A Far Cry From Kensington
Sir Alec arrived all beams and smiles at five past three, ushering before him Emma Loy. I had never seen him in this exuberant mood.
‘We have kept you waiting, Mrs Hawkins. Have we kept you waiting?’
He busied himself with Emma’s coat and settling her into a chair. They had evidently been to lunch somewhere grand like the Ivy, Rules or the Ritz, and were mellowed with all the wines and rare foods my imagination could impute to the occasion. One of the effects of being on a diet is a kind of puritanical dismay at the idea of other people’s eating and drinking, especially the quantity. Three luxurious courses, I thought wildly, as I greeted Emma Loy with my good smile; Rhenish white wine, smoked salmon, then lamb chops with tiny vegetables or something flambé, followed by —
The details began to escape my imagination, but anyway my attention was directed quite away from these two and their lunch by the arrival of Ann Clough, the formidable reproach to our national conscience whose maniacal father had been hanged, and who was so nice, and an important director of the firm. She was followed by Colin Shoe who immediately said, ‘Emma, you look wonderful,’ to the tailored and grey-clad Name who sat back in her armchair, dreamy with lunch. ‘Are we late?’ said Colin. Clearly this was to be a meeting and it had been called for three o’clock. I thought, paranoically, that I had been called for two-thirty and made to wait in order to put me in my place; but maybe they only forgot to tell me that the time had been changed. Whatever Colin Shoe had been struck off the medical rolls about, it wasn’t a lack of bedside manner. He fussed over Emma and exclaimed proudly and justly over her forthcoming novel; and he quite forgot for the moment that the best author was a dead one. Sir Alec had now called someone else on the intercom, in response to which Abigail de Mordell Staines-Knight came in and was introduced to Emma Loy as such.
‘I didn’t quite catch the name,’ said wicked Emma, whereupon Abigail mildly replied, ‘Abigail will do.’ Abigail had a short-hand notebook. She perched on the edge of a chair on the outskirts of the circle we had formed, with pencil poised.
‘This is a very pleasant occasion,’ said Sir Alec. ‘I doubt if we shall have a great deal of discussion. It is the question of this book by our author Hector Bartlett, entitled Quest for Eternity —’
‘The Eternal Quest I think is the title,’ said Ann Clough with a smile at Emma Loy.
‘The Eternal Quest. There are a few small problems, they need not detain us for long. Mrs Hawkins, you have undertaken to deal with this book and I have your note that it can’t be improved.’
‘Exceedingly high praise,’ said Colin Shoe, with the optimism of one who observes that four months to live is a lifetime.
Abigail squiggled her pencil across the lines of her notebook.
‘Mrs Hawkins doesn’t want to touch the book,’ said Emma Loy. ‘You know, Mrs Hawkins, you are terribly prejudiced against Hector.’
‘Let us stick to the book,’ said Ann, with the tone of a patient schoolteacher. ‘We are not here to discuss personalities. The book’s the thing.’
I spoke directly to Emma Loy. ‘Nobody could re-write the book. No-one can edit it. It’s awful.’
‘I want to do this for Hector,’ she said. ‘Why are you so down on him?’
‘He’s a pisseur de copie,’ I said, and I said it because I couldn’t help it. It just came out.
‘Oh, God!’ said Emma. ‘That epithet of yours. It’s going the rounds and it’s ruining Hector’s career. I’m not claiming he’s a genius, but —’
‘What was that you said, Mrs Hawkins?’ said Sir Alec. Colin Shoe looked up at the ceiling.
‘Pisseur de copie. It means that he pisses hack journalism, it means that he urinates frightful prose.’
‘Perhaps we’d better —’ said Ann.
‘The truth is’, said Emma, ‘that I’d like to help Hector and I don’t know how.’ She meant, as I suspected at the time, that she wanted to get him out of her life, and this attempt to get his book published was a valedictory present.
‘I’m sure Mrs Hawkins doesn’t mean —’ said Colin Shoe.
‘I am sure that a distinguished author like Miss Loy’, said Sir Alec, ‘would not recommend an unworthy book, and if I may say so, Mrs Hawkins, your terms of expression are hardly —’
‘Not having read the book personally —’ said Ann.
Abigail scribbled on, her legs crossed, cool and slim on the edge of her chair.
‘I wish you could get to know Hector, Mrs Hawkins,’ said Emma. ‘He has so many good points.’
It had become almost a private argument between Emma and me. She said Hector Bartlett went to a great deal of trouble over his writing. I told her trouble was the word. ‘Agreed,’ she said. ‘But touch up the book a bit. My dear, what are you here for?’ Then I recounted what I had just seen in the pub. ‘A great slosh of mustard on a sausage roll,’ I said. ‘The poor dog.’
‘There’s another side to Hector,’ said Emma. ‘After all, how many authors and artists in history have been absolute swine. It’s nothing to do with his work. I say you’re prejudiced.’
‘If you want my advice,’ I said to Sir Alec, whose postprandial euphoria I had thoroughly spoiled, ‘you will send this book back to the maker, just as a shopkeeper would do with any faulty object, a camera or a tin of beans gone bad. Send it back.’
Poor Ann Clough said, ‘Let us be fair —’
‘And,’ said Emma, ‘Mrs Hawkins, your description of the author is obscene.’ She turned to Alec. ‘You must admit —’
‘Miss Loy’s name is enough to guarantee —’ said Colin Shoe.
‘I think we’ll have to pass the book to one of our other editors,’ said Sir Alec, it’s a great shame, Mrs Hawkins, but we can’t have this. Just when we were counting on you to assist with The Phantom. The Phantom’, he said, turning to Emma, ‘is a new project of ours, a quarterly review of the occult.’
They never published the Pisseur’s book. They brought out The Phantom, not assisted by me, and it flourished for nearly twenty years.
‘It was a pity you had to call him that name,’ said Milly that night, when I gave her a replay of the day’s events.
‘I can’t help it. Sometimes the words just come out and I can’t stop them. It feels like preaching the gospel.’
‘Then you’re quite right, Mrs Hawkins. You’re quite right to speak out.’
Next day Colin Shoe brought me a month’s pay. He said I could leave as soon as I liked, ‘to our great regret, Mrs Hawkins.’
I signed for the money and said that I would be leaving almost right away, as soon as I had cleared up a few minor things I had to do. I added, ‘And do not forget that Hector Bartlet is a pisseur de copie.’
‘I won’t forget, Mrs Hawkins. None of us will forget. You are looking very smart these days, if I may say so.’
I said good-bye to my colleagues; I sensed a sort of envy in Ann Clough’ s good-bye, as if I were getting out of something she couldn’t. I went to say good-bye to Abigail. Before I left her office, while I was still chatting, I saw, lying sideways on her desk a typed list of about ten names. I looked at them while talking, not really meaning to take them in. One of them was Wanda Podolak.
That cold March of 1955 was one of the strangest in my life. Milly Sanders was away all that month in Ireland, where her daughter was ill. I lay long awake at nights, listening to the silence with my outward ears and to a crowding-in of voices with my inward ear.
There was the voice of Martin York, ‘Credibility, Mrs Hawkins, credibility is everything. I am attempting to regain credibility for the Press,’ and of Ivy, the typist at the Ullswater Press, whose ‘n’s sounded like ‘d’s: ‘Mr York is id a meeting. It is simply dot possible …’ Came the shrill short phrases of Patrick’s wife, Mabel, thrown at me like stones. ‘You, Mrs Hawkins. You, Mrs Hawkins. You sleep with my husband, you make love with him in your bed. You, for your pleasure, Mrs Hawkins …’ And now Mabel was dead, suddenly in her grave. Her voice was soft on
those occasions when her mood swerved, ‘Mrs Hawkins, you are so good to us. You have been so kind to Patrick.’
Milly had said, ‘You should marry again, Mrs Hawkins. You’re a young woman. Twenty-eight, twenty-nine, is too young to settle for life as a widow.’ I had told her part of the story of my brief war-time marriage. ‘It was hardly a marriage,’ she said. This was objectively true.
During that March after I was pushed out of Mackintosh & Tooley I didn’t think of looking for another job. With Milly away, I spent my days taking long rides on the top of buses all over London, to the furthest outskirts and termini. Stanmore, Edgware, Bushey, Chingford, Romford, Harrow, Wanstead, Dagenham, Barking. There were few streets intact although the war had been over ten years. Victorian houses, shops, churches, were separated by large areas of bomb-gap. The rubble had been cleared away, but strange grasses and wild herbs had sprung up where the war-demolished houses had been. While it was still light I rode past the docks and the railway sidings, and the dark pubs not yet open, until it was time to go home again. London was still sooty from coal fires in those days. Wembley, Hackney, Islington, Southall, Acton, Ealing. And sometimes I walked round the City, soon to be reconstructed with eloquent, rich high-rises. Sometimes I went to Richmond, to Greenwich, to Dulwich, Hampton and Kew where I walked in the vast lonely parks on dry days and was solicited at times by men in raincoats whom I thoroughly scared off. Surbiton, Ewell, Croydon and as far as Orpington. So I spent my days after days on the top of the buses staring out of the window and watching with discreet eyes my fellow passengers, most of them shabby, and, if they were not alone, listening with half an ear to their talk, mostly about their families and friends, their shopping and their jobs; and not once in all those long rides did I hear a snatch of conversation about a general topic.
At times I felt faces looming over me. The conductor, the passengers as they passed to get on or off, shrill schoolchildren and burly mothers who had been unable to find a seat on the lower deck. I felt like Lucy Snowe in Villette, who walked, solitary in Brussels on a summer night, among the festival crowds; the faces pressing round her, of people made hilarious by the occasion, were made even more grotesque by her state of hallucination induced by laudanum.
There was no such hectic celebration in sober London but I experienced a throb and a choking of hysteria in the London voices around me and in the bland and pasty, the long and dour, the pretty and painted faces of the people. Barnet, Loughton, Hendon, Northolt, Willesden, Camberwell, Plumstead, Kingston, Bromley. I had lunches in noisy pubs, leaving half on my plate, to the consternation of many barmaids whose eyes seemed to me too wild, their lips too red to be real. I had tea and half a bun in tea-shops where no waitress cared what I didn’t eat. I was tempted to reflect that my diet had the same effect as a drug, but I put the thought from me. I thought about my life as Mrs Hawkins and came to no conclusion whatsoever. ‘Good evening, Mrs Hawkins,’ said our next-door neighbour’s new wife, as I turned in our gate at Church End Villas at the same time as she turned in hers.
I was married in 1944 at the age of eighteen to Tom Hawkins. I met him in July and married him on the 28th August for which purpose he got special leave from the army. Tom was a parachutist, a sergeant in the airborne troops. I had not long left school and had joined the Land Army. It was as a land-girl that I first met Tom. He was home on leave at the estate where I worked. I was a great, robust girl but not truly fat as I had been lately. Tom was a tall fellow, with a long thin face very dark of complexion; he was one of those dark Englishmen that make you wonder where the darkness came from — the Romans? the wrecked mariners of the Spanish Armada? maybe a Norman import from the remnants of the Gallic mercenaries? He was now twenty-four and had been attending an agricultural college when the war broke out.
Tom’s father had some land in Hertfordshire. It was settled that Tom would be a farmer when the war was over, and I would be a farmer’s wife. I wonder what sort of farmer’s wife I would have made if Tom had lived? I had chosen to go into the Land Army because I was big and strong, and because, after my years at school, the idea of being out in the open in all weathers was one of freedom as opposed to the office work I would otherwise have been sent to do in those war years of total recruitment for all under the age of forty-five. But I had a bookish side, which Tom didn’t live to see.
I had met Tom Hawkins at a dance, then we met again. Then, when he went back to his unit, we wrote to each other, at first every week, then twice a week, then every day. He phoned me when he could. I had no knowledge of where he was stationed; it was secret like everything else of interest at that time; his letters had to be addressed to a number, a division and some other rigmarole ending with HM Forces. Tom came on leave again, for a weekend, and asked me to marry him. I thought it over for a fortnight, but the interval was only a formality. For at this stage I was absolutely in love, as much in love as Tom. My parents, Tom’s father and sister, and two of my school friends who were on the land with me, came to my wedding on the 28th of August. I wore my school-concert dress, long and white, which did very well, and saved clothing coupons. Tom wore his uniform. We had four days in London, in a borrowed flat. We had intended to go to theatres, but we never did. We were disturbed only by a few incendiary bombs and V1s, for which there were air-raid warnings. The V2s for which there were no warnings had not started. We went to Hampton Court and to Kew. We walked in Hyde Park, round the Serpentine, almost every day, and on to Kensington Gardens, and to tea with chocolate cake at Gunter’s in Curzon Street at the extravagant price of two shillings and sixpence each, plus tip.
After that I was a land-girl again, looking out for my letters addressed to Mrs Hawkins. I knew Tom would soon have to go into action on the Western front where the Germans were toughly holding out. To steel myself and prepare for the worst, in those weeks since our wedding, I used to secretly rehearse a telegram from the War Office advising me that my husband had been killed in action. The personnel officer in our group would say, There’s a telegram for you, Mrs Hawkins.’ And that would be that. ‘I s there anything you would like, won’t you lie down? You must be very brave, Mrs Hawkins. You aren’t the only one …’
Tom put in an unexpected appearance on Monday night, 11th September. He was to go back next day. We took a tiny room at the local pub. Tom didn’t say so, but I guessed he was AWOL, as we called ‘Absent without leave’. We were Mr and Mrs Hawkins. I supposed he was going into battle very soon. What a fool he had been, I thought, to join the parachuters.
After supper downstairs he left me and I went up to bed; he had said he felt he could do with a drink. He had already drunk three double whiskies. They happened to have whisky that night in the pub. It was a special consignment. Whisky was scarce at that time. I was in bed by nine, reading a book and waiting for Tom. There was a considerable noise downstairs in the public bar, but I had fallen asleep by closing time, when Tom woke me up, bursting into the room wild and drunk.
Now, it is my advice to anyone getting married, that they should first see the other partner when drunk. Especially a man. Drink can mellow, it can sweeten. Too much can make a person silly. Or it can make them savage: this was the case with Tom. I hadn’t seen him drunk before. He broke up the place, starting with the china ewer and basin on the wash-stand and ending with the wall-mirror. I was on my feet and had tried to stop him when he heaved the mattress off the bed and tried to push it out of the window. This only had the effect of his hurling me across the room, after which the mattress went out of the window. And all the time swearing and shouting, while the landlord and his wife, first standing in the doorway, then called their son to fetch the police.
Tom made off, back to his camp, without even looking at me before the policeman arrived; I don’t know how he got transport; probably he got a lift. I helped to put things straight in the room, with the landlady puffing and clucking; I settled the bill for damage, and went back to my billet in the big old house where we were quartered. The policeman was
kindly in the circumstances.
I wonder if my marriage would have lasted? I thought, even then in my inexperience, that this couldn’t be Tom Hawkins’ normal behaviour. It must be war-nerves, or something like that. But then, I thought, Tom was one of thousands, he wasn’t the only one. I think, now, that if I had shown the strong side of my character right from the start, Tom wouldn’t have broken out like that. I had a great bruise on my forehead where it had struck the wall, and others on my arms. I had a cut on my neck. It is my advice to any woman getting married to start, not as you mean to go on, but worse, tougher, than you mean to go on. Then you can slowly relax and it comes as a pleasant surprise. I hadn’t shown Tom my strength, and perhaps this also included my bookishness; I had been wifely, docile, in love, during those brief days, and Tom didn’t know me at all.
I had no letter from Tom for eleven days. But in fact he was killed six days later, at Arnhem in Holland, where the Allied airborne troops had landed and were surrounded. I never knew if Tom was killed in the air while landing, or if he managed to reach the ground to fight. Tom’s letter, eleven days later, came the day after the telegram. There had been some delay in the handing over of Tom’s identification by the Germans to the Red Cross.
We were having a lecture in the great hall on the subject of cattle-breeding. I was called out. ‘Now look, my dear, there’s a wire for you …’ And the next day in the ordinary post, Tom’s letter, a short one, written before he had left England. He made no reference at all to his wild outbreak. Had he remembered it? Had he thought, perhaps, it was of no account, just one of those things in married life? I will never know. His letter gave no hint. It was a love letter.