THE GUARDIANS

How kind she is!

She is dressed in black but it is not a <u>black dress</u>. It
seems fresh and new and is very well-cut and fashionable with
its row of little buttons. The tight-fitting bodice is pointed
over the double row of flounces. My mother bends down as if to
lift me in her arms.

My mother's little hat is dark, too. It is perched some-
what back on her head, with triangular wing-like little stiffened
bows.

We are going away. I am seated on a trunk or box. The
trunk or box is covered with a neatly fitted tufted patterned
chintz. This blue-shell pattern is repeated on the bed-spread.
I am lying asleep under the bed-spread. But I am awake. I am
back in the late eighteen-eighties. On the trunk or box, I am
just past the crawling-stage. It is possible that I can just
walk, but it will be more pleasant if my mother carries me.

I wake remembering the dream. That was in London, in 1937.
I was getting ready to go to America, after a long absence. My
last trip was in 1920. Now September 1945, I try to recall de-
tails of that second visit. I do not think of the luxurious
<u>Normandie</u>, the meeting with old friends in New York, interesting

2

new contacts, talks and parties, a trip to Boston, a trip to my
birth-place in Pennsylvania, and so on. That is, now (September
1945) preparing for my third visit, I think of these things, but
the clearest memory of that period is the dream that I had just
sailing,
before, of my young mother in her travelling-costume, and of myself
seated on a chintz-covered trunk in my own room in London, while
myself lay asleep on the bed.

That dream for the moment, seems more important to me than
anything that has happened in the war-years. I can not say that
I thought of it during the years. It came back, as if I had
dreamed it last night, as I just now flung myself down to rest on
top of that same blue-shell coverlet. The shells are blurred here
and there and the tufts are uneven and the edge needs hemming.
The blue-shell coverlet is worn and shabby.

Why do I think of the dream now? True, I have been sorting
out clothes and manuscripts, getting ready for this third visit.

I think Mary reminded me of my mother.

They came in this morning for coffee, what they call
"elevenses". I spent part of my summer with them in Kent, two
summers, and I had a short stay, one Easter. I liked Mary for
her neatness and reserve and somewhat childish dignity, though
Joan was my original friend among the sisters.

Mary the youngest, was a Wren, slender and smart in blue

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uniform; she shed this on reaching home. Then you would see
another Mary in her brother's cast-off garden trousers, somewhat
theatrical but practical high Russian boots (a relic probably of
Joan's Chelsea period) and a Batik blouse which I remembered
with a shock having myself worn, before handing it on to Joan.
Mary's long-short fair hair fell over her face and she looked
like a Dresden-china garden-boy as she dug her spade with vigour
and decision into the hard earth, bordering the tomato-patch.

Perhaps they took me nearer to their hearts than I then
knew. I did try to be patient with poor old Nannie, who lived
with them since her outer-London house was blitzed. Fortunate-
ly, at the time, Nannie was staying with her niece near Tonbridge,
but she grumbled that "the children" as she called them, wouldn't
let her go back to London. Nannie was deaf and well over eighty.
Then, Sheila the oldest sister, a Wren too, was killed on duty,
in an air-crash.

Nannie would go over old photographs and say, "but I must
show Mrs. Alton that one of Edwin and the twins and the dear
Vicar - you know, Dora, it's my favourite and you've hidden
it. But here is Sheila's funeral one, and here is a bit from the
paper about Sheila, Mrs. Alton, they put her poor hat on top of
the coffin and she had full Naval honours." And I would say,

4

"I think I read that yesterday, it was all so interesting."
But Nannie was not taken in, "no, it was the other bit, in the
other paper that I gave you to read."

But Dora was hovering somewhere, "Nannie, Joan says she's
waiting for Mrs. Alton to get the top plums before she moves the
ladder," and at the door, Dora would whisper, "don't let her
wear you down, she'll never let you go, once you give in to her."
But Nannie who was deaf would hear the whisper, "Dora, it was
you who hid the photographs, Mrs. Alton said she wanted to see
all the photographs."

In the garden, well out of Nannie's draw-net, Dora ex-
plained, "poor old Nannie -" "But I'm interested." "You can't
be, no one could be, you're so patient, you heard it all last
summer."

I was about to say, "not all -" but I remembered Sheila,
in time. I said, "but why does she go on and on about the photo-
graphs?" Dora said, "she's collected them all our lives. They
went, of course, with the house." "O -" "Nannie doesn't know
that; we found some in mother's old boxes and Martin and Mary
and all of us grubbed out what we had, but Nannie knows her own
dints and tints and fly-specks. She knows those aren't hers.
It was Joan's idea. We told her, we'd sent her things to Scotland
to my god-mother to be safe till the war was over. We thought

5

Nannie would be pleased - but Nannie wasn't."

Of course Nannie knew, she knew everything. She knew Edwin
the older boy was going to die, if they took him away from her.
I listened to the story. She made out that Nannie was wanted that
day to take the younger children to their Aunt Flora's for a party.
It wasn't true, any of it, just to get her out of the house.
She found finally where they'd taken Edwin. She stormed the
hospital. "My boy - and me not even told about it! If the vicar
had been alive, it never would have happened. And my boy died -
that was Edwin. I showed you Edwin in the garden. I would ask a
special favour, Mrs. Alton. It's that rose-tree in Putney. The
children here are high-handed, Dora in especial is high-handed.
She never consulted me about those boxes. I always watched that
rose-tree. They won't even let me go to Putney. Do you ever go
to Putney?"

I said, I sometimes drove out with a friend with flowers on
her mother's birthday.

"That's what I say. The children don't remember. Not that
I mean Joany. Joany resembled Edwin. If you could go to Putney -"

I said that I would make a special effort when I got back to
London.

"They won't even let me go and look at my boy's grave,"
Nannie grumbled.

....

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Nannie fortunately was deaf, though she could hear a whisper. When the planes passed in their droves, over the cottage-roof, the knocker on the front door would tap-tap. "O," said Dora, "there's Nannie again," for Nannie sound asleep in her bed in the tiny box-room at the turn of the wooden stair-case, though oblivious to the boom of aircraft guns, even to the thud of an occasional stray bomb that fell in the fields, in the woods and even once in the road before the oast-house, would hear the door-knocker and descend in grey cotton wrapper and shuffle across the floor, ignoring the lot of us clustered around the huge oven-like open fire-place.

Joan would give an emphatic bang with the poker and there would be a shower of sparks, lighting up the oak-beams, the great bundle of autumn leaves or late summer flowers under the portrait (which we all agreed wasn't so bad) that Mary had done of Martin.

Martin was there though he had been in France and was soon to sail for India. Sheila was there, just behind the latched wooden door to the left of Martin's portrait. Sheila was in the living-room, that was always somebody's bed-room. There was a framed Medici print of Lombardy poplars, along a French river, above the mantel, perhaps a book of butterflies or a Greek lexicon or anthology that Martin had taken from the glassed-in row of shelves and forgotten to put back.

7

They would leave Martin's book there. Martin was there though he soon might be in India and Mary; who was really a sort of hyphenated person, Martin-and-Mary, would soon be there again, though she might have dashed off this very morning on the early Tunbridge bus, to catch a train to wherever it was she happened to be going.

Sheila was there under the French poplars, smiling under her eighteenth-century Wren officer's tricorn. Her hair under her hat, just neatly covered her ears. Her smile was gay and un-defeated. You could imagine that the fair folds of hair were dressed to match the tricorn and at the back, there would be a neat knot, tied with a black ribbon. You would look twice at this eighteenth-century boy's face and be glad he wore his own hair and that the fair hair was left, unfashionably unpowdered.

---

Edna might be there, though it was tacitly agreed that Edna left any room that Nannie chose to enter. Edna was a fairly recent acquisition, she was doing war-work as an extra farm hand under Joan's supervision. Edna and Dora wore regulation helmets, and wrapped in their rain-coats or their trench-coats, went in and out, officially reporting. "They're all going to London," shouted Edna brightly, at stated intervals. It did not make me

8

any happier. Crouched in a corner of the sofa, facing the wooden settle, I would try not to think of London.

The roof-beams shivered and the windows rattled. There seemed to be such a lot of us here, and Nannie sensing, rather than seeing Edna, stood like a statue of a peasant-woman by Rodin or some Michaelangelo symbolic figure of a Sibyl. (There are some such, as I remember, painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome).

The room was dark, as the black-out material was worn rather sleezy and we didn't take the trouble of pinning up the extra lengths of heavier material every evening. So "we better not light up," Dora would say, looking like Saint Joan in her helmet, in the fire-light.

Then Edna would say, "they're having fun and games at the estuary - it's only London," and seeing Nannie, would stalk out through the dining-room. When the garden-door banged, Nannie (who could not hear but knew everything that happened everywhere) would turn round. She addressed the lot of us and I would feel complimented that she included me in her list of culprits, "not one of you," she would scold soundly, "ever answers the front door."

"Nannie," said Joan, "look Nannie, you're shivering." I would say, "the red sticks look so pretty." She did come. She sat down. Joan banged the tongs on the uneven hearth stones.

9

She shouted, "we'll have a nice cup of tea now soon, Nannie."
Nannie said, "what's happened? Why do they knock and knock? Why
don't you go to the door when they knock? It's long after mid-
night. What's Dora doing in the garden?" The planes roared and
roared, it seemed as if they would lift up the house-roof and even
the house foundations with the roar of their propellers.

Somebody was knocking. That was all Nannie seemed to hear
or care about. It seemed as if the whole little house was about
to be dragged up into the trail of the wings in passing. Such
black wings! They went on and on and on. Indeed, we were right
on their track, a half-way house between the coast and London.

Joan was off-duty. She yawned ostentatiously from the corner,
not by, but in the fire-place. It was an enormous fire-place, al-
most a room in itself. They had arranged two low chairs in either
corner. The metal-basket in the centre, had an iron hood above
it, which acted as a funnel and drew the smoke up from the hearth
into the huge chimney. The fire-place was really like a little
room in another dimension or a stage, open to the audience. The
sofa and the settle held the audience, and now that Dora and Edna
had gone out again, the audience seated as it were, in the royal
box, was Nannie and myself.

"Time to go to be-ee-d," shouted Joan, shouting as it were,
above Inferno. She made an echo with her hands, "ba-ah-ah-ah-ah -

10

be-ee-d, Nannie" she said, like a little girl ba-aa-ing like
sheep.

We saw Joan, a little girl with short hair that wouldn't
grow and wouldn't curl. Her Gainsborough fringe was cut neatly
but she would brush it off her forehead and disarray the neat,
fine strands that a moment since, had shone as slick and clear
as brush-strokes on the forehead of a Dutch doll. The eyes, per-
fectly level and almost too large to be convincing, added to the
effect. She was a doll or an early Victorian child in a miniature.
Nannie wouldn't see that, but Nannie would see to it that Joan
like the rest of them was "dressed like a lady's child". I never
heard Nannie use the expression in the early days when I first
knew them. It was only after she died that Nannie in all fair-
ness, remembered.

I never heard Nannie criticize Joan. I felt sometimes,
seeing Joan leading Thistle or Jackie across the meadow, that
Nannie fancied Edwin had come back. I think the thought was never
wholly absent from her mind. That was Edwin in the blue overall,
a gentleman's son you could see, doing farm-work, not being too
strong, in war-time. There was another, not Edwin but Joany
dressed up.

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Now Joany was a doll, a boy-doll flung down in a doll-chair
in a doll-house. Her legs were flung out like a rag-doll. They
were striped black and yellow like a jumping-jack. Nobody knew
when or where or how this particular phase of Joan's fancy-dress
had materialized. The trousers were nicely tailored, they were
not lounge pyjamas or play-suit. They were good firm weave and
texture. They were not basted together from a cast-off curtain
for a charade. The material looked like sail-cloth or awning.
Dora's "why ever did you choose that sort of stuff for trousers?"
had never had an answer. They were a great joke with everyone.
Joan astride Thistle or Jackie, bareback, was Joany dressed up.
That never could be Edwin. This was Punchinello, a boy-doll.

Nannie eagle-eyed had watched my first reaction to the
trousers. It was then that she explained, not criticising Joan,
"say what you will, she always saw to it, that Joan (with the rest
of them) was dressed like a lady's child."

Now I saw Joan for the first time, as Nannie saw her, "a
lady's child."

The planes were going on and on and on ... and the door-
knocker did a long drum-roll, tap-tap-tap-tap-tap and paused and
then punctuated it with one firm, final bang. Then it began
again and I began to count the taps as if it were a message in
Morse code that I couldn't follow, tap-tap, tap-tap-tap-tap.

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It meant something, obviously.

I knew things that they didn't know and so did Joan. In
fact, Joan and I knew a little too much sometimes, but she made
a parlour-game of it and called it Astrology, and I kept quiet.

The things Joan gave me were a lot of odds and ends that
didn't match and didn't go together, yet that somehow belonged
together like pickings in a rag-bag or like the clothes she wore.
People didn't know what a rag-and-taggle I felt myself sometimes,
and then I would say, "I'm having a week-end with the Townsends."
My more sophisticated friends were shocked or pretended to be,
"not the east-house again?" They were, I was assured by those of
my friends who met them, "an ordinary English family."

The vicarage background was ordinary, two of the girls
murses? they would be, the brother a school-master, of course;
even Joan's so-called Chelsea period was true to type, "one of
them always tries to break loose." As to Nannie, "every self-
respecting English family has a poor relation."

All that no doubt, was true. But I too had had an "ordinary
family." I did not talk about my "ordinary family" to my London
friends nor did I discuss it with the Townsends. Only once I said
to Nannie that I liked Scotch people, that I had a grandmother who
was part Scotch.

Nannie had been telling me about her. She was dead now, so
Nannie instead of bewailing alleged "neglect of my children", let

13

by-gones be, and confided proudly that *she* was the Castle people.

There was a Castle somewhere in Scotland, to add in or to
take account of, now. I did not ask what Castle, Highlands or
Lowlands, or exactly who *they* were, but I think I managed to look
suitably impressed.

I had no castle to dredge up from my American background,
my castles were in fairy-books with old witches and fairy god-
mothers who resembled both my own grandmother and this eternal
Nannie. I said, "I had half a Scotch grandmother, I mean, one
grandmother was half Scotch." Nannie gave me a searching eagle-
like look with those eyes, that were set like grey-glass in her
granite face. She said, "half a grandmother could gi' ye the
sight."

When I asked Joan what Nannie meant by the sight, Joan said,
"0, second-sight, of course." "Has Nannie it?" Joan said, "0 -
no." "Does she talk about people who have?" "Hardly ever - "
"How do you know she meant second-sight when she said sight?
I haven't, anyway, told you what she did say." Joan said, "you
said, she said a half-grandmother can give you the sight." But
I was sure I had not said it, I had only thought it. I didn't
argue it with Joan. That is how things were with me and Joan
sometimes - though not often.

That is how things were with me and Nannie, almost always.

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If Nannie hadn't the sight, I don't know who had. It did not need an Einstein to prove the past was in the present and the present in the future, or whatever it's all about. When Nannie waylaid me with a "new picture", there were layers of past and present. The "new picture" would be faded and curled at the edges. I had always been repelled by so-called "spirit photographs", till I saw that these were.

"You'd know it was Martin, wouldn't you?" The baby in the white dress was not the least like the other baby in the white dress. You could always pick out Martin, he loomed tremendous. " - you'd know Martin, Mary being so small and not expected." I listened again to the story of how the little Joan cried to think that the tiny new sister had no bassinet. "Joany cried, **putting my sister in a drawer.**" "A drawer?" I asked, genuinely astonished. "Of course, when another baby comes unexpected, you clear out a drawer. It was the middle-drawer." I would listen now, half-listening to the list of the vicar's shirts and socks or **her** under-linen. Was it the vicar's socks and shirts that Nannie folded and laid aside or carefully fitted into the third drawer or was it? - there was something of death about it though it was an extra baby.

Perhaps it was Joan crying.

No, it was the "new photograph" that I held in my hand.

15

We all knew this photograph though usually we leave it behind.
The baby in the bureau-drawer might have been myself, Martin my
older brother. They were all there. I recognised another, a
big boy stretched in a garden-chair. He was reading a book.
He did not in the least, suspect that the vicar (I presume it
was) was lurking behind the rose-bush with the camera. The thin,
tall boy with the book was Edwin, of course.

It was a "spirit photograph", the varnished surface was
cracked, one corner dog-eared and another torn off. Edwin was
in the past and Edwin was in the present but by no process of
logical reasoning, could I have then proved that Edwin was or
would be in the future.

I did not think of the tap-tap, tap-tap-tap specifically
as a "message" but Nannie, so old, so strong, so tireless, so
selfless in her integrity knew that someone was outside there,
knocking.

Who was it? Nannie of course, knew. Someone was watching.
Nannie was watching. She had brought the past into the present.
She was part of the old world that was watching. She was one of
the Guardians, an old Prophetess or Sibyl and she had accepted
me in her pronouncement, "half a grandmother could gi' ye the
sight."

....

16

Then they came in this morning, for "elevenses". We didn't
speak of Nannie.

I had not seen Mary in town for some years, except in uni-
form. She had had many transformations. This was not the Dresden-
china garden-boy nor the "other twin" of the before-war week-ends,
who effaced herself in the arm-chair with a book. That Mary was
dutiful, childish, perhaps a trifle affectedly immature.

That Mary usually had a long-haired dachshund curled, like
a squirrel, in her lap. That was probably, Judy, for Mary had
lost Rudy.

Rudy was Judy's twin. There was an extensive tract of
forest behind their little holding. Joan said, "we'll go on
looking - pretend you think he's lost. That keeper shot him."
We all pretended, and Joan and I went creeping through the forest
to look for Rudy or for poor Rudy's gold-red little furry body.
Trespassing was forbidden and the keeper was our enemy. Dora
said, "don't go far in, you'll be shot at sight." We made Dora
keep Mary with her, we said, to keep an eye on Judy. Joan and
I went on and on, the paths branched and we knew whichever path
we took would be the wrong one, so we parted, "we might as well
be lost separately as together," I said, remembering how Mary had
cried, "Rudy might be caught in a trap and not even dead."

We had all been caught in a trap for so many years,

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and not even dead.

But apparently now the war was over, I didn't know.
"What has happened to Mary?" I asked. "Dora, you haven't had a
biscuit; is it Mary?" Martin was seated on the couch opposite
Dora, I was one end of the table, Mary, the other. I said, I
had just asked, "is it Mary?" It was a rhetorical question and
did not really need an answer. But Mary's eyes titrated like
blue wings, then settled level. She looked English out of a
Victorian picture-book, though she was half-Scotch. She answered
me, quite seriously, "yes."

I said, "well, I only have your word for it - you look -
you look -" Martin spoke up, "she looks different because she's
not in uniform," which was ridiculous.

But perhaps he was right. The coat buttoned to the throat,
was somehow "period". It was not simply pre-war or "not in
uniform." Perhaps it was a coat of her mother's; "take mummie's
over-shoes," Dora had suggested one wet day when I was helping in
the garden. But "mummie's" rather elegant quarter-length heeled
rubber boots, were too small.

Mary had been in uniform almost five years. She seemed
taller but perhaps it was the period-cut of the coat. I asked,
"have you heard from Joan?" They had heard last, when I heard.
Joan was in Italy. When petrol ran low, it was decreed that their

18

holding was no longer important enough to warrant the weekly trips
to London with farm produce. Joan said it was not the same thing,
delivering to the neighbouring villages, so she left the reduced
farm work to Dora and Edna and made tracks, in a welfare-worker
"Save the Children" uniform, for the Near East. She had been
in Egypt and Jugo-Slavia and was now in Italy.

Joan dressed up, was playing a game, a charade. But just
any-old-thing that Mary laid her hands on, became "period", cos-
tume, romance itself, rather than theatre. It is true, her offi-
cer's uniform, remained for me, perhaps the most romantic of her
"characters". I would never forget how I first saw her flash
through the hall and up the wooden stair-case, in most elegant
distinction, the tricorn set at a swagger angle and almost click-
ing a sword.

The Dresden garden-boy was another of my favourites. I will
never forget my astonishment at the recognition of my own Batik
blouse, with Martin's trousers and the well-cut, well-weathered
Russian boots, a relic one presumed from Joan's "Chelsea period",
when I saw the garden-boy for the first time from my upper window.
But all this was in its way, quite fair. It was not fair that
Mary should, with no warning whatsoever, turn into an old photo-
graph of my mother.

---

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"More coffee, Martin? You must be glad, Mary, to be out of uniform." Mary said, "I'm not." Dora said, "Oh, Mary - she has only to snap a finger and say 'steward' and she has twenty girls rushing to do her bidding." This was Mary who wouldn't, in the old days, say boo to a goose, yet who could fight like a tigress when the well-being of Rudy or Judy was in question.

Mary said she was going on with her work with the Wrens, the WRNS, Women's Royal Naval Service, and no wonder. She was busy, she was happy, she was well paid. Why should she go back to the cottage in Kent (except for holidays) and be the "other twin"? The other twin?

Yes, they were right, my more sophisticated London friends, the Townsends were an ordinary English family (who happened to be half Scotch) and ordinary English families were like that. That is why it was all so extraordinary.

Now it was some days ago that I last saw them. "Thank you for coming," I said, "thank you for the roses, Dora. Thank you, Martin for bringing my books back." I had left some books with them and clothes when over-night, one might have lost everything. Now, I remember an over-animated bright-faced girl that I met in Stewarts, on Piccadilly, one day, the years overlap, I can not remember just when. She asked if she could share my table.

20

We were, as we said, mate-y in those days. I said, "of course."

The girl was a complete stranger, though we were none of
us strangers. She said with no preliminary, "I'm so lucky,
I'd forgotten my laundry."

I said, "what?" She said, "it was Kensington, last night,
you remember." Last night was not very long ago, I was not far
from Kensington, I remembered. The girl said, "I look all right,
don't I?"

I said, "you look very smart." She said, "yes, I was
lucky in this too," she waved a hand-bag at me and exhibited a
pair of gloves. "I hadn't undressed. I lost everything. It
didn't seem to matter. I was out rather late and went straight
to the shelter. Then it didn't matter. I lost everything."

I tried to seem interested in my cup of coffee, I offered
her a cigarette. She opened her hand-bag with the air of an
empress, "but I have cigarettes." It was all so bright and chatty.
I admired her silk scarf. Yes, she had been out, wasn't she lucky?
I went on agreeing that she was lucky, we were all very lucky.
"But the laundry?"

"O, that's extra. I just remembered on the way here that
the laundry hadn't come back."

Yes, it was good to get away from London. I was _somewhere else_. There was a thicket of thorn-trees across the road that were

21

white with blossom that wintry Easter. There was a disproportio-
tionate box or yew-tree at the gate that had the look of once
having been formal topiary and had now got out of hand. There
was the wooden garden-gate with the latch that banged too tight
shut and had to be lifted. It was a good fence, a good garden-
gate though awkward to manage sometimes, there was still a hint
of white paint. There were clusters of crocuses that pushed and
elbowed each other like flowers stuffed by a child in a small
jug. I could hardly absorb this at the time, it was an "ordinary"
English country-cottage and I was going back to London.

But when the planes whirred and roared and Joan banged the
embers to new life and the door-knocker began its tap-tap, tap-
tap-tap, I was right there. Things happened here, as well as in
London. We were all together.

I was there in the past, the present and the future, though
I had not then been able to see this clearly. Joan had told me
all about it. There was Sheila, there was Edwin, Mrs.Townsend who
had (Nannie said) her way in everything had it all worked out,
the next child would be David. But David didn't materialize, or
did he? Joan said that Edwin called her David and was coaching
her so that she could go on as a student to the college where he
would later be instructor. He was it seemed, mathematically
gifted ... Joan was seated at the table, the lamp was smoking,

22

She had just put away the school-books that she had inherited
from Edwin. Nannie was beating at the nursery-door and calling
Edwin.

"He isn't here, Nannie," Joan explained carefully that they
were all sleeping at Aunt Flora's after the concert.
"But Edwin?" No, not Edwin - didn't Nannie remember? "Don't
you remember, Nannie? I told you - I told you Edwin had gone
back to college." "He wouldn't, without saying good-bye."

"I told you he had to make up the lost time." She had said
all this before. "He studies too hard," said Nannie. "No one
looks after him properly," said Nannie. "He never had enough to
eat, what with this war -" "Look, Nannie, the war was over,
long before Edwin started college." "It's never over," said
Nannie, "they wouldn't even let him go on with his officer's
cadet corps at school. She ought to have known then."

It was a nightmare, it was a dream. (Things happen like
this in dreams). The nursery-door wasn't the nursery-door though
it stood in the same place at the end of the same corridor, with
the fence and the gate that led down to the kitchen. She had
climbed those stairs so many, many times, hot milk in mugs or milk

23

with the chill just taken off it that had been standing in hot
water in the pudding-bowl and Cook always making a fuss; what-
ever she took to stand the babies' bottles in, was just what
Cook wanted at the moment. Of course *she* was a lady but some
ladies have been known to come into the kitchen to see that the
mursery rice-pudding was properly browned and the children's
sugar-ration kept separate. Nannie could steal sugar from the
"house" but Cook could retaliate by stealing sugar from the
"mursery". It was, however you look at it, a losing game, for
it was not sugar for herself she wanted nor to prove to Cook
that she knew her place and that she knew Cook's. It was not a
game of proving to Cook that if stealing and hiding and hoarding
things was all that mattered, any Scot could beat even a Cockney
at that.

And with all her ingenuity and wit, with all the lumps of
sugar salvaged through the years ("put Nannie's sugar on the sau-
cer, not in the cup," Dora would admonish Joan, "you know Nannie
likes to put it in herself afterwards, when her tea gets cool"),
with all those week-ends when *she* went to stay with her sister at
Brook Street and Nannie whispered to Cook, "you go to your niece
at Brighton, I'll see *she* doesn't know," with all this and even
at the end, Cook (for the sake of the Brighton week-ends) aiding
and abetting her with dripping - what with this and what with

24

that, it was no use. Edwin was dead.

It was just a stray bomb in a field and the house settled down, and suddenly, it was very quiet. We heard the kitchen-door bang as the two came in or one of them came in. A smouldering stick slid down through the staves of the iron-basket and we heard it drop on the stone and crumble, hissing slightly. We heard the broken edge of the leather sole of Joan's red felt slipper flap against the outer ledge of bricks, as she stepped down out of the fire-place, off her little stage - at least, I heard it. I heard these things but there was something missing. It was a clock that should have been ticking in the corner. But I knew there was no clock there.

I was listening for something but it wasn't a clock ticking. It was the tap-tap-tap of the knocking on the front door, that now was silent.

And the nursery-door wasn't the nursery-door. The house wasn't even the vicarage. Nannie knew quite well that they had moved to Margate, after the vicar died. The corridor was the same and the back stairs and the fence and the gate. Every house of this size always had a fence and a gate - a gate, anyway, to

25

shut off the back stairs, when there were children. This is
where the nursery-door would have been, if there had been
children.

But there were no children. Even the younger ones had
grown up. Martin was at his preparatory school, and Mary,
though at home, was out almost all day at her French and her
drawing-lessons. And soon Joan was going right away to a uni-
versity with Edwin. Edwin?

"Why didn't you go to the - concert?" "I told you,
Nannie," said Joan, edging her along the dark corridor, "that
I'm swatting up those exams for - Edwin." "But you put away
all your books. You put them behind the other books -" "Edwin
wanted me to remember. He said, 'put the books away - put them
away where you can't get at them. Put them behind the other
books.'" "But they're the books you learned from, Edwin's books
that he learned from, that he gave you." "It's a new - a new
method," Joan explained to Nannie. "You see, if you're swatting
for an exam - I mean, if you go looking at the books - I
mean, Edwin said, if you can't remember without the books before
the exam, you can't remember at the exam -" "Remember what?"
said Nannie. "I told you," said Joan, "the sum of the sides of a
right-angled triangle -" "You stayed because of me," said
Nannie. "They said someone would have to stay at home with

26

Nannie." "Who said?" said Joan. "She did," said Nannie.

But it was no use. They could go on forever, she knew and Joan knew, in a defiant sort of loving-hating argument. But it was no use, it was no use at all. Emma Forbes (she actually had a name, had Nannie) knew it was no use. The children had grown up, all of them. Sheila and Dora had left home long ago, for that nurses college. Martin would be going to Oxford - well, for all she saw of him, he might be there now. Mary wanted to live with their Aunt Flora and go to a proper art-academy in London. Joan was going to the university - Joan?

They were standing at the head of the stairs now. The clock was ticking in the hall below. It was ticking very loudly - louder - louder - It was not the clock ticking. It was someone knocking; tap, tap, tap-tap-tap.

She went down the steps like an Empress in a Ballet. She wore her starched cap - not like that Violet's cap which might have been snipped off, one inch each side her apron strings, no body to it - pert she was, Violet, one of the new lot, post-war, they called it, lip-stick and those moving-pictures! And Violet and even Cook now, called her Mrs. Forbes. Mrs. Forbes! Not that it wasn't right and proper, a lady's housekeeper or anybody important, if she had been with them, since you might say, the beginning - Mrs.Forbes - when she was getting - not

27

so much old, as more responsible you might say - not to do
with age but because you had been with the family, as you might
say from the beginning, quite right too, to the butcher's boy
who might have been grandson to the original Andy or Jimmy who
would have preferred being gilly like her own brothers, but a
gilly was something special, a special sort of person, and why
should the Castle take on town-boys when they had them all there
to choose from? Mrs. Forbes!

"I am Emma Forbes," said Nannie, holding her head high, under
her starched crown. Not that Violet maybe didn't mean well, not
a bad girl really, flighty and pert and she must have been
listening outside the door, because I wasn't really coughing very
bad. Went to her - said Mrs. Forbes was working up a tempera-
ture. Temperature - fever was a good enough word in Dr.
Macalister's day and he was with the vicar at the last and if
they'd listened to him, Edwin -

"Nannie," he would say, "you're neglecting your boy," with
a twinkle in his eye to be sure, "he needs fattening up" and
"Nannie, you must tell me about your reducing method - there's
going to be fortunes in it one day. That's right, Nannie, keep
away from sugar" - as if he'd heard in some roundabout way
about the trouble in the kitchen. But knowing - knowing -
That's what a doctor had or hadn't. He knew or he didn't know.

28

Old Dr. Macalister knew and that young goggle-eyed specialist
at the hospital, didn't. And I told him that he didn't. That's
why she made the excuse of Violet's tattle-tale to say Nannie
was too ill to go to the concert. As if I didn't know the
boy was dead and the minute he died and how she killed him.

She was a match for the lot of them. - with her thrown
in, to boot - the vicar, that is, always being on her side.
So what was one of them - even without the vicar? "There'll
be something for you, Nannie," he said. "I want you to know it's
not to pay you for what you have done for the children - nothing
this side of heaven, could do that." It was all written out;
he said, young Mr. Stetson of Thorpe, Griffith and Stetson, their
solicitors, was dropping in to-morrow; but young Mr. Stetson
didn't. The vicar forgot that to-morrow was Saturday and young
Mr. Stetson had the week-end habit. Not that she cared - it
was the way he said, "it's not to pay you - nothing could do
that," that mattered. Not that she blamed her altogether; she
had other things to see to, and even Dr. Macalister hadn't thought
the vicar would go so soon. Sunday evening, it was and in his
sleep. There was something saved, not much but something.

Dora once said, "Nannie never saved anything, she spent it
all on presents for us."

But something was saved. Not quite lost. It loomed from

29

the deep-sea, wave on wave, advancing, receding. It was Nannie, Nannie, Nannie repeated a thousand-thousand times by querulous or eager or affectionate or listless or even angry voices. The voices rang like chimes or they boomed like great bells,"Nannie - it's not to pay you - nothing this side of heaven could do that."

But there was heaven, wasn't there? And hadn't she heard him read it, in Church too, and more than once, and preached on it too, the very words about their names being written in the Book?

Well - maybe, it was only because that Violet reminded her - not that she was a bad girl really, but you'd think at a time like this, Cook and Violet would put on their best black and sit quiet, out of respect, somewhere, even if it was only in the kitchen over a cup of tea. Mrs. Forbes! They had gone out, she supposed and it wasn't (everybody knew) in a gentleman's house, the nursery that answered the front door. But this last time she would do it, but she would never do it again. There was something saved and there would be someone somewhere. Even if it was only because that Violet kept reminding her, still she had something - to be written - in the Book.

"I am Emma Margaret Forbes," said Nannie.

-----

30

"Nannie" - there it was again. But it was only Joan at the top of the stairs. And Joan was only one of them and what was Joan against her determination to go - go - She would answer the door this last time, though it wasn't the nursery in a gentleman's house, as everyone knew - "where are you going, Nannie?" "You can see for yourself." She did not turn round. Where did Joan think she was going? She walked straight on, crossing a strip of carpet which was a patterned rug that led across a stage to "exit" or "the throne" or "wall before the citadel" or "temple steps" or "the high altar."

The voice kept pace with her steps, as if it had all been practised, measured out and carefully timed by an astute stage-manager. As Nannie took a step forward across the rug, Joan took a step down the staircase, though when Nannie got to the front door, Joan, by some trick of rolling panel or reflecting mirror, was there before her. The overhead light was dim, a point only in the dusk. Nannie knew it was a trick. She knew it was not Edwin...perhaps that Violet was right, there were rings and circles and she felt she was going to fall and the bells chiming and the deep bell, "Nannie...it's not to pay you...nothing this side of heaven could do that."

And there was Joan at that new telephone that stood in the alcove to the other side of the clock, where in the vicarage, the rack stood, where the vicar hung his overcoat and kept his umbrella

31

and sticks. It could have been put in sooner; at the vicarage,
it would have saved him a lot of coming and going, but only now
was it put in, lately, since she worked herself up about the state
of her heart - her heart - and Edwin -

He was wearing the dark blue flannel that she had sewed the
name-tapes in for his school and then ripped them out and then
sewed in new for Martin. He was wearing that old dressing-gown
that had wandered from room to room - and now Joan had it.
He must have come like that to make it seem familiar - knocking
too, tap-tap-tap, not too loud on the knocker, like the vicar
did when he came back late and forgot his key. Of course, they
wouldn't hear it, sleeping the way they did with the windows closed
and the door. And you wouldn't expect a lady to answer the door
after midnight, though it was her own husband coming home and may
be worn out with sitting up with sickness or death - death? ...
saying "Nannie" ... but that was Joan at the telephone.

"You just fell down, Nannie." "I did no such thing."
"What are you doing on the floor then?" "I wanted to see if
that Violet swept the dust like she always does, under the rug."
"Well, Nannie, if you'll sit on the hall-chair, I'll take off
your shoes." Together, she and Joan, lugged the thing called
Nannie to unsteady feet and sat it on the high-backed chair.

32

A throne now! She smoothed back the white cuffs she had stitched
into her best black; she put her hands to her head and adjusted
the starched crown.

She saw in the dim circle of the overhead light, a blue
flannel collar turned back from a thin throat. Blue flannel that
she had sewed name-tapes in and ripped name-tapes out of. There
was the patch on the elbow of the old dressing-gown that might
have been the vicar's or their Uncle Edwin might have left it.
She saw the head with the short hair parted unevenly on the side,
and she saw the eye-lids and when Joan looked up, she knew that
she would be looking into the eyes of Edwin. But that didn't
prove anything.

A gentleman's son, dead or alive, would try to make things
easy and make them so, that afterwards, if you were feeling queer
about it, you could say, I was dizzy; maybe that Violet was right,
and I had a touch of fever - temperature, she called it. He would
knock on the door, but gentle like the vicar did when he forgot his
key and didn't want to wake the house but knew Nannie would be sure
to hear him. Then he would slide through the door, but he wouldn't
do that first; though she, Nannie, wasn't one to get "turns" like
Cook did, yet it might take you unexpected, if he came like that.
He would wear something you knew him by, but something that had a
special reason for being worn, like the blue flannel that she had
sewn name-tapes in and ripped them out of. He would say things

33

so that you would know he said them, but afterwards could say, if
you had a mind to work it out that way, that it was someone else
who said them. He could make himself look like it was his own
sister speaking.

Tap-tap-tap, tap-tap-trrrrap! She was standing now. "Sit
down, Nannie," I said. I tugged at the folds of the flannel
dressing-gown. "Nobody answers the front door." Who did she
think I was, I wonder? One of the older girls or a recalcitrant
Cook or Violet? Whatever I was, I wasn't *her*, I hoped. Perhaps
I was someone not too remote, yet one of them, one of the visit-
ing godmothers or Aunt Flora or Aunt Margaret. "It's only Joan
banging with the poker." But Joan had dropped the poker. "Sit
down, Nannie," she said.

The thing that exploded was maybe, inside or outside.
Though I had heard so many of these things go off, I did not know
if it had exploded inside me or outside somewhere.

But it didn't explode then, though I heard the noise. It
was then, a present that was in the future or it was (a moment
later) a past that was in the future, and when it came true (and
it only came true a few days ago, when I began to write about it)

34

it was a past and present and future, all together.

When I first wrote of Nannie's photographs, I said Edwin
was in the future, though I did not know exactly what I meant by
it or how (if actually, at all) that future could become a present
that would be, almost in the act of "becoming", a past. Past,
present and future - you might say they were chock-a-block and
unresolved in Nannie's mind but you would be wrong. If you came
to sort them out, those states of being, you would find that
Nannie had in her way, solved curious highly specialized formulae,
things too advanced in the way of algebraic and geometrical equa-
tions, even for the books she so revered, that Edwin "learned
from". Edwin was in the future for me in a dim sort of way, when
Nannie brought me the "new" photograph that was faded and mounted
a little lop-sidedly on a dog-eared square of cardboard. He
was the one she loved most, perhaps always had loved most, "my
boy", and I did hear the story of how she stormed the hospital
and I did hear about the rose-tree and I would go and look for it
some day. I would be so very glad to look for it - but I did
not listen very intently to her long-winded description of how
you turn to the right, to the left in Putney Vale and it isn't
as if she had even asked me to the funeral. It was the feud
between the fortunate proudly placed mother and the motherless
dependent. It went very deep. I did not think of it in terms

35

of Greek tragedy. I thought rather of my Anderson and Brothers Grimm - and there was a special rose-tree somewhere and I had promised to go and look at it, as "the children won't even let me go and look at my boy's grave."

So Edwin was in the future, a dim future; "yes, I would be happy to do that for you Nannie. I do go out there sometimes with a friend - who leaves flowers, on her mother's birthday."

The stray bomb had dropped, not so very far away, a quarter of a mile or a half-mile, maybe. The house trembled and then settled, so to speak, on its haunches, as if about to leap, snarling upon the ambushed enemy. But no; the house shrugged, as it were, its shoulders and settled to the norm; the enemy wasn't ambushed in the thorn-thicket or clump of alders or the hedged-in orchard. You could see the various clumps and thickets by day, from the side-window of the living-room. The living-room door was behind our shoulders; it was set at right angles to the dining-room door and faced the flight of steps that led to the landing and the corridor above, with bed-room doors, open or shut, beginning with Nannie's little box-room at the top of the stairs.

This enemy was not ambushed, he was up in the air somewhere and he may simply have been testing straps or ropes or wires (whatever one does test) of some bomb-holder or bomb-rack, and

36

one slipped out, a little prematurely on the way to London.
It was not an important bomb, you might say. Dora was shouting
something to that effect, across the kitchen-garden that sloped
down hill to the little stream. Her voice seemed to come from
that direction anyway, behind the wall of the living-room where
Sheila was smiling above the fire-place, under her 18th century
Wren officer's tricorn.

Dora was shouting, "come back, Edna; that isn't our beat
and anyhow, it's too near for the Four-way cottages."

---

A few weeks ago, Dora wrote me, "poor old Nannie has gone
at last." Indeed she had grown very difficult, very troublesome
with her long, long stories of the vicar and she and endless
anecdotes of the children that we had all heard over and over.
I could have listened forever to the story of Dora saying her
prayers, but naturally Dora having heard it practically all her
life, said, "and this time, I mean it, if I'm forced to listen
to that story just once more, I'll walk out." But Dora stayed
the course and was with Nannie at the end.

I wonder which anecdote of her immense repertoire, Nannie
saved for the last. For Dora's sake, I hope it was not the one
of Dora saying her prayers - in a way, it was almost my favourite.

37

"I was turning the twins' flannel on the fender," said Nannie. "Dora was saying her prayers. She said, 'God bless Daddy and Mummy and Uncle Edwin and Aunt Flora and Aunt Margaret.' She said, 'God bless Sheila and Edwin and Joany and the twins.' She called them proper in her prayers, not Bo and Ba, speaking like it was formal, to God. She said, 'God bless godfather and godmother and please bless Miss Annie who does the sewing and please bless the boy who brings the bread that we speak to on our walks.' She said, 'please bless Daddy and godmother', a second time. Then she said, 'please God, I have a special for to-night.' (On birthdays and Christmas and such, they would ask special).

"Dora said, 'please God, this is not a special night but I want something from you special.' Her hands were folded, her eyes were shut and she looked like a picture of a little girl saying her prayers. I turned round, having turned the twins' flannel on the fender, the better to hear Dora's special.

"Dora said, 'please God, I do erne'tly 'seech you, please do not bless that old cross nassy Nannie.'"

September 1945
----------