‘The Excitements’ Chapters 19-24

“Imagine if that had been an enemy,” Penny reassured him while Josephine got out her chequebook.

“We feel rather responsible for this sudden mania with martial arts,” Josephine told Archie’s mother Miranda as she pressed the price of a new lamp into her hands.

At the time, Auntie Penny was less apologetic. “Everyone needs to know how to handle themselves. You can’t make a hero without breaking lamps, Miranda dear.”

She whispered to Archie, “I knew you’d be good at Defendu. You see, you’re a clever boy and cleverness always wins out over brawn in the end.”

“Do you think I could have been an agent in World War Two, Auntie Penny?” he asked her.

“Oh yes. They would have snapped you up. You’re clever, you’re brave, and you can do a perfect back flip to standing.”

He’d felt himself grow a little taller at the thought.

Then he tried the back flip again—in the garden to avoid any more breakages—and that was when he broke his wrist. He had to wear a plaster cast for the whole of the school holidays and the first two weeks of term. The sisters wrote on it. Josephine drew an old-fashioned Chad cartoon, with its nose hanging over the wall. “Wot no tennis?” she scribbled underneath. Meanwhile Penny scrawled a line straight from Fairbairn.

“There are no rules. Only kill or be killed.”

“Do not encourage him,” Miranda wailed when she saw what Penny had written.

But Penny had encouraged Archie. She had encouraged him enough that when he went back to boarding school in September, he walked a little taller and the rumours that swirled around the reason for his plaster cast made the bullies a little less quick to pick on him. Then the cast came off and Archie’s courage seemed to come off with it.

“It doesn’t matter,” Penny assured him that night in New York. “I had us covered with my brolly and I know that if I hadn’t, you would have stepped in in an instant. You’d have found the strength to defend us both had you needed it. As it was, I rather enjoyed that little episode,” she added. “Took me right back.”

Right back to what, Archie wondered.

 

SAILING HOME to Southampton—thankfully not having to put on accents this time—they heard from other passengers that their outbound voyage had been hit by a string of thefts.

“That’s why I’m wearing all my jewellery at once,” said the American matron who passed on the news.

“You cannot be too careful,” Penny agreed.

Bizarrely, when Archie got home to his parents’ house in Cheltenham and was decanting clothes from his suitcase back into the wardrobe, he discovered a single diamond earring in the breast pocket of his dinner jacket. He had no idea how it got there. He took it with him to his next lunch with the sisters.

“Must have happened when that old biddy from Atlanta gave you a hug on the last night of the cruise,” Penny suggested.

Archie couldn’t remember that having happened.

“I should hand it in,” he said.

“After all those thefts onboard? I wouldn’t put yourself through it. You’ll only put yourself in the frame. No good deed goes unpunished.”

“But it’s a big diamond, Auntie Penny.”

Penny examined it. “Two carats max. She won’t miss it. But if you’re worried, I’ll hand it in for you, dear.”

 

IT WAS FUN It was fun to pull the wool over the eyes of nosey fellow travellers, but lately Archie realised that he’d often felt Penny was holding something back from him too. Many times he had asked her a question about that “admin job” during the missing year only for her to start fiddling with her hearing aid. Did hearing aid batteries really run out so frequently?

Suddenly the chairman of the French veterans’ association tapped the side of his wine glass with a spoon.

“Mesdames et messieurs ...”

Another speech. By the time the chairman had finished talking, Penny had probably forgotten what the journalist had asked her in the first place and it was time to introduce the sisters to the nice people from the BBC.

 

Chapter Twenty-Two

Unfortunately, the interview with the BBC Paris correspondent did not go exactly as Archie had planned. The presenter’s eyes lit up when she realised that not two but four female World War Two veterans had been given the Légion d’honneur that day and she insisted that Davina Mackenzie and Sister Eugenia take part in the recording too. What could Archie say? He could hardly tell her about the rivalry between his great-aunt Josephine and Davina Mackenzie. All he could do was ask Arlene and Sister Margaret Ann to help him gather all four elderly ladies together in front of the screen the cameraman had set up in a back room at the restaurant and hope that Josephine was able to get a word in.

“Archie, why didn’t you tell me this interview was happening before,” Davina Mackenzie barked at him. “Will there be hair and make-up?”

When Archie told Davina that the BBC had sent only a cameraman and a presenter, he found himself being despatched to a nearby pharmacy to purchase a comb, face powder, and a coral-pink lipstick. These accoutrements were for Sister Eugenia.

“I find that grey rather washes me out on camera,” she said, indicating her neatly-pressed habit.

 

THE INTERVIEW WENT horribly, with all four of Archie’s ladies (he seemed to have assumed responsibility for all of them now) talking over each other all the time.

“Well, we’ve certainly got plenty of material to choose from,” was the BBC presenter’s tactful summing up when the recording was finally finished.

As Archie trotted out after the presenter to take her a notepad she had left behind in the restaurant, he heard her saying to the cameraman, “We can’t use any of that last segment. I guess it just goes to show that not everybody gets better with age.”

Archie didn’t dare ask the BBC presenter exactly what it was that they couldn’t use. He could only hope that it hadn’t come from either one of his great-aunts.

After that, Archie decided that it was time for everyone—himself included—to have a little rest. While poor Arlene accompanied Davina Mackenzie and Sister Eugenia back to their hotel, Archie summoned a taxi for The Maritime. En route, Penny asked, “Well, that was a very nice lunch but what excitements do we have for tonight?”

“We ’re going to a party at Stéphane’s auction house,” he said.

“Oh yes,” said Penny. “I knew that.”

But a look of confusion flickered briefly in her eyes, followed by something that looked a lot like frustration.

“Yes. I knew that,” she said again.

Archie hated these moments, when he had to remind the sisters of something he’d already told them several times. It wasn’t the having to repeat himself, but the implications of it that made his heart sink. He wasn’t ready to lose his great-aunts, especially not by increment. Even now they were in their nineties, he wanted them always to be as brilliant and funny as they had been when they first rowed him around the loch and taught him how to swear in pig latin. They’d done pretty bloody well so far. When it came to recognising the creep of dementia, Archie wanted to remain just as deep in denial as Penny was.

 

ARCHIE SAW BOTH his great-aunts to their rooms, Josephine first. As he pushed open the door to Penny’s room, she told him, “Come in for a minute please, Archie. I’ve got something I’ve been meaning to give you.”

She reached into her handbag and pulled out an old 1930s silver match-box that Archie hadn’t seen in years; not since Penny gave up smoking in her late-eighties.

He gasped at the sight of it. “You’ve still got that old thing?”

“Of course. But I thought you might like to have it now.”

When Archie had first known his great-aunts, Penny was still what you might have called a “chain smoker.” She’d given him his first cigarette, when he was nine years old.

“The sooner you learn how vile these things taste, the better,” she’d said, before taking a long drag on the filter to get it started.

There was method in her madness. Archie had eagerly helped himself to one of Penny’s Camels (the brand she had smoked since Algiers), coughed his lungs up, and never tried again. He certainly never got round to learning to blow magnificent smoke rings as Penny could.

Back in those days, Penny had carried that silver matchbox everywhere. Archie liked to help by filling it with England’s Glory when she ran out. He’d been fascinated by it, especially having read in his W.E. Fairbairn books all the ways one could incapacitate a man using a metal matchbox as a makeshift knuckle-duster.

“Never practise these moves on yourself as you will likely knock yourself out,” the author warned. Naturally, whenever Archie could get hold of Penny’s matchbox, he did practise the moves on himself—albeit in slow- motion—in the mirror.

Penny’s matchbox was engraved on one side but Penny would never tell him what the engraving referred to or how she had come by such an unusual item. Eventually Archie came to know that the engraving was a stanza from a poem—“Invictus”—but he still didn’t know how she’d come to own it.

“I know you don’t smoke,” she said as she handed it over in her Paris hotel room. “But you always liked this silly box when you were a child.”

“Gosh, Auntie Penny.” Archie held the box as though it were solid gold. “I’ve always loved it. But why are you giving this to me now?”

“Oh. You know ... Seems like the right time.”

Archie threw his arms around Penny and hugged her to him tightly. “Thank you, my dear, dear auntie. I will look after it. But you can have it back whenever you like.”

“I don’t think I’ll be needing it again.”

“You never know. Have you had a lovely day, Auntie Penny?” Archie asked all of a sudden. “I hope you’ve had a lovely day. We ’ve got so many more excitements before bedtime and lots to come in the future. Auntie Josephine’s hundredth birthday next year. And yours right after that. There’s so much to look forward to. I’m so glad to have you both in my life. I don’t know what I would do without you.”

“Are you quite alright, Archie?” Penny asked. “You seem a little agitated.”

Archie was agitated. Truth was, the unexpected gift of the matchbox had worried him. That matchbox was one of Penny’s most treasured possessions but now she’d decided she no longer needed it? He’d heard about this sort of thing; read about it while searching online for dementia resources. If she was giving away something that had once meant so much to her, she must be preparing to go.

Though the sisters had made that horrible pact to avoid the old people’s home more than a decade before, Archie had never really believed they would orchestrate their own exits. He’d met many people their age over the years. Some people definitely decided their time was up and simply let themselves fade away. That had been the case with his maternal grandmother. But not Penny and Josephine. They’d always wanted to squeeze life until its pips squeaked. Had something changed? Was Penny worried about the memory lapses that had led to her accidentally shoplift from Waitrose and, most alarmingly, that temple of the high street, Peter Jones? What was she planning? He subconsciously patted the jacket pocket which contained his passport and those of both his great-aunts. No one was going to Switzerland on his watch.

Archie had always been able to turn to his great-aunts when he was worried. His parents had too many expectations for him. They were too closely interested in his progress through life; too invested in his being a certain way—their way. With Penny and Josephine, he had always felt as though he could be his authentic self. Whenever he’d shared his fears with them, he’d always come away feeling reassured and absolutely supported. He wanted to be able to do the same for them.

“Can I use your bathroom?” he asked Penny now.

“Of course.”

Running the taps in the basin to cover the sound, he quickly rifled through Penny’s wash-bag, taking an inventory of the tablets therein. He knew her medication regime by heart and didn’t think any of it might be dangerous in excess, besides which Arlene had carefully packed only tablets enough for the trip and one day extra in the event of a travel delay, but ... Could one take too many Rennies? He removed half of Penny’s supply of the indigestion remedy just in case.

When he came back into the bedroom, he said, “Auntie Penny, you know I am here for you—you and Auntie Josephine—no matter what. No matter what worries you have, you can share them with me. I’m not the little boy you rowed around the loch all those years ago. I’m a grown man and whatever you need, I can make sure you have it.” He realised as he spoke that he might be opening himself up to a request he didn’t want. “Unless it’s, you know, something illegal. Do you remember my grandfather Tom? Of course you do. He couldn’t even recognise his own children towards the end but he was always very happy. I don’t think he would have shortened his life by a day.”

“Archie, dear, I don’t think I follow you. Perhaps I’m a little bit tired but ...”

“I don’t ...” Archie stumbled over the words. “I just don’t know what I would do without you. You and Auntie Josephine.”

Penny squeezed his hand. “I don’t know what we’d do without you either. Look at all the lovely excitements you’ve arranged for us today. How many old ladies are lucky enough to be having so much fun in their nineties? Now what time are we supposed to be at the wotsit this evening?”

“Seven o’clock.”

“I’m looking forward to it. Now you had better go and get yourself ready to see your old flame. Toujours gai, Archie.” Penny sent him away with a wave.

 

BACK IN HIS own room, Archie lay diagonally across the enormous bed, staring up at the ceiling as he turned the silver matchbox over and over in one bit. The thought of a future where all he had left of his dear aunts were trinkets such as this made him terribly, terribly sad. He knew that the day would come when they were no longer around—no one lives forever—but he couldn’t let them go yet. Picking up his phone, he googled “oldest woman in the world” to cheer himself up. It was still that French nun, Lucile Randon, known as Sister André, now clocking in at 118. 118? Why, Penny might have another twenty years!

While he was looking at other uplifting stories of grand old dames who had made it past 110, while still variously smoking, drinking, and riding horses, his phone pinged. It was a message from Stéphane.

 

Looking forward to seeing you tonight, mon cher Archie.

 

Sitting up to respond to Stéphane ’s sweet text, Archie determined to shake off his worries about Penny for the moment. He replied to Stéphane, then he checked his emails. He was sure that his very capable assistant Tim could hold the fort at the gallery in Mayfair, but he wanted to be certain he hadn’t missed any urgent personal messages from his more important clients.

Thankfully, there was nothing happening on the work front that required his immediate attention, but there was something else that definitely warranted action. While he’d been wrangling his great-aunts, Archie had received a message regarding the DNA sample he’d sent away in the hope that it might solve the mystery of his mother’s paternity. Now he clicked on the link that led to a breakdown of his DNA profile, excited to know what secrets that little test-tube of spit—ugh, spit—might have revealed.

There were no surprises in Archie’s genetic make-up: Scottish, English, and a touch of Scandinavian. That didn’t mean he didn’t have an American grandfather, of course. There were plenty of people with Scottish, English, and Scandinavian heritage in the US. The surprising part—the delightful part—was that as well as a breakdown of his genes, the report told Archie that an actual genetic match had been found in Canada. That was very nearly the US for the purposes of his GI fantasy. The points of similarity suggested that the match was a close cousin. Would Archie like to be introduced? Too right he would. Archie responded right away.

Oh, it was like Grindr but much more exciting! And with a much higher chance of a long-lasting relationship at the end.

Archie still hoped that his grandfather was a GI, as his mother suspected. Wouldn’t it be amazing if he had heroic World War Two veterans on both sides of his lineage? Archie had loved his grandpa Tom but the possibilities for a new thread in the tapestry of his family history were too exciting. As he got ready for the reception at Brice-Petitjean, he allowed himself a daydream in which he met his new cousin and saw a photograph of their grandfather in common—a GI with a face that resembled his own. There weren’t many aspects of modern life that Archie approved of, but this DNA sampling business was turning out to be a wonderful thing.

 

Twenty-Three

1949

After their disastrous Parisian holiday in 1947, the next time the sisters saw each other was in the spring of 1949. By then Josephine was in her final year at Cambridge. Penny was a social worker in Manchester. They’d been summoned to London by their grandmother’s sister, who’d arranged for them to be presented to the King and Queen. Great Aunt Helena was very keen on the idea of “society” and thought it a terrible pity that the War had prevented the Williamson sisters from having the debutante season that was their due as young women of a certain social standing.

As children they’d looked forward to being debutantes but the very idea of being presented at court seemed ridiculous to both sisters now. All the same, they did it out of respect for the maternal grandmother they had both dearly loved.

Stepping into that glittering drawing room at Buckingham Palace, for a moment it was as if the War had never happened (though of course even the palace had not escaped the Blitz unscathed). Having served their country with every bit as much courage and intelligence as some young men of their acquaintance, Penny and Josephine suddenly found themselves catapulted back a decade and reduced to white-gloved clothes horses and suitable wives-in-waiting, who had to curtsey—curtsey! for goodness’ sake—in front of the Royals. As if that wasn’t bad enough, they then had to shuffle back to the receiving line without turning their backs on the monarch. The young woman who went ahead of the sisters caught her heel in the bottom of her skirt as she tried to stick to the protocol.

The Queen looked bored, Penny thought. As well she might. She wondered how many “nice young gels” the Queen had cast her eye over since her husband ascended the throne. Meanwhile George VI looked unwell. His skin was distinctly yellow.

After the assembled loyal subjects of the Empire had been presented, they were ushered through to an anteroom where they were offered tea and dainty little sandwiches with the crusts cut off. An unthinkable waste, not eating the crusts. It wasn’t so long ago that bread was on the ration. Still Aunt Helena was delighted to have seen her great-nieces properly launched with royal approval at last and was soon in conversation with another woman, accompanying her daughter, who agreed that “such things are important.”

While Helena expounded on the importance of “society,” Penny showed her teaspoon to Josephine. It was stamped with the royal crest. “Dare me to pinch this.”

“You never would,” said Josephine with absolute confidence. “You’re much too good. You wouldn’t even pinch a sweet from Woollies.”

“How much longer do you think we have to be here?” Penny asked. “It’s ridiculous, all the curtseying and shuffling about like demented crabs so the King doesn’t have to see our bottoms.” She launched into a rant that had become familiar to Josephine from her letters. “After everything this country has been through, doesn’t it bother you that the old guard are still trying to carry on exactly as before? We should have known this would happen. We should have known no one would make the effort to do things differently and make life better for the average man and woman. All those lives laid down for this nonsense to continue. All that courage and sacrifice so we can carry on tugging the forelock. I could spit.”

“Don’t though, will you? Not while we’re at the Palace.”

Penny bit into another sandwich and said, with her mouth full, “I can only imagine what the people I work with would think if they saw me gussied up like this. I’m helping a family who were in Singapore. They spent three years starving in a Japanese camp. Three years! The father died from malnutrition. The mother and children came back here after all that and were given a flipping tin of condensed milk by the local council as a welcome home.”

“Nobody here has had much to give,” Josephine reminded her.

“Some people have done OK. And here I am eating fancy sandwiches. I should be back in Manchester, helping that family find a decent home where their fourteen-year-old daughter Jinx doesn’t have to share a bed with her little brother. Jinx is the bravest child you ever met, Josephine. After VJ Day, when the POWs were left to fend for themselves, she had to pull gold teeth from the mouths of dead Japanese soldiers to get money to buy food for her family.”

“Gosh,” said Josephine, putting the slice of cake she had been so looking forward to back on her plate, so she could digest the thought.

“She’s amazing. Not scared of a thing, even after everything she’s been through. I want her to have the opportunities we’ve had. She’s got such grit.”

Aunt Helena was looking for them now. “Girls! Girls!”

“Girls?” Penny growled. “We were officers in the women’s services, for heaven’s sake.”

Josephine linked her arm through Penny’s. “Come on. It’s only one day. You can go back to being a communist tomorrow. Aunt Helena is so pleased we allowed her to arrange this. She thinks she’s done us a great favour by ensuring we didn’t entirely miss out on our debut.”

Josephine pronounced the word “day-boo” with the intention of making Penny smile.

“Look how happy it’s made her to have an excuse to see the King and Queen. And think yourself lucky you didn’t have to dress up in white and spend a whole month dancing with the chinless sons of the aristocracy. If the war hadn’t happened, you’d have been married off to one of them by now. You’d be Lady Chinless Wonder ...”

“So.” Penny nudged Josephine in the ribs. “Is there a chinless wonder on your horizon? You must have met dozens at Cambridge.”

A flame of sadness flared in Josephine’s eyes so briefly that Penny didn’t see it.

“What about that submariner you met in Plymouth?” Penny persisted. “Gerry, wasn’t it?”

“Gerald. Never call him Gerry. He doesn’t like that. I still hear from him,” she admitted.

“He’s not married?”

“No.”

“But he was so good-looking. You must have done quite the number on him.”

“Oh, there you are!” Great Aunt Helena had caught up with them. She frowned at Penny’s crumb-covered plate. “I hope you’re going to have room for another round of sandwiches. I’ve invited a couple of lovely young men to join us at The Ritz,” she added in a conspiratorial way.

Josephine pressed her lips tightly together and did not look at Penny, knowing that Penny would not be happy about that at all.

 

AFTER A HURRIED second tea, Penny bid goodbye to the suitable boys, her sister, and Aunt Helena, and carried on alone up Bond Street. She took off her hat as soon as she thought she was out of her aunt’s sight. If it hadn’t cost so much money, she would have stuffed it straight in a bin, but she thought she’d better hang onto it. She could probably sell it on with an advertisement in the back of The Lady. Waste not, want not.

As she drew level with the shining windows of Devrey, however, she put the hat back on and straightened herself up a little. It wasn’t often that Penny felt well-dressed enough to visit Devrey, the society jeweller. Dare she step inside now? Smiling pleasantly, she approached the door. An attendant stepped forward to swing it open for her.

Inside, the store was empty but for a single sales assistant. The man, who was in his forties, greeted Penny warmly and asked how he might help.

Without quite knowing why, Penny affected a French accent for her response. “I should like to see some bracelets,” she said. “My father is going to buy me a gift for my twenty-first birthday.”

“How nice,” the sales assistant said. “Let me show you what we have. Do you have an idea what you might be looking for? A bangle style? Or links? Would you like it to be set with a particular stone?”

“Show me everything,” said Penny.

It wasn’t long before the sales assistant had fifteen bracelets out on the counter. One by one, Penny picked them up and examined them closely.

She had the sales assistant fasten them onto her arm. They looked especially good against the white gloves that were compulsory attire for the Palace.

“They are all so beautiful,” said Penny, keeping up her Parisienne. “I don’t know which one to choose. Perhaps I could try one on each wrist to compare.”

She kept the assistant talking.

“It must have been awful in occupied France,” he said.

“Yes. It was frightening but not as frightening as it must have been for you here in London, with all the bombing.”

“It wasn’t much fun when they started with the V2s,” the assistant said with classic English understatement.

During the course of the conversation, the sales assistant revealed he had been among the men evacuated from Dunkirk. Penny’s hand fluttered to her throat.

“You must have been so scared.”

“Oh, it was too chaotic to be frightening at the time. It wasn’t until after we got back that I really thought about it. I’m just glad I didn’t have to go back to France. Terrible what happened in Normandy. I lost a cousin there.”

“I lost two uncles,” said Penny, thinking of Claudine’s younger brothers, frozen in time. She did consider them sort of uncles and it was easier to be convincing when your story contained a grain of truth. Of course, had she been telling the whole truth, she could have mentioned that her father was at Dunkirk too. Too risky.

All the time they talked, Penny kept holding out her wrists so the assistant could add and remove bracelets from the stack she was wearing along her arms.

“Not this one,” said Penny, turning her right wrist so that the assistant could unclip a bracelet set with rubies and snap one set with sapphires in its place. Backwards and forwards. Forwards and back. Penny’s French gamine was finding it terribly difficult to make up her mind. Would the sapphires go with more of her dresses than the emeralds? Perhaps she should stick to diamonds? They go with everything. If she could just try the rubies again?

They continued in this vein until the clocks in the showroom struck five. “I must go!” Penny said. “I’m supposed to be meeting my father at The Savoy.”

“You mustn’t be late,” the assistant agreed.

“I’ll come back with my father tomorrow. I think I’ve settled on the diamonds,” Penny said, giving the diamond bracelet an affectionate stroke with the white-gloved fingers of her right hand. “You will be here tomorrow?” she asked.

“Oh yes,” said the assistant. “Just ask for Frederick.”

“Frederick,” Penny purred. “À demain!”

Then Penny walked from the store, bidding the doorman “good evening” as she went. He tipped his hat at her.

As she stepped out onto Bond Street, Penny’s heart was hammering so hard, she was sure that everyone within half a mile had to be able to hear it. Knowing she must not draw attention, she walked slowly and steadily as she could to the junction with Burlington Gardens, even forcing herself to pause to look into other shop windows, then as soon as she was out of the direct line of the doorman’s sight, she broke into a run, taking off the dratted hat and stuffing it into a dustcart as she went.

Safely on a bus heading east, she finally dared to fold down the cuff of her left glove to see the emerald bracelet nestled against her wrist. She’d done it. She felt half elated and half sick. Poor Fred would be waiting a long time for the French heiress to return with her father’s chequebook.

But now what? Penny was overdressed for a visit to the pawn shop but also knew the sooner she got the bracelet off her hands the better. Where should she go to off-load the thing? Jumping off the bus near Hatton Garden, she chose the shop that looked least sleazy, which still didn’t mean that it looked like the kind of place where a young woman who had spent the morning at Buckingham Palace would naturally find herself a few hours later.

The old man behind the counter sat up a little straighter as he checked her out.

“I’d like a valuation for this,” Penny said in her old friend Marguerite’s accent. Her story now, if anyone asked, would be that she was an Austrian refugee. There were lots of them in London and it wouldn’t seem so unusual that they had jewellery to sell.

 “I’ll have a gander,” said the old man.

As he studied the bracelet with an eyeglass, Penny hopped from foot to foot. Why was he taking so long? Perhaps it wasn’t too late to snatch the bracelet back, return to Devrey and claim she had only discovered the bracelet was still on her wrist when she got to The Savoy. They would believe it was an accident, wouldn’t they? No. She had to go through with it. Penny steeled herself by imagining being able to hand a wad of notes to Jinx’s mother: enough to rent a decent flat, buy some decent food, get Jinx a proper uniform for the grammar school ...

Just as the man placed the bracelet back on his velvet desk pad and was about to tell Penny what he’d give her for it, the shop doorbell rang. Penny jumped out of her skin. She turned, half-expecting—more than half- expecting—to see a police officer, come to take her away. She could hardly claim she’d been intending to return the bracelet if she was in the process of getting it pawned. And indeed the man on the threshold was a police officer, in a smart black uniform with a shiny silver badge. But it was much worse than that.

“Bruna?”

It had been a very long time since anyone had called Penny by that name.

 

Twenty-Four

1942

What Penny didn’t know when she used her best Major Fairbairn tactics on Alfred the army man during that long-ago performance of Blithe Spirit, was that she had unwittingly passed a test. Alfred of the roaming hands would not bother her for a date again and Pamela was furious, claiming that Penny had all but ruined her prospects with Ginger too, however in the audience at the theatre that night was someone who was extremely impressed by Penny’s ability to protect herself. This despite the fact that she’d stamped on his foot during her escape.

Since she’d been wearing her brand-new FANY uniform it was easy for Penny’s admirer to quickly find out who she was, not least because by the following morning the incident in the theatre was already the talk of FANY HQ. When Penny’s admirer heard, via his contacts, about her language skills, he was even more intrigued.

“Excellent French,” Penny’s commanding officer confirmed. “Speaks like a local. Spent a lot of time with godparents in Paris before the war, I understand.”

Penny was duly invited to a meeting with the “Inter Services Bureau” in an anonymous-looking mansion block near Baker Street.

When she received the invitation, Penny assumed she was to be reprimanded for the Blithe Spirit incident. Bashing an army officer’s ugly mug against the back of a theatre seat in the middle of a Noël Coward play was surely something one should feel guilty about. Not that Penny did. Not really. Four days on, she was still exhilarated at the memory and enjoying the hushed reverence that now followed her about the FANY dorms. The majority of the girls had sided with Penny over Pamela. No FANY should ever have to put up with the kind of impertinence to which Penny had been subjected! Some of the girls had even asked for a demonstration of the Fairbairn technique.

“We should be taught this kind of thing in basic training,” Penny told them to enthusiastic agreement. By the time she had finished, Penny’s FANY friends were the most dangerous dates in London.

 

AT THE MANSION block, Penny was directed by the doorman to a flat on the fifth floor. She understood that the damage wrought by the Blitz meant that many government and military departments were having to work in less conventional surroundings than one might expect, but all the same, she was surprised to be asked to wait in a bathroom. Should she perch on the loo or on the side of the tub? She chose the tub, thinking it was slightly more elegant.

Five minutes passed before she was retrieved by a woman who did not introduce herself. The woman wasn’t in uniform, so Penny assumed she must be a secretary. She didn’t exactly exude warmth as she invited Penny to follow her to the drawing room. On the way, Penny looked for anything that might give a clue as to why she had been summoned here. There was no FANY regalia and nothing to suggest she’d been called before an army disciplinary hearing either. Everything about the set-up was utterly anonymous. What was this Inter Services Bureau about?

In the drawing room, a man who looked to be about Penny’s father’s age was waiting by the window. He also declined to introduce himself—“We don’t need names here,” he said—before he made Penny understand that the conversation they were about to have was not to be repeated in the outside world. “And I hope you won’t mind if we speak French,” he added.

“French? Pourquoi pas?” said Penny. It was an odd request but why not?

“Excellent,” said the man. “I understand you’re rather good at French. Now, where shall we start?”

Penny blushed as the man revealed that she had squashed his foot as she escaped that fateful performance of Blithe Spirit.

“Perhaps I went a bit too far,” Penny said.

“Pas du tout,” he assured her. “You were under attack and you acted swiftly. Let’s hope the silly chap learned his lesson.”

“But am I in trouble? Is that why I’m here?”

“The incident certainly drew you to our attention. We understand that not only are you fluent in French, Miss Williamson, but you also have basic German and that you’ve been selected to be trained in code and cipher.”

“I don’t think I’m supposed to talk about it.”

“We know. So tell us a little about what you like to do when you’re not at work. Apart from disrupting West End productions ...”

As the conversation continued—all in French—Penny was reminded of her initial FANY interview. Many of the questions seemed irrelevant but she knew now there was no such thing as an irrelevant question in war time. The crossword question, for example, was intended to get an idea of her suitability for code and cipher work. Now the strangers quizzed Penny about her family, though they already seemed to have all the facts at their fingertips. They knew she had a sister in the WRNS and her father was an army man, currently stationed in North Africa. Did her parents approve of her being in uniform? they wanted to know. Where had she learned her martial arts skills?

“I taught myself,” she said. “From Major W.E. Fairbairn’s Self-Defence for Women and Girls. I haven’t had much opportunity to practise.”

That seemed to amuse her interviewers.

“We might be able to change that,” said the man.

“Am I being sent home?” Penny asked then. She couldn’t bear the tension a moment longer. “I don’t think I could stand it if I had to go home. You see I’ve only just escaped.”

“You’re certainly not being sent home. Penny, we’d like to send you on an assessment course,” said the woman, who was obviously not a secretary after all.

“For what?” Penny asked.

“We think we might have an interesting role for you. In France.”

 

THERE FOLLOWED TWO further interviews with the same two nameless people. At the second, Penny was apprised of the “interesting role.”

“You’d be living as a civilian behind enemy lines, supporting the local resistance groups by sending and receiving messages to and from London, arranging supply drops, acting as a courier for documents, that sort of thing.”

“I’d be a spy?” asked Penny.

“Spying is not our business,” said the man.

“We ’re not after another Mata Hari,” the woman told her. “Should you be caught, your status as a FANY officer ...”

“Officer?” Penny, a mere cadet, was confused.

“Yes. Officer ... You’d be promoted. It should give you some protection. But, well, the truth is, should you get into trouble, you will be on your own. You’ll be prepared for all eventualities but there likely won’t be anyone coming to rescue you. Death in service is a strong possibility.”

“A very strong possibility,” said the man, with a nod. “It’s vital work but dangerous.”

Penny nodded back.

“Now you must go away and sleep on it.”

“I don’t need to sleep on it,” said Penny. “I’m ready to go.”

The dire warning had done nothing to dampen her rising excitement. “Sleep on it,” the woman said kindly. “You can tell us when next we meet.”

 

TWO WEEKS LATER, having signed the Official Secrets Act, Penny was on her way to Surrey to join the mysterious assessment course. As she boarded the train, she felt the same sense of joyful anticipation as someone about to start a jolly holiday. She’d been instructed to travel incognito so she wore civilian clothes and did not talk to anyone, though she was fizzing with excitement. Disembarking, she did her best not to draw any attention to herself. She’d been told that if any locals asked what she was doing in the area, she was to say she was working as a secretary at the country pile that housed the new commando training school.

Ha! She imagined what her old headmistress, Miss Bull, might have to say if she heard that Penny, whose fire drill antics had earned such disapprobation, was going to a commando school. How Penny would have loved to see her face. It was frustrating not even to be able to tell Josephine what was going on. But Penny had been told she was to be incognito even to the other people on the course. The less they knew about each other, the safer. Upon arrival, she was informed that from that moment forward, she was to be known only by an alias. She should forget Penny Williamson existed. “So what is my code name?” she asked the officer who checked her in and handed over her new uniform, which comprised fatigues and ominously heavy-duty boots. “Am I allowed to choose one?”

She was not. She was informed that her code name would be “Bruna.”

 

From THE EXCITEMENTS by CJ Wray. Copyright © 2024 by C J Wray. Reprinted by permission of William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.