The Londoners

by Margaret Pemberton

  ‘Where will they go?’ Kate asked, forgetting that Albert was one of the many neighbours she no longer spoke to and who no longer spoke to her. Albert, equally oblivious, said, ‘Another half hour and I reckon we’ll see them streaming out of the Blackwall Tunnel and across the Heath, pushing prams and handcarts in the direction of Kent and the hop-fields.’

  He pushed his tin hat towards the back of his head, sipping at his tea. It was the first mug of tea he had had in twelve exhausting hours and it tasted like nectar. ‘You’ve heard about the house in Point Hill Road?’ he asked, a big map of Blackheath and Lewisham pinned to the wall behind him, a box of marking flags nearby.

  Kate nodded and Albert said heavily, ‘Of all the bloody times for her to be making a parochial visit she has to be making one at five o’clock on a Saturday!’

  Kate felt a nauseous sensation in the pit of her stomach. ‘Who are you talking about, Albert? Are you talking about Mrs Giles? Was Mrs Giles at the Point Hill Road house when it was hit?’

  Albert put his mug of tea down unsteadily. ‘Aye,’ he said thickly. ‘Me and Nibbo helped pull her out about an hour ago. And the others. There were four others.’

  ‘All dead?’ Kate’s voice was a whisper. It had been obvious to her long hours ago, when she had been sitting with Miss Pierce in the shelter, that hundreds upon hundreds of people must have been killed during the night. Her relief at finding Magnolia Square still standing had, however, fooled her into believing that no-one she knew personally had died or been injured.

  Now she said, stunned, ‘I saw the vicar just as the raid was starting, he was running towards the vicarage.’

  ‘No doubt he thought he’d find his missus at home,’ Albert said, picking up his mug of tea again, his knuckles white. ‘As it is, the poor bugger is never going to find her at home again. Bloody Germans. They all need bloody annihilating.’

  A man Kate only knew by sight, his Home Guard uniform grey with the dust of fallen masonry, came into the Centre, saying disbelievingly, ‘I thought I’d seen everything this last few hours but now I’ve seen the bloomin’ lot.’

  ‘What is it, Fred?’ Albert asked, bracing himself for the worst.

  ‘A bloomin’ Bentley, that’s what it is! A blinkin’ army of poor devils from the East End pushing their worldly goods across the Heath and that rich bastard Joss Harvey is sitting in his parked Bentley in Magnolia Square as though it’s Derby Day!’

  ‘Whereabouts in Magnolia Square?’ Kate asked, knowing the answer already.

  ‘The top end,’ her informant said, rummaging in a haversack hung on a hook on the wall. ‘Near the Heath. Have you got any chalk, Albert? I want to chalk out a no-go area around the house in Point Hill Road. Until we can raze it completely it’s going to be a danger to anyone walking too near it. And we don’t want any looters rummaging in it neither. There’s reports of some shameful looting going on in Poplar and Bow.’

  Kate didn’t wait to hear any more. She spun on her heel, hurrying out of the ARP Centre, wondering why on earth Joss Harvey was visiting her; wondering what in the world he could possibly have to say to her.

  ‘I want to know why you didn’t insist on telling me the truth,’ he said to her pugnaciously as they faced each other yards apart, Kate with her back to her front-garden gate, Joss Harvey with his back against his Bentley. ‘Lance Merton visited me early yesterday afternoon. He was a close friend of Toby’s and he has relatives hereabouts.’ He paused, as if unsure how to phrase his next words.

  Kate remained silent, not remotely disposed to be helpful. Further down her side of the Square she could see Miss Helliwell sweeping up the glass that had been blasted from her windows. On the bottom side of the Square, Leah Singer was discernible, energetically applying adhesive-tape to windows still miraculously intact. On its island St Mark’s church doors were wide open, whether intentionally or because they had been blasted from their hinges, Kate couldn’t tell.

  Joss Harvey sucked in his breath, his Savile Row, double-breasted, grey silk suit looking bizarrely out of place in a world where Home Guard and Air Raid Warden and Fire Auxiliary uniforms had become the order of the day.

  ‘He assumed we were acquainted and asked after you,’ Joss Harvey finally continued, his heavy-jowled face revealing how hard he was finding it to repeat his and Lance Merton’s conversation. ‘He referred to you as “Toby’s fiancée”. Naturally I asked him if you had had the impertinence to contact him, claiming such a relationship.’ He paused again, hardly able to bring himself to continue.

  Again, Kate didn’t attempt to make his difficulty any easier for him. Hettie Collins was coming out of the church, a bunch of fake violets drooping from the crown of her black hat. Kate could see that Hettie’s eyes were red from weeping. She remembered Hettie’s self-imposed weekly task of supplying the church with fresh flowers. Hettie would have been on more than mere neighbourly terms with Mrs Giles, and Mrs Giles’ death would have hit her hard.

  ‘He said that though he had called on you some weeks ago, the last time he had leave and was in the neighbourhood, he had done so only because he knew from Toby that the two of you were affianced and intended marrying in the very near future.’

  He paused yet again, waiting for her response.

  Kate didn’t make one. She was still waiting for an apology for the inexcusable names he had called her when they had previously faced each other in his boardroom.

  ‘So why,’ he demanded aggressively, ‘didn’t you state your case with a little more stubbornness and make me aware of the relationship that existed between yourself and my grandson?’

  There was nothing remotely conciliatory in his tone.

  Along the main road separating Magnolia Terrace from the Heath, a long line of hastily commandeered lorries could be glimpsed, conveying refugees from the burning infernos raging out of control on either side of the river. From Albert’s comments, Kate assumed that Daniel Collins was one of the Auxiliary Firemen battling the massive conflagration.

  As Joss Harvey cleared his throat with impatience, Kate returned her attention to him. He was quite obviously not going to proffer an apology and she hadn’t the remotest intention of allowing the conversation to continue as though no apology on his part was necessary.

  ‘When I informed you of my relationship with Toby you not only called me a liar, Mr Harvey,’ she said, her tone no more conciliatory than his own had been, ‘you called me a half-German trollop, a Kraut, a slut and a blackmailer. You also threatened to have me interned and, if I breathed my “foul lie” outside your boardroom, threatened to sue me for slander in every court in the land.’

  He sucked in his breath again harshly. The smell of smoke from the dockland fires wafted towards them on a faint breeze. ‘You are half-German,’ he said unrepentantly, ‘and even if you aren’t a full-blooded Kraut, your father most certainly is!’

  ‘And you ask me why I didn’t state my case with more stubbornness?’ Kate’s gentian-blue eyes were hard as ice. ‘It’s a question you’ve just answered for yourself ! I’ve nothing further to say to you, Mr Harvey. And I don’t wish ever to speak with you again.’

  Turning her back on him, she opened her front gate.

  ‘Stop!’ There was a throb of real urgency in his voice as he covered the distance between them in swift strides. ‘You said you were pregnant. That you were carrying Toby’s child. Is that true?’

  She turned, only the gate separating them. His narrowed eyes were fiercely demanding. For one long, long moment she was tempted to say it wasn’t true. But that would have been to become what he had accused her of being: a liar. ‘Yes,’ she said curtly. ‘It’s true.’

  Without waiting for his reaction, she again turned her back on him, walking up the path towards the short flight of steps that led to her front door.

  ‘That child is my great-grandchild!’ he said harshly, his hands gripping tightly onto the gate. ‘You can’t bring up a child on your own! Not in wartime!’

  She had
reached the foot of the steps and she paused for a moment, certain that now he had accepted that she was carrying his great-grandchild, an apology and reasonableness on his part would follow. She was just about to turn and face him in anticipation of accepting his proffered olive-branch, when he said flatly: ‘I want the child. I want to adopt it.’

  It was as if a fist had been slammed into the centre of her back robbing her of all breath. Very slowly she walked up the steps, fighting for control. At the top she turned and looked down at him.

  ‘Never!’ she vowed. ‘Not even over my dead body! Never! Never! Never!’

  For a hate-filled moment that seemed as long as eternity his glittering eyes held hers and then, his lips white, his nostrils flaring, he swung abruptly away from the gate, striding towards his Bentley, yanking the door open.

  Kate didn’t wait to watch him drive away. Trembling from head to foot, she turned her back on him for the last time, fumbling with the door-knob in her haste to open the door.

  Ellen Pierce opened it for her from the inside.

  ‘Dear God!’ she said, taking one look at Kate’s shock-contorted face. ‘What’s happened? Are the Germans sailing up the Thames? Have the Houses of Parliament been captured?’

  ‘How dare he even suggest such a thing?’ Kate demanded as Ellen pressed a mug of tea into her hand. ‘How could he even imagine I would part with my baby?’

  Ellen Pierce’s face was etched with concern. A baby! Until Kate’s revelation only minutes earlier she hadn’t even remotely suspected that Kate might be pregnant. As she thought of what the stigma of illegitimacy would mean for the child and for Kate, she said tentatively, ‘Perhaps Mr Harvey made the suggestion because, not knowing you and how strong a person you are, he thought it was one that you might find welcome and . . .’

  Once again, whatever else she had been going to say was lost as the stomach-churning wail of air raid sirens surged into life.

  Kate, remembering the hard discomfort of the benches inside the Anderson, scooped two cushions up from the settee.

  ‘There’s no time to fill a Thermos,’ she said as she hurried with Ellen into the kitchen and saw Ellen’s eyes fly longingly in the direction of the kettle. ‘Take these cushions while I drag Hector from under the table. You’d think a dog that had lived on an RAF airbase would be indifferent to the noise of sirens, wouldn’t you?’

  Hector wasn’t indifferent, nor were Queenie and Bonzo and the thousands of other animals who uncomprehendingly endured the hell of the next weeks. Every night, and nearly as often through the day, the raids came. No-one, not even the most loonily optimistic, doubted that Britain was fighting for her very survival.

  ‘Barges for the invasion lie in wait across the Channel,’ the Prime Minister announced ringingly in a broadcast to the nation four days after the first air raid had given Londoners a foretaste of what was to come. ‘And we must regard the next week or so as a very important period in our history. It ranks with the days when the Spanish Armada was approaching the Channel, and Drake was finishing his game of bowls; or when Nelson stood between us and Napoleon’s Grand Army at Boulogne. We have read all about this in the history books; but what is happening now is on a far greater scale and of far more consequence to the life and future of the world and its civilization than those brave old days.’

  Ellen Pierce, back home in her Edwardian terraced house in Greenwich, shivered at the enormity of Winston Churchill’s words. Kate, hurrying between raids to Deptford and the canteen for fire-fighters where she had begun working as a volunteer, wondered if her father and his fellow internees had been allowed to listen to the Prime Minister’s speech. Carrie, making Rose an omelette out of powdered egg, wondered if Danny, now fighting the Italians in far-away Egypt, would also somehow hear the broadcast or read a report of it.

  ‘If even Winnie thinks we’re up against it, things must be grim,’ Mavis said to Kate, trousered legs astride Ted’s motor bike. ‘How do you like my ATS uniform? Do you think I look like Marlene Dietrich?’

  ‘You might do if it wasn’t for the cycle-helmet and goggles,’ Kate said, giggling. ‘Why have you plumped for despatch-riding? I thought you wanted to drive an ambulance?’

  ‘They wouldn’t let me,’ Mavis said with a sniff of disgust. ‘Said I wasn’t qualified as a driver. The ATS weren’t so fussy. Not where motor cycles are concerned anyway. Ted taught me to ride this when we were courtin’. Bet he never thought I’d be ridin’ it through a bloody blitz though!’

  For the rest of September and all through October the murderous onslaught by Luftwaffe bombers continued.

  Miss Helliwell, unable to manipulate her handicapped sister out into the garden and into the Anderson shelter, had a newfangled indoor Morrison shelter installed.

  ‘It resembles a reinforced table,’ she said to Leah Singer. ‘It’s much pleasanter than a horrid, damp Anderson shelter. I keep blankets and pillows in it and your son-in-law assures me that it’s just as safe as an Anderson or a public shelter.’

  Leah had never held an overly high opinion of her costermonger son-in-law’s capabilities and found it difficult to reconcile herself to the respect he now commanded amongst their neighbours as Captain of the local Home Guard.

  ‘Are you sure Albert knows what he’s talking about?’ she asked dubiously. ‘Are you sure you and Esther haven’t been palmed off with a chazzerai ping-pong table?’

  ‘Absolutely not!’ Miss Helliwell protested, outraged at the very thought. ‘Captain Jennings recommended a Morrison shelter personally.’

  ‘He’s only Captain of the local Home Guard, bubee,’ Leah retorted, becoming increasingly annoyed by the esteem Albert was beginning to be so obviously held in. ‘He ain’t exactly a four-star General!’

  ‘You stay in the Anderson if you want to, Mum,’ Miriam said defiantly to Leah. ‘I’m off down the public shelter next time the bleedin’ sirens go. At least there’ll be more company there and we can have a bit of a sing-song. I wish to God we lived near a tube station. The Underground has to be safe. Stands to reason when it’s so bloody deep down.’

  Miriam was wrong in thinking the Underground system a hundred per cent safe. On the night of 15 October bombs pulverized Balham Tube Station, breaking through to the platform far below. A mountain of ballast, sand, sludge and slime cascaded down, burying alive sixty-four of those taking shelter there, nearly all of them women and children. On that one night alone over nine hundred fires raged across the city and when dawn finally broke four hundred Londoners had been killed and nearly a thousand seriously injured.

  It was a hell everyone coped with in their own way. As a captain in the Home Guard, Albert Jennings diligently instructed all and sundry, even Miss Helliwell and Hettie, in the art of grenade-throwing, determined that in the event of invasion every single inhabitant of Magnolia Square would make a valiant last stand.

  Miss Helliwell was an exceedingly nervous pupil, preferring to aid the war effort by means only she regarded as rational.

  ‘I’m holding seances and trying to contact both Sir Francis Drake and Lord Nelson,’ she told Carrie as they stood patiently in a long queue outside the butcher’s in Blackheath Village. ‘I’m sure that any advice they can give will be invaluable to Mr Churchill.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Carrie said, not wanting to give her too much encouragement but not wanting to ridicule her either. ‘Problem is, what happens if you do make contact with them and they do give advice? How are you going to pass it on to the Prime Minister? You’re not exactly on nodding terms with him, are you?’

  As the local Air Raid Warden, Mr Nibbs displayed a resolute determination to do his duty. Only the first raid had taken him by surprise and sent him flying down to his Anderson shelter, his trouser braces dangling wildly. Since then, during night raids, he had toured his district diligently, reporting all incidents, calling up the appropriate rescue services and, if he was first on the scene, doing his best to rescue the trapped and provide first aid for the injured. During th
e day, like thousands of other exhausted civilians, he had resumed his daytime occupation, opening his shop no matter what the circumstances.

  Daniel Collins was also fast becoming a local hero. As an Auxiliary Fireman his voluntary job was, perhaps, the most horrendous of all. Day after day and night after night he battled with his professional and amateur companions against the flames, often not resting for twenty-four or thirty-six hours at a stretch. The danger they faced from collapsing walls and falling brickwork and poisonous fumes was made worse by the fact that the bulk of their work was undertaken while bombing raids were in progress.

  ‘The bombers always aim for the fires,’ Hettie would say, squeezed into the public shelter next to Miriam, so fearful for her husband’s safety that her knitting needles would clatter against each other. ‘Bloody Hitler! May he die from a lingering tumour!’

  Mavis, too, risked life and limb daily, delivering messages in and out of heavily bombed areas, much to her son’s admiration and envy.

  On the night of 3 November, for the first night since 7 September, there was no German air raid over London.

  ‘I couldn’t believe it,’ one of the middle-aged women who worked in the canteen said to Kate. ‘I slept right through! It’s done me the world of good. I feel sixteen this morning!’

  Though Kate was equally grateful for the undisturbed night, she didn’t feel sixteen. She was now five months pregnant and there were times, after long hours dispensing tea and hot soup, that her ankles puffed up and her back ached. And it wasn’t only physical discomforts that were dispiriting her.

  For many weeks, when she had first begun working at the canteen, she had been known only by her first name. Unlike her neighbours in Blackheath, no-one in Deptford knew that her father was German and her long plait of flaxen hair was no give-away because, like all the other women in the canteen, she wore her hair coiled up beneath a headscarf tied turban-fashion.