GIRL: She said she was sad. That’s why she was drinking.
WOMAN: I’m sad. We’re all sad – but we don’t carry on like that.
GIRL: She could’ve been a lady’s maid, she said. Five pound a year and all her grub. Now she makes five pound a week, she says.
WOMAN: She’ll end up in a rookery. I bet my life. Selling herself for thruppence to a shoe-black.
GIRL: She’s a good soul, Lizzie.
WOMAN: She’s half mad and three parts drunk.
A subject for Mr Strindberg, perhaps, were he still with us. The river of sex flows as strongly in London as it does in Vienna.
August the fifth. War was declared on Germany last night at 11.00 p.m., Greville said when he came in. I went out this morning to find a paper but they had all been sold. This evening we had barely twenty people in the auditorium but we performed the play with as much zest as if it had been a full house. Rutherford very cast down – says we’re bound to close at the end of the week. So, the world will be denied Lysander Rief and Gilda Butterfield in August Strindberg’s Miss Julie. Gilda was upset. I said German troops had advanced into Belgium and attacked Liège, a fact that made our little theatrical problems and regrets seem insignificant. ‘Not to me,’ she said fiercely. For a second I thought she was going to slap my face.
7th August. I see in the paper that HMS Amphion has been sunk by a mine off Yarmouth. For some odd reason I wondered if the Amphion had been Fyfe-Miller’s ship – and that thought suddenly brought the war alive to me in a way that days of shouting headlines hadn’t. It was personalized in the shape of an imagined Fyfe-Miller drowned at sea off Yarmouth. It made me cold and fearful.
I was being measured for a new suit at my tailor’s yesterday and I said to Jobling that I rather fancied a ‘waist-seam’ coat. ‘Very American, sir,’ he said, as if that was an end to the matter. I said I thought the waist-seam was flattering. ‘You’ll be wanting slanting pockets next,’ Jobling said, with a chuckle. Not a bad idea, I retorted. ‘Your father would turn in his grave, sir,’ he said and went on to talk about Grosvenor cuffs and double collars. And that was that. My father’s ghost is still determining what I can wear.
A letter from Hettie arrived in this afternoon’s post. The stamp was Swiss.
My dear Lysander,
Isn’t this the most terrible business? I cry all day at the awful folly of it all. Why would Britain declare war on us? What has Vienna done to London or Paris? Udo says this is a purely Balkan affair but other countries are just using it as an excuse. Is this true?
I’m very, very frightened and I wanted to send this letter to you with all urgency to tell you what I have decided to do in these awful circumstances. My position is difficult, as you will be well aware. I am a British subject living in a country with which Britain is in a state of war. Udo has offered to adopt Lothar, the better to protect him and to make his nationality secure. I may be interned but Lothar would be safe – so of course I agreed. Once the papers are drawn up he will take Udo’s name and become ‘Lothar Hoff’. It’s for the best, my dear one – I can and must only think of Lothar, I mustn’t think of myself nor of your feelings, though I can easily imagine them.
Lothar is very well, a happy healthy boy. I wish us all happier and more secure times.
With love from us both, Hettie.
Hamo tried to console me – he was very affectionate and warm. Think of the little chap, he said, it’s for the best. I came down last night (Sunday) to stay in Winchelsea with Hamo and Femi. Hamo is thinking of adopting Femi himself, he said, as there has already been fighting in West Africa between the British and the German colonies. Togoland has been invaded by British and Empire forces.
Last night we stayed up late, talking. I said that I assumed all his plans for making a trip to Vienna must now be abandoned.
‘No can do, dear boy,’ he said. ‘But as soon as this damn war ends, I’ll be there. With a bit of luck it might not last that long.’
I sit in the spare bedroom, under the eaves of this little cottage, writing this up, wondering what to do as everything seems to conspire against me. There is a stiff gale blowing up tonight, ripping the first leaves off the trees. I suppose I should try to find another job as the theatres show no sign of closing but the thought of auditions makes me feel sick. From somewhere in the lane the lid of a dustbin has been lifted off and sent clattering and spinning down the alleyway, its tinny percussion discordant and unnerving beneath the sudden giant rushings of the wind off the sea.
7. Illegal and Enemy Aliens
A fine rain had started falling as the lorry shuddered to a halt outside the camp. Lysander and the new detachment of guards jumped down from the rear.
‘Fuck me,’ Lance Corporal Merrilees said. ‘Fucking rain.’
‘Meant to clear up this afternoon,’ Lysander said, taking his cap off and looking up at the mass of grey clouds above his head. Cold drops hit his upturned face.
‘All right for you, Actor, ain’t it? All fucking warm and cosy.’
Merrilees led his section off around the perimeter wire and Lysander kicked the mud of his boots before going up the steps into the clubhouse.
The Bishop’s Bay Internment Camp had been the Bishop’s Bay Golf Club before the war started and before it was requisitioned by the Home Office as a holding facility for ‘illegal and enemy aliens’. A few miles west down the coast from Swansea, round the headland from the Mumbles, it had been transformed into a fenced prison camp of some forty wooden huts, each sleeping twenty people on bunk beds, constructed along the length of the eighteenth fairway. The clubhouse became the administrative centre and the members’ lounge was reconfigured into the camp’s canteen, capable of serving three sittings of two hundred prisoners a time, if required. The camp’s population fluctuated between four hundred and six hundred internees, men, women and children. Other areas of the golf course had been wired off as football and hockey pitches but there was not much demand for these, Lysander had noticed. The prevailing mood amongst the internees was one of glum injustice; grumbling and petulant lethargy their principal pastimes.
Lysander knocked on the camp-commandant’s door. ‘Capt. J. St.J. Teesdale’ it said on a temporary sign outside. Lysander stepped inside on Teesdale’s cry of ‘Enter!’ and forced himself to smile and say, ‘Good morning, sir.’ Teesdale had arrived only two weeks before and was finding his new authority something of a trial and a burden. He was nineteen years old and having some trouble growing his first moustache.
‘Morning, Rief,’ he said. ‘Nasty-looking one for the middle of May.’
‘Ne’er cast a clout ’til May be out,’ Lysander said.
‘Say again?’
‘An ancient adage, sir. Summer doesn’t start until May is over.’
‘Right.’ He looked at some papers on his desk. ‘I’m afraid it’s Frau Schumacher, first up. Insisting on seeing a doctor again.’
Lysander collected his ledger and a bundle of files and empty forms and followed Teesdale from the Club Secretary’s office to the ‘19th Hole’ bar. Here a couple of middle-aged typists from Swansea coped with the camp’s administration, with the help of a solitary telephone, seated at desks at one end of the long room, while at the other, in front of a wide bay window, was a long trestle table where the day’s meetings and interviews took place. Through the window was a panorama of a choppy Bristol Channel with its massed continents of clouds – mouse-grey and menacing – beyond the links and the first tee. The walls were covered with framed photographs of golfers past – foursomes and monthly medal winners and amateur champions of the South Wales golfing fraternity holding silver trophies aloft. The bar had been cleared of its bottles and glasses, its shelves filled with rows of cardboard box files, one for each internee. Lysander found it one of the most depressing rooms he’d ever occupied.