Lady Baverstoke had spent England’s Finest Hour stockpiling sufficient sugar and sherry to last a thousand years. By The End of the Beginning she was the dedicated enemy of the ARP, the WVS and the Captain of the local Home Guard, to that list she could now add GIs. However, it seemed that the Americans were shortly to be foisted on the deserving French and Lady Baverstoke, sugar and sherry supplies still holding out, felt quite able to do a little fundraising in aid of the victory that must surely be at hand. Putting on a play had struck her as a means of putting her drawing room to a use that was both patriotic and elegant. Surprisingly she had found a ferocious ally in the vicar’s wife, Mrs Emma Houghton. No one could have accused Mrs Houghton of having a quiet war. She had billeted evacuees, rolled bandages, knitted balaclavas and had sent exhausted survivors of Dunkirk on their way armed with strong tea and tart jam sandwiches. And she sat on committees.
That Lady Baverstoke had never sat on a committee with Mrs Houghton before was proof of her powerful, if latent, political instinct. Furthermore, realising that it is much easier to steer a committee from below than to order it from above, she had helped elect Mrs Houghton to be president of the newly formed Amateur Dramatics Committee.
Something very English, the committee felt, would be desirable in the circumstances. Someone promptly suggested Shakespeare. Someone else, perhaps not without a touch of malice, suggested Henry V and the possibility of involving local evacuees. Lady Baverstoke was not the only person with visions of these willing little extras re-enacting the battle of Agincourt through her drawing room. Some kind soul pointed out that the imminent film, with its rather superior resources made a play rather unnecessary just now. No one could remember just who it had been who suggested Jane Austen but everyone, without quite explaining how, felt that she struck the right note; highbrow but not too difficult to understand, obviously. Very English, of course, and perfect for acting in a large drawing room.
Getting enough men for the play had been a problem; nothing but Christian fortitude, patriotic duty and fear of his wife would have made the Reverend Gerald Houghton take to the stage as Mr Bennet. He could now be observed getting in to character for the Netherfield ball scene by showing the greatest possible reluctance. His wife’s glance swept proprietarily over the cast as the Bennet girls trooped in.
‘Lizzy!’ admonished Mrs Bennet, ‘wipe that lipstick off. It’s far too bright anyway, not right for the period at all.’
‘Mrs Houghton’s quite right, dear,’ urged Lady Baverstoke.
‘But we’ll look such frights,’ protested Lizzy. ‘We’re all wearing modern evening dresses and you can’t then say that everything else has to be Regency, it doesn’t make sense.’ She rolled her eyes and gave her mouth a desultory wipe. ‘There, will that do?’
‘For now,’ agreed Mrs Bennet. Now line up for the dance; chaps on one side…oh dear, oh dear we do need more men.’
‘There’ll be two more on the night,’ pointed out Polly, ‘me and Rosalind—’
‘Rosalind and I, dear,’ interposed Lady Baverstoke.
‘Rosalind and I in our hunting kit. The others will just have to dance with each other.’
‘Polly will you dance now?’
‘All right, come on, Alice.’ Alice bounced forward but Mrs Bennet swooped.
‘No, no, Alice must dance with Mr Bingley. It says so in the book. He dances first with Charlotte Lucas. Come along Henry.’ (Mr Bingley was her nephew.) He shuffled forward. Charlotte and Mr Bingley, being sixteen and seventeen respectively, turned scarlet. They were hustled to the front of the stage, touching each other only when and where strictly necessary.
‘Now is everyone ready?’ A figure drifted to the edge of the stage with an expression of nervous inquiry. ‘No, Mr Darcy, off stage, we don’t need you yet, not until your grand entrance.’ The figure vanished with alacrity.
‘Now,’ to Lady Baverstoke, ‘could we have a waltz please? We begin the dancing and Mr Darcy comes in.’
Lady Baverstoke smiled and obliged, with the ‘Blue Danube’. To Mrs Bennet’s irritation she was very good but in her role as director she had more pressing concerns. After a few bars she began to glare towards the wings. The second time she waltzed past she risked a gesticulation and Mr Darcy, accompanied by Miss Bingley, moved to the centre of the stage with the high-shouldered, stork-legged gait of a man who fears that his breeches are going to fall down. He had been outvoted by the females of the cast who were quite determined that Mr Darcy should wear breeches. (Mr Bingley was luckier; simply appearing in his Eton tails which had been deemed quite suitable.) Lady Baverstoke had donated her late husband’s court dress but the late Lord Baverstoke had been cheerfully corpulent and the current Mr Darcy was not. Despite belt and braces, he was in miseries.
The casting of Ken Thornton as Mr Darcy had been a worry to Lady Baverstoke, of course he was terribly good-looking and he sounded alright, more or less, but her nephew Reggie had sniggered dreadfully when she told him.
‘Good Lord, you mean you’re casting a Brylcreem boy as the quintessential English hero?’
‘Well, my dear, what else can I do? You wouldn’t care to play the part I suppose?’
‘No fear. I’ll probably be in France by then anyway. And I think I’d rather be there,’ he added with a laugh.
Whether Ken Thornton would rather have repeated a botched parachute landing somewhere over Beachy Head, which left him with three broken ribs and a few weeks leave, was a moot point. Certainly nothing but his being grotesquely in love with Emily Lowe, who was playing Lydia Bennet, would have induced him to spend the last of that leave cooped up in Lady Baverstoke’s drawing room. Lydia had kissed him twice behind the scenes and promised to write to him. (She had also promised to write to one Coldstream guardsman, a Lieutenant in the Royal Hampshires and a Free French pilot. Her handwriting was not very clear.)
The dancers stopped and everyone stared at Ken. He really did look rather good in court dress. Mrs Bennet bore down on him and curtseyed. Mr Darcy bowed stiffly.
‘There’s nothing like dancing, sir, one of the refinements of polished society,’ she opined.
‘Every savage can dance,’ Mr Darcy snapped.
He had actually forgotten the rest of the line and was trying to act but it sounded like truculent rudeness and not only Mrs Bennet but also Emma Houghton took it as such. She considered Ken Thornton’s manner ‘distinctly offhand’. She was annoyed by Polly’s presence and Muriel’s absence. She sensed that her cast did not really consider this play, her play, important, although her potent combination of cajolery and bullying had already sold out both performances. (Her cast had nearly rebelled about that second performance.) Nearly one hundred people at a shilling apiece, would be squeezed in to the drawing room to suffer the particular martyrdom offered by the church hall’s folding chairs. Two performances would raise nearly ten pounds, which, Mrs Bennet considered, was quite a lot of spitfire for one village. She was tired, having spent all afternoon rehearsing, all morning volunteering at the nearest hospital and a fair portion of the night before sewing up the back of Jane Bennet’s evening dress, which its occupant had managed to split from stem to stern at a party. Mrs Bennet felt that it was very unfair. At the end of the scene she sat back in the armchair, and eyed the other cast members with intent. They drew together instinctively.
‘I don’t know what is wrong with you children,’ she began peevishly. ‘All you do is complain—’
But Mrs Bennet was suddenly silent. The cast froze in a tableau around her chair. Lady Baverstoke, still at the piano stool, put her hand to her mouth as if to silence the tiny ‘oh!’ that escaped it. Slowly every face turned upward.
In another time and place, it is possible to think of a sound like a giant hornet’s thrum, or perhaps the metallic burble of a motorbike passing down the lane. However, none of the people in that room had the luxury of metaphor or distance: instant terror bought instant recognition.
The engine of the V2 rocket chugged on, on, on.
Silence.
One or two people put their hands over their heads, but mostly they stared at the ceiling, the beautiful Angelica Kauffmann ceiling that, for a petrified moment, turned into a fabulous mosaic, before the cracks turned to raining plaster, the delicate carvings to relentless missiles. As everything that was solid and heavy in the world began falling—
They pulled Mrs Bennet out first, protesting furiously that they should have taken her nephew before her. Gradually the rest of the cast was disinterred, scratched and bruised but, with the exception of Mr Darcy’s broken arm, essentially undamaged. The chief fireman came over as the survivors were being solicitously wrapped in blankets. Someone had managed the English conjuring trick of hot sweet tea for emergencies.
The officer surveyed them. ‘You were lucky.’
Lady Baverstoke turned from surveying a house that had not a window left in it with wobbling lip and welling eye. She said, ‘lucky?’
‘If that had hit the house you’d all have been killed. As it was—‘He indicated the crater that had once been a croquet lawn. ‘You’d probably have been all right if it hadn’t been for that rotten old ceiling.’ It was too much for Lady Baverstoke who broke down again. The cast tried to comfort her but the fact remained that her drawing room was ruined and the rest of her house not much better. She was quite inconsolable and perhaps it was a little tactless of Mrs Bennet to declare, after a few more minutes, ‘well, we’ll simply have to move the play to the church hall.’
The cast gaped. Even Lady Baverstoke was silenced. Then Mr Darcy smiled at Mrs Bennet. ‘Maybe a sling will improve my performance.’
Mrs Bennet turned on him a face like the rising sun.
‘Oh, Ken, how noble of you!’ The smile vanished under a tide of relief. ‘Thank goodness I didn’t have time to bring those chairs over from the church hall.’
My inspiration: A Jane Austen novel seems the antithesis of violent chaos, although these novels were written between the Terror and Waterloo. They appear to be concerned with a thin veneer of civilised behaviour among an exclusive minority yet they have survived and flourished among readerships very different from the ones for which they were written. Jane Austen has always been associated with the country house but has proved herself well able to survive and flourish in much tougher circumstances.
CLEVERCLOGS
Hilary Spiers
Yesterday I read 27,373 words. Not counting rereading the cereal packet. It would have been more but Dad took my torch away last night so I had to kneel on my bed to try to read by the light of the street lamp outside, with my head poking through the curtains. That was hard work, because I had to keep listening out for Mum’s footsteps on the stairs. She’s really sneaky, taking her shoes off at the bottom and creeping up to catch me out. ‘You’ll go blind reading in the dark,’ she says. Which is stupid because all you are doing when you’re reading is using your eyes, just the same as if you were looking where you are going or shopping in the supermarket or enjoying the view. Anyway, I wouldn’t have had to read the cereal packet if Dad hadn’t said at breakfast, ‘It’s rude to read at the table,’ and taken my book away. He’s always doing that.
The book I’m reading at the moment (or was until Dad took it away from me) is Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen. Granny lent it to me. Dad flicked through it and said to Mum, ‘Should she be reading this?’ like it was one of those fat books Mum reads on holiday that I’m not allowed to borrow. Mum shrugged and said, ‘It’s a classic,’ so Dad just put it on the counter until I’d finished my muesli. I hate muesli; when I stay over at Gina’s, she has those little packets with all the different cereals in them. Mum says they’re bad for your teeth, but what I had for breakfast had 22g of sugar per 100g, so I don’t think that’s very healthy either.
I worked out the number of words I’d read by using a formula. My formula is one page equals 350 words. You times the number of pages by 350 to get the total, and then add all the other words you’ve read during the day. You can count adverts and things like menus, but not road signs or shop names that you pass every day, because they’re not new. I read 60 pages of Sense and Sensibility today, so that makes 21,000 words already. Then I added all the words in lessons (in books and on the board) and the hymns in assembly. Plus the torn bit of newspaper someone had left on the seat by the bus stop. And it came to 27,373.
I overheard Uncle Terry say to Mum once, ‘She’s a right little bookworm’, like it was something not quite right. I looked it up. The dictionary said Bookworm: An organism, sometimes a literal worm, which harms books by feeding on their binding or leaves. Also a term for a person devoted to books. I think he meant the ‘also’ bit. I like the word devoted. It makes me think of Little Women. I’ve read that too.
I yearn to get back to Elinor and Marianne. Yearn is my word of the day. It means to long or ache or hanker for. I don’t like hanker much because it sounds too close to handkerchief which is not serious enough. Granny gave me a very old dictionary, which looks like someone has picked at the cover with their nails. I think it might be covered in leather because it smells a bit funny and the pages are blobby with little brown marks. I looked up yearn in that and it said: To have a strong, often melancholy desire. And I thought that suited Sense and Sensibility because that is how I feel about it. It makes me scrunch my toes up and hold my breath. I’ve just read the bit where Marianne falls ill because of the horrible Willoughby, which was so terrible I could hardly bear it (even though I think Marianne is a bit of an idiot sometimes) and I wanted it to go on forever at the same time. This is why it is such a good book, because it’s almost making you read it whether you want to or not.
Sometimes when I’m lying in bed at night, all the characters of all of the books I’ve read swim round my head in a mad dance. My head feels like it might burst with words sometimes and then I think that I’ve years and years of reading still to come and where do all the words go? Mrs Finch said in class that everything we ever see or do or read leaves a memory in our brains, but I’ve seen a picture of a brain and it’s so small. And if we can’t store all the words and stories, then how do we know we aren’t just reading the same things over and over without knowing it? That’s why I keep all the books I’ve read in my bedroom so I can prove to myself I know what they are about. Some of my friends test me sometimes, especially Harriet. She says, ‘Okay, cleverclogs, tell me what happens in the book,’ so I do. I tell her about all the characters and what happens to them and the sorts of things they say and how it makes me feel. I did that with The Lord of the Rings, but she said, ‘Oh, I’ve seen that on DVD so I don’t have to read it,’ and even though I told her that the books were miles better and that the films left loads of stuff out, she didn’t care. At first, Mrs Finch didn’t believe I’d read all three books – it’s called a trilogy – because she’d never met anyone as young as me who had. She didn’t read them until she was at university. I told her I hope they have loads of books at university because I don’t want to go there if it’s full of things like The Lord of the Rings that I’ve already read. Although I wouldn’t mind reading something like Pride and Prejudice again (but not straightaway), because there’s so much going on and you can learn a lot about life in olden times. Plus Mrs Bennet is really funny.
Once I’d learnt what a bookworm was, the word kept coming up all over the place. It was in the paper yesterday morning in an article about Jacqueline Wilson and I saw it on the back of a book I picked up in the local bookshop on the way home from school. I didn’t buy the book, I never do, unless it’s my birthday or something, but I love being in there, surrounded by the smell of books. Sometimes I think words just hang around in the background waiting to be noticed and then when they are they get sort of brighter so they stand out. I don’t like the ‘worm’ bit, but if that’s what the word is, then I suppose I’m stuck with it. I wonder if there are jobs for people to invent new words or better ones, because sometimes you come across something and there isn’t a
word for it. Or perhaps there is, but I haven’t read it yet. I mean, why isn’t there a word for those days in September when the dew twinkles on the spiders’ webs in the privet hedge and the air feels like it’s decided just that morning that summer is over? Or the sensation you get when the melted cheese in cheese on toast sticks to the roof of your mouth? I asked Granny that once and she just said, ‘Goodness me, Laura, you do have some odd ideas, don’t you? Sticky?’ and then she gave me a big hug and said ‘Bless’ to Mum over my head. Sticky’s not right: that doesn’t describe the way you can push the cheese around with your tongue like playdough and how the butter makes it all slippery.
Mrs Finch has been having ‘one-to-ones’ with each of us at the moment. One-to-ones are conversations just between her and one pupil, in private. It’s part of the preparation for us moving up to secondary school next year. I like Mrs Finch a lot; she reminds me of my Auntie Ruth. She’s quite large, like Auntie, and very jolly, with a big laugh that makes her face and boobies bounce up and down. But she can be very strict if she thinks we aren’t behaving properly. Everyone knows to keep quiet when Mrs Finch gets one of her moods on. But in the one-to-ones, she is really kind and empathetic. That means standing in our shoes and imagining the way we might be feeling. She said, ‘Are you nervous about going to Haydon Hill? I know I would be if I were you.’ But I’m not, not at all. I’m looking forward to doing new subjects and wearing the Haydon Hill uniform. And anyway, most of my friends are going too, so I don’t expect it will be that different there. Mrs Finch said a funny thing when we finished our chat, ‘At least you’ll never be at a loss for words, Laura,’ and gave a little laugh, so I laughed too to be polite and went to collect my coat and bag because it was home time by then.
I was going to call in at the library on my way home, because I knew I would finish Sense and Sensibility at the weekend and I was worried I wouldn’t have anything to read on Sunday. I want to read all Jane Austen’s books and I haven’t read Persuasion yet, but Granny didn’t have a copy of that. ‘Still enjoying Miss Austen, then, my pet, are you?’ she said last weekend when I rushed back to Sense and Sensibility after Sunday lunch and when I said yes, she smiled and whispered, ‘I think that’s her best book. Takes you to another place, doesn’t she?’ I knew what she meant. She’s taken me to loads of places already – Norland Park, London, Bath, Pemberley, Mansfield Park – so I was looking forward to my next adventure.