The Safest Place in London

by Maggie Joel

  The bombing had let up for the time being, or had moved away, and into the silence a child cried.

  Diana clutched the handle of the case and her fingers ached. It was a small overnight case, very lightweight, in pale blue vinyl with a metal handle and gold clasps burnished with age and use. Inside it was lined with imitation pale blue silk with a deep pocket sewed into the lid in the same material and two canvas straps with buckles with which one could secure the contents tightly. It was Gerald’s case, though Diana had never seen him use it and she wondered if he had inherited it, perhaps, at some time. It was rather cheap and battered, and next to her Florida alligator handbag with the morocco leather purse nestling inside it looked cheap, out of place, but it was lightweight and that was the thing.

  The little girl was awake. Her mother, the woman with the fair hair and the shaped eyebrows, had been minding a baby earlier, brought by a small, grubby child who had emerged out of the chaos to hand it to her, and though the baby clearly was not her own she had walked up and down with it, unconcerned by its screaming. A bomb had fallen and another and the woman had not flinched. A near miss, the rumble and shaking of the station, the horror of their crowded circumstances, none of it touched her. The woman was fearless and splendid, and Diana imagined her the heroine of a government propaganda poster captioned Hitler Beware! Mothers of Britain Stand Firm!—or something nonsensical like that.

  Of course it was absurd and Diana had looked away before the woman noticed her watching.

  After a time the baby had been reclaimed by the same small, grubby child, its place taken by a man in a duffle coat with an unsettling intensity in his eyes who had sat with the woman for a time and they had whispered together, touched once, then sat in silence. Eventually the man had got up and gone. Now the woman sat and did not move. Did not smoke, even. During the man’s visit her little girl had slept, her head on her mother’s lap, but now the child was wake and she watched Diana with a face that showed no expression, with eyes that saw through the cheap pale blue vinyl of her case to the bounty within.

  Diana clutched the handle of the case and her fingers ached. She uncurled them to flex each one. She could not sleep and she would not sleep, there was no question of it.

  ‘Need the lav!’ said Abigail, pulling at her mother’s hand.

  Diana had no feeling in her legs and wondered if she could stand even if she wanted to, but there was nothing for it. She got stiffly to her feet. Ought she to take the case? She took her handbag and left the case—they could hardly take it with them—casting a doubtful glance around her to see who was watching. The little girl was watching. Everyone else slept. The little girl did not move but her eyes saw everything.

  Diana took Abigail’s hand and they picked their way over the people towards the large tarpaulins up on the platform proper. The smell grew more intense as they approached and they held their handkerchiefs over their faces. Naturally there was a queue and Abigail cried, ‘Mum, need to go!’ because now it was urgent. Abigail hopped and crossed her legs and eventually it was their turn. They braced themselves and found a latrine and it was best not to look where they were stepping or look at anything at all really, and when it was done and they realised there was nowhere to wash their hands, they came out.

  And Diana saw Lance Beckwith leap off the escalator and emerge onto the platform, breathless and dishevelled and clearly terrified.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Joe had gone. He had appeared out of thin air and their lives together here in London had ended. Now they must wait. On some unnamed date in the future, Nancy would pack up what remained of their lives and she and Emily would leave London forever for some unknown and undreamed-of place across the sea.

  And each second that passed took Joe further away from them.

  The blood pumped in her ears. She was one heartbeat away from leaping to her feet, scooping up Emily and running with her up the escalators and into the fire-stricken night, running after Joe, calling out his name, searching place after place for him and finding him or not finding him—either way, each possibility seemed a catastrophe.

  But Nancy did not leap up. She did not run after Joe. The blood pumped in her ears. And meanwhile Emily slept on, unaware of the cataclysmic events that had transpired, that would change her life. The war would end and other dads would come home but Emily’s dad would not. There would be no medals and his name would not appear on any war memorial.

  But Emily was not asleep. She lay unmoving beneath the blanket, her head on her mother’s lap, staring at the blue travelling case that the smart woman had brought with her down to the shelter and that clearly contained nothing of use in an air raid as the woman had not opened it once but had sat stiffly clutching the handle. Now the woman had gone, taking her little girl with her, and the case was left behind.

  The distant boom of an explosion caused the floor to vibrate and Nancy looked up. Small cracks appeared in the ceiling, dust trickling down, and Emily’s hand darted out and made a grab, not for the blue travelling case, but for the little girl’s teddy bear that lay beside it, almost hidden and similarly abandoned.

  A second explosion echoed distantly and all around heads bobbed up, bodies shifting, pulling blankets closer about them as though a blanket could protect you from a bomb blast. The bombing had picked up again and a murmur of voices accompanied it. People were frightened when no one had seemed very frightened before. It was being woken from their sleep that did it.

  The teddy bear was gone, as though it had never existed, and Emily pulled the blanket tightly around herself. Of the mother and her child there was no sign. Presumably they had gone to the latrines and when they returned the little girl would discover her teddy was missing. Her mother would be angry with her, would conduct a search, would tell the child off and the child would cry. The teddy would not be found. The mother would not confront the people seated around her, she was not the type. She would tell the child to be quiet. She would tell the child she would buy her another teddy bear.

  Nancy searched for her cigarettes, pulled one from the packet and stuck it in her mouth, striking the match and observing the flame flare, tasting the dry little flakes of tobacco on her lips. The tip of the cigarette glowed redly.

  She could hear a baby crying, screaming furiously, and she realised she needed to be up and moving about, that something might snap if she did not get up at once. She located the Rosenthals easily enough. In the heaviest months of the Blitz the railway company had installed bunks up on the platform proper and this was where the Rosenthals had positioned themselves, looking very settled with a bunk of their own, with their bundle of blankets and pillows and a foul-smelling potty covered with a cloth for the youngest ones to use as the trip to the latrines was not always safe. Billy Rosenthal saw her and waved. He was squatting beside his younger brother, Stanley, and had one of the littlest girls—Pamela or Barbara, she didn’t know which, always had trouble distinguishing the younger ones—bouncing on his knee. Mrs Rosenthal was nursing the baby, or trying to. His face was red and scrunched up and he was bawling fit to burst. Mrs Rosenthal saw Nancy and gave a wan smile which turned to relief as Nancy took the baby off her. Nancy had brought half a sausage roll with her which she divided into pieces. The baby was too young for solids really, but she put some on her finger and let him suck it. The rest she shared among the youngest kids.

  Nancy saw them then, the mother and daughter, emerging from the latrines a little distance away, faces white and shocked, as well they might be—a visit to the latrines at this stage of the night was not for the faint-hearted. The little girl was adjusting her skirt, holding out her hands to her mother as though she did not know what to do with them. The mother spoke to her, offered a handkerchief, then looked up, and perhaps she saw Nancy and recognised her and perhaps she did not. Either way, the child spotted something at that moment and darted off and they were gone.

  ‘He’s enough to frighten off Adolf all on his very own,’ said Mrs Rosenthal of the ba
by, pushing the hair out of her exhausted face. Her thin fingers seemed to be just bone and her dress was soaked through with sweat as though it was summer and not the middle of winter.

  ‘He’s got a set of lungs on him, alright,’ Nancy agreed, but she didn’t mind it, didn’t mind it at all. There was something special about this one. She had been there at his birth, holding Mrs Rosenthal’s hand in the squalid upstairs room in Odessa Street on a wet Sunday afternoon the day after Halloween. A midwife had come, finally, when they had all but given her up, and the baby had stuck fast so that Mrs Rosenthal had screamed like a dying animal and there had been a moment when they’d thought the baby was lost. Perhaps that would have been for the best—the midwife had certainly seemed to think so, for when the baby was at last ejected from poor Mrs Rosenthal’s broken and spent body, she had held it up by its ankles, all bloodied and crumpled and purple, like a dead thing already, and she had looked at Mrs Rosenthal and at the squalor of the room they lived in and at the six other kids sitting outside waiting, wretched and unfed, in the stairwell and she had said, ‘Do you want this one?’ The baby was almost dead anyway; it was a small matter to help it on its way. ‘’Course I want it!’ Mrs Rosenthal had declared, loud as you like. ‘He’s my little boy. ’Course I want him!’ And now the baby was three months old and thriving, as much as any baby thrived down here, with a horde of brothers and sisters to look out for it.

  ‘You alright, luv?’

  Nancy looked down and saw Mrs Rosenthal studying her, a little frown on her face. Was she alright? The question took Nancy by surprise. Their lives, hers and the Rosenthals’ (a shared toilet out the back, paper-thin walls, a meter for the electricity that broke down without warning, an intermittent water supply, uncarpeted stairs and a ceiling that shook every time someone slammed a door), were as intimately entwined as that of husband and wife. She had held Mrs Rosenthal’s hand while her baby was stuck fast inside her yet Nancy had never once used Mrs Rosenthal’s first name (which was Sylvia) and she had never once gone to her with a problem of her own that was not connected to the outside toilet or the electricity meter or the intermittent water supply. They were intimately entwined but utterly private from one another.

  And so Mrs Rosenthal’s question took her by surprise.

  ‘’Course,’ she said, patting the baby’s back. I’ll tell Emily she must give it back, she decided, for the little girl and her teddy bear had been on her mind, though she had only now realised it.

  ‘Your Joe got off alright to his new ship, did he?’

  Nancy buried her face in the baby’s blanket and made no reply. When she and Emily were gone would the Rosenthals move into their rooms? They would leave at night, just before dawn, for that was the way it was done in Odessa Street, and she did not know if they would say goodbye to the Rosenthals before they left or not. The war might be over by then. Len Rosenthal might have returned—or he might be dead.

  ‘Yes, Joe got off alright.’

  ‘It’s a bloody miracle,’ said Mrs Rosenthal, indicating the baby, who had stopped crying and was now sleeping, good as gold.

  And Nancy agreed that yes, it was a miracle. She handed the baby back—the urge that had made her leap up and abandon Emily was fading. She made some excuse and left. She would see them in a few hours when they returned at dawn, worn out and bedraggled, to the house—if the house had survived—and they would all get on with their lives just as though nothing had happened, just as though Joe was back on a ship and at sea.

  The bombing continued, if anything had worsened, and people were moving restlessly about so that her path was blocked and she was forced to take a circuitous route back. The rows of bunks continued on down the length of the platform, two, three, four people wedged into each one, and as she passed they watched her, every one of them, as men in a cellblock might watch a new inmate.

  She felt again the urgency to be moving, active, but now it drove her back to Emily, drove her to think about her own baby growing inside her, hers and Joe’s. Let it be alright, let this baby be alright. And she wondered then where the baby would be born.

  As she reached the final row of bunks right at the end of the platform a hand shot out and grabbed her. Fingers closed around her arm, gripping it, pulling her in, pulling her down, and she found herself seated on one of the bunks facing Milly Fenwick and two staring little boys.

  ‘Hello, Nancy,’ said Milly. ‘We thought it was you.’

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  ‘Mummy, look—it’s Uncle Lance!’ said Abigail, and she tugged at Diana’s hand.

  But Diana did not move. For he stood with his coat flapping open and shirt collar awry, his hair unkempt and fallen forward over his eyes, out of breath and glancing behind him at the escalator down which he had just come, snatching at his hat and mopping his brow with it. This was not the urbane Lance in a silk scarf recently returned from South America who had sat across from her at the Conduit Street cafe, nor was it the hard-nosed Lance conducting dubious transactions from behind his desk eight, nine hours earlier. And this was not Lance caught in an air raid—she had an idea he would not be concerned by a raid. No, this was something quite different.

  You shouldn’t have brought her here, Lance had said. You shouldn’t have told her my name. It was stupid, as though simply by bringing her child with her Diana had somehow compromised his safety, as though his very existence was so precarious. At the time she had been furious, embarrassed. Now, in the dimly lit concourse, she saw the whites of his eyes, wild and staring.

  ‘Mummy—want more chocolate!’

  And in a second Abigail was gone, letting go of her mother’s hand and darting off into the crowd after him.

  ‘Abigail, stop!’

  Diana lunged after her. She could see Abigail’s tiny figure just ahead of her, just out of reach, weaving between the people, and just beyond her was Lance, who had turned to the left and then to the right and now seemed almost to retrace his steps. Perhaps he saw Abigail or had heard her cry, a small child in a tweed coat with little mittens sewn to the cuffs and smart little shoes with silver buckles running towards him, and for a moment he seemed to regard her in bemusement.

  Abigail, who had run full tilt at a man she had met only once in her life and in a place that was utterly unfamiliar and alien to her, suddenly lost her nerve and pulled up short. This gave her mother precious seconds to swoop down and whisk the girl into her arms. Whether she would, at this point, have raised her hand to wave to Lance or opened her mouth to call out to him afterwards Diana did not know, but before she had time to wave or call out, before she had time to wonder why, when Lance’s office was at Liverpool Street, he would choose to take shelter in Bethnal Green, three men appeared out of nowhere and surrounded him.

  At first Diana could make no sense of it. The men seemed to have followed him into the station, pursuing him down the escalator, and what flashed into her head was the boxes hastily sealed and haphazardly stacked in Lance’s office and the frown on his face that she had assumed was for herself but that she now realised had been for this.

  She did not move, though Abigail squirmed furiously in her arms. The three men surrounded him and Diana thought of children in a playground surrounding their victim. But these were not schoolboys. She smelled the cheap cigarettes they smoked and she saw the brims of their hats, stained dark and steaming slightly from the rain, though it had not been raining earlier; she saw a rash of dark stubble on a chin, the callouses and blackened fingernails of another, the fresh mud caked on the heel of a boot—impressions, fleeting but profound. If words were exchanged she could not hear them, and in a moment, no longer, they separated, the three men melting away into the crowd, gone.

  Lance remained where he stood, alone now and dazed it seemed, then he reeled away. His felt hat had come off and rolled away and Diana found it at her feet. She could see the cream silk lining inside the hat which ordinarily would display the mark of a good tailor but the lettering, she saw, was in Spanish.
>
  She stepped forward, her heart thudding, but still she did not call out.

  He made for the latrines, though he stumbled almost at once and put out a hand to the wall to steady himself. His hand slid, leaving a dark mark on the painted brickwork, like soot, thought Diana, as though Lance had been out there in the air raid calmly lighting a fire. Or oil, perhaps it was oil. He sank to the ground and did not move and his hand slid from the wall creating an arc as he fell. And it wasn’t soot or oil.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  ‘Nancy Keys. Who would have thought?’

  For a moment Nancy could not reply. It was Milly Fenwick, who had left Madame Vivant’s hat shop to marry a police constable and live in a house near the park. Milly Fenwick, whose wedding Nancy had not been invited to, whom she had never—in five years of air raids and bombing—seen sheltering here in this Underground station; and whom, if she thought about it—which she had not—she would have assumed had her own cosy little Anderson shelter in her own little back garden overlooking Vic Park. Yet here she was, Milly, just the wrong side of thirty and looking it, too, the long shadows failing to hide the lines at her neck and mouth, the puckering of lips that perhaps no longer held any of her own teeth, the small eyes that had swept over Nancy unseeingly all the years they had worked side by side but that now fixed on her and would not let go.

  Here was Milly, whose fiancé Nancy had stolen.

  ‘Milly.’

  She wore a clever little hat that might have come from Bond Street but might, equally, have come from a stall down Petticoat Lane, in a prewar winter coat with fur trim (but rabbit not beaver) and lace-up Oxfords in patent leather with a Continental heel that would have cost half her pay packet in 1939 but that five years later she was wearing in an air raid, her hair—no sign of grey yet—held neatly in place underneath her hat by a hairnet (no headscarf for her), her lips carefully outlined and coloured in lipstick an unflattering shade of mauve, her face thinner (though everyone’s face was thinner), and you might describe her as slim if you were being generous, gaunt if you were not. And seated on the bunk beside her were two identical little boys in short trousers and matching pullovers, hair neatly parted and combed, observing Nancy unblinkingly from behind the lenses of large wire-framed spectacles.