The Londoners

by Margaret Pemberton

  ‘You haven’t introduced Christina,’ Carrie said to her father as Miss Helliwell squeezed past them, a flamboyant scarf worn exotically gypsy-fashion.

  ‘Why all the fuss about introductions?’ her father grumbled in mock exasperation. ‘It ain’t a Buckingham Palace garden party!’

  Carrie raised her eyes to heaven and took the honours on herself, ‘Christina, allow me to introduce you to Mr Voigt. Mr Voigt is Kate’s father and captain of the pub cricket team.’

  Carl took hold of Christina’s outstretched hand. ‘I’m very pleased to meet you,’ he said in German. ‘Welcome to England.’

  Christina froze, ‘You’re German?’ she said uncertainly. ‘Jewish? You’re a refugee also?’

  ‘I’m not Jewish and not a refugee,’ Carl said as Hettie Collins pushed through the throng towards them. ‘But I am German. I was born in Heidelburg.’

  Christina snatched her hand from his grasp as if from a fire and then, in front of all his neighbours and the entire pub cricket team, she spat full in his face.

  Chapter Three

  JULY 1938

  ‘It’s going to be a lovely sunny day for tomorrow’s wedding,’ Miss Pierce, Personnel Officer, said to Kate as they walked out of the forecourt of Harvey’s head office.

  Kate found Miss Pierce nearly as daunting as Miss Godfrey and in her eighteen months at Harvey’s had never got beyond exchanging polite pleasantries with her. The only reason a hint of familiarity had now entered their conversation was that she had been obliged to make arrangements with Miss Pierce for a day’s unpaid absence.

  ‘I know it’s a bloomin’ nuisance,’ Carrie had said to her when she had asked her to be her bridesmaid, ‘but Danny’s leave is from Wednesday to Friday and so we have to be married on a weekday. Dad’s pleased, of course. It means he won’t have to miss a Saturday’s trading.’

  Kate said now, as she and Miss Pierce stepped out into the steep street that ran up alongside Greenwich Park to the Heath, ‘The long-term weather forecast has been a relief to Carrie. She was certain the heatwave was going to break on her wedding morning.’

  ‘There’s absolutely no chance of that,’ Miss Pierce said confidently, pausing on the pavement before turning and making her way down the hill towards Greenwich. ‘Enjoy your three day break. Next week is going to be very hectic. It’s never easy having Mr Harvey in the office and with his grandson joining us next week he’s bound to be calling in.’

  ‘I’m not sure I’ve understood just why Mr Harvey’s grandson is going to be working in the office,’ Kate said, genuinely puzzled. ‘It obviously isn’t because he needs a job.’

  Miss Pierce’s thin mouth twitched in amusement. ‘Goodness me, no. Harvey’s is a family firm and Mr Joss Harvey is obviously preparing his grandson for the day when the company will be his responsibility.’

  ‘And so he wants him to spend some time in each department? Sales? Accounts? Marketing?’

  ‘Exactly. It’s becoming an old-fashioned concept that the head of a large company should be familiar with the mundane day-to-day running of that company, but then Mr Harvey is old-fashioned.’

  It was the longest conversation that had ever taken place between them and both of them were rather surprised by it.

  ‘Have a nice day tomorrow,’ Miss Pierce said, realizing that she was on the verge of committing what was, in her eyes, the cardinal sin of gossiping about her employer. ‘Give my best wishes to the bride.’

  ‘I will. And thank you for arranging the day off for me.’

  With a gratified smile, Miss Pierce continued on her way down into Greenwich and Kate began to walk up the hill. She had known ever since the day of the fête, nearly two years ago, that Carrie intended marrying Danny but it still seemed incredible to her that the wedding was actually going to take place; that it was only hours away. She knew that she should be looking forward to it, but she couldn’t help feeling a pang of regret. No matter how Carrie might deny it, their friendship would never be quite the same after she married Danny. There would be no more going to dances together; no more spending all their free time together.

  As she neared the Heath she scolded herself for her selfishness. Carrie hadn’t the faintest shadow of doubt that her future happiness lay in marriage to Danny. Tomorrow was going to be a joyous occasion and there had been far too few such occasions of late. Reflecting back on the events of the last two years she shuddered. Ever since the traumatic scene between her father and Christina at the church fête, hideousness had followed hideousness.

  A month after leaving England for Spain, Jerry Robson had been killed fighting for the Republican side against Franco’s Nationalists in a small Spanish town no-one had even heard of.

  ‘Badajoz,’ a grief-stricken Charlie Robson had said, pronouncing the name with great difficulty. ‘Jerry died in a place called Badajoz.’

  His stunned incredulity had been heartrending. Even worse had been the knowledge, a month later and care of the Foreign Office, that Jerry had not died in battle but had been one of hundreds of disarmed militiamen who had been rounded up by the Nationalists and slaughtered in the city’s bullring.

  Kate had sat on her bed for a long time after hearing the news, her arms around the teddy bear he had given her. They had spent only one afternoon together and that had been in the company of his brother and Danny and Carrie and Christina. They had never kissed, never even held hands, yet she knew that in those few hours together at the fête he had become as suddenly aware of her as she had of him.

  When she finally rose to her feet and put the teddy bear back on her dressing-table, his orange-gold fabric fur was wet with her tears. She wouldn’t forget Jerry. Not ever. And she wondered if Miss Helliwell had seen his death when she had read her palm and if that was the reason she had been so disconcerted and had brought her palm-reading to such an abrupt end.

  The news continued to be as grim in the rest of the world as it was in Spain. In November, Hitler and Mussolini signed a formal pact agreeing that in future they would hunt as a pair.

  In the New Year the international situation had become so perilous that the British government announced it was aiming to treble the strength of the air force via a massive recruiting drive. By the end of the year gas masks had been issued to all London schoolchildren and practice gas-mask drill had become compulsory.

  ‘Do you think it’s really going to come to a shindig with old Hitler?’ Hettie Collins had asked her one day in the street. ‘Mr Nibbs says it’s bound to and he’s digging an air raid shelter into his garden. Can’t say I’d want to go down into one of ’em myself. It’d be like being buried alive.’

  Kate didn’t fancy the thought either but her father thought it was a precaution they should take and in the spring of 1939 she helped him dig an Anderson shelter into what had once been his prized back lawn.

  It was hard physical work and by the time they had finished her father was exhausted.

  ‘I’ll make you a cup of tea,’ she had said, disturbed by the extent of his weariness and knowing it was a weariness that went far deeper than temporary physical tiredness.

  Ever since Christina had spat at him there had been a change in him. Always a quiet man, he had become even quieter and more withdrawn. Everyone had assured him, of course, that it was an incident he shouldn’t take to heart; that Christina’s action was understandable after the horrors she had endured at German hands.

  ‘She wasn’t to know that you’re not like the Germans who carted her mother and grandmother off to a concentration camp,’ Nibbo had said to him reasonably. ‘We know you’re not like them, but she don’t.’

  Her father had said that he understood Christina’s action utterly and that there wasn’t the slightest iota of ill feeling on his part. Kate had known he had been speaking the absolute truth and she had known also that the incident had shaken him far more than he was allowing people to believe.

  ‘If it does come to war with Hitler, people will remember Christina’s react
ion to me,’ he had said heavily. ‘Though everyone in the Square knows I was born in Germany, very few people have ever thought of me as German. Now they will.’

  His anxiety hadn’t been eased when the Home Office had, on the grounds of his nationality, refused to allow him to act as sponsor to a Jewish refugee family. Three months ago, on the day Hitler annexed Austria, the worst blow of all had fallen.

  ‘I’ve been asked to resign my position at the school,’ he had said to her in stunned tones when he had come home from work. ‘From now on German is being dropped from the syllabus.’

  He had sat down at the table she had laid ready for their evening meal and said unsteadily, ‘The headmaster could hardly look me in the face when he told me. He said that the education authority had hinted to him that it would be better if no-one of German extraction was working in the school and that, very reluctantly of course, he was forced to agree with them.’

  He passed a hand across his eyes and to her horror Kate saw that it was shaking. With an overpowering feeling of nausea, she had sat down beside him and taken hold of his hand. ‘You mustn’t take it too much to heart, Daddy,’ she had said, so sick at heart herself she had found it hard to speak. ‘Something else will turn up. Something much more enjoyable than teaching German.’

  As she walked from the Heath into Magnolia Terrace she reflected that for once her optimism had been fully justified. Within days of the news of his forced resignation from the school becoming public knowledge, Nibbo had told him that the elderly owner of the bookshop, next door to his own green-grocery shop in Blackheath Village, was looking for a manager. By the end of the month her father had exchanged teaching for book-selling and, to both his and her vast relief, was enjoying the novelty of his new occupation.

  On the other side of the terrace, Charlie Robson was walking in the opposite direction, Queenie at his heels. She gave him a wave which he cheerily reciprocated and it occurred to her that he hadn’t been absent from the neighbourhood for quite some time. In the old days he was always dropping out of sight and it was common knowledge when he did that he wasn’t on holiday or visiting friends but was serving time for petty theft in one of His Majesty’s many prisons.

  She began to cross the Square, wondering if Charlie’s new way of life was in any way connected with Miss Godfrey and the reading lessons she had given him. Whether the reading lessons were still continuing or were now no longer necessary she didn’t know, but she did know that Miss Godfrey and Charlie were still on friendly terms.

  Smiling to herself at the oddness of some friendships, she neared the Jennings’ house. Ever since the incident between her father and Christina she hadn’t been as regular a visitor there. It wasn’t that Carrie’s mum and dad and gran had changed in their attitude towards her, but Christina was still living with them and her relationship with Christina was extremely strained.

  In the aftermath of the horrendous incident in the tea-tent, Albert Jennings had explained to his guest that the gentleman she had spat on had lived in England for nearly twenty years and that Kate’s mother was English and that Kate had been born in England and had never ever left England. Christina had remained unimpressed.

  ‘She says you have German Aryan blood and that all German Aryans are the same,’ Carrie had said to her resignedly. ‘Mind you, when you think of the Nazis dragging her family off to a concentration camp, you have to sympathize with her. Dad says he reckons her mum and gran will be dead by now. And her father and brother are dead. The Nazis shot them in the street when they tried to prevent a mob burning their shop to the ground.’

  Like everyone else in Magnolia Square, Kate did sympathize with Christina. She also felt resentful towards her. No matter what the horrors Christina had endured in Germany at the hands of the Nazis, it had been unfair of her to have publicly reacted towards one of her new neighbours as if he, too, were one of Hitler’s National Socialists. It had caused her father deep distress and it was because of the distress he had suffered that Kate couldn’t bring herself to totally forgive Christina.

  ‘Nice to see you, bubbelah!’ Leah called out from the hallway as Kate walked up to the already open front door. ‘Carrie is upstairs trying her dress on.’

  Her usual cheery face looked strained and Kate remembered that Leah, alone of everyone else in Magnolia Square, was not wholeheartedly looking forward to the wedding and, though she had promised to bake pies and tarts and bagels and blintzes for the reception, wasn’t going to be in the church when Carrie became Danny’s wife.

  ‘She’s never got over my mother marrying a shaygets,’ Carrie had said in affectionate despair. ‘Why she should have thought, after the rackety way Mum and Dad have brought me up, that I would have a kosher wedding I can’t imagine.’

  ‘But your gran doesn’t dislike Danny, surely?’ Kate had said, feeling rather out of her depth.

  Carrie had shaken her head, her thick mane of hair tumbling around her face. ‘No. If he was Jewish she would think he was the bee’s knees. She just doesn’t like the way Mum is so oblivious of what she sees as being Mum’s religious and cultural heritage.’ She gave a wry smile. ‘If you ask me, I think it’s one of the reasons Gran is so very Jewish in her speech. She does it in the hope that it annoys my dad and as a constant reminder to Mum that she’s let the side down.’

  Now, as Kate entered Carrie’s bedroom, Bonzo yapping at her heels, Carrie turned towards her saying anxiously, ‘What do you think? Does the waist need letting out another half inch? I’ve been living on lettuce all week but I still seem to have put weight on since the last time we fitted it.’

  Thankful that Christina was obviously not in the house, Kate sat down on the edge of Carrie’s bed and looked with critical eyes at the slipper-satin wedding dress the two of them had made from a McCalls paper pattern. ‘You’re imagining things,’ she said to Carrie’s vast relief. ‘The fitting is perfect. You look wonderful.’

  It was true. The design of the dress was simple and very elegant. The neckline was heart-shaped, the sleeves long and narrow, dipping to a medieval point over the backs of her hands. The bodice and skirt had been made in one piece, princess-fashion, the skirt merely skimming her toes in front and falling into a short train at the back. Although completely unadorned by ruffles or flounces, it looked magnificent. Laid out on Christina’s bed was a headdress of imitation orange-blossom and a thigh-length, lace-edged veil that Carrie’s mother had worn on her wedding day. The bouquet of crimson roses and white carnations that would complete Carrie’s ensemble was being made by a family friend who had a flower stall in the market.

  ‘And I shall wear the pearl necklace Gran gave me for my birthday,’ Carrie had said to Kate when they had first begun to discuss dress styles, ‘that will make up for Gran not being there when I say my vows. I need to be wearing “something old, something new, something borrowed and something blue.” My veil will be the something old, the necklace can be my something new. I’ll wear Miss Helliwell’s white net gloves for the borrowed bit and pin a blue ribbon to my underslip for the something blue.’

  Kate said now: ‘Do you think I should try my bridesmaid dress on again?’

  ‘What on earth for?’ Carrie asked in mock exasperation. ‘You’re as likely to have put weight on as fly to the moon!’

  Kate grinned. ‘That’s because I don’t work down the market. If you didn’t help yourself so liberally to whatever it is you’re selling, you wouldn’t have a weight problem either.’

  ‘I only eat when there’s a lull in customers and anyway, fruit isn’t supposed to make you fat.’

  ‘It depends how much you eat of it,’ Kate said, amused. ‘And isn’t there a pie and mash stall near to your stall? Don’t tell me you don’t have a sneaky pie and mash every now and again because if you do, I won’t believe you.’

  ‘I haven’t had a pie and mash since I knew the date of the wedding,’ Carrie said grimly, breathing in and viewing her reflection sideways on. ‘The prospect of lumbering down the aisl
e like a cart-horse with you sylph-like behind me has been nearly enough to make me stop eating altogether.’

  ‘What about Beryl?’ Kate asked, amused. Beryl, Mavis’s two-and-a-half-year-old daughter was also to be a bridesmaid, though very much at Mavis’s insistence, not Carrie’s. ‘Is she looking forward to tomorrow?’

  ‘She’s looking forward to it all right, but it’s whether she’s going to behave or not I’m worrying about,’ Carrie said, beginning to carefully lift her wedding dress over her head.

  Kate rose from the bed to help her and, from beneath the sumptuous folds of material, Carrie continued, her voice muffled, ‘Thanks to Mavis she seems to think tomorrow is going to be a cross between a day trip to Folkestone and a church fête.’

  Kate lifted the wedding dress free of Carrie’s hair and laid it reverently on the bed.

  ‘I told Mum I thought Beryl was too young to be a bridesmaid but Mum said Mavis would create murder if Beryl wasn’t asked and so there you are, she’s been asked and I have to worry about whether or not she’s going to behave herself,’ Carrie finished darkly, stepping into a cotton dress patterned with azure-blue cornflowers and scarlet poppies.

  She pulled the dress up on to her shoulders and fastened the zip. ‘Ted says I’m worrying unnecessarily. He says he’s explained to her she’s got to stand very quietly with you and Christina during the service but I have a vision of her saying she wants to wee-wee or have an ice-cream.’

  ‘And what about Bonzo?’ Kate asked, as Bonzo laid his head on her knee. ‘Will he be at the wedding too?’

  Carrie brushed her dishevelled hair away from her face, anchoring its heavy weight with tortoiseshell combs. ‘He’d better not be in the church!’ she said, overcome with horror at the thought. ‘Though I wouldn’t put it past Mum to try and take him in. She’s already made a big blue satin bow for him to wear.’