The Very Thought of You (5 page)

“
I’m still getting used to the strange ways of army life
,” he wrote, but felt reluctant to describe their banal routines: polishing buckles, erecting tents. They were busy much of the time, but there were also frequent between-times, when they all seemed to be waiting and waiting for the war to begin. Everything hanging on the news from Poland. He felt mapless in this new world, with his wife unattended, and their child in an unknown house.

“
Where is Anna’s new home
,” he wrote, “
have you heard yet?
”

* * *

“I am speaking to you from the Cabinet Room of 10 Downing Street.”

On the morning of Sunday 3rd September, Anna was sitting with a silent crowd of children in the Ashton saloon, listening to Mr Chamberlain on the wireless. All the evacuees had been assembled to hear the Prime Minister’s broadcast just after eleven o’clock, when his solemn, hangdog voice announced that they were now at war with Germany.

“You can imagine what a bitter blow it is to me that all my long struggle to win peace has failed… I know that you will all play your parts with calmness and courage.”

Anna felt keenly for her father, picturing him in his uniform. And would there be bombs, now, over London, with her mother sheltering in the cellar?

Mr Ashton switched off the wireless.

“It is unlikely that very much will happen to begin with, so please don’t worry yourselves about anything,” he said with a steady face. “And now I suggest you all write to your parents – to tell them you have arrived at a safe new home.”

The children were guided into the dining room, where each place was set with a sheet of lined paper and a pencil. Anna sat down and tried out her new curly handwriting, keeping her letters close to the lines.

Dear Mummy, my train went to Ashton Park in Yorkshire. It is huge. We play in the gardens a lot.

Roberta opened the letter as soon as she saw it on her return home from work. It didn’t say much. She looked at the post-mark – three days old. She read it over and over, to see if she had missed some nuance. Eight-year-olds could chatter away, but wrote as little as possible.

Tomorrow, she would go to the library and look up Ashton Park on the map. She had thought Anna would be in a family house, with foster-parents, but this sounded like a school. Perhaps that was better. She had given Anna a signal to let her know if things were too dire – she was to write, “Can you send me some extra socks?” Yet what if Anna had forgotten?

In the front room, the absence of her husband and child was palpable in the unlit silence. She rolled down her makeshift blackout curtains, then turned on a lamp and wrote to Lewis at his training camp:

I don’t know much about her new home yet, but her first letter was cheerful.

7

In Warsaw the mood was mysteriously euphoric on 3rd September. Britain’s declaration of war was greeted by rejoicing crowds spilling through the streets, and Poland’s
Colonel Beck arrived at the British Embassy with a bottle of champagne. He waved to well-wishers from the embassy balcony, but Norton had never felt less like celebrating. It was an unnatural jubilation, he thought, an odd gallows glee, and a desperate hope that if Britain was on their side now, and France too, there must surely be hope yet for Poland.

But any elation faded rapidly as Allied planes failed to appear and the Nazi tanks rolled on undeterred. Not for the first time, Norton felt acutely ashamed of Britain’s vacillating support for the Poles. The news from the front was desperate, with reports of the Polish cavalry being mown down by German tanks. And it was rumoured that almost the entire Polish air force had been destroyed on the ground, in a single Luftwaffe raid.

By 4th September, waves of German bombers were attacking Warsaw. Norton and his wife stood on the embassy roof, and watched the city burn. Within hours, heavy air raids forced them and their staff to abandon the embassy and head eastwards. There was little room for a chauffeur, so his wife insisted on driving their Plymouth herself.

“You’ve barely slept for days, and I’ve spent all summer getting to know the roads,” she said.

Norton’s wife had always been unflappable. Sometimes people asked him why she was called “Peter”, but as he watched her mobilizing the embassy evacuation, he thought how apt her nickname was: she was irrepressible, like Barrie’s pantomime boy. With her short hair and angular face, she had never been pretty, but Norton loved his wife for her energy and bracing candour.

She drove him through the night, in pitch darkness. Their car was right down on its springs, and she navigated by moonlight.

At one point she lurched abruptly into a copse, and the jolt of her braking woke him.

“Stukas,” she said, “we’ll wait here.” He heard the engines rumbling overhead.

“You should have woken me earlier – I might have died in my sleep,” he muttered. She glanced at him sideways in the dark.

“You would’ve probably woken up just
as
you were dying.”

She kept on driving for several days, until they reached the eastern town of Krzemieniec, where the diplomatic corps were regrouping.

“It looks like the backdrop for a ballet,” said Norton, admiring the pretty hillside town as they unloaded the car. But the next morning, six German planes appeared from the west and dive-bombed the marketplace, packed with peasants and their loaded carts.

It was all so sudden. Houses collapsed, and screaming people scattered in every direction. a shrieking horse bolted through the market, his twisted cart clattering over cobblestones. Other dead horses littered the streets. Norton found a woman streaming with blood in a crater, and he pulled her out, while his wife ran to help an old man trapped by a wall.

The rest of that day was spent digging out bodies from the debris. Twenty or more houses were destroyed, and over fifty people died outright, but many more were injured. Norton tried to cable London with reports of this civilian slaughter, but the wires were down.

The diplomats huddled together in that broken town until the thirteenth day of the Nazi invasion, when news came through of a sudden pincer invasion by the Soviets from the east, sealing Poland’s ruin. Then they all knew it was time to leave.

The Nortons drove to Kuty, a small town separated from romania by ariver. There, Norton got out his visa stamp,
and signed as many British visas as he could for refugees trying to escape Poland. Then he and his wife joined the interminable queue across the border bridge to safety, and began their long journey back to England.

When they at last found their way home to London, the parks were empty and the streets swollen with inert piles of sandbags. The city had a strange, corpse-like air.

It was a few days before Norton realized what was missing. It was the sound of children, walking home from school, running to the corner shop, waiting with their mothers at bus stops. As if the Pied Piper had passed through London and lured them all away.

Affinities

1939–45

8

6th October 1939

Dear Mummy,

There are lots of trees and conkers here. Yesterday we made a big pile of leaves and hid inside it.

Anna had never noticed autumn before. Back home, the sheer cliffs of terraced streets blocked the light and hid the seasons. There was summertime when you ran about outside, but after that she could only remember darker days, and the long wait for Christmas. Wet leaves on the pavement and bare branches against a white sky.

But here, now, in remote Yorkshire parkland, Anna saw the glory of autumn for the first time. Great avenues of trees towered with colour. Wide lawns glinted with ripe conkers, and gusts of wind swept down leaves in fiery drifts. The weather reached right through her fingertips and deep inside her, until she felt different and new.

Today, a sparse drizzle had driven the other evacuees indoors, but Anna lingered outside for a while, strained by playing with children she barely knew. In the empty garden the roses were oddly still, as if arrested in time. The quiet was such that only a sigh of rain could be heard, close or far.

At that moment, under a sullen sky,
realized she was disappointed. Only weeks ago, she had thought they were being sent to the seaside, all of them. She had pictured herself running on soft sand, in an endless afternoon of sunshine
with no school. Now she wondered how soon she could get back home to her mother.

Beside her stood a cluster of flaking roses, yellow but edged with brown, and torn by rain. They had no scent. The box hedges were stiff with raindrops which quivered on small points. Anna flicked a hedge with a stick, and water sprayed over her bare shins.

I have a uniform now. Does that mean I’m staying here longer? I’m fine but I miss you. Please write soon. Lots of love, Anna.

The day they all lined up for their uniforms had felt like a turning point. Grey tunics for the girls, grey shorts for the boys, white shirts for both. There were a few standard sizes, and many of the evacuees drifted around in clothes too big for them, cuffs rolled up. But the next morning, when they filed in for assembly, Anna noticed how they all looked more or less the same now.

She counted six teachers at the school – or seven, including Mr Ashton. They were led by Mr Stewart, a Scotsman who had been a headmaster in Pimlico. His back was army straight, and he hid behind a moustache flecked with grey, like Mr Chamberlain. Anna often saw him set off for solitary walks, picking his way through the fallen leaves with a stick.

Some of the children were always homesick, snivelling with tears which seemed to blend into their colds and runny noses. But Anna didn’t cry. As the weeks unrolled she began to pride herself on being one of the braver evacuees, who could adapt to anything. She still missed her home, but a part of her now wanted to see this adventure through to its end.

She had never known a place with so many secrets to explore. There was a watchful statue of Father Time on the lawn, and an abandoned palm house in the woodland – and beyond, a pet cemetery marked with strange names. Inside the house, the corridors were hung with ghostly portraits of forgotten people, and hidden attic steps climbed up to dusty storerooms crammed with old furniture and papers.

One of the older children discovered a disused nursery. A painted room, once cornflower-blue, now faded somewhat and piled with old toys. It became a secret den for some of the bolder girls, including Anna. There was a doll’s house, still peopled by pretty porcelain dolls with faces of startled happiness. An old rocking horse stood patiently to one side, with a scraggy mane and frayed stirrups. Dusty wooden puzzles were stacked on shelves. Tin soldiers, too, and a wind-up drummer whose drumbeat still worked if you turned the key. Dolls with unruly hair, and teddies missing their glass eyes.

Did the Ashtons have a daughter, Anna wondered, locked away in another part of the house?

“Whose was the doll’s house in the old nursery?” she asked casually one day, as Mrs Robson, a housemaid, was folding laundry.

“that’d be Miss Claudia’s,” she said, “Mr Ashton’s little sister – died of the flu as a girl.”

Anna breathed in sharply. a dead child, a dead sister, at Ashton Park. Perhaps there was a family curse.

“And Mr Ashton, was he always… lame?”

“Oh no,” came the emphatic reply, “He was the finest young man in Yorkshire. Running, riding, dancing, everything.”

Brisk Mrs Robson seemed unfussed by this revelation, but Anna felt herself flinching. To change so drastically – that was terrible!

What happened to him?
Anna wondered. Perhaps war wounds had crippled him. Perhaps he had won medals for bravery in the Great War, leading his men. Or perhaps it was a car crash—

“That’s
awful
,” was all she could muster, hoping Mrs Robson would be more forthcoming.

“He copes. There’s many to help him.”

Mrs Robson was busy counting pillow slips, but she glanced over at the child, who was suddenly damp-eyed at Mr Ashton’s misfortune, and became stern, irritated even.

“There’s worse things than being an Ashton, even if you’re crippled. Save your pity for those as go down the mines every day – if you break your body there, you’re finished, like a broken tool. Mr Ashton has plenty to enjoy, plenty to be glad about. He’s all right.”

There was a firm note of reproach in the older woman’s chiding, but all Anna’s sympathy was welling up for the kind, gentle man who tried so hard when he taught them. She had not realized how much he had lost.

By the time Mr Ashton arrived at her next lesson, she felt a shiver of secret embarrassment – because she had been thinking about him. He had triggered her pity, and there was no ridding that from her heart now, as she watched him wheel himself to the front of the class.

* * *

Thomas Ashton swivelled his chair by the teacher’s desk, then looked across to see fourteen young faces gazing up at him, expectant, respectful, perhaps a little nervous too.

How very strange it all was. To find himself teaching this group of unknown children, all under ten. Their first Latin lesson.

“Let us begin at the beginning,” he said, clearing his throat. “
Amo, amas, amat, amamus, amatis, amant – that
is what all children learn first in Latin, the verb ‘to love’. Learn
amo
, and you will open a door onto one of the great lost languages of the world.”

He smiled as he said this, hoping the children would relax.

“It is all quite simple after this,” he went on, wheeling himself over to write the words on the board.

“Just repeat after me.
Amo
– I love.
Amas
– you love.
Amat
– he or she loves…”

He began to chant the words and the children followed him.

“
Amo – amas – amat – amamus – amatis – amant.”

“Again.”

The children recited it over and over, understanding nothing, really, of their stiff chorus.
I love, you love, we all love.

“That’s very good,” said Thomas, halting their chant with a raised hand. “Now you can speak Latin. Remember these words, and they will never leave you.”