Their Finest Hour and a Half (10 page)

‘I'll do it, Miss Beadmore,' said Pearl.

‘No, really, I'd like Nora to come with me.'

Nora stood up like a little wooden puppet, picked up her work basket and followed Edith.

Dolly pursed her lips in disapproval and mouthed the word ‘Shock' at Pearl. ‘I once heard of a girl . . .' she began, as Edith closed the door.

There were certain items that the general public simply would not leave alone: Hitler's moustache, Nelson's eyepatch, Gandhi's spectacles – all were picked at, adjusted, dropped, swapped and occasionally stolen. Marlene Dietrich's top hat had been replaced, serially, by a boater, a policeman's helmet and a knotted handkerchief, while the husky that accompanied Amundsen to the Pole had gone missing twice, on the second occasion turning up outside Battersea Dogs' Home with a note tied to its harness. Other damage was less deliberate and more insidious – satin gowns were stroked, medals fingered, bald heads patted, and skirts lifted and peered under by filthy-minded small boys. Poor Mary, Queen of Scots, lying on the ground in clinging black velvet, her head resting on the block, was particularly vulnerable to unauthorized clothing adjustment, not to mention dust, and, at Edith's request, Nora knelt beside her and spent a calming ten minutes picking lint off the dress and rearranging the heavy folds.

Edith worked her way along the row of Henry the Eighth's wives, feeling, as she always did during this procedure, like a sergeant major inspecting his favourite platoon: kirtles and partlets all present and correct, coifs, cornets and bumrolls to the ready. Such gorgeous, heavy fabrics, such a rich and strange nomenclature . . .

She had thought, when she had started working at Madame Tussaud's in 1931, that she might one day aspire to designing such costumes, that her evening studies and her year at art school (dreamed-of for a decade, gone in a blink) might mark her out as someone with potential. She'd been wrong, of course: designers, she found, came from another world. They swept into Tussaud's with a bundle of sketches and then swept out again, they were vivid and glossy and memorable, and Edith had stayed in the workroom and inched her way from the title of under-seamstress to that of seamstress. ‘Miss Beadmore,' as the manager of the museum had once said, in a phrase that had lodged uneasily in her memory, ‘is our backbone.' She would remind herself, if feeling a little low, that in many ways the costumes were more truly hers than the designers', and that there was really nothing finer than her daily privilege of walking through the galleries before opening hours when the displays were all pristine, radiant, unsullied by punters. There was order here, too, and space and neatness, all the qualities so dreadfully lacking in her current home life.

‘I've done that, Miss Beadmore,' said Nora, standing up and dusting off her skirt. ‘What shall I do next?'

‘You could come along with me to Heroes and Heroines – I want to check on the new figure. If you feel up to it, that is.'

‘I'm fine now, Miss Beadmore.' Nora trotted along, willingly enough. Separated from Pearl she was always quiet and respectful, and it was hard to tell whether her current silence was in any way abnormal, or simply indicative of her boredom in adult company.

Edith had no knack for talking to the youngsters, no instinct for what might catch their interest, but perhaps it was better not to try at all than to attempt, like Dolly, to use slang, or to claim to have a ‘pash' on the same film stars that the girls shrieked over. Edith could blush, sometimes, for the conversations that took place in the sewing-room, though she tried not to show her embarrassment; it would only encourage their silliness, to think her a prude. She would rather be labelled reserved, or over-serious.

‘So have you seen it?' she asked Nora, as they took the short-cut through the almost deserted foyer, where a single Canadian airman stood with a guidebook.

‘Seen what, Miss Beadmore?'

‘The new figure in the Heroes of War tableau.'

‘No I haven't, Miss Beadmore. Is it a soldier?'

‘Yes, he's called Captain Warburton-Lee.'

‘Oh.'

‘He won the Victoria Cross for gallantry at Narvik.'

‘Oh.'

‘That's in Norway.'

‘Oh.'

‘And they're almost finished in the moulds room with another one – a hero of Dunkirk.'

Nora glanced up at her, suddenly interested. ‘Is it the twins?'

‘No, it's a Lance Corporal Nicholls. Who are the twins?'

‘The
Starling
twins,' said Nora, apparently amazed by Edith's ignorance. ‘They were in
Tit-Bits
two weeks running. With illustrations. They went all the way to France in their boat and they picked up soldiers from the water, and then they brought them all the way back again, and there was explosions and torpedoes and all that, and it was ever so brave of them.'

‘I see.' Edith thought of the countless similar stories she had read in the press, and wondered what it was that had marked the twins as especially memorable. ‘Were they very handsome?' she asked.

‘They were
girls
,' said Nora, triumphantly, her war knowledge having topped Edith's at last. ‘It said someone named a rose after them, and they got a letter from the Queen and from the princesses, and they—' From somewhere outside, the unmistakable slow howl of the siren began and Nora's lips bunched inward as though she had bitten on a rotten tooth.

‘They won't come here, will they?' she asked.

‘I hope not.'

But there was another note behind the siren, a low, uneven growl, and they both heard it, tilting their heads like pointers. They found me in Wimbledon, thought Edith, and now they're looking for me again – though she knew that the thought was nonsensical, that those boys in the cockpits saw nothing, really, except the flames of their own making, and the glint of the river.

‘Shall we go to the basement?' she asked, and Nora nodded, and, after a moment, took her hand.

It wasn't until the evening that the bomb fell. Sirens came and went all afternoon until no one could remember whether the last one had been the alert or the all-clear, and no one knew whether to make the dash for the underground, or to stick it out in the dusty basement. The noise, when it came, was colossal, the darkness instantaneous, but Edith, with the ceiling dropping around her, felt none of the terror and euphoria of her first bomb; her heart gasped once and then raced steadily onwards, and she knew that she was alive, and likely to stay that way. So when she took her torch and climbed the stairs into the rubble and chaos of the museum, and – under the broken roof, with the searchlights tilting overhead – began her second Assessment and Rectification round of the day, she couldn't (as Dolly afterwards tried to) ascribe her actions to shock. It was more of a terrible curiosity – the same emotion that had driven her up the stairs at Wimbledon. And just as at Wimbledon, where Pamela's prissy little room, and the dank scullery and the lounge that Edith didn't give a fig for had survived intact, so the mannequins in the Enemies of Great Britain display needed little more than a brush down and the Hall of Sporting Champions had suffered nothing worse than a toppled footballer or two, while her favourite room, her own room, the central gallery where the kings and queens of England posed in finest silk and stiff brocade, in ermine and velvet and Bruges lace, in gowns of deepest crimson, of ivory and of midnight blue, was devastated. The soft smudge of torchlight swept across a royal massacre, a waxen Ekaterinburg.

There was Mary, Queen of Scots blown into the ranks of the Plantagenets, there was George IV pinned under a roof beam, and poor, plain, unlauded Queen Anne half-stripped and decapitated. And in a line across the centre of the room, each lying on the legs of the next like a coxless six, lay Henry's wives. Here and there, through the layer of filth and plaster that covered them, a tiny spot of colour showed – the green lining of Anne Boleyn's sleeve, a hint of crimson at Catherine Howard's breast. A tiny pattering noise began, like weak applause, and, unthinkingly, Edith raised her torch towards the roof. A fine rain slanted across the beam.

There was a shout, and the crunch of running footsteps. ‘
Off
. Turn that bloody torch off.'

‘Sorry.'

‘I should bloody well hope you are. Anyone hurt in here?'

‘I don't think so. We were all in the basement.'

‘I'll go and check, then.'

She stood in darkness as the warden walked away and she listened to the rain falling, to the dust turning to mud and the plaster to glue.

NEWSREEL

November 1940

There were two viewing rooms at the Ministry of Information: the superior, with padded seats and a ventilation fan, for official screenings, and the intra-departmental, with sticky wooden benches and a pervasive smell of sweat. Catrin, in the latter, remained standing and breathed through her mouth while watching the scrap of film, stopwatch and script in hand.

The scene was a two-shot, filmed over the shoulder of Woman 1, so that whereas Woman 2's face was fully visible, only part of the back of Woman 1's head was in view. This was known in the films division, Catrin had discovered, as a ‘salvage shot', since Woman 1, her lips invisible, could be redubbed to say anything that would fit in the gaps between Woman 2's replies, thus saving on the cost of shooting new footage.

Back at her desk, Catrin underlined the words ‘Food Flash' at the top of a piece of scrap paper, re-read the Ministry of Food guidelines she'd been sent, took out the stopwatch again and set to work on a draft.

She missed Ivy and Lynn. The So-Bee-Fee campaign was still extant – she had spotted the latest instalment in
Woman's View
– but someone else was writing the captions now, and the characters' dialogue, which she'd tried so carefully to differentiate, had become interchangeable. Bert had also become interchangeable, carelessly appearing as Lynn's husband one month, Ivy's the next, while the illustrations were once again spiralling away from reality: in the last one she'd seen, Ivy had been frying sausages while wearing an evening stole.

Catrin read the Ministry of Food memorandum again.
Also swedes
, it said at the bottom.

The office door opened and one of the script-editors stuck his head in.

‘Call for you in scenarios,' he said, disappearing again.

There was a telephone on her own desk, but it wasn't connected to anything. The words ‘her own desk' were similarly redundant since she shared it with one of the office messengers, a man in his sixties who had generously come out of retirement in order to contribute to the war effort. Personnel had decided to utilize his forty years in industry by giving him the job of occasionally taking pieces of paper from one floor to another, and he spent most of his time sleeping with his head next to Catrin's typewriter. He opened an eye as she stood up. ‘Any jobs?' he asked, plaintively.