‘Miss Todd?’ he said, tipping the brim of his railwayman’s cap. ‘Are you all right? You look worried.’
‘I’m fine, Fred, thank you for asking.’ Just in a state of mortal dread, nothing to fret about. Fred Smith didn’t look as if he had ever suffered a moment of mortal dread.
She walked back along the lane, still drenched with the nameless fear. Halfway along she met Nancy Shawcross and said, ‘Hello there, what are you up to?’ and Nancy said, ‘Oh, just looking for things for my nature book. I’ve got some oak leaves and some tiny baby acorns.’
The fear started to drain from Ursula’s body and she said, ‘Come on, then, I’ll walk back home with you.’
As they approached the dairy herd’s field a man climbed over the five-bar gate and landed heavily among the cow parsley. He tipped his cap at Ursula and mumbled, ‘Evening, miss,’ before carrying on in the direction of the station. He had a limp that made him walk rather comically, like Charlie Chaplin. Another veteran of the war perhaps, Ursula thought.
‘Who was that? Nancy asked.
‘I have no idea,’ Ursula said. ‘Oh, look, there on the road, a dead devil’s-coach-horse beetle. Is that any good to you?’
A Lovely Day Tomorrow
2 September 1939
‘MAURICE SAYS IT will be over in a few months.’ Pamela rested her plate on the neat dome that contained her next baby. She was hoping for a girl.
‘You’re going to go on for ever until you produce one, aren’t you?’ Ursula said.
‘Till the crack of doom,’ Pamela agreed cheerfully. ‘So, we were invited, much to my surprise. Sunday lunch in Surrey, the full works. Their rather strange children, Philip and Hazel—’
‘I think I’ve only met them twice.’
‘You’ve probably met them more than that, you just didn’t notice them. Maurice said he’d invited us over so that the “cousins could get to know each other better” but the boys didn’t take to them at all. Philip and Hazel have no idea how to play. And their mother was being a martyr to the roast beef and apple pie. Edwina’s a martyr to Maurice as well. Martyrdom would suit her, of course, she’s quite violently Christian considering she’s C of E.’
‘I would hate to be married to Maurice, I don’t know how she puts up with it.’
‘She’s grateful to him, I think. He’s given her Surrey. A tennis court, friends in the Cabinet, lots of roast beef. They entertain a lot – the great and the good. Some women would suffer for that. Even suffer Maurice.’
‘I expect he’s a great test of her Christian tolerance.’
‘A great test of Harold’s beliefs in general. He had a scrap with Maurice over welfare, another one with Edwina about predestination.’
‘She believes in that? I thought she was an Anglican.’
‘I know. She has no sense of logic though. She’s remarkably stupid, I suppose that’s why he married her. Why do you think Maurice says the war will only last a few months? Is that just departmental bluster? Do we believe everything he says? Do we believe anything he says?’
‘Well, generally speaking, no,’ Ursula said. ‘But he is a big chief in the Home Office, so he ought to know, presumably. Home Security, new department as of this week.’
‘You too?’ Pamela asked.
‘Yes, me too. The ARP Department is now a ministry, we’re all still getting used to the idea of being grown-ups.’
When Ursula left school at eighteen she had not gone to Paris, nor, despite the exhortations of some of her teachers, had she applied to Oxbridge and done a degree in any languages, dead or alive. She had not in fact gone further than High Wycombe and a small secretarial college. She was eager to get on and earn her independence rather than be cloistered in another institution. ‘Time’s winged chariot, and all that,’ she said to her parents.
‘Well, we all get on,’ Sylvie said, ‘one way or another. And in the end we all arrive at the same place. I hardly see that it matters how we get there.’
It seemed to Ursula that how you got there was the whole point but there was nothing to be gained from arguing with Sylvie on the days when she was mired in gloom. ‘I shall be able to get an interesting job,’ Ursula said, brushing off her parents’ objections, ‘working in a newspaper office or perhaps a publishing house.’ She imagined a Bohemian atmosphere, men in tweed jackets and cravats, women smoking in a sophisticated manner while sitting at their Royals.
‘Anyway, good for you,’ Izzie said to Ursula, over a rather superior afternoon tea at the Dorchester to which she had invited both Ursula and Pamela (‘She must want something,’ Pamela said).
‘And who wants to be a boring old bluestocking?’ Izzie said.
‘Me,’ Pamela said.
It turned out that Izzie did have an ulterior motive. Augustus was so successful that Izzie’s publisher had asked her to produce ‘something similar’ for girls. ‘But not books based on a naughty girl,’ she said. ‘That apparently won’t do. They want a gung-ho sort, hockey-captain kind of thing. Lots of japes and scrapes but always towing the line, nothing that will frighten the horses.’ She turned to Pamela and said sweetly, ‘So I thought of you, dear.’
The college had been run by a man called Mr Carver, a man who was a great disciple of both Pitman’s and Esperanto and who tried to make his ‘girls’ wear blindfolds when they were practising their touch-typing. Ursula, suspecting there was more to it than monitoring their skills, led a revolt of Mr Carver’s ‘girls’. ‘You’re such a rebel,’ one of them – Monica – said admiringly. ‘Well, not really,’ Ursula said. ‘Just being sensible, you know.’
She was. She had become a sensible sort.
At Mr Carver’s college Ursula had proved to have a surprising aptitude for typing and shorthand, although the men who interviewed her for the job in the Home Office, men she would never see again, clearly believed that her proficiency in the Classics would somehow stand her in better stead when opening and closing filing-cabinet drawers and conducting endless searches among a sea of buff-coloured folders. It wasn’t quite the ‘interesting job’ she had envisaged but it kept her attention and over the next ten years she rose slowly through the ranks, in the bridled way that women did. (‘One day a woman will be Prime Minister,’ Pamela said. ‘Maybe even in our lifetime.’) Now Ursula had her own junior clericals to chase down the buff folders for her. She supposed that was progress. Since ’36 she’d been working in the Air Raid Precautions Department.
‘You’ve not heard rumours then?’ Pamela said.
‘I’m a lowly squaw, I hear nothing but rumours.’
‘Maurice can’t say what he does,’ Pamela grumbled. ‘Couldn’t possibly talk about what goes on within the “hallowed walls”. He actually used that term – hallowed walls. You would think he had signed the Official Secrets Act with his blood and pledged his soul as warranty.’
‘Oh, well, we all have to do that,’ Ursula said, helping herself to cake. ‘De rigueur, don’t you know. Personally, I suspect Maurice just goes around counting things.’
‘And feeling very pleased with himself. He’s going to love the war, lots of power and no personal danger.’
‘Lots of things to count.’ They both laughed. It struck Ursula that they seemed very merry for people on the brink of dreadful conflict. They were in the garden of Pamela’s house in Finchley, a Saturday afternoon with the tea things set out on a spindly bamboo table. They were eating cake, almond speckled with chopped-up pieces of chocolate, an old recipe of Mrs Glover’s handed down on a piece of paper that was covered in greasy fingerprints. In places, the paper was as transparent as a dirty windowpane.