Georgia

by Lesley Pearse

  He hadn’t wanted her to move here. She should have stayed in Suffolk with her folks until they came round. A girl like her didn’t belong in this place with its dark little alleys, the smells and the dirt. But he’d wanted to be with her so badly he didn’t say any of that. London was the place where they didn’t mind a girl having a black Yank. There was too much going on to dwell on tomorrow.

  He remembered a hospital here. Not a big place like the one in the main street. A saint’s name. Was it Peter? When did that get pulled down? It was an ugly, dark place, like a workhouse he’d seen pictures of before he came to England.

  It was very cold. Sam zipped up his jacket and pulled up the fur collar. Hughes Mansions was up ahead of him. It looked different now too. Kind of forgotten. Old-fashioned compared with these new places.

  When Katy lived there it was a good modern place. She took pride in telling him they were all business people who lived there and for Sam who had been brought up in a shingle shack, it was the nearest thing he’d seen to luxury.

  A bathroom with a geyser to heat the hot water. Electric light, an indoor john and a proper kitchen with a boiler for the washing. Katy had a little room of her own, with roses on the walls and a satin-covered eiderdown on her bed.

  Sam stopped at the gateway and stared up. It looked the same but it wasn’t. Three blocks set on three sides of a square. Katy had lived in the one at the back. Five floors of red brick, stone balconies running from a central staircase. She used to wait on that landing in the summer, three floors up, just her head and shoulders visible above the stone wall.

  But now there were four blocks, they seemed to press in on each other, shutting out light from the middle square.

  ‘You looking for someone?’

  Sam was startled to find a middle-aged woman standing by him. She was pushing a basket on wheels piled high with laundry. Her hair in curlers with a scarf over them, a plaid, shapeless coat with a fur collar.

  ‘I used to know someone who lived here,’ he said almost reluctantly. The expression on her tight face was one he knew meant resentment. ‘It looks different now, but I can’t make out why.’

  ‘Those three are new blocks,’ she said pointing to the three buildings furthest from the road. ‘They may be new but they ain’t as warm and dry as the old one.’

  Sam could see now. They were copies, the brickwork and doorways different. Only the one on the road was an original.

  ‘But why leave that one?’ He pointed to the old one and frowned. ‘It don’t make sense.’

  ‘A bomb hit two of them.’

  ‘Bombed?’ Sam felt his head reel. ‘When?’

  She looked at him as if he were simple-minded.

  ‘In the war of course!’

  ‘I meant what year. Which month,’ he said quickly. His heart was pounding, a dry feeling in his throat.

  ‘I dunno,’ she turned to walk away. ‘I’ve only lived here five years.’

  She was gone before Sam could question her further. He saw her pulling her basket over the central tarmac square and disappear into a flat across the other side.

  There was a sick feeling in his belly. Was that why Katy didn’t reply? They moved her on somewhere and his letters never got delivered?

  Sam sat down on a low wall. He was cold, colder than he’d ever been before. The sky was black and threatening above him, the four apartment blocks were dark and gloomy, yet twenty-two years ago this had been the place where dreams came true.

  All those years of thinking she’d just stopped caring. Never once had it crossed his mind she might be homeless, alone or frightened. Love had turned to bitterness. He had been so engrossed in self pity it had blinded him to considering she might have had her own problems.

  Sam saw an old man turn into the yard. The man paused for a second, leaning heavily on his walking stick, his shoulders bent, breath like smoke in the cold air. He looked at Sam suspiciously, old rheumy eyes watering in the cold wind.

  ‘You waiting for someone?’ His tone suggested Sam should wait somewhere else. The kind of arrogance Sam understood.

  ‘I came to look for an old friend,’ he replied, standing up and taking a step towards the man. ‘One of your neighbours just told me two of the blocks were bombed.’

  ‘You took yer time coming,’ the old man said, taking a handkerchief out of his coat pocket and blowing his nose noisily. ‘Twenty years ago that was.’

  ‘Well I’m American,’ Sam said. ‘I got posted to Germany, then I went back to the States. Did you live here when it happened?’

  The old man wobbled on his stick. The suspicious look replaced by one of interest.

  ‘Yes son, thought I’d lost my wife and kids when I heard the news. But they was all right, it was the people in that block that copped it.’ He lifted his stick and pointed to the block where Katy had lived. ‘Was your friend in there?’

  ‘Yes,’ Sam felt his eyes welling up. ‘When did it happen? Did many die?’

  ‘March ’45. It were one of those V.2S. No warning, nothing. Seven in the morning. Over a hundred and thirty killed.’

  The sick feeling in Sam’s stomach grew stronger. He swayed on his feet, closing his eyes momentarily.

  ‘What happened to the survivors?’ he whispered.

  ‘Mostly men that had gone out to work.’ The old man’s tone softened, seeing the pain in the black man’s eyes. ‘Who was it you knew?’

  ‘She was called Katy. Small, dark-haired, shared a place with two other girls. I think it belonged to one of the girls’ aunts. Number twenty-four it was.’

  ‘Don’t remember her.’ It wasn’t often someone wanted to talk about the old days and he was anxious to prolong the conversation. ‘But my daughter might. She’s in there now, getting me some dinner. Come on up and ask her.’

  The old man lived on the first floor of the old block. He took the stairs slowly, clinging on to the banisters.

  It was dirty now, the way these blocks never looked back when Katy lived here. Someone had written on the walls, the stairs hadn’t been swept for years and there was a smell of urine.

  ‘They was supposed to be moving us old ‘uns out,’ the old man held his chest and wheezed. ‘But it never came about. I reckon I’ll be here till the last. Eighty next month. Been here since they was built.’

  ‘Come on Dad. What kept you?’ A rosy-faced woman came out on to the landing, a flowery apron over her dark jumper and skirt. Not fat exactly, but big hips and breasts. A round, unlined face as if life had been kind to her. Calm brown eyes and a soft mouth.

  ‘My fault, ma’am.’ Sam flashed a brilliant smile at her, hoping charm would make it easier for her to talk to him. ‘I kept him talking about the bombing here. He thought you might know my friend who lived in the back block.’

  She smiled then, dimples showing in her pink cheeks. She had a girlish quality, even though she was in her late thirties.

  ‘You’re American? You were here during the war?’

  ‘That’s right ma’am,’ he held out his hand. ‘Sam Cameron. I’ve come over here to play at Ronnie Scott’s. I just wandered down here to look at the old place, and it’s gone.’

  ‘Well Sam,’ she fluttered her eyelids a little at him, her hand in his was soft and warm. ‘May I call you that? I’m Hilda Croft. Come in and have some coffee while Dad has his dinner. I’ll see what I can remember.’

  ‘This is real kind of you,’ Sam said once he was sitting by the fire with a cup of steaming coffee in his hands. ‘It’s my first day back in England and here I am in a room just like the one I remember from last time.’

  It was almost identical to the living room in Katy’s place. A heavy old polished table covered with a cloth and a sideboard of the same wood. A small couch covered in dark red material, worn thin on the arms and two matching armchairs, placed round the fire. If it hadn’t been for the big television under the window and a gas fire replacing the coal one, he could have gone back in time.

  At number twenty-fou
r there’d been a wireless in the corner. A big shiny wood one with cut out sun-ray effect. He could almost see Katy perched on the arm of the chair, twiddling with the knobs to tune it. There was a wind-up gramophone too, pictures of horses on the walls and a plaster plaque of a cottage with roses round the door. It was always warm there, even though the girls had to carry bags of coal up the stairs.

  ‘I was only sixteen when the rocket hit.’ Hilda sat down in the chair opposite him. She was wearing red fluffy slippers and her ankles were surprisingly slim. She made an impatient gesture to her father sitting at the table just behind them, half rising as if expecting him to ask her to cut up his dinner. ‘I got married soon after and moved on out to Chigwell. But I know some of the people who lived in that block. What was your friend’s name?’

  ‘Katy Collins,’ Sam sipped the hot coffee, curling his fingers round the cup to warm them. ‘Small, dark and pretty. She lived with Doris Lessing in number twenty-four.’

  ‘I remember Doris,’ Hilda frowned. ‘Big strapping girl. She was in the Fire Service.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Sam’s face broke into a smile. ‘Can you remember Katy?’

  He could see she was struggling to put a face to the name. He willed her to remember.

  ‘She had a baby?’

  ‘No,’ Sam chuckled. ‘Not Katy.’

  ‘One of those girls did,’ Hilda insisted. She frowned as if she knew she was right. ‘I remember walking home with Doris once just after Christmas. She showed me the pattern for a coat she was knitting. She said her friend was about to have a baby.’

  ‘Maybe that was Ruth?’ Sam said easily. ‘The other girl who lived there.’

  Hilda shook her head.

  ‘No, she was a glamour puss. She had long red hair and was always out dancing. The one that had the baby was a dressmaker. Doris told me she’d made lots of little nighties.’

  A strange feeling ran down Sam’s spine.

  ‘Was she a dressmaker?’ Hilda dropped her voice, aware she had hit a sensitive note.

  Sam nodded. ‘What happened to Doris?’

  ‘She copped it, and the other two. Same as most of the folk did in that block,’ she stopped short, covering her mouth with her hand. ‘Oh Sam, I’m sorry.’

  Sam’s face blanched. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Of course I’m sure,’ she lowered her eyes and twisted the ring on her finger round and round. ‘I had stayed the night with my girlfriend across Mile End Road. We heard the bang, saw the smoke and dust. Someone said our flats had been hit and I ran all the way here. I knew Dad would be at work but Mum and the kids were here.’

  ‘Were they safe?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ she closed her eyes as if reliving it. ‘The rocket hit the back block, it left a crater thirty foot deep in the courtyard. The side block was almost entirely blown away too. All the windows here were broken. Some of the people were blown out of them. But Mum fell on the floor and the kids were still in bed.’ She looked up at Sam again, a look of pain in those dark eyes, all flirtation gone.

  ‘There’s lots of things I’ve forgotten, but not about that day. They laid the dead out there as they found them. It was the worst thing I ever saw. Old ladies and men, blown out their beds. Kids blown to pieces, arms legs,’ she shuddered, pausing and wiping her hand over her eyes. ‘Doris, Ruth and the other girl were all together, still in their nightclothes. I can remember seeing Ruth’s red hair as they put her body on a stretcher, it was hanging down over the end, almost touching the ground. So pretty.’

  Tears trickled down her cheeks. Sam reached out and touched her hand.

  ‘Don’t mind me,’ she sniffed. ‘I wish I could say your girl wasn’t there. But the three of them were all together. Doris in striped pyjamas. Ruth in a silky nightie and the other girl in between them, she had a blue dress. I even remember someone saying they must have been eating breakfast together.’

  ‘I’m sorry I brought it back,’ he said.

  ‘It’s okay,’ she tried to smile. ‘We got hardened somehow by it. Days and days of funerals, living in the hall across the road till it was safe to come back. We learned so much about one another, kind of shared the grief.’

  ‘But the baby. Was that with them?’ He was sure Hilda was mixing Katy up with someone else. The only evidence was Doris making a coat. That could have been for almost anyone.

  ‘I don’t remember,’ she sighed deeply, frowning with concentration.

  ‘I remember about the baby.’ The old man’s voice surprised them both. They turned sharply. His open mouth revealed few teeth left and some half-chewed cabbage.

  ‘You don’t remember anything,’ Hilda said sternly. ‘Get on with that dinner before it gets cold.’

  ‘I do,’ he retorted, putting down his knife and fork. ‘They never found it until the evening of the second day. I was out there helping clear the site. A young fireman found her, he heard crying under the ground. I was there when they lifted it out.’

  Sam looked at Hilda, waiting for her to snap a denial at her father. Instead she looked thoughtful.

  ‘Dad’s right,’ she said slowly. ‘I remember now. One of the women came tearing across the road to the church hall to tell us. There was women who’d lost their children, nearly out of their minds with grief. They all ran back to the site to see it.’

  ‘It was a black baby,’ the old man piped up again.

  Hilda looked sternly at her father, then back again to Sam.

  ‘Was it?’ Sam said softly.

  She didn’t speak for a moment, as if trying to sort out real memories from rumours.

  ‘Mrs Kirkpatrick, she was the old girl who acted as midwife around here, said it was, but I never saw the baby. They said she was around ten weeks old. We were all so amazed the baby wasn’t dead or even hurt. She was buried alive, still in her pram, trapped under rubble.’

  ‘Did anyone claim her?’ Sam’s voice was little more then a whisper. ‘I mean, did this baby belong to a survivor?’

  Hilda shook her head, eyes filling up with tears.

  ‘You think she was yours?’

  Sam couldn’t reply.

  A flashback took him back to that bedroom with the satin eiderdown. White curtains with red roses moving in the early morning breeze.

  ‘I should have been careful.’ He was damp with perspiration, his face pressed into her small pink-tipped breasts. His hand against Katy’s face looked so dark in contrast to her white skin. ‘What if I’ve put you in the family way?’

  ‘I wouldn’t care,’ her laugh was like a caress. ‘Besides, that only happens to other people.’

  He remembered watching her as he dressed that last time, fastening his blue uniform slowly, anything to prolong the moment of leaving. She lay with her dark hair tangled on the pillow, dark eyes full of unshed tears.

  ‘You will come back?’ her voice wobbled. ‘I’m counting on you.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Sam’s voice shook as he answered Hilda. ‘In her last letter she said she had a surprise for me. But I just thought she had made something for me. Why would a girl hide something like that?’

  ‘Maybe she was frightened you’d run out on her?’ Hilda sighed. ‘I mean men do, don’t they?’

  ‘But we were going to get married,’ Sam insisted. ‘I left for Germany in April of ’44. She wrote to me nearly every day. If I’d known I’d have found some way to get back. The last letter I got was dated March twenty-fifth. Then nothing.’

  ‘It was the morning of the twenty-seventh when it happened,’ Hilda said softly.

  Sam just stared at Hilda. She was counting on her fingers.

  ‘They said the baby was ten weeks old. That works right back to happening just before you left for Germany.’

  The room was spinning. It was too hot. He wanted to run out denying what this woman was telling him.

  Was this some sort of bad dream? Why should he believe this baby belonged to Katy anyway? Twenty years distorted everything.

  ‘What happe
ned to this baby?’ he asked.

  Hilda shook her head.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said softly. ‘Mrs Kirkpatrick would have known, and my mother too, but they both died years ago. I almost wish Dad hadn’t brought you up here. Perhaps it would have been better if you’d never known about any of this.’

  A spotlight glinted on his saxophone as he raised it to his lips. He filled his lungs with air, fingers poised on the keys.

  ‘Watermelon man’, a fitting number for a poor black man from New Orleans. He hadn’t been prepared to sit in with the band tonight, but they’d insisted.

  Scores of people sitting out there in the smoky darkness waiting to see if he could truly make his horn sing and all Sam could think of was Katy.

  He tried to cut out the ugly scene Hilda had described and remember Katy how she was.

  The notes came out as he pictured her running to him down the lane at Lakenheath. The fields were yellow with buttercups, she was wearing a pink dress that clung to her slim legs, her arms held out to him, hair flowing back from the small heart-shaped face. Cherry lips, cheeks pink with excitement.

  ‘I’ve found a place we can be together,’ she shouted even before she reached him. ‘I love you Sam.’

  He didn’t know he was putting all that into his music. It was all so real he could smell the fields, feel the sunshine on his neck and face, hear her voice.

  A roar washed over him, bringing him back to the present.

  Out beyond the stage he could see nothing but a blur of white faces and clapping hands.

  So she was dead. Yet, in a way it was kinder than thinking she stopped loving him. He was back in the country that made him a man, and by that applause he knew he’d played a great solo.

  He had turned a corner in his life. So Ellie had run out on him, but how could he blame her? Hadn’t he ever only loved her with half a heart? He knew the truth at last about Katy and he had his children.

  Maybe the baby found in the rubble wasn’t his, but he couldn’t rest until he found that out for certain.