Miss Carter's War by Sheila Hancock Read Free Book Online Page A

political events, especially door-to-door canvassing, were definitely ‘suit’, to add respectability to the Labour Party members in the light of the patrician, born-to-rule image of the leading members of the Conservative Party. Sadly Aneurin Bevan and Ernie Bevin in their shambolic suits were no competition, in the sartorial stakes, for the relaxed elegance of Eden and Macmillan, or Churchill’s aristocratic eccentricity. Tony did his best with his flannel, but after a while it began to look the worse for wear. He flatly refused to buy a new suit, arguing that the leather patches he stuck on the frayed elbows of the jacket were a good example of ‘make do and mend’ that the working class would understand only too well. He did not talk much about his childhood, but the odd comment made it clear that his personal experience of deprivation was what fuelled his ­left-wing zeal and devotion to a party that seemed, with its construction of the Welfare State, to be doing something about it.
    They were both bitterly disappointed when the Labour Party suffered a major decline in its majority in the 1950 election. Marguerite was torn in her allegiance, feeling a secret delight that Margaret Roberts seriously challenged the seat of the long-standing male socialist MP, despite her sex and inexperience. Both of them had to be careful to keep their political activity separate from their job. Many of the girls demonstrated passionate commitment to the parties they were representing in the permitted mock elections, but Miss Fryer was adamant that the staff should be apolitical within the school gates.
    Thus it had to be in a hidden corner of the school field that Pauline, a member of the Labour League of Youth, and Hazel a Young Conservative, cornered her with a leaflet about a meeting they were organising in the boys’ grammar school, united by their opposition to the hydrogen bomb. Marguerite identified with the two girls, having grown up listening to her parents’ political rhetoric and participated in their activism. She understood the passion for a cause that can consume a child.
    She promised that she and Mr Stansfield would attend. It was probably breaking the no-politics rule, but the cause was so crucial to her that she decided it was worth the risk. Marguerite had been horrified at the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the Allies’ atom bombs; this meeting, jammed full of concerned youngsters, brought home to her how fear for the future, indeed the likelihood of no future at all, overshadowed the lives of these war-weary children.
    The diminutive Pauline, with pink-satin ribbons in her pigtails, opened the meeting by reading out in a shaky voice the constitution.
    ‘ “We, the representatives of our respective countries, believing that since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed, and believing that the peace must be founded, if it is not to fail, upon the’ – here the girl took a deep breath – ‘intellectual and moral solidarity of all peoples, have resolved to combine our efforts to form an association of the peoples to be known as the World Federation of United Nations Associations.” ’
    Having made it to the end, she beamed with pride.
    ‘That’s us. There’s going to be lots of us all round the world. So that’s good, isn’t it?’
    And she took her seat amongst the people on the stage. Above her chair was a plaque dedicated to the sixty young men from the school who had died in the two wars. Marguerite could see that the poignancy was not lost on Tony.
    Then the politicians had their say. A bumbling aide introduced the town’s Tory candidate as ‘Margaret Roberts, now Margaret Thatcher after her marriage to the distinguished Major Denis Thatcher who is in paints’. She was transformed by her recent triumph at the polls; she may not have won, but the number of votes she had secured was a remarkable result in a Labour