Connie Willis - Blackout

THE VICAR CAME TO GIVE EILEEN AND THE REST OF THE staff their first driving lessons the day after she returned from Oxford. “Aren’t you frightened?” Una asked Eileen.

“No,” she said, taking off her apron. “I’m certain the vicar’s an excellent teacher.” And, thanks to my time in Oxford, I shall be an excellent pupil.

In spite of her having had only two days and no help from Polly, she’d learned not only how to get into the Bentley, but how to start it and how to work the gear stick and the hand brake. Just before she’d come back, she’d driven it along the High, up Headington Hill, and safely back again. “I rather think these lessons will be fun,” she told Una and went out to the car. But it wasn’t the Bentley, it was the vicar’s battered Austin.

“Her ladyship had a WVS meeting in Daventry,” the vicar explained.

And she didn’t want her car damaged, Eileen thought.

“But driving one car is much like driving another,” the vicar said.

Not true. The clutch pedal on the Austin seemed to operate on an entirely different principle. It stalled no matter how slowly Eileen let it out-if she could get it started in the first place. Either the engine refused to turn over, or she flooded it. When she finally did succeed in starting it and putting it in gear, it died before she’d gone ten yards. “The old girl’s rather temperamental, I’m afraid,” Mr. Goode said, smiling at her. “You’re doing very well.”

“I thought clergymen weren’t supposed to tell lies,” she said, and after three more tries managed to nurse the Austin all the way to the end of the drive. But compared to Una, who couldn’t even remember which foot to put on which pedal and burst into tears every time the vicar attempted to coach her, she was positively brilliant.

Samuels was even worse, convinced he could master “that bloody car” by brute force and blasphemy, and Eileen was surprised the vicar didn’t abandon the whole project, Lady Caroline or no Lady Caroline. But he kept grimly on, in spite of his students and the Hodbins, who’d decided it was the funniest thing they’d ever seen, and who raced home from school on lesson days to sit on the steps and heckle.

“What do they think they’re doin’?” Alf would ask Binnie in a loud voice.

“Learnin’ to drive, for when the jerries invade.”

Alf would watch the proceedings for a moment and then innocently ask, “Whose side are they on?” and they would both collapse in merriment.

I must get back to Oxford on my next half-day out and practice on an Austin, Eileen thought, but she didn’t make it. On Monday morning four new evacuees arrived, and she had no chance to get to the drop, and a week later evacuees they’d had before began to come back-Jill Potter and Ralph and Tony Gubbins-all of whom joined the Hodbins on the steps to watch the driving lessons and shout taunts. “Get a ’orse!” Alf yelled during a particularly bad lesson of Una’s. “You’d ’ave better luck teaching it to drive than this lot, Vicar!”

“I think the vicar should teach me to drive,” Binnie said. “I’d be heaps better than Una.”

No doubt, Eileen thought, but a Hodbin version of Bonnie and Clyde, with Binnie driving the getaway car, was the last thing the vicar needed. “If you truly want to help win the war, go collect paper for the scrap drive or something,” she told the Hodbins, only to find out the next day they’d “collected” Lady Caroline’s appointment book, a first folio of Shakespeare, and all of Mrs. Bascombe’s cooking receipts.

“They’re impossible,” she told the vicar when he came for her next lesson.

“Our faith teaches us that no one is beyond the hope of redemption,” he said in his best pulpit manner, “although I must admit the Hodbins test the limits of that belief,” and proceeded to show her how to reverse the car. She felt guilty that he was spending so much time teaching her. He should be working with someone who’d be here when the war began in earnest, and she only had a few weeks left. She comforted herself with the knowledge that Backbury had had almost no need for ambulance drivers. It hadn’t been bombed, and only one plane had crashed-in 1942, a German Messerschmitt west of the village. The pilot had died on impact and hadn’t needed an ambulance. And at any rate, petrol rationing would soon prevent anyone from driving anything.

She doubted extra lessons would help Una or Samuels, and Mrs. Bascombe was still staunchly refusing to be taught. “I’m willing to do my bit to help win the war same as the next one,” she told the vicar when he tried to persuade her, “but not in an automobile, and I don’t care what her ladyship wants.”

“I don’t mind automobiles,” Binnie said. “You could give me lessons, Vicar.”

“What do you think?” he asked Eileen later. “She is a quick study.”

Which was putting it mildly. “I think she’s dangerous enough on foot,” Eileen said, but after a week of her stealing signboards off front gates (“We had to,” she said when caught with Miss Fuller’s Hyacinth Cottage sign, and showed Eileen a year-old Ministry of Defence directive ordering all signposts to be taken down), Eileen decided driving might be the lesser of two evils.

“But you’re to do exactly as the vicar says,” she told Binnie sternly, “and you’re not to set foot in the Austin except during driving lessons.”

Binnie nodded. “Can Alf ’ave lessons, too?”

“No. He’s not allowed to be in the car with you at all. Is that clear?”

Binnie nodded, but when she and the vicar pulled up to the manor after her first tentative trip down the drive, Alf was leaning over the backseat. “We found him at the end of the drive,” the vicar explained. “He’d twisted his ankle.”

“’E ain’t able to walk at all,” Binnie said.

“A likely story,” Eileen said, opening the back door. “You do not have a sprained ankle, Alf. Out. Now.”

Alf got out, wincing. “Ow! It ’urts!” Binnie helped him limp around to the servants’ entrance, leaning heavily on her.

“They’re quite good,” the vicar said, watching them. “They should consider going on the stage.” He grinned at Eileen. “Especially since the sprained ankle was a last-minute improvisation. We came round the curve rather suddenly and caught him preparing to spread tacks on the drive.”

“No doubt to puncture the Germans’ tires when they invade.”

“No doubt,” he said. He looked after Binnie, who was half-carrying Alf inside. “But to prevent any further attempts on my tires, I think it’s best I keep him under my eye during future lessons. You needn’t worry, I have no intention of letting him behind the wheel, and besides, he’s not tall enough to reach the pedals.” He smiled. “Binnie’s actually quite good. I’m glad you suggested I give her lessons.”

Yes, well, we’ll see, Vicar, Eileen thought, but even though Binnie drove much too fast-“Ambulances got to go fast, to get to ’ospital before the people die,” she said-the lessons otherwise proceeded without a hitch, and Eileen was immensely grateful for at least some time when she needn’t worry what the Hodbins were up to, because four new evacuees had arrived, one of whom was a bed wetter and all of whom had arrived in rags. Eileen spent every spare moment mending and sewing on buttons.

There weren’t many spare moments, though. Lady Caroline had decided everyone should learn to use a stirrup pump, and announced that the vicar was going to give them lessons in how to disable an automobile by removing the distributor head and leads. In between, Eileen attempted to keep an eye on Alf and Binnie, who’d stopped heckling Una’s driving lessons and moved on to more ambitious projects, such as digging up Lady Caroline’s prize roses to plant a Victory garden, and Eileen began counting the days to her liberation.

When she had the time. Lady Caroline’s son Alan arrived home on holiday from Cambridge with two friends, which meant even more laundry and beds to make up, and, as the war news grew worse, more and more evacuees arrived. By the end of March, there were so many the manor couldn’t take them all. They had to be billeted in the surrounding villages, and in every cottage and farm in the area.

Eileen and the vicar used her driving lessons to pick up the draggled-looking children at the station. They were often sobbing and/or train-sick, and more than one vomited in the vicar’s car as he and Eileen delivered them to their assigned billets-some of which were extremely primitive, with outhouses and stern foster parents who believed regular beatings were good for five-year-olds. If Eileen hadn’t had her hands full with her own evacuees, she would have been more than able to view evacuees “in a variety of situations.”

But they were up to twenty-five children, more than half of them their original evacuees who’d come back. By mid-April, all of them had returned except Theodore. His mother probably couldn’t get him onto the train, Eileen thought, wearily making up more cots. I can’t believe I ever complained about not having enough evacuees.

She was so busy she didn’t even attempt to go to the drop, though she hadn’t been through since February. Even if she’d had the time, it was nearly impossible to get away without being spotted by the Hodbins and followed, or lectured to by Mrs. Bascombe on the dangers of meeting young men in the woods. And there was only a week of her assignment left.

Surely I can last a few more days, she thought, but when two more batches of evacuees arrived, all with head lice, she wasn’t certain she’d make it. She spent the entire week washing their hair with paraffin.

It was after midnight on Sunday before she was able to lock herself in her room, rip open a section of her coat’s hem, and take out the letter Props had sent with her, although it was probably just as well she hadn’t been able to do it before. No hiding place was safe from the Hodbins.

The letter was addressed to her, and the return address was a nonexistent village in remote Northumberland. It and the postmark were smudged slightly to make them unreadable. She tore open the letter. “Dear Eileen,” it read. “Come home at once. Mum’s very bad. I hope you are in time. Kathleen.”

It was to be found lying on her bed for Mrs. Bascombe or Una to read after she’d gone. She debated hiding it under her mattress till tomorrow afternoon, then thought of the Hodbins and stuck it back inside the lining of her coat and basted the hem shut.

She got up at five on Monday and worked frantically all morning so everything would be in order before her half-day out began at one. She hoped they could find someone to replace her. She’d assumed Lady Caroline would simply hire another maid when she left, but yesterday Mrs. Bascombe had said that Mrs. Manning had been advertising for help for three weeks and hadn’t had a single reply. “It’s the war. Girls who should be in service running off to join the Wrens or the ATS. Chasing after soldiers is all girls think of nowadays.”

Not all, Eileen thought, shrugging out of her uniform and into the blouse and skirt she’d arrived in. She retrieved the envelope from her coat lining, took the letter out, arranged them to look like she’d flung them down in haste, and pulled on her coat.

There was a knock on the door. “Eileen?” Una said.

Oh, what now’? Eileen opened the door a crack. “What is it, Una?”

“Her ladyship wants to see you in the drawing room.”