Sons and Daughters

by Mary Jane Staples

  ‘Well, thanks, Jimmy.’

  ‘My pleasure.’

  ‘When does your holiday end?’

  ‘We’re going home tomorrow.’

  ‘Tomorrow?’ Jenny looked surprised. ‘But we’ve got another week. We always have three weeks and a bit. The bit takes care of two days of travel here and back.’

  ‘Do the eight of you travel in your own bus?’

  ‘No, four in one car, four in another. Tomorrow, you said?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Jimmy, ‘tomorrow we’re homeward bound.’

  ‘Oh, well,’ said Jenny. ‘Listen, your uncle, who is he?’

  ‘My uncle,’ said Jimmy.

  ‘Fathead,’ said Jenny. ‘No, is he someone distinguished and important? Only Chloe’s got a terrible crush on him.’

  ‘Barmy,’ said Jimmy. ‘She only saw him for about five seconds.’

  ‘In those five seconds, Chloe went ga-ga,’ said Jenny.

  ‘Ga-ga about what she thinks is distinguished importance?’ said Jimmy.

  ‘No, we all thought he looked impressive,’ said Jenny.

  ‘Well, tell Chloe he’s old enough to be her grandfather,’ said Jimmy.

  ‘He doesn’t look it,’ said Jenny, her tightly fitting blue swimsuit streamlining her ups and downs. ‘And it won’t make any difference to Chloe. She’s cross-eyed and wandering.’

  ‘She’s rollicking about in the water right now,’ said Jimmy.

  ‘Oh, she’s a fighter,’ said Jenny. ‘What’s your uncle’s name?’

  ‘Boots.’

  ‘Boots? Boots? That’s absurd.’

  ‘It’s a nickname pinned on him as an infant,’ said Jimmy, ‘and it’s stuck ever since. He doesn’t mind.’

  ‘What’s his real name?’

  ‘Robert Adams.’

  ‘I’ll tell Chloe,’ said Jenny, ‘I think she’d like to send him a Valentine card.’

  ‘I advise against that,’ said Jimmy, ‘or his wife, my Aunt Polly, will track her down and chuck her off the top of Tower Bridge.’

  Jenny rippled with laughter.

  ‘Jimmy, you’re a wag,’ she said.

  A head popped up high out of the sea and a shout issued forth.

  ‘Hey, come on, Jenny!’

  ‘That’s Barry,’ said Jimmy.

  ‘That’s Barry,’ echoed Jenny. ‘Well, I don’t suppose we’ll see each other again, unless you’ll be down here next year. Be good. Lots of luck. Bye, now.’

  ‘Send me a Valentine card,’ said Jimmy.

  She laughed again, and away she went to splash through the shallows.

  Jimmy looked up at the blue heavens.

  ‘Thanks very much,’ he said, ‘you’ve been a great help, I don’t think.’

  Susie, far away on the other side of Brea Hill, was enjoying her stroll with Sammy.

  ‘By the way,’ she said, ‘something’s happening to our Jimmy.’

  ‘He’s shaving?’ said Sammy.

  ‘He’s been shaving for a year, you goof,’ said Susie.

  ‘Well, perhaps I meant is he growing a beard?’ said Sammy. ‘Tell him not to, or his grandma will come after him with her scissors. You know what she thinks about bearded men. They’re either bandits or Bolsheviks. Might I ask, incidental like, where you get goof from?’

  ‘From our American daughter-in-law Patsy,’ said Susie.

  ‘Americans use a funny kind of language,’ said Sammy.

  ‘Not as funny as our kind, like corblimey, how’s your father,’ said Susie. ‘Sammy love, I think Jimmy’s been struck by lightning.’

  ‘Don’t I know it,’ said Sammy, ‘he walked into a door at the cottage yesterday. That’s serious.’

  ‘It’s that girl we’ve seen him talking to,’ said Susie, ‘the one he played golf with.’

  ‘Looks a bit of all right to me,’ said Sammy.

  ‘You don’t say a bit of all right about a girl that makes our Jimmy walk into doors,’ said Susie.

  ‘How can we help?’ asked Sammy, his sandals and Susie’s in his hands, their bare feet treading wet sand.

  ‘If that means you’re thinking of interfering, Sammy Adams, think again,’ said Susie. ‘Let Jimmy work things out for himself.’

  ‘Might I point out, Mrs Adams, that I was only going to suggest inviting her to Sunday tea?’ said Sammy.

  ‘That’s up to Jimmy,’ said Susie.

  ‘I feel for him,’ said Sammy. ‘I mean, I had a hard time meself with you, didn’t I.’

  ‘That’s a laugh,’ said Susie, ‘you spent years backing off and driving me dotty. Still, you came to your senses in the end. Just as well, or I’d have finished you off with my dad’s chopper.’

  ‘Well, I’m glad you didn’t, Susie, or me business would’ve died an early death, and the profits likewise. Susie, what d’you think, has it been a good marriage, me and you?’

  ‘Sammy love, a lot better than if it had been me and someone else.’

  ‘I’ll buy you a fur coat come winter,’ said Sammy.

  ‘I don’t want a fur coat,’ said Susie. ‘I’ve got everything I ever needed. Except something that would make this day last for ever.’

  Saturday morning.

  Jenny knocked on the door of a cottage in Daymer Lane. A woman in an apron answered.

  ‘Oh, good morning,’ said Jenny, ‘I’m looking for Jimmy Adams.’

  ‘Oh, he went off with the families early on,’ said the woman. ‘I’m Mrs Boddy, I do the clearing up and cleaning for them on the day they go, like last year, m’dear. They always leave early.’

  ‘Blow that,’ said Jenny.

  It was a long drive home for the families. The twins tumbled into bed soon after arrival. Paula and Phoebe tucked down soon after nine, Jimmy at ten. Sammy and Susie retired five minutes later. Boots and Polly sat up for a while, sharing an old-fashioned pot of night-time tea, something Polly would have eschewed in her pre-marriage days.

  They flopped when they were eventually in bed.

  Boots had a dream, the same one. Belsen. Corpses, faces, eyes. Faces. One face out of many. It woke him up.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ he whispered.

  Polly stayed asleep.

  Sunday morning.

  The twins, refreshed, consumed a rattling good breakfast. With Flossie on holiday, Polly, not the world’s greatest or most enthusiastic cook, could at least produce happy-looking eggs and bacon, and what Boots called classy toast. The large three-pound jar of marmalade was a present from Susie, who always made her own, from Seville oranges. She’d missed out during the war, but Sevilles were now being imported.

  ‘Daddy,’ said Gemma, ‘what we going to do today?’

  ‘Laze about,’ said Boots.

  ‘Well,’ said Gemma, ‘I don’t think much of that. Can’t we get some sand and make castles in the garden?’

  ‘Can’t we dig a hole and make a pond to swim in?’ said James. ‘I’m prepared,’ he said grandly, ‘to do my bit.’

  ‘And I’ve got my seaside spade,’ said Gemma. ‘Daddy,’ she said generously, ‘you could use that. I could just watch. I don’t mind just watching.’

  ‘Just watching?’ said James. ‘Well, can you believe that?’

  ‘Shall we dig a hole, Polly?’ asked Boots.

  ‘Such decisions, old bean, I cheerfully leave to you,’ said Polly. ‘I’ll cut some gladioli for the house.’

  ‘I’ll help Mummy,’ said Gemma.

  ‘Right, then,’ said Boots. ‘James can start digging the hole, and I’ll help him after I’ve attended to some of the letters that were waiting for us yesterday. We’ll fill the hole with water from the hose. If it runs away, we’ll use the hole to plant a flowering shrub. I’ll show you where you can start digging, young ’un.’

  ‘It’s got to be a big hole,’ said James.

  ‘So-so,’ said Boots.

  Later, when James was digging and Gemma was watching, Boots had a word with Polly.

  ‘Polly, you remember the Nuremberg trials?�
��

  ‘Will I ever forget?’ said Polly. They had spent a day there.

  ‘You remember the film that included scenes at Belsen, with some of the camp guards in evidence?’

  ‘Once again, will I ever forget?’ said Polly.

  ‘When I was there in ’45, I looked into the faces of most of the guards. Women as well as men.’

  ‘You told me of that well before we went to the trials,’ said Polly. ‘What’s on your mind?’

  Boots said most of the men and women guards avoided being looked in the eye, that all of them had suddenly been made aware of their infamy by the arrival of British troops. There was one man, however, an SS officer, who refused to accept that the extermination of Jews was any kind of crime. He’d been sent by Himmler to arrange for all surviving inmates to be finished off before any Allied troops turned up. He was too late, and that alone bothered him. He looked me in the eye, said Boots, without showing any signs of remorse whatever. All that has played on your mind since it happened, said Polly, but is there something new?

  ‘There’s the fact that one of the women guards, a handsome bitch, was the only guard to meet my eye,’ said Boots. ‘I saw no remorse, no guilt, just contempt for what I represented, an enemy of her ideology, the ideology of Himmler.’

  ‘Did you hang her?’ asked Polly.

  ‘I made her and all the other guards, and Himmler’s unrepentant messenger, a Major Kirsten, bury the mounds of dead and clean up the filth of the camp before being taken to prison and to Nuremberg,’ said Boots. ‘Now, Polly, how did that one woman escape Nuremberg?’

  ‘Did she escape?’ said Polly. ‘If so, how do you know she did?’

  ‘She’s here,’ said Boots.

  ‘Here?’ said Polly.

  ‘In London,’ said Boots.

  ‘You’re losing me, old soldier,’ said Polly.

  ‘I’ll help you catch up with me,’ said Boots. ‘I saw her.’

  Polly stared at him, at his deep grey eyes, the left one as clear as the right, yet almost blind. Years and years ago, during the first battle of the Somme in 1916, the searing flash of an exploding German grenade had blinded him. An operation in 1920 had returned full sight to his right eye. His left had remained permanently damaged, but only the slightly lazy action of the lid betrayed that. Polly kept a subconsciously caring watch on his sound eye.

  ‘Boots, you saw her?’

  ‘Yes, and of all places, in the East Street market of Walworth on the day Sammy and I took his girls and the twins there. The twins and the girls were with me at old Ma Earnshaw’s stall, and this woman was a little way off. She’d changed, of course, she looked like a nicely dressed housewife. I gave her only a brief glance, and although her features didn’t clearly register, I had a faint idea there was something familiar about her. It didn’t stay with me. We moved on and she took her place at the stall. The kids saw her again later on, and pointed her out to me. Again, nothing important registered, not until I had that dream again last night. Her face and her eyes – she had the blue eyes that Himmler regarded as true Aryan – surged into the dream. I woke up, and I knew then that I’d seen her that day in the market.’

  ‘Ye gods,’ said Polly, ‘so what are you going to do?’

  ‘Find her,’ said Boots. ‘I owe it to the poor murdered inmates of Belsen.’

  Polly noted then that the grey of his eyes was touched by the hint of blue steel. That happened whenever his tolerance was shattered by the vicious, the unspeakable or that which posed a dangerous threat to the family. She wondered if the SS woman had glimpsed that steel when Boots, as Colonel Adams, had come face to face with her and looked her in the eye. Polly hoped she had, for if Boots did find her she would know her time had come.

  ‘Go hunting, old love,’ she said, ‘I’ll be right beside you.’

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Monday morning.

  Lulu was ten minutes late arriving for work. She found Paul in argument with a beefy woman from the publicity department of the collective grass roots of the Party. The woman was known as Blunderbuss Beryl on account of her tendency to deliver booming broadsides at opposition newspaper editors for allowing unadulterated tripe about Clement Attlee’s government to appear in their rags. She wasn’t averse to rushing off to Fleet Street and demanding to see an editor in person. And person to person she was almost always bigger and louder. Some editors locked themselves in when told she was in their building.

  The argument she was having with Paul was not only verbal. It was also physical in that she had hold of two legs of a chair, Paul was gripping the back of it with both hands, and a violent tug-of-war was taking place.

  ‘Let go, you squirt!’ she roared. A Young Socialist official was small fry to her. ‘This is my chair and you pinched it, you young bugger. Let go, you hear?’

  ‘This chair,’ hollered Paul, ‘was spare and unoccupied at the time I chanced on it, and by the old and true working-class principle that possession is nine points of the law, I’m claiming it.’

  ‘Working-class principle my Aunt Fanny, let go!’ Blunderbuss Beryl yanked. Paul yanked.

  Lulu looked on, specs glinting with happiness. There was no way that that smartypants was going to get the better of Blunderbuss Beryl. It was said that in 1946 she’d demolished the entire editorial staff of the Daily Mail, and that when the corpses came to and found they were actually still alive, they emigrated to Australia, that being as far from her as they could get. Only a story, of course, but it was typical of her reputation.

  ‘I’m getting cross!’ shouted Paul. He must have been cross. Like his dad and his uncles, he never resorted to bawling. This was a first-timer. ‘This chair’s mine!’

  ‘You saucy pipsqueak, let go!’ Blunderbuss Beryl yanked mightily. Paul let go. Back she staggered and her abundant bottom cannoned against the wall. Every cushioned spring in her body quivered. But she was made of sterner stuff than to yell for the law. She waited until all her springs had settled down, then said, ‘So this is how you treat a defenceless woman, is it, Adams? And in front of another one, eh?’

  Lulu tried looking the part.

  ‘You’ve got me there,’ said Paul.

  ‘I’ve got you all right,’ said Blunderbuss Beryl, keeping hold of the chair. ‘You’re finished, you’ll be out by the end of this week, and you’ll be lucky to escape a charge of assault.’ A quiver returned to her bottom. ‘And I’m not sure battery didn’t take place as well. Yes, you’re finished, and I’ll see that Miss Saunders takes your place. Miss Saunders, open this door.’

  Lulu opened it and Blunderbuss Beryl departed, with the chair. Lulu closed the door.

  ‘Exit Boadicea with her chariot,’ said Paul.

  ‘You weren’t at your best,’ said Lulu. ‘What a clown. Ought to know better than to pick a fight with her. You’re going to lose your job.’

  ‘I’ll find another,’ said Paul, cooled down. ‘I’d like to stay in politics. I’ll try for a job in the Commons, as assistant to the assistant of an MP’s parliamentary secretary. Yes, good idea. MP George Brown might be the answer. He went to the same school as one of my uncles, West Square.’

  ‘You’ve got an uncle called West Square?’ said Lulu, wearing what Paul thought could double for a brown tent. ‘Mercy me, can you Adam-and-Eve it?’

  ‘West Square’s a school in St George’s Road, you dolly,’ said Paul. ‘Look, there’s a maintenance bloke somewhere in this building. I’m going to find him and borrow some tools that’ll help me fix back the leg on that broken chair. Be a good girl and open the mail for me while I’m gone. Put any applications for membership in the relevant tray. OK?’

  ‘Will do,’ said Lulu.

  * * *

  At mid-morning, Mrs Kloytski was in the East Street market, buying apples and cabbages from Ma Earnshaw, and having a friendly little conversation with her.

  ‘Ah, I think many people know you, Mrs Earnshaw,’ she said. ‘You have many customers.’

  ‘So I
have, ducky,’ said Ma, selecting the kind of cabbages she knew the Polish woman liked. Good solid crisp ones. ‘And so I should, I been running this here stall for more years than I care to remember.’

  ‘I wonder,’ said Mrs Kloytski, ‘do you know if anyone has been asking about me?’

  ‘Didn’t you ask me that there same question before, like?’ said Ma.

  ‘Well, you see, I lost sight of my brother when he was taken from Warsaw by the Germans to work in one of their factories—’

  ‘Gawd help us, them devils of ’Itler’s,’ expostulated Ma in a compulsive paddy, ‘when they weren’t killing people or dropping bombs on them, they were making slaves of ’em.’

  ‘Ah, but some survived, and I am always hoping my brother did, yes,’ said Mrs Kloytski. ‘I am also hoping he will find out I have come to England with my husband. Then perhaps one day he will reach London and ask people questions about me. Perhaps he will even reach this market and ask people here. No-one has asked you about me, Mrs Earnshaw, no?’

  ‘Well, I did tell you last week no-one has,’ said Ma.

  ‘Ah, how sad,’ said Mrs Kloytski.

  ‘Still, you never know,’ said Ma, ‘so keep yer pecker up, eh?’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘Don’t get downhearted, ducky.’

  ‘I see, yes.’ Mrs Kloytski smiled. ‘Ah, wait, if anyone should ask, please let me know quickly. I will pay if you send a boy with the message.’

  ‘All right, dearie,’ said Ma.

  Mrs Kloytski paid for the apples and cabbages and left. A few minutes later, Ma thought, well, she didn’t say where she lived. I’m sure it’s Wansey Street, where Cassie Brown lives, but what number? Still, I don’t expect her brother to come asking. If he ain’t dead, I’ll be more than surprised. Them Nazis left a lot more people dead than alive. Oh, well, it’s all over now, praise the Lord, and I ain’t one to keep on about it.

  That evening, Lulu left her flat in Walworth to call on her parents at their home in Kennington. Her dad was there, not at some political function, and she had a long chat with him.