There were other reasons, too, why this Christmas was so special, and not all of them were to do with it being the first peace-time Christmas in six long, traumatic years.
‘Leon has something to tell you, Dad,’ she said, her eyes shining with a happiness so deep she felt as if it had seeped into her very bones.
Carl looked towards his handsome, muscular, caring and kind black son-in-law. ‘The adoption?’ he asked, hardly daring to say the words in case he was jumping the gun; in case they hadn’t yet heard.
Leon slid his arm around Kate’s waist, holding her as close as his injured rib cage allowed. ‘Yes,’ he said, his relief and joy almost too deep for expression. ‘It was granted this morning. Joss Harvey didn’t contest it.’
‘He said that after being a witness to Leon’s bravery he had had second thoughts,’ Kate said, well aware that Leon would never speak of the reason. ‘There’ll be no problem now about our adopting Daisy. We’re almost completely legal at last, Dad! We’re a family no-one and nothing can separate!’
‘Are we going to ’ave carols first? Or charades? Or a knees-up?’ they could hear Nellie demanding. ‘An’ if we’re goin’ to ’ave carols, can we start off with “Silent Night”?’
‘What? With all this rabble?’ Daniel retorted equably. ‘Chance’d be a fine thing!’
It was when they were on the final chorus of ‘Silent Night’, Hettie at the piano, everyone crowding around her, that there came the sound of someone knocking on the front door.
‘Now who can that be?’ Albert said as Hettie continued to play. ‘We’re all ’ere, ain’t we?’
‘Emily and the Vicar ain’t ’ere!’ Nellie proffered, waving her sprig of mistletoe in time to the music.
Ruth, who had been standing next to Esther’s wheelchair, rushed for the door as though she had wings on her heels.
‘Blimey,’ Albert said as everyone else continued to sing, ‘I wish Miriam still moved that fast when I knocked on the door!’
On the far side of the piano, Leon and Kate, Christina and Jack, Pru and Malcolm, all swayed to the music as they sang. Or at least, Leon swayed as much as his injuries allowed him to sway, and Christina merely leaned against Jack, looking almost as if she were being physically supported by him, her lips barely moving, her thoughts far, far away, in another time and another place. Mavis and Ted, Carrie and Danny, Miriam and Albert and Leah, were all pressed in around the back of Hettie. Doris and Cecily were by the window, cupping a glass of sherry each. Charlie and Harriet were standing to one side of the fireplace, Carl and Ellen at the other side of it. Daniel was seated in one of the easy chairs, Luke on one knee, Matthew on the other. Nellie was seated in state in the other easy chair. Billy and Beryl and Rose and Daisy were all sitting cross-legged on the floor, singing lustily, Billy cramming a mince pie into his mouth as he did so.
Bob Giles entered the room, Ruth at his side, and there was something so charged about the two of them, such a powerful emotion barely contained, that Hettie’s hands faltered on the piano keys and everyone fell silent.
‘What on earth is it, Vicar?’ Nellie asked, never one to be dumbfounded for long. ‘Yer look as though you’ve just been witness to the Second Coming!’
‘I feel as if I have, Nellie,’ Bob said unsteadily, his eyes fixed on Christina, his entire attention focused on her. ‘Christina, my dear,’ he said as if there were only the two of them in the room, ‘I’ve brought another two guests to the party. Two guests you’ve been looking and looking for . . .’
In the crowded, fire and gas-lit room a pin could have been heard dropping. Very slowly, with not a vestige of blood in her face, Christina moved away from Jack’s supporting arm, walked from behind the piano, crossed the room towards him.
‘He can’t mean what I think he means!’ Leah whispered to Miriam, pressing a shaking hand to her mouth. ‘Ai-yi! He can’t mean it! It isn’t possible!’
The door behind him, leading into the paper-chain-decorated hallway, was still open. Kate could glimpse Emily, her many scarves reaching almost to her ankles. There were two other people in the hall, standing just out of view of the door. She could glimpse a booted foot, see the wing of a coat hem.
‘It wasn’t possible to warn you, my dear,’ Bob Giles was saying as Christina approached him almost like a sleep-walker. ‘We weren’t sure, you see. It was impossible to be sure . . .’
Emily moved arthritically forward into the room. Two women, one heavily middle-aged and one looking older than Time itself, moved, dazed and bewildered, into view behind her. Christina sucked in her breath and then gave a broken, animal-like cry that sent every scalp in the room prickling and tingling. The very old woman, her face yellowed and wrinkled, didn’t move. Instead, stooped and frail, she looked round at the sea of faces, and at Christina, uncomprehendingly. The other woman gasped and stumbled forward, her arms outstretched like those of a long-drowning woman about, at last, to be saved.
‘Mutti!’ Christina took one step towards her – two – was in her mother’s arms; was clinging to her so tightly, it seemed that nothing on this earth would ever separate them again. ‘Oh, Mutti! Mutti! Mutti!’
Leah was on her feet, moving towards Jacoba with all the speed of a young girl. ‘Jacoba, my life! Why for don’t you say something? Why for do you look as if you don’t know me?’ She was hugging and hugging her, Jacoba whom she had promised to be kind to long, long ago, when her father had been killed by the nasty Boers, Jacoba who had been her friend for so, so long.
‘I don’t think she remembers you, Leah,’ Ruth said gently. ‘She remembers very little . . .’
‘Meine Tochter!’ Eva Frank was murmuring, rocking Christina in her arms. ‘Ach, meine schöne, schöne Tochter!’
‘Blimey,’ Albert was saying, his eyes over-bright. ‘This is a right old Christmas and no mistake.’
‘But how . . .? Where . . .?’ Harriet was saying bewilderedly.
‘Moshambo,’ Emily said proudly, looking like a diminutive and ancient pixie in her layers of variegated wool. ‘Moshambo told me they were both alive and then, when I asked where, he said to look for them by the Thames.’
‘Grossmutter?’ Still in her mother’s arms, Christina was looking towards her blank-eyed, unresponsive grand-mother. ‘Grossmutter, it’s me, Christina!’
‘The Thames?’ Carl Voigt said disbelievingly, ‘Ach, Du lieber Himmel! How, in the name of God . . .’
‘They’ve been in London ever since 1938,’ Bob Giles said, causing everyone to gape at him like stranded fish.
‘She doesn’t remember you, Liebling,’ Eva Frank was saying to her daughter, her precious daughter, her daughter who had, by a miracle she still didn’t comprehend, been restored to her. ‘That was why I couldn’t find you! Only she knew her old friend’s address. Only she knew where in London her old friend lived!’
‘And her mother’s been searching for Christina all these years?’ Hettie asked, her voice cracking with emotion at the very thought.
‘How did they get out of Germany?’ Carl was asking Bob.
‘Who are those old ladies?’ Daisy was asking Kate inquisitively. ‘Are they displaced persons, like Anna? Will we have to find clothes for them, like we did for Anna?’
‘Oma?’ It was the name Christina had used for her grandmother when she had been a small child. ‘Oma? It’s me, Christina. We’ve found each other at last, Oma.’ Tenderly she touched her grandmother’s face. ‘Please know who I am, Oma. Please. Please!’
The tiny wizened figure looked blankly from Christina to Leah and back again. A slight frown puckered the wrinkled brow. ‘Christina?’ she said at last in a quavering, puzzled voice. ‘Christina and Leah?’
Christina took both her grandmother’s hands in hers, willing her to understand. ‘Yes, Oma. Leah lives in Magnolia Square. Do you remember? And I now live in Magnolia Square, too.’
Very slowly Jacoba looked around the room. There were so many faces, so many staring, incredulous faces. The residents of
Magnolia Square, even the children, held their breaths.
‘Everyone here is a friend, Oma,’ Christina’s voice was breaking with emotion. ‘They are all Leah’s family and friends. All my friends.’
‘It’s true, Jacoba.’ Leah’s face was awash with tears. ‘My Miriam is here, and her goy husband Albert. And little Carrie is here, only she ain’t little any longer, nu. When she was little, I used to tell her all about you and me and how we met. Do you remember the schoolroom, bubbeleh? Those slates we had to write on, and the smell of chalk and the teacher saying how your pa had died at Majuba and how I was to be kind to you?’
Something stirred in the depths of Jacoba’s eyes. Though she was still looking at Leah, her hands tightened on Christina’s. ‘And you were kind to me,’ she said to Leah, nodding her head. ‘Always kind.’ She turned to look at Christina, partial understanding dawning at last. ‘And you’re here, bubbeleh?’ Tears began to trickle down her withered cheeks. ‘Ai-yi! After all this time, my darling, my dove, at last you’re here!’
‘No, Oma,’ Christina said, hardly able to speak for her own tears, ‘you are here. It’s you have come to me!’
‘Why is everyone crying, Mr Collins?’ Matthew, still on one of Daniel’s knees, asked in fascination.
‘How did they get out of Germany?’ Carl was asking Bob Giles yet again.
‘Jacoba has a British passport,’ Bob said, knowing exactly how incredulous Carl was feeling. ‘They were only imprisoned for a matter of weeks. It was nineteen thirty-six, remember? At that time, Hitler’s extermination policy wasn’t running at full throttle.’
‘And when we couldn’t find you, Liebling, we knew you had managed to escape, and we knew where you would try and make for,’ Eva was saying to Christina. ‘But by the time we reached England, Bubbeleh’s memory was failing. She couldn’t remember her old friend’s married name or her address. She only knew it was near Bermondsey, where she and Leah had lived as children. That it was near the Thames.’
Daniel raised his eyes to heaven. Near to Bermondsey, for goodness sake! So it was, in a way, but then so were a thousand streets and terraces and squares.
‘I want you to meet my husband,’ Christina was saying to her mother and grandmother, her dark beauty ablaze with the joy singing through her veins. Lovingly she led them each by the hand to where Jack was still standing by the piano. ‘He isn’t Jewish Mutti, but he’s a chawchem all the same.’
‘What’s a corkem?’ Hettie hissed to Miriam.
‘A fine man. A man worthy of admiration.’
‘Blimey.’ Hettie was impressed. ‘I’ve heard people call Jack a lot of things but never that little lot!’
‘I’m very pleased to meet you,’ Jack was saying inadequately to Christina’s mother and grandmother, still pole-axed with shock. Tina’s mother and grandmother! And they’d been in London, living near the Thames, ever since 1938! Where on the Thames, for God’s sake? And how had Bob Giles managed to track them down?
‘Where on the Thames?’ Doris was asking Ruth. ‘They weren’t down in Greenwich, were they? They weren’t only spitting distance away?’
Ruth shook her head. ‘I don’t know, Doris. I only know that Emily said Moshambo had told her they were living in London, near the Thames. Since then Bob’s visited every synagogue and every Jewish shop and factory south of the river. When he went out tonight it was to make enquiries on nearly the very last place on his list, but he knew a Mrs Berger was at the address he had been given and so we hoped, and prayed . . .’
Eva Frank was still holding Jack’s hand, looking at him with unnerving gravity. At last she nodded her head, as if to say that he would do. ‘Once it would have mattered,’ she said quietly and he knew that she was referring to his non-Jewishness, ‘but now . . . now other things matter also. If you love meine Tochter, if you are good to her and make her happy, then I am happy, too.’
‘What a Christmas!’ Charlie was saying, shaking his head in disbelief. ‘What a wonderful, wonderful Christmas.’
‘Can we have some more carols?’ Rose asked, wanting things to get back to normal.
‘Can we show your ma and grandma a good old-fashioned knees-up?’ Nellie asked Christina, hoping a knees-up wouldn’t be thought disrespectful on such a monumentally emotional occasion.
‘Can I have another mince pie?’ Billy asked Kate, mindful that it was Kate’s house they were in. ‘They weren’t ’alf scrumptious.’
As Daniel and Albert ushered Jacoba Berger towards the comfy easy chair that Daniel had vacated, and Jack told Eva that he hoped she and Jacoba would immediately leave wherever they were living and move into number twelve with him and Christina, so that they would all be living together as a proper Jewish family should live together, there came another sharp rat-a-tat on the front door.
Leon looked down at Kate, his arm around her shoulders. ‘Any idea who that can be, sweetheart? You haven’t invited anyone else, have you?’
She shook her head. No-one she could possibly think of had yet to arrive.
‘I’ll get it,’ Billy said, darting out of the room and into the hall, eager to make himself useful and to perhaps cadge another mince pie as he did so.
‘It looks as if we’re going to have two new neighbours,’ Leon said, looking towards Eva and Jacoba and knowing this was a Christmas no-one present would ever forget.
Kate turned to face him, saying lovingly, ‘And someone else who is going to be living pretty close to us is making their presence felt.’ Gently she took one of his strong dark hands and laid it against her rounded stomach. ‘Can you feel those movements, darling? Like a little butterfly fluttering its wings? It’s our new son.’
‘Or our new daughter,’ Leon said, loving her with all his heart, knowing he would love her as long as he lived.
Billy charged back into the room. ‘It’s a policeman!’ he announced at the top of his voice. ‘’E thought Nellie might like to know there’s a young man on ’er doorstep. ’E says ’e’s got a kit-bag on his shoulder and that ’e don’t ’alf look tired.’
‘Oh, my giddy aunt!’ Nellie heaved herself exuberantly to her feet. ‘Ain’t this Christmas just the best ever? Ain’t this Christmas the bee’s knees? It’s my ’Arold! It’s my ’Arold, ’ome at last!’
And as Hettie sat herself down at the piano again, Nellie lumbered out of the house faster than anyone had ever seen her move before, intent on ensuring that her nephew would be part and parcel of the best, most memorable Christmas party Magnolia Square had ever had.
Coronation Summer
the third novel in Margaret Pemberton’s ‘The Londoners’ trilogy is out now.
It is early summer in 1953, and the friends and neighbours of Magnolia Square are looking forward to celebrating the coronation. The war has become a distant memory and the future seems rosy. Kate Emmerson looks on with pride at her growing family, including Matthew, whose father was killed during the war. But Matthew’s wealthy relations have never really forgiven Kate for marrying Leon, a West Indian who works as a Thames lighterman, and when Matthew runs away from his smart boarding school in Somerset, the tensions which exist between the two families come to a head.
Meanwhile Zac, the wonderfully talented and handsome new signing at the local boxing club, is being watched hopefully by all the young women of Magnolia Square. But he has eyes for only one – Carrie Collins, who has teenage children of her own and whose husband, Danny, seems more interested in the boxing club and his market stall than in her.
In the weeks leading up to the coronation, Magnolia Square is once again the centre of conflict and drama.
The first chapter follows here.
Chapter One
‘So I shall be wearing red, white and blue for the coronation, just as I did for VE Day,’ Mavis Lomax said breezily to her younger sister. They were in Lewisham High Street.
Carrie, five years Mavis’s junior, was behind the family’s fruit and vegetable stall, polishing up a fresh delivery of apples on th
e corner of her gaily patterned, wrap-around overall. ‘You’ll look ridiculous,’ she said bluntly, placing a nicely gleaming Cox’s at the centre of her apple display. ‘You looked ridiculous on VE Day, and you were only in your thirties then. As I remember it, your red skirt was split halfway to your thighs and your blue-and-white spotted blouse had a cleavage so low, it nearly met it. Now you’re in your forties you should show a bit of sense.’
‘I’m forty,’ Mavis said with emphasis and a toss of her bottled-blonde, poodle-cut curls, ‘not forty-two or forty-four or ’alfway to fifty, and I shall wear wot I bloomin’ well like.’ She was visiting the stall as a customer and she transferred a wicker shopping basket laden with potatoes and carrots and a couple of pounds of the apples Carrie had polished earlier from one scarlet-nailed hand to the other. ‘You should try taking a leaf out of my book and tart yourself up a bit. You’re getting to look quite frumpy. Next thing you know you’ll be like our mum, wearing curlers all day and only taking your pinny off when you go to bed.’
She stood with her weight resting on one leg, the curve of her hips lushly voluptuous beneath the tightness of her caramel-coloured pencil skirt. ‘Me and Ted are off down The Bricklayer’s Arms tonight,’ she continued, noticing for the first time that Carrie, usually so buoyant and ready for a laugh, looked as fed-up as she sounded. ‘Why don’t you and Danny come with us? We could have a bit of a knees-up, just like the old days.’
Carrie shook her head. ‘Thanks, but no thanks,’ she said, grudgingly appreciating the spirit in which the offer had been made. ‘Danny’s coaching at the club tonight, and I don’t want Rose sitting in on her own.’
Mavis was about to suggest that Carrie bring her fourteen-year-old daughter with her but then decided against it. She and Carrie were as different as chalk and cheese and, whereas she had quite happily often taken her two youngsters for a drink when they were still under age, it wasn’t something Carrie was ever likely to do. ‘See yer then,’ she said, about to turn on her heel and begin the walk home. A thought occurred to her and she paused. ‘’Ave yer seen the new boxer the club’s signed up? Our Beryl says he’s a smasher – tall, blond and ’andsome, with shoulders on him as wide as a street.’
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