Read Online The Great Silence by Juliet Nicolson - Free Book Online
Authors: Juliet Nicolson
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Fingall, the half English, half Irish society hostess, was also unable to see the promised benefits that a British victory would bring. ‘I used to think and say during the war that if ever that list of Dead and Wounded could cease, I would never mind anything or grumble at anything again,’ she recalled. ‘But when the Armistice came at last, we seemed drained of all feeling. One felt nothing. We took up our lives again or tried to take them up. The world we had known was vanished. We hunted again but ghosts rode with us. We sat at table and there were absent faces.’
Monica Grenfell, the sister of Julian and Billy who had both lost their lives to the war, wrote to her mother Lady Desborough that day of how she felt there to be ‘agonising sadness in this calm after strife’.
There had been no armistice celebration in East Peckham in Kent where kindly Elizabeth Tester managed the village laundry. Despite her son Edward’s efforts to be brave, his letters from the trenches had been profoundly upsetting. Mrs Tester sensed the loneliness barely concealed between the jokey but highly accomplished line drawings. Ted, as he was known by all those who loved him, always hada talent, she told her friends, but the drawings and the cheery requests for a pot of his mother’s home-made jam, the thought of which ‘makes my mouth water’, did not deceive his mother. Occasionally his homesickness slipped right through the bravado. ‘I don’t think I shall grumble much about anything when I get back again,’ he had written to his mother. ‘I shall know how to appreciate a good home.’
And then, after 2 October 1916 Edward had fallen silent. At the urging of her husband Robert, on 15 November that year Elizabeth Tester had sent a letter to the Chaplain of the 11th Battalion of the Queen’s Regiment to ask if they knew where Ted could be contacted. The final letter from France arrived just before Christmas, but it was not from Ted. Instead the Commanding Officer wrote to tell Mrs Tester that her ‘much liked’ son Edward had been killed by a shell on 21 October. Two years later his father Robert, who had suffered for many years from a weakness of the lungs, confided to his remaining daughter that with the death of Ted he had ‘lost the will to live’.
A broken-hearted man, Robert had succumbed to the vicious influenza that had started to appear in communities up and down the country. Two of the Testers’ other children, Arthur and Daisy, had never known about the war, as both were too fragile to live beyond their second birthdays. Bobby, the youngest boy, was suffering from a condition that severely restricted the maturing of his mind. But Norah, the eldest child, despite the loss of her brother and her fiancé in the trenches, was eager to help her mother. They both loved children. And Elizabeth had a canny business sense that helped to ensure her decimated family would remain clothed and fed. They would continue their prewar practice of taking foundling children into the laundry. The small sum paid to them by shame-faced relations for looking after children conceived but unwanted would be a help. And if Elizabeth was to face life without her husband, or Ted, Daisy or Arthur, at least she could show her love to those children denied a loving home.
Ten-year-old Tom Mitford, lover of food, books and football in that order, was halfway through the autumn term at his boarding school in the country when the ceasefire came. For three days the pupils of Lockers Park in Hemel Hempstead had been practising singing ‘O God Our Help in Ages Past’ in preparation for a service to be held just after the announcement. A collection would be takenfor the school Memorial Fund, and plans for a memorial window dedicated to the pupils who had died in the war were already under discussion. But in his weekly letter to his mother, Tom was more preoccupied with the cigarette cards that he collected than in the declaration of peace,
Monica Grenfell, the sister of Julian and Billy who had both lost their lives to the war, wrote to her mother Lady Desborough that day of how she felt there to be ‘agonising sadness in this calm after strife’.
There had been no armistice celebration in East Peckham in Kent where kindly Elizabeth Tester managed the village laundry. Despite her son Edward’s efforts to be brave, his letters from the trenches had been profoundly upsetting. Mrs Tester sensed the loneliness barely concealed between the jokey but highly accomplished line drawings. Ted, as he was known by all those who loved him, always hada talent, she told her friends, but the drawings and the cheery requests for a pot of his mother’s home-made jam, the thought of which ‘makes my mouth water’, did not deceive his mother. Occasionally his homesickness slipped right through the bravado. ‘I don’t think I shall grumble much about anything when I get back again,’ he had written to his mother. ‘I shall know how to appreciate a good home.’
And then, after 2 October 1916 Edward had fallen silent. At the urging of her husband Robert, on 15 November that year Elizabeth Tester had sent a letter to the Chaplain of the 11th Battalion of the Queen’s Regiment to ask if they knew where Ted could be contacted. The final letter from France arrived just before Christmas, but it was not from Ted. Instead the Commanding Officer wrote to tell Mrs Tester that her ‘much liked’ son Edward had been killed by a shell on 21 October. Two years later his father Robert, who had suffered for many years from a weakness of the lungs, confided to his remaining daughter that with the death of Ted he had ‘lost the will to live’.
A broken-hearted man, Robert had succumbed to the vicious influenza that had started to appear in communities up and down the country. Two of the Testers’ other children, Arthur and Daisy, had never known about the war, as both were too fragile to live beyond their second birthdays. Bobby, the youngest boy, was suffering from a condition that severely restricted the maturing of his mind. But Norah, the eldest child, despite the loss of her brother and her fiancé in the trenches, was eager to help her mother. They both loved children. And Elizabeth had a canny business sense that helped to ensure her decimated family would remain clothed and fed. They would continue their prewar practice of taking foundling children into the laundry. The small sum paid to them by shame-faced relations for looking after children conceived but unwanted would be a help. And if Elizabeth was to face life without her husband, or Ted, Daisy or Arthur, at least she could show her love to those children denied a loving home.
Ten-year-old Tom Mitford, lover of food, books and football in that order, was halfway through the autumn term at his boarding school in the country when the ceasefire came. For three days the pupils of Lockers Park in Hemel Hempstead had been practising singing ‘O God Our Help in Ages Past’ in preparation for a service to be held just after the announcement. A collection would be takenfor the school Memorial Fund, and plans for a memorial window dedicated to the pupils who had died in the war were already under discussion. But in his weekly letter to his mother, Tom was more preoccupied with the cigarette cards that he collected than in the declaration of peace,
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