Bombs on Aunt Dainty Read online

  Supper was almost a family affair. The Woodpigeon made a little speech to welcome Anna back. “Though you are a foolish girl,” he said, “for not staying in the beautiful countrysides with the sheeps and the grasses.”

  “Really, Mr Woodpigeon,” said Frau Gruber who could pronounce his name no more than anyone else, “your English is getting worse each day.”

  The air-raid warning did not sound until sometime after dark and Mama waved it aside contemptuously.

  “They won’t come tonight,” she said. “There’s too much cloud.”

  “I don’t see how you can be so sure,” said Papa, but everyone else seemed ready to accept Mama as an expert, and it was decided not to sleep in the cellar.

  Anna found that she had been given a room on the first floor, next to Mama. (“No point in sleeping under the roof when the whole hotel is empty,” said Frau Gruber.) She had been worried that she might get very frightened again during the night, but her rest in the country must have done her good, for the few bumps which woke her did not trouble her at all, and even the following night which had to be spent in the cellar was not too bad.

  When she returned to the secretarial school she found that it had acquired a new air of purposeful activity. Madame Laroche, thinner and more excitable than ever, had taken over the reins again and her incomprehensible Belgian accent could be heard in every classroom. There was paper for the machines again – someone had unearthed an English source of supply – and there were even some new students.

  No one talked about air raids any more. They had become part of everyday life and were no longer interesting. Instead, all the talk was about jobs. There was a sudden demand for shorthand typists since London had come to terms with the bombing, and Madame Laroche had pinned up a list of vacant positions on a notice board in the corridor.

  “How soon do you think I could get a job?” Anna asked her, and to her delight she replied something that sounded like “get back into practice” followed by “a few weeks”. In fact, Anna’s shorthand came back to her very quickly and one morning, about ten days after her return, she said proudly to Mama, “I’m going to ring up about a job from school today. So if anyone asks me to go for an interview I may be home late.” She felt very grand saying this, and as soon as the first lesson was over she made for the school telephone with a copy of Madame Laroche’s list and a shilling’s worth of pennies.

  The best jobs were at the War Office. A girl Anna knew had just been taken on there at three pounds ten shillings a week, and she only spoke mediocre French. So what wouldn’t they pay someone like herself, thought Anna, with perfect French and German? And indeed, when she rang up and explained her qualifications the voice at the other end sounded enthusiastic.

  “Absolutely splendid,” it cried in a military sort of way. “Can you come round at o-eleven hundred hours for an interview?”

  “Yes,” said Anna, and one part of her was still trying to work out what on earth was meant by o-eleven hundred hours while another part was announcing to Mama that she had a job at four pounds or even four pounds ten a week, when the voice said as an afterthought, “I take it that you’re British-born?”

  “No,” said Anna, “I was born in Germany, but my father …”

  “Sorry,” said the voice, several degrees cooler. “Only British-born applicants can be considered.”

  “But we’re anti-Nazi!” cried Anna, “We’ve been anti-Nazis long before anyone else!”

  “Sorry,” said the voice. “Regulations – nothing I can do.” And it rang off.

  How idiotic, thought Anna. She was so disappointed that it took her some time before she could rouse herself to ring up the Ministry of Information, which was her second choice, but the reply she received was the same. No one could be considered unless they were British-born.

  Surely, she thought with a sinking feeling in her stomach, everyone can’t have that rule, but it appeared that they did. There were six large organisations on Madame Laroche’s list, all appealing for secretaries, and none would even grant her an interview. After the last one had refused her she stood for a moment by the telephone, completely at a loss. Then she went to see Madame Laroche.

  “Madame,” she said, “you told me that I would get a job at the end of this course, but none of the people on your list will even see me because I’m not British.”

  Madame Laroche’s reply was difficult to follow as usual. The regulations about British nationality were new – or perhaps they were not new, but Madame Laroche had hoped that by now they might have been waived. Whatever it was, the one thing to emerge clearly was that it was hopeless for Anna to go on trying.

  “But Madame,” said Anna, “I must have a job. That was my one reason for coming here. You told me that I would get a job, and I told my mother this morning …” She stopped, for what she had told Mama was really nothing to do with it, but even so she had the greatest difficulty in keeping her composure.

  “Well, there’s nothing I can do about it now,” said Madame Laroche unhelpfully in French, whereupon Anna, to her surprise, heard herself say, “But you’ll have to!”

  “Comment?” said Madame Laroche, looking at her with dislike.

  Anna stared back at her.

  Madame Laroche mumbled something under her breath and began to rummage among the papers on her desk. Finally, she extracted one and muttered something about a cross, red colonel.

  “Won’t he object to my nationality?” asked Anna, but Madame Laroche thrust the piece of paper into her hand and cried, “Go! Go! Ring up at once!”

  Back at the telephone Anna looked at the paper. It said The Hon. Mrs Hammond, Colonel of the British Red Cross Society, and gave an address off the Vauxhall Bridge Road. She borrowed two more pennies and dialled the number. The voice that answered was gruff and brisk, but it did not ask whether she was British-born and suggested that she should come for an interview that afternoon.

  She spent the rest of the day in fidgety anticipation. She wondered whether to ring Mama and let her know that she was going for an interview but decided not to, in case nothing came of it. At lunch she could not face her usual meal of a bun and a cup of tea at Lyons and wandered about the streets instead, eyeing her reflection in the few remaining shop windows and worrying whether she looked sufficiently like a secretary. At last, when the time arrived, she got there far too early and had to walk up and down the Vauxhall Bridge Road for the best part of half an hour.

  It was not a very attractive neighbourhood. There was a brewery at one end and the sour smell of hops pervaded the entire district. Trams shrieked and clattered along the middle of the road. All the shops had been boarded up and abandoned.

  Mrs Hammond’s office turned out to be a little apart from all this, in a bomb-damaged hospital overlooking a large square, and after the noise of the main road it seemed very quiet when Anna finally rang her bell. She was admitted by a woman in an overall who led her through a vast, dark place which must have been one of the wards, through a smaller brightly-lit room where half a dozen elderly women were rattling away on sewing machines and to a tiny office where the Hon. Mrs Hammond was sitting stoutly behind a desk surrounded by skeins of wool. Her grey hair was covered with fluff and the wool seemed to have climbed all over her, hanging from her chair and her blue uniformed lap and lying in coils on the floor.

  “Damn these things!” she cried as Anna came in. “I’ve lost count of them again. Are you any good at arithmetic?”

  Anna said she thought so and Mrs Hammond said, “Jolly good. And what else can you do?” causing Anna to list her accomplishments from her School Certificate results to her ability to take down shorthand in three languages. As she went nervously through them Mrs Hammond’s face fell.

  “It won’t do!” she cried. “You’d hate it – you’d be bored stiff!”

  “I don’t see why,” said Anna, but Mrs Hammond shook her head.

  “Languages,” she cried. “Got no use for them here. You want somewhere like the W
ar Office. Crazy for girls like you – French, German, Hindustani – all that.”

  “I’ve tried the War Office,” said Anna, “but they won’t have me.”

  Mrs Hammond absent-mindedly tried to unfasten a loop of wool which had wound itself round a button on her tunic. “Why?” she said. “What’s wrong with you?”

  Anna took a deep breath. “I’m not English,” she said.

  “Ha! Irish!” cried Mrs Hammond and added reproachfully, “You’ve got green eyes.”

  “No,” said Anna, “German.”

  “German?”

  “German-Jewish. My father is an anti-Nazi writer. We left Germany in 1933 …” She was suddenly sick of explaining, having to justify herself. “My father’s name was on the first black list published by the Nazis,” she said quite loudly. “After we’d escaped from Germany they offered a reward for his capture, dead or alive. I’m hardly likely, therefore, to sabotage the British war effort. But it’s extraordinary how difficult it is to convince anyone of this.”

  There was a pause. Then Mrs Hammond said, “How old are you?”

  “Sixteen,” said Anna.

  “I see,” said Mrs Hammond. She stood up, scattering wool in all directions like a dog shaking water out of its fur. “Well now,” she said. “Why don’t we have a look at what the job consists of?”

  She led Anna to some shelves stacked with bulky packets up to the ceiling.

  “Wool,” she said.

  Then she pointed to a filing cabinet and flicked open a drawer full of record cards.

  “Little women,” she said, and as Anna looked puzzled, “They knit. All over the country.”

  “I see,” said Anna.

  “Send the wool to the little women. Little women knit it up into sweaters, socks, Balaclava helmets, what have you. Send them back to us. We send them to chaps in the Forces who need them. That’s all.”

  “I see,” said Anna again.

  “Not very difficult, you see,” said Mrs Hammond. “No need for languages – unless of course we sent some to the Free French. Never heard of them being short of woollies, though.” She gestured towards the room with the sewing machines. “Then there’s the old ladies out there. Bit more responsibility.”

  “What do they do?” asked Anna.

  “Make pyjamas, bandages, all that, for hospitals. They live roundabout and come in. All voluntary, you understand. Have to give them Bovril in the morning and tea and biscuits in the afternoon.”

  Anna nodded.

  “Fact is,” said Mrs Hammond, “it’s all jolly useful. Found out from my own son in the Air Force – never got any woollies, always cold. And I do need someone to help. Think you could do it?”

  “I think so,” said Anna. It was not exactly what she had hoped for, but she liked Mrs Hammond and it was a job. “How …” she stammered, “I mean, how much …?”

  Mrs Hammond smote her forehead. “Most important part of the business!” she cried. “I was going to pay three pounds, but reckon you could get more with all those languages. Say three pounds ten a week – that suit you?”

  “Oh yes!” cried Anna. “That would be fine.”

  “Start on Monday, then,” said Mrs Hammond and added, as she ushered her out, “Look forward to seeing you.”

  Anna rode triumphantly down the Vauxhall Bridge Road on one of the clattering trams. It was getting dark and, by the time she had walked to Hyde Park Corner, the stairs leading down to the tube were crowded with people seeking shelter for the night. Quite a few had already spread out their bedding on the platform, and you had to be careful where you stepped. At Holborn there were people sitting on bunks against the walls as well as on the floor and a woman in green uniform was selling cups of tea from a trolley. At one end a knot of people had gathered round a man with a mouth organ to sing Roll Out The Barrel and an old man in a peaked cap called out, “Good night, lovely!” as she passed.

  The sirens sounded just as she turned into Bedford Terrace and she raced them to the door of the Hotel Continental, through the lounge and up the stairs, to burst breathlessly into Mama’s room. There was a droning sound, announcing the approach of the bombers.

  “Mama!” she cried as the first bomb burst, some distance away, “Mama! I’ve got a job!”

  Chapter Twelve

  Anna almost did not start her job on the following Monday after all, because something happened.

  It was on the Friday. Max had come on one of his rare visits and was staying the night, and though there had not been very much to eat for supper – food rationing was getting stricter – they had sat over it a long time with Max talking about his life as a schoolmaster which he quite enjoyed, and Anna talking about her job.

  “The lady is called the Hon. Mrs Hammond,” she said proudly. “She must be related to some kind of a lord. And she’s paying me three pounds ten a week!”

  Mama nodded. “For the first time we can look ahead a little.”

  Her face was pinker and more relaxed than Anna had seen it for some time. It was partly because Max was there, but also because the November mists had finally arrived and they had been able to sleep in their beds two nights running. Tonight, too, the sky was heavy with clouds and Max who was not used to London had been much impressed with Mama’s careless dismissal of the air-raid warning.

  By the time they went to bed it was quite late and Anna fell asleep almost immediately.

  She dreamed about the Hon. Mrs Hammond, whose office had inexplicably become entirely filled with wool which Anna and Mrs Hammond were trying to disentangle. Anna had got hold of an end and was trying to see where it led and Mrs Hammond was saying, “You have to follow the sound,” and then Anna noticed that the wool was giving out a curious humming like a swarm of mosquitoes or an aeroplane. She pulled gently at the piece in her hand and the humming turned at once into a violent screeching.

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean …” she began, but the screeching grew louder and louder and came closer and closer and then it drew her right inside itself and she and Mrs Hammond were flying through the air and there was a shattering crash and she found herself on the floor in a corner of her room at the Hotel Continental.

  All round her were fragments of glass from the shattered window – that’s the third lot of windows gone, she thought – and the floor was grey with plaster from the ceiling. I mustn’t cut myself this time, she thought, and felt carefully for her shoes, so as to be able to walk through the broken glass to the door. As she put them on, her hands were shaking – but that’s just shock she thought. There hadn’t really been time to be frightened.

  The landing was a mess with a lamp hanging from its socket and plaster all over the floor, and Max and Mama appeared on it almost immediately.

  Max was furious. “You said,” he shouted at Mama, “that the Germans wouldn’t come tonight!”

  “Well, they didn’t!” cried Mama. “Only just that one!”

  “For God’s sake!” Max shouted, pointing to the confusion about them. “Look what he’s done!”

  “Well, how was I to know,” cried Mama, “that the one German plane over London tonight would drop a bomb straight on us? I can’t be responsible for every madman who takes to the air in the middle of a fog! It’s easy for you to criticise …”

  “For God’s sake,” said Max again. “We might all have been killed!” – and at this the same realisation hit all three of them.

  “Papa!” cried Anna and rushed along the passage to his room.

  The door was jammed, but there was a scuffling sound inside and after a moment the door was wrenched open and Papa appeared. He was black with dust and there was plaster all over his hair and his pyjamas, but he was all right. Behind him, Anna could see that most of his ceiling had collapsed and that it was only the presence of the heavy wardrobe which had prevented it from crashing down on his bed.

  “Are you hurt?” cried Mama, close behind her.

  “No,” said Papa, and then they all stood and looked at the wreck
age that had been his room.

  Papa shook his head sadly. “To think,” he said, “that I’d just tidied up my desk!” Miraculously, no one was hurt except for cuts and bruises, but the whole hotel was in chaos. There were ceilings down everywhere, the heating no longer worked, and downstairs in the lounge the wind blew through gaps where doorposts and window frames no longer fitted into the walls. The bomb had fallen on the adjoining house, fortunately empty, and luckily it had been a very small bomb. (“You see!” cried Mama, still smarting from Max’s criticism, “I told you it wasn’t a proper one!”) But the damage looked to be beyond repair.

  The experts from the Council who came round later thought so too.

  “No use trying to fit this place up again,” they told Frau Gruber. “For one thing it wouldn’t be safe. You’d best find somewhere else,” and Frau Gruber nodded, sensibly, as though it were the most ordinary thing in the world, and you had to look quite closely to notice the twitching of a muscle near her mouth as she said, “It was my livelihood, you know.”

  “You’ll get compensation,” said the man from the Council. “Best thing would be if you could find another house.”

  “Otherwise we all shall be without a roof on our head,” said the Woodpigeon sadly, and the rest of the guests looked hopefully towards Frau Gruber as though she were capable of producing one out of a hat.

  It was curious, thought Anna – ever since the beginning of the blitz everyone had known that this might happen, but now that it had no one knew what to do. How did one find a new home in a bomb-shattered city?

  In the middle of it all Aunt Louise rang up. She was in London for the day and wanted Mama to have lunch with her. When Mama explained what had happened she cried at once, “My dear, you must buy the maharajah’s place!”

  Mama said rather tartly that Frau Gruber was looking for a house in London, not a palace in India, but Aunt Louise took no notice.