The Authentic Eclectic
Prima Donna of the Underground
On the crowded platform she held herself aloof. Posture and expression conveying her detachment from everyone despite their shared danger.
‘Oh, god! Look at us all, huddled down here like rats in a trap. I’m not surprised they didn’t want underground stations used as air-raid shelters. But when that horrid warning siren goes off, well, one has to go somewhere.’
She drew her fur coat around herself like a substitute gesture for the grand exit she couldn’t make.
‘I’m sick of doing this charity work and I don’t care if Rex says it is good for my public image. I just don’t want to see another child’s grubby face or another haggard-looking woman whose husband is fighting for his country. I don’t care! Well, I do, of course I do, but my constitution is not suited to it. A leopard cannot change itself into a Persian cat just because there is a war on.’
She longed to go home and drink tea from her own teacups not a nasty tin mug. Beside her, two lovers whispered and clung to each other. He was ashamed of the disability that kept him at home when the country needed every man to enlist, his fiancee soothed and reassured, secretly glad that it did.
She determined to go home the moment they let them out of this dreadful station, imagined taking tea on the terrace with the rose garden in full bloom. A woman in a primrose yellow dress with the hem coming down was talking to anyone who’d listen about the children she was afraid she’d never see again.
She wondered about the possibility of a dinner party, ‘just a small one, of course,’ as a nurse walked by soothing a fretful baby for a harassed young mother of three.
‘Excuse me.’
It took her a moment to realise the words were addressed to her. But they were repeated and she looked around to see the nurse with the baby dozing and dribbling on her shoulder. She recognised the look on the nurse’s face, mingled timidity, adoration and something close to awe and felt justified.
‘I don’t need to do charity work. My public adores me, even in a place like this.’ To the nurse she said, ‘yes?’
‘You’re Clara Ferrante, aren’t you. I saw you at Covent Garden in 1932, La Traviata. You were magnificent, I was in tears at the end.’
Clara murmured her thanks in a tone of dismissal but the nurse went on, ‘I say, would you sing for us now? I think it would raise everyone’s spirits no end.’
A scornful refusal was on Clara’s lips. ‘What does the silly creature think I am? A music hall artiste?’
But…
Sixty years from now, when she is ninety-three and both her voice and strong angular beauty are in that other country, The Past, she will recall this moment in a conversation with a journalist. ‘Something in the way she asked me, in her face as she asked me, made me stop thinking of myself and really see the other people. They were sharing cigarettes and making jokes about Jerry. Someone had a box of biscuits and was passing them around. Everyone was behaving like they were having a jolly time but their faces told the truth — we were all so very frightened.’
In the underground station become air-raid shelter the grand diva, known as Il Divina to that adoring public, took in those details in one sweeping glance and shrugged herself free of the fur coat. She vocalised a moment and then, in the ringing soprano that had brought entire opera houses across the world to their feet in rapturous standing ovation,began to sing:
“When Britain first at heaven’s command,
arose, arose from out the azure main…”
And the lovers and the lady in primrose and the harassed mother and her children, the nurse and the entire mass of the sheltering crowd made a ragged choir for the chorus.
“Rule, Britannia, Britannia, rule the waves,
Britons never, never, never shall be slaves.”
The diva and her chorus sounded a note of defiance that rang down the tunnels, powerful enough to rise up to the streets where the bombs were falling, brave enough to carry itself even as far as Berlin and the desk of the Fuhrer himself.
The cheers and applause were succeeded by the All Clear sounding and then laughter as someone called out, ‘looks like we sent Jerry packing!’ Someone placed the diva’s coat around her shoulders. The crowd parted in a human wave to let her through and Il Divina made her grand exit. Reaching out to touch hands reaching out to her as she went, responding to the clamour of voices from all sides — ‘Well done,’, ‘bravo!’, ‘that was wonderful,’ ’never ‘eard nothin’ like it in me life before, bloomin’ marvellous!’ and ‘thankyou,’ ‘thankyou,’ ‘thankyou.’
Six decades from now the aged diva will declare to the journalist, “that was my finest ever performance.”
