Things a Bright Girl Can Do

  Teddy, glancing at her, said, ‘Buck up, old thing, it isn’t as bad as all that. It’s only Brighton.’

  She tried to smile.

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry. I’m being a brute. I just – well.’ She stopped, then: ‘Look. Do you remember after that action – with the king – when you told me you couldn’t imagine a cause worth dying for? Don’t you think it’s rather – I mean—’

  ‘You mean, wasn’t I a sanctimonious twit?’ said Teddy. ‘It’s all right, I do appreciate the irony.’

  ‘I didn’t mean that. And you were quite right, anyway. It was an idiotic thing to do.’

  ‘Naturally it was. All of the best things are.’

  Evelyn blinked. She wasn’t sure what to do with this. Had he changed his mind? Did he think she’d been right after all? She wanted to pursue it, but time was running out. And her own question was more urgent.

  ‘I meant –’ she hesitated – ‘Teddy, do you think it’s worth dying for – honestly?’

  He looked at her, and she was taken aback by the seriousness of his expression. She had expected self-deprecation, or a joke about how he’d only joined up because all his art-school friends had, and England Expects, and Public Schoolboys Doing Their Bit and all that.

  ‘Do I think Belgium’s worth dying for? It probably is, but I don’t know that I would; I rather like being alive. It’s not that I object to Belgians, but it isn’t like I know them, you know. Do I think you – and Hetty – and Kezia – and my mother and father – do I think you’re all worth it …?’

  He stopped. She knew this was the point in the conversation where she was supposed to fling herself on his neck. Instead, she just felt irritated. Why did Teddy get all the fun of dying for his country? If either of them were going to sacrifice themselves for a noble cause, she did rather think it ought to be her.

  And – damn him – it wasn’t as though he were wrong, either. Teddy, she thought, as she often had before, would be much easier to deal with if he wasn’t so often bloody right.

  ‘Oh, marvellous!’ she said, so loudly that the sweetheart on the other side of her (who was, she noted bitterly, pulling off brisk and cheerful with élan) looked at her in surprise. ‘I suppose you want me to be grateful? Because now, when you get blown to bits, at least I’ll know it’s my fault. You might—’

  ‘Evelyn Collis,’ said Teddy. ‘I love you more than I’ll ever love anybody, but you’re the world’s worst goop. Shut up and kiss me, can’t you?’

  Evelyn opened her mouth and then shut it again.

  ‘All right,’ she said.

  He leant forward and kissed her, on the mouth. At first it was hot and wet and clumsy, and then, suddenly, it wasn’t. He seemed to know exactly what to do. Had he kissed other girls before? She supposed he must have done. Who? When? She closed her eyes, then opened them again and pulled apart, horrified at herself. Kissing a man in public! And enjoying it! What on earth must the other passengers think? She felt awkward and angry, and – worst of all – some treacherous, womanly part of her just wanted to beam and beam and beam.

  They looked at each other for a long moment. Teddy was flushed, and his mouth was displaying a most inappropriate tendency to turn itself up at the corners. Her face felt hot. She wanted to hurry away from him as quickly as possible, and, bizarrely, to lean forward and kiss him again.

  ‘I’ve been wanting to do that for a long time,’ he said.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, ridiculously. ‘Did you like it?’

  ‘You are an ass,’ said Teddy. ‘Of course I did.’ His mouth won out over his manners, and he beamed at her. ‘I dare say you’ll think me frightfully indiscreet,’ he said. ‘But could we do it again?’

  It was the only time she’d ever kissed him. She couldn’t stop wondering if she’d ever do it again.

  Adults

  IN JULY 1916, May was seventeen.

  Seventeen, as far as several of the girls in her form were concerned, was practically an adult. One or two had already left school; one to volunteer in a London hospital, another to help care for a brother who’d been invalided out of the army. But most of the girls were still there.

  The war fervour of the early years was gone, though. The war was a fact of life, and a bloody one at that. Adults might – and did – talk about ‘glorious sacrifice’ and ‘brave heroes’; the newspapers were full of letters from mothers celebrating the exploits of their dead children. But strangely – or perhaps not strangely at all – the girls in May’s classroom had stopped caring. They all knew boys who were in France, or Italy, or Egypt, or Belgium, or Turkey, or Palestine. Some had brothers or fathers or cousins out there. Barbara even had a sweetheart in Egypt – or she claimed she had a sweetheart, a boy who lived at the end of her road and had joined up on his eighteenth birthday. But the jingoism of the early years had been replaced by boredom, and in some cases cynicism. Now, when the mistresses talked about glory and sacrifice, the girls giggled and yawned and rolled their eyes. It was considered sophisticated to be very above the grown-ups’ nationalism. Several of the girls in the Upper Sixth were now avowed pacifists. Even the Lower Sixth had lost interest in the war, except to moan about food shortages, and the dull, pinched diet of thin bread, watery stews, and endless greyish margarine.

  Somewhere along the way, without speaking about it or even really acknowledging it, the girls had made it up with May. The death of Barbara’s brother in April had helped. No one, of course, had reminded Barbara that in 1914 she’d said that she’d be glad if this happened. When it had happened, it had so obviously been something about which no one could possibly be glad. May had not said ‘I told you so’, either. Maybe she was growing up too; in 1914, she probably would have done. Instead, later that day, as they were going for a gymnastics lessons, she’d caught up with Barbara and said quietly, ‘I’m sorry about John.’

  Last year, Barbara might have sniffed, or turned her head, or pretended not to hear. But perhaps she too felt this quarrel was too petty to continue, because she simply nodded, and said, ‘Thank you.’

  No more was said. But after that, May found that none of the girls seemed interested in their campaign of attrition. They might not exactly be friends, but they would consent to hand her a sheet of blotting-paper, and to pass the salt. As the weeks went past, May found herself on a hockey team with several girls in her form, who permitted her to walk across from history with them and talked about tactics in quite a friendly manner. She got a part in the school play – not a big one, but a speaking part – and Mary Waterfield, who was in her form and also in several of her scenes, spent all of one French walk telling her in dreadful French how nervous she was about it. And then Winifred and Jean decided to put on a revue of songs and comic skits to raise money for the starving children in Belgium, and invited May to take part, and May persuaded Barbara to recite, and even managed to bite her tongue when Barbara announced she wanted to do that awful, patriotic Horatius at the Bridge.

  Lars Porsena of Clusium,

  By the Nine Gods he swore

  That the great house of Tarquin

  Should suffer wrong no more.

  By the Nine Gods he swore it,

  And named a trysting-day,

  And bade his messengers ride forth,

  East and west and south and north,

  To summon his array.

  East and west and south and north

  The messengers ride fast,

  And tower and town and cottage

  Have heard the trumpet’s blast.

  Shame on the false Etruscan

  Who lingers in his home,

  When Porsena of Clusium

  Is on the march for Rome!

  May was sure Barbara thought her a false Etruscan and had chosen the verse on purpose to say it, but she smiled and said nothing and even offered Barbara a role in her skit about sweethearts waiting for letters. And the other forms came along to watch, and said they liked it, and it seemed as though the girls had come to a t
acit agreement that her period of ostracisation was over.

  And perhaps Barbara had meant the verses for John, after all.

  Things were changing at home too. At the beginning of 1916, the government had finally introduced conscription. Ireland was exempt, which just went to show, May’s mother said angrily, what happened when people threatened to riot if you passed a law, and why were pacifists in Britain so willing to let this pass without challenge?

  ‘Because they’re pacifists?’ said May, amused. ‘Mama, you aren’t really suggesting the Quakers should start a riot, are you?’

  ‘Oh, I suppose not,’ her mother said. She looked tired, May thought, to her surprise. Mothers didn’t look tired. Mothers were all-powerful and all-knowing; a mother who was a human being, and rather a worn-and-darned human being at that, was a new concept, and not entirely a pleasant one.

  Conscription changed everything. The act included a clause that said those called up could apply for an exemption on the grounds of ‘conscience’. But since it gave no indication of what might constitute a genuine conscientious objection, almost all of the young men who applied found themselves either imprisoned for desertion, or shunted off into non-combative alternative roles. Since ‘non-combative’ could mean anything up to and including digging trenches, naturally most of the men refused.

  Outside of Quaker and suffrage circles, most people seemed to have a pretty low opinion of conscientious objectors. May remembered her argument with Nell about it. Wasn’t it better to kill one person if it saved the lives of dozens of others? That was the argument they used in the conscientious-objector tribunals too. May could see it made a sort-of sense, if you took God out of it. The problem with believing in God was that you had to do what he told you, even if it seemed cracked. She wished she’d said that to Nell. She wondered what Nell would have said back.

  That was still the only time Nell had ever said she loved her. May wondered if she really had. Had she missed May at all, these long months, the way May had missed her?

  Anti-conscription meetings were held each week in Finsbury Park by young men awaiting their conscription notices. May went most weeks, her mother when she could. She sold copies of the Daily Herald and other anti-conscription literature to the crowds, which seemed to grow larger every week – or was it May’s imagination? There were agitators there too; most weeks, the stage would be overturned by supporters of the war. But the men carried on speaking regardless. May wrote an article about it for the school magazine, and the editors published it without complaint; it aroused very little comment from the other girls either. In fact, Winifred said confidentially to May that her brother had told her that someone in his battalion had actually been part of a court-martial of a conscientious objector and he – Winifred’s brother – thought it a crying shame.

  So there was that.

  Postcards From the Dead

  FIELD POSTCARDS WERE a thing soldiers sent. You usually got them after a big offensive, which was all very well if one arrived, but rather shattering if one didn’t.

  Evelyn’s friend Joyce called them Postcards from hell. Postcards from the dead was what Miss Kent called them.

  ‘Because if they aren’t dead now, they soon will be, won’t they?’

  Miss Kent was a girl on Evelyn’s corridor last year, who had been inclined to be rather hysterical about the war. She came from one of those towns where the whole battalion had gone over the top one day and never came back. Since this battalion had included both of Miss Kent’s brothers, her cousin, the boy who did the gardening and the handyman, Miss Kent was understandably cynical when people talked about ‘glorious sacrifice’ and ‘our brave boys’. Most of the girls in college avoided her, as though her bad luck might be contagious. Evelyn had, when she first arrived, considered it a test of basic human decency to talk to her, but as the war dragged on, and waiting for letters became more and more nerve-racking, she’d begun to lose heart. It was also basic human decency to be reassuring to someone when that someone had a fiancé on the Front Line, wasn’t it?

  Miss Kent was inclined to be cynical about fiancés, on the basis that most girls only got engaged because of the war. This was, of course, technically true in Evelyn’s case, but she felt it missed the point somewhat. She and Teddy would have got engaged eventually.

  ‘I wouldn’t ever have married anyone else,’ she’d explained to Miss Kent, and Miss Kent had said, ‘Well, at this rate, you won’t marry anybody.’

  After that, Evelyn decided even basic human decency had its limits, and made friends with Miss Foxwell instead, who was small, timid, looked about fifteen, and told Evelyn in a tremulous voice that she was sure she was going to fail everything.

  It was now over three weeks since the Battle of the Somme had begun. Evelyn, assisted by an anxious Hetty, took to reading the casualty lists in The Times every day, but casualty lists were peculiar things. Men might easily be missed from them, or lost in No Man’s Land, or appear with their name misspelt, and anyway, if someone you were related to was killed, you did rather expect to be told first.

  ‘Perhaps he’s been taken prisoner,’ said Hetty. ‘Or – or – perhaps he’s been tragically wounded, and he’s forgotten everything except your own sweet face, only of course that isn’t any use without your own sweet name and address, so he’s lying there bleeding heroically being oh so brave and cheering the nurses with his dear ways. People do forget things when they’re wounded. There was a story all about it in The Girl’s Own Paper. And then one day, he’ll see some sight made holy by the memory of your presence, and it’ll all come flooding back, and he’ll just know.’

  Or perhaps he’s dead, thought Evelyn. But she didn’t say it. What would be the point?

  At last, when Evelyn had wound herself up into such a state of tension that every knock on the door had turned into a telegraph boy, a field postcard arrived. Hetty, who had charged to the door at the sound of the postman, picked it up from the mat and shrieked, ‘He’s alive!’

  Evelyn felt as though her heart had stopped. She was dizzy with relief and, for a moment, she was sure she was going to faint. She clutched at the breakfast table. She had not realised, until that moment, how sure she’d been that he was dead.

  The field postcard, however, was frustrating. It read:

  NOTHING is to be written on this side except the date and signature of the sender. Sentences not required will be erased. If anything else is added the postcard will be destroyed.

  Underneath this alarming pronouncement were the possible answers, which Teddy had marked through with a pencil.

  Evelyn sat on the bottom step and read through the postcard again and again. She still felt rather dizzy, and Hetty and Kezia’s noisy interest was not making things any easier.

  In the plus column was the obvious fact that Teddy was not only not dead, but was apparently well enough to sign his name – and that definitely was his signature, not a nurse’s, though rather shaky. So that was good. Nothing too dreadful could have happened to someone well enough to sign his name, she told herself. In the minus column was that ominous and am going on well. Fiancés, Evelyn thought fiercely, also had a responsibility to be reassuring, and of all the things that and am going on well might be, reassuring it was definitively not.

  Hetty seemed to have decided that it was her job to be cheering, which she did with great gusto – the relief of knowing that Teddy was alive, which had wiped Evelyn out, seemed to have invigorated her.

  ‘Not going on well is good,’ she said. ‘Maybe it means something that’ll get him sent home. Maybe for ever! He’s probably just being stupid and honest and doesn’t know you’re supposed to be “going on well” even if your legs are falling off – which they won’t be,’ she added hastily, seeing Evelyn’s face. ‘You don’t get field postcards when people’s legs are blown off, you get kindly letters explaining that they’re quite all right really and very cheerful considering. Enid in my form’s Auntie Mary got one, and Enid said her Auntie Mary said
it was the most ridiculous thing she’d ever read. And,’ she went on cheerfully, ‘he’s left the letter follows bit uncrossed. So you’ll know soon anyway.’

  And with that Evelyn had to be satisfied.

  Gas

  THE ANSWER CAME a few days later, in the form of an official letter to Teddy’s parents. Teddy had been shot ‘in the abdomen’, and had also been the victim of a gas attack. He was in a hospital in France, but was on the list to be sent home to England as soon as possible. This, Evelyn knew, might take days, or even weeks. Teddy’s brother Herbert had had to wait nearly a week for a boat-train home.

  ‘And it’s always worse after a big offensive.’

  Evelyn and her parents, and Teddy’s parents, pooled what information they had about gas attacks. It could kill you. If it didn’t kill you, it burned the inside of your throat and destroyed whole chunks of your lungs. Like the feeding-tube, thought Evelyn, with a shudder. Whatever she’d expected Teddy to face in France, she’d assumed he’d be safe from that.

  Herbert, when appealed to for information, had not been very forthcoming.

  ‘Good God!’ he said. ‘Poor little devil. Well, with any luck, he’s out of it now.’

  Evelyn tried to picture him, but the problem with war-wounds was that the official words covered so many possibilities. ‘Shellshock’ seemed to mean everything from nightmares and headaches to men who were literally unable to speak or move. ‘Gunshot wound’ could mean everything from death, to permanently invalided, to simply grazed. She, Hetty, her mother and Teddy’s parents had all written, but the letter Teddy had promised never arrived, which Evelyn told herself was almost certainly down to postal delays, and nothing to worry about. But to her astonishment, she found herself praying. She, Evelyn Collis, who had never believed in Father Christmas, let alone in Jesus!