* * *
A few days after the hunt for Oliver James Pengelly had turned out to lead precisely nowhere, he was signing on the dotted line as Jimmy Oliver, at a military base in Wiltshire.
The first thing he’d had to do was get as far away from Cornwall as possible. And he wasn’t going to waste his shrewd journalist’s brain on rushing into what would be his family’s obvious conclusion. They still considered him a boy, but Oliver always thought things through before he made a move.
They would naturally assume he wanted to be a soldier, since army talk was all that anyone ever discussed. His cousins Seb and Justin had enlisted in the army, and his own father and Nick had served in the last war. His mother and female cousins too, he remembered, as he carefully worked out his plan.
Joining the Navy was definitely not an option, he thought with a shudder. There had been drownings in his family and their connections in the past, and although it didn’t follow that any ship he joined would be torpedoed, the very thought of being sucked under the waves into that infinite underwater hell was enough to chill his bones. He had the inheritance of his mother’s vivid imagination to thank for that.
He had never felt any particular passion for flying until he had seen some of the small airplanes whizzing about the skies in practice manoeuvres as he took the train away from Cornwall. Through the train windows he had watched them soaring into the blue, the sun glinting like silver on their wings, and turning them into shimmering works of art.
In those moments he had felt a brief and poetic affinity with the flight of angels… and the heady certainty of what he wanted to do had become as inevitable as breathing.
But he had no intention of enlisting as Oliver Pengelly. Jimmy Oliver he now was, and he blessed his size and powerful physique, and the self-assurance that easily persuaded the recruitment officer that he had left his identity card at home, but it would be sent on as soon as possible. He felt a pang on his mother’s account as he told the lies so glibly, but he was almost seventeen now. A few months more, and they couldn’t touch him. He was simply anticipating the day.
The officer was jaded and anxious to get home to his wife and children at the end of the day, and Olly held his breath as his papers were finally stamped. He was now one of the lowest of the low in His Majesty’s Royal Air Force.
The rank didn’t matter. He was in, and that was enough to give him an adrenalin rush in his veins as he collected his kit and went to find his billet.
* * *
‘It’s just as if he’s vanished from the face of the earth,’ Skye told Lily some weeks later, with a feeling of sheer desolation. ‘How could he do this to us?’
Lily looked at her thoughtfully, and decided it was time for shock tactics.
‘Why don’t you think about his needs for a minute, Skye, and not yours?’
‘What? Well, thank you very much for that. I thought I’d have your support at least!’
‘Darling, you have my support in anything you do, and you always have. But I think that as usual you’ve got blinkers on as far as Olly’s concerned. Is Nick giving you a particularly hard time over it?’
‘You could say that,’ Skye muttered after a few resentful moments. ‘He’s taking it personally, thinking he’s driven the boy away. But Olly left us a long time ago, and I don’t mean to throw any blame on you or David for that. Olly was always frustrated by having a clever stepfather and three women in the house who either made a pet of him or laughed at him. Poor love. He really couldn’t win either way.’
Lily was silent, letting her work things out for herself. Privately, she admired Olly for doing what he felt was right. With the heavy bombing of London now, they needed every young man they could find to beat the Germans.
But, like Skye, she still remembered the trenches of France from the first war, and she shivered, not wishing for Olly or anyone to go through that hell again. She felt guiltily thankful that her own boys were far too young to be involved.
Skye saw her shiver, and tried to pull herself together. She had always known in her heart that Olly would enlist at the first opportunity. He was just jumping the age queue, like so many other young men, and all she and all those other mothers could do was to pray for his safe return.
God, she was being noble now, she thought in disgust… but she had to be, or go under. She drew a deep breath and tried to move her thoughts to other things.
‘There’s nothing we can do about it except what Nick’s already doing, so let’s talk about something else,’ she said with a huge effort. ‘How is the shop doing?’
‘Poorly, since you ask. Few people have the money to spare on fancy goods these days.’ She hesitated. ‘In fact, I wanted to talk to you about that, Skye. So many of these evacuees are miserably dressed. What would you say to my starting a second-hand clothes section? People could bring in their unwanted children’s clothing, things they have outgrown, for instance, and we could offer them at a small price for the evacuees, or even do an exchange arrangement. David could advertise the scheme in the newspaper…’
Her quick burst of enthusiasm faltered when Skye didn’t answer. She knew it was a bad time to be discussing such things when Skye was so worried about Oliver. But then she saw that she had at least caught her cousin’s interest.
‘What a sensible woman you are, Lily. The clothes would need to be clean and pressed before we accepted them for sale or exchange, of course, and David would need to stipulate all that in the advertisement.’
‘Can I go ahead then? It’s your premises, and I wouldn’t do anything without your say-so.’
‘More than that. You have my blessing.’
* * *
They heard from Olly just after his eighteenth birthday. He was now stationed “somewhere in Wiltshire”, he wrote grandly; he was in the Royal Air Force, and learning to fly a kite. They were not to worry about him. And he begged his mother to forgive him for running off the way he had, but life was good – oh, and he had some new pals who were simply spiffing.
‘He sounds like a real toff, don’t he?’ Butch Butcher said when Skye read out the words to the family and the evacuees that afternoon.
‘He sounds grown-up,’ Celia commented, with an unexpected rush of affection for her brother.
‘It ain’t grown-up to fly a kite. Anybody can do it,’ Daphne put in rudely. ‘I ’ad one once. Me Dad used to take me up on Clapham Common ev’ry Sunday morning when he come out of the Nag’s Head. Course, he was sometimes too tiddly to fly it proper,’ she added, with a giggle and a nostalgic tear in her knowing young eye.
‘Yes, well this is a different sort of kite,’ Celia told her briskly. ‘It’s how the airmen refer to their aeroplanes.’
‘Well, I think that’s daft,’ Daphne said.
‘She thinks everyfing’s daft,’ Butch said. ‘But she’s the daft one, ain’t she?’
Any minute now, Skye could see, battle was about to be done. She told them instead to get washed for their tea, ignoring Daphne’s grumblings that she hated margarine and she wanted proper shop-bought jam on her bread like they had at home, and not the homemade stuff.
‘She’s lucky enough to get any at all,’ Skye retorted after the children went upstairs, protesting all the way.
Now that everything was becoming rationed they all had to tighten their belts – though she had to admit it didn’t do female figures any harm. She frequently longed for a good strong cup of tea, but now that tea was rationed to two ounces per person per week, even that resembled ‘cricket’s piss’ – according to Daphne’s colourful vocabulary.
But at any rate, now that they knew what Olly was doing she felt a little better. Ironically so, she thought wryly, since he was putting himself in the front line of danger. But not knowing was always the worst, and even Nick was showing a definite and belated pride in Olly’s daring. She lulled herself into a false sense of optimism.
* * *
The Blitz began in September, with the heaviest bombardment that L
ondon had ever witnessed. As it continued unabated, through Christmas and into another year, Skye constantly begged Wenna to come home where she would be safe, but Wenna stubbornly reiterated that the show must go on to keep up people’s spirits.
Even so, the Flamingo Club had put up its shutters except for Saturday nights, and once the air raid sirens started wailing, few Londoners risked turning out of their homes for anything so fancy, even to hear Miss Penny Wood sing.
Like most of them, she and Fanny hurried to the nearest Underground station, where temporary sleeping quarters and coveted family corners were the order of the day now. It was the new community shelter, and although the sights and smells were sometimes indescribable, Wenna recognised the weird sense of belonging, of beating the Hun by the sheer defiance of not moving out of London. This was where they belonged; they were all together; and this was where they would stay. Even the King and Queen said the same thing.
But families, friends and lovers were being parted, and she hadn’t seen Austin in months now, although he wrote as often as he could and she knew he was due for a few days’ leave soon. She knew that her cousins Sebby and Justin were stationed “somewhere in France” now, and that her brother Olly had enlisted. She was enormously proud of him.
But there was something else that drew Wenna to these people she now virtually thought of as her own. When the dull sounds of bombing grew louder and more frightening and rocked the Underground stations, no matter how deep they were, there were always those who started a sing-song to keep up the peckers of the rest, and to try to drown out what old Hitler was doing. She admired them all so much.
Even Miss Penny Wood wasn’t averse to joining in the choruses, and eventually found herself leading the nightly singing. Most of the people who fled to the Underground were ordinary folk and not theatre-goers at all, and had no idea who she was. But they quickly realised they had a nightingale in their midst, and adopted her just as readily as she had adopted them.
‘Gawd, I’ve forgotten me glasses. I’ll have to go back for ’em, duck,’ Fanny Rosenbloom said as they rushed towards the Underground station one early spring night in 1941.
The ritual was routine now, and people took so much of their homes with them that it resembled a huge underground refugee camp. Many of the older women took their knitting, since making socks and scarves for soldiers was their contribution towards the war effort.
Fanny Rosenbloom always took her showbiz and women’s magazines, but she had finally succumbed to the inevitable, admitting that she was as blind as a bat without glasses.
‘You can’t go back,’ Wenna said at once. ‘Just join in the singing tonight or try to have a sleep instead.’
‘I ain’t sleeping while old Hitler’s up there doin’ his worst. I’ll just be a few minutes, gel.’
‘Fanny, please don’t—’
But there was no stopping her, and Wenna watched anxiously as she picked her way carefully over bodies preparing to settle down for another night of mole-like existence; young mothers trying to settle down their children; babies crying fretfully while the older men belched or farted or drank more bottles of ale than they should to try to forget why they were all here. She couldn’t blame any of them.
‘Come on then, gel, let’s see your pearly whites! Give us a song from that pretty throat of yours,’ someone yelled, and others took up the call at once.
Wenna obliged at once, and the dimly-lit Underground immediately came alive with the sound of singing, so that the heavy bombardment didn’t seem so bad. They could drown it out, and they bleedin’ well would. Fanny always said so…
* * *
Fanny looked up at the maze of searchlights picking out the German bombers as they zoomed towards the London landmarks – like angry bleedin’ dragonflies buzzing about, she thought irritably. The city was ablaze with light from the burning buildings by now, anyway, and they hardly needed the bleedin’ searchlights at all. Fanny blasphemed cheerfully with the most inventive curses she could find, tripping and staggering through the rubble of a recently demolished row of houses on her way back to the Flamingo Club.
The buggers weren’t going to stop her getting back to her own place, so sod ’em all. She gave the two-finger salute skywards as she reached the club, and stumbled in through the darkness and up to her bedroom to fetch her glasses.
She was deafened and consumed by noise now, as buildings all around her rocked on their foundations and the street was lit up with a blinding flash of light so intense that it was almost unearthly. But Fanny hardly saw it. Within seconds there was nothing left of her to see anything.
Chapter Four
The singing grew determinedly louder and more raucous as the noise of the bombardment from above penetrated the crowded Underground station. To those who were incarcerated below, it seemed to go on for hours, and voices were strained to their utmost as if to ward off the knowledge of what everyone knew was the destruction of their homes and businesses.
But one of them knew it was too long since her benefactor had gone. The sweetest voice of all had become silent, her vocal cords drying up with what her family would call a true Cornish premonition.
‘Fanny,’ Wenna whispered brokenly. ‘Oh Fanny, no…’
Finally, she could remain there no longer. There was a frail hope that Fanny would have sheltered elsewhere, and she had to know. She clambered over the bodies of those who were either trying in vain to sleep, or ignoring Hitler’s whole bloody onslaught, and tried to reach the exit.
‘Where d’you think yer goin’, gel?’ one and then another shrieked. ‘The All Clear ain’t gawn yet.’
‘Let me go,’ she gasped, as they tried to pull her back. ‘I have to find Fanny. I have to know what’s happened.’
As if to aid her determination, moments later they heard the long-drawn-out sound of the All Clear siren, and the sound of cheering replaced the hoarse singing.
Wenna clambered out of the Underground, swaying and blinking in horror at the carnage that assaulted her eyes.
Searchlights still criss-crossed the night sky in the moonlight for any stray German bombers, but there was little need for any natural or artificial light. It was a scene out of hell. The flames of the burning buildings lit the sky with a terrible red glow, and the acrid stench of burning flesh filled the air. Rubble and splintered glass lay everywhere, and the dust was choking and blinding. From several collapsed buildings where a bomb had struck a direct hit, rank sewage was pumping out with a stomach-turning stink.
People milled about in complete disarray. Among the rescue workers were half-clad folk peering out of home-made shelters in various stages of relief or fear or total disorientation. Others who had stubbornly remained inside their houses staggered outside the dangerously crumbling buildings, deafened and bewildered. But they were the lucky ones. They were still alive.
Wardens shouted angrily at Wenna to get off the streets as ambulances and fire engines screamed through them, seeking a passageway. Where they tried impotently to put out the worst of the fires, the firemen’s hoses were instantly seared and scorched in the intense heat. It seemed as if the whole of London was on fire, lit up like a hideous red inferno.
Not knowing what to do or how to help, Wenna feverishly tried to ignore what the rescue workers were doing, willing away the anguished cries of the injured and dying. She closed her mind to the sight of blood and scattered limbs, screaming inside as she trod on a soft piece of flesh that had once been someone’s arm, and at the sight of a bloodied and mutilated baby tossed into a pile of rubble as if it was a rag doll.
Weeping and almost demented, she ignored everything in her rush to reach the Flamingo Club and Fanny. She struggled through the winding streets and alleyways, and finally gaped in numbed shock and disbelief at what had once been Fanny and Georgie Rosenbloom’s pride and joy.
There was nothing left of the entire street. Nothing but a heap of smouldering bricks and mortar. And somewhere beneath it all was the woman who had love
d her like a daughter.
Galvanised at last into action, the sensations of pain and horror rushed through Wenna so fast that they made her gasp. Her chest was so tight with holding in the pain all this time that she was near to fainting. But she knew she had to do something, however futile the task.
She crawled over the broken stones and glass, ignoring the jagged edges that cut into her flesh, and began to tear frantically at the debris with her bare hands. They quickly began to bleed as the shingle ripped her tender skin, but she hardly noticed. Sobbing hysterically, she worked unceasingly until other hands pulled her away, and a man’s voice she didn’t know was shouting roughly in her ear.
‘There’s nothing you can do ’ere, duck. They’re all long gawn, and you need ’elp yerself, by the looks of yer.’
Wenna turned on the air raid warden angrily.
‘I have to find her,’ she croaked wildly. ‘You don’t understand. I live here,’ she finished, choking, and not noticing the compassion in his voice.
‘Not any more you don’t, gel. Come on now, into the ambulance wiv yer and get those cuts cleaned up—’
‘I don’t need a bloody ambulance! I’m not hurt. Go and see to those who need you.’
Was the man completely stupid? Wenna glared at him as the cruising ambulance pulled up alongside them, and then saw the kindliness in his tired eyes. And instantly, she knew he had seen far more terrible sights than she had this night, and with a whimpering cry, she slid to the ground at his feet.
* * *
‘My God,’ Skye said, white-faced, two weeks later.
She looked up from the letter that had been delivered that morning, her throat working and almost unable to speak.
‘What is it?’ Celia said sharply. ‘It’s not Olly, is it?’ Dear God, don’t let it be, she prayed.
‘This is from Wenna’s agent. She’s been in a London hospital for more than a week now after one of those dreadful air raids. She’s in a state of shock and hasn’t spoken since she arrived. Apparently one of the other patients recognised her as the singer in the Flamingo Club and the hospital almoner contacted her agent. He thought we should know.’
A Brighter Tomorrow Page 6