Magnolia Square

by Margaret Pemberton

  ‘No,’ Carrie said, hurriedly agreeing with her and trying to defuse the situation. ‘Whenever Danny wrote to me and his mum he always posted the letters off together and they never arrived together. That’s true, isn’t it, Danny?’ She looked towards him for support.

  Danny dutifully nodded, his freckled face struggling for an effect of earnest sincerity. ‘Absolutely. Carrie would receive her letter weeks before Mum did, or Mum would get ’ers and Carrie’s wouldn’t even arrive!’

  Christina was not remotely interested in the vagaries of Danny’s mail. ‘I would like to see the letter,’ she said tautly to Mavis, her lips nearly as white as her face. ‘I would like to read Jack’s comments for myself.’

  The conga procession had begun making its way back up the Square, with Albert Jennings spiritedly leading it. His two daughters and Kate and Christina were oblivious of him.

  Mavis eyed Christina thoughtfully, the tension almost unbearable. ‘I don’t think I can ’elp you out there,’ she said at last as Leon cleared his throat uncomfortably and Danny shifted his feet. ‘Letters are private things. Sorry, Christina.’

  Christina sucked in her breath, furious with herself for having asked anything of Mavis; furious with Mavis for so laconically refusing her request; furious with Jack for having written the letter to Mavis in the first place.

  ‘Aiya, aiya . . . conga,’ Albert bellowed, kicking his left leg out at a jaunty angle as he led his tipsy conga line towards them. ‘Come on, Mavis! Show a leg there! Aiya, aiya conga! Churchill is a hero . . . !’

  Mavis grinned and accepted her dad’s invitation with relief. The local young scoutmaster, who had long wanted to get his arms around her, seized his opportunity and latched on behind her and away they all went, conga-ing rumbustiously towards the Blackheath end of the Square.

  Carrie looked across at Christina unhappily. Christina was trembling, though what the emotion was that was causing her to tremble, Carrie wasn’t sure. It could have been distress or it could have been anger. She tried to imagine how she would feel if Danny had written to a young married woman telling her when he expected to be home, and she hadn’t received a letter with such news herself. She couldn’t. Firstly, because Danny hated putting pen to paper to such an extent that even if Betty Grable asked him to be her pen-friend he’d refuse on the grounds that the task was too arduous. And secondly, because it was simply something Danny would never do. Not in a million years.

  ‘Christina, I . . .’ she began awkwardly.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ Christina said quickly, not wanting her to see how deeply hurt she was. ‘I’m on my way into the house to make a cup of fresh tea. ’Bye.’ Speedily she took her leave of them, not wanting to see the embarrassment in their eyes. Or the pity. What on earth had she been thinking of to have reacted to Nellie’s news in such a public manner? Why hadn’t she simply pretended Jack had written to her also with the news that he was coming home soon, and that he was hoping for an early demob? Why had she allowed Mavis the satisfaction of knowing how intensely she resented the long-standing, disturbingly free and easy relationship between her and Jack?

  She turned in at the Jennings’s gateway. There was no gate. Billy’s constant swinging on it had broken its hinges years ago. The front door was ajar, but that didn’t necessarily mean that anyone was home. In Magnolia Square doors were often left ajar, and a locked door was unheard of. Wearily she pushed the door open and stepped into the sanctuary of the cluttered hallway.

  ‘Is that you, bubbeleh?’ Leah Singer called out from the kitchen.

  A slight smile touched Christina’s still tense mouth. Leah’s greeting would do for any female member of the family who wandered in: Miriam, Carrie, Mavis, Carrie’s daughter, Rose; Mavis’s daughter, Beryl.

  Mavis. Her smile died. Unlike the rest of the Jennings family, Mavis alone had not welcomed her with effusive affection when she had arrived in Magnolia Square, numbed from the horrors taking place in her homeland, vastly relieved to have been able to move on from the Swiss Auffanglager where she had first been given shelter after her escape from Germany.

  Mavis hadn’t been hostile or openly unwelcoming, merely indifferent. At the time it was an indifference Christina had merely shrugged away. Now, however, she couldn’t help wondering if Mavis’s lack of interest had been occasioned by the fact that, from the first moment she, Christina, had stepped into Magnolia Square, Jack Robson had expressed fierce romantic interest in her, pursuing her with relentless persistence.

  ‘It’s me, Leah!’ she called out in answer to Leah’s greeting, negotiating her way around a heavily laden clothes-horse that took up most of the room in the hallway.

  Had Mavis regarded Jack as her own property even then, way back in 1936? Had it been sixth sense on Mavis’s part that had prompted her to keep her distance when everyone else in the Square had been so wonderfully welcoming? Had Mavis instantly sensed that Jack, notoriously heart-whole after breaking nearly every female heart in south London, was finally going to have his affections seriously engaged?

  ‘There’s some soup on the stove,’ Leah said, her sleeves rolled up to her elbows, an apron tied around her comfortably thick waist as she pounded strudel dough on a floured board. ‘Beans and barley, and made with decent beef bones for once.’

  ‘Thanks, but no.’ Christina kissed Leah affectionately on her wrinkled cheek. ‘I need a cup of tea, not food.’

  Leah turned to look at her, saw the expression in her eyes and the strain around her mouth and immediately pushed the strudel dough to one side of the board and dusted her hands. ‘Sit down and I’ll make the tea,’ she said, well aware that there was far more wrong with Christina than tiredness caused by over-celebrating. Not that Germany’s defeat could be over-celebrated. She’d been giving thanks for it herself non-stop ever since she’d heard the news. And so should Christina have been, not looking instead as if she’d all the troubles in the world on her shoulders. ‘So, what’s the tummel?’ she asked when she had put the kettle on to boil. ‘Today’s a joyous occasion. Why you look so troubled?’

  Christina sat at the kitchen table that, over the years, had been scrubbed until the wood was almost white, and pushed a fall of soft dark hair away from her face. Surely, with Leah, she could share her mental burdens? Leah had been her grandmother’s girlhood friend. Leah, like herself, was Jewish. If anyone would understand how, for her, the war was not yet over, Leah would. Perhaps it was the reason Leah wasn’t with the rest of their neighbours, conga-ing the length and breadth of Magnolia Square in euphoric celebration. Perhaps Leah, too, was thinking of Jacoba Berger and her daughter Eva, and was wondering what their fates had been; was wondering if they could possibly be still alive.

  As for her other anguish – Leah had known Jack since he was a baby, and Mavis was her granddaughter. If anyone could enlighten her about the true nature of the relationship between the two of them, Leah probably could. ‘I’ve been thinking about Mutti and Grossmutti,’ she said at last, her voice unsteady. ‘I’ve been wondering what happened to them after they were taken away in the trucks.’

  ‘You know what happened, faygeleh,’ Leah said gently, sitting down beside her. ‘They were taken to a concentration camp. And they died.’ Her gnarled hand took hold of Christina’s. What more could be said? How could such horrors ever be put into words, without the words cheapening the suffering? And how ironic it was that Jacoba, born and bred in south London, should have been one of the first of Hitler’s victims, her German-Jewish son-in-law’s shop burned to the ground, he and his son shot in the street, and herself and her middle-aged daughter taken off to a camp.

  Leah’s hand tightened on Christina’s. A camp. They had never known which camp, though in those early days of 1936, when the camps were being described to the foreign press as ‘mild reform centres for Germans who have not yet seen the light’, the most likely was the new women’s concentration camp at Lichtenburg.

  ‘But what if they didn’t die?’ Christina said ur
gently, putting her newly-born hope into words for the first time. ‘What if they were released after I had left Heidelberg? They wouldn’t have known where to look for me. They wouldn’t have known I had escaped to Switzerland, or that I had applied for asylum in England.’

  ‘They would have guessed,’ Leah protested, shocked. ‘Jacoba would have written me—’

  ‘Would she?’ Christina’s amethyst eyes burned with fierce intensity. ‘The two of you hadn’t been in contact with each other for years and years. It was only when Red Cross officials questioned me as to whether my family had any relatives or friends, however distant, in Britain or America or Canada, that I remembered Grossmutti’s girlhood friendship with you.’

  Leah was silent, remembering far distant schooldays in Bermondsey. They had used slates to write on and, if she closed her eyes, she could still conjure up the smell of chalk and the rank smell of poverty that had filled the crowded schoolroom. Jacoba had sat at the desk next to hers. ‘Be kind to Jacoba,’ their teacher had said, ‘her father’s been killed at Majuba, fighting the nasty Boers.’ And so she had been kind to Jacoba, and Jacoba had become her friend. They had been together when the second Boer War had broken out eight years later, and when the country had celebrated Queen Victoria’s Jubilee, and when London had received the news that General Gordon had been killed in Khartoum.

  And then Jacoba had met Anton Berger, a German-Jewish medical student studying in London, and she had married him and accompanied him back to his home town of Heidelberg. There had been letters, of course. A lot at first, reducing to a trickle as the years passed, and then drying up entirely when Europe plunged into the darkness of the 1914 –18 war. Afterwards, there had been an occasional card. Enough for Leah to know that Jacoba had been widowed and that her daughter Eva was now married and had given birth to a daughter. And then, some time during the twenties, all communication had ceased. Had it been her fault, or had it been Jacoba’s? Or had it simply been that their lives had grown so far apart that, even on paper, they had become strangers to each other?

  Leah gave a deep sigh. ‘Oy veh,’ she said, tears winding their way down her cheeks, ‘Oy veh, oy veh. So much trouble. So much misery.’

  ‘But do you agree with me, Leah?’ Christina persisted, not allowing Leah to avoid her question. ‘It might never have occurred to Grossmutti that I would get in touch with you. And if she and Mutti became separated . . .’ she faltered slightly, ‘if she and Mutti became separated,’ she said again, her voice raw with pain, ‘I doubt if the possibility would even have entered Mutti’s head.’

  The possibility that her old schoolfriend and her daughter were still alive had certainly never entered Leah’s head, not even way back in 1936. Why should it have done? Jews had already been banned from German public life. They were merely ‘subjects’ without rights. And as Christina’s father and brother had been dragged from their burning home and shot before her eyes, why should any hopes have been entertained that Jacoba and Eva would emerge alive from wherever it was they had been taken to? That after all these years Christina was expressing the hope they may have survived, disturbed her deeply. It meant that, though everyone had assumed Christina had come to terms with her family tragedy, she had, in fact, never done so. It meant she was still conjuring up horrors that her mother and grandmother might be enduring. And it meant she was living in hope. A hope Leah was certain would never come to fruition.

  ‘They’re dead, faygeleh,’ she said again, very gently. ‘Haven’t we said Kaddish for them? Don’t we know in our hearts they’re at peace now?’

  Until a little while ago, Christina would have been in reluctant agreement with her. She was so no longer. Hadn’t many people given Leon Emmerson up for dead, and wasn’t Leon very much alive? And there would be hundreds, perhaps thousands, of other people who had also been given up for dead who would prove to be alive.

  ‘I’ll brew the tea,’ she said, rising to her feet, knowing that if she continued the conversation Leah would only grow even more distressed. Instead she would speak to Kate about the possibility that her mother and grandmother were alive. Kate was always very positive and optimistic. And Carl Voigt, Kate’s German-born father, might very well know how she should go about beginning her search.

  ‘Blimey!’ Danny said as he and Carrie and Kate and Leon watched Christina walk away from them. ‘That was a bit of a show-down and no mistake.’

  ‘Do you think I should go after her?’ Carrie asked, frowning. ‘I’ve never seen Christina so upset before. She usually keeps everything bottled up inside, or I presume she does, because she certainly doesn’t give vent to much. I’ve always had my suspicions that Mavis’s friendship with Jack distressed her, but that’s the first time she’s ever shown it distressed her.’

  Kate, too, was frowning slightly. ‘It’s a shame, isn’t it?’ she said, disturbed at the thought of Christina being so unhappy on such a wonderful day. ‘I’d stake my life that Mavis and Jack’s friendship is completely innocent.’

  Carrie gave a rude snort, and Leon said mildly, ‘I’m sure you’re right, love. They’ve grown up living next door to each other, haven’t they? They’re bound to be pretty close in a brother and sisterly kind of way.’

  Carrie raised her eyes to heaven. Leon had only spent a few short months in Magnolia Square when, recovering from war wounds, he had moved into Kate’s home as a lodger and then, after being declared fit for active service again, a short leave. After that leave his ship had been sunk and he had been taken prisoner. The time he’d spent in the Square had been long enough for him to have fallen irrevocably in love with Kate, but had quite obviously not been enough for him to get Mavis’s measure.

  ‘Are the fireworks over?’ Daniel asked, ambling back up to them now it looked safe to do so, a rolled newspaper tucked beneath his arm. ‘Dear oh dear, but I thought for a minute we were going to be in for a bit of scratching and biting and hair-pulling!’

  Danny grinned at his dad affectionately. ‘Keepin’ out of the danger area as usual, were you? No wonder Mum always complains you’re never around when she wants to ’ave a barney!’

  ‘No-one with any sense would be,’ Daniel retorted, deep feeling in his voice. ‘There ain’t a more frightening sight in the world than my Hettie brandishing a rolling-pin!’

  The little rejoinder lifted the troubled atmosphere. Danny caught hold of his six-year-old daughter as she dashed by, chased by Daisy and Matthew. ‘’Ow about calming dahn a bit?’ he said lovingly. ‘I can’t ’ear myself fink for your shrieking, and Maffew’s dad is just goin’ to tell me who liberated him, the Russkies or the Yanks.’

  Leon and Kate exchanged hopeless, frustrated glances; were they never, ever, going to be able to slip away on their own?

  Carrie, seeing the look and interpreting it correctly, said to her nearest and dearest, ‘Why don’t you leave chin-wagging with Leon about your mutual POW experience till you’re both in The Swan with a couple of pints in your hands? In the meantime you can take Rose, Daisy, Matthew and Luke down to the river to see the tugs.’

  As he stared at her in incredulity, Leon and Kate seized their chance. ‘Matthew!’ Kate called. ‘Daisy! Come over here! Rose’s daddy is going to take you down to the river.’

  Matthew hurtled up to her, pretending to be an aeroplane, his arms going like windmills. ‘Don’t want to go with Rose’s daddy,’ he panted breathlessly, ‘want to stay with you and Leon.’

  Kate bent down to him, saying with gentle firmness, ‘I want you to go with him. It will be nice for Luke to see the tugs, they’ll be all decked out in flags and bunting, and he won’t go if you don’t.’

  This was true, and Matthew knew it. His little brother wouldn’t go anywhere unless he went too. The desire to be a good boy and do what was being asked of him, and the desire to stay close to Leon’s side, fought for supremacy. Leon was going to be his daddy – and no-one else he knew, no-one else at all, had a daddy who looked so excitingly different, a daddy who was chocolat
e-coloured!

  Seeing his disappointment, Leon squatted down on his haunches in front of him. ‘If you go with Luke down to the river today, with Rose’s daddy, I’ll take you down there tomorrow on your own. We might even see the boat I used to work the river in and, with a bit of luck, go aboard her.’

  Matthew beamed at him sunnily, his eyes shining. His new daddy-Leon had been a Thames Waterman before he’d gone away to fight, and when he grew up, he was going to be a Thames Waterman too. ‘All right,’ he said, only too happy now to indulge his mother’s wish, ‘I’ll go with Rose’s daddy.’

  ‘That’s a good boy, pet lamb.’ Kate ruffled his blond hair lovingly, hardly able to believe that Danny was going to take all her children off her hands for her.

  As Leon swung Luke down from his shoulders, his gratitude to Carrie knowing no bounds, Danny said plaintively, ‘Blimey, Carrie. Yer don’t ’alf drop a fella in it! I’m goin’ to be like the Pied Piper of bloomin’ Hamelin with this little lot!’

  ‘You’ll enjoy it,’ Carrie said placidly, knowing he would do no such thing, ‘and it’s a way of keeping Matthew, Daisy and Luke out of Kate and Leon’s hair for a little while.’

  ‘Out of their ’air?’ He was looking at her with incredulity, his own mahogany-red hair standing up in tousled tufts. ‘Out of their ’air?’ he said again as Leon and Kate, their arms tightly around each other’s waists, began walking speedily away from them, Hector lolloping at their heels. ‘Lord ’ave mercy, Carrie! Leon’s only been ’ome a shake of a donkey’s tail. Why the ’ell would ’e already be wantin’ the kids out of ’is ’air?’

  Carrie looked at him pityingly. She loved him with all her heart, but it had to be admitted that there were moments when he was as thick as two short planks. ‘For the simple reason that he’s not been home the length of time you have! Do use your head, Danny! They want to be on their own together for a bit of lovey-dovey.’