The FitzOsbornes at War (59 page)

20th June, 1944

I
’D NEVER SEEN
J
ULIA LOSE
her temper before today, although I can’t say I blame her in the slightest. Toby, it turns out, has torn up the paperwork for his impending discharge from the RAF, and is trying to get the doctors to certify him as medically fit.

‘This whole thing is ridiculous!’ Julia cried. ‘Toby, you’ve already done
enough
. If you absolutely
must
stay in the air force, then go and work at Fighter Command HQ or something. But it’s
insane
to think of going back to flying!’

‘Why?’ said Toby. ‘Plenty of pilots have returned to duty after much worse injuries than mine.’

‘Who?’ she demanded. ‘Richard Hillary? And look at what happened to him! Crashed his plane during retraining! Killed himself
and
some other poor airman!’

‘Hillary’s hands were so badly burnt, he could barely use a knife and fork. My hands are fine.’

‘Oh? And what about your
legs
?’

‘Douglas Bader had two artificial legs, and he still managed to shoot down a couple of dozen German planes.’

‘And then he got shot down himself and now he’s mouldering away in some filthy Nazi prison camp! And that could just as well happen to
you
if you go ahead with this stupid idea!’

‘Well,’ said Toby, ‘it’s
my
decision to make, not yours.’

‘No, it isn’t!’ snapped Julia. ‘You shouldn’t have married me, if you thought you could do whatever you damn well please with no consideration for anyone else!’

Poor Julia. Naturally, she’s upset – she’s already lost one husband in a horrible plane crash. And of course, everyone’s on edge these days anyway. For one thing, we’re all desperate to know how things are going in France, now that the invasion’s finally underway. It began two weeks ago, just as I was starting to think it would never happen. There was a brief mention of ‘paratroopers in northern France’ on the BBC news early that morning, and Veronica and I dropped our toast and stared at each other and said, ‘Is this it? Has it started?’ She had to go off to work then, but I stayed glued to the wireless and, at about ten o’clock, General Eisenhower made the official announcement that the Allied forces had landed in Normandy.

I cried. I thought of those tens of thousands of soldiers struggling up the beaches, battling their way through land mines and machine-gun fire and who knows what else the Nazis were hurling at them. I thought of poor Kick, frantic about Billy, and all the other families anxiously waiting to hear if their men had survived the landings. I couldn’t just sit at home doing nothing, so I went out and walked about until I saw a church with its doors open. I wanted to go in and pray for the soldiers, but the vicar stopped me in the foyer and said no woman was allowed in
his
church without a hat. So I marched straight out again – I could pray just as well without his stupid church – and eventually made my way back to Kensington, where I spotted a lady carrying a bundle of second-hand clothes into the local Women’s Voluntary Service office. So I followed her inside and signed up to help, and it’s a good thing I
did
, given the pressing need for volunteers in London now.

Because that’s the other thing making everyone sick with worry – these ghastly bombing raids, which seem so much worse than any we’ve experienced before. I don’t know if that’s because we’re all sick and tired of the war and have reached the limits of our endurance, or because there are so
many
bombs, at all hours of the day and night, or because the very notion of ‘pilotless planes’ is so creepy. This is the ‘secret weapon’ that Hitler’s been threatening for years to unleash upon us – little robot planes launched from France, designed to fly by themselves to London, where they run out of fuel and plummet to the ground and explode. Actually, I just heard another one go over, about five minutes ago. It’s such a sinister sound – a sort of humming, like a motorbike engine, that gets louder and louder as it approaches. I sit there thinking,
Keep going! Keep going!
Because if the engine noise stops above one’s head . . . well, one’s had it. It’s all over. (Of course, when I say,
Keep going
, I mean,
Keep going until you reach a nice empty stretch of land with no one around, and then explode in
that.) The worst of it is that hundreds of people have been killed already, in just one week, and there doesn’t seem to be anything that can
stop
the bombs. They can’t be shot down over London, because they’ll just explode wherever they land. And there are so many of them that the Warning sirens are useless. If one wants to stay (relatively) safe, the only choices are to spend all day and night in a very deep underground shelter, or else leave London. That’s what I’ve mostly been doing with the WVS, helping organise the evacuation of women, children and the elderly to the country –

Oh, Veronica wants the light out now in the cellar. I need some sleep, anyway. Will try to write more tomorrow, and meanwhile, I must keep reminding myself how incredibly lucky I am that Rupert and Simon aren’t fighting in Normandy, and that Toby is – for the moment – out of action.

28th August, 1944

W
ONDERFUL AND HORRIBLE NEWS,
all
mixed up. Paris has just been liberated and vast swathes of France are now free of the hateful Nazis, who are gradually being driven back towards Germany. But thousands of our men have already sacrificed their lives, and poor Joe Kennedy Junior was one of them. I felt so desperately sorry for Kick – for all of her family, really, but especially her. She telephoned me with the news and kept choking on tears and then
apologising
for it, because she said Kennedys were brought up never to cry. Oh, it’s so sad! Joe was the only one of her family who’d supported her when she got married – the only one who was kind and understanding when she most needed it – and she is devastated by this. She’s flown back to the United States to be with her family, and the one good thing that might result from this awful tragedy is that her mother
might
now start to unbend a little about Kick’s marriage. Thank Heavens Billy has made it through all the fighting in Normandy – he’s even been promoted to Major. Hopefully the Allies will soon have defeated the Germans and then he can come home.

I must admit, I’ve been too busy to pay more than fleeting attention to the news from France. I work twelve hours a day at a community hall, where I give out clothes to people who’ve been bombed, and then try to find emergency accommodation for them, which is basically impossible because half the houses in London are uninhabitable now – including ours. Last month, a flying bomb landed in our garden, blasted an enormous hole in the wall of Montmaray House and tore the roof off our flat. It’s lucky Veronica and I were at work at the time. We did manage to salvage quite a lot of our things, thanks to our wonderful ARP warden chasing off the looters, and now we’re staying with Julia. She’s working at the ambulance station again and Toby’s based at an aerodrome in Sussex. He’s learning how to fly some new sort of plane, but I have a horrible suspicion it’s one of the planes the RAF uses to shoot down the flying bombs over coastal areas, before the bombs reach London. Of course, Toby may have already
finished
his training and been posted back to an operational squadron. He is very sneaky, and he knows Julia would throw a fit if she found out he was involved in anything so dangerous.

I also suspect Toby is plotting something with the Colonel – I overheard a snippet of a telephone conversation between them. However, I haven’t yet had the time or opportunity to investigate further . . .

17th September, 1944

I
T DOES SEEM UNFAIR,
that
I should be so blissfully happy when so many others are suffering. Oh,
poor
Kick – first Joe, and now this. She only had five weeks with Billy before he was sent off to France, and now he’s lying dead in some muddy field in Belgium, and they didn’t even have a chance to set up a
home
together. I haven’t spoken with her yet – Lady Bosworth told me the news about Billy this morning – but I think Kick will be coming back to England as soon as she can arrange it. Billy’s family is very fond of her and would probably be much more sympathetic company for her than her own family. Oh, but it’s such a dreadful, dreadful thing for
all
of them.

And of course, there must be thousands of women being widowed every day, on both sides of the conflict. Why don’t the Germans do the decent thing and
surrender
? Of course, if they were decent people, they’d never have invaded all those other countries to begin with, but the Allied forces are streaming into Germany now, so it’s simply a matter of time before we win the war. Perhaps it won’t be over by Christmas, after all . . . but please let it end very,
very
soon. It isn’t simply that I want all the death and destruction to end, although I do. I must confess, it’s mostly for my own, selfish reasons . . .

No, I
refuse
to feel guilty about being happy! I deserve, just as much as anyone, and certainly far more than people like Hitler, to have nice things happen in my life. And this is by far the nicest, most exciting thing ever to happen to me! Oh, how I wish I could gush about it with absolutely everyone I know! But Veronica’s still in Spain and Anne has moved to Edinburgh. And how could I possibly expect Kick to feel happy about it now – about the news that I am to be
married
?

How strange it seems, to be writing that in my journal for the first time! And yet, not really, because it also feels like the most natural, inevitable thing in the world. But let me set it all down in order, the way it happened.

I hadn’t seen Rupert since the invasion of France started, which was more than three whole months of missing him. I kept writing him long letters, but had nowhere to send them, as he was constantly moving. He wrote me notes when he could, but each time he came to London, I was busy with my WVS duties, so we didn’t ever manage to meet. It was awfully frustrating, but I knew how hard he was working and that his job must be very important. Finally, he telephoned Julia one morning and left a message asking if I could attend some official work function with him. Of course, I didn’t have anything nice to wear, half my wardrobe having been shredded when our flat got bombed, but I borrowed a dress from Julia, and organised a few hours off work, and was waiting for him when he pulled up outside the house. Oh, just watching him climb out of the car made me feel so warm and happy! (How could I
ever
have wondered if I was in love with Simon, when I was nearly always flustered and anxious around him – and that was when I wasn’t feeling absolutely
furious
at him for one reason or another?) And Rupert looked just as glad to see
me
. After quite a bit of kissing, he handed me into the car and we drove off.