Life after life

January 1915

‘DID YOU HEAR the latest news?’ Bridget asked.

Sylvie sighed and put down the letter from Hugh, its pages as brittle as dead leaves. It was only a matter of months since he had left for the Front yet she could hardly remember being married to him any more. Hugh was a captain in the Ox and Bucks. Last summer he was a banker. It seemed absurd.

His letters were cheerful and guarded (the men are wonderful, they have such character). He used to mention these men by name (‘Bert’, ‘Alfred’, ‘Wilfred’) but since the Battle of Ypres they had become simply ‘men’ and Sylvie wondered if Bert and Alfred and Wilfred were dead. Hugh never mentioned death or dying, it was as if they were away on a jaunt, a picnic (An awful lot of rain this week. Mud everywhere. Hope you are enjoying better weather than we are!).

‘To war? You are going to war?’ she had shouted at him when he enlisted and it struck her that she had never shouted at him before. Perhaps she should have.

If there was to be a war, Hugh explained to her, he didn’t want to look back and know that he had missed it, that others had stepped forward for their country’s honour and he had not. ‘It may be the only adventure I ever have,’ he said.

‘Adventure?’ she echoed in disbelief. ‘What about your children, what about your wife?’

‘But it’s for you that I am doing this,’ he said, looking exquisitely pained, a misunderstood Theseus. Sylvie disliked him intensely in that moment. ‘To protect hearth and home,’ he persisted. ‘To defend everything we believe in.’

‘And yet I heard the word adventure,’ Sylvie said, turning her back on him.

Nonetheless, she had, of course, gone up to London to see him off. They had been jostled by an enormous flag-waving throng who were cheering as if a great victory had already been won. Sylvie was surprised by the rabid patriotism of the women on the platform, surely war should make pacifists of all women?

Hugh had held her close to him as if they were new sweethearts and only jumped on the train at the very last moment. He was instantly swallowed by the crush of uniformed men. His regiment, she thought. How odd. Like the crowd, he had seemed immensely, stupidly cheerful.

When the train began to heave itself slowly out of the station the excitable crowd roared their approval, frantically waving their flags and throwing caps and hats in the air. Sylvie could only stare blindly at the carriage windows as they passed by, first slowly and then more and more rapidly until they were no more than a blur. She could see no sign of Hugh, nor, she supposed, could he see her.

She remained on the platform after everyone else had left, staring at the spot on the horizon where the train had disappeared.

Sylvie abandoned the letter and took up her knitting needles instead.

‘Did you hear the news?’ Bridget persisted. She was placing the cutlery on the tea-table. Sylvie frowned at the knitting on her needles and wondered if she wanted to hear any news that had Bridget as its provenance. She cast off a stitch on the raglan sleeve of the serviceable grey jersey that she was knitting for Maurice. All the women of the household now spent an inordinate amount of time knitting – mufflers and mittens, gloves and socks and hats, vests and sweaters – to keep their men warm.

Mrs Glover sat by the kitchen stove in the evening and knitted huge gloves, big enough to fit over the hooves of George’s plough horses. They were not for Samson and Nelson, of course, but for George himself, one of the first to volunteer, Mrs Glover said proudly at every opportunity, making Sylvie quite crotchety. Even Marjorie, the scullery maid, had been taken by the knitting fad, labouring after lunch on something that looked like a dishcloth, although to call it ‘knitting’ was generous. ‘More holes than wool’ was Mrs Glover’s verdict, before boxing her ears and telling her to get back to work.

Bridget had taken to making misshapen socks – she could not turn a heel for the life of her – for her new love. She had ‘given her heart’ to a groom from Ettringham Hall called Sam Wellington. ‘Oh, for sure, he’s an old boot,’ she said and laughed her head off at her joke, several times a day, as if telling it for the first time. Bridget sent Sam Wellington sentimental postcards in which angels hovered in the air over women who wept while sitting at chenille-covered tables in domestic parlours. Sylvie had hinted to Bridget that perhaps she should send more cheerful missives to a man at war.

Bridget kept a photograph, a studio portrait, of Sam Wellington on her rather poorly appointed dressing table. It took pride of place next to the old enamelled brush and comb set that Sylvie had given her when Hugh had bought her a silver vanity set for her birthday.

A similar obligatory likeness of George adorned Mrs Glover’s bedside table. Trussed in uniform and uncomfortable before a studio backdrop that reminded Sylvie of the Amalfi coast, George Glover no longer resembled a Sistine Adam. Sylvie thought of all the enlisted men who had already undergone the same ritual, a keepsake for mothers and sweethearts, the only photograph that would ever be taken of some of them. ‘He could be killed,’ Bridget said of her beau, ‘and I might forget what he looked like.’ Sylvie had plenty of photographs of Hugh. He led a well-documented life.

All of the children, except for Pamela, were upstairs. Teddy was asleep in his cot, or perhaps he was awake in his cot, whichever state he was in, he was not complaining. Maurice and Ursula were doing Sylvie knew-not-what and was not interested in it as it meant that tranquillity reigned in the morning room, apart from the occasional suspicious thud on the ceiling and the metallic report of heavy pans in the kitchen where Mrs Glover was making her feelings about something known – the war or Marjorie’s incompetence, or both.

Ever since the fighting on the continent began they had been taking their meals in the morning room, abandoning the Regency Revival dining table as too extravagant for wartime austerity and instead espousing the little parlour table. (‘Not using the dining room isn’t going to win the war,’ Mrs Glover said.)

Sylvie gestured to Pamela who obediently followed her mother’s mute orders and trailed round the table after Bridget, turning the cutlery the right way round. Bridget couldn’t tell her right from her left or her up from her down.

Pamela’s support for the expeditionary force had taken the form of a mass production of dun-coloured mufflers of extraordinary and impractical lengths. Sylvie was pleasantly surprised by her elder daughter’s capacity for monotony. It would stand her in good stead for her life to come. Sylvie lost a stitch and muttered an oath that startled Pamela and Bridget. ‘What news?’ she asked at last, reluctantly.

‘Bombs have been dropped on Norfolk,’ Bridget said, proud of her information.

‘Bombs?’ Sylvie said, looking up from her knitting. ‘In Norfolk?’

‘A Zeppelin raid,’ Bridget said authoritatively. ‘That’s the Hun for you. They don’t care who they kill. They’re wicked, so they are. They eat Belgian babies.’

‘Well …’ Sylvie said, hooking the lost stitch, ‘that might be a slight exaggeration.’

Pamela hesitated, dessert fork in one hand, spoon in the other, as if she was about to attempt an attack on one of Mrs Glover’s heavyweight puddings. ‘Eat?’ she echoed in horror. ‘Babies?’

‘No,’ Sylvie said crossly. ‘Don’t be silly.’

Mrs Glover shouted for Bridget from the depths of the kitchen and Bridget flew to her command. Sylvie could hear Bridget yelling, in turn, up the stairs to the other children, ‘Yer tea is on the table!’

Pamela sighed the sigh of someone with a lifetime behind them already and sat at the table. She stared blankly at the cloth and said, ‘I miss Daddy.’

‘Me too, darling,’ Sylvie said. ‘Me too. Now don’t be a goose, go and tell the others to wash their hands.’

At Christmas, Sylvie had packaged up a great box of goods for Hugh: the inevitable socks and gloves; one of Pamela’s endless mufflers and, as an antidote to this, a two-ply cashmere comforter knitted by Sylvie and baptized with her favourite perfume, La Rose Jacqueminot, to remind him of home. She imagined Hugh on the battlefield wearing the comforter next to his skin, a gallant jousting knight sporting a lady’s favour. This daydream of chivalry was a comfort in itself, preferable to the glimpses of something darker. They had spent a wintry weekend in Broadstairs, bundled in gaiters, bodices and balaclavas, and heard the booming of the great guns across the water.

The Christmas box also contained a plum cake baked by Mrs Glover, a tin of somewhat misshapen peppermint creams made by Pamela, cigarettes, a bottle of good malt whisky and a book of poetry – an anthology of English verse, mostly pastoral and not too taxing – as well as little hand-made gifts from Maurice (a balsa-wood plane) and a drawing from Ursula of blue sky and green grass and the tiny distorted figure of a dog. ‘Bosun,’ Sylvie wrote helpfully across the top. She had no idea whether or not Hugh had received the box.

Christmas was a dull affair. Izzie came and talked a great deal about nothing (or rather herself) before announcing that she had joined the Voluntary Aid Detachment and was leaving for France as soon as the festivities were over.

‘But, Izzie,’ Sylvie said, ‘you can’t nurse or cook or type or do anything useful.’ The words came out harsher than she intended, but really Izzie was such a cuckoo. (‘Flibbertigibbet’ was Mrs Glover’s verdict.)

‘That’s it then,’ Bridget said when she heard of Izzie’s call to alms, ‘we’ll have lost the war by Lent.’ Izzie never mentioned her baby. He had been adopted in Germany and Sylvie supposed he was a German citizen. How strange that he was only a little younger than Ursula but, officially, he was the enemy.

Then at New Year, one by one, all the children came down with chickenpox. Izzie was on the next train to London as soon as the first spot erupted on Pamela’s face. So much for Florence Nightingale, Sylvie said irritably to Bridget.

Ursula, despite her clumsy, stubby fingers, had now joined in the household’s knitting frenzy. For Christmas she received a wooden French knitting doll called La Reine Solange which Sylvie said meant ‘Queen Solange’ although she was ‘doubtful’ that there ever was a Queen Solange in history. Queen Solange was painted in regal colours and wore an elaborate yellow crown, the points of which held her wool. Ursula was a devoted subject and spent all of her spare time, of which she had oceans at her disposal, creating long serpentine lengths of wool that had no purpose except to be coiled into mats and lopsided tea-cosies. (‘Where are the holes for the spout and the handle?’ Bridget puzzled.)

‘Lovely, dear,’ Sylvie said, examining one of the little mats that was slowly uncurling in her hands, like something waking from a long sleep. ‘Practice makes perfect, remember.’

‘Yer tea is on the table!’

Ursula ignored the call. She was in thrall to majesty, sitting on her bed, features scrunched up in concentration as she hooked wool around Queen Solange’s crown. It was an old bit of fawn worsted but ‘needs must’, Sylvie said.

Maurice should have been back at school but his chickenpox had been the worst of all of them and his face was still covered in little scars as if a bird had pecked at him. ‘Another few days at home, young man,’ Dr Fellowes said, but, in Ursula’s eyes, Maurice seemed bursting with rude health.

He paced restlessly round the room, bored as a caged lion. He found one of Pamela’s slippers beneath the bed and kicked it around like a football. Then he picked up a china ornament, the figure of a crinolined lady that was precious to Pamela, and tossed it so high in the air that it glanced off the vaseline glass shade of the light with an alarming ting. Ursula dropped her knitting, her hands flying to her mouth in horror. The crinolined lady found a soft landing on the pouchy quilt of Pamela’s satin eiderdown but not before Maurice had snatched up the discarded knitting doll instead and started running around with it, pretending it was an aeroplane. Ursula watched as poor Queen Solange flew round the room, the tail of wool that protruded from her innards streaming out behind her like a thin banner.

And then Maurice did something truly wicked. He opened the attic window, letting in a blast of unwelcome cold air, and sent the little wooden doll soaring out into the hostile night.

Ursula immediately hauled a chair over to the window, climbed aboard and peered out. Illuminated in the pool of light that flooded from the window, she spotted Queen Solange, stranded on the slates in the valley between the two attic roofs.

Maurice, a Red Indian now, was jumping from one bed to the other, emitting war whoops. ‘Yer tea is on the table!’ Bridget bellowed more urgently from the foot of the stairs. Ursula ignored both of them, her heroine heart beating loudly as she clambered out of the window – no easy task – determined to rescue her sovereign. The slates were slick with ice and Ursula had barely placed her small, slippered foot on the slope beneath the window before it slid out from under her. She let out a little cry, held out a hand towards the knitting queen as she raced past her, feet first, a tobogganer without a toboggan. There was no parapet to buffer her descent, nothing at all to stop her being propelled into the black wings of night. A kind of rush, a thrill almost, as she was launched into the bottomless air and then nothing.

Darkness fell.