described exactly the sort he wanted: ‘Of thickest black Harris tweed, like my old coat, but khaki-coloured with leather lining and camel hair lining inside that, and a tall well-fitting collar to allow a thick muffler within. Can you also buy the warmest possible gloves, but not fur. Also have 2nd Lt badges on my coat. It must be of a military exterior, more or less.’

That same day, he wired Charlie again:

No time to write. Could you buy me the very best compass you can find with the poles marked by luminous points?

A few days later – on 14 October, the day the North Midlands were put on standby to embark for the Front at twenty-four hours’ notice – came a flurry of requests:

Old Boy

    Would you try and get me the following:

I think you can get all these at Army & Navy Stores and put them down to Father – Acc. No. 15956.

    Very many thanks indeed old boy if you will do this.

That evening, he added another item to the list:

Old Boy

What a damned nuisance you must think me. There is yet one more thing I should love you to do. I saw today a very handy little leather medicine chest about the size of this piece of paper, but not quite so tall. It was like a leather cigar case, with lots of little long glass bottles with tablets etc in them – aspirin, quinine, chlorodine, and other useful things – scissors, needles, gauze, etc. I wonder if you could find me one.

So sorry to trouble you.

First thing the following morning, having evidently spent the night thinking about the things he had forgotten, he wrote again:

Old Boy

One or two more things I should be very glad if you would get me. A Field Service Pocket Book and a good leather belt with rings on it for attaching things to, and also a pocket in it if possible. Also would you ask Savory & Moore to send me a hypodermic syringe and some serum for Tetanus. Also if you could get me a good serviceable knife with tin opener, things to take stones out of horses’ hoofs, button hook etc.

So sorry to give you all this trouble – also one dozen indelible pencils.

Hope you don’t mind doing this for me. A & N stores the best place.

Yr loving J

Charlie’s house in Chelsea was a fifteen-minute walk from the Army and Navy Stores in Victoria Street. Established in 1882 for the families of serving officers, the shop was the first point of call for residents of Chelsea and Westminster with sons at the Front. Charlie had made a list of the things John wanted. Anxious to avoid the long queues, he left the house early.

On his way there
, he passed Victoria station. The concourse outside was packed with troops waiting to board trains for the Channel ports, and convoys of ambulance wagons that had come to collect the wounded from the Front.
The wagons, which were long and grey
, and painted with red crosses, were open at the back. Crowds of onlookers, two to three deep, lined the pavement beside them. It was a scene that was replicated every day; the sight of the stretcher-loads of wounded was the one visceral experience of the war available to Londoners.

Inside the station, the platforms where the hospital trains came in were cordoned off.
‘The public weren’t allowed in the station,’
one stretcher bearer recalled: ‘It was always very quiet in there, with just the long lines of ambulance drivers and VADS and detachments of stretcher bearers waiting. The trains came in at all hours of the day and night. You saw some terrible sights. The worst case I saw – and it still haunts me – was of a man being carried past us. It was night, and in the dim light I thought that his face was covered with a black cloth. But as he came nearer, I was horrified to realize that the whole lower half of his face had been completely blown off and what had appeared to be a black cloth was a huge gaping hole. It was the most frightful sight, because he couldn’t be covered up at all. There wasn’t very much we could do for the boys. We just had to get them to hospital as quickly as possible.’

The ambulance wagons and the long, snaking lines of troops were a reminder to Charlie of what was in store for John. He was missing his nephew terribly. It was the first time since the summer of 1909 – when John had returned to London from Rome – that they had been parted for more than a few weeks.
Charlie had seen him twice
since 4 August, on both occasions for only a few hours. When he was a boy, writing from school, it was always John who had wanted to see him. Now the tables were turned. Charlie had written him numerous letters, hoping for a meeting: ‘I wish I could see you. I suppose there isn’t a chance at present?’; ‘I miss you badly. Any chance of seeing you?’; ‘I don’t suppose you know whether you can get a day’s leave yet? I long to see you.’

In an effort to cheer himself up
, and to escape the emptiness of the long evenings alone at the house he and John had shared in Cadogan Gardens, Charlie had resorted to spending one or two days a week at the Metropole, a fashionable hotel in Brighton. But this too he found gloomy. The main attractions – the two piers and the Royal Pavilion – were closed, and at night a blackout was in force. With fears of an invasion high, there were few other guests in the usually crammed hotel. Even the view from his room depressed him. Facing out to sea, it overlooked the West Pier, where engineers were working around the clock to cut out large sections of the pier in order to prevent it being used as a landing stage by the Germans.

Along Victoria Street
, newspaper vendors were shouting the headlines of the day. ‘Deadlock at Nantes’; ‘Hospital Ship Sunk in the Channel’; ‘The Enemy Reports Victory at Amiens’. Charlie’s views on the duration of the war had altered. A former captain in the Blues and Royals, at the outset he had predicted ‘three months of explosion and then stoppage by general consent’. But the entrenchment of both the German and British armies along the hundred-mile Front in France and Flanders had convinced him that it would go on for much longer.

His cousin, Lawrence Drummond, an officer in the Scots Guards, had given him a first-hand report of the Battle of Mons. ‘His experiences are remarkable,’ he wrote to John:

He was first in command of a Brigade on the extreme left, and had 5 days and nights’ incessant fighting of a most terrible kind. His praise of English men’s fighting is enormous, the first true opinion I have heard which can’t have a suspicion of exaggeration. In many cases the men were dead beat and were asleep the moment they touched the ground, but never a difficulty in rousing them at a moment’s notice when a move was necessary. The German rifle shooting was as bad as our own was good, but their shell fire is described as the most wonderful they have ever seen. Absolutely incessant all those days and nights and the air literally ablaze with shells the whole time. He said a good deal about the perfectly indescribable noise and concussion of 4 or 5 Army Corps firing at the same moment. The enormous and fearful shellfire is what seems to have surprised him most and also the very perfect behaviour of our men under really bad circumstances.

In recent weeks, long lists of casualties had begun to appear in the newspapers. Already, the sons of people he knew were being killed or wounded: ‘You were quite right about Aubrey Herbert,’
*
he wrote to John on 17 September: ‘I am told he is in a French hospital not much the worse, but I see Percy Wyndham
^†
is killed – hard luck. I fear poor little John Manners
^‡
is a washout. He has been described as dead (also Lord Cecil’s boy).
^§
Albemarle’s boy
^¶
is wounded and a prisoner but supposed to be going on well.’

The thought that John might soon be fighting on the Western Front was one that Charlie was struggling to come to terms with. For almost two months now, he had known exactly what Violet was up to: she had kept him informed of her every move. Yet he had said nothing to John. It was the first time he had withheld information of material importance to him. The problem was, he wanted his sister to succeed in her bid to keep him back from the war. John was his main-stay;
for twenty years, Charlie’s life had revolved around his nephew. He couldn’t face the prospect of losing him.

The news from Violet was encouraging. John had told him that the North Midlands were on standby to leave at any moment; yet her intelligence suggested that it would be a while before they left England. Further, when they did, it would not be for the Western Front, but to replace regular army troops manning garrisons in the outposts of the empire.

Violet’s intelligence had come from Lord Grenfell. Nine days earlier, on 7 October, she had finally managed to see him. ‘Darling C, nothing definite,’ she reported back after the meeting: ‘Only that he is sure they will not be going to the Front for a year! I did feel comforted talking to him. And he also says the Territorials will go to
replace
– places like India, Malta etc.’

Violet had sought to corroborate Grenfell’s information. That morning, she had forwarded Charlie a copy of a note that had come from Dr Donald Hood. ‘Send me this back and phone, darling. Rather a comfort, isn’t it?’ Hood’s note contained classified information, which his brother had passed him: ‘I heard last night that under present regulations no Territorials will leave for another 3 months, and then the first lots will go to various garrison duties such as Malta, Egypt and Gibraltar.’

Hood’s brother was a senior civil servant at the War Office. ‘Don’t ever give his name, or his informant away,’ Violet cautioned Charlie: ‘
Fearfully Private
.’

Later that afternoon, when Charlie got home from the Army and Navy Stores, he wrote to John. He did not report the important news that Violet had conveyed that morning:

Dear Jacko,

Army & Navy are sending you (and you should get them tomorrow) 3 pairs of their thickest vests and drawers. Not Jaeger, as they don’t keep them, and say there are others far better in every way.

I’m not sure I was very pleased with them but they are the best they have got. Also 5 pairs of thick woollen socks. They, of course,
will take them back if you don’t like them, and on hearing from you I will at once go to Jaeger or elsewhere and enquire.
Soft
thick socks are of course useless as they don’t wear for a day.

The air pillow from A & N is the one mostly used, they say. I told them also to send you 2 sleeping caps. The knitted one, though hardish, is what has been proved to be far better than the soft things that are now made because it clings tight to the head. The torch was not to be had at the Stores. They say they had 50 of them last week but sold them all in 2 hours. But I found out that they came from Ian Steward in the Strand, and though he had none left, he has sworn to send you one tonight. I saw his sample one. You will have to understand – for instantaneous light you press one button, for prolonged light you press the smaller button and twist it a little round. If you want a light not to show up, you keep the leather top of the case closed.

I am going to Brighton again tonight. So if you wire, wire both places. No other news that I know of. Brighton is like martial law – no lights at night etc. I don’t suppose I shall go on long with this going down there for the night, as it is rather a bother coming up early in the morning, but I get gloomy alone in London in the evenings. Hope to see you again v soon.