Asta's Book (20 page)

I am going to buy a French tricot cardigan I’ve seen and a motoring coat with raglan sleeves and maybe a pagoda-shaped costume that has a tricorne hat to go with it. I like extreme clothes that make people stare.

January 3rd, 1914

All the children made New Year Resolutions—well, Swanny made Marie’s for her. She may suck her thumb but she is never again to suck that bit of blanket she carries about everywhere with her. Poor little Marie kept to that for a whole two hours! Swanny made a resolution not to cry any more, Mogens to work harder at mathematics and Knud not to smoke cigarettes. When I said he didn’t smoke cigarettes anyway, he was too young, he said you never could tell when the craving might start and it was as well to be prepared.

Rasmus, half in fun no doubt and to please the children (he says) made his resolution to be a millionaire! I think he’s serious.

June 30th, 1914

Two days ago the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife were assassinated in a place called Sarajevo by a Bosnian Serb. Why is it that important people, royalty and suchlike, get assassinated while other people are just murdered?

It is obvious that the poor man who did it had been driven mad by having his country taken over by Austria-Hungary. My father felt the same about Schleswig and Holstein though he didn’t assassinate anybody, thank God. The fools are those people who say it was all a plot engineered by Servian officials. Why do they want to
make
trouble?

I’m glad it’s all happening such a long way from here.

I took the girls and Emily for a picnic in Highgate Woods but Marie got bitten by a mosquito, cried and cried and refused to be comforted. I was carrying her and not too happily because she is a big lump and must weigh three stone—Emily had the picnic basket—when who should we meet in the Muswell Hill Road but that Mrs Gibbons who lived next door but two in Lavender Grove.

I don’t think she’d have recognized me if I hadn’t spoken first. She eyed me up and down, taking in all the details of my Bordeaux-red dress with the tricolour motifs and my white hat with red cockade. I’ve worn my wedding ring on my left hand ever since she told me people would think I wasn’t respectable if I didn’t, and now I wear Rasmus’s emerald on top of it. I moved my hand up across Marie’s back to show off the rings and I could see her looking.

‘Did your husband ever come back, Mrs Westerby?’ she said, as if she hadn’t seen him in Lavender Grove scores of times. I suppose it was her way of getting revenge for me being so obviously rich and having a maid with me. She looked pretty badly off herself, poor thing.

I made Marie say hallo to her, though her face was all puffy with crying.

‘Children have been known to die of mosquito bites, you know,’ she said.

I’d been going to invite her back to Padanaram for tea but that stopped me. All the more reason to hurry back, I said, and get some arnica put on it. But it made me think about me and the women I know. Mrs Bisgaard that I met at the Danish church and who lives in Hampstead is quite nice and I have been to tea with her and she to me, but she is so correct and well-mannered, all her talk is small talk and she cares for nothing but children. I wish I had a friend!

July 29th, 1914

Yesterday was Swanny’s birthday. She was nine. We had a birthday party after school and ten of her friends came—well, ten girls from her class. I don’t know if they were really friends. I’m not much of a cook but I wanted to make her birthday cake myself and it turned out quite well, a Victoria sponge with jam in the middle and Royal icing on top and nine candles. She blew them out in one go.

I made her party frock too, saxe blue and emerald shot silk with picot edges to all the flounces. When Hansine saw the material she said, ‘Blue and green should never be seen,’ but I think they can be a beautiful combination. Swanny’s lovely fair hair reaches to her waist. She was quite the prettiest girl at the party. The little Bisgaard girl, Dorte, had the most beautiful dress, real matelasse in a shade of old rose, but nothing can take away the plainness of her face. Rasmus didn’t show himself at what he called the ‘jollification’ but stayed outside in his workshop all the time. When I complained he said, didn’t I want a wrought-iron jardinière for the hall? He thought I did (very sarcastic) and that was why he was labouring out there at all hours.

Much less important than the party was those Austrians declaring war on Servia. Mr Housman and his new wife, his bride really, came in much later in the evening and Mr Housman said it will all be over in a week. He’s a sensible man and I believe what he says. Russia, who thinks of herself as the protector of this small Slav state, will have to sink into the humiliating position of a beaten power. She dare not fight and must watch the Teuton Empire expanding in overwhelming might (his words—I don’t think he intended a rhyme).

Mrs Housman, who is a very big woman but quite good-looking and with hair so red that it must be hennaed, had a very smart dress on. She’s tall so she can carry it off. It was green-and-white check, high-waisted and without a girdle but with huge hip pockets and a great black satin bow on the bosom. She has asked me to tea and to bring the girls.

August 2nd, 1914

How glad I am that my sons are too young to fight. By the time they are old enough to be soldiers it will certainly all be over—if it starts. But it looks as if it will start.

Germany has declared war. Her object, it seems, is to sweep down and conquer France, the ally of Russia, before Russia can make a counter-stroke. These matters are always very complicated. The British Empire hasn’t seemed much concerned in all of it but it may be different now, especially if Kaiser Wilhelm is going to challenge our sea power. Funny, I wrote ‘our’, though I think of myself as every inch a Dane.

Rasmus talks of nothing but war. To distract myself I’ve started reading those books Tante Frederikke left me. I’ve had them for a year and never bothered to look into them till now. The one I’ve started is called
A Christmas Carol.

September 7th, 1914

Hansine is in great distress of mind because her Cropper has joined the army. He is a bit younger than she, no more than thirty-one or thirty-two, so by no means too old to enlist. In floods of tears, she told me they were engaged, were saving up to get married and had been planning to do so next year. I must say, I think she might have said something about this before.

He’s a very handsome man. It will be a crying shame if he gets himself killed.

I meant to chronicle everything that happens in the war in this diary but it’s impossible, there’s so much of it, it’s so complicated and happening in so many places. One thing is for certain, it isn’t going to be quickly over. The wounded, coming back from Mons, all tell stories of German cowardice and treachery. One said, ‘If you stand up in the firing-line they cannot hit you. They do not aim with the rifle and will not face the bayonet. They are afraid of cold steel.’ Well, who wouldn’t be? I can believe any Teuton is treacherous but if they’re such cowards and bad soldiers why couldn’t we drive them out of Belgium?

It’s once again a very good thing I write in Danish because if anyone here could read this I don’t know what they’d do to me. One has to be very patriotic, say all the British are saintly heroes and the Germans cowardly rats. There’s no middle way.

There was a photograph in
The War Illustrated
of a painting of Belgrade—as it used to be. ‘The beautiful white city’, they called it. Since the Austrian bombardment it’s become a desolate stretch of ruins. I’m glad I’m not Servian and my children aren’t. They say Belgium is full of beautiful age-old churches. I wonder how long they’ll remain standing?

I took Marie to tea with Mrs Housman at her house in Hampstead, at Frognal. Swanny was at school. There were six other ladies there and two more children, so no chance for conversation, only chat and small talk. You wouldn’t have believed there was a war on.

January 21st, 1915

Mogens was seventeen yesterday. We have to face the fact that he isn’t clever, he’s just a very kind nice boy. I wonder where he gets it from? I can’t think of anybody you could call nice in my family that I’ve ever known. My mother was always ill throughout my childhood, so you can’t count her. Who could be nice when they’re always in pain? My father was very strict and stern, famous for his moral character, but that didn’t stop him offering me to the first taker in need of hard cash. As to Tante Frederikke and her sons, they were a fault-finding, humourless, dour bunch of people. So there’s no knowing where Mogens gets his niceness from. Happy, laughing, sweet-natured Rasmus maybe and his family of brutish peasants.

Mogens wants to leave school in the summer and Rasmus says in his sour way that there’s no point in paying school fees for someone who can’t pass exams, or won’t try. I don’t know what Mogens will do, go into Rasmus’s business perhaps, if that’s possible. Rasmus says his only intellectual exercise is collecting numbers of
The War Illustrated
which he intends having bound into volumes. That will make depressing reading in the future.

Zeppelins crossed the North Sea last night and bombarded the coast of Norfolk. People were wounded in King’s Lynn and Yarmouth and a woman was killed while her husband was away fighting at the front. What an irony! The newspaper called the Germans ‘loathsome blood-mad fiends’ whose war methods are more savage than those of ‘the lowest races known to anthropology’. That made me laugh. What would Mrs Housman say if she could read Danish? The paper said we should be able to take reprisals. Up till now our airmen have flown over German cities but dropped no bombs.

Mrs Housman’s brother has joined the army.

March 1st, 1915

Mr H. G. Wells must be much cleverer than I am, otherwise he wouldn’t be in the position he is in, famous and listened-to and honoured by everyone. But sometimes when I read what he writes I can’t help thinking, what a fool! Doesn’t he know better than to think people change, that a whole nation can change more or less overnight? Here is an example, he is writing of what will happen to the Englishman when the war is over: ‘All the old pre-war habits will have gone. He will, as chemists say, be “nascent”, unsubmissive, critical … He will be impatient with a Government that “fools about”, he will want to go on doing things. So that I do not see that the old forensic party game is likely to return to British political life with the ending of the war …’ Ah, well.

Anyway, the war isn’t over yet and not likely to be for a long time. I have taught Swanny to knit and she is really very good for a child not yet ten. She is making khaki socks for soldiers. Her kind father’s comment: ‘I pity the poor fellow who has to feel all those lumps and knots in his boots.’

She is growing very tall for her age. I try not to worry about it. If she were a boy I suppose I should be delighted. She is nearly as tall as Emily and Emily is a full-grown woman, though a small one. Rasmus never hesitates to rub it in and says very tall women don’t find husbands.

‘Would that be so bad if she didn’t?’ I said.

He laughed. ‘Where would you be without one, old girl?’ he said, and he’s right. A woman has to have a husband or be a useless laughing-stock, but there’s something wrong with that somewhere, it can’t be the proper way for things to be organized.

I am reading
The Old Curiosity Shop.
I didn’t know reading stories could be such a pleasure. It’s funny but I seem to get right inside the characters and
be
them, which makes me care about what happens to them and get quite impatient to be back with my book.

March 30th, 1915

Mrs Housman’s brother has been killed in Flanders, three weeks after he joined up.

Of all the women I meet who’ve lost men at the front none ever seems to expect they might get killed. It’s the others who will die, theirs have charmed lives. Does it make the shock and the pain worse, I wonder? Perhaps not, because I’ve noticed you can’t prepare yourself for death. You may know it’s inevitable and tell yourself so day after day but when it comes it’s the same, as if you never expected it but thought the person would live for ever.

Mrs Housman kept saying, why him? Why me? Why did it have to happen to him? As if it wasn’t happening to hundreds, thousands. And what does she mean? That it should have happened to other men but not to this man because he was hers?

The French have published a list which shows
three million
German casualties but our list of
our
men lost at the Dardanelles shows just twenty-three dead, twenty-eight wounded and three missing. I don’t believe in these figures, they can’t be right.

July 28th, 1915

Swanny’s birthday and Mogens’ last day at school. He is going to start straightaway in the motor car sales business with Rasmus. I suppose he will do a clerk’s job because I’m sure he knows nothing about motor cars. I’m never told much but I can tell business isn’t good at present, I don’t suppose it could be with this war going on. It’s more than a year and a half since Rasmus made that New Year Resolution and he’s not a millionaire yet!

For her birthday we gave Swanny Greek dancing lessons, every Friday night from now till next spring. I found a wonderful word for her in my dictionary, we never have words like that in Danish: terpsichorean. I told her we should expect her to be proficient in the terpsichorean art.

Hansine’s Cropper has been reported missing in the Dardanelles. She is hoping—we are all hoping—he is a prisoner of war. Because they aren’t officially engaged, she is just his sweetheart not his fiancée, she had to hear the news from his sister who came round in secret yesterday to tell her. His mother is jealous as a tigress and won’t acknowledge Hansine’s position, calls her ‘that foreign slavey’. Then today poor Hansine got a letter from Cropper, weeks old of course, dated before the evacuation of West Gallipoli. I don’t think he knows she can’t read or he wouldn’t bother to write. He can’t want me to read out the private things he says to her, all the endearments and lovey-dovey bits. And really that’s all there is because although he wrote more, most of it is slashed out by the censor. For all we know he’s dead. Strange reading the cheerful and hopeful words of a dead man.