Alicia pretended that she wanted to take Catherine back home with her but Catherine doubted her sincerity. She was still angry about losing her brother and was quite critical as a young woman can be. Catherine’s grandmother was dead and her grandfather was ill and she was afraid he’d die and she’d never see him again. Her English grandfather assured her that the Germans would never dare attack “mighty England” as he called it. Then scarcely ten days after they said goodbye to her mother the London Blitz started.
All the nights of the Blitz were spent down in the local subway stop, called the Tube over there. Because of her grandfather’s importance he had a little office toward the end of the stop as he needed safe access to a phone. MI5 also gave him two very large guards which consoled her grandmother who lived out the Blitz in a state of relentless fear. They stood right outside the door all night long. Catherine often worried about their families but they had been sent to relatives in the country early on. They were also visited once a day before dinner by grandmother’s French cook and his wife Nina. They had a hot plate in the office and Patrice would cook whatever he could scavenge that day from the markets. Grandfather refused to use his importance to get better food than the rest of the city could get because of rationing, but sometimes when Patrice got something particularly good and nondemocratic Grandfather would pretend he hadn’t noticed while eating his sacred lamb chop or whatever it was. There was also an open toilet bowl and sink in the office and an electric transformer against the wall which kept them warm on cool nights. They slept with blankets on thin mattresses that would be rolled up and stuffed under the desk during the daytime. So Catherine couldn’t complain that her family suffered like thousands of others in the Blitz. At first it embarrassed her to go potty in front of others but when you are hearing the thunder of bombs and the walls are shaking you learn to adapt.
The barrage called the London Blitz continued for fifty-seven nights in a row. Even if you didn’t hate Hitler at the beginning you would be insane with rage by the end. Catherine read later that it had killed forty thousand innocent civilians and severely injured about that number. Her birthday fell in October and Patrice managed to make her a cake on the hot plate which made her quite happy, a nice chocolate cake with chocolate frosting.
Catherine felt cheated of the night. She had always loved to walk at twilight and see nightfall, hear the nighthawks and whippoorwills, then stumble home in the dark. Mother would make her take a flashlight but she never used it. The flashlight seemed vulgar in the beauty of the night. She missed most seeing the moon. Grandpa knew this and the evening of the full moon he daringly took her to the top of the stairs to see it. Frederick, one of the guards and a huge Jamaican, escorted them. The moon was distorted by all of the smoke in the air but still beautiful. There were fires all over London from the bombs. They stared at it but suddenly the Luftwaffe dropped the first bombs of the evening not a quarter mile away. Frederick put himself in front of them but Catherine saw the moon turn bright orange from the firestorm. She was both awed and horrified.
Grandpa took her for a walk in the station every afternoon so she could get some exercise. That was when there were the least people in the station. Many left during this time to scavenge for food and to go to the toilet on the streets, as the public toilet in the station was in disrepair. The Red Cross began bringing food which was much appreciated but never enough. Then Patrice was shot trying to steal meat. Nina was bereft but brave and stayed on with Catherine’s grandparents until they died. Way into the time of the Blitz one day MI5 sent a small truck that picked up Grandma and Catherine. Grandmother was very ill at the time and the war effort couldn’t afford to let Grandfather go with them. The truck, manned by a nice American from Missouri, drove them through the rubble of London. There was a special insignia on the side of the truck and no one tried to stop them. The man from Missouri, named Ted, drove them way out a couple of hours from London to Truro, in Cornwall, to Grandma’s brother’s small farm. Grandma wept when she saw the farm because she had been raised and given birth to Catherine’s mother there. Catherine’s heart soared when she saw a big gaggle of chickens in the yard. As soon as she got out of the truck she walked among them crying and speaking soft loving words. A rooster pecked her leg before she could push him away with a foot. It was a solid peck and hurt but she didn’t care. Her great-aunt Winifred, called Winnie, made them an early supper because Ted had to drive the truck back to London before nightfall. Catherine would always recall it as the best supper of her life. Great-Aunt Winnie made an enormous omelet with her homemade cheese and served it with a big plate of very red garden tomatoes. Despite what Patrice came up with Catherine hadn’t seen an egg in a month and a half because eggs were very precious and she thought she had never tasted anything as utterly delicious in her life. Winnie gave her an Easter basket and it was her job to feed the chickens and gather the eggs as she had done back home in Montana. Most people don’t care for chickens, looking at them as food-bearing pests, so everyone was happy when Catherine took over the job. She knew what grand creatures they were and she was pleased to do it. At eighty-five Catherine would still be taking care of her own chickens. When they ate a stewing hen Catherine knew her private name for her. It didn’t bother her. It was just part of life.
Chapter 2
Catherine graduated from Barnard in New York City, the female adjunct of Columbia, in 1952. Her mother had a New York apartment (lavish at that) at the same time and relentlessly stuck her nose in Catherine’s business whenever possible, which was a problem. She spent an entire winter in New York not calling her mother a single time. Alicia pretended to be bereft.
Mother divorced Father after the war and married the man who owned the yacht that had taken her from England to Newport during the war. Catherine came to suspect it didn’t take her mother long to seduce him. She had also discovered another secret about her father aside from his affair with the divorcée, whom she’d seen and didn’t think very attractive. Maybe she was nicer to him than her mother, who was rarely acidic with her children but could be merciless toward her husband, particularly when they were drinking. On pleasant summer mornings Father would have his coffee out on a picnic table in the backyard under an oak near the hedge. He always took along his red journal or notebook and didn’t want to be disturbed. One morning when Catherine was in her last year at Barnard he rushed off and forgot the journal on the table and she noticed it when she went out to the hedge to check a yellow warbler nest. It was wrong but she couldn’t help snooping. To her shock the journal was full of poems he had written. What an unlikely poet this small town banker and bullying father was, she thought. She saw that most of the poems were imitations, not very good, of the English Romantic period of Wordsworth and Shelley but a few terse short ones were fair to good. In general, however, he was too flowery and should read Wallace Stevens, she thought, or William Carlos Williams, a personal favorite of hers.
She wondered how often people had secret obsessions that never saw public daylight. Who acted less “poetic” than her father? Did anyone know besides him? She doubted it. She later read a writer who said, “There must be freedom before there can be freedom.” It sounded like nonsense but she thought she understood that we must be ready for our obsessions when they arrive. Like her own interest in chickens. Mother once told her that when she was about two she put her down in the yard while she was hanging wet clothes on the clothesline. She turned to check on Catherine and a hen was sleeping on her lap and she was petting the cozy hen with her tiny hand. She dated this as the beginning of Catherine’s chicken obsession but Catherine herself viewed it as far more gradual. And her first move in the barnyard when she first learned to walk was to follow the chickens, getting their poop on her baby shoes. Grandmother tried to stop her but she became distraught so they bought tiny rubber boots they could wash off with the hose. In her eighties she still enjoyed tottering out to feed her hens. They pretended they were interested in her until she threw their food, the scratch, and then they only chased their meal. It was the same when she fed the pigs or calves skim milk, which was left over after the cream when they put milk through the hand-cranked separator. The pigs would watch her approach with eager pig smiles and then she’d pour the skim milk into their trough and they’d be all business. The calves in their pen would mooch up to her like long-lost friends, licking her arms with their rough tongues, and then she’d pour the milk and they’d be at it though not nearly as sloppily as the pigs. Calves would at least look up and around during their meal but not pigs. Compared with both, the chickens were methodical but diffident eaters with more faith apparently in future eating.