Christmas Pudding and Pigeon Pie (35 page)

‘Well, that’s all now, Greta. Good night,’ Sophia said. Greta slunk out past Florence, who did not give her a glance but told Sophia that she had come in search of an aspirin.

‘I had to go off duty, my head ached so badly.’

‘Oh, what bad luck. Would a Cachet Fèvre do as well? I’ve just been having such a scene with Greta; she has got it into her head that somebody is going to take her back to Germany, silly fool. I wish to goodness somebody would, I’d give anything to get rid of her.’

Florence said it was always a mistake to have foreign servants, thanked her for the Cachet Fèvre, and went upstairs. Sophia had rather been expecting that now Luke had gone perhaps Florence would be moving too, but she showed no signs of such an intention. However, the house was large, and they very rarely met, besides, she did not exactly dislike Florence; it was more that they had so little in common.

‘S
T
A
NNE
’
S
H
OSPITAL
F
IRST
A
ID
P
OST

The telephone bell rang and Sophia answered it. ‘Southern Control speaking. Practice RED, expect casualties.’ This meant
that ‘casualties’ would be arriving from the street. She ran up to the canteen to warn Sister Wordsworth, who was having tea.

‘Thank you, Lady Sophia. Now would you go and ring up the doctor?’ said Sister Wordsworth. ‘If you hurry, you will catch him at his home address. He said he would like to come to the next practice we have here.’

Sophia ran downstairs again. On her way back to the office she nearly collided with Heth and Winthrop who were carrying a stretcher.

‘Casualties already!’ she said, and as she was going on she noticed that the ‘casualty’ under the rugs on the stretcher was her own maid, Greta. For a moment she felt surprised, and then she thought that Florence must have asked Greta to do it; probably they were short of casualties. Greta was far too superior to be bribed by three pence and a cup of tea. She had a sort of bandage over her mouth, and had evidently been treated for ‘crushed tongue’, a very favourite accident at St. Anne’s. She seemed to have something in her eye, or at any rate it was winking and rolling in a very horrible way.

Sophia, as she went to the telephone, giggled to herself. ‘Typical of them,’ she thought, ‘to treat the wretched woman for crushed tongue when really she is half blinded by grit in the eye. Let’s hope they’ll take it out and give her a cup of tea soon.’ As the practice got into full swing Sophia became very busy and forgot the incident. She never saw Greta again.

The sensation which was caused by the supposed murder of Sir Ivor King, the King of Song, at a time so extremely inconvenient to the British Government, had scarcely subsided when the old singer turned up, wig and all, in Germany. It happened on the very day that Vocal Lodge was opened to the public, a ceremony which, at the request of the A.R.P., was unadvertised, and which therefore consisted of Sophia, in a simple little black frock, dispensing cocktails to Fred, in his pin stripes, and a few other friends. The house was rather bare of furniture, owing to Lady Beech. Hardly had Fred arrived when he was called to the telephone; white to the lips he announced that he had had news which compelled him to leave for the office at once.

The German Press and Radio were jubilant. The old gentleman, it seemed, was visiting that music-loving country with the express purpose of opening there a world-wide anti-British campaign of Propaganda allied to Song. This campaign, it was considered, would have a profound effect on neutral opinion, and indeed might well bring America into the war, on one side or another. He was received like a king in Germany, the Führer sending his own personal car and bodyguard to meet him at the airport, and he celebrated his first evening in Berlin by singing ‘Deutschland über Alles’ on the radio in a higher and then a lower key than it had ever been sung before.

Lord Haw-haw succeeded him at the microphone, and in his inimitable accents announced that the Lieder König was too tired to sing any more that evening but that listeners should
prepare for his first full programme of Song-Propaganda in two days’ time at 6.30 p.m. on the thirty-one meter band.

‘You must all be most anxious to hear,’ continued Lord Haw-haw,
‘how
the Lieder König come to our Fatherland. (He himself will be telling you
why
he came.) Your English police, it seems, never realised that the body found on the Pagoda at Kew Gardens was, in fact, the body of a wigless pig. Had they not jumped so quickly to conclusions, had they not assumed, as, of course, they were intended to assume, that these bleeding lumps of meat did not constitute the mangled body of the Lieder König, they would not, I expect, have been in such a hurry to bury them. There must be many housewives, whose husbands are at present behind the lines in France, flirting with the pretty French demoiselles, and to whom your Minister of War, Mr Horribleisha, has not yet paid their pathetically small allowances, who would have been only too glad to dispose of these lumps of pig. For bacon is extremely scarce in England now, and is indeed never seen outside the refrigerators of the wealthy.

‘Again I ask, where is the
Ark Royal
?

‘Here are the stations Hamburg, Bremen and D x B, operating on the thirty-one metre band. Thank you for your attention. Our next news in English will be broadcast from Reichsender Hamburg and station Bremen at 11.15 Greenwich mean time.’

For a day or two the English newspapers assured their readers that the loyal old ‘King’ was really reposing in his Catholic grave, and that the Germans must be making use of gramophone records, made before the war had begun, in order to perpetrate a gigantic hoax. Alas! The ‘King’ only had to give his first full-length broadcast for this theory to collapse. Nobody but himself could say ‘Hullo dears! Keep your hairs on’ in quite that debonair tone of voice.

‘I have come to Germany,’ he went on, ‘with the express intention of lending my services to the Fatherland, and this I do partly because I feel a debt of gratitude to this great country, this home of music where many years ago my voice
was trained, but chiefly because of my love of Slavery. I have long been a member of the English Slavery Party, an underground movement of whose very existence most of you are unaware but which is daily increasing in importance. It is my intention to give bulletins of news and words of encouragement to that Party, sandwiched between full programmes of joyous song in which I hope you will all join.

After bellowing out a good deal more of this kind of drivel, the ‘King’ told a long story about an English worker who, having been free to marry a Jewess (a thing which, of course, could never happen in Germany), had been cheated out of one and sixpence by his brother-in-law

‘Now here is a word of advice to my brothers of the Slavery Party. Burn your confidential papers and anything that could incriminate you at once. Those of you who have secret stores of castor oil, handcuffs and whips waiting for the great dawn of Slavery, bury them or hide them somewhere safe. For Eden was seen entering the Home Office at 5.46 Greenwich mean time this afternoon, and presently the Black-and-Tans are to conduct a great round-up in the homes of the suspects. For the benefit of my non-British listeners, let me explain that the Black-and-Tans are Eden’s dreaded police, so called because those of them that are not negroes are Mayfair play-boys, the dregs of the French Riviera. They are a brutal band of assassins, and those who fall foul of them vanish without any trace.’

Now the sinister thing about all this was that Mr Eden really had entered the Home Office at 5.46 on the afternoon in question. How could they have known it in Berlin at 6.30?

The Ministry of Information decided to suppress so disquieting a fact for the present.

By the next morning, of course, every single window of the newly constituted Shrine of Song had been broken. Lady Beech having removed all her own furniture, books, knick-knacks and kitchen utensils in three large vans, there was fortunately nothing much to damage, except the ‘King’s’ tatty striped wallpapers. Larch and his fellow-domestics gave notice at once, and fled from the Shrine of Shame as soon as they could.

Poor Sophia felt that she had been made a fool of, and wished the beastly old fellow dead a thousand times. She communicated this sentiment to the many reporters by whom she was once more surrounded, but unfortunately, once crystallised into hard print, it did not redound entirely to her credit considering that she was the ‘King’s’ heiress. The dignitary of the Roman Catholic Church, too, was very much displeased at having been bamboozled into allowing a Requiem Mass to be sung for the soul of a pig. Indeed Roman Catholics all over the world were aghast at the ‘King’s’ treachery, the more so as they had always hitherto felt great pride that one so distinguished should be a co-religionist, had regarded his enormous fame as being a feather in the cap of Holy Mother Church herself, and had never forgotten the pious deeds of his late wife, the posthumous Duchess King. At last Papist feeling became so strong on the subject that the Pope, bowing before the breeze, removed the body of the posthumous Duchess from its distinguished resting-place in the Vatican gardens, and had it re-interred in the Via della Propaganda. When a German note was presented to him on the subject, he gave it as an excuse that the younger cardinals were obliged to learn bicycling on account of the petrol shortage, and were continually falling over her grave. Equally furious and disillusioned were music lovers and fans of the ‘King’ in the whole civilised world. His gramophone records and his effigy were burnt in market towns all over England,
his wigs were burnt on Kew Green, whilst in London his songs were burnt by the public hangman.

But the person who really caught the full blast of the storm was poor Fred. He hurried round to No. 10, and did not spend anything like half-an-hour there, but only just so long as it took him to write a letter beginning ‘My dear Prime Minister’ and to hand over his Cabinet key. He was succeeded at the Ministry by Ned, to Ned’s delight hardly veiled. The
Daily Runner
unkindly printed extracts from the ‘Oh! Death! where is thy sting’ speech, and crowed over Fred’s resignation, but was not the least bit pleased over Ned’s appointment, and suggested that it was a case of out of the frying-pan into the fire.

Fred and Sophia dined together very sadly at the Hyde Park Hotel. Ned would not risk being seen in such discredited company and kept away, and probably he was wise because, as they went into dinner, they were ambushed and subjected to withering fire by about ten press photographers. Fred could no longer afford oysters or pink champagne, so they had smoked salmon and claret instead.

He was intensely gloomy altogether. ‘My career is over,’ he said.

Sophia told him, ‘Nonsense, think of Lord Palmerston,’ but there was not much conviction in her voice.

The next day she heard that he had taken over Serge’s Blossom.

‘S
T
. A
NNE
’
S
H
OSPITAL
F
IRST
A
ID
P
OST