If pudding was sour it was sweetened by little white tablets named saccharine. Jennifer began to forget what the old food had been like. She forgot also what sort of suits men wore in the days before the war. Everyone had khaki now. It was difficult to imagine anything else.
She wondered whether Daddy would have gone to the war if he had not died. She tried to remember his face and his figure, but all she could ever see was the tangled hair on the pillow. Even his photograph failed to remind her. He belonged to another time, long, long ago. There was something pathetic in the fact that he would never know about the war. His infinite wisdom dwindled in her eyes, and she saw him smaller than he had been before, smaller and shrinking in value, a pale shadow compared to the living stalwart presence of Harold and Willie. Already she herself was older, superior to him.
He was a tombstone in a churchyard now, and the churchyard itself a far, forgotten place.
Jennifer pushed the photograph carelessly behind the ornament on the mantelpiece, and ran down the stairs, her satchel on her shoulder, humming ‘Tipperary’, a song he had never sung.
Harold was killed in March.
She returned home from school in time for tea, and directly the front door was opened she knew what had happened.The servant’s expression was scared, and she fumbled with the handle of the door, avoiding Jennifer’s eyes. There was a man’s hat lying in the hall. She looked into the dining-room and saw that tea had not been laid. One of the boarders came out of the drawing-room, and as soon as she saw Jennifer, her mouth worked queerly, and she stepped back again, closing the door softly. The rims of her eyes had been red.
A pain came into Jennifer’s heart. She must not let the servant know that she had guessed.
‘Where’s Mother?’ she asked.
‘Upstairs with your granny - she’s - she’s not very well, I think,’ said the woman, and slipped away silently to the basement. For a moment Jennifer hesitated, wondering whether she could creep from the house and run somewhere far, run so that she would never have to find out whether this thing was true. Terrified lest she should meet someone who would tell her she went along to the downstairs lavatory, and locked the door. No one would find her here. She knelt on the floor and prayed. ‘Please, God, don’t let it be Harold or Willie, please God, let it be just my imagination.’ Then she rose and waited, her ear to the door, listening for footsteps.
In about twenty minutes she heard a slow, heavy footfall descending the stairs. It moved across the hall and went into the drawing-room.Then the door closed.All was silent. Jennifer knew that it was Grandmamma. Stealthily she opened the lavatory door and stepped into the hall. It was no use, she could not wait any longer. She must know the truth. She stole up the staircase to her mother’s bedroom, and with her heart thumping and her hands clammy with sweat, she crept inside.
The room was quite dark, and the curtains were drawn. Faintly Jennifer could make out the figure of her mother on the bed. She stood by the door, holding her breath, terrified that she would be seen. The blind flapped against the window pane. There was a little sound from the bed, and the figure moved.
Mother spoke, in a thick swollen voice that she had never used before.
‘Is that Jenny?’
‘Yes, Mother.’
There was a silence, and she waited, her heart thumping ... thumping; her throat dry.
Her legs suddenly began to tremble.
‘Harold’s been killed, darling ...’ the voice trailed off, smothered and lost.
‘Yes’ - whispered Jennifer. ‘Yes - I know.’
For one moment she longed to go to the figure on the bed and creep next to her, holding her very close, making by this humble effort of consolation the beginning of friendship, love, and understanding. She did not know that the whole of their future might depend upon this moment.
Jennifer was too shy.
She stole from the silent room and crouched in the passage outside, the scalding tears blinding her eyes, running down into her mouth . . .
Jennifer woke with a start. It seemed as though the gun had sounded next to her, close to her ear. Once again the report rang out, shaking the very walls of the house with its vibration. She sat up in bed and reached for her dressing-gown. This signal to which she was so accustomed never failed to waken within her a smouldering whisper of dread, a cold senseless touch of babyish fear. Then the maroons began. Screaming, whistling, they lifted their voices, filling the air with a hideous cry of panic, stirring the slow and sleepy part of her to action, causing her to jump from her bed and run crazily to the door, stuffing her fingers in her ears. Already the three servants were tumbling down the staircase from their cheerless rooms beneath the roof. Their figures were clumsy and grotesque. Impossible to connect the cook, the martinet of the boarding-house kitchen, with this lumpy, moon-faced woman, clutching her flannel dressing-gown to her with trembling hands. There was something painfully intimate about seeing her thus, something almost shocking. Jennifer smiled politely, but avoided her eyes. Mother appeared on the landing, helping Grandmamma, a monstrous, horrible figure in a red dressing-gown.
The boarders came out of their rooms.The women in various stages of undress, hair screwed anyhow, grease at the corners of their noses, and the only two men of the boarding-house who were left, old Mr Hobson, kicking his stomach before him as he walked, and Mr Weymes who had only one lung and could not fight, his long red nose sniffing the air, his pale eyes seeming to apologize for the fact, ‘Really, you know, it isn’t my fault that I’m here.’
They went down into the cellar, where campstools and rugs were already prepared, and huddled together they seemed a preposterous little group, the women nervous, the men over-smiling, their faces yellow and strange in the dim candlelight.
Jennifer sat next to her mother, her teeth chattering. Funny - she wasn’t afraid but - but she could not keep her body from shaking like this, nor her teeth from rattling. They went on, in spite of her efforts to control them. It was the silence that was unbearable, the straining her ears to listen, and wondering what was happening up in the sky above.
‘Hark! did you hear that?’
One of the boarders spoke sharply.
The air was filled with sound now. First the terrible splitting echo of the Hampstead gun, followed by the low thunder and steady rumbling of the others. Jennifer closed her eyes and pressed her hands against her tummy.
It was something that would never stop, that would go on for ever, that she would know to the end of her days.
While the guns paused for a moment it seemed there came a high thin humming, steady and unmistakable, the hum of distant bees, crowded together in a flock, moving slowly. Somebody whispered in the darkness, ‘There are the Gothas - they’re right above our heads.’
Once more the guns broke out, deafening the world with the explosion.
It seemed to Jennifer that she had sat in the cellar from the beginning of things, that never, since she could remember, had there been anything in her life but this. One day, so she was told, it would be ended. One day there would be no war.
Now she was twelve, she was old, she understood.
The war had killed Harold and Willie. Once they were alive, laughing with her, playing with her, she had touched them, knowing them to be true, then all that was left of them were two telegrams, two letters from strange officers. However much she called to them in lonely moments, they would not come. Soon their photographs would seem unreal, like the photograph of Daddy.They would be dead people. She herself, as a grown-up woman, would glance towards them casually, seeing their faces younger than hers, faded, curiously old-fashioned - ‘Yes, those were my brothers.’
They would not even have the reality of an old toy, found in a forgotten cupboard, dusty and reproachful.
The guns were quieter now, from time to time there came a low rumble and a fierce short clamour, then they ceased again, muttering distantly a grumble and a threat.
Jennifer saw herself growing up and leavi
ng Daddy and the boys behind, passing beyond them, to strange fancies and new thoughts, remembering them in quiet moments as belonging to a list of discarded things, children’s books at the back of a shelf, the illustrations torn, boxes of cracked paints, an armless teddy bear - jerseys she had outgrown.
And Plyn, a queer blurred vision of the sea, high hills, and a path across the fields.
The horror of growing up, the horror of no longer laughing at really funny things, nor caring to run wildly, forgetting to pretend you are a boy, walking dully instead of slashing at trees with your sword. Never seeing again the fun of kicking autumn leaves in the gutter, stamping in puddles, banging a stick along railings, turning chairs and dust-sheets into camps, making food out of twigs and grass and pulling the petals off daisies for potatoes. No more to stroll hands in pockets, humming a tune, sniffing adventure round the corner.
Jumbled and confused the thoughts scattered themselves in Jennifer’s mind as she crouched on her campstool, her eyes closed, her teeth chattering. Soon she would be old with the noise of the guns in her ears, London her home, Daddy, the boys, and Plyn the dead dreams of a forgotten year, and running by her side the shadow of a little girl who wanted to stay young.
Everything was silent now, the rumbling and the muttering had ceased. Suddenly, with the suggestion of a whisper, like a faint far echo, came the sweet muffled call of a bugle.
Two little notes, twice repeated, losing themselves in the distant streets.
‘All clear’ . . . ‘All clear’ . . .
7
Jennifer stayed at school until she was seventeen. She was twelve at the end of the war, and during the next five years she developed rapidly in mind and body, throwing aside her old childish shyness and timidity and becoming aware of her own latent will-power. At school she worked when she chose to give her mind to it, but remained throughout curiously detached as though she considered education merely a way of spending her time. Her teachers could make little of her.
Jennifer left school at the end of the summer term of 1923, and after the annual dreary holiday at the seaside, Felixstowe this year, she found herself back at No. 7 Maple Street with the prospect of empty days before her. Grandmamma, who merely sat in a chair in the drawing-room now and directed operations from there, advised her to help her mother with the business of running the boarding-house, and to be thankful that owing to her own generosity there was no need for her to tramp the streets looking for work.
‘At the same time, Jennifer, I trust you realize what a lucky girl you have been all these years, receiving that splendid education, treating this home as your own, and now at the age of seventeen enjoying such liberty as your mother never had at your age, I can assure you.’
Jennifer glanced up from her book. She had grown so used to these speeches that they had little effect on her.
‘I don’t know about the liberty,’ she said. ‘The only difference is that I go about in the tubes and buses alone and Mother didn’t. Otherwise I should think I lead very much the same sort of life.’
Grandmamma sniffed.
‘Nonsense, nonsense,’ she muttered, ‘I don’t approve of all this running about at all.’
Bertha snapped a piece of cotton in two. She was embroidering a camisole.
‘I think it would be good for Jennifer if she made some really nice friends,’ she announced. ‘I wish you’d kept on with that Marshall girl, dear, she might have asked you to stay. I believe they had quite a place in Herefordshire.’
‘What’s that?’ asked Grandmamma, peevishly, ‘what’s that? I can’t hear what you say, you mumble so.’
‘I said it’s a pity Jennifer hasn’t some nice friends who would ask her to stay,’ shouted Bertha.
‘What nonsense! Isn’t the child happy here? Why should she wish to go tearing off somewhere? She’s only just home from Felixstowe.There’s too much going away these days altogether. ’
‘Still, Mamma, she has no young companions she seems to care about. Of course I had Edith and May in the old days, and anyway we always found plenty to do. No, it’s a great pity you haven’t more friends, Jenny.’
‘Don’t worry, I’m all right,’ said Jennifer scowling, hating to be discussed. ‘I don’t want any friends. I hate girls, I always have.’
‘What does she say, Bertha? Why doesn’t she speak up so that I can hear?’ Grandmamma stamped the floor with her stick.
‘Jenny says she doesn’t care for girls, Mamma, that was all.’
‘Doesn’t care for girls? What a stupid thing to say. What does she mean, I should like to know.’
‘Yes, tell us, Jenny.You are always so reticent in your opinions. ’
‘Oh! nothing, Mother. I don’t know why exactly. They’re rather fools I think, at least they all were at school. Always giggling and whispering. I like people who either do a thing openly or keep quiet about it.’
‘Do a thing openly, what do you mean, child?’ Grandmamma pricked up her ears suspiciously. ‘You shouldn’t be so mysterious in your conversation. Explain yourself.’
‘Only an expression, Grandmamma. It doesn’t mean anything. It would take me months to give you all my reasons for disliking girls.’
‘Well, Jenny,’ said Bertha cheerfully, ‘at least you don’t know many boys to compare them with, but I dare say you will as you grow older. I should like you to meet some really nice young men - after all, you are sure to marry one day.’
‘I don’t want to marry.’
‘Oh! every girl says that at your age, I’m sure I did myself. You wait and see. It’s just a pretence, being shy of men.’
‘Shy?’ Jennifer smiled. ‘I’m not shy of men, I like them. Don’t know many, but I see them walking about the street. They’re more human than women, same as dogs.’
‘What’s that? What’s that? What did she say?’
‘Jennifer doesn’t mind men, Mamma. She says they’re like dogs, she sees them in the street.’
‘She sees what? How perfectly disgusting - didn’t she call a policeman?’
‘No, Grandmamma, you didn’t hear properly. I said men were human.’
‘Well, everybody knows that, child, but it’s no excuse for filthy behaviour. So that’s why you like to go about London alone. Bertha, I don’t approve of this at all.’
‘It’s all right, Mamma. Jennifer was joking.’
‘H’mph! Joking, don’t see any joke. The child knows too much, that’s the trouble.’
Bertha changed the conversation.
‘What are your plans for the week, Jenny?’
‘Haven’t got any. I thought of walking along the Embankment tomorrow, and seeing if there were any ships.’
‘What a funny thing to want to do.’
‘I like it.’
‘Don’t get spoken to by any roughs.’
‘Nobody ever speaks to me, I wish they would.’
‘What’s that? The child wants to be assaulted by roughs? Bertha, I forbid Jennifer to go off on this expedition.’
‘Very well, Mamma. Jennifer, you heard what Grandmamma says.’
‘Yes. I heard.’
‘Still, it’s a pity to spoil your day. I was thinking of doing some shopping tomorrow afternoon.You can come with me and we’ll have tea afterwards at Whiteleys.’
To their surprise Jennifer burst out laughing and walked from the room.
‘Oh, dear! I hope Jenny isn’t going to be difficult,’ said Bertha thoughtfully.
Grandmamma sniffed, and settled herself in her chair. ‘She needs watching, in my opinion; I don’t like the look in her eye. The child’s a dark horse.’
So they dismissed her from their minds.
Jennifer, who believed in fair play, stood exactly two months of idleness at the boarding-house, and then decided she could bear no more. It was absurd to say her mother needed her help in running the place, on the contrary, she would have been fussed at interference.
Bertha realized that the girl had nothing to do and was bored,
but she seemed to think it was the fault of her character and could not be changed. Poor Christopher had been the same as a young man. Always restless and dissatisfied. It was most unfortunate that Jennifer should have inherited this fault. Bertha did not see what could be done about it. She herself had been so very different as a girl. Still, there it was; such a pity Jennifer had no hobbies to make some sort of amusement. Painting or music now. However she was very young, perhaps she would meet some really nice man with plenty of money . . .
She talked the matter over with Grandmamma, and they both agreed that this was the only thing for Jennifer. ‘That’s why I’m so anxious for her to make friends,’ argued Bertha.
‘She is so obstinate, and will not go out of her way to make herself agreeable. That Marshall girl at school had a lovely place in the country, and would have introduced her to no end of people. She might even have hunted.’
‘Hunted? Nonsense, nonsense. No girl secures a husband by hunting for one. Jennifer is only too ready to make herself cheap as it is.’
‘No, Mamma dear, you misunderstand. I mean hunting on horseback, after foxes you know.’
‘Oh! well, why don’t you say what you mean? Hunting indeed, what nonsense.’
‘I am afraid Jenny has rather an unfortunate manner with strangers,’ continued Bertha. ‘She will give people the impression she is laughing at them. Even with people she knows it’s the same. All the boarders here, for instance. I’m sure everyone is very nice to her, but she has such a quick tongue. I believe she would frighten off any man who wished to make an impression.’
‘Humph! that’s all a pose. Still waters run deep. She seemed on very familiar terms with Mr Tupton the other evening. I was watching her.’
‘Oh! Mamma, they were only discussing horse-breeding. Quite harmless.’
‘Harmless? Glad you think so. I call it a decidedly intimate subject to be discussed between two people of the opposite sex. There’s no knowing what might be said. Men are always ready to twist words about and cause confusion.’