King Lear Prize Competition "Highly Commended" Short Story Winner - Julia Underwood

Here's my Highly Commended story for the King Lear Prize. It was in the Real Short Story section so it autobiographical. Entrants had to be over 65 - I'm well over that! The story gives that fact away.

The idea of the competition was that Shakespeare is supposed to have written King Lear during a plague epidemic. So - here we are in Covid. . .

And here is my story. Thank you for reading!

King Lear Prize Competition The Indomitable Spirit by Julia Underwood

The clang of the ambulance bell did little to drown the din it left behind as it sped through the suburbs of London on its way to Hertfordshire. The clamour of war bellowed through the frosty air – the rattle of anti-aircraft fire from rooftops, the crash of falling masonry as bombs dropped, and the visceral roar of fires devouring ancient buildings. The onslaught of the Blitz at its most brutal intensity.

‘They’re making the hell of a racket tonight, Bert,’ said the driver. ‘How’s she doing?’

‘Get a move on, son. It won’t be long now.’

While Bella stridently expressed her pain, the ambulance rattled through dark country lanes. The authorities had evacuated the maternity hospital near Bella’s home in Wembley to a requisitioned country mansion, Woolmer’s Park, in Hertfordshire.

The ambulance man’s prediction was faulty. Several more hours passed before my mother pushed me into the world in the early morning of 5th November 1940. In later years, Bella, often in the company of her three sisters, regaled me – in gory and unnecessarily graphic detail – with features of her long and arduous labour; a description which negatively coloured my own experience of childbirth many years later. If she had still been around when I was expecting my babies, I might have chided her for her lack of sensitivity. But, in spite of her difficulties, I was born safely on that momentous night, all nine pounds of me. Bella never endured the experience again and Woolmers Park has been the place of birth I have filled in on documents ever since, with no clear idea of where it is, and never revisited.

* * *

Undeniably, the Phoney war was over. Hostilities began to effect civilians in earnest in September 1940. This came as a shock as, since the declaration of war with Germany on 4th September 1939, conflict in the United Kingdom had been a low-key affair. Hitler was busy building his forces in Europe, skirmishing at the borders of small countries ripe for invasion and consolidating his position in Poland, but he left Britain alone, mostly. It wasn’t until the fall of France in June 1940 and the disastrous retreat from Dunkirk that the British experienced the brutal reality of war.

Everything changed for Great Britain when, on 7th September 1940, the Blitz began with the bombing of English cities. 10,000 civilians died in the London area in the last three weeks of that month and the bombing raids continued remorselessly, driving citizens underground, or into whatever shelter was available, for over six months.

It was in the midst of this historic carnage that I made my entrance into the world. Poor Bella was alone in the hospital; her husband stationed in North Africa and her family forbidden to visit. My arrival was not momentous to anyone but her and, on the 5th of November, a symphony of explosions, the scent of cordite and soaring bright lights have orchestrated my birthdays ever since.

* * *

In the 1930s, before marriage and the war, Bella had ambitions to be an actress. She spent the money she earned at her music shop job, at Imhoffs in the Strand, on elocution lessons to hone her vowels to the approved standards of the time. To pursue her dream she tried ballet, but failed to impress – her jaw was broken when her partner dropped her in a pas de deux, the language she used to protest was so scorching that they instantly expelled her from the company. Once she was fit, she joined the chorus line, singing and dancing in the West End of London, where being ladylike was not such a requisite. Opportunely, when the glamorous and rosy theatrical future she’d envisaged didn’t materialise, fate intervened to rescue her from the poorly-paid drudgery of music hall theatre into the prospect of a better life.

Hugh, a public school and Cambridge educated man about town – possibly one of the last young men of his class to go on the Grand Tour of Europe, enjoying life and learning languages – had returned to his old haunts in London. Those linguistic skills stood him in good stead later. He and his friends regularly frequented the West End theatres and music halls, and ate, drank and danced in the best restaurants and nightclubs. Hugh met Bella at the stage door of the Apollo theatre and instantly smitten by her beauty and her sylph-slim figure. After a meteoric courtship, and much to his mother’s disgust when she found out, he became a Stage Door Johnny, marrying Bella in the late 1930s.

My parents’ marriage was a mixed one, on the basis of class. Their upbringings could not have been more different. Bella’s father, a Scots Guards veteran of the First World War, was a station guard. The open air life suited him, helping his gas-scarred lungs gasp for every breath. Jock’s wife, Nellie, an iron-willed matriarch with four daughters, had been in service in her youth. Clearly, there was never any possibility of a convivial meeting between them and Hugh’s family. His father was a wealthy industrialist and his wife one of the six daughters of a rich Australian landowner living in Melbourne, the freeholder of many outback acres strewn with millions of sheep.

Hugh and Bella must have loved each other and been happy at first; in early photographs they look besotted. The glamour and excitement of late 1930s London, with its famous singers, dancers, jazz, and fashionable clothes, was there to wallow in for anyone who had the money. They were constantly out on the irresistible town with their friends. Hugh couldn’t resist Bella’s wonderfully sinuous dancing skills, and her delightfully open nature. The heady atmosphere whirled Hugh and Bella in a life of hedonism and luxury, dazzling Bella with possibilities.

Nellie and Bella’s three sisters at home in Wembley watched and listened with apprehension. Nellie never quite took to Hugh.

‘Too stuck up for ’is own good,’ she muttered with a sniff. ‘Nothing’ll ever come of it.’

In spite of her dire predictions, the couple married in a secret registry office ceremony. Secret, because Hugh’s mother was not informed of the union until months later as he was terrified that as soon as she met Bella, she would withdraw the generous allowance he relied on to fund their lifestyle. Of course, they had to meet eventually, particularly when there was a baby on the way and, as Hugh had feared, she took an instant dislike to poor Bella.

‘Whatever made you marry that cockney girl?’ she asked in braying tones, repeated frequently in the years to come, unimpressed by Bella’s tutored vowels. Luckily, when I was born, as I was her only grandchild she decided to spoil me and supply me generously with gifts. She equipped me with pretty smocked dresses, patent leather shoes, and smart Harris tweed coats with velvet collars. All from Harrods. By then, post-war, her husband had died and she was living, as was common at the time, in a tall, stucco-fronted hotel in Iverna Gardens, Kensington. This had become the perfect, and convenient, residence for elderly ladies with money since it preserved the illusion of living in a home with servants and room service, and gave the bonus of having friends on hand to play bridge with every day.

* * *

Possibly blinded by love, Bella thought she was on to a good thing when she married Hugh, imagining that such a well educated and connected young man would bring her comfort and a life of luxury. He was handsome too, especially when he came to wear a uniform.

Unfortunately, Hugh’s travels and adventures on the continent, which included climbing the Matterhorn and other intrepid exploits, had not given him any inclination to work hard – if at all if avoidable. He relied on his parents to supply whatever he needed and indolence had become a habit. When he met Bella he was working, with little enthusiasm and mainly for show, for a large city stockbroker where he was a complete failure, losing not only his clients’ money but his own. The personal financial disaster, and his general fecklessness, caused his parents to cut off his allowance, vowing never to give him another penny, a blow he never recovered from.

For Bella, the marriage, idyllic at first, soon became a disappointment and bitterness flowered in her heart. Due to his privileged upbringing with servants at every turn and doting parents to support him, Hugh had become a selfish and lazy man who never lifted a finger to sustain domestic bliss. Bella even had to remove the top of his breakfast boiled egg. This may have seemed charming at first when she was still happy to wait on him, but her attitude hardened when it became clear he would never change. When did she first realise she had made a terrible mistake?

Her sisters, contrary to their mother, thought Hugh was wonderful. He had very good manners – much better than those of their own beaux – and brought them flowers and chocolates when he visited with Bella. Nellie, though, saw through his superficial élan and dismissed his blandishments with a sniff and pointed readjustment of her bosom.

‘Hmmph,’ she grunted, with a scowl.

How did they get along once the early, cosy cocoon of romance split apart and a glorious butterfly failed to emerge? What did they talk about? They can have had very little in common: Hugh behind his Daily Telegraph, Bella her Daily Mirror. She with her trashy (his opinion) murder mysteries borrowed from Boots lending library, and he with his leather-bound classics. He was highly educated, beyond his capabilities perhaps, and she had left school at 16 to help support her family.

Bella had been raised in a household where getting on with it, working hard, doing your duty – and, of course, lying in the bed you’d made for yourself, however uncomfortable – were a given. Grumbling about your lot was not an option. Even if she was unhappy, she did her best to keep her husband content.

For Hugh, the declaration of war in 1939 must have seemed fortuitous as a means of escape from the job he hated. He volunteered into the army as a private in a quixotic gesture that turned out to be unnecessary as, if he had waited a few months, he would have been commissioned right away. That was the customary military path for public school educated men, especially those who spoke several languages. As it was, he went through the tedious rituals of basic training, parade ground bashing and all the other humiliations inflicted on army privates – until he was discovered.

Luckily, a hairsbreadth before Hugh was mobilised to the front as a private, someone in recruitment found his file and spotted that he spoke four European languages – French, Italian, German and Spanish – fluently, as well as having a smattering of Russian and Arabic. Speaking languages was the one skill at which Hugh was proficient. The army rapidly sought him out; grabbed him from the training camp; shooed him into a commission; trained and cleared him, and he entered the Army Intelligence Corps as a lieutenant.

Hugh spent most of the war interrogating prisoners of war, first in North Africa and later in Italy and Germany, and never saw a shot fired in anger – or only accidentally. Photographs of the time show him tanned, fit and handsome, having a jolly good time, drinking on sun-soaked terraces overlooking glittering lakes. It wasn’t quite so relaxed later, in Germany, but Italy was a prolonged holiday.

Before that, while Hugh was in training and before he was sent to North Africa, Bella became pregnant. Stationed abroad during most of her pregnancy, he only reappeared on a brief leave four months after my birth. My presence in the world did little to impress him; he was disappointed I wasn’t a boy and never forgave me for that oversight. Hugh was away in one theatre of war or another for the next four years until he reappeared at our home, on leave, in late 1944.

I didn’t like the look of the peculiar stranger who had appeared from nowhere, and I refused to speak to the alien who had invaded our home. It became a family joke when I said: ‘When’s That Man going away, Mummy?’

Hugh’s looming presence in our small bungalow in Ruislip – very near Northolt Aerodrome, not the best choice of venue during a war – also drove Bella to distraction. He had acquired an irritating habit of striding up and down the sitting room – ‘wearing a path in the carpet’ – echoing his constant pacing on marble floors in palatial Italian mansions while he interrogated prisoners. Bella felt quite relieved, and certainly more relaxed, when he finally left to resume his duties.

It seems unlikely that Hugh made a very good officer, due to his retiring and indolent disposition, or to have impressed his underlings with his authority. But he remained in the Army Intelligence Corps until long after the war was won, ending up as a major. Once it was possible, after the war ended in the spring of 1945, Bella and I joined him in Berlin, once the authorities permitted wives and family to join their husbands. Hugh was working on denazification with the Control Commission in Germany by then.

Over the next three years, our family moved from one British Army base to another – about eleven in all, some better than others – much to the detriment of my schooling. So, in 1948 they sent me to a country boarding school in England, the fees paid partly by my paternal grandmother and partly by the British taxpayer, as was then the custom for the children of officers stationed abroad.

In all the ten years I was at that school, Hugh wrote me a postcard about once a term. Bella, however, wrote at least one long letter each week. I think she must have been very lonely, living alone, or with one of her sisters, labouring with intrepid determination at whatever job she could find so we had a home when I came home for the holidays. Even an Army major’s pay was pitifully small in those dark days, with the nation on its knees and almost bankrupt. Bella had left Hugh in Germany to be closer to me and to evade the snobbery of the officer clique and their wives – she’d had enough of them. It was a difficult time, but she managed somehow, scrimping and scraping to make the ends of a small salary meet. She passed on her wartime habit of frugality, which has never left me. And Bella always had the stalwart support of her three sisters, her imperious mother and devoted father.

* * *

Bella’s dreams of a life of comfort with a wealthy man had long since crumbled. Hugh was seldom in the country as he moved around Europe, first in Germany, then Austria. After he was demobilised in the mid-1950s, he conducted rich American tourists around Europe for Thomas Cook – his linguistic skills put to use in peacetime. His low opinion of this work was unusually vociferous for him, and damning; he considered it insultingly demeaning, but he enjoyed the generous tips. Bella dreaded him coming home between tours as they did nothing but argue. Her disillusion spilled over into a rage she had bottled up for years and could no longer keep inside.

I was so distant and unaware – tucked away at school in idyllic Sussex countryside – that I had no notion of how dismal was Bella’s life, and what a struggle she endured, moving from one lodging to another in pursuit of cheaper rent. It wasn’t until 1956, when one of Hugh’s Australian aunts died and left him money that they bought a house of their own in Eastbourne. They paid £4,000 for a four-bedroom detached house overlooking the sea and sheltered in the embrace of the South Downs. Hugh even lived there for a short time, but he was soon off on what I was told would be a short visit to relatives in Australia. It took me a long time to realise my parent’s had separated, although neither of them owned up to it. In reality, I imagine, he hoped to find work in Australia and start a new life.

Hugh was away and I was applying for a place at London University. On impulse, Bella decided to sell the Eastbourne house and bought another in Chiswick. I wasn’t happy at this arrangement as I would have preferred my freedom after all that time in boarding school, but Bella insisted she needed to be nearby, to keep an eye on me. It took me a long time to recognise that she did this not so much for control but because she loved me and wanted to spend more time in my company. Although I resented the move, and protested with teenage sulks, as events unfolded it was the best thing she could have done.

A few months after we moved into the Chiswick house, Bella was diagnosed with lung cancer. She had never smoked a cigarette in her life, but a youth spent in theatres, nightclubs and almost every other environment then saturated with tobacco smoke, must have taken its toll.

The treatment for lung cancer was brutal in 1958, and I believe the operations she endured hastened her fate. I nursed her for over a year in the Chiswick house after peremptorily summoning Hugh back from Australia. I thought he’d come gladly, but he clearly resented the suggestion and tried to wriggle out of it. I think my innocent assumption that he’d want to come brought him in the end. Duty and, perhaps, residual love, or guilt, returned him to us, but his presence became an heavy encumbrance to me and Bella while he lounged around the house expecting to be waited on, fed and have his laundry done. I’d been obliged to learn to cook from scratch, so the food wasn’t much good and received much stinging criticism.

During a long eighteen months of inertia, he never once made her as much as a cup of tea while she lay dying. She, of course, was as indomitable as ever, refusing the strong painkillers because they made her ‘woozy’, stoically refusing to give up. My aunts and I pretended she was getting better and planned sun-drenched holidays in exotic places for when she was well, but she knew.

She died in September 1960, one month before I started my course at London University.

She was 49.