Sergeant Hill looked doubtful. ‘Could be trouble with that,’ he said. ‘Could have people trying to get into the Lees’ tan – er, their tent.’
‘Could be trouble whatever’s done.’
‘That’s true.’ He cleared his throat, then asked me about the funeral and I said, quite honestly, that I didn’t have a clue about when it might take place. I hadn’t seen either of the girl’s parents about it yet and I could hardly ask young Charlie. The only thing I did know was that the service, in all probability, would be performed by Ernie Sutton.
‘Well, you let me know when it’s going to be, won’t you, Mr H?’ Sergeant Hill said, as he rose to indicate that our conversation was over. ‘Elaborate dos, Gypsy funerals. All sorts of traditions have to be kept. Anyway, we’ll need to be there to hold back the crowds we hope won’t turn up.’
‘I don’t think that the Lees will want people outside their group . . .’
‘They might not have much choice,’ Sergeant Hill replied. ‘Not if so much as one of them buggers up Epping gets wind of it. And they will. Things like this can never be secret, can they?’
He was right, of course: there are few real secrets in life. Most things unknown are simply suppressed. I expect that most of London knows about what happened at South Hallsville School, but I’d lay money that few ever talk about it. That would make it real, and a horrible event is much easier as a half-truth. To face the reality would be painful, and people have enough of that in their lives as it is. When you don’t have any coal to heat your home in winter and all your blankets are wet with damp, that’s enough for anyone.
I left the police station in a bit of a dream. I’d seen people leaving Epping Forest earlier and in what appeared to be good order. But if coppers had been called up to Epping from this far south, not to mention from Scotland Yard, then things up there had to be serious. Hysteria, this time not of a religious kind, was taking hold . . .
‘Watch where you’re going, for Gawd’s sake!’
I came to and found myself staring into a broad, heavily scarred female face. Mrs Hinton, a proper street-fighting woman if ever there was, and one of the ‘girls’ my sister Aggie worked with down at Tate & Lyle.
‘Oh, it’s you,’ she said, as she recovered herself and gave me what passes in Mrs Hinton for a smile. I’d buried her husband, Jack, back in ’39 and she’d shown her gratitude by trying to run me up her stairs to her bedroom before poor old Jack was even cold. Naturally I’d been nervous of Mrs Hinton ever since. Now here she was with one hand inside her green gabardine coat – at chest height. I prepared to close my eyes.
I raised my hat politely to her.
‘Hello, Mrs Hinton.’ ‘Hello, Frank Hancock.’ Her toothless old gums shone up at me like a row of pink limelights. Thankfully, she soon closed her gob, then looked quickly over both shoulders, like Sergeant Hill had back in the police station. There were scores of people going about their business before darkness and the Nazi bombers came. But this didn’t seem to deter Mrs Hinton, who just dug her hand deeper into the top of her coat.
Christ, I thought, I had enough of a look at what she had when she chased me up her stairs!
‘’Ere y’are,’ she said, as she pressed a small, still-warm chicken into my hands. ‘Get that in yer coat and don’t say nothing!’
Now it was my turn to look around wildly, mainly at the police station behind me.
‘Mrs Hinton! If this is knocked off . . .’
‘Quick! Put it away, you daft ha’porth,’ she said, as she bundled the brown-feathered chicken under my coat. ‘Course it’s knocked off. Who has a chicken for his dinner, these days?’
‘But . . . you . . .’
‘Oh, don’t worry about me,’ she said, with yet another of her horrible smiles. Then, pulling her coat to one side, she revealed three more chickens pressed to her heavily drooping and very bare right breast.
‘Bet you don’t see one of them every day, do ya?’ she said, as she scurried off down the Barking Road in the direction of Green Street.
You can call behaviour like hers madness, the result of a mind gone barmy from the bombing, but it’s also an act of great spirit. Europe is tearing itself apart at the behest of monsters like Hitler and Mussolini. A person could easily fall into despair. But while an elderly woman is prepared to hide knocked-off chickens against her bare chest, then give one to a man she fancies outside a police station, there has to be some hope. At least, that was how I saw it as I chuckled my way home under the eyes of an equally amused old constable who, on his way back to the station, had seen the whole barmy thing.
Even before I opened the door to the shop, I knew that something was different. In the hours of daylight it’s always noisy out in the street – women trying to get a bit of shopping before the next raid, newspaper sellers shouting their smoke-dried bark, encouraging people to buy papers that will tell them nothing, kids running about picking up whatever they can find to sell, pawn or eat. And in the shop, these days, it’s rarely silent, as it used to be in the more peaceful and respectful twenties and thirties. There’s far too much death, far too many people needed to help me, for that. But as I pushed open the shop door in what was becoming the half-light of dusk, all I could hear from within was silence and all I could see was Doris standing in front of the candle-lit desk gazing somewhere that I knew I had never seen her gaze before.
I took my hat off. ‘Doris?’
She said nothing. I approached her, but not too closely. I didn’t feel it would be right. ‘Doris, what’s happened?’
Still she didn’t answer.
‘Doris?’
And then, suddenly, her eyes met mine, so quickly it was almost as if she had snapped them into place. ‘My Alfie’s dead,’ she said baldly.
Although people die suddenly every day, I was stunned. Alfie was a mate. ‘Oh, Doris . . .’
‘Midday. There was an unexploded bomb at the end of our street. Some disposal boys come to blow it up, but it went off in their faces. They all died. My Alfie too. The blast was so close, it stopped his heart. He had a dodgy ticker, as you know.’ There wasn’t a tear in her eye, not a crease of grief upon her face. And yet she was suffering. She had loved her husband, Alfie. He had worshipped the ground she walked on. Doris tossed her head backwards and said, ‘He’s out the back, if you want to go and have a look. He ain’t got a mark on him.’
I put out a hand to touch her arm, but she flinched away from me. Alfie Rosen, her husband, had been a bus conductor. It was well known that he’d had a weak heart, which had been made worse when his father was interned. He’d found that time a tremendous strain. But for Alfie to die from the effects of bomb blast, even with his weakened heart, was still difficult to take in. Alfie had been a cheeky, cheerful soul, unlike me, very full of life. It wasn’t fair. It never is.
‘The Reverend Silverman says he can bury Alfie up the cemetery in West Ham tomorrow. Can you do tomorrow afternoon for my Alfie, Mr H?’
‘Doris . . .’ My eyes stung with tears for Alfie, for Doris and for this terrible manifestation of ice-cold grief she was suffering.
‘Half past three, the rabbi said,’ she continued. ‘I mean, I know I don’t have to tell you, Mr H, that Jewish people have to be buried quick, so I apologise for hurrying you up like this . . .’
‘Doris, of course I’ll conduct Alfie’s funeral!’ I said. ‘There’s nothing in this world that could be more important than—’
‘I’ll pay,’ she said, raising her small round face to mine. ‘And I’ll be back to work the day after—’
‘You will not,’ I said, as calmly as my rising panic would allow. I know what we used to call ‘shell-shock’ when I see it. ‘You will not pay me a farthing and you will only come back to work when you’re fit to do so. Doris . . .’
She backed away from me. ‘I don’t want no charity!’ she said. Only now did she seem close to tears. ‘I don’t want nothing!’
Behind her I could see my mother and Alfie�
�s father, Herschel Rosen, standing just inside the black curtains at the back of the shop. They looked first at Doris and then at me, their faces clouded with grief and concern.
‘Doris . . .’
‘No!’ She backed to within an inch of my mother’s arm. Then her face screwed up and she shrieked, ‘Alfie! I want my Alfie! That’s all I want! I don’t want no money or—Stuff it! Stuff you, Mr H, and your fucking free funeral and—’
Before she sank to the floor, Herschel and the Duchess caught her in their arms. The weeping and the weakness of grief had rendered Doris incapable and she sat on the floor in the arms of the old people at the end of all of her strength. She’s only a young woman, Doris, in her early thirties. Alfie, with whom she hadn’t had any nippers, had been her world.
As I bent down to Doris who was now begging my forgiveness for shouting at me, I put my hand on old Herschel Rosen’s shoulder and said, ‘I’m so sorry, Mr Rosen.’
The old man shrugged.
‘Arthur and Walter have laid Alfie out ready for you, Francis,’ the Duchess said.
‘Thank you.’
So now I had two bodies to prepare for the grave – one a young girl barely into adulthood and the other a friend and sometime employee. Alfie Rosen had done a few good turns bearing for me alongside Arthur and Walter. I would miss him, but more than that I would miss the light he had put into Doris’s eyes when she married him. You see so many young widows now – girls with downcast faces and dead eyes. I tried not to imagine how she would do without him.
As I went through to the back of the shop to see Alfie Rosen, I saw my cousin Stella cleaning the stair banisters with beeswax polish, humming cheerily to herself. Young Charlie Lee, who was at the bottom of the stairs, was staring at her with ill-disguised confusion. But Stella was the very image of a complete basket case. God knows, I understand what that’s like, but suddenly I snapped.
‘Stella, you know that Doris’s husband has died, don’t you?’
She gazed at me with vacant eyes and smiled. ‘Yes, but the Virgin will make sure he’s safe, Francis,’ she said. ‘The Virgin will bring Dad back to me eventually.’
I lost my temper. ‘Christ Almighty, Stella,’ I said, ‘the girl that “saw” the Virgin is lying out the back here awaiting burial, and Uncle Percy is not coming back here or anywhere else. He’s dead!’
There was a tiny pause and then it was as if all the magic and stories that had sustained her blew off Stella’s face and out of her mind all at once. ‘Francis!’ she screamed. ‘No!’
‘He’s dead, you’re an orphan, and God, the Virgin and all the saints are off on a beano to somewhere the other side of heaven!’ I stretched up towards her now weeping face. ‘Because they certainly aren’t here, are they? Because this is hell and those types don’t come to where the devil is, do they?’
‘Oh, Francis!’ she wept. ‘Don’t talk like that! Please!’
I knew I was being cruel and part of me wanted to be. But poor Stella’s face and her ruined dreams threatened to make me hate myself so I pushed past Charlie Lee and went out the back to Alfie. Already in the tailcoat and stiff white shirt he had been married in, Alfie Rosen lay in the coffin the boys had found for him, as if he was asleep.
I sat down beside him as I had a hundred times before and lit a fag. I talked for some time, apologising for the loss of my wand and other nonsense, before I’d built up enough courage to take one of his ice-cold hands in mine and squeeze it, like a mate.
I’d asked Charlie Lee several times without success about what his parents intended for their Lily. I’d even telephoned Ernie Sutton to find out if he knew anything, but he was as clueless as I was.
‘We can’t keep your sister here for ever, you know, Charlie,’ I said to the boy, after we’d all finished what had passed for our evening meal. Although Doris and Herschel Rosen had now been taken home by Rabbi Silverman, Hancocks was still a morbid and subdued place to be. Everyone had known and liked Alfie, and the knowledge that his dead body lay just one floor below our parlour was not comfortable. Nobody had so much as glanced at the chicken I’d got from Mrs Hinton, and that included me.
Charlie didn’t answer. My sister Aggie, however, who, it has to be admitted, is a sight more forceful than me, or most men come to that, said to the boy, ‘Are you listening to what my brother’s asking you?’
Charlie looked up into Aggie’s powdered and rouged face with undisguised dislike. ‘Yeah.’
‘Well, why don’t you answer him, then?’ Aggie said. ‘You can see what a hard time we’re having here. We’ve just lost a good pal.’
‘Agnes, the boy has lost his sister,’ the Duchess put in, as she placed a calming hand on Aggie’s shoulder.
‘Yes, I know, but—’ Aggie lit a fag, then sprang to her feet and agitatedly left the room. ‘To bloody hell with everything!’
We all heard her sobbing as she ran up to her room. But no one followed her. What she was doing was only natural. People you know die all the time in war – the butcher over the road, a cabbie my old dad used to talk to up on Green Street, some old girl who always got drunk in the Abbey Arms – and it isn’t pleasant. But when those close pass away, like Uncle Percy, like Alfie Rosen, it’s different. It hurts physically as well as in the mind. I don’t eat, but everybody’s different. As Aggie howled on, we all felt that extra bit depressed as the gas went down in the parlour when she put her light on up in her bedroom. But then the fact that we had any gas at all was, we all knew, a mercy. Ever since the shop windows had been boarded up, downstairs had only been bearable when we’d had gas. Otherwise we were forced to meet our customers and do our business by candlelight. Even for an undertaker who’s seen most things and believes in little, the shapes and shadows that candlelight can throw, particularly in a dusty old place like this, can be unnerving at best. Now, however, as darkness had fallen some hours ago, we were all occupied with waiting for the sirens. Alfie was dead and it hurt, but there was still that feeling of moving on that one gets after a close death these days. An uncle or cousin lies dead, but your ears still strain for the wail that tells you to get down to the shelter or run for your life. And you do.
But it wasn’t the sirens that broke the silence that hung over my family, Charlie and me that evening. It was the shop doorbell.
‘Who’s that?’ Nan said, as she always does when people call after hours.
‘Perhaps it’s the fire-watchers,’ the Duchess said. ‘Mr Deeks from the bank and his boys.’
Nan put her knitting on the floor and stood up. ‘Well, what would they want?’
‘It’s a cold night and they’ll be out there for hours,’ the Duchess said. ‘Maybe some tea or blankets . . .’
‘Yes, but they bring things with them and that and—’
‘Well, if you don’t go to the door, we’ll never know, will we?’ I said, through gritted teeth. Like a lot of East-End women, particularly those of middle age and beyond, Nan can’t half go on about nothing sometimes. She glared at me before she went downstairs.
A moment later, Charlie said, ‘I’d best get down and be with our Lily.’
‘You know that when a raid’s on I’m going to make you go down into our Anderson,’ I said. ‘No arguments.’
‘Mum said she stayed with Rosie when she was here and German planes come.’
‘Your mum’s a grown-up. She can do what she likes,’ I replied.
The Duchess looked at me at crossly. She’s always hated the way I won’t go down the shelter with the rest of them. But she was never in a trench with ten tons of mud above her head, threatening to bury her alive at any second. It’s not a thing I can tell her too much about either.
I set about to change the subject back to my original conversation with the boy. ‘Charlie,’ I said, ‘about Lily . . .’
I was interrupted by the thunderous sound of many boots running up our stairs. Charlie, alarmed, cast his eyes around the room as if searching for a way out. But there is only one door into ou
r parlour so when Captain Mansard and two of his Military Policemen stood in it they cut off this exit to all of us.
‘Where are your parents, Charlie?’ the captain said to the boy, without so much as a word to me or my mother. ‘Where’s Edward?’
‘At the camp,’ the boy said.
‘No, they’re not!’
Charlie shrugged.
‘Your parents, Edward whatever-his-name-is and your brothers are nowhere to be found,’ Mansard said. ‘Your sisters are not exactly forthcoming and Bruno the bear appears to have been given to some old man with a wooden leg. What’s going on?’
‘Maybe Dad’s gone on the drom again,’ Charlie replied. ‘I don’t know.’
‘On the drom? What nonsense is that?’ Captain Mansard reached down towards the boy and said, ‘You’re coming with us.’
‘Drom means on the road,’ Charlie said, as he tried to pull Mansard’s hand away from his neckerchief. ‘Ow!’
‘Er,’ I said, ‘Captain Mansard, aren’t you supposed to be guarding the Gypsy camp? Aren’t you telling people that Lily’s body is there? If they find out it’s here . . .’
‘The adult Lees have left the campsite,’ the captain said, with what seemed to me a lot of anger in his voice. ‘The other Gyppos are still there but the Lees have gone.’
‘Well, I’m sure they’ll be back because of Lily,’ I said. At the same time I tried to catch Charlie’s eye but found I couldn’t. That Betty had left her daughter down at the mortuary had been strange, I’d thought at the time. Now I was inclined to think that Charlie might know why that was. However, why any of it was important to the MPs was beyond me – unless, of course, Mansard was still intent on clearing Sergeant Williams’s name.
‘Captain Mansard,’ I said, ‘why are you so worried about the Lees?’
His eyes blazed. ‘Why, Hancock, are you asking that question?’
‘Well . . .’
He moved in close to me, an action that caused the Duchess to walk over to my side.
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