Eva Ibbotson - The Morning Gift

This was not as easy as it sounded. Number 27 Belsize Close was not a place where privacy was high on the list of priorities, nor had Ruth ever had to have secrets from her parents. Fortunately she had read many English adventure stories in which intrepid boys and girls buried treasure beneath the loose floor-boards of whatever house they lived in. Accustomed to the solid parquet floors of her native city, she had been puzzled by this, but now she understood how it could be done. The floor of the Bergers’ sitting room, hideously furnished with a sagging moquette sofa, a fumed oak table and brown chenille curtains, was covered in linoleum, and her parents’ bedroom next to it was obviously unsuitable. But in the room at the back, with its two narrow beds, which Ruth shared with her Aunt Hilda, the floor was covered only by a soiled rag rug. Dragging aside the wash-stand, she managed to prise open one of the splintered boards and make a space into which she lowered a biscuit tin decorated with a picture of the Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret Rose patting a corgi dog, and containing her documents and the wedding ring which she meant to sell, but not just yet.

Next she went to the post office and secured a box number to which all mail could be sent, and wrote to Mr Proudfoot to tell him what she had done. After which she settled down to look for work. It was nearly two months before the beginning of the autumn term at University College and though she had heeded Quin’s admonitions and was looking forward very much to being a student once again, she intended to spend every available second till then helping her family.

Jobs as mother’s helps were easy to come by. Within a week, Ruth found herself trailing across Hampstead Heath in charge of the three progressively educated children of a lady weaver. Untroubled by theories on infant care, she felt sorry for the pale, confused, abominably behaved little creatures in their soiled linen smocks, desperately searching for something they were not allowed to do. When the middle one, a six-year-old boy, ran across a busy road, she smacked him hard on the leg which caused instant uproar among his siblings.

‘We want it done to us too. Properly,’ said the oldest. ‘So that you can see the mark, like with Peter.’

Ruth obliged and soon the walks became extremely enjoyable, but, of course, the money was not very good and it was Ruth’s announcement that she intended to spend her evenings as a waitress in the Willow Tea Rooms which brought Leonie’s period of saintly virtue to a sudden end.

For several days after Ruth was restored to her, Leonie had kept to her vow never again to argue with Ruth or speak a cross word to her. Just to be able to touch Ruth’s hand across the table, just to hear her humming in the bath, had been a joy so deep that it had precluded ever crossing Ruth’s will again. This, however, was too much.

‘You will do nothing of the sort!’ she yelled. ‘No daughter of mine is going to have her behind pinched by old gentlemen and take tips!’

But Ruth was adamant. ‘If Paul Ziller can play gypsy music in a cummerbund, I can be a waitress. And anyway, what about you doing the ironing for that awful old woman across the road?’

Leonie said it was different and canvassed the inmates of the Willow Tea Rooms for support which did not come.

‘Of course, when she begins university it will be another matter, but now she will want to help,’ said Ziller, meaning — as did Dr Levy, and von Hofmann from the Burg Theatre and the banker from Hamburg — that the sight of this bright-haired girl bearing down on them with a tray of an evening was a pleasure they did not think it necessary to forego.

So Ruth became a waitress at the Willow and was undoubtedly good for trade. For the weary, disillusioned exiles, Ruth was a sign that there was still hope in the world. She had been rescued mysteriously by an Englishman and that in itself was a thought that warmed the heart. And not only was Ruth young and sweet and funny, but she was in love!

‘I have had a letter!’ Ruth would say, and soon everyone in the Willow Tea Rooms and the square knew about Heini, everyone asked about him. The news that Heini’s visa was almost through made them as happy as if the good fortune was their own — and they all understood that it was essential that when Heini arrived, he had his piano.

It was the matter of Heini’s piano which disposed of the last remnants of saintliness still adhering to Leonie. For there was only one place where it could possibly go: in the Bergers’ so-called sitting room — and Leonie was perfectly correct in saying that it would make the place impossibly crowded.

‘All right, he can sleep on the sofa till he has his own place, but Heini and the piano — Ruth, be reasonable.’

But when has love been reasonable? Seeing her daughter’s distress, Leonie consulted her husband, sure that his strictness would prevail. But the week in which they had believed Ruth lost had changed the Professor.

‘We shall manage,’ he said. ‘I work in the library in any case and we can take one of the chairs into our bedroom.’

So Ruth had put a jam jar on the windowsill, with a label on it saying Heini’s Piano. It was an entirely British jam jar, which gave her satisfaction, having contained Oxford marmalade and been retrieved from the dustbin of the nursery school teacher on the ground floor, but it was not filling up very quickly. Ruth had made enquiries about the deposit on the kind of piano Heini required and it was two guineas even before the weekly rental and there was a delivery charge as well. She gave her wages from the progressive lady weaver to her mother and had hoped that the money from the Willow Tea Rooms would help, but there always seemed to be an emergency: Aunt Hilda needed throat pastilles, or the teapot broke its spout. Though she bought nothing for herself during those long hot weeks of summer, not a hair ribbon, not an ice cream on the most sizzling day, the heap of coins at the bottom of the jar remained pitifully small.

If Heini’s letters were shown to everyone and were matters for rejoicing, the letters from Mr Proudfoot, arriving secretly at Ruth’s post office box, were another matter. Mr Proudfoot had seen fit to lay the conditions of nullity before Ruth, who found them daunting.

‘Are you sure there’s no insanity in the family?’ she asked her puzzled parents. ‘What about Great-Aunt Miriam?’

‘To believe that the Kaiser was a reincarnation of Tutankhamen may be eccentric, but it is not insane,’ said her father firmly.

But if the immediate prospects for annulment were poor, Mr Proudfoot was helpful about getting her British naturalization confirmed, sending her forms in prepaid envelopes and continuing to offer assistance. That Quin himself never wrote or sent a message was only what she had expected and did not disappoint her in the least.

By the middle of August, the crisis over Czechoslovakia began to dominate the newspapers. Hitler’s rantings grew more demented; newsreel pictures showed him strutting about with his arm round Mussolini or shaking his fist at anyone who dared to interfere with the concerns of Eastern Europe. Cabinet ministers abandoned their grouse moors and began to shuttle back and forth between London and Paris, between Paris and Berlin. The Czechs appealed for help.

Great Britain’s increasing preparations for war affected the inhabitants of Belsize Park in various ways. Mrs Weiss looked up at a large grey barrage balloon floating above her, said, ‘Mein Gott, vat is zat?’, fell over a hole in the pavement and was conveyed to Hampstead Hospital for stitches in her nose. Uncle Mishak, passing a poster which urged him to Keep Calm and Dig , did just that, excavating a vegetable patch in the rubble-strewn garden behind the house. In the Willow Tea Rooms, Miss Maud pored anxiously over a leaflet giving instructions for the assembling of a prefabricated air-raid shelter and received much good advice from the male customers who professed to understand them. Mrs Burtt stopped singing over the washing up because her Trevor had been passed fit for the air force, and Dr Levy, though he had made it perfectly clear that he was not entitled to practise medicine, was pulled into a neighbouring house to resuscitate a man with a weak heart whose wife had sought to amuse him by coming to bed in her gas mask.