Private Papers Page 5

  This was particularly so on his last leave, before he was posted missing on D-Day 1944. He had come home, without warning, for a forty-eight hour leave at the beginning of January, just turning up, dreadfully haggard, on the doorstep in the early hours of the morning. All the household was asleep, to my immense relief. For the first time, he did not have to embrace four people all at once amid laughter and shouting and usually, also, crying. There was just me, bleary-eyed and shivering in my nightdress. We crept into the kitchen, whispering, like fugitives. I savoured every second of it, of this wonderful intimate privacy. There was time just to be silent together, to become accustomed once more to each other’s features and expressions. Oliver talked more than he had ever done on any of his other leaves. He told me he was less convinced that what was being done in the name of a righteous war was worth it. He had been with a division sent into action on the Belgian-German border and had attended large numbers of wounded German women and children caught in the crossfire. His voice shook as he described their sufferings. The means were said to justify the ends, but did they? He spoke of his disgust at the hatred deliberately provoked against the whole German race, of the indoctrination of the troops. The only good German was a dead one. His mind had turned to all the ‘good’ Germans not only in history but those alive now. His fervour was lessening all the time. He wished he had stayed in London. He wished he had become a pacifist. Perhaps I had been right all along and there was nothing worth leaving one’s family for: no cause was great enough. His misery was so acute that it hurt me physically. We clung together as the cold winter dawn lightened the kitchen and overhead we heard the first sounds of our children wakening. I told him he was worn out, that what he needed was sleep and more sleep.

  Most of those forty-eight hours he did indeed sleep. When he was awake he sat with the children and played dominoes. Rosemary hung about him all the time, she even sat outside our bedroom while he slept during the day. She would not let him alone, forever stroking his hair and clinging to his arm and pressing herself to his side. She was terribly proud of him being an officer and a doctor and boasted endlessly to Miss Clarke (who was more than ready to hero-worship). Although it was all so understandable it irritated me. I had to try hard to stop myself telling her to leave him alone. And I was very glad when at the end of an exhausting day she went to bed, leaving my husband to me. That night, Oliver began to confess once more his new terror that nothing could have justified the deaths and sufferings he had witnessed, that perhaps life, any sort of life under any sort of regime, was better. I found myself arguing strongly that it was not, that he had been right all along. He also began to talk about dying himself but I stopped him. I could not bear it. When he did die I regretted my cowardice bitterly – oh, how I would have welcomed some instructions. ‘If I die,’ Oliver might have said, ‘this is what I want you to do, this is what I want my children to do . . . you must always . . . when they grow up I would like . . . tell them that . . .’ Who knows what things he might have said? I stopped him saying anything. I clung to him, as Rosemary had clung to him, and loved him. We both wept ourselves to sleep —

  *

  I don’t think I can stand this. It must be rubbish, romantic twaddle. Nobody could be as slushy in real life. She’s just doing what she likes with the past. Imagine a man, exhausted, on this short leave in this hellish house with his terrible old mother moaning on and three little kids driving him mad with all their fussing – does he really have these philosophical discussions with this Perfect Wife? I don’t believe it. Every account of soldiers on leave I’ve ever read or heard always says how you were just too fucking tired to say a bloody word and, as for philosophizing, all you were interested in was food and sleep and, if you could get the energy, sex. No mention of sex from Mother. Love, yes, spiritual unions, yes, but straightforward sex, no. But sex there was because as we all know, little Emily appeared prematurely less than eight months later, two and a half months after my father’s death. So there was undoubtedly sex to give him a good send-off.

  I know it was painful. It was painful for me too. It was tragic and terrible for her but not, surely, as she describes it here. I don’t know about her and Dad, whether they were the perfect match she makes out. I only know I’ve watched her turn every event into something it wasn’t. I don’t think she even sees things as they really are – I know she doesn’t.

  *

  — and then next day, on the same sort of grey morning he had arrived, Oliver had to leave. Naturally, he had no idea when his next leave would be. He said he thought there was going to be a big push soon.

  Grandmother Butler made reading The Times aloud to her one of the ordeals of the day. I did it, although it was meant to be one of Miss Clarke’s duties, because I found it less demanding than some of the other chores she would rather I had taken on. I did it at the same time every day, eleven in the morning when Rosemary was at school and the other two were having a nap. I tried to make it a pleasant ritual. I made tea and toast, which I took into Grandmother Butler’s sitting room, and we always had five minutes’ exchange of pleasantries before I began. She so adored having The Times read to her – her own eyesight was by then very poor and, even with spectacles, she could not cope with that excruciatingly tiny print – that she was capable of some degree of pleasantness. It felt quite cosy and I had a real affection for the poor old thing at that moment. She was so eager and attentive, straining her awkward bulk forward to catch every word, as though everything in the newspaper was meant personally for her. The news of the latest invasion of Europe in The Times of June 7th 1944 excited her tremendously. I had to read everything twice and she loved it all. General Eisenhower’s message to his men, something about the tide having turned and the free men of the world marching together to victory, had her flushed and breathing heavily with emotion, even if he was one of the Americans she scorned. It sounded like the most dreadful kind of glib cliché to me but to Grandmother Butler they were truly stirring words.

  I had no idea, and neither had my mother-in-law, that Oliver had already, while we were reading that account of D-Day, been posted missing. We thought it very likely he had been involved, but no regiments were mentioned. And since all the emphasis was on victory we did not experience that tightening around the heart which gripped us when I read news of devastating defeats. We were unusually buoyant and optimistic. I read out aloud of this ‘mighty armada’, which had sailed so nobly to regain France, and I could not help but feel triumphant. There was a message printed, I remember, from General Montgomery, in which he claimed to have complete confidence in success. Grandmother Butler was annoyed with me for laughing at how he ended his missive – ‘Good hunting’, I think it was, or some other banality, entirely inappropriate. There was even a piece on the role of the medical corps which I read with pride. Every column of that paper seemed filled with good news for a change. Churchill’s speech in the House of Commons was cautious but more than convincing: the end of the war must be in sight. ‘I think,’ Grandmother Butler said, ‘this calls for a celebration.’ So we got the sherry out and solemnly drank a toast of Grandmother Butler’s devising: ‘To England and Oliver!’

  How absurd. As if Oliver was in the least patriotic or jingoistic. But Grandmother Butler was. The days stretched into weeks, and then months. It became obvious Oliver must be dead (though I did not admit it until all the prisoners of war had finally returned and put to rest my mad theory that somehow he had been spirited from Normandy to the heart of Germany and put into a concentration camp). Grandmother Butler started saying things like, ‘He died for his country and there is no finer death. All the Butlers die for their country.’ I found it unbearable and that is why I left. There had been shock after shock ever since that heady D-Day. First the letter from Oliver’s commanding officer saying he regretted he was ‘unaccounted for’, then the second letter saying he had been put on the official missing list, then another transferring him to the missing believed killed – oh, the categories w
ere endless. Slowly, the dread grew, and yet I had faith. I never felt Oliver was dead in my heart of hearts. I was not pretending. And I believed that this feeling I had, that Oliver was safe, was to be trusted. So I said nothing to the children. They were used to their father being away, they thought nothing of it. I left them undisturbed and told them only happy news. The happiest news of all was that I was expecting another baby, to my great joy. At least Oliver knew that. There was pleasure and anticipation in every line of his last letter. It would be a boy, he was convinced (and so was I). A ‘peace’ baby, he was equally convinced. How clever we were, he wrote, to arrange our very own victory celebration. He even suggested a name, Alexander, after Alexander the Great.

  I had to leave Grandmother Butler’s house. It was sheer folly, but for the sake of preserving my own sanity I had to leave, after that final letter saying Oliver must now be definitely presumed dead. I was not going to presume anything of the kind, but Grandmother was. She wept, she wailed, she talked and talked about the death of her only son, and I hated her. So I came to an agreement with Miss Clarke. I agreed to double the lavish wage she was already receiving, if she would take sole charge of my mother-in-law for at least the following six months. I knew I was consigning Grandmother Butler to unfeeling, if not downright hostile hands, but I could not help it. She was appalled when I broke the news. She ranted and raved at my cruelty, my desertion, my unworthiness to bear the name Butler. Then she collapsed, and had to be put to bed, and clung to my hand and begged me to stay with her, for Oliver’s sake, for the sake of the family because I was all she had. But I left. In July 1944, seven months pregnant, I somehow managed to transport myself and three small children back to London. My conscience tortured me but I was driven by such inner compulsion that I endured it. I wanted peace, and there was no peace, while I remained in Grandmother Butler’s house, from the nightmare of Oliver perhaps being dead. I was forced, too, to run away from that house because, there, Oliver had been only a soldier. I never wanted to think of him as a soldier ever again. Once back in London, I had different visions of him and those who —

  *

  I thought this wasn’t meant to be a memoir, an autobiography? I thought it was meant to be about choices, and how my sisters and I didn’t realize what we had done to our own lives and my mother did? So far it has been all memoir, all self-justification for what happened in her own life. I can’t see it has anything to do with us. Is she building up to something? Is this really all ‘essential background’? I doubt it.

  *

  — time in my life when I most lacked family support. I had no relatives whatever who could help me. There was no one to whom I could turn, upon whom I could rely. Any friends I had made —

  *

  Ah. But this is relevant to all of us. Mother had no friends, I don’t know what she means by saying ‘any friends I had made’, because there simply weren’t any, unless she kept them secret. She has gone through her whole life without a single close friend. And why? Because friends in her eyes are signs of weakness. They get in the way. In the way of family – they come between you and your family who are the only friends worth having and should be quite enough. My mother has always been the cat who walked by herself and oh so proud of it. She never wanted any of us to have close friends – we had each other, did we not? No good pointing out that no four children had less in common than Jess, Celia, Emily and me. We couldn’t be each other’s friends because we had no common ground except our relationship. Our personalities clashed from the beginning, our temperaments were totally different, our interests poles apart. Mother wouldn’t acknowledge this nor would she acknowledge the importance to us of outside friends – outside the family. She pretended she wanted us to make friends, but her resentment when we brought them into our joint life was perfectly clear. She could never accept them, nor be easy with them. She was hospitable, but never welcoming. Her most frequent comment, after any friend of mine had stayed the night, was ‘isn’t it nice to be on our own again’. And she had strange notions of what having a friend entailed. If someone was your friend that had to mean one hundred per cent loyalty. You didn’t dare say, in a flash of temporary irritation, such as all friendships are subject to, ‘I hate Anne,’ or whoever, Mother would pounce. If you hated Anne even for a day, she could not be your friend. And, if Anne asked you to do something and you said you couldn’t be bothered or whatever, Mother was scandalized: friends couldn’t be let down.

  *

  — had moved out of my neighbourhood. I returned to that London house, to wartime London, with nobody to help. The house, which we had left empty, was in an even worse state than when we had deserted it, and that had been bad enough. What gave me the necessary courage to carry on was the baby I was carrying inside me. People tended to pity me twice over because my husband was missing presumed killed and I was unmistakably pregnant, but none of them understood. Without that baby alive and kicking inside me I could not, at that point, have continued. The baby was my own life-saver. For the baby I ate as well as I could, rested as much as I was able, kept as calm and cheerful as possible. The baby made me go out and seek help instead of struggling on: it was for the baby’s sake that I made the sensible decision to employ Linda, the sixteen-year-old daughter of my neighbour. She had just returned from her evacuated school and was pleased to have the job of mother’s help. The coming baby was my hope, it alone kept my mind off death and destruction. As the time for its birth drew nearer I grew excited, feverishly so. I knew everyone looked at my pink cheeks and shining eyes and broad smile and wondered how I could, in the circumstances, seem so happy and well. But I felt happy and well, and the reason for it was the child they all pitied me for carrying.

  Of course, I thought it was a son. I was absolutely sure. I succumbed to every kind of old wives’ tale imaginable, even believing things as silly as the shape of the bump showing it was a boy. It seems elementary now to point out that I also had done what many bereaved women do who give birth posthumously: I had come to believe, tricked myself into believing, that I was carrying Oliver inside me. So long as my son thrived in my womb my husband was not dead. I was pleased, rather than alarmed, when I went into labour prematurely. On August 30th I was rushed by ambulance into University College Hospital. I could hardly wait to see my darling son (and my darling husband in him). I treated childbirth like a party, laughing and triumphant all the way through. It shocked those around me. Their anxious, disapproving faces only amused me more. I knew they thought I was succumbing to hysteria, that they could not recognize euphoria when they saw it. Even to the end of that difficult labour I was smiling through the pain which only afterwards I acknowledged as agony. I thought the fact that it was all taking such a long time, and was so much harder than my other two easy, straight-forward labours, was because this time it was a boy and before I had only borne girls. (Another ludicrous superstition.) When finally, at midnight, Emily arrived, a fine healthy girl, I could not take in the fact of her sex. Everything seemed to stop within me. I found myself holding my breath, struggling to understand. There was no son, no Oliver. And then the tears came, harsh, frantic sobs which racked my feeble body in which every nerve seemed to sing. They put Emily into my arms and pressed her to me, to give me comfort, but her tiny face was drenched with my tears, her scrap of a body shook with the force of my sobs, and they had to take her away.

  Everyone was very kind. Now that I was miserable, everyone understood. I was allowed to lie there and cry for days on end. Nobody tried to jolly me along. When my baby was once more put into my arms, she was so vulnerable it shocked me. There was no question of rejection or blame, no shred anywhere in my heart of not wanting her, or of hating her, because she was not a boy. I came to terms with that at once. Thinking of a name for this new daughter was the first sign that I was healing myself. I thought of Alexandra, because of Oliver’s wish that a son should be Alexander. But I knew every time I used that name I would be trying to make her into a boy. I chose Emily be
cause I had been reading Emily Brontë’s poem ‘Remembrance’. It was not that I wanted Emily to be a remembrance of her father’s death (which I had still not accepted), or even of Oliver himself, but that, like Rosemary, she was the embodiment of such happiness. The line in that poem which goes, ‘Then did I check the tears of useless passion – weaned my young soul from yearning after thine’, seemed to me what I must start to do. I would not wallow in what was past. I would indeed wean my young soul. If Oliver ever returned he would be proud of me.

  By October I was better. I had stopped crying every day. All my energies were channelled into planning ahead. I went to the family solicitors to ask about my financial position and learned that the house was mine and there was no mortgage. Oliver’s inheritance at twenty-one from his father had enabled him to buy the house outright. All that saving in our first few years had been unnecessary, but I suppose Oliver did not want to spend all his capital at once. I tried to be hard-headed and realistic. I had no immediate worries. But I saw, after I had done a few sums, that within five years, whilst I would never be penniless, I could quite easily be hard up, with four children to support. So I decided to divide the house and make a flat on the top which I would let, thereby giving myself an income. This proved a wonderful diversion. It gave me something unemotional to think about and I relished that particular kind of challenge. Linda’s father was a carpenter, wounded at the start of the war and invalided out. He put me in touch with a good builder and decorator, and throughout the rest of the year work went ahead on the house. It meant workmen everywhere, which normally I would have hated, but in the circumstances all the comings and goings, the banging and shouting, the general chaos, was good for me. The workmen were all rather elderly and clearly felt fatherly towards me. They helped me in all kinds of ways and I was touched. And the children loved having so many men around. Without all the activity that first winter back in London, with none of the wartime restrictions lifted, life would have been even darker and more dreary than it was.