Free The Final Curtsey by Margaret Rhodes Page A

and the noise of the impact when they hit their
target was terrifying. Then of course it was too late for so many innocent victims.
    I have often reflected since those momentous days on how curiously adaptable human beings are. At the time all the dangerous situations thrust upon us during the war strangely didn’t
actually seem dangerous; just commonplace. I remember after a weekend in the country arriving back at Victoria station, just after an air raid, and picking my way through piles of shattered glass
and rubble along streets with flaming buildings on each side. One just took it in one’s stride. It was just as well, of course, otherwise life would have been completely intolerable. But
beside the air raids and work there was play. The theatres and cinemas remained open and there were lots of young men around, all in uniform of course. They looked so handsome in their dress
‘Blues’ and as often as not we would end up at the 400 Club, in Leicester Square. It was dark, smoky and romantically mysterious. There was a tiny square dance floor on which we
smooched around, cheek to cheek, imagining ourselves in love.
    I had two weeks’ leave a year and usually headed home to Scotland. The trains were slow and packed with servicemen. I would sit bolt upright all night in a third-class compartment, with
the windows blacked out and covered with some sticky protective material in case they were blasted in or out during a raid. The only illumination was a dim blue light in the roof. At Carberry I
found that my mother had risen to the challenge of supplementing the meagre rations with home-grown recipes. We ate stewed nettles both as vegetables and in soup, melted down rose hips and very old
eggs preserved in something called ‘waterglass’. Each adult was entitled under the strict food rationing regime to two small meat cutlets a week; about four ounces of butter and the
same amount of sugar. Fruit was only the home-grown variety and everywhere one looked one could see flower gardens turned into vegetable patches and allotments. We were luckier in the country than
people living in the towns. We could always shoot rabbits or pigeons and many a hen past its laying prime would find its way to the family table. It was a long way from the lavishness of our prewar
picnics and dinners when my parents entertained house parties during the shooting season, but most people, particularly the children, seemed remarkably healthy. Childhood obesity was not then a
problem.
    Back in London, I and the girls with whom I worked and lived were overwhelmingly affected by the drama of our jobs and were only too ready to see spies lurking round every corner. Those were the
days when people, unbelievably now, regularly reported spotting parachuting nuns, every single sister a spy of course. Liz Lambart and I lived as paying guests in a house in Chelsea. Our landlord
spoke with a heavy foreign accent and limped, although we once caught him running up the stairs. He was often away and something of an enigma. Was he, I wondered, transmitting to Berlin? He would
offer us lifts to work in the morning — how did he get the petrol for his car — and we went to extraordinary lengths to convince him that we worked in a totally different part of
London. We were convinced that he was a spy. We even went as far as reporting him to MI5, although I never found out what happened to him. In retrospect I hope it wasn’t anything too
serious.
    Later in the war my mother managed to engineer both my brother Andrew and me into Buckingham Palace as lodgers. I would think that it probably would not have needed much more than a telephone
call to her sister, the Queen. Our new home was wonderfully convenient, because it was, for me, only a short walk across the park to ‘Passport Control’. We had a bedroom each, a sitting
room and a bathroom all on the second floor and a housemaid’s pantry as our kitchen. There was a small electric cooker, but no