London (165 page)

It had come as a shock, when she finally emerged, physically broken, to realize that the country was drifting towards war. After all, Germany might be an imperial rival to Britain now, but the two countries had always seemed to be natural friends. The king and the German Kaiser were cousins. Germany might be jealous and aggressive, the politics of Central Europe might be a tinder box, but somehow things would be patched up. Who could have foreseen that in a welter of botched diplomacy and misunderstanding the powers of Europe would get themselves into a position where they were forced to declare a war that none of them wanted? And who could have realized that after a skirmish or two the whole silly business would not have been over in a few months?

It had been the end of July 1914, just a week before war was declared. Henry had been due to go up to Oxford that autumn and even then none of them could believe that a war would prevent it. Within the family there had been a truce since Violet’s release. Her father was really very old now, shocked by her treatment in prison and desiring only to see his family living in peace. They had all been reunited at Bocton and for some months she had made only a few trips to London. On one of these she had decided to take all three children to the British Museum. As usual she had led them up to its grand portals – only to be refused admission.

“I’m sorry, madam,” the doorman explained, “but no ladies are being allowed in. It’s those terrible suffragettes,” he confided. “We’re afraid they’ll set fire to the place or start smashing the glass cases.”

“I will take responsibility for this lady,” Henry had offered, and so, after some hesitation, the doorman had let them in.

“By the way, mother,” he had whispered, as soon as they were inside, “which glass case do you want to smash first?”

Dear Henry: a month later he had volunteered and was in uniform.

She had discovered what mustard gas could do when he had finally been invalided home after Ypres in 1915. “I suppose I should be glad to be alive,” he told her wryly. Indeed, had he been older, he probably would have died. “These very young men have hearts that will take almost anything,” the doctor told her. But he was a shadow, grey and almost lifeless all the same. And so he had stayed all through the long years of the Great War, while others were dying in the huge futility of trench warfare. By the end, Violet scarcely knew a single family who had not lost someone.

The war brought one other great change. So severe was the shortage of men at home that women stepped in to do their jobs – and were welcomed. They worked in the munitions factories and on the railways, they served behind counters, worked the telephones, toiled and dug. The Suffragettes had given up their campaign for the duration of the war; their service, it soon appeared, made their case for them. As people saw what women were doing, even the most stalwart conservatives found their own opposition to women’s votes melting away. Violet knew her cause had finally triumphed when old Edward who had been taken ill and had to spend a few days in hospital told her: “The whole place was run by women, Violet! Porters, ambulance drivers, everything except the doctors. Very well run too.”

In 1917, with hardly a murmur against it, Asquith, the Prime Minister, gave women the vote, declaring: “They have earned it.”

The following year the Great War ended – and with it, Violet had supposed, the terrible loss of life.

Whether the great pandemic of Spanish ’flu at the end of 1918 was more dangerous than other influenzas, or whether it was just that, weakened after the long trauma of the war, people were more vulnerable, it was hard to know, but it spread right round the world with astonishing speed. The global death-toll in a six-month period was greater than that of the Great War itself. In England, more than two hundred thousand were estimated to have died. One of them was Henry.

Since then the memory of that winter had dissolved into a grey blur out of which his poor, pale, ravaged face arose to haunt her. And again and again over the years she had asked herself: should she have let the others do the marching? Why had she given such pain to the child who was gone?

As she sat alone in the house while Helen went for her walk it was hard to come to terms with the grim thought that she had not confessed to her daughter. Helen had not had her premonition alone. Violet had had it too.

Helen walked through Sloane Square then turned up Sloane Street towards Knightsbridge and Hyde Park. It still felt odd to look at the familiar streets which she remembered as a débutante and see all the windows taped against bomb blast and the piles of sandbags by every doorway. The place seemed strangely quiet, like a Sunday.

As she passed Pont Street, a few drops of rain began to fall. By the time she was nearing Knightsbridge it had turned into a shower. To escape it she dived left into the Basil Street Hotel where she waited, gazing out of the window as the raindrops streamed down it, feeling sad.

She had no wish to die. She did not think she particularly deserved it. Hadn’t she at least tried to serve some purpose all her life? She had always known that her mother was right to serve a cause, despite what the others had said. When she had been taken away to live at Bocton as a child her grandfather had tried to pretend that her mother was mysteriously called away, too, though she had known perfectly well from her brothers that she was in gaol. This had not detracted from the respect she had felt for the old man: she could see from the obvious respect that everybody had for him that apart from his disagreement with her mother his opinions were probably sound. Sometimes, having nobody else to talk to, he had discussed the issues of the day with the little girl as they sat in the old walled garden or went to look at the deer. And even now she could hear him, as clearly as if he were beside her, explaining gently:

“It’s the socialists who are the real danger to us all, Helen, far more than the Germans. Mark my words, that will be the battle you face in your lifetime. Not only in Britain either, but in the whole world.”

Had he lived just a little longer, to the end of the war, how right he would have seen his words to be. The Bolsheviks. The Russian Revolution. She had still been at school when these horrors occurred. The Tsar and all his children murdered. A wave of sympathy and disgust had passed across all Europe. As the horror of the war and the misery of the great flu epidemic receded, the Bolshevik menace was spoken of whenever people turned to serious conversation. Could such a thing, as the Bolsheviks themselves confidently predicted, come to Britain too, destroying everything she knew and loved?

In a way – her mother said so, everybody said so – a revolution in English society had already begun. The death duties introduced by Lloyd George had been cutting a swathe through the upper classes. There had been large sums to pay when old Edward had died at Bocton. Numerous gentry and aristocrats were being obliged to sell up. The coalition government during the war had been continued afterwards, on and off, but with the great difference that when the recently enfranchised troops returned demanding a better post-war world there had been a huge increase in the Labour Party supported by the Trades Unions. To many people’s astonishment, in 1924 the Labour leader Ramsay MacDonald had even briefly been called upon to form a government. “If it’s not a bloody revolution, we shall just be dispossessed,” Violet had predicted.

The answer for some, she knew, was to ignore the whole thing. For many of her friends, there had been a sense of adventure in the air. The war was over. Those who had survived were relieved to be alive; those, like her brother Frederick, who had been just too young to fight, were anxious to prove themselves by doing something daring. And parents, if they could, wanted to reassure themselves that the world was returning to something like normality. Helen had been a débutante. It was rather quaint really, but she understood that her mother’s sorrow about the death of Henry had made her determined to give her other children a good time if she could. She had wondered if her past as a militant might have put the other mothers against her, but it seemed all that was forgotten. Besides, handsome young Frederick Meredith was considered an asset at any party, especially with the shortage of men after the losses of the war. His little sister Helen therefore, as the saying was, “came out”.

What a time she had had! There had been the traditional balls of course, but the new generation of 1920s débutantes were less demure than their mothers had been. Young men were allowed to take liberties which would have been almost unthinkable before. Helen knew scarcely any girls who would go “all the way”, but that did not mean they wouldn’t go a very long way indeed. She was pretty – she had her father’s good looks, together with the bright blue eyes and golden hair of her Bull ancestors. She was vivacious and intelligent. By the end of her season she had received three offers of marriage, and two of them would have been very good matches indeed. The only trouble was that the young men didn’t interest her. “They’re insipid,” she complained.

“You could still do worse,” her mother had said weakly. “I just want you to be happy.”

“You chose an interesting man,” Helen had pointed out.

But where to find one? There had been the Frenchman. She had met him thanks to Frederick who had taken up flying. He had flown her across the Channel to an aerodrome in France, and it was there, one astonishing summer day, that she had met him. He had a plane. And a château. She had spent a wonderful summer. Then it had been over. There had been other interesting men, since then. “But the interesting men don’t seem to marry,” she had confessed to her mother sadly. What was she to do with her life?

“You’re still a flapper, Helen,” her brother Frederick would tease her affectionately. “Always looking for excitement.” A flapper – that was what they had called the bright young girls of the 1920s.

“Why shouldn’t I?” she demanded. “You obviously do.” Frederick, having gone into the army, looked every inch the dashing hussar, but she suspected that his occasional disappearance to Europe might have something to do with a more secret life. But it was not only a question of excitement: she wanted a cause to which she could devote herself.

The General Strike of 1926 had seemed to offer such a chance. “This is the revolution that those Bolsheviks have been waiting for,” Violet had announced. “We’ve got to beat them.” Helen did not know anyone who thought otherwise. How they had all worked during those heady days! She had acted as a conductor on a bus driven by a young man from Oxford she knew. They had operated the 137 route from Sloane Square to Crystal Palace. Other people ran the underground and the other public services. Thank God, she had reflected, that this was Britain, where people behaved decently. There had been little violence. The strike had been broken. And the whole country, unions and all, had drawn back from the awful communist threat.

After that, she seemed to drift. She had found a job as a secretary to a Member of Parliament. It was hard work, but she enjoyed it and felt she was doing something useful. When it came to the larger issues however, she experienced a growing sense of disappointment. There were great tasks to be accomplished. She was inspired by the aim of the League of Nations to rid the world of war – but saw it crumble. She watched in admiration as America responded to the Depression with the New Deal. Yet no great initiatives for a new world were coming out of the Mother of Parliaments. Under the canny but uninspiring Prime Minister Baldwin, there seemed only one strategy: to muddle through and keep the British Empire – only held together by goodwill – out of trouble. Helen’s passionate nature secretly rebelled. “You had a cause to serve,” she would tell her mother. “I haven’t got one.”

It was Frederick who provided it

When Hitler had come to power in Germany, like many people in the western world Helen had supposed that it was probably a good thing. “His supporters are unpleasant,” they agreed, “but he does seem to be a bulwark against communist Russia.” As he strengthened his rule and ugly rumours about the character of his regime spread, she had chosen to discount them. As for his military intentions, when the rogue politician Churchill, still disappointed to be out of office, started his campaign for rearmament, she had believed her own MP. “Churchill’s insane,” he said. “Germany can’t fight a war for twenty years.”

During one of his fleeting visits to London, Frederick disabused her. He had been sent as a military attaché to the British embassy in Poland the year before and his assessment was blunt. “Firstly, Churchill is right. Hitler is rearming and means to go to war. Secondly, my dear Helen, this is news only to the English at home. Every embassy in Europe knows it perfectly well. Every military attaché, including myself, has been filing detailed reports which London is studiously ignoring. Our attaché in Berlin, a brilliant man, has just been sacked for reporting the German troop movements that he saw. Those politicians who know this either think the public won’t stand for the truth, or have persuaded themselves they’ve done a deal with Hitler. The whole thing’s a scandal!”

“The MP I work for says Germany won’t be ready to fight for twenty years,” objected Helen.

“That’s the received wisdom. It’s based on a first-rate report done by the War Office. There’s only one problem – the report was written in 1919.”

She had started to gather information after that. Friends in the army, a diplomat she knew, even one or two sympathetic people in Westminster had given her facts which corroborated her brother’s charges. She and Violet built up a detailed dossier. Some of their friends thought them a little mad; others, remembering Violet’s militant past, smiled and shrugged. Among the other secretaries in Westminster, most of whom came from families like her own, her cause became known as “Helen’s crusade”, and she soon discovered that several of them had relatives in the diplomatic corps who felt the same way. “You should talk to your boss about it like I do,” she would say. “After all, he is in Parliament and you see him every day.” Once she even tried to speak to the Prime Minister herself. When the abdication crisis of 1936 had come up, and everyone else was talking about the new king and Mrs Simpson, Helen shrugged. “I’m sorry for him, of course,” she declared. “But it hardly matters if Hitler is going to invade.”