Octavia (18 page)

‘It’s a sonnet by Rupert Brooke,’ he told them. ‘You know. The feller from Cambridge. Jolly good stick by all accounts. Anyway here it is. I think it speaks for us all.’ And he cleared his throat and began.

It was done with such style that his guests broke into admiring applause. ‘Bravo that man!’ they called. ‘Well said!’

‘I don’t mind telling you,’ he admitted, a touch bashfully. ‘It speaks for me too. I was getting to be absolutely stifled in the bank before this happened. Sorry about that, Pater, but it’s the truth. Banks are a dashed good idea and all that but they ain’t for everyone. I feel like a free man now. Absolutely top hole. Off to do my duty and show the Hun what’s what. They may think they’ve got everything going their way, invading poor little Belgium and all that rot, but you wait till
we
get there. It’ll be a different story then.’

That was applauded too. ‘That’s the style!’ his guests called. ‘You show ’em, Squirrel!’

‘Didn’t I tell you he was a hero,’ Maud said to her sister. ‘My dear brave boy.’

‘And I’ll tell you something else,’ her hero went on. ‘If there are any chaps out there who haven’t enlisted yet, you’d better tell ’em to jump to it or it’ll all be over before they’re trained. I give it till Christmas.’

Later that evening when the drinking and dancing were done, Tommy walked Octavia home across the quiet heath. They strolled together in the moonlight, dreamily, his arm about her waist, stopping for kisses that roused them to the sharpest desires, kissing again and again, aching and unsatisfied.

‘You will come to the flat tomorrow,’ he urged.

‘Yes,’ she said between kisses. ‘Yes. Of course, my darling, darling.’

‘If we were married we could go there now,’ he complained. ‘All this observing the proprieties is such a bore.’

‘I know,’ she soothed. It wasn’t the time or the place to argue, for the heath was tranquil about them and the western sky already greened by the approach of dawn. Trees and bushes rustled in a sudden breeze as if they were sharing secrets, the grass was dappled with mysterious shadow, the white stars studded in their familiar patterns, aloof and watchful.

‘Will it be over by Christmas?’ she asked.

He was kissing her neck and in thrall to sensation, so it took him a minute to answer. ‘Who can tell?’ he said. ‘Wars ain’t predictable.’

‘What do
you
think?’

‘I prefer not to think about it at all,’ he said. ‘I’d rather take you to bed and love you all night.’

‘There’s not much of the night left now,’ she told him. And teased, ‘You’re running out of time.’

He was suddenly and unnervingly serious. ‘We’re all running out of time,’ he said, bitterly. ‘That’s the truth of it. Squirrel and Podge and me, all of us; running out of time, running away from our homes and the people we love, running, all of us, running headlong into a war and we don’t know what it will do to us, or what we shall see, or anything about it. Blind fools, the lot of us.’

She was riven with pity for him, remembering that dreadful massacre and how she’d felt when she heard about it. He was right. It was all very well people saying it would all be over in sixth months but how could they possibly know? War was unpredictable. He was right about that too. There was no knowing what he would have to face in France, no knowing how monstrous the battles would be – and there were bound to be battles. It occurred to her that she was being selfish, thinking of herself and her job when he was going away to war. She ought to have agreed to marry him in August and not made him wait till Easter. Maybe she ought to do it anyway, now, quickly, before he leaves, while there’s still time.

He was walking on, his arm still round her waist, as the trees whispered above them. I will speak to Papa, she decided, and see what he advises. Tomorrow, at breakfast.

Sunday breakfast at South Hill Park was always a leisurely meal, with plenty of time to read the papers and discuss the news. J-J said it was the one moment in the week when they could relax and be themselves. ‘When I retire,’ he promised, ‘we shall have Sunday breakfast every day of the week. How will that suit you?’

‘I shall be married by then,’ Octavia told him, making her opportunity. ‘In fact, to tell you the truth, I’m beginning to
wonder whether I ought to be married now.’

‘Now?’ her father asked, laughing. ‘Today do you mean?’

‘Before he goes to France.’

Her mother was alarmed. ‘Don’t think I’m trying to discourage you, my darling,’ she said, ‘but it would give us very little time to prepare. We would do it of course, if that is what you truly want, but it’s very short notice.’

Her father was looking at her quizzically. ‘I thought you had decided on next Easter,’ he said. ‘Is this a change of heart?’

She answered him seriously ‘No, Pa,’ she said. ‘A change of obligation. He is going to war and I’m staying here. I shall be safe at home and he’ll be in the thick of it. He could be wounded – or even killed.’ It made her shudder to think of it. ‘Perhaps I ought to marry him before he goes. It’s what he wants.’

J-J became serious too. ‘I see,’ he said. ‘But what of your work in the school?’

‘That is the problem.’

He considered for a few minutes before he spoke again. Then he said, ‘Would you be happy to leave it now? Have you achieved all that you hoped to?’

‘Oh no,’ Octavia said earnestly. ‘I’ve barely begun. I’ve learnt a great deal over the year but there is so much more I need to know.’ And as her father’s expression was encouraging her, she began to elaborate, exploring ideas as they came into her mind. ‘There are so many educational practices I don’t understand. For example, why do we tell children the same things over and over again and make them learn everything by heart? The other teachers say it’s because children can’t learn without endless repetition and
reinforcement, but that isn’t true. I know it isn’t. When they’re happy in what they’re doing, they learn easily and only need telling once – or at most twice. I’ve seen it on so many occasions.’

The pins were falling out of her hair, as they always did when she was agitated but she didn’t notice. It was such a relief to be able to speak like this. She’d never been able to tell Tommy what she felt about teaching. He’d never seemed interested. He was a darling and she loved him passionately but he didn’t care about her work at all. Now with her father’s intelligent face approving what she was saying, her ideas pressed in upon her so hard she could barely contain them. ‘And there’s another thing,’ she said. ‘Why do people think it’s necessary to shout at children so much? You don’t have to shout at them. When they’re happy they will listen to a whisper. There are times when I think the others just want to punish the poor little things, they shout so much and cane them for so little. You would hardly believe what small transgressions merit the stick. But then again, to imagine teachers as sadistic is rather harsh. Too harsh to be acceptable, anyway. I have to admit that. Sometimes I suspect that they’re just doing what they’ve always done, without thinking about it. And they should think about it. If I could find a way to make them think, I should have lived to some purpose.’

There was a strand of hair in her mouth and she stopped to remove it. ‘But then there are other matters too. Most of our children are underfed and poorly clothed, many are ill. They have head lice and adenoids and toothache. When the weather’s bad they cough all the time. And they truant. If they’re girls and their mother goes to work they have to stay at home to look after the little ’uns. If they’re boys and their
father is working he takes them along as an extra pair of hands. And who can blame him? They need the money. Mr Shaw is quite right. We should be attending to all their needs, for food and clothing and somewhere to live, not just making them chant their tables. And that’s another thing…’

‘Stop! Stop!’ J-J begged, holding up both hands in mock alarm. ‘You are making my head spin.’

‘Yes…well…’ Octavia said and grimaced at him. ‘I’m sorry, Pa. I have gone on a bit but you
did
ask me.’

‘You have answered my question,’ he said. ‘Don’t you think so?’

It was true. She had. Her work was too important to her to be left. But knowing it didn’t stop her feeling selfish and when Tommy’s embarkation leave was over and she went to Victoria station to wave him goodbye, she felt worse than she’d ever felt in her life. She stood on the platform among all the other wives and mothers, watching as the long train snaked away from her, khaki arms waving from every window and grieved to think how badly she had treated him. My poor dear Tommy, she thought. I should have married you. I was wrong to put the school first.

Life was very quiet after their soldiers had gone and it seemed a long time before their first letters home began to arrive.

‘At last!’ Octavia said when Tommy’s letter was delivered and was annoyed to see that her hands were shaking as she opened it. To her disappointment, he hardly said anything at all. He’d arrived
‘in good order’
, couldn’t tell her where he was, ‘
they censor everything
’, hadn’t seen anything of the others and hoped she wouldn’t forget him.

‘The others’ were equally terse. According to Emmeline, ‘Podge sends picture postcards and doesn’t say anything and all Squirrel ever says is that he’s ticketty-boo or in the pink and please send another parcel and can he have some more jam. Although he did say he hoped we were missing him. Soppy thing. As if we wouldn’t.’

Her children missed him terribly. Dora and Eddie, being seven and six years old, were grown up enough to understand that he’d gone to France and that it was a long way away and he couldn’t just come back when he felt like it, but Edith, who was only just five and often very babyish, fretted to see her
uncles every time she came to visit Grandma and refused to be comforted, no matter how hard her mother tried to explain things to her. Two-year-old Dickie was too young to understand, of course, which was just as well, for Emmeline was now heavily into the seventh month of her fifth pregnancy and too weary to cope with tears and tantrums.

‘It’s all very well for people to say when you’ve got four you don’t notice another one,’ she complained to Octavia. ‘I do. My back’s killing me and I notice it every day.’

In September, Octavia started her second year at Bridge Street School and was soon enjoying it even more than she’d enjoyed the first one. She’d been given her old class in a different classroom. ‘It is a special dispensation you understand, Miss Smith,’ the headmaster told her. ‘In view of the good work you did with them last year.’

The children knew nothing about dispensations. They simply welcomed her back like an old friend. ‘Billy said you was gettin’ married, miss,’ one little girl confided, ‘but we knew you’d never.’ Octavia was touched by their confidence even though it renewed her guilt about the way she’d treated poor Tommy. She tried to assuage it by writing to him every day and as an extra sop to her conscience, she took to visiting Emmeline every Thursday to help with the children and swap such news as they had.

It would have been easier for them if the news had been good. But it wasn’t. It had been bad from the beginning, when what had been reported as a great victory at a place called Mons turned out to be a retreat, and as the weeks passed it got worse. The Germans overran Belgium and neither the French army nor the BEF seemed able to stop them. There were battles at places they’d never heard of, the casualty lists
were terrifying, and as if to underline how appalling they were, there was an official call from the government for another ‘half a million men’.

‘If they go on killing one another at this rate,’ Octavia said to her father, ‘we shan’t have any men left.’

On October the 19
^th
, when baby Johnnie slid, red-faced and bawling, into their darkening world, there was a battle at a place called Ypres. The casualty figures were the worst yet. That night when Octavia wrote to Tommy to tell him about the new baby, she asked him how things really were.

His answer was no help to her at all.
‘Can’t tell you, old thing,’
he wrote.
‘Blue pencil and all that rot.’

Christmas came and was celebrated quietly. None of them had the heart for parties now, although Amy did volunteer that she’d try to organise something if J-J thought she should.

‘And what about your wedding, my darling?’ she said to Octavia, as they sat about the fire on Boxing Day. ‘Easter isn’t far away now. Will you still go ahead with it?’

‘I doubt it, Mama,’ Octavia said. ‘We chose Easter because we thought the war would be over by then. Now… No, I think we’ll probably wait until it really is over and plan it then.’

‘That would probably be the best thing,’ her mother agreed, with evident relief. ‘Everything’s so uncertain these days.’ And she tried a little joke to lighten the conversation, because it was really extremely sad to be talking about postponing her Tavy’s wedding, especially when they’d all been looking forward to it for such a long time. ‘I don’t suppose you could even be sure he’d get leave for it, could you? And we could hardly have a wedding without the groom. Perhaps it will be over by the summer.’

‘Perhaps,’ Octavia said, although privately she was
beginning to think that even the summer was unlikely. It was going on so relentlessly and, reading between the lines of what the newspapers were reporting, it seemed to have reached a stalemate, because the armies were digging themselves in. By the end of January, there were reports of soldiers living in trenches all along the front line, and so many men were in the army that there was a chronic shortage of manpower back at home. More and more women were working in munitions and it wasn’t long before they began to appear in the streets of London, cleaning windows and delivering bread and coal. But in February, at long, long last, Tommy came home on a week’s leave.

He was so changed that when he arrived at Octavia’s doorstep to collect her for their first evening out, she could hardly recognise him. All his lovely thick hair had been cut back to a stubble, his face was lined and there was a long scar on his left hand.

‘Oh, Tommy!’ she said, as they walked down the path together. ‘What have they done to you?’

‘Fortunes of war, old thing,’ he said lightly.

‘It’s bad, isn’t it?’ she said.

‘It’s no picnic,’ he agreed but she could see from his closed expression that he wasn’t going to talk about it. He opened the car door for her and gave her his old courteous bow. ‘Hop in,’ he said. ‘Let’s go and have fun.’

They spent as much time together as they could, given that she was at work and they
‘had fun’
every evening. She found it exhausting and perplexing, for although it involved a nightly trip to a theatre or a music hall, which was pleasant enough, it also meant some very heavy drinking, most of it whisky, which was a taste she’d never seen in him before, and
that wasn’t pleasant at all. Too much drink made him rough when they finally got to bed, and she was used to gentleness. It was almost a relief when his leave was over and they were kissing goodbye at Victoria station again.

‘Toodle-pip,’ he said, in his laconic way. ‘See you again soon. DV.’

It wasn’t until she was home again that she realised they hadn’t talked about her work at the school. Not once, in the entire week. And they’d never mentioned their wedding either, so she’d been right to say it had been postponed for the duration. The war’s taken him over, she thought. He’s not interested in anything else. It was understandable, given how awful it must be out there, but it hurt her feelings to be marginalised. It’s just as well I’ve still got a job to keep me occupied, she thought. And she returned to it with renewed enthusiasm.

Two weeks later she found an advertisement in
The Times
that made her sit up and take notice. It was asking for applications from
‘Teachers of English Language and Literature’
for a position at a local grammar school. She passed it across the breakfast table to her father.

‘I’ve half a mind to apply,’ she said, taking care to sound casual. ‘What do you think, Pa?’

He thought it an excellent idea. ‘Bernard Shaw would be delighted,’ he said. ‘Has he not always maintained that you should be training the next generation of teachers?’

‘Indeed he has,’ she agreed. ‘He maintains it with steady regularity. But if I do apply, it will be for my benefit and not that of the great dramatist.’

He laughed at that. ‘Then you must do it for your benefit – and the benefit of your pupils,’ he said.

So the application was sent. And in the rush of the school week, quickly forgotten. It was an exceptionally cold week, with flurries of snow most playtimes and frozen pipes in all the lavatories. ‘Makes yer life a right misery,’ the school keeper complained. ‘Mussen grumble though, not when you think of our poor fellers out there in them trenches.’

Octavia thought of them every day, when she sat at her desk to write to Tommy. It was no good asking him to tell her how he really was – she’d learnt that now – but that didn’t stop her from telling him how anxious she was for his safety.
‘I think of you every day,’
she wrote,
‘and hope you are well and haven’t been hurt, you and Squirrel and Podge and Jimmy. If I could send you each an invisible shield to protect you I would.’

But as things were, all she could do was write, and worry, and try to read between the lines of his laconic answers. Revelation, when it came, was at a moment when she least expected it and she was shattered by it.

There were four letters for her that morning, delivered to the breakfast table in the usual way by Mrs Wilkins and she looked at them in the usual way to see whether one was from Tommy – postcard from Emmeline, letter from the WSPU, something official by the look of it, and a letter from the Front. But it wasn’t from Tommy. It was from Cyril. She opened it and spread it out in front of her to read while she ate her toast.

‘Dear Tavy,’
it said.
‘I hope you will forgive me for writing to you like this but I have to tell someone what is happening here or I shall go mad and I can’t tell Mama or Emmeline, they would never understand
.

‘Life here is hell. There is no other word for it. We are not 
supposed to tell anyone about it for fear of breaking morale and every word we write is censored, so I’ve arranged to send you this with the help of a girl in a local
estaminet
behind the lines. It would be all blue pencil if I posted it in the normal way. We officers talk to one another, of course, but it’s mostly chaff. No one wants to lose face, I suppose. We mustn’t say anything in front of the chaps. That’s absolutely forbidden. We’re supposed to keep up their spirits, though they must know what we think, and how you can keep up anyone’s spirits when you could all be killed the next time you go over the top is beyond my comprehension
.

‘Yesterday was the worst day since I came out here. The worst day of my life to tell you the truth. We were supposed to be out of the line for a couple of days because we’d just finished our stint and we were resting in a trench a few miles back, but we were woken at three, so we knew there was something up. Not much for breakfast – just bread and cheese and pretty hard tack at that. But that’s standard. We’re often on short rations. I’ve known days in the line when we were out of food and water altogether. I don’t know how we’d manage sometimes if it wasn’t for your parcels. Pretty soon word came down the line that the Germans had broken through and we were to proceed to the forward trenches. So I got my platoon in order pretty sharpish and we marched off in good order. When we got to the railway line it was full of refugees, all scared stiff, running away from Ypres as fast as they could, heading for Dickesbusch. It was ten kinds of chaos, people in a terrible state, rushing at us out of the darkness: old women hib-hobbling along, children in filthy clothes pushing carts piled so high with mattresses and chickens and pots and pans they couldn’t see where they were
going, women with babes in arms, and all their livestock with them, cows, goats and kids all covered in mud and bleating and baaing and kicking up a racket, and everybody shouting and crying. We knew something bad was going on but we couldn’t make out what they were saying so we left them to it and just pressed on. It really put the wind up some of our lads, the locals running away and us marching into it.

‘When we got there we could see that the forward trench was still in our hands, which was one good thing, but we’d hardly arrived before the barrage started up. Big one this time and the noise enough to shatter your eardrums. Our gunners hadn’t got their range and a lot of shells were falling short which made us jittery, although we all tried to hide it. It’s no joke being out in no-man’s-land and being fired on by both sides. Bad enough being fired on by the Hun. Then the order was given and we had to go over the top. I don’t know how I’m going to tell you what happened next. It is making me cringe to think of it. But I must tell someone or my nerve will crack entirely, which would never do. An officer has to keep up his morale for the sake of his men. Only, after yesterday, I feel so much worse, I don’t think I can do it for much longer. If people back home knew what is going on out here they would do something to stop it. Only how can we tell them? I can barely find the words to tell you. It is all too enormous and beastly and brutal and inhuman. Every time I get back to the line I feel as if I’m stepping off the edge of the world. The line goes on for ever. You cannot see the end of it. They say it runs from the Channel to Switzerland in a long strip ten miles wide and everything in it is blackened and destroyed. There is nothing where I am but mud with the stumps of trees sticking out of it and bomb craters full of foul water and the twisted 
corpses of men and horses, everywhere you look, lying in heaps, decomposing. We bury our dead whenever there is a lull and the stretcher-bearers can get out to gather them in but the next push leaves the place full of dead and dying all over again and the horses lie where they fell, all twisted and distorted with the rats eating their flesh. You only have to look at them to see what pain they were in when they died. The stink of dead bodies is dreadful. It fills your nose and throat and makes everything taste bad. It is worse than a nightmare. At least a nightmare stops when you wake up but this goes on and on, day after day and month after month, getting worse and worse and worse. I am sorry to write to you like this, but it is the truth.

‘I was going to tell you about yesterday, wasn’t I? You see how it is, your mind gets twisted up in this place and you forget what you were going to say. We went over the top at dawn with the bombardment going on all round us. Appalling noise, shells screaming overhead, explosions, men screaming when they were hit, the Hun’s machine guns rattling. The machine gun is the most efficient killing machine known to mankind. It can kill fifty men a second, and does. It just rattles on and on, spitting red-hot metal and our chaps drop like flies. They were falling all round me. I could see that there were fewer and fewer of us still running. Although you can’t see very well what with the smoke and the mud being thrown up by the explosions and men falling everywhere. I must have gone about twenty yards when the soldier in front of me was hit. I was going so fast I fell over him. Knocked the wind out of me. And the spirit. I should have got up and run on but I didn’t. Oh, my dear Tavy. I hardly know how to tell you this but in the end I have proved a coward. That’s what I am. A 
miserable rotten coward. I just lay there in the mud, playing possum, praying not to die, trying to scrabble into the filth to find somewhere to hide. I couldn’t stand up and get shot. The man I fell over was groaning and calling for his mother and I didn’t even crawl over to help him. I was stuck to the spot. A yellow-bellied coward. I don’t know how long I lay there in that shameful way. The man stopped groaning so I assumed he was dead but I didn’t go to see. In the end I heard whistles and someone yelling that we were falling back and then I got up and ran hell for leather until I was back in the trench. The same trench. Back where I’d started. There were only three of us left alive and unharmed from the entire platoon. All that suffering and all those lives lost and that poor devil lying out there in the mud and me not helping him and all for nothing. I should have gone to help him. I know it. It was shameful. They were my men and I let them down. Shameful. Well, now I have something to expiate.