I knew the answer from reading about it—the Moulten sisters were received as heroes by the king after the war—but I asked anyway, “Then what did you do?”
Edina replied, “I had never favored our window curtains, had you, Edith?”
She giggled. “No, not at all. So we set fire to them. Then to the sofa, then to newspapers we were collecting for salvage. We left the cottage just in time.”
Edith completed their story. “Soon the roar of the fire drowned out the Germans’ screaming. We heard the pinging of the piano strings as they snapped from the heat. Our home burned to the foundation. We lived with our brother in Crawley until the war ended. We miss that little cottage. But perhaps less so than we should, knowing there are two cooked Germans in the cellar.” She chuckled, “Cooked, and basted in port.”
These accounts have been representative samples, no more dramatic than a thousand others. English civilians did not take kindly to the Germans, and throughout Kent and Sussex they extracted their small tolls from the invaders.
20
“When did she begin to love him?”
The British historian Joseph Windham asked me the question after the war. He was working on a biography of Lady Anne Percival’s father, Earl Selden.
I answered rather testily that she never did love General Clay, that she was incapable of the emotion, that the very notion was preposterous. Lady Anne did not love, she devoured. And if she appeared smitten, it was only because she possessed a singular talent for presenting herself as she wished. Her infatuation was an act to suit her purposes, murky as those purposes were.
Windham replied, “Now that you’ve vented your spleen, I’ll ask again. When did she begin to love him?”
If love existed, it must have had a starting point, and I can recall several times when I may have witnessed its inception in Lady Anne.
It may have been at a British Army military hospital in Glasgow, which we visited during one of the general’s countless tours before the invasion. The hospital, a somber brick structure built as a woolen mill 150 years before, was filled with soldiers wounded in the North Africa campaign. Lady Anne had been appointed to something called the Women’s Hospital Advisory Committee and claimed it gave her the right to join us. On that day she led us into the long-term convalescence ward. British soldiers struggled upright in their beds or turned their heads toward us. A few rose unsteadily and saluted the general. They grinned at the honor. General Clay loudly greeted them, then walked slowly along the line of beds, speaking with them one at a time, shaking hands, returning salutes, patting shoulders.
He came to one soldier who was staring at the ceiling. A sheet covered him to his neck. He rapidly opened and closed his eyes and wet his lips in a mysterious syncopation, but seemed oblivious to our visit. Clay stopped at the end of his bed. Lady Anne, the British colonel who was the hospital director, and I gathered around him. Clay asked, “Tell me where the German got you, soldier.”
The wounded man did not respond, but a serviceman in a bed across the aisle called out, “The Germans had nothing to do with it, General. The chap is taking a few weeks off from the war, is all. A bit of a holiday.”
Another soldier, with a leg elevated in a cast, said loudly, “He’s supposed to be shell-shocked, general. But he eats fine, whatever is served. And he reads his mail. And you know how dreary it is on the front, sleeping on rocks and cactus, and having to put up with those pesky Germans.”
Someone else shouted, “Pigeon-hearted bastard.”
General Clay pulled at his chin. He lifted the chart from the foot of the bed and glanced at it. Then he leaned closer to the shell-shocked soldier. He said in intimate tones, yet sufficiently resonant for all to hear, “I’ve kept this a secret for decades, Private Sidwell, but this same thing happened to me in the Great War.”
A chorus of laughter came from the British soldiers.
One shouted, “Sure it did, General.”
“Right-o, General,” said another. “And I’m the Prince of Wales, just as soon as I can convince my doctor.”
The soldier with the elevated leg chortled, “You’re a real tonic, General. A regular Ben Lyon.”
Lyon was the radio comedian who appeared with his wife, Bebe Daniels, on the show Hi Gang!
Clay grinned at them, but held up a hand. “Let me finish.” He turned back to Private Sidwell. “It didn’t happen during the first artillery battle I was in, but the second, which I’ve always found curious. I was a battery officer, and we were trading rounds with the German. The sound was unbearable. It just collapsed my will. I was shaking so badly I could hardly give the firing sequence. And then one of my pieces was taken out by German artillery, splattered my gunners all over French soil.”
General Clay stood stiffly to his full height. He gazed at the ward wall, his mouth turning down. He seemed lost in the remembrance. “And then I just sat down on the edge of a crater and stayed there. I couldn’t move. I was taken to a hospital in Rouen and stayed there for three weeks.”
Lady Anne stared at him, indiscreetly, I thought.
“The dunderheads in the army didn’t understand the injury back then, and I would’ve been drummed out of the service if Alex Hargrave hadn’t covered for me. He lied on all sorts of reports and finagled the doctors at the hospital into doing the same. To this day, only four or five people know what actually happened to me, and where I was for those weeks.”
He turned to the wounded soldiers. He put an edge of mock belligerence in his voice, “And now you Tommies know, so don’t go talking it around, or my reputation will be shot.”
They called out, “Yes, sir.”
“I was hurt badly, but there was no blood. Same as this man here.”
“Yes, sir.”
The general may not have convinced them, but at least they quieted. Private Sidwell, blinking and running his tongue over his lips, gave no indication he had heard Clay. We moved down the aisle between the beds. The general spoke briefly with dozens of wounded soldiers. All the while I felt the deflected heat of adoration from Lady Anne, who at one point stumbled over a lamp cord because she had been unable to remove her eyes from the general.
I add, with admitted petulance, that I have searched records of the British war government and auxiliary organizations, and find no reference whatever to the Women’s Hospital Advisory Committee. I suspect she invented it to accompany him. The committee may not have been the only invention that day. I thoroughly searched General Clay’s records from the first war, and find no mention of a stay at a hospital in Rouen. Either Alex Hargrave superbly covered up the incident, or General Clay concocted the story on the spot at the Glasgow hospital.
This hospital tour may have been when her love began, or it may have been when General Clay and Lady Anne visited the lambing station on the earl’s farm. The general knew nothing about sheep and may have thought he was about to witness a shearing. As always, I followed at their heels.
The station was a squat barn with one wall open to the pasture. Stalls were filled with straw. The spring scent of alfalfa and the bleating of the Hampshire ewes and their newborn filled the barn. Three farmhands touched their caps to Lady Anne.
She led us along the sheep shed. “Have you ever seen a lamb come into the world, Wilson?”
The general looked sharply at her. “Born? I’ve never seen anything being born.”
“It’s an unforgettable experience,” she said.
The general shook his head. “I’ve gone a long way out of my way to avoid watching anything being born.”
“I thought you spent your childhood in the farm country,” she chided.