Anthony Powell: Dancing to the Music of Time by Spurling Hilary

Author:Spurling, Hilary
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241256558
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2017-10-04T16:00:00+00:00

Lieutenant Powell defending Gosford Castle.

Four days later German armies crossed the border into the Netherlands, which surrendered on 15 May. Belgium was defeated by the end of the month. The Germans pushed on across France, reaching the Channel ports, forcing the British army into the sea at Dunkirk, and entering Paris on 14 June, after which France collapsed. Henry Lamb wrote to say he had seen the same armies fighting over the same ground as a young army doctor in the first war (‘all the ghastly memories … which I had succeeded in keeping sealed up in forgetfulness have come pouring out in an overwhelming flood’). Constant Lambert and the Sadler’s Wells Ballet, dispatched on a goodwill tour of the Netherlands by the British Foreign Office in May, joined the tens of thousands fleeing for the Channel coast before Hitler’s racing tanks. ‘I had to stop in the middle of writing to Freddie Ashton as it suddenly struck me that the poor old ballet must be in the thick of things,’ wrote Violet. Miranda Christen had sailed with her own new baby at the beginning of the year to join her husband in Java, where he assured her they would be perfectly safe so long as the Dutch avoided defeat by Germany. ‘Poor old Miranda, I’m afraid she really has bought it this time,’ wrote Violet.

She herself had nothing in prospect and nowhere to go. Her boarding house was threatened with requisition, and in any case the Morris motorworks made Oxford an obvious target for German bombs. London was too dangerous, Dynevor too remote. She had been invited to stay by her sister Julia, who had married a dashing if unreliable and impoverished husband called Robin Mount, and was currently bringing up her own first baby in a cramped cottage at Chitterne in Somerset, too close for comfort to the military installations on Salisbury Plain. Violet’s only other option was to share with John Heygate’s wife Gwyneth, who had rented a house for the summer at Boxted in Sussex near Tunbridge Wells, directly under the flight path of bombers heading for London. On 24 May Tony summed up her dilemma in an impersonal situation report, making it clear that Violet, on her own with a four-week-old baby, faced alternatives that were all unsafe or unsatisfactory or both. ‘My childhood had been blighted by the First World War,’ she wrote sombrely, ‘and the Second World War … cast a black cloud over my first days of motherhood.’

On 4 June she moved in with Gwyneth, who had a small son called George and a baby, Richard, three months older than Tristram. Two bombs fell the same day on Ashdown Forest, near enough for Gwyneth to hear them explode. She was a small cool blonde, always known as Gwyfkin, with film-star looks (she had abandoned a promising career after her first film to marry John), and a conventional outlook that grated on Violet, but she had a nursemaid to look after the children, a housemaid to cook, clean and wash nappies, and the formidable management skills of a good general.

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