Bombs on Aunt Dainty

  The National Gallery was crowded and she had a struggle to make her way up the steps and into one of the main rooms. This, too, was full of people, so that at first she could only see parts of the paintings between bobbing heads. She knew at once that she liked them. They looked like the square outside, brilliant with light and a kind of joyful promise.

  They were hung in no particular order and as she walked from room to room she was bewildered by the profusion. She did not know what to look at first, since it was all unfamiliar, and stared at landscapes, figures and interiors indiscriminately between the shifting bodies of the crowd. When she got to the end she went round again and this time some things leapt out at her – a mass of green water lilies in a green pond, a woman in a garden, a miraculously drawn dancer tying her shoe.

  But when she went round a third time she had already changed. The water lilies which had so dazzled her before now seemed less remarkable, and she was fascinated, instead, by some bathers painted entirely in tiny spots of brilliant colour. She looked and looked and finally, when she could see no more, she fought her way to the office near the main door in the hope of buying some postcard reproductions which she could look at at home, but the gallery was about to close and there were none left. She must have been looking at the pictures for nearly three hours, she thought in surprise.

  As she emerged onto the steps above Trafalgar Square, now purple in the dusk, she stopped for a moment. Suddenly she did not want the bother of catching buses and tubes and of sitting through supper at home. She stood and stared across the darkening square, feeling vaguely afloat.

  A voice behind her said, “Hullo,” and she turned to see John Cotmore in his old duffel coat.

  “Well,” he said, joining her at the balustrade, “and what did you think of the Impressionists?”

  “I loved them,” she said.

  He smiled. “First time you’ve seen them?”

  She nodded.

  “First time I saw them was twenty years ago,” he said. “In Paris. I was quite a dashing young man then.”

  She could not think what to answer. Finally she said, “I used to live in Paris. I went to school there.”

  “What, finishing school?” he asked, and she laughed.

  “No, the école communale – elementary school.”

  There was a sudden exodus from the gallery and people streamed past them down the steps, hemming them in.

  “I’m a German refugee,” she said, and immediately wondered why on earth she had said it. But he seemed interested and not too surprised, so she went on to explain about Max and Mama and Papa and their life together since they had left Berlin.

  “I don’t usually tell people about it,” she said at last.

  This did surprise him. “Why not?” he asked.

  “Well—” It seemed obvious to her. “People think it’s odd.”

  He frowned. “I don’t think it’s odd.”

  Perhaps it isn’t, she thought, as the darkness closed round them and the last footsteps clattered past. It was suddenly cold, but he seemed in no hurry to leave.

  “You mustn’t go round pretending you’re something you aren’t,” he said. “Where you come from is part of you, just like your talent for drawing.”

  She smiled, hearing only the word “talent”.

  “So no more of this pretence.” He took her arm. “Come on, I’m going to walk you to the tube.”

  They made their way along the narrow pavements of a side street, and as they reached the Embankment she was again filled with the happiness that she had felt earlier that afternoon. But this time, instead of being shapeless, it seemed to contain the paintings she had seen and the fact that she was walking through the dusk with John Cotmore, as well as a huge and mysterious sense of expectancy.

  The feeling was so strong that she smiled involuntarily, and he said, “What’s funny?” looking put out.

  He had been talking, but she had hardly listened. Something about living alone, cooking his own supper. Had his wife moved out, then?

  Hurriedly, she said, “I’m sorry, nothing’s funny, it’s just …” She hesitated because it seemed so idiotic.

  “I’ve been feeling terribly happy all day,” she brought out at last.

  “Oh!” He nodded. “I suppose at your age…How old are you, anyway?”

  “Eighteen,” she said.

  “Really,” he said to her annoyance. “You seem much younger.”

  They had arrived at the tube station and stood together for a moment before she bought her ticket. Then, as she stepped into the lift, he called after her, “See you on Tuesday!”

  “See you on Tuesday!” she called back, and the happiness welled up again inside her and lasted all the way home to Putney.

  The cold, sunny weather persisted, and so did Anna’s happiness. She felt almost painfully aware of all the sounds, shapes and colours around her and wanted to draw everything in sight. She drew on the tube and in her lunch-hour and when she got home in the evenings. She filled one notebook after another with drawings of people straphanging, sitting, eating and talking, and when she was not drawing she thought about it.

  She loved everything. She felt as though she had been asleep for years and had just woken up. In the mornings when she took the bus down Putney Hill to the tube station she stood outside on the platform, so as not to miss a moment of the view as the bus crossed the river in the early light. She spent hours looking at a book about the French Impressionists which John Cotmore had lent her, and some of the reproductions so delighted her that it was almost as though she could feel them with her eyes. When there was music on the radio in the lounge it seemed to her unbearably beautiful, and the sight of the dead men’s clothes at work made her unbearably sad. (But even this was curiously agreeable.) She joined the local firewatchers, which meant turning out at night whenever there was an air-raid warning, and stood endlessly in the dark, admiring the dim shapes of the suburban landscape in the starlight.

  One night she was on duty with Mr Cuddeford, who was the leader of the group. There had been a few bombs, but nothing close, and some anti-aircraft fire from the guns on Putney Heath. No incendiaries, which was what Anna and Mr Cuddeford were watching for. It was very cold and the All Clear was a long time coming, and Mr Cuddeford began to talk about his experiences in the previous world war.

  He had been in the trenches where there had been a lot of suffering and Mr Cuddeford, especially, had suffered with his legs. Other men had been wounded and others yet had had trench feet, but Mr Cuddeford had varicose veins. In case Anna did not know what varicose veins were, he explained them to her, and exactly how they felt, and what the doctor had thought about them.

  Like everything else during the past weeks, Mr Cuddeford’s varicose veins were very vivid to Anna, and as he proceeded with his description she found herself feeling slightly sick. How silly, she thought, but the feeling grew alarmingly until suddenly, when Mr Cuddeford said, “So the doctor told me, ‘We’ll have to cut those out,’” she was overwhelmed by a stifling wave of nausea.

  She mumbled, “I’m sorry, but I’m feeling rather ill,” and then, amazingly, the sky shifted sideways and the ground lurched up towards her and she was lying in some wet leaves and Mr Cuddeford was blowing his whistle.

  “I’m all right,” she said, but he told her to lie still and almost at once the boots of another firewatcher appeared on the ground beside her.

  “Passed out,” said Mr Cuddeford with a certain satisfaction. “I reckon it’s the cold.”

  “No, really—” said Anna, but suddenly they had a stretcher and were loading her on to it.

  “Heave-ho,” said Mr Cuddeford, they lifted her up and the stretcher began to move through the darkness. Trees and clouds passed erratically above her and for a while she watched them with pleasure, but as they approached the hotel she suddenly realised what her arrival would look like to Mama and Papa.

  “Honestly,” she said, “I can walk now.”

 
But the firewatchers had seen no action for months, and there was no stopping them. They carried her through the front door and Mama, who must have seen them from the window, came rushing down the stairs in her dressing gown.

  “Anna!” she shouted so loudly that various doors opened and the Woodpigeon appeared behind her, followed by the two Czech ladies and the Poznanskis.

  “Where is she hurted?” cried the Woodpigeon.

  “Yes, where?” cried Mama, and Mr Poznanski, amazingly wearing a hairnet, suddenly called from the top of the stairs, “I will a doctor fetch.”

  “No!” shouted Anna, and Mr Cuddeford at last let her off the stretcher so that she could prove to everyone that she was all right.

  “It was only Mr Cuddeford’s varicose veins,” she explained when her rescuers had left, and it seemed ridiculous even to herself.

  Once Mama had got over her fright she thought the whole incident very funny, but she said, “You never used to be so easily upset.”

  It was true, thought Anna, and wondered at the change in herself.

  The evening classes were the focal point of her world. She now went to three a week and John Cotmore not only helped her with her life drawings but took an interest in the sketches she made out of school.

  “These are very good,” he once told her after looking at a series of drawings she had made of workmen shifting rubble on a bomb site, and she felt as though she had suddenly grown wings.

  It was disturbing and yet exciting to be absorbed in something of which Mama and Papa knew so little. Neither of them had ever had the slightest wish to draw. Once, while John Cotmore was talking at the café, Anna suddenly understood about abstract painting, which had always been a bit of a joke at home, and her feeling of elation was followed by a twist of something like regret.

  How far away I am moving from them, she thought, and Mama must have sensed it too, for although she admired Anna’s sketches she became increasingly irritated with the evening classes.

  “Always that old art school,” she would say. “Surely you don’t have to go again!” And she would ask Anna about the people she met there and what on earth they found to talk about all that time.

  Sometimes Anna tried to explain and Mama would listen, her blue eyes bright with concentration, while Anna expounded some thought she had about drawing.

  “Oh yes, I understand that, it’s quite simple,” Mama would say at the end, and expound it all back to Anna to prove that she had indeed understood.

  But Anna always felt that somehow during the explanation some essential ingredient had escaped, so that not only had Mama not quite understood, but the thought itself had somehow shrunk in the process and had been returned to her poorer and more meagre than before.

  Talking to Papa was more satisfying. There was an initial difficulty to overcome in that she did not know the words for what she wanted to say in German, and Papa did not know them in English. She had to speak in each language in turn, with a bit of French thrown in for good measure, until her meaning came across – more, she sometimes felt, by telepathy than anything else. But then Papa understood completely.

  “It’s very interesting that you should think this,” he would say, and talk about some comparable aspect of writing, or ask her what she thought of some painter she hadn’t mentioned.

  Both he and Mama were curious about John Cotmore and the students with whom she spent so much of her time.

  “What sort of people are they?” asked Papa, and Mama said, “what sort of homes do they come from?”

  “I suppose they come from all sorts of homes,” said Anna. “Some of them have cockney accents. Harry, I think, is quite grand. I like them because they all draw.”

  “This John Cotmore,” said Mama. “What sort of age is he?”

  (Why did she have to call him this John Cotmore?)

  “I don’t know,” said Anna. “Quite old – about forty.” Later she said hypocritically, “It’s a pity you can’t meet them all,” knowing full well that there was little opportunity for Mama to do so.

  However, next time Max was home on leave he suggested coming to the café one day after school. Probably it was Mama’s idea, thought Anna, but she did not mind – she had wanted him to come anyway.

  At first it was difficult. Max sat there among the cracked coffee cups with his open smile and his uniform, looking like an advertisement for the RAF, while the pale young man and Harry discussed the influence of Cubism and the girls gazed at Max admiringly but dumbly. But then Barbara arrived. She was a recent addition to the group – a big blonde girl in her late twenties with a pleasant, placid face. She settled herself next to Max and asked such intelligent questions about the Air Force that he was delighted. Then she said, “We all have great hopes for your sister, you know,” which was an exaggeration but made Anna blush with pleasure.

  “Isn’t that so, John?” asked Barbara, and added to Max, “John here thinks she’s absolutely bursting with talent.”

  John Cotmore agreed that he did think Anna very promising, and Anna sat between them feeling pleased but foolish, exactly, she thought, as she had done when Mama came to talk to the teacher at the end of her first term at primary school.

  Max must have felt something of the same sort, for he assumed an elderly air while phrases like “full-time art course” and “help from the Council” fell between them, and only became himself again when the pale young man asked him if flying wasn’t very dangerous and Barbara offered him some chips.

  “I like your friends,” he told Anna later. “Especially that girl Barbara. And John Cotmore seems to think that you can draw.”

  They were travelling down the escalator to the tube and she glowed inwardly while he considered the evening.

  “Do they all know about your background?” he asked. Harry had made a glancing reference to Germany.

  “Yes, well, I told John Cotmore first,” she said eagerly. “And he said it was wrong to pretend to be someone one wasn’t. He said that people who mattered would accept me anyway, so there was no need.”

  “He’s quite a chap,” said Max.

  “Yes, isn’t he!” cried Anna. “Isn’t he!”

  Max laughed. “I take it you want me to reassure Mama about him. Don’t worry, I’ll tell her everything she wants to hear.”

  They had reached the bottom of the escalator and were walking down the steps towards the platform. Anna took his arm. “Did you really like him?” she asked.

  “Yes,” said Max. “Yes, I did.” Then he said, “he’s divorced or something, isn’t he?”

  Chapter Eighteen

  There were air raids again in the spring. People called them “scalded cat” raids because the planes came in low, dropped their bombs and escaped again at top speed. They were not bad raids, but tiresome. Anna had to turn out with the local firewatchers every time the air-raid warning sounded. She still had chilblains left over from the winter and it was agony cramming her feet back into her shoes after the warmth of the bed had made them itch and swell.

  However, one night when she was keeping watch with Mr Cuddeford he said to her, “I hear you’re artistic.”

  Anna admitted that she was, and Mr Cuddeford looked pleased and told her that his aunt had just died. At first it was unclear how this could affect Anna, but then it transpired that the aunt had been artistic too – extremely artistic, said Mr Cuddeford – and had left a lot of equipment which no one knew what to do with.

  “If there’s anything there that you’d like, you’re welcome to it,” he told Anna, and so, the following weekend, Anna went to look at it.

  The equipment was nearly all Victorian, for the aunt who had lived to the age of ninety-three had acquired most of it in her girlhood. There were two easels, several palettes and a clutter of canvases, all enormously heavy and solid. Anna was intoxicated at the sight of it. John Cotmore had been encouraging her for some time to try painting in oils, and here was nearly everything she would need for it.

  “I think I coul
d use it all,” she said, “if you can spare it.”

  Mr Cuddeford was only too pleased to be rid of it and even lent her a wheelbarrow in which to carry the things home.

  The problem now was where to put them. Anna’s and Mama’s joint bedroom could not possibly accommodate them.

  “Perhaps I could use the garage,” said Anna. This was a separate building in the garden at present filled with the old lawnmower and other paraphernalia.

  “But you couldn’t drag your easel up to the house every time you wanted to paint,” said Mama. “And anyway, where would you set it up? You couldn’t use oil paints in the lounge.”

  Then Frau Gruber had an idea. Above the garage was a small room where, in the maharajah’s day, the chauffeur must have slept. It was dusty and unheated but empty, and there was even a basin with a tap in one corner.

  “No one ever uses this,” she said. “You could have it as a studio.”

  Anna was delighted. She moved in her equipment, wiping at the dust half-heartedly, for it did not bother her, and took a hard look round. All she needed now was some form of heating and some paints and brushes. She dealt with the heating by buying a second-hand paraffin stove, but after this her money was exhausted. It was difficult, nowadays, to save anything out of her wages, for prices had gone up and her wages hadn’t.