What We Did in the War

PROLOGUE

High Wycombe, November 1952

I’ve found her at last: my partner in crime. It’s taken eight years but finally I’ve tracked her down. She’s standing with her back to me, looking out of the window. Her cardigan’s slung around her shoulders and she holds a cigarette aloft, one hand cupping her elbow and a thin plume of smoke spiralling up into the air. I close the door behind me, suddenly light-headed, and dig my fingernails into my palms.

She turns around, smiles and advances towards me with her hand outstretched. ‘Hello. You must be–’ She stops when she realises who it really is, the colour draining from her face. ‘Good God,’ she says, taking a step back.

‘Heavens!’ I put on a smile, pretending just in time to act surprised too. ‘Claude! Can it really be you? What an extraordinary coincidence.’

She stands there, staring at me, dumbfounded. At least I have the chance to take a good look at her, see how she’s changed in the time we’ve been apart. She’s become – well, dowdy, that’s the only word for it. Her face has filled out, her hair has been tightly and unflatteringly permed, and she’s wearing a lumpy tweed skirt and sludge-coloured twinset with pearls – of course. Pearls are part of the uniform, although I sold mine long ago and haven’t the heart or the money to replace them. I used to think she could wear anything and look marvellous but now all that panache has gone. Torn between disappointment and relief, I wonder for a moment how this unremarkable figure can have lived inside my head for so long. Then I catch in her eyes a glimpse of the glorious creature she once was and remember what she did to me, and I’m glad she looks a frump, glad I’m perfectly made up and wearing a particularly smart costume in black-and-white houndstooth check, glad she looks afraid.

‘You’ll never be pretty but you can try to be chic,’ she said to me once, and I’ve taken her words to heart.

‘You look well,’ I say, since that’s the sort of remark people generally make in these situations.

She doesn’t return the compliment, although I deserve it more than she does. Instead she says, ‘I wondered whether I’d ever see you again,’ and gives an odd little smile, her eyes rather glassy and strange. Her accent is more cultivated than it used to be and I wonder whether she’s putting it on for my benefit, or whether this is how she talks nowadays.

We don’t seem to be getting very far. I prop my briefcase against a chair and push up my sleeves in a businesslike fashion so that my bracelets jangle. ‘Well, you have a beautiful home. Have you decided which rooms you’d like to refurbish?’

I usually say something similar to clients but in this case it happens to be true. Her house is charming: a large Edwardian villa with high ceilings and tall, arched windows filling the rooms with light. The garden’s lovely, too, from what I can see through the window, with stone steps from the terrace leading down to a sweeping lawn and a parterre formed of clipped box hedges.

She laughs uncertainly. ‘Do you seriously think we’re going to sit down and discuss soft furnishings?’

‘Why not? The company offered a free design consultation – you might as well have it.’

She stubs out her cigarette, walks over to the sideboard and pours herself a whisky from a cut-glass decanter. Pressing the glass against her cheek for a moment, she says, ‘So you work at Berridges? That’s quite a step up.’

‘I’d say we’ve both done rather well for ourselves. Clever old you, marrying into money.’ I won’t be patronised by anyone, least of all her. She hasn’t even had the decency to offer me a drink.

She flushes. ‘This is all rather awkward. I’d like you to leave, if you don’t mind. Obviously, I shan’t be asking you to do any work in my home.’

She’s becoming more sure of herself but I don’t appreciate being dismissed like an unsatisfactory servant. ‘Don’t you think we should talk?’

‘No, I do not.’ She takes a mouthful of Scotch, clutching the glass so tightly her knuckles turn white. ‘What on earth is there to say?’

‘I want to explain. You owe me that, at least.’ I sit down in the chair beside my briefcase and light a cigarette to show her I’m not going anywhere. She’ll have to account for herself, too, though I know better than to say so.

‘I don’t owe you anything,’ she tells me.

‘Really? Do you honestly imagine you’d be living in a house like this, were it not for me?’ I wave a hand around the room to take in the cut-glass chandelier, the antique furniture, the surprisingly good paintings. ‘I bet your husband has no idea what we got up to during the war.’

She opens her mouth and shuts it again, the colour rising in her cheeks. And then right on cue, the door opens and the man himself walks in. He’s tall and distinguished in a sports jacket and flannels, greying at the temples; in his early forties, I’d guess, a good ten years older than Claude.

‘Hello there,’ he says, amiably enough. ‘Sorry to interrupt.’ And then to her, ‘Stella, darling, have you seen my specs? Can’t find the damn things anywhere.’

Without a word, she picks up a pair of spectacles from a side table and hands them to him.

‘Thanks,’ he says, glancing at the two of us. ‘Everything all right?’

‘Of course.’ She smiles automatically, coming back to herself. ‘Henry, this is…’ She hesitates, no doubt wondering which name I go by these days.

I stand up, reaching out my hand. ‘Margot Hall. How do you do?’

‘From the interior designers,’ she adds. ‘Do you remember, I mentioned someone was coming this morning.’

‘So you did. Henry Lycett,’ he says, shaking my hand. ‘Well, I’ll leave you to your deliberations. Women’s work, ha ha. Not sure I can add anything to the proceedings.’ He helps himself to a sherry and wanders off, leaving the door ajar.

Alone again, we face each other. ‘This isn’t a coincidence, is it?’ she says. ‘Somehow you’ve managed to find me.’

‘Well, no one can stay hidden for ever. You of all people should know that.’

‘So what do you want?’

‘I told you; I want to explain. Nothing more.’

She glances towards the open door. Someone is clattering pots and pans in the kitchen – the housekeeper who showed me in, probably – and her husband can’t be far away. ‘We can’t talk here. Let’s go out to the garden.’

Round one to me, I think.

1

HOW IT ALL BEGAN

London, July 1944

Ishall always remember the first time I saw her, downstairs at La Petite Amie. I only have to close my eyes and I’m back in that hushed, subterranean room, listening to snatches of other people’s conversation, punctuated by the creaking wheels of the dessert trolley with its solitary bowl of trifle and the occasional blare of a siren. She and her companion – a blustering colonel with red pips on his shoulder – were sitting at the table to my right and she was facing me, so it was hard not to catch her eye whenever I glanced around. The restaurant was only half full and I felt a little self-conscious, eating alone. Yet I wasn’t the sort of person who attracted attention, not then, and that day I was as nondescript as usual in my tweed skirt, twinset and pearls. They were rather good pearls, but it always seemed to me they lost some of their lustre as soon as I fastened them around my neck. The most one could say was that I looked respectable, which was the impression I wanted to give. Anyway, taking too much trouble over one’s appearance was frowned upon then; we were meant to have our minds on higher things, like making Woolton pie and winning the war.

This girl was my opposite in every respect. Somehow she managed to make her drab khaki uniform seem glamorous, as though it had been tailored to fit so perfectly. She had a full, old-fashioned sort of figure with an ample bust. Her hair was a vivid reddish-brown, the colour of a conker, scooped into an untidy knot with strands escaping over her collar, and she had a freckled, tawny complexion with lively hazel eyes. She threw her hands about when she spoke – in a piercing, rather affected voice – and her face was extravagantly mobile. Anyone could tell what she was thinking. She was a few years younger than me, I guessed. In her mid-twenties, maybe? She was probably his driver. In other circumstances, I might have amused myself by making up a story about this odd couple embarking on an affair, but I was too distracted that day to let my imagination run riot.

The colonel had a fat, bristly neck that bulged over his collar, and he slurped up his soup like a pig at the trough. He was making a great performance out of eating, breaking a roll into pieces and pushing them around the bowl with his spoon like a tiny bread flotilla while he held forth on various topics. He was declaiming about morale among the other ranks when this girl winked at me over his lowered head, then rolled her eyes with such a wicked expression that I snorted with laughter and had to snatch up a napkin to cover my mouth. My pretend coughing fit soon turned into a real one, which made the colonel turn to glare at me. I daren’t look their way again and spent the next ten minutes turning over the empty pages of my engagement diary in an effort to compose myself.

I ordered a glass of red wine from the waiter when he brought my pâté. Under the navy cardigan, my heart was beating fast. It had taken some courage and careful preparation to come to London in that doodlebug summer of 1944, when the Germans were blowing the city to pieces. We were only meant to travel if our journey was strictly necessary, although the trains were already much less crowded than they had been in the spring, when the whole country seemed to have been on the move. Now that our troops were beating back the enemy in France, those petty restrictions were easing a little so I’d taken an uncharacteristic risk and booked my ticket. The solicitor’s letter had requested my presence in person and frankly, any chance of a break from the utter dreariness of my life at the time was worth seizing. I debated for ages over what excuse to make at the farm; in the end, I muttered something about having to see a specialist in London, blushing so furiously that the manager must have assumed it was something to do with women’s problems. He let me have the day off, grudgingly, on condition that I did the morning’s milking first. I’d been in the Land Army for a couple of years by then, up at dawn to herd the cows and home after a long day’s work to give Mother her supper and help her to bed, and a week each summer was the only holiday I’d taken.

I told Mother I’d been summoned to the city on Land Army business, and that Ellen would stay to serve her supper in case I was late home. I could tell what she thought about my outing from the way she stood in the kitchen doorway the night before, leaning on her walking frame to glare at me while I laid up the lunch tray: bread and margarine with the crusts cut off, a slice of cheese and a hard-boiled egg. (Yes, a shell egg! I’d been hoarding it for days.) She clearly didn’t believe my story about a training lecture for tractor drivers, though of course she didn’t say a word. The nurse had said her speech might improve with practice but she hadn’t tried to talk since the stroke. She used to write me shaky notes instead: Fetch commode. Shut window. Leg hurts. That sort of thing.

I cycled frantically to the farm at first light the next morning, banged my way through the chores, then hurtled back home again to throw off my breeches, scrub the dirt from under my fingernails and spray myself with cologne to disguise the tang of manure before setting off again for the railway station. I smoked and paced along the platform, looking out across the sodden fields while my hair turned to frizz under my hat, expecting Ellen or a policeman to appear at any moment and summon me home. The summer had been miserable so far and I couldn’t bear to think about harvest, which would be late and unrewarding. Finally the train arrived to carry me away, and my heart leapt as I climbed aboard. Escape at last!

I sat in a state of nervous excitement as we left the countryside behind and rattled towards London but the closer we got to the city, the more depressing the landscape became. Tarpaulins flapped over roofs and children played in a wasteland of ruined buildings, squeezing through glassless window frames and sliding down piles of rubble. Fireweed already covered older bomb-sites from the Blitz but newer scars where the doodlebugs must have fallen were raw and brutal. A woman pegging out her washing in a grimy backyard turned to watch the train thunder past, her face blank, and I shivered, wondering what I’d let myself in for.

Eventually it was time to brave the noise of Liverpool Street Station, where newspaper boys shouted the latest headlines beneath the shattered roof and soldiers with kit bags over their shoulders threaded their way through the crowds. I’d allowed plenty of time for the journey, but by the time I’d queued for a taxi and that taxi had made several detours to avoid burst water mains and cordoned-off streets, it looked like I might be late for my appointment. As the driver reversed around yet another corner, I could hear a hoarse rur-rur-rur, like a powerful but elderly motorbike struggling uphill.

‘There ’e is!’ The taxi driver pointed a finger. ‘See the bugger go!’

A flying bomb was shooting across the sky at top speed, alarmingly low. I saw the whole length of it: the torpedo-shaped body, the square, stubby wings in the shape of a cross and the funnel on top, with a wisp of smoke trailing out behind. It looked like a snarling dog with its ears laid back. People called them doodlebugs to lessen the horror but there was no disguising they were fiendish things, launched by the Germans from sites in France.

‘Shouldn’t there be some sort of alert?’ I asked the driver, clutching my handbag.

He looked at me in the rear-view mirror, grinning. ‘They’re too fast. By the time the siren’s sounded in Vauxhall, the bomb’ll be falling on Hampstead Heath.’ He was one of the chatty types, unfortunately. ‘It’s all right, Miss. You only have to worry if the engine cuts out. That means there’s no more fuel and the bomb’s about to drop. When everything goes quiet, then it’s time to run for cover.’ He took out a handkerchief and blew his nose with one hand. When he’d finished mopping up, he added with grim satisfaction, ‘They can come at any time. Day or night, full moon or cloud, don’t make no difference. First thing in the morning’s often bad, when everyone’s leaving for work, and then again in the evening, when folk are coming home. Still, you’ll get used to them soon enough. Staying long?’

‘Just for the day.’ I dug my fingernails into my palm, watching the buzzing insect speed on towards the horizon. A pilotless bomb was somehow more unnerving than a plane with a human being at the controls; it was so indiscriminately malevolent, like some devilish invention from the pages of science fiction. All of a sudden I wanted to be back in the countryside, where everything was ghastly in a different way but familiar, at least. I lit a cigarette and stared out of the window, wondering what lay ahead and trying not to build up my hopes in case of disappointment. The taxi dropped me a couple of streets away because the road ahead was blocked by a lorry offloading sandbags, but I was glad of a walk in the fresh air to clear my head. Perhaps I was imagining things but the solicitor’s secretary seemed to look at me with some curiosity as I sat outside his office, powdering my nose with fingers that trembled a little. She brought me a cup of tea later, once he had told me what he had to say, with sugar in it although I hadn’t asked. For the shock, I suppose. It was all so unexpected. The solicitor told me not to worry about remembering every detail; he’d written a letter which laid out the gist of the matter. I put it into my handbag to read later.

‘Take some time to think it all over,’ he said at last, shaking my hand to show me our meeting had finished. ‘You don’t need to take any action straight away.’

I emerged from his office in a daze and leaned against the wall to take stock. I’d been planning to lunch in the nearest Corner House but that seemed inappropriate now, and I decided instead to treat myself to a slap-up meal; a celebration, of sorts, and a chance to plan my next move. La Petite Amie was just around the corner in Sloane Square. My aunt had taken me there for my twenty-first birthday; we’d eaten grouse and game chips, and drunk champagne cocktails with a maraschino cherry at the bottom – like a gallstone, I thought, although of course I’d never actually seen one. It was a meal that had stayed in my mind and which I’d probably embroidered in my imagination, because the place seemed to have gone downhill since then. The carpet on the stairs leading down to the restaurant was threadbare and the dining room smelt of stale cooking fat. The waiter showed me to an unobtrusive table in the corner, suitable for a single woman; I glanced around at my fellow diners, wondering whether to take off my hat. That was when I first saw her, the girl with chestnut hair. She was an unlikely vision among a cast of nonentities: a sprinkling of military types in uniform, two dowdy middle-aged women eating in silence and an elderly man with a copy of The Times propped against his beer glass.

The war had taken the shine off everything. We were all tired out after five long years, longing for it to be over now the tide was turning in our direction. We’d been through so much: the inevitable build-up to war and the tense months when nothing seemed to be happening, then the humiliation of Dunkirk and the horror of the Blitz, the grinding years of blockades, losses at sea and shortages of everything at home – before, finally, the joy of D-Day that June, when our troops landed in France to send the Nazis packing. With the Americans on our side, we were getting somewhere; the Germans were abandoning their defences in Cherbourg and retreating inland. The rout had begun.

For me, however, the prospect of victory brought problems of its own, and the letter in my pocket complicated matters further. I drank the vinegary wine in some agitation, and the steak, which might have been horsemeat, stuck in my throat. Laying my knife and fork together, I snatched a look at the next table to find that the girl was staring at me. And then a most appalling sound came floating down the stairs.

‘A nice little creature but ruined by the owners,’ trumpeted the voice of Marjory Bly. ‘They fed it crumpets from the table, would you believe.’

It couldn’t be anyone else; no one had a booming delivery quite like Marjory’s. But what on earth was she doing in London? She lived ten miles from us in the country and bred cocker spaniels. Horrified, I saw her stout shoes and muscular calves descend the stairs, and then the hem of her drooping skirt came into view, followed by the hideous tapestry bag she carried everywhere, stuffed with newspapers and dog treats. This was an awful coincidence. If Mrs Bly saw me dining alone, Mother would get to hear of it and I’d be in deep trouble. I stood up, panicking, grabbed my handbag and stumbled towards the back of the restaurant, bumping into tables as I passed. Putting my hand on the door that led to the Ladies’ cloakroom, I became aware of someone at my shoulder. It was her, the girl with the glorious hair, so close behind she was almost treading on my heels.

Flattening myself against the wall, I held open the door for her and said in a strangled voice, ‘After you, Claude’: one of the ridiculous catchphrases from that show on the wireless everyone listened to. What on earth had possessed me?

But she only laughed and stood back herself, replying with the stock answer, ‘No, after you, Cecil.’

I stumbled through, my hands clammy with perspiration, and headed down the passage. She followed me through to the facilities: two lavatory stalls, side by side, and a small room beyond with a washbasin and mirror above.

‘After you, Cecil,’ she repeated with a grin, nodding her head towards one of the stalls.

I didn’t need to go, and the thought of performing in front of an audience was unimaginable. Why was she stalking me? Clutching my handbag, I said stiffly, ‘Actually, I only came out here for a breath of air. Don’t let me stop you though. I can wait outside until you’ve finished.’ That would show her how to behave.

She laughed – rather coarsely, I thought – throwing back her head. ‘Don’t worry, no room for finer feelings in the forces. There’s nothing I won’t do in public. Well, very little anyway. But I don’t want to use the lav either.’

‘Then why did you come out here?’

‘To see if you were all right. And to get away from Colonel Blimp.’ She brought a packet of cigarettes out from her pocket. ‘Fancy a smoke?’

I hesitated. Looking back, this was a defining moment, although of course I didn’t realise it at the time. If I’d gone back into the restaurant and made up some story for Mrs Bly, who knows how my life would have turned out? It wasn’t like me to accept a stranger’s invitation, but something in the frankness and warmth of her expression made me lay down my handbag, take a cigarette and light it from the match she had struck. She must have sensed I needed help, and I was desperate enough to accept it. Or maybe she thought nothing of the sort; maybe she was merely bored and wanted some distraction. I shall never know, and I don’t suppose it matters now.

‘Mind if I take the seat?’ She sat down heavily on the one folding chair, loosened her belt and sighed in relief. ‘That’s better. So come on, spill the beans. What made you rush out of the room like a scalded cat?’

‘Because somebody I knew was coming down the stairs.’ That truthful answer was out of character, too, but I didn’t feel like myself just then. I was unbalanced by the strangeness and intensity of it all: the danger, the opportunity, Marjory Bly appearing like one of the Fates, and now this girl taking an interest in me. She was glamorous, and glamorous people don’t usually bother with me. They certainly didn’t then, at any rate.

She narrowed her eyes through the smoke. ‘And you don’t want to be seen, even though you’re all on your tod?’

I glanced towards the window and then the door, wondering what to do next. ‘Planning your escape route?’ she asked.

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ I’d had enough of these intrusive questions and wanted to be alone so I could think without distractions. A doodlebug was droning in the distance, too, apparently heading in our direction.

She cocked an ear. ‘I’ve