by Ellie Dean
She flinched as he leaned forward and rested his hands either side of her on the bed. ‘Well, I ain’t marrying you, Julie – not until you get rid of that kid.’
‘But . . .’
He leaned closer, his sour breath stirring her hair. ‘No buts, no ifs, no maybe. I ain’t raising another man’s bastard, and that’s an end to it.’
Julie gripped the gas-mask box and tried to stand.
He casually pushed her back onto the bed. ‘Get rid of the kid and we’ll set a date,’ he said, his voice low and flat. ‘Keep the kid and it’s over, Julie.’
She stared at him, terrified now of what he might do. The spell in which he’d held her broke, and she scrambled off the bed. ‘I’ll think about it,’ she babbled, edging towards the door.
He returned to his perch on the windowsill and began to roll another cigarette. ‘You do that, gel,’ he murmured. ‘And when you’ve seen sense, come back here and I’ll show you what you would’a been missing.’ He gave her a lascivious smile and winked. ‘As you said the other night, gel, it’ll be worth the waiting.’
Julie wrenched open the door and fled down the dark stairs. She slammed through the front door and stumbled into the street, gasping for fresh air and from the overwhelming need to get as far away from him as quickly as possible. Retrieving her bicycle, she pedalled furiously down the street, away from that awful room, the squabbling seagulls and the raucous noise of the docks. She didn’t stop until she’d reached the hostel.
She was shaking so badly she almost fell off the bicycle as she came to a halt, and she had to stand for a moment to regain her equilibrium. It was rather galling to realise he hadn’t chased after her, or even called to her from his window. But there were no tears or regrets for having that awful encounter, for it was obvious she’d had a merciful escape.
Stan was not the man she’d thought he was – and certainly not the man who’d charmed her family with his nice manners and respectable prospects – but someone whose veneer of kindness and urbanity had finally slipped to reveal his true character. She couldn’t believe how stupid she’d been to think she loved him when, really, she hadn’t known him at all. Looking down at the little engagement ring she’d once treasured, she decided to post it to him first thing in the morning.
She wheeled her bike through the gates and parked it alongside the others under the lean-to, her thoughts whirling. With the engagement over and Stan out of her life, she was now truly alone. She faced that fact, and began to make plans. She had always dealt with the family’s correspondence and had the family address book in her bedside drawer. Tonight, she would write to Bill and his family, explaining the situation in the faint hope his parents would take William in. Then she’d write to Eileen and her brothers, and tell them all what had happened.
She watched Horace filling a bucket with anthracite to feed the range, spilling most of it on the path as he carried it into the hostel. Yet her thoughts were elsewhere.
She didn’t really expect a reply from Bill’s family, but if Eileen wrote back, then at least she’d know she still lived in Cliffehaven and could begin to make plans to go down there. Apart from her brothers, who were fighting in North Africa, Eileen was all the family she had now. Although there was a gap of twelve years between them, they were still family, and that counted for a great deal to all East Enders. Eileen was duty-bound to take her in.
Still rather shaken from that scene with Stan, she nevertheless began to feel more positive about things as she went in through the back door of the hostel and headed for the bedroom. She felt grubby after sitting on that revolting bed, tainted by the sleaziness of Stan and his horrid little room – and the way she’d cheapened herself by begging him to marry her. Apart from that, she could swear the stench of curry still clung to her coat and hair.
Julie grabbed fresh towels and locked herself in the bathroom. A good scrub with soap and hot water would put her to rights. Then she could settle down to writing her letters, and start making plans to take William out of the chaos of London to what she hoped would be the safety of Cliffehaven.
Chapter Six
PEGGY REILLY WAS taking a few well-earned minutes to herself, having been on her feet for most of the morning at the Town Hall where she worked as a volunteer, sorting clothes for those poor unfortunate people who’d lost everything in the raids.
Her sister, Doris, had called in and thrown her weight about, which, as usual, had wound Peggy up to the point where she’d simply turned her back on her and walked away. Doris would make her pay for that moment of exasperation, she had no doubt of it, but for the moment Peggy was just relieved to be out in the fresh air.
She battled against the wind which buffeted her slight frame and brought her bicycle to a halt by one of the stone benches that were dotted along the promenade. She sat down, glad for this quiet moment after the chaos and noise of too many women squabbling over everything from frying pans to pyjamas while their babies screamed and their toddlers ran about under everyone’s feet. Beach View Boarding House could manage without her for a while.
It was early afternoon, with streaks of sunlight piercing the clouds to lie in golden pools on the grey water of the Channel. The horizon was darkening with the promise of rain, but it would be a while yet before Cliffehaven got a soaking, and Peggy decided to risk it. She knotted her headscarf under her chin and pulled up her coat collar. The wind was bitter as it came off the sea, and the bay didn’t look its best with huge coils of barbed wire barring the way to the mined beach, but Peggy was warm in the new coat her husband Jim had given her for her forty-fourth birthday, and happy to have this moment of solitude as she drank in the view and let her thoughts drift.
Cliffehaven had been a popular seaside resort before the war, its hotels and guest houses full of visitors, with music and dancing on the pier and hundreds strolling along the promenade. Peggy had lived here all her life, taking over the running of Beach View when her parents retired some years ago. She had seen many changes over that time, but these long months of war had brought the greatest, and she wondered if the town could ever return to how it had once been.
The grand old hotels still graced the seafront, even though they bore the scars of enemy bullets and the general carelessness of the soldiers and Allied servicemen billeted there. The smaller boarding houses and Victorian villas still perched on the hills that sloped right down to the promenade, but there were gaps between them now. The High Street had fared no better, for shops and offices had been turned to rubble, the railway station was reduced to a shell, and the slum housing behind it had been obliterated during that terrible night at the end of December.
Peggy didn’t want to dwell on the horrors, and she turned her attention back to the view. The shingled bay curved between tall chalk cliffs to the east and rolling hills to the west, the town nestling amid those hills and spreading out with new factories and hastily built emergency accommodation for those who’d been bombed out. Beyond the town and hidden from view amid the hills was a Canadian army camp, and an all-but-abandoned First World War American airbase. This base was home to a handful of American pilots and engineers who could often be seen about the town, using their heavy machinery to help shore up toppling houses or clear the debris following a raid – but everyone knew they would have preferred to be flying alongside the RAF boys, and their frustration at not being a part of things often led to trouble at closing time.
To the far north lay the extended runways, Nissen huts and hangars of Cliffe airbase, which had become strategically more important as the war went on, and therefore a prime enemy target. This airbase was where Peggy’s son-in-law, Martin, flew his Spitfire, and where her youngest daughter, Cissy, now worked as a secretary. They’d both sustained injuries in a particularly vicious raid before Christmas, but thankfully had fully recovered.
Peggy gave a deep sigh as she regarded the beach where she’d played as a child, and where she’d taken her own children to paddle in the sea and hunt for treasures i
n the rock pools. It didn’t look at all inviting now. Concrete shipping traps were dotted across the bay, and ugly gun emplacements were positioned all along the promenade. The entrance to the pier had been blown up so it stood marooned in the water, and noxious dark clumps of oil and tar came in with every tide to cling to the iron footings and lie amid the pebbles. Thousands of tons of shipping had been sunk in the Channel over the past year, and the tar was a tragic reminder of how many had lost their lives.
She shook off these dark thoughts, determined not to spoil these precious few minutes by dwelling on the awfulness of war, and turned her attention to the white cliffs which loomed over the sadly depleted fishing fleet anchored on the shingle. Her father-in-law, Ron, had come from a long line of fishermen, and had run several boats and crews down on that beach before he retired and came to live in the basement of Beach View Boarding House. His eldest son, Frank, had continued the family tradition with his own three sons until the outbreak of war. Now that the boys had enlisted into the Royal Naval Reserve as minesweeper captains, Frank was the only Reilly who still fished off these shores.
Peggy’s thoughts drifted from Ron and Frank to her husband, Jim, Ron’s youngest son. She gave a wry smile. She’d married Jim during the last war despite her parents’ disapproval, and was as much in love with him today as she had been then. Contrary to all the warnings that he was a rogue and a fly-by-night, their marriage was still a happy one – but the depth of that contentment depended largely upon what sort of mischief Jim had been up to.
There had been moments when she could have killed him – when she’d thought his flirtatious ways had led him to being unfaithful – and moments when she’d adored him, and could forgive him almost anything. She’d had to accept that Jim Reilly would always have an eye for an attractive woman and a dodgy deal, and it had taken all her determination and love to keep him on the straight and narrow. Somehow, they had survived, and would soon celebrate their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, and be further blessed with the birth of their first grandchild.
Peggy snuggled into her coat, warmed by the excitement of this new arrival. Anne and Martin lived in a tiny hamlet to the north of Cliffehaven, but she would be coming home to Beach View Boarding House the following day to be nearer to the doctor’s surgery and spend the last two weeks of her pregnancy with her family. Everything was prepared for this momentous occasion, right down to the refurbishment of the old pram which had stood at the back of the shed ever since Peggy’s two boys, Bob and Charlie, had grown out of it.
She blinked away the tears that always came when she thought about her two youngest. They were down in Somerset, and although she’d managed to go and see them over Christmas and found them sprouting up like weeds and clearly relishing life on a farm, she’d found it the hardest thing ever to leave them behind and still missed them horribly.
This damned war had a lot to answer to, for not only were her boys happily growing up without her, but Anne had to watch and wait and worry over Martin, who was in charge of a Spitfire squadron; Cissy risked life and limb working on that same airbase, and Jim and Ron had discovered the far-too-tempting opportunities of the black market. And, as if she didn’t have enough to worry about, there was also the elderly Mrs Finch, the two young nurses and Rita to take care of.
Peggy watched the seagulls dip and swoop and hover, their haunting cries carried on the wind. She smiled with soft affection as she thought about her ‘chicks’. Fran and Suzy had come to live at Beach View shortly after the outbreak of war. Fran was from Ireland, and the livelier of the two, but Suzy happily accompanied her friend on their few hours away from the hospital, and they both lived life to the full, taking advantage of the numerous parties and dances laid on to entertain the sudden influx of servicemen.
Rita was a few years younger and just as lively, for if she wasn’t driving fire engines about, she was charging around on her motorbike, organising impromptu races on the abandoned dirt-track circuit at the back of the new factories. These races had become so popular among the servicemen that she’d had to limit the number of entries, but all the money she made through this enterprise was handed over to charity.
Rita was a local girl whose mother had died some years ago, and whose father had enlisted as an engineer on an airbase somewhere up north. She was one of Cissy’s friends who’d been a frequent visitor before the war, so when she’d been bombed out, it seemed only right she should make her home at Beach View.
Peggy’s oldest ‘chick’ was Mrs Finch. No one knew quite how old Cordelia was, but although she was frail and birdlike, and twittered on like a demented sparrow, she’d proved to be as stalwart and strong as the best of them. Nothing much seemed to get her down, but being as deaf as a post was a saving grace during air raids, for she could switch off her rather useless old hearing aid and snore through the whole thing to her heart’s content.
Mrs Finch was a widow and had moved into Beach View several years ago. Her sons had migrated to Canada after the First War and seemed to have forgotten her, but she’d found her niche with Peggy’s family and had become an intrinsic part of it. With the war on and a house full of young people, she’d found new purpose in life. This sustaining discovery gave her the vim and vigour of a much younger woman, and she’d taken on some of the household chores with relish.
She adored Ron and Jim, and would often get as flustered as a young girl when they tried their Irish charm on her. But she knew blarney when she heard it, and had soon got their measure, often being one step ahead of them, her salient advice rescuing them from several close calls with the law. The girls all thought of her as a grandmother, telling her their woes as they helped unravel her knitting, treated her to a new hairdo, or took her to see the latest Hollywood musical at the cinema.
‘Yes,’ muttered Peggy, ‘we’ve all been blessed by Cordelia’s presence.’
She shivered as the chill finally got to her, and decided she’d sat here long enough. There were things to do at home if everyone was going to eat tonight. Having retrieved her bicycle, she pedalled along the seafront, the wind buffeting her and tearing at her headscarf.
The basket Ron had fixed to the handlebars shuddered as the wheels ran over the uneven surface, making her handbag and gas-mask box dance about. She eyed her handbag fretfully, hoping the surprise she’d hidden in there would survive the journey. It had been quite a feat to get it, had cost rather more than she’d expected and would probably not be well received – but she hoped everyone would come to appreciate its benefits.
It was a steep climb from the seafront as Peggy headed towards Beach View Terrace, and she was huffing and puffing like an old steam train by the time she’d gone three blocks and reached Camden Road, which stretched off to her left.
Camden Road ran parallel to the seafront and was the flatter route home from the High Street, but now and again Peggy needed to see the sea and let the salty wind blow away the cobwebs. However, it was tougher going when the wind blew this hard, and she had to stop a minute and get her breath back.
Her gaze travelled over the few shops where she’d registered for her rations and past Ron’s favourite pub, the Anchor, to the distant bulk of the clothing factory, the fire station, and the grey stone walls of the sprawling hospital. There had once been a primary school in Camden Road where Anne had taught, but it had been flattened during a bombing raid early on in the war. Mercifully it had been at night and no one had been killed, but it had been the deciding factor when it had come to the safety of Bob and Charlie, which was why they were now living in Somerset.
Peggy took a deep breath and pushed the bicycle across the road and into Beach View Terrace. A gas explosion had destroyed the two houses at the far end and she still found the gap they’d left quite disturbing, but the rest of the terrace of Victorian villas had survived with only a few scars to mark the enemy’s passing.
Beach View Boarding House rose three storeys above the pavement, with concrete steps shadowing the basement window as the
y led to a pillared portico and rather battered front door. There had once been ornate lamps at the bottom of the steps and stained-glass windows on either side of the door, but they’d been blown to smithereens during a raid. The front door was second-hand, and the only thing that had survived the blast was the brass lion’s-head knocker which she polished every morning.
Many of the windows had been reglazed and heavily taped to protect them from further blasts, but one or two of the panes had had to be boarded over. There was only so much money to spend, and it would cost a fortune to keep buying new windows when the Luftwaffe would only wreck them again.
Peggy hoisted the bike up the stairs and opened the front door. She was greeted by a delicious smell of cooking, which made her mouth water in anticipation, but as she wheeled the bike into the kitchen, it was to find it strangely deserted.
A glance out of the window told her the reason why. Ron and Mrs Finch were in the vegetable plot having an argument. Or at least, Ron was doing all the arguing, for Mrs Finch had clearly switched off her hearing aid and was ignoring him as his face went puce and his bushy eyebrows waggled in frustration. While this was going on, Ron’s dog, Harvey, was rummaging through the compost heap to find the best and smelliest place to have an ecstatic and leisurely roll.
Peggy gave a sigh of despair that was tinged with loving acceptance. Ron and his dog were alike in many ways and rarely seen apart. Harvey was a lurcher, a shaggy-haired Bedlington–greyhound cross with a mind of his own and a prodigious talent for hunting and sniffing out anything that was buried. Ron was a disreputable, shaggy old rogue who liked nothing better than to go poaching on Lord Cliffe’s vast estate. They both seemed to relish getting as dirty as possible and couldn’t seem to understand that Peggy didn’t appreciate them tramping their muck into her house.
And yet Harvey and Ron had earned themselves quite a reputation during the past year, for not only had they rescued an injured pilot and brought him safely down from the hills during an air raid, but they had also managed to find and rescue scores of people trapped beneath their ruined homes and businesses.