Louis de Bernières - The Dust That Falls From Dreams

He is a very fine young man, most handsome and athletic, and he and my daughter Rosie have been promised to each other for a very long time. It would be true to say that they were childhood sweethearts.

In view of the reports of terrible casualties that have already been received I have the honour to ask you to if you would be so awfully kind as to ensure that he is posted somewhere quite safe once his training is completed, which I believe will be at Christmastime. The reason I ask is that I believe that my daughter’s heart would be quite broken should he be killed, and she might never recover.

May I have the honour to repeat that my daughters and I would be most delighted to entertain His Majesty and Her Majesty the Queen at any time that they might be in our part of Kent.

I have the additional honour to submit myself, with profound respect, Your Majesty’s most devoted subject and servant,

Mrs Hamilton McCosh, gentlewoman

Buckingham Palace

20 September 1914

Dear Mrs McCosh,

His Majesty asks me to express his gratitude to you for your kind letter of 15 inst. He asks me to inform you that he had the distinct pleasure of witnessing the First Battalion of the Honourable Artillery Company march past and out to war in his presence on the 12th of this month. He found them to be a fine body of men, most impressive in stature and demeanour, and he is conscious of the burdens and trials which they will imminently have to endure.

His Majesty asks me to express his pleasure in hearing from you again, thanks you for your kind invitation to tea, and asks me to remind you once more that whereas he reigns, he does not rule. That is, he has no powers other than to advise, to warn and to encourage, and is therefore unable to intervene in any executive decisions, such as the posting of individuals in time of war. This he leaves to his government and his generals. It is for the same reason that he was unable to intervene in the matter of the unreliable gas lamps in Court Road, Eltham, and in the matter of the lack of canine fastidiousness on the Esplanade at Ryde, as complained of in your two most recent letters.

His Majesty hopes most earnestly that the conflict will not be a long one, and that your daughter’s fiancé (whose name you omitted to mention in your kind letter) comes through these difficult times unscathed. His Majesty has complete confidence that he will acquit himself with honour. You may be aware that even His Royal Highness Prince Albert has not been spared in the present conflict and is in service with His Majesty’s Royal Navy. His Royal Highness Prince David has not been allowed to serve abroad with his battalion of the Grenadier Guards, but has gone to France nonetheless to serve as ADC to Sir John French, and frequently puts himself in danger whilst visiting the front line.

I remain, madam, your humble and obedient servant,

Lt Col. Sir Frederick Edward Grey Ponsonby, Secretary to His Majesty

ON THE DAY that the first bomb was dropped on London we were walking by the Tarn. We knew nothing about the bomb, though, until we read about it in the paper the following morning. The bombing of civilians made us hate the Boche even more. It seemed like absolutely ages since we had all been worrying about a civil war in Ireland, even though that had been only a few weeks before.

Ash was in khaki, and looked very dashing. All the training had thinned him a little, and there was a jaunty spring in his step. He and I were strolling in front, and my sisters were walking behind at quite a distance, in order to avoid being gooseberries, and give us some privacy. Ash’s brothers Sidney and Albert were with them, charming them all at once. If they came out, it spared my mother the trouble of being a chaperone, and in any case it was better for Ash and me because my mother was very taken with him herself. She would monopolise the conversation, and even be flirtatious. If she was with us, she rather spoiled things. It was windy and cold, but I always did like clear autumn days. The golden leaves were drifting and lifting, and ripples passed across the surface of the water. ‘The trees were weeping yellow leaves’, as I wrote in one of my poems from back then. We had taken stale bread for the swans.

Ash and I sat on a bench, and Ottie, Sophie, Albert, Sidney and Christabel went to the other side of the Tarn. They had Bouncer with them, and he was a slow old dog by then, especially as he liked to stop and sniff at practically everything. We saw a gypsy girl approaching us. ‘Oh darn,’ said Ash wearily. It was obvious that she was going to importune us.

She was young, perhaps no more than fifteen, but she had a tiny baby wrapped up in a shawl and perched on one hip. The gypsies were a law unto themselves. They lived parallel lives that we knew very little about. When they turned up with their ponies and pretty wagons and their scrawny optimistic little dogs and their frightful hordes of wild children, you could expect a flurry of crime. Your milk bottles would go missing from the doorstep, and you’d lose your rake and even your brass doorbell. Ash was inclined to see the best in people, and said it was because the petty criminals in the locality took advantage of the fact that everyone would automatically blame the gypsies.

A lot of them were very useful people. The tinkers could mend almost anything made of metal, and they’d sharpen knives marvellously well. They had grinding stones that rotated through a trough of water, and they’d set them up in the street so that the scullery maids could rush out and get the cooks’ knives perfect again. The gardeners would go out with their axes and sickles and billhooks. The didicois took away all the metal things that were beyond repair. There were people called pikeys as well, and they got most of the blame for the thieving. They didn’t seem to have any other profession. The gypsies ran the funfairs and they travelled around picking whatever harvests needed to be picked. They always passed our house when it was time to pick the hops in the Weald, the men walking beside their ponies, leading them by the halter, and the children scampering in and out of the wagons.

This gypsy girl was a Romany. They had their own language and sometimes they’d stop speaking it the moment they thought you might be listening, or, contrarily, they’d tip into it so that you couldn’t understand. She was dark-skinned, with shiny black hair, and big gold rings through each earlobe. Her eyes were so dark that you couldn’t see how big the pupils were. She was wearing a loose scarlet dress embroidered in gold and black, and a waistcoat that matched. When Daniel showed me his photographs of India after the war, I was struck by how similar the Hindus looked to our Romanies. The girl looked wonderful and exotic, but she was obviously cold, and she was dirty too.

She stood before us, and held out a sprig to Ash. ‘Good day to thee. Lucky white heather,’ she said.

Ash looked at her a little ironically, and replied, ‘Isn’t it supposed to be in bloom? How do I know if it’s really white heather?’

She screwed up her mouth vexedly, and said, ‘Times is hard. I got a baby.’

‘What’s its name?’ asked Ash.

‘She’s Sinnaminti,’ said the girl, ‘and I got another chavi called Nilly-Lisbee, and a chal by name of Awkie.’

We were shocked. ‘But you’re only a child yourself!’ exclaimed Ash.

The girl blew a wisp of hair away from her mouth and shrugged. ‘Even so, I loves them. There’ll be more if God allow.’