As I sneaked upstairs to look for my tie, I passed my sister going down.
‘That’s all she thinks about – that Sister Traven will ask us all out to her place to tea.’
‘I’m not going. I can’t find my dratted shoes,’ Ann said. She was then thirteen, one of the classic shoe-losing ages.
Even when I was in my bedroom I could hear her shouting at Mother. She was far more vociferous than I.
When I was dressed, tie and all, I sat on the edge of my bed, tentatively reading a magazine. Thus Mother found me when she came upstairs.
‘Ready, darling? Well, why don’t you go downstairs and be prepared for your guest? Wouldn’t that be nicest? I’m going to do my hair again – I must look like nothing on earth! I feel absolutely exhausted before she’s even arrived. I do hope she isn’t too fussy! I wish Daddy’d been able to fix the blackout properly in that room.’
‘You look fine, Mum.’
‘Thank you, darling.’ She came nearer to me and hugged me and gave me a kiss on the cheek. ‘You’re a good boy, darling, a very good boy. Don’t be in too much of a hurry to grow up, will you? Let me just put your tie a bit straighter. So glad you found it. I wish I’d borrowed Auntie Nell’s tea service.’
‘Why? Is ours broken?’
‘You know how cracked and chipped it is.’ She stepped back and surveyed my tie critically. ‘Your collars never look right. I bet they have really lovely tea services at Traven House, don’t you? You did say her father was an admiral, didn’t you?’
‘Rear-admiral.’
‘Good. Now you go downstairs, darling, and I’ll just tidy my hair and be down in a minute. And, Horatio …’
‘Yes, Mummy?’
‘Do try not to talk too Leicestershire!’
‘I’ll try, Mummy.’
‘Watch those long “u”s then.’
Rolling the magazine and cramming one end into my pocket, I went downstairs and glumly joined my sister. We sat one either end of the sofa. She did not blame me for our present constraints, for which I was grateful. She was playing chess with herself, as Father had taught her.
Like me, Ann was munching a cachou. Mother ladled them out to us on such nerve-racking occasions as the present, when we were about to be presented to someone of importance. Perhaps they effectively heightened our charms, though I have no recollection that our breaths needed sweetening.
On these occasions Mother always took a cachou herself, as she distributed them out of a tiny cardboard box. I loved their meretricious perfumed taste, even if they were associated with nerves and straightened ties.
My mother was a tall thin woman, several inches taller than my portly father. He was ponderous where she was bird-like. His reputation (somewhat unearned) was for never giving way to excitement; she (more justly) was known to be nervous. Our doctor had recommended fresh air as a restorative for my mother’s nerves and at this period of my life she was always out walking in the streets or the nearby countryside, sometimes with Ann and, less often, with me and Father lagging somewhere behind.
‘You’re too slow to catch a funeral!’ she would call back. Father, with an elaborate display of dumb humour, would stare about, searching highway and hedgerow for sight of the hearse.
The guest whose appearance we were now so anxiously awaiting behind our perfumed defences was the nursing sister of my school, Miss Virginia Traven. I say ‘my school’, but by this date I had determined that school was over and done with as far as I was concerned.
Several reasons existed for this determination, chief among them that I was finding my manhood, and that this was a good time to find it. The time was mid-September 1939, when Great Britain had been at war with Nazi Germany for something under a fortnight. My older brother, Nelson, had already disappeared into the Army, and was – according to the one letter we had received from him – messing about in a barracks in Aldershot. Beatrice’s husband, a husky young man who cleaned our car once a week, was reported to be training with the infantry somewhere on Salisbury Plain. My father was going through agonies of indecision about whether he should volunteer or not, and what the bank would say if he did. And I was sitting there on the sofa, picking calluses formed on my hands by the shovelling of great piles of soil on top of our air-raid shelter in the garden.
The doorbell rang. My mother cried from above, ‘There she is now!’
Beatrice went to the front door. Against instructions, I followed. I wanted to get a private word in first.
Sister came lightly in, wearing her worn but tidy light tweed coat. She smiled at me with her head held slightly on one side, and quickly put her small hand into mine. Something lit in her face at the sight of mine lighting.
‘Hope you won’t be too bored,’ I whispered. Mother was already bearing down the stairs, making little sort of preliminary tuning-up sounds. I stood back for the overture.
Meals have changed since then. They changed almost at that precise moment in time, as far as the Stubbs family was concerned. Perhaps that was the last of the rather lavish teas that my mother liked to give for her friends, sitting at the top of the table, with the teapot and its accessories by her side on a separate folding table, talking amiably to all and sundry, addressing each of her guests in turn so that none should feel left out, pausing now and then to give low-voiced instructions to Beatrice.
My poor mama! She was always happiest in the past, and this present spread was an attempt as much to stop the clock as to impress the visitor. In the recent declaration of war, boys of my age had already smelt change, and trembled; my mother’s generation doubtless did the same – but their tremblings were far less pleasurable than ours.
Perhaps for this reason she decided to address Sister as if the two of them were of the same generation. I must admit now that there can have been less than ten years between them, but that gulf appeared to be infinite at the time.
Over the jelly and cream, the dainty slices of brown bread and butter, the jams in their glass dishes inside silver holders, the sponge and fruit cakes, the buns and biscuits and chocolate éclairs that were there mainly for Ann’s benefit, Mother cheerfully talked of Sister’s future, about which she knew even less than I.
‘I must say, I think it’s jolly brave of you to throw up a safe job and join the war effort! You’ll have a wonderful time, lots of boy friends and admirers! Oh, I know!’
‘I’m hoping to get posted to France,’ said Sister.
‘Lovely, what fun! Go to Paris! Such a beautiful city. Notre-Dame! The boulevards! Robert and I love Paris, especially in the spring …’
‘You were only there one day, Mummy!’ Ann said.
‘A beautiful spring day – eat your bread-and-butter properly, Ann, and sit up straight! You’d like Paris, I know, Sister.’
‘Yes, I do, very much. I have connections there.’
‘Family connections, no doubt? I expect you know most of the capitals of Europe … I should like to do my bit for the old country, but I’m not as free as you – three children and a husband …’
‘You wouldn’t actually call Nelson a child, would you, Mum?’ I asked. ‘He’s in the forces and he’s grown a moustache.’
Mother smiled at me and held out her hand. ‘Pass your cup nicely if you’d like another cup of tea. Beatrice, I think if we could have some more hot water … Nelson looks so silly with a moustache, Sister! Of course, you’ve never seen him. They’ll soon make him shave it off. He’s at Aldershot; Robert was there in the Great War. He’ll always be my child if he lives to be sixty. I hope he’ll do well in the Army. I believe your family are some of them in the forces, Sister, aren’t they?’
A