Abdication A Novel

Chapter TWO





The following morning, May stood cap in hand in Sir Philip Blunt’s study at Cuckmere Park in Sussex as he faced her, employer to employee, from behind his large mahogany desk. She had returned to the house late the previous evening, and had gone straight to her bedroom without speaking to anyone. She feared the worst. She had tried to prepare herself for the inevitable consequences of her fatal carelessness, and had been unable to stop herself reliving the minutes following the second of impact. She could not absorb the shocking knowledge that she was responsible for the death of a living thing.

Sir Philip put a match to his cigar, igniting it with big billowy puffs. May watched one end of the brown cylinder darken with saliva while the other end glowed with menace. For a moment a large puff of smoke obscured his face.

“I am happy to come straight to the point and tell you that Miss Nettlefold has concluded that yesterday’s incident was not your fault.”

May tried to swallow but her throat felt blocked.

“In fact, it is to you whom Miss Nettlefold now wishes to apologise,” he explained, looking a little bemused. He had received a telephone call from Miss Nettlefold at Sunningdale just an hour ago. She had begun speaking in a state of understandable anguish, even anger, declaring that Wiggle had been “the love of her life,” and the only living soul she could trust. But she had calmed down and in the end registered her distress at the distress that must have been suffered by Miss Thomas. The dog had been unwell for a few days—an allergy to offal, apparently—and that weakness must have prevented Wiggle from dodging the approaching wheels of the car.

At that moment May wished she still had enough hair to cover her face, which she was sure betrayed a vestige of the guilt she still felt. Sir Philip had not finished.

“There is one other small matter that I wish to raise. I understand you met certain people when you delivered Miss Nettlefold to the address at Sunningdale yesterday?”

May nodded.

“Well, far be it for me to question the wisdom of introducing you to those particular individuals. What is important is that I already know you well enough, May, to say that I feel you to be a dependable person. And an intelligent one too.”

She was not quite sure where this was all leading.

“So I want your confirmation that you will never discuss with anyone that meeting yesterday. And when I say ‘anyone’ that includes not only the staff in the house here but your own family when you return home. Have I made myself clear?”

May nodded vigorously.

Sir Philip smiled. “Good. I knew you would understand.”

May left Sir Philip’s study, relieved on two levels. First, she was happy to escape a smell that reminded her of smouldering socks, the result of the accumulated decades, if not centuries, of cigar smoke that had impregnated the ancient stone walls of the Sussex manor house. But mostly she was astonished to have held on to her job and to have been exonerated so completely from the consequences of yesterday’s accident. Considering how things might have turned out, May felt herself to be most fortunate, although she hated to think how much she must have upset Miss Nettlefold. May was startled by the forgiving nature of the woman who, the previous afternoon, had settled herself into the back of the car. As for the caution that she should be discreet about yesterday’s encounter in the yellow drawing room of Fort Belvedere, she felt no anxiety. Keeping secrets had been a way of life for May for as long as she could remember.


Up until the moment when Miss Nettlefold had slid the glass partition aside May had maintained the respectful silence that was expected of a chauffeur. As a courtesy, she had formally introduced herself to her passenger at the beginning of the journey but Miss Nettlefold had been so preoccupied with her bags and parcels and small snuffly dog that she had paid little attention to the driver. However, in her driving mirror May could see the surreptitious stares Miss Nettlefold began to give her from the backseat and had expected to hear the whoosh of the screen that separated the passengers from the driver being pushed back even sooner. The little window had not closed properly from the first day May had begun driving the car and although she had considered getting it fixed she had changed her mind. The almost imperceptible gap through which private conversations reached her was too much of an unexpected bonus to relinquish.

“I do declare you are a girl!” Miss Nettlefold had finally concluded aloud, in a rich and lilting accent that was unequivocally American. “Tell me I’m right,” she said, already chuckling deeply at the accuracy of her deduction. “My, oh my, you certainly have some pluck in choosing this profession at such a young age! And what with you being so pretty in such a male line of work!” she continued. “Tell me, how did this all come about?”

After a little hesitation, May described briefly how she and her older brother Sam had left their home at the sugar plantation in Barbados and had sailed to Liverpool on the sugar consignment boat two months ago. She told her passenger how, with the encouragement of her mother’s London cousins, she had looked in the newspaper and applied for this chauffeuring job.

Miss Nettlefold professed herself to be “quite fascinated” by everything May told her and had kept up her chatter for the last twenty miles of the journey. Both women were amazed to discover they had disembarked from their respective ships at the Liverpool dockyards on exactly the same day. Miss Nettlefold felt certain that the coincidence was a fortuitous sign of a future amicable relationship between them. Indeed, her passenger appeared so effusive that May began to feel a little uncomfortable. But she listened politely as Miss Nettlefold explained how she was on her way to meet an old school friend from Baltimore, Maryland, whom she had not seen for years. If she was honest, she was apprehensive at seeing her again after such a long interval.

“Of course, we stayed in touch by letter, you understand, May? Oh forgive me? Do you mind if I call you May, Miss Thomas? I wanted to ask, rather than presume, especially as we Americans can sometimes run away with our manners over here in England. I guess we can be too informal for some folks.”

“I don’t mind being ‘May’ in the least,” May replied. “In fact Sir Philip asked to call me by my first name only last week, so you are in good English company.”

“Oh, you have no idea how pleased I am to hear that,” Miss Nettlefold sighed. “It’s so good to meet up with someone who understands what it is like to be a bit on the outside of the insiders, if you get my meaning? My word,” she continued, “there are so many things one is not allowed to talk about over here, and it takes a Yank a bit of time to figure it all out.”

May sensed a further confidence teetering on the edge of Miss Nettlefold’s fashionably red-painted lips.

“I expect you’ve heard whispers about … well … you know … the goings on at the top?” Miss Nettlefold went on. Her remark was more a statement than an enquiry.

May gave what she hoped was a noncommittal movement of her head.

“Most people think it will all blow over just as it did with his earlier married girlfriends, but they don’t know Wallis like I do. Death of a king, crowning of a king, whatever happens, when Wallis wants something, boy, does she hang around until she gets it and blow the consequences!”

May’s silent concentration on the road quieted Miss Nettlefold but only for a moment.

“Oh, there I go, opening my big mouth again! Forgive me, May.”

But May had pulled the car over and was examining the written directions that lay on the front seat beside her and a few moments later the car was making its way across the gravel and Miss Nettlefold was wishing out loud that the journey had not been over so soon. Chauffeur and passenger assured one another that after this agreeable beginning, they would look forward to meeting again before long.


The day after the accident, May had left Sir Philip’s study and gone to her room in Mrs. Cage’s house, eager to clarify her thoughts by writing in the blue cotton-bound diary given to her by her mother, Edith, just before May had stepped on board the ship. Sir Philip had not mentioned a diary in his list of forbidden confidantes.

“Don’t forget to write everything down, darling,” her mother had said. “Nothing has really happened until you write it down.”

May did not write every day. Sometimes there was not much to say. Sometimes she was nervous that if she put down the truth someone might read it. There was also another drawback to confiding everything to paper. The shortest of entries could trigger the memory of experiences best forgotten. Her mother was right. Once something was committed to writing it became a reality, whereas if she failed to record an incident, or sometimes skipped a whole day, she could pretend it had never happened at all. But with her brother Sam already away at the beginning of his training in the voluntary naval service, and in the absence of anyone else she was allowed to talk to, or trusted enough, she took the diary down from the shelf beside her bed, hoping that the exercise would simplify her confused state of mind.

“I am keeping this diary for you, Mamma,” she began, “although it feels good to be able to write it for me too, without feeling I have to be careful what I confide. Did you know that Dad has been reading my diary for years? I never mentioned it in case he took it out on me. Although the last few weeks have been unpredictable nothing has happened to make me regret boarding the ship to England, except of course for missing you.”

May’s mother Edith had been born and brought up in considerable hardship in the Hebrides in the North of Scotland and when she reached her twenties, she had gone south to Liverpool with her elder sister Gladys. The girls hoped to find both their freedom and their fortune and, with those aspirations in mind, they found employment in the kitchens of a transatlantic cruise ship. Two months later they had reached the port of Bridgetown in Barbados in 1911 and Edith had been enchanted by the fertile abundance of the island, a landscape in arresting contrast to the bleak beauty of the Scottish moors. Not long after Edith’s arrival she had met Duncan Thomas, a fellow Scotsman. Duncan’s great-grandfather had made little money from trading in peat and wool and, hating the cold and the damp of Scotland, had emigrated to the West Indies in the 1850s. There Mr. Thomas had established a life of relative affluence, and incomparable warmth, as the proprietor of a small sugar plantation.

Two more generations of Thomases followed the first Mr. Thomas into the sugar business but by the time the third owner, Duncan’s father, had succumbed to a fatal dose of malaria, the world sugar market was suffering and the Thomas plantation was no longer so prosperous. Duncan was in his early twenties when he inherited the family business and met the lovely young woman who had recently arrived from the Scottish Highlands. The charm of the palm-covered island, the lure of its balmy water and the prospect of financial security convinced Edith to accept a proposal of marriage from a man she barely knew. Gladys, her feisty elder sister, the fight for women’s suffrage powering the blood through her veins, decided that life on an island in perpetual sunshine was not for her. She returned to England, saddened by the parting from her much-loved sister and burdened with the task of telling her parents that they would probably never see their younger daughter again.

Back in England, Gladys married Bob Castor, an ex-miner and a Scottish trade unionist. Their only son, Nathanial, was born in London shortly before Edith gave birth in Barbados to her own son, Sam. Three years later Edith became the mother of a daughter, May. At the outbreak of the war Duncan had joined the British navy and, apart from one brief spell on leave in 1915, did not return to the island until 1917, when the seriousness of his wartime injuries ensured his future permanent exclusion from national service. A year after the war ended Gladys had died in prison, where she had been detained for her militant role in the suffragette cause, leaving her sister Edith shattered by the news. Shortly afterwards Bob also became fatally ill with tuberculosis, a casualty of years of inhaling the noxious air of the mines, and within eighteen months Nathanial Castor had become an orphan.

Seventeen years later, May and Sam set off on the sea passage to Liverpool on one of the plantation’s regular sugar cargo ships. The decision had not been without its challenges, especially as May was leaving the island of her birth for the first time. If it had not been for Sam’s repeated assurances to their mother that he would look after May on the ship, and deliver her safely to Bethnal Green and the front door of cousin Nathanial, their only remaining family member in England, May would not have found the courage to leave and her mother would not have found the strength to let her go.

Both children had longed to come to England for as long as they could remember. Sam had been working on the plantation since he left school at the age of sixteen. He had grown up around ships and had accompanied his father several times on board the sugar consignment boats to England. His ambition was to join the British Royal Navy, just as his father had before him.

But while Sam was motivated to follow the profession of his father, May thought of little other than how she could escape Duncan. On the face of it, Duncan appeared to be a doting father. He encouraged Sam with his studies and insisted on reading bedtime stories to May every night. As a very young girl May had lain in her bed, too hot to tolerate a nightdress, as her father had pulled up a chair beside her. Only May had known that those bedtime stories were accompanied by a “little nip,” the term of endearment, or so Duncan made it sound, that he reserved for those sneaky tots, upended in one swift movement into his mouth from the silver flask he kept in the pocket of his cream-tea planter’s jacket.

“Just one little nip to oil the wheels before we get going,” Duncan would whisper through the gap in his teeth, half speaking to himself, his small bloodshot eyes looking down at May’s body in her bed, as soon as he heard Edith’s shoes receding down the stairs.

“Our little secret,” he would say, as May tried to conceal her instinct to draw back at the moment when he began to trail his fingers through her hair, his dirty and broken nails snagging as they made their way down through her ponytail, towards her back, flicking the familiar switch of alarm. But May’s mother had suspected nothing and May had been too frightened to tell anyone, feeling that Duncan’s behaviour must somehow be her fault.

As May grew too old for the bedtime stories, Duncan left her alone, staying away from the plantation for nights at a time and reappearing with no explanation for his absence. A few years later he had seemed genuinely pleased by May’s interest in learning to drive the plantation car and by her cautious acceptance of his offer to teach her. Her skill behind the wheel led to her employment as the official plantation driver. But during the driving lessons Duncan would stroke the back of her head as May, powerless to stop him, gripped the wheel in revulsion. He would put his hand on her knee as she worked the pedals at her feet. He would appear through the high stalks of sugarcane when she was out talking to one of the women in the fields and offer to walk her home, or he would think of a reason to accompany her on her weekly trips to the bank and the post office in nearby Speightstown. May became practised at avoiding him but she knew that however much she tried to protect herself, one day he would succeed in crossing the final boundary. In the end it had been Sam’s persistent pursuit of his naval ambitions that had opened up the opportunity for escape and freedom.


In the very early days of January 1936, May and Sam Thomas stepped off the ship, up onto the high Liverpool quayside at Albert Dock. May shivered beneath the inadequacy of her thin, cotton coat. The pale blue, summer-flimsy material had been perfectly suited to the warm climate back home, wrapped around her narrow shoulders by her mother before she had pulled her daughter close to her and kissed her goodbye. But May had been quite unprepared for this feeling of real English coldness. Not only was her skin cold to the touch, but she felt as if her blood had stopped pumping round her body altogether.

From the warmth of her bed in Mrs. Cage’s house, May thought back over the past few weeks. At home the brightness of the overhead sun could dazzle with a light that filtered scarlet through closed eyelids. But on that first day in Liverpool, the greyness of the early morning had given her the illusion that nighttime was already falling. The sky hung so low that it appeared to be collapsing onto the Pier Head.

Sam knew his way around the dock from his previous trips to Liverpool. He had tucked his sister’s right hand into that of his own glove and, joined together in that manner, they walked along the vast quayside. The grey water, until so recently their exclusive landscape, had vanished behind the frosty sea mist that rose above the huge harbour walls. The walkway was thick with people, almost all men, all travelling in different directions. The level of noise was nearly as hard to tolerate as the freezing air. Men pushed carts so precariously laden with vegetables and fruit that the weight caused the carts to weave uncontrollably from side to side. Warehouse workers rode bicycles with huge trailers packed with cardboard boxes hooked behind them, and the occasional private car nudged its way through the crush, granted special permission to draw up at the water’s edge only because of the importance of the human cargo it had come to collect. May pulled at Sam’s sleeve to stop. A beautifully kept dark blue Rolls-Royce was parked up against the harbour wall. The plantation car that she loved for the freedom and independence it gave her had been one of the hardest things to leave behind.

Glad to be on land for a few days before the return journey, Sam’s sailor friends were full of good humour, telling the sort of jokes generally too risky to tell in the presence of a woman. They had accepted May as one of them, warming to her on the voyage partly for her brave-spiritedness in the rough seas but also for her unusual and delicate beauty. The ration of rum distributed on arrival in port had induced a friendly boisterousness towards her that bore no resemblance to the threatening, drunken silences that had accompanied Duncan’s lingering looks.

A couple of the crew offered to help carry their few pieces of luggage and the little group made their way along the bustling fog-draped pier, to the nearby Pier Head bus station. The timetable for the Crosville Motor Services to London was pinned onto the waiting-room wall and a gas fire was sputtering in one corner, doing its best to warm the cramped space. The room began to fill up with people blowing air into their hands. When the squat green and cream bus drew up outside, just visible through the smeary condensation of the only window in the waiting room, the passengers gathered up their bags and cases. The driver, his mood avuncular, stood at the foot of the coach steps.

“Come along, ladies and gents,” he said, taking May by the crook of her elbow and helping her up onto the bottom step of the coach. “Mind how you go, my dear.”

Some of the male passengers saluted as they boarded and the driver returned the gesture of mock-deference, touching his cap, the smartest part of his otherwise shabby uniform. Several of the women around May clutched thermoses, their curlers visible beneath their headscarves. They spread woollen rugs over their knees and soon the driver was swinging the bus out of the station, the large steering wheel sliding easily through his fingers like a seal slipping through a circus hoop.

May settled back into the velvety moquette seat, tucking her gloveless hands beneath her thighs to warm them up. As a child she had often hidden her hands, not for warmth but in embarrassment, longing for them to turn as pale as those of her brother and mother. Only recently had she accepted the inexplicable, that just like the rest of her body, they would always be a slightly deeper colour than those of the rest of her family.

The journey to London took up much of the day as flasks of tea were passed up and down between the aisle, and jam sandwiches in little greaseproof packets were offered to those who had come unprepared. May had not eaten since leaving the ship and was grateful when an elderly man gestured to her and Sam to help themselves to his own supply. Each time the coach hit an uneven patch of road the man put his hand to his mouth.

“It’s my teeth,” he explained. “These new ones cost me an arm and a leg and I don’t want them shooting out onto the floor. Might never find them again.”

Eventually the soothing sway of the coach encouraged sleep. Every so often the coach stopped in a city bus station to pick up and drop off more passengers and twice the coach drew into the forecourt of a public house where a chatty line formed outside the door to the ladies’ facilities, while the men vanished behind the back of the building, whistling. Each time the coach paused, first at Birkenhead, then Chester, and then Whitchurch, the interruption to the motion woke May from her doze. She watched the tiny breath clouds that hung for a moment in the outside air as more London-bound travellers came huffing onto the bus, visibly disappointed to find that the presence of a group of human bodies had made little effect on the cold inside.

At Oxford, the last stop before the end of the two-hundred-mile journey to London, May and Sam left the coach for some fresh air. A barely lit cigarette stub was clinging to the corner of the driver’s bottom lip and the front crease down the length of his trousers had disappeared. He looked crumpled and tired, the bonhomie of the early part of the journey squeezed out of him. Sam offered him a Player’s from his own packet and, with an embarrassed shrug of the shoulders, the driver apologised for his dishevelled appearance. He confided that he still preferred his winter uniform to the summer variety. The white linen jacket, compulsory throughout July and August, was never free from oil and smuts and he dreaded the ignominy of being confused for an ice-cream salesman.

An insipid watercolour sun was setting as the men stood and smoked outside the bus in the half-ghostly light. May stared at the skyline ahead of them.

“Matthew Arnold says ‘the dreaming spires of Oxford need not June for beauty’s heightening.’” Sam recited. “I learned the poem at school but I never thought I would see the place for myself.”

May was mesmerised by the dramatic outline of the city and the silhouetted buildings with their towers and spires, which glinted with a romantic beauty. She was barely awake when she felt Sam putting his hand inside her own glove before leading her across the bus terminal at Victoria. The National Omnibus let them off at Bethnal Green Road. Night had fallen and struggling through the darkness with their heavy cases they left the busy main road and soon arrived at a short terrace of small brick houses abutting a park. Children swung off ropes tied to the waists of the gas lamps and May had to step into the street to avoid trampling the chalked-in numbers of a recently abandoned game of hopscotch. All along Cyprus Street, wooden shutters painted black opened out flat against the wall on either side of the ground-floor windows. A brightly coloured display of flags decorated part of a wall opposite the Duke of Wellington pub and a memorial stone had been set well into the brick. Despite her tiredness, May tugged at Sam’s arm to stop for a moment so she could read the words.

R.I.P. In loving memory of the men of Cyprus Street who made the Great Sacrifice 1914–1918.

Erected by the Duke of Wellington’s discharged and demobilized soldiers and sailors benevolent club.

Spelled out clearly beneath the plaque were more than two dozen names.

Turning the corner onto Oak Street they saw a broad-chested man, his curly hair breaking on his shoulders, standing at the open door of number 52.

“At last,” he said, beaming at May and Sam. “I am Nat. And you are really here at last.”

Nathanial Castor, the son of their mother’s adored elder sister Gladys, had been expecting his cousins for an hour or more and even though this was their first meeting, he enfolded May in his arms before embracing Sam with equal warmth.

May looked back in the direction of the Cyprus Street war memorial.

“We call it the shrine,” Nat told her. “It commemorates the highest number of men from any one London street to have died in the war, and reminds us all how they did their duty to their country.”

“It’s beautiful,” May said.

“Yes, isn’t it?” Nat agreed. And then he said, “Come in, come in, Sarah is longing to meet you.”