Evie's War by Anna Mackenzie Page A

certainly go, and has ordered the carriage to take me. I can’t tell whether she is less or more worried than earlier.

1915

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1 January 1915
    In the space of a week I have gained two brothers! When I arrived home last night, at around 11.30 p.m., I met Dr Chiltern on his way out; he smiled and said Mother was much improved and the rest he’d leave Father to tell me. The news was that I have a brother, a tiny, red, smudged-up scrap of a thing. He is to be named William Aubrey Guscott Faulkner. Father looked relieved in the extreme and Aunt Marjorie hugged me then sent me to bed — where I was jolly pleased to be, and fell asleep almost before I could take it in. Being thoroughly worn out I slept through and missed breakfast, but things are still topsy-turvey so Cook was happy enough to provide me with a tray; I think it was the last of the Christmas goose. What a week it has been.
    Mother is very pale and tired, and Father gone off about some business on the estate. Little William is not beautiful but Aunt M says he will improve. He sleeps a lot at present, and cries to be fed; he looks rather as if he had quite a battle arriving, as does Mother. When I confided to Winifred that the baby was imminent she told me some rather alarming details. Were the evidence not before me (and thememory of Mother’s cries), I should simply not believe her.
    That aside, Winifred’s party was perfectly pleasant. There were thirty or so guests, amongst whom I felt something of an interloper. Two young men invited me to dance but my conversation proved worse than abysmal, which I blame on my abstraction (when told of the situation vis-à-vis Mother, the first positively blanched, so I thereafter kept my counsel). Several of Winifred’s WSPU friends from London were there, but I had not the confidence to break into their circle. Supper was white soup, cold pheasant and ham, and a veritable mountain of quivering puddings and jellies of wonderfully fanciful design. I should probably have enjoyed the whole thing a good deal more had I not been so worried about Mother.
2 January
    It is bitterly cold — I have never known anything like it, and have resolved to knit faster so that the men will not suffer on account of my tardiness. In all the flap of William’s arrival I forgot to write that Edmund is located; as suspected he has joined the local Regiment. Uncle Aubrey assures us the situation is not irreversible and that we should trust him to arrange things.
3 January
    At lunch Father offered distraction by way of an astonishing story that Uncle Aubrey confirmed: namely, that on Christmas Day the men in the trenches arranged a ceasefire with the Germans and they scrambled out across the snow and talked with one another and exchanged gifts. Some even played football. Then they all went back to their trenches and started firing at one another again! It scarcely seems credible. But I suppose the German troopsare just boys like our own, though of course their Officers are not at all like ours, having no qualms about ordering terrible atrocities to be committed.
4 January
    A watery sun showed itself for an hour in the afternoon and my cousins and I rolled snowballs and built a snowman on the front lawn. He has twigs for fingers and a carrot nose and looks quite as he should, other than being a little lopsided.
5 January
    Our snowman survived the night perfectly well but has now been battered by Monty, who announced it was a German snowman and that he was teaching it what for.
    William is a noisy fellow; Mother looks exhausted.
8 January
    Uncle Aubrey brought news of Edmund; not that which Mother hoped to hear, but my uncle believes it the best outcome in the circumstances. Edmund has been released from the local Regiment to take up an Officer Cadetship with Uncle Aubrey’s old Unit — my uncle’s hand can clearly be seen — and with that Mother must be content. Edmund will undergo two months of