by Beezy Marsh
It was a clear, crisp October day when Peggy finally received word from George. She recognized his neat, copperplate writing, in pencil. She traced each stroke with her finger, over and over, seeking some connection with him. The words were not the words he would have chosen, she realized that. He had probably been told to copy it down, sitting in a room with his fellow captives. But the very fact that he had written to her, managed to send word that he was alive, meant the world. The letter read: ‘I have been taken prisoner of war in Germany. I am in good health. Please do not worry. I will be transferred from this camp in a number of days so please do not write until I send word. George.’
Peggy knew she would have to hand it in to the War Office, because the authorities had told her that if she heard anything from him, she must do so without delay. But she held that note close for the rest of the day and put it under her pillow that night, just to have his words beside her for a moment longer.
Peggy blew out the candle and drifted into a dream about a chatty blue-eyed boy and a tall girl with dark hair, carrying a book under her arm, making their way down a cobbled street by the Thames. They wandered in a time between the wars, when children played without bombs falling from the sky and everyone knew their neighbours, even if they were all as poor as church mice and didn’t always get along.
27
The Lambeth Girls, May 1945
For once, the paperboy was shouting good news and the billboards screamed victory. Peggy hurried back across Waterloo Bridge, clutching her sheaf of newspapers, her heart pounding in her chest. Hope had been building for days, with the Nazi armies falling like dominos and the Allies gaining ground, despite so many years of defeat. George would be free soon, she could feel it in her bones, but she wouldn’t be truly happy until he was back home.
People were already celebrating, beeping their car horns and Peggy saw two vans piled full of teenagers, with some hanging off the doors and others crammed into the cab, laughing, smoking, drinking and waving flags, heading up into Trafalgar Square to join the crowds dancing in the fountains. Celebrations had already kicked off up there last night but today the whole of London was going to have a massive knees-up for VE Day.
The excitement was palpable. After more than five years of blackouts, bombings and misery, the war was over. The city had been blasted to bits in places but its spirit was not broken and with two days to celebrate Victory in Europe, Churchill intended to show that to the world.
Peggy made her way down to her mum’s flat in the Borough and found Kathleen and Eva already there, with a bottle of sherry open on the table.
‘George will be home soon, don’t you worry no more,’ said Mum, embracing her. ‘We can put all this behind us and get back to normal again, you’ll see.’ Peggy reluctantly took a sip of the drink that had been poured for her.
‘You have to come and celebrate with everyone, Peg. I won’t have it any other way,’ her mother added. She was right. The war was over and Peggy needed to trust that things would be all right. They couldn’t go back to how they used to be; so much had changed, not just for her, but for everyone. Now was not the time to say that, Peggy understood. Eva and Kathleen were already chucking back the sauce and plotting a great evening.
Street parties for the children were hastily organized and Nanny Day clubbed together with Mrs Avens and Mrs Davies from number 16 Howley Terrace to do a big celebration. It was decided that the kids would all go along to join in. It was fitting, somehow, for the family to gather there, rather than down in the Borough. It was where they belonged, they all felt that.
Mrs Davies had kept a load of old bunting from the King’s Jubilee Party back in 1935 and that was strung from house to house, while the women pooled their resources to bake some fairy cakes and scones. There was no shortage of booze: rum, whisky and sherry were pulled from the back of cupboards and from under floorboards, where they had been stashed and held back for the moment it was all over. Tables and chairs were arranged in time-honoured fashion, in the middle of the road, with best tablecloths and china carefully laid out and endless cups of tea poured.
The kids from Tenison Street were there, bashing on upturned pots and pans with wooden spoons, making such a racket, as everyone sang ‘We’ll Meet Again’ and the ‘White Cliffs of Dover’. It was a case of the louder, the better. Punters brought their pints from the pub around the corner to join in and in the middle of it all, Mrs Avens sat down on her doorstep and sobbed her eyes out because her Johnny wasn’t there to see any of it. Mum and Mrs Davies gathered her up, dried her eyes and poured a stiff shot of brandy down her throat.
‘That’s the spirit!’ said Mum, as Mrs Avens managed a weak smile. ‘We cannot cry now, for the children’s sake. We have to put on our best face and show them the way forward. We’ve won and we can’t give in, for Johnny, for all of them.’
Patsy gave Mum a hug, just as Dad sauntered out of the house. He looked at them both, spat on the ground in disgust and walked off to the pub, where he spent the rest of the day. He could never accept his Margaret being with another man, but she’d made her mind up, he knew that, and there was no changing it.
A huge bonfire was lit on the waste-ground at the end of the street and the smell of burning wood filled the evening air. People were doing the same all over the borough, lighting fires like little beacons to end the blackout. Children looked on in wonder, many of them having been born in a time when night only meant pitch black and fire was the consequence of bombs dropped on innocent families.
As darkness fell, gangs of good-natured revellers, rowdy men and women in uniforms, came across the bridge into Lambeth, looking for more parties. No one wanted the celebrations to end. Someone had an accordion out and a fiddle and Kathleen’s old piano was pulled from its place in the front room to provide music. Kathleen wasn’t playing – she was too busy dancing, twirling around, as Albert watched her from the side-lines, leaning on a walking stick. His leg had been badly shot up in Italy and he’d been shipped home a few weeks ago to convalesce. Kathleen didn’t talk about it but Eva and Peggy both feared it hadn’t done his temper any good. Eva caught the look in his eye as an American GI swept Kathleen up and down the street in a foxtrot, while everyone clapped and whooped them on. Albert would have started another war there and then, if his leg had been up to it, Eva felt sure of that.
Peggy was woken by the most almighty hammering on the door the next morning. She wasn’t one for drinking but she’d definitely had a few too many and she could have done without the early-morning wake-up call.
‘All right!’ she yelled, pulling on her dressing gown. ‘I’m coming.’
She pulled open the door to find Kathleen’s mother-in-law, her hair still in curlers, standing there with Della in her arms. The baby was crying as she was thrust towards Peggy.
‘It’s Kathleen,’ she said. ‘There was an accident last night. She’s in the hospital. I can’t look after the baby, I’ve got Albert to care for, you see, with his leg and all. You’ll have to take her.’
‘What happened?’ said Peggy, stroking Della’s hair to calm her down.
Albert’s mother couldn’t look her in the eye. ‘She slipped and fell downstairs and hurt herself, silly girl.’
Peggy and Eva sat at Kathleen’s bedside, holding her hand as she slept.
She had two black eyes, a swollen lip and her head was swathed in bandages. Her beautiful curls were all matted with blood and her face so pale she looked like a broken doll lying there, rather than their sister.
The nurse came over to them. ‘She will sleep for a good while now. The doctors say rest is the best cure. Her skull is fractured but although they are confident that there is no bleeding to worry about we need to keep a close eye on things. You can come back later in the day, at visiting time. We’ll take care of her, I promise.’
Eva was shaking as she stood up.
‘We’d better tell Mum,’ said Peggy eventually.
‘You go,’ said Eva, her hands closing in
to fists, ‘I’m going to find Albert.’
Eva had never been one to judge people by where they lived; she’d grown up poorer than most.
But this grimy little street in Vauxhall really was a disgrace. It had houses with dirty windows and grubby net curtains and the front steps hadn’t been swept in an age, judging by the state of them.
She arrived at Albert’s door. A pint of milk was still on the front step, so she picked it up before banging loud enough to raise the dead. She noticed, with a self-satisfied smile, that a few curtains were twitching.
His mother answered, hair in curlers, still wearing a housecoat and slippers. She folded her arms. ‘What do you want, then?’
‘I need to talk to Albert,’ said Eva. ‘I have got a message from Kathleen.’
‘Who is it?’ Eva heard his voice from the scullery and he hobbled out with his stick as his mother retreated down the hallway.
‘Well, what’s up?’ he asked, leaning on the doorframe, as if he hadn’t a care in the world.
‘You’d better step outside,’ said Eva. ‘I can’t tell you this in front of your mum.’
He was easing himself down the front step and into the street, when she raised the milk bottle high in the air and smashed it down, hard, on the top of his head.
Albert screamed, from the shock of it and the pain, as splinters of glass embedded in his scalp. Milk coursed down his face, mixing with blood from the cuts on his forehead, and his walking stick fell to the ground.
‘You stupid bitch!’ he cried, putting his hands to his head and sweeping shards of broken milk bottle to the ground. ‘What did you do that for?’
Eva held the broken bottle by the neck and jabbed it towards Albert’s face. ‘That is from me and Peggy and Kathleen.
‘If you hurt her, you hurt all of us. We’re sisters. Blood is thicker than water and don’t you forget it.’
Epilogue
1949
The little terraced houses which had nestled by the river since the last century were seen as insanitary now. Hitler hadn’t managed to flatten them in the Blitz but London County Council had bulldozed them into the ground. People wanted gas and electric, in neat little prefabs, with bathrooms inside the house and not just a lavatory and a tap in the back yard. Peggy, Kathleen and Eva stopped off at the seafood stall in the Cut to pick up a pint of prawns and some whelks for the kids before taking a trip down memory lane. Peggy and Kathleen had moved down to Brixton, which was quite posh compared to the backstreets of Waterloo, and Eva had a nice flat down in the Borough.
The war seemed so long ago. Everything was about rebuilding, making things better, from the new National Health Service to the welfare state. People who had lost so much didn’t want to look back, only forwards.
George had returned from the prisoner-of-war camp in Poland so thin and dishevelled that when Peggy asked, ‘Where’s Daddy?’ little Gloria ran to get her peg doll because she hadn’t recognized him at first. The war had not broken him – far from it. He was promoted and stayed on with the Army and was now in Singapore. Peggy and Gloria would be joining him out there any day now, which was the beginning of a whole new adventure.
And Kathleen, well, she was divorcing Albert and was writing to a GI she had met at the end of the war who wanted her to move over to the United States, to be with him, and start afresh with Della.
Only Eva planned to stay put in London. Jimmy was making a good living running betting shops and a toy shop too, down the Elephant. They were happily married, with two little girls to think of: Beverley and her little sister, Shirley. Jimmy provided more than enough for all of them and although Eva had always earned her own money, she was content at last to give up hoisting and let him look after her.
Their father, James, had moved out to a tenement block down in Southwark and was as satisfied as he was ever likely to be. He was still working down at the cricket bat factory, although he was already into his sixties. Kathleen’s twin, Jim, had married a lovely local girl, Hannah, and they were proud parents to a little boy.
Mother and Patsy were as happy as larks down in the Borough, where she now had a telephone installed in the flat – the first in her neighbourhood – thanks to Frankie, who bought her everything she could wish for. It was best not to ask how he paid for it all.
As the girls rounded the corner, Howley Terrace and Tenison Street lay in ruins before them. A few walls were still standing, here and there, but even they’d be gone soon. Weeds were growing where tidy little homes had once stood and women had fussed over the state of their front steps.
Della, Gloria and Beverley skipped along the cobbles, holding hands, dressed in their best clothes, singing nursery rhymes as they went, their feet covering the ground which had been the scene of everything from street fights to street parties.
Eva, Peggy and Kathleen linked arms and paused for a moment. It was strange to see it all reduced to a wasteland. ‘They call this progress,’ said Peggy. She held a flyer for the Festival of Britain, which was opening down the road, a massive exhibition, showcasing everything new the country had to offer. ‘Shall we go and have a look?’
They turned and walked back, passing the gate of the Lion Brewery, which was all that was left of it. The whole building had been razed to the ground too, in the slum clearance. The Lion of Lambeth, the statue which had presided over the comings and goings on Belvedere Road, had been scrubbed clean of soot and now had pride of place along the way, outside County Hall on Westminster Bridge. That lion used to scare the living daylights out of Eva when she was little, and Nanny Day hadn’t helped, joking that he’d jump down and gobble her up if she misbehaved. Nanny Day was dead and gone; her heart had given out in the winter of 1947, so she couldn’t say what needed to be said.
Eva turned to her sisters, with a twinkle in her eye. ‘Come on,’ she whispered. ‘We’re going on a lion hunt.’
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Evelyn Wolff and her mum, Beverley, for all their assistance and their memories of the Fraser family, and especially to Evelyn (Bub) for continuing with her genealogical research.
Thanks to Ingrid Connell of Pan Macmillan for seeing the potential in the life stories of three sisters from Lambeth and her expert guidance, which ignited the spark for this book. My agent Tim Bates at Peters, Fraser and Dunlop was a brilliant support during the writing process, and it was a pleasure working with editor Zennor Compton and desk editor Natalie McCourt and all the team at Pan Macmillan.
I am grateful to Sophie Buhler, my unofficial first reader, and to my husband Reuben, my boys Idris and Bryn, and my friends Mark, Jo and Sally for their enthusiasm for the project throughout.
The research for this book was wide-ranging, taking me from sources as varied as Hansard, Pathé News and the photographs of Edith Tudor Hart, to personal blogs about war-time memories and local history groups on Facebook. Recreating the world of the 1930s and the 1940s was rather daunting at first and I am very grateful to the wide range of personal memories shared with me, including some from my own family, who were Londoners at the time of the Blitz. Some characters from Howley Terrace are composites of local people and their names have been changed to protect their real identities. Thank you to Professor Helen Glew for sharing her knowledge of women working in the Post Office between the Wars, and to Jon Baker, curator of the Imperial War Museum at Duxford, for help in tracking down military records.
The following books were invaluable to me during my research:
Branson, N. and Heinemann, M., Britain in the Nineteen Thirties, Herts, Panther Books Ltd, 1973.
Pember Reeve, M., Round About a Pound a Week, London, Persephone Books, 2008.
Madge, C. and Harrison, T. Mass Observation Britain, London, Faber and Faber, 2009.
Tebbutt, M. Women’s Talk: A Social History of Gossip in Working Class Neighbourhoods, 1880–1960, Hants, Scolar Press, 2005.
Glew, H., Gender Rhetoric and Regulation: Women’s Work In The Civil Service And The London C
ounty Council 1900–1955, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2016.
Howell, G., Wartime Fashion: From Haute Couture to Home Made, 1935–1945, London, Bloomsbury, 2013.
Spring Rice, M., Working-Class Wives, London, Virago, 1981.
Collins, M., The Likes of Us: A Biography of the White Working Class, London, Granta, 2004.
Levine, J., Forgotten Voices of the Blitz and the Battle for Britain, London, Ebury, 2006.
Camp, J., Holloway Prison: The Place and the People, London, David and Charles, 1974.
Bright, N., Southwark in the Blitz, Stroud, Amberley Publishing, 2016.
I also viewed archive material, films and images from:
Pathé News
East Anglia Film Archive
British Newspaper Archives
Getty Images
The photographs of Edith Tudor Hart
Hansard
I also am grateful to the following online resources and blogs:
A London Inheritance: A Private History of a Public City blog – www.alondoninheritance.com – for images and descriptions of Howley Terrace and the surrounding area.
Lydia Syson’s blog, about the Battle of Bermondsey in 1937 – www.lydiasyson.com
Bombsight – www.bombsight.org
Hertfordshire Memories blog – www.hertsmemories.org.uk
The West End at War blog – www.westendatwar.org.uk
The War Time Memories Project – www.wartimememories.co.uk
‘Now and Then Walworth’ Facebook group – www.facebook.com/groups/69569490746/