“Madam always knows,” Mary said gravely. “Why, she told Ruby the other morning, hurry up and fetch those apples, there’s going to be a warning. And sure enough, there was.”
“I didn’t know you were a prophet, Miss Tippett, as well as a cook,” one of the ladies said, putting down her cup.
“Oh, it’s not prophecy,” Selina said modestly, “it’s just rheumatism; I feel it in my bones.”
11
IT MIGHT BE BEARABLE, Eve thought, sipping her tea, if the atmosphere were less like a boarding school. The teachers enjoyed themselves, Angelina, old Miss Hill, and Dobbie the warden, but the pupils, civilians like herself, sat miserably along the wall, the victims of a vast, destructive bureaucracy that was the same in every land. It was impossible to realize what was happening. Angelina had compared raids to a film, but the screen was at least concrete; it was easier, she decided to her amazement, to accept a photographed storm as real than this concentrated bombing. It was the absurdity of it all, the dropping of balls upon the ninepin houses, that baffled understanding.
Even in the few weeks taboos had grown up; the people chattered incessantly as they came in about the events of the day as though this would prevent untoward happenings at night. Beds were arranged in the same order, less because of comfort than from fear that to alter the original sequence might mean a worse night. Thermos flasks marked a solemn pause: afterwards, whether you gossiped or not depended upon your neighbour. War was the triumph of bad organization, Eve decided; there was Joe, completely happy as he never could have been in peacetime, and here she was herself, her world broken, her future darkness and her present almost unendurable. “Now I know just what you need!” Miss Hill’s voice, which was so much heavier than her small, bustling personality, rang out above the rest of the conversation. “Juniper oil; I took five drops myself this morning.” She reached under her camp bed for a handbag.
“It’s just nerves!” Her victim, who had the air of a rather pale mouse wrapped up in a grey shawl, leaned back wearily in her canvas deck chair. “I’m sure the noise must affect us subconsciously.”
“Nonsense, dear, my grandfather used to say, what do you mean by subconscious?—we got along perfectly well without knowing it existed! But I knew you’d upset your digestion, drinking that tea at four o’clock yesterday morning.”
“I seem to get so cold.”
“Well, the juniper oil will put you right. It was a better England, when we gathered our own remedies and baked our own bread. And I wish I had lived a hundred years ago myself.”
“I expect our ancestors had their troubles too.”
“But they didn’t have the radio. Directly the wireless started blurting out a lot of unnecessary news like a town crier bellowing about a mad dog, I knew something would happen. All this gossiping out loud, you could almost call it eavesdropping, is unnatural.”
These wretched women, Eve thought; if old Hill says another word, I shall have to go back to my room. The zipper of her sleeping bag had caught in the fringe of her coat and she tried to focus her attention on disentangling the strands. She would much have preferred to stay upstairs in bed, but it upset the Tippett, and Selina was the only person in the room who was really kind to her. People talked about progress, but when you came down to happenings and not articles in the press, the same old Victorian life went on. They accepted the Warming Pan because it belonged to the kitchen, was domestic, but her own job was taboo. There was nothing people hated more than independence.
The guns came nearer. Occasionally there was a screech of brakes as an ambulance rounded the corner. “That’s just a door banging,” Angelina called, as an old lady, hearing the thump, struggled out of her bed.
“Well, what I say is, these shelter evenings encourage correspondence!” Eve’s neighbour, the only other “business girl” in the room, looked up from the rose-pink linen notepaper case carefully arranged on her knee. She was sixty, the cashier at the stationer’s up the road and came, not from the Warming Pan, but from her own attic somewhere else in the neighbourhood. Selina and Eve had christened her privately “Miss Empire,” for she had nieces in New Zealand, a brother at the Cape; Muriel, “my colleague all the time I was at Jackson’s,” was in Montreal, and there was another friend in Vancouver. Lilian herself (her name was inevitably Lilian) had never left her London birthplace except to visit a married sister in Exeter, but she had exchanged her mind, Eve always pretended, for a post-office guide.
“Did you really look today for cards?” The Christmas mail was the axle around which the year revolved. It was less the fires and the German armies that Lilian feared than the disorganization of the posts; she was forever quoting precedents from 1917.
“Yes, dear, how kind of you to be interested in my spot of worry. I wanted to find an English hunting scene to remind my nieces of England’s picturesque joys, and today, in town, I secured one. A calendar. It does look bright and jolly and typical of England’s winter days, but it is difficult somehow to reconcile it with all this,” and she looked round at the bundled-up forms on the mattresses and chairs. “I would have kept it to show you, but I thought in these times we never know what is going to happen.” She giggled as though she had uttered a rather
