My Little Blue Dress (13 page)

“W
ORLD WAR TWO
!” screamed the giant headline of Mr. Montgomery's newspaper as I crept into the breakfast room the next morning. I slid into my chair, poured myself a coffee with shaking hands, and downed it like a shot of whisky. I had no problem with newspaper headlines screaming
WORLD WAR TWO
! at me. My beef was with the material below the headline, the columns of swarming, antlike text filled with details of troop movements and strategies, and . . .

I mean: rationing.

What, for instance, was I going to do about rationing?

What was going to happen when I went into a shop and tried to buy some food that I should have known was being rationed? How would I explain myself?

And what about that thing of having to hang a heavy black cloth over the windows so the German bombers couldn't “draw a bead on” you? Would we be asked to do that in London? Or was it just for people who lived on the coast where the bombers made their landfall? There were a
million
tiny things like that, any
one
of which could trip me up.

O
KAY, DEEP BREATH
.

Just had to toughen up and . . .

Suddenly Mr. Montgomery lowered his newspaper. “Ah. Nanny. There you are. This morning there is to be an air-raid drill. We have been mandated by mayoral
communiqué to take shelter in the local underground station. Conceivably for some length of time.”

We locked eyes. I nodded.

“I'll be brave, Father,” said Peter, who had just entered. Veronica was present too, all of a sudden, I noticed, a caricature of preparedness in waterproof rainhat and shoulder-slung travel bag.

“Peter, don't talk to your father while he's reading his newspaper,” I said, refilling my coffee. “And will you be bringing your magnificent newspaper to the underground station, sir? I should very much like to read it. Really come to grips with where we all stand, as a nation, on this grimmest of mornings.”

Down came the paper again. “No, Nanny. Sadly I shall not be. The principles of fire safety do expressly forfend the introduction of unlaminated paper to a restricted and unventilated environment such as the underground system. Nor shall there be electrical outlets for the plugging in of radio-phonographs. We shall be entirely cut off from the outside world, but we shall at least be safe.”

I chewed my toast impassively and swallowed it down. “That makes sense. It's a . . . it's a question of priorities, I suppose. People should always make sure they're physically safe before they start worrying about things like newspapers.”

“Well said, Nanny.” Mr. Montgomery looked round at his children, hoping to imprint this nugget of wisdom on their growing brains. “As Nanny maintains, placement of the cart
behind
the horse is a vouchsafement of success in this vale of uncertainty that some wise men refer to as life.”

Peter gawped at me with worthless admiration.

My chair creaked as I nodded. “When do we leave?”

“Forthwith.”

The walk to the station could literally not have been more hellish. Everywhere one looked was a newspaper vendor shouting news of the war or a public information poster nailed to a tree. But then quickly we were inside, gripping the cool rubber of the escalator handrail and gliding down into what even an official cardboard sign at the station's entrance had admitted was only a Temporary Shelter.

1940–1949
THE GLOBE AFLAME AGAIN

[27 AUG--9:15
P
.
M
.]

T
HE TUNNEL WAS
dark and the platform very crowded. Half of London seemed to be down there, some standing, some sitting, most of them knitting or playing cards, but all of them having a visibly fantastic time. I lost the Montgomeries almost immediately—which was probably just as well, I reckoned—and thrust my way through the mob to an unoccupied square foot of platform right over by one of the tunnel's mouths where I slid to the ground beneath a vandalized chocolate-bar vending machine and commenced doing very little indeed, just sitting and breathing, not even thinking.

After some time had passed I watched a thin man with a ginger wig and a bony, misshapen face that reminded me
strongly of my own ankle bounce up onto a bench, clutch his cap to his chest, and to the accompaniment of a child's toy piano being plinked by some henchman in the crowd, set the huddled people swaying with a heartbreaking cockney waltz of a sort that was fairly popular back then.

Oh, angels have taken a floor at The Ritz,

he sang,

There's a unicorn in Green Park

An' on the steps of Sain' Porl's there's a sparrer 'oo sits,

Flappin' 'is broken 'eart.

“Flappin' 'is broken 'eart” echoed a certain percentage of the crowd and I remember musing to myself, as my depression lifted ever so slightly: What a genius song. What a gorgeous, moving and utterly authentic chunk of contemporary English whimsy.

And the man wasn't finished. Once he'd soaked up the applause he identified himself as “Suggestive Bertie,” announced that somewhere there was a bucket for people to put money in and then, with his chum on the toy piano plinking an awful lot faster than he had been, Bertie started striding from one end of the bench to the other while waggling his elbows and saucily passing his cap between his legs. Suddenly
boom
: we, the audience, were ears deep in a carefully worded tale of frottage and adultery amid the mossy aqueducts and leaning spires of deepest east London.

She wore it like a scarf,

sang Bertie at one stage,

She 'ad it in 'er marf!
Oh, my massive dip-sy din-gle!

Which struck me, actually, as pathetic.

Stupid.

In fact, I had never heard such a steaming pile of cack in all my life—with the exception, obviously,
of
my life. Because, as I sat there on the platform, reader, cowering from a war I knew nothing about, it began to occur to me that my entire life was entirely ridiculous.

Oh, it had had its moments, don't get me wrong. Like slightly paler and fractionally less stenchful pellets amidst a monstrous pile of black steaming feces, there had been sequences, incidents, that at the time had seemed like harbingers of normalcy ahead.

But they never panned out. Before you could say Jack Robinson I had invariably painted myself into another disgustingly stupid corner from which I needed to be rescued by something ridiculous happening, something random, something preposterous.

Whether or not I managed to extricate myself plausibly from this war thing, it didn't matter. The damage was already done. I had long, long, long ceased to be anything even resembling a Real Person because the tragic and embarrassing fact of the matter was that Real People didn't need their grandfathers to intervene with glistening slabs of gibberish to explain why they don't talk one iota like a tiny little farm girl and Real People's boyfriends didn't ever suddenly decide to reinvent themselves as introspective poets who never
want to have another conversation and certainly Real People don't ever develop allergies to information or

[find themselves having to fake an entire old woman's autobiography in a single night? yes they do, you turd. toughen up. come this far.]

anything like that.

BOOM!

I punched myself in the face, pulled myself together.

This was no time for self-pity—though I had every excuse for feeling some. I was about to turn forty years old.
Forty
, reader. And as people, especially women, famously do around that horrific personal milestone I was clearly lashing out at myself for having drifted so far from my life plan.

But you know what? (I realized as I sat there in the London Underground on the very first day of the Second World War.)

That was just life.

Life is random. And ridiculous. And “implausible.” It just is. Ask anyone.

And on reflection, reader, it was at that precise moment that I finally grew up.

B
EFORE THE WAR
the Bunley Downs Military Research Institute had been a sanitarium for rich people to visit when they had heart attacks or nervous breakdowns. Rambling over about a hundred acres of treey English countryside the vast complex of red-brick buildings and recreational facilities featured tennis courts, a golf course, a dining hall in a
glass rotunda and a network of trails through the tidy woods that were color-coded with painted wooden poles according to their varying levels of cardiovascular intensity. Even now in wartime the place exuded a sort of medicinal-strength serenity and as I admired the main building's ivied exterior from the sweeping gravel driveway, hatboxes at my feet like a gaggle of children, it was the darnedest thing but I could actually feel myself becoming
taller
, as decades of tension simply drained away out of my back muscles.

At the recruitment office, down in London I had been fairly candid with the man behind the desk about my problem with Information, and the first order I received from a superior in the British Army was not to worry about it. The army understood that if they were going to recruit civilians they would have to learn to be flexible about accommodating special needs.

Besides, he told me, rustling in a file cabinet, he had just the job I was looking for: being a member of the support staff at Bunley Downs, a top-secret military research facility deep in the English countryside where the finest minds in the free world were hard at work adding a layer of purely intellectual muscle to the more conventional, soldiers-with-guns component of the Allied war effort. The focus at Bunley Downs was on breaking codes and designing new types of camouflage and thinking of tricks to confuse the Germans, which was, he explained, why the institute was situated deep in the countryside. Necessity might be the mother of invention for
ordinary
people, but for the sort of hard-core self-motivating genius they had at Bunley Downs it was apparently well documented that an abstract, low-pressure environment was far more conducive to creativity.

“You mean . . . you mean they don't talk much about the actual war itself?”

“They don't talk about the war at all. Not even a mention. We want these people following their internal creative compasses, not the headlines in the evening paper.”

“You mean . . . You mean I can help with the war without actually
knowing
about the war?”

“Yes,” he'd said simply, at the memory of which I'd burst into a massive flood of tears right there on the driveway. Furiously I willed them away. This was a fresh start, a new chance to be a plausible and unremarkable member of society and I wasn't going to mess it up by having my new employer's first impression of me be “oh, she's crying.” I looked up at the sky, counted to ten, then seized my luggage and followed the signposts around to the servants' entrance. That door was ajar and through it I could see a pleasant-seeming gray-haired old lady who looked a little like my mother and who was folding a sheet inside. “Hail there,” I said cheerily, “I'm looking for . . .” I checked the note on my hand, “Miriam. I'm the new tea lady.” I looked the woman square in the face. “They told me to come here and . . . me
mam
?”

Yes.

It was me mam.

And any plans I'd had about not crying were instantly rendered moot.

T
HE WORK WAS
really easy and I loved it. My official title was “tea lady” and all it entailed was wheeling a cart laden with sandwiches and cakes and cups and an urn of hot tea up and down the corridors of the main building. Swiftly I
became an expert, tapping on an office door with one hand while pouring a cup of tea with the other and then, depending on whether the genius was bent over his sketchpad or merely looking out the window, I would either engage him in banter or quietly set down his refreshment and slink away. It sounds stupid, I know, but I really did feel that with every cup of tea I served I was inching England closer to victory in the enormous war it was presumably still fighting somewhere far, far away over the trees.

Me mam and I picked up right where we'd left off all those years before. She apologized for making such a fuss that day about my hatboxes and I told her how sorry I was for leaving her to look after Davey, who after all had been my boyfriend. Apologies were accepted, hugs exchanged, and soon we were hard at work rebuilding our relationship. At sundown each day we drank subsidized wine in the officers' mess and talked about life back in Murbery, then at night, in the servants' dormitory, after Miriam had turned out the lights, we whispered like schoolgirls until one of us (me mam) fell asleep leaving me to lie there in the darkness, warm and comfortable, listening to her breathe and thanking every god I'd ever even
heard
about for how well everything had turned out.

Was my life absurd?

Absolutely. More than ever. I'd landed an improbable-sounding job that insulated me utterly from the war, and who's the first person I run into when I get there? Me mam. Me very own mam. Reader, I was up to my hips in absurdity.

But I had learned now not to care about that sort of thing. The forces of chaos, I had learned, were only
enemy
forces if you attempted to resist them. The moment you accepted the idea that your life could, and probably would,
veer off in an implausible new direction at any given moment, those forces started working
for
you. Because if anything was possible . . . well, then
anything was possible
.

A case in point: my jawdropping leapfrog of a promotion in the summer of 1942.