‘Never mind, Linda, you will be a wonderful old lady.’
‘You will be a wonderful old gentleman, Davey,’ said Linda.
‘Oh, me? I fear I shall never make old bones,’ replied Davey, in accents of the greatest satisfaction.
And, indeed, there was a quality of agelessness about him. Although he was quite twenty years older than we and only about five years younger than Aunt Emily, he had always seemed much nearer to our generation than to hers, nor had he altered in any respect since the day when he had stood by the hall fire looking unlike a captain and unlike a husband.
‘Come on, dears, tea, and I happen to know that Juan has made a layer-cake, so let’s go down before the Bolter gets it all.’
Davey carried on a great meal-time feud with the Bolter. Her table manners had always been casual, but certain of her habits, such as eating jam with a spoon which she put back into the jam-pot, and stubbing out her cigarette in the sugar-basin, drove poor Davey, who was very ration-conscious, to a frenzy of irritation, and he would speak sharply to her, like a governess to a maddening child.
He might have spared himself the trouble. The Bolter took absolutely no notice whatever, and went on spoiling food with insouciance.
‘Dulling,’ she would say, ‘whatever does it matter, my perfectly divine Hoo-arn has got plenty more up his tiny sleeve, I promise you.’
At this time there was a particularly alarming invasion scare. The arrival of the Germans, with full paraphernalia of airborne troops dressed as priests, ballet dancers, or what you will, was expected from one day to the next. Some unkind person put it about that they would be the doubles of Mrs Davis, in W.V.S. uniform. She had such a knack of being in several places at once that it already seemed as if there were a dozen Mrs Davises parachuting about the countryside. Uncle Matthew took the invasion very seriously indeed, and one day he gathered us all together, in the business-room and told us in detail the part that we were expected to play.
‘You women, with the children, must go to the cellar while the battle is on,’ he said, ‘there is an excellent tap, and I have provisioned you with bully-beef for a week. Yes, you may be there several days, I warn you.’
‘Nanny won’t like that,’ Louisa began, but was quelled by a furious look.
‘While we are on the subject of Nanny,’ Uncle Matthew said, ‘I warn you, there’s to be no question of cluttering up the roads with your prams, mind, no evacuation under any circumstances at all. Now, there is one very important job to be done, and that I am entrusting to you, Davey. You won’t mind it I know, old boy, if I say that you are a very poor shot – as you know, we are short of ammunition, and what there is must, under no circumstances, be wasted – every bullet must tell. So I don’t intend to give you a gun, at first, anyhow. But I’ve got a fuse and a charge of dynamite (I will show you, in a moment), and I shall want you to blow up the store cupboard for me.’
‘Blow up Aladdin,’ said Davey. He turned quite pale. ‘Matthew, you must be mad.’
‘I would let Gewan do it, but the fact is, though I rather like old Gewan now, I don’t altogether trust the fella. Once a foreigner always a foreigner in my opinion. Now I must explain to you why I regard this as a most vital part of the operations. When Josh and Craven and I and all the rest of us have been killed there is only one way in which you civilians can help, and that is by becoming a charge on the German army. You must make it their business to feed you – never fear, they’ll do so, they don’t want any typhus along their lines of communication – but you must see that it’s as difficult as possible for them. Now that store cupboard would keep you going for weeks, I’ve just had a look at it; why, it would feed the entire village. All wrong. Make them bring in the food and muck up their transport, that’s what we want, to be a perfect nuisance to them. It’s all you’ll be able to do, by then, just be a nuisance, so the store cupboard will have to go, and Davey must blow it up.’
Davey opened his mouth to make another observation, but Uncle Matthew was in a very frightening mood and he thought better of it.
‘Very well, dear Matthew,’ he said, sadly, ‘you must show me what to do.’
But as soon as Uncle Matthew’s back was turned he gave utterance to loud complaints.
‘No, really, it is too bad of Matthew to insist on blowing up Aladdin,’ he said. ‘It’s all right for him, he’ll be dead, but he really should consider us a little more.’
‘But I thought you were going to take those black and white pills,’ said Linda.
‘Emily doesn’t like the idea, and I had decided only to take them if I were arrested, but now I don’t know. Matthew says the German army will have to feed us, but he must know as well as I do that if they feed us at all, which is extremely problematical, it will be on nothing but starch – it will be Mrs Beecher again, only worse, and I can’t digest starch especially in the winter months. It is such a shame. Horrid old Matthew, he’s so thoughtless.’
‘Well, but, Davey,’ said Linda, ‘how about us? We’re all in the same boat, but we don’t grumble.’
‘Nanny will,’ said Louisa with a sniff, which plainly said, ‘and I wish to associate myself with Nanny.’
‘Nanny! She lives in a world of her own,’ said Linda. ‘But we’re all supposed to know why we’re fighting,
