‘Of course you don’t hate it, Alice.’ If Jean Miller’s gentle face could have glared it would have done. The best she could manage was a deep frown. Her husband was very good at glaring. And scowling. And shouting. He would have dealt with this absurd nonsense. But he had gone to see a client in London – no doubt why Alice had chosen this moment to go on the attack. ‘It’s one of the best girls’ schools in the country, and you’re very lucky to be there . . .’
‘It’s not a fine school, and I’m very unlucky to be there. The girls are all such snobs, and all they think about is who they might marry, and how soon.’
‘Well, there are worse things to think about.’
‘Mummy! What about getting qualifications, a career? How can a husband compare with that? I want to do something – something useful.’
‘Alice, the most useful thing you can do is stay where you are so we don’t have to worry about you. And get on with studying for your exams, pass them well. You’re not even sixteen yet—’
‘I will be in three weeks. Anyway, Granny was married when she was fifteen!’
‘That was rather a long time ago. And I thought you despised marriage?’ said Jean, seeing a flaw in Alice’s argument, and able to make a point.
‘No, I despise people who think marrying the right man, by which they mean rich and not common, is the only thing they want to do.’
‘Alice, this is turning into a rather silly conversation. The answer’s no. Now I’m very busy. If you really want to help, you can sew the Cash’s name tapes onto your summer uniform, so that I can get on.’
‘With what? Going to the hospital, I suppose, pushing your trolley round. I’d quite like to do something like nursing. How old are the probationers? Sixteen? I thought so. But you wouldn’t even let me do that, I bet. Oh, it’s so unfair.’
‘Alice, listen to me. If you’re so keen to have a career – and I think nursing is an excellent one for a girl – then you should stay on at school and take your School Certificate and your Higher.’
Whereupon Alice left the room, banging the door behind her.
Her mother sighed. Alice was such a pretty girl, and she and her husband had high hopes for her; talented and popular, she attracted boys effortlessly, and was always the belle of the ball at the junior tennis club dances. The Millers weren’t quite in the league of those whose daughters were presented at court, but they moved in a well-heeled middle-class society and Alice’s prospects as the wife of a rich and successful man were, they felt, extremely good.
Alice had been born in 1928, shortly after her parents’ first wedding anniversary. At thirty-five and thirty-two, Alec and Jean were a little old to be bride and bridegroom; and Jean, who was not a beautiful girl, had expected to remain a spinster. Being both bright and personable, she became a secretary to a firm of solicitors in Ascot. Her boss, one of the partners, who would have been on the brink of retirement had not the Great War removed two of the three younger partners, invited her and her widowed mother to a Christmas party at his home a year after she joined the firm and there she met Alec, his nephew. He was charmed by Jean, having had his heart broken by a girl who had chosen not to wait for his return from the front, and he had embarked on his long-postponed degree course in law at Durham University with a view to never exposing himself to a broken heart again. However, Jean, with her gentle ways and pleasant looks, so clearly the opposite of the girl who had jilted him, won his heart almost against his will. They were married in 1927, Alec taking up a position at his uncle’s firm.
They settled in Sunningdale. Which, with its solid, aspirational respectability; large houses, many of them built in the newly fashionable mock-Tudor design; and close proximity to Ascot to lend it further class, suited them very well. With Jean as tireless hostess and a large circle of friends among the Sunningdale wives, very important to an ambitious man, he rose quite quickly to become one of the area’s leading solicitors.
They had hoped that Alice would be the first of many children, but that was not to be. They bore their disappointments stoically, although after the fourth miscarriage Jean was so distressed that she told Alec she couldn’t face any more. They considered adoption, but neither of them was particularly keen. ‘The thing is,’ Jean said to her closest friend Mildred, who was the only person in the world she had confided in, ‘one never knows quite how the child might turn out. Some of these girls come from very doubtful backgrounds.’
In all other ways, however, things went well for them: when Alec’s uncle retired, he became the firm’s senior partner. They acquired a larger house (still Tudor style) with a big rhododendron-filled garden, a maid, a part-time gardener and a cook. Jean continued to play the perfect wife; her only failure indeed had been to produce the longed-for boy, but Alec was so proud of his daughter that he managed to overcome his disappointment and his pride in her was enormous. She was a pretty little girl, with shining fair curls, very large blue eyes, amazing dimples and a rosebud mouth; she was also, being sweet natured and generous, very popular with other little girls, and her social life was hectic from her earliest years.
The Millers had at first thought themselves safe from the worst excesses of Mr Hitler’s efforts, and in many ways Sunningdale life appeared largely unchanged to the casual observer, apart from an absence of any young men; its older residents continued to run their businesses, and everyone played golf, tennis and bridge as they always had done. The main problem, endlessly bewailed over bridge and supper tables, was that so much of the domestic help was no longer available; the females had gone to work in factories, and the only gardeners to be found were rather elderly and unsuited to heavy work. Food was on the plain side, and making palatable meals from powdered eggs and Spam a challenge, but there was a war on, the women all kept reminding one another, and one had to do one’s bit.
There were very few cars on the roads, largely because of petrol rationing, and Alice and her friends could cycle about in perfect safety, often into Bagshot almost five miles away, where they even bought that unimaginable luxury, ice cream. The only serious traffic, and an indication that all was not as it had been, was the long convoys of army tanks and lorries, packed with soldiers who would wave and shout at the children as they travelled to the southern ports to be shipped into war.
But it proved not so safe after all. There was a munitions factory at nearby Longcross, which was a target for bombing, and one afternoon during the summer of 1940, a squadron of bombers had flown over the golf courses and manicured gardens of Sunningdale and been attacked by Spitfires.
The Millers were badly shaken by this, and agreed that while it wasn’t dangerous enough for the whole family to move, Alice’s life must not be endangered. She was sent to board at a famous cradle for well-bred young ladies, St Catherine’s, near Taunton in the depths of Somerset, where she missed home and her friends dreadfully.