I made a sympathetic noise. To my surprise, his response was to pull tight the cloth he was holding with a sudden jerk and twist his mouth into a scowl.
‘Saw one of your ambulance attendants take a bottle of whisky out of the house. Saw him tuck it under that grey coat you lot all wear. Then he scurried away like the rat he was, ’fore I could get a name. Might’a taken more, ’cos the house’s back door stood open when I went back there in daylight and things looked like they’d been gone through. I telephoned your Mrs Coke about it yesterday, but she didn’t seem interested. Sounded annoyed that I’d phoned.’
It did not surprise me that Mrs Coke had done nothing. She had done as little as she could since taking over as the station officer.
‘Did you get a look at the man?’ I asked.
‘Scrawny little feller. Couldn’t see his face. He had on one of them grey coats and a steel hat. Thought it looked like that Fred Knaggs what’s always at the dog track, but I couldn’t swear to it.’
‘I’m so sorry, Mr Richie.’ It appalled me to think of ambulance officers looting from bombed houses, but from what I knew of Knaggs he would have to be a likely suspect.
‘Not your fault, love. There’s always bad apples. Next time I sees anything, though, it’ll be reported to the police, not to your Mrs Coke.’ He scratched his head. ‘Keep yer eyes open, will you? If you notice anything suspicious when you’re on duty, let me know?’
‘Of course I will.’
I thought about what Mr Richie had said as I walked down Gray’s Inn Road. Most looters were regular criminals, but there were plenty of rumours about the heavy rescue workers and demolition men who mixed business with pleasure by helping themselves to objects in the houses they were working on. And there were stories of ambulance officers and even firefighters stealing bottles of spirits, valuable knick-knacks, money, clothes and jewellery from bombsites. Wallets disappeared from the injured, never to be found again; women awoke in hospital without rings or brooches or earrings, without the fur coat they had slipped on to wear in the shelter, without their precious handbag containing personal papers, cash and valuables.
Levy had nursed a bee in his bonnet about looting since the Blitz started. If he had any suspicion that Knaggs was looting houses he would take matters further. And yet, if anyone had to catch Knaggs, I hoped it would not be Levy. His life was hard enough at the station without complicating things further.
CHAPTER NINE
Four days later, on Friday afternoon, I arrived early at Woburn Place to start the last night shift for the week. As driver, it was my responsibility to check the oil, water and petrol before each shift, but I also wanted to make sure that no unpleasant little ‘jokes’ had been left for Levy to find. Although Levy brushed off such anti-Semitism with a shrug, I hated him to be bothered with it.
Sure enough, I found a pair of pig’s ears and a tail arranged on top of a pile of blankets in the back of the ambulance, together with a rather artfully conceived pamphlet entitled ‘This is a Jews’ War!’ On cursory inspection, it asserted that it was the Jews who had planned this war in order to achieve their aim of world domination. On another pile of blankets were two books, Douglas Reed’s Disgrace Abounding, which had a sealed, blank envelope tucked inside, and Dachau the Nazi Hell, which appeared to be an account of a Jewish prisoner’s terrible suffering in a German concentration camp. This last was puzzling, unless whoever had put it there wanted to scare Levy with what might happen to him if the Nazis invaded Britain.
I had been lent Reed’s Insanity Fair last year, and had found his descriptions of Hitler’s Germany to be fascinating. He had an easy journalistic style that was persuasive, but his anti-Semitism was a nasty feature of the book.
I had some pleasure in tearing the pamphlet into bits as I walked past the line of ambulances and cars to the bin. There I threw in the remains of the pig and pamphlet but I was not sure what to do with the books or the envelope. I had a strong aversion to destroying a book. Hitler destroyed books.
‘More presents left for me?’
Levy was standing behind me.
‘Pig’s ears,’ I said. ‘A pamphlet about how you lot are going to take over the world. And these.’ I handed him the books.
He smiled slightly, which surprised me, and held up the book on Dachau. ‘This one’s mine, actually. I lent it to a friend. A distressing book, but needs to be read. I borrowed the other one. It’s good to know what the intelligentsia – if you can call Reed that – is writing about us.’
‘It has an envelope inside.’
He found the sealed envelope, smiled and tucked it into his breast pocket before closing the book with a snap.
‘I can fight my own battles, Brennan. Whoever is doing this is targeting me, not you. Leave it for me to deal with.’
I began to remonstrate, but he cut me off and I could hear real anger in his voice. ‘I mean it. Leave any little gifts for me to deal with in future. And don’t bother defending my honour against the morons in the common room.’
‘But how can you bear it?’ I blurted out the words without thinking and wished immediately that I could take them back.
Levy stiffened, sucked in a breath and sighed it out.
‘I survived boarding school. This is nothing compared with what I went through at Harrow.’
‘But it’s so unfair.’
He shrugged. ‘It’s so common that I hardly notice it now. It’s like people whispering in the cinema or coughing at a concert. You don’t really hear it because you’re concentrating on the music or the film. One would only need to deal with such things if they greatly interfered with one’s enjoyment.’
‘Have you ever dealt with it?’
‘On occasion.’ He looked up, into my eyes. ‘But I’ve found that it never really helps. Not me or my tormentors.’
He looked away and shivered a little. ‘Of course I hate it, but it’s so pervasive, Brennan. The slight reluctance before a handshake, the muttered comment, the look of polite contempt. I can’t change centuries of hatred. I just have to live with it.’
We walked together back to the Monster. ‘I grew up hearing how lucky I was to live in a country without pogroms,’ he said. ‘My mother’s family fled Russia in the last century and ended up in Germany. They thought Germany was a haven. “The most civilised country in Europe,” my grandparents would tell me whenever they came to visit when I was a boy.’ His hands clenched. ‘Only, we’ve not heard from them, or any of my mother’s family, for some time now.’
‘Oh, Levy . . .’
I shut up. When I thought about what I had seen in Prague, I shivered.
Levy turned to me, shrugged and tried to smile. ‘I was born in this country, as was my father and his father. My brothers wear its uniform and they fight for it, as my father fought for it in the last war. I went to Repton, then Harrow and Oxford. My passport says I’m British, but to most in this nation I’ll never be an Englishman.’
‘But—’
Levy touched my cheek, very softly. ‘You can’t fight my battles, Brennan. Hanging on to anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die. There’s no point. Now, scram, there’s a good girl, and have a nice cup of tea. I’ll check my supplies and join you in the common room.’
As Levy walked away from me, I wondered how it must feel always to be the ‘outsider’, always to face unreasoning discrimination. It was annoying for me in London to be constantly judged by my accent, but it had never been anything more than annoying.
Of course I knew something about being bullied as the outsider at school. It all came to a head near the end of my first year when I returned to the dormitory to find a pack of giggling girls – all from ‘good families’ who delighted in tormenting me – standing around my bed.
‘Oh just look at this,’ their leader, Phyllis Gregory, had announced, bending to sniff the urine-coloured stain on the mattress. ‘Barmaid Brennan has wet the bed. Smells of beer. Barmaids wee beer apparently.’
>
When I got closer I could smell that it was indeed beer, no doubt poured on my bed by one of her lackeys.
I had dressed myself in silence and left the dormitory accompanied by laughter. I had walked past the dining room, down the main drive and out of the front gate of the school to end up at my uncle’s house, a mile or so away. I found him in his front garden, choosing a rose for his buttonhole.
‘I’ve run away from school. I won’t go back, so don’t think that you can make me. I’m going home to Kookynie.’
Uncle Charles placed the rosebud carefully in his buttonhole before looking up at me.
‘Tell me about it over breakfast.’
He took me to a small tearoom near his law chambers where, over bacon and eggs and tomato and sausages and toast and jam – a veritable feast to a boarding school girl – the story was told. When I had finished, Uncle Charles sighed.
‘It’s a very good school, Lily. Your mother and father would be most upset if you allowed yourself to be driven out by some badly behaved girls.’
‘But it’s—’
‘Yes, it’s awful. I know the Gregory girl’s father, and he spoils her terribly. Do you hate everything about the school? Lessons, the teachers, the routine?’
‘I don’t mind any of that. But I don’t have any friends and the girls are so awful to me. I want to go home.’
‘Who would you like to be friends with?’
‘I like Rose Pellew. She plays violin in the orchestra.’
I had rather a crush on willowy Rose, who cultivated a dreamy expression and dealt with Phyllis by steadfastly ignoring her.
Uncle Charles had considered the matter for a minute or so, before stating, ‘Join the orchestra. You play the piano well enough.’
The thought had never occurred to me. ‘I do, but they don’t need—’
‘Well what do they need?’ Uncle Charles didn’t waste words.
‘They’ve been asking for a percussionist, but I couldn’t do that. Phyllis would tear me to pieces.’
He smiled. ‘Don’t over-dramatise. Phyllis may tease you, but I’m sure the girls in the orchestra will be happy to have you.’ There was a decided nod. ‘Yes. That will solve the problem nicely, and you will learn a new skill.’ He gestured at the empty plate. ‘Eaten enough?’
‘Yes, but—’
‘I was called Stinky at school,’ he said, which made me laugh. ‘I think it was to do with my tennis shoes. My old schoolmates call me Stinky even now.’
He had carefully brushed away some crumbs from his jacket and grimaced. ‘I was bullied as well, for a while. But it’s easier to deal with such things in a boys’ school.’
‘Why?’
‘We tend to resolve our problems with our fists, and I’m a pretty good fighter.’
My uncle was a fastidious man, and the idea that he had ever been a smelly little boy was very amusing. But it was frankly amazing to think of him as a fighter, even though I knew he had been away to war when he was a young man.
I agreed to stay at school. Uncle Charles was proved right to some extent, because I became good friends with Rose and the other girls in the orchestra. Once I had friends, no spiteful remark ever cut so deeply.
But it was something else Uncle Charles said, but never intended me to act upon, that really improved matters for me. I dared Phyllis Gregory to meet me behind the big gum tree.
‘Barmaids have to know how to deal with nasty customers,’ I told her in front of witnesses, with my fists clenched and my head high. ‘I’ll show you how they do it.’
She knew I was serious, and I saw the spark of fear in her eyes. More importantly, she knew that I knew she was afraid of me.
Of course she refused my challenge point blank, which I thought was rather cowardly given she was more than a year older than me and much taller. The next day her father arrived at school and raged at the headmistress, demanding my expulsion, but Dad and Uncle Charles somehow managed to talk her around. After that Phyllis and the posh girls of her set left me alone. I was happy enough at school, but my real revenge was trouncing the lot of them in the final exams, and winning state exhibitions in French and German.
After my abortive challenge to Phyllis, I found my nickname Barmaid had been shortened to Barmy. Letters from school friends were still addressed ‘Dear Barmy’. I had heard recently from one of them that Phyllis was engaged to a very handsome, very wealthy war hero.
Life is so often unfair.
I was in a low mood by the time I reached the common room. What I had suffered was almost nothing compared to what Levy had to put up with, simply because he was Jewish. He had asked me not to take the matter any further, but it was the third time I had found pig parts and pamphlets in the ambulance and I was sick of it.
I was in a fighting mood as I knocked on the door of Mrs Coke’s office. Levy would never raise with her the subject of the nasty ‘surprises’ that I had been finding in our ambulance. So it was up to me.
She was seated at her desk, surrounded by raffle ticket butts, cheques and letters. Mrs Coke ran the Ambulance Benevolent Fund, which raised money to buy ambulances. The main money-making venture for the fund was a raffle, where the prize was War Bonds, but she also actively encouraged donations. Levy maintained that the only person to really benefit from it all was Mrs Coke, because she made important contacts and it gave her a reputation as a ‘good woman’.
For my part, nothing about Mrs Coke seemed real. It was as if she had read a description in a book of the type of woman she wanted to be and had spent the rest of her life imitating, but never actually becoming, the phantom she so admired. She was large-bodied and tall, neither good-looking nor plain, with no outstanding characteristics beyond her faded blue eyes that protruded slightly. By moving quickly and decisively she somehow gave the impression that she had just come in from a bracing walk and was managing everything splendidly.
Mrs Coke had told all of us, at one time or another, ‘in absolute confidence’, that she was the daughter of an Irish earl whose name she would never reveal. She said her father had cast her off when she married Mr Coke for love. I don’t think any of us really believed the story, but only Levy had drawn her anger by replying to this confidence with a snort of laughter, followed by the comment that he had seen the play at the Shaftesbury, and it ended badly.
‘High-jinks, Brennan,’ she said, cutting me off before I had even finished my story. ‘We all need to keep up our spirits in a war and Levy is perfectly capable of dealing with such things himself.’
‘But—’
‘Oh, “but me no buts,” as the Bard said.’ Mrs Coke was all smiles and false teeth as she misquoted Shakespeare. ‘Levy’s a big boy. Let him stand up for himself.’
It was a disappointing response, but what had I expected? Mrs Coke never put herself out for anyone but herself. I conceded defeat.
‘Yes, Mrs Coke.’
Her smile became sly. ‘He’s a handsome man, I grant you. But, honestly, Brennan, be realistic. And Halliday should stop making sheep’s eyes at him as well. Jews marry their own and they treat girls like you with contempt.’
‘Girls like me?’ I kept my tone polite, but I wanted to shriek at the silly woman.
She wagged a finger. ‘The Jews have a name for Christian girls who chase Jewish boys.’
‘Really?’
‘Oh yes, they certainly do.’ Her voice sharpened. ‘And there’s no need to look at me like that. You may go now, Brennan.’
CHAPTER TEN
I returned to the common room, where the conversation had settled into the usual war gossip and rumours. While people never discussed war-related matters such as troop movements, it had proved impossible to stop people from chattering, gossiping and speculating about the war. I took most of it with a large grain of salt.
Last month the chat had been all about the invasion: where it would happen, when it would happen, how it would happen. Now we were well into autumn it was generally accepted that there would b
e no German invasion this year.
Maisie smiled at me as I sat down.
‘Oh, I hate all this nonsense about the invasion,’ she said. ‘We all know Hitler has put it off until next year.’ She glanced at the door to the kitchen. ‘Is Levy in there?’
‘I think so. We’ve finished preparing the Monster.’
‘Want a cuppa? I need a cup of tea.’
‘Love one,’ I said.
As she walked to the kitchen, I wondered if Maisie was Levy’s book borrowing friend. She was a lovely girl, and friendly with Levy, but they had never seemed all that close. I suppressed a sigh. Levy’s love affairs were his business, but I hoped he wouldn’t break the girl’s heart. Or vice versa.
‘It’s the God’s own truth,’ said Doris Powell. She was a driver, aged around forty, with frizzy hair and a high girlish voice.
I realised that the discussion had moved on to a perennial favourite: spies and fifth columnists.
‘It happened to a friend of a friend of my Aunt Glad. She’d been shopping in town and was on the bus back home to Swiss Cottage. Sitting next to her was a nun, all in black and covered right up, like they are. She thought she looked a bit hefty, but thought nothing of it until the – shall we say – the person reached to get something out of her bag. Then she saw how muscly and hairy the arms were. So she got up, very casually you understand, and went to tell the conductor, who told the driver, who detoured to the nearest police station. The police carted her off quick smart.’
Who did the police cart off, I mused, Aunt Glad’s friend’s nosy friend or the hairy nun? Powell’s pronouns were confusing. I had heard the story before and it always was a ‘friend of a friend’ who discovered the German paratrooper or spy in nun’s robes. I thought that life must have become extraordinarily difficult for hirsute or athletic nuns if they were to be mistaken for the enemy whenever they went out of doors.
‘It’s the looters I hate,’ said Maisie, entering the room with Levy. ‘A friend of mine was bombed out the other day, and when she was allowed to return to her flat it had been cleaned out. Her jewellery, her winter coat, even some of her underwear. She suspects it was the heavy rescue team, but the police say there’s no evidence of that. It was devastating on top of the bomb damage.’
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