A new life, she thought, a new life after all the deaths and the terror of the raids and all those poor devils hauled out of the wreckage shocked and bleeding and helpless, a new perfect life. And she suddenly remembered the grass growing before their eyes in Greenwich park when the rain ended that long drought, oh such a long time ago, and how she and Jim had walked under the trees with the rain fresh on their faces marvelling at the wonder of it. New life reasserting itself just when they’d resigned themselves to parched earth for ever. And tears of pure joy sprang into her eyes and rolled down her cheeks.
‘I’m ever so sorry,’ Megan said smiling at her in the most beautifully relaxed way. ‘I was going to give you such a nice holiday too. Bad timing.’
‘Oh no!’ Peggy said swooping across the room to kiss her. ‘Perfect timing. I couldn’t ask for anything better. What are you going to call her?’
‘Winifred,’ Megan said kissing the baby’s dark head. ‘After Froggy’s mother and old Churchill you see. Winnie for short.’
‘Winnie,’ Peggy approved. ‘She’s a beauty, Megan.’
And Winnie for short opened her dark blue eyes and looked at them for a long stunning second before she slept again, and at that they both wept and kissed one another and admired the baby over and over again and were rapturously happy. New life. Oh what could be better in the midst of war?
Peggy spent the next eight days looking after mother and child. Jim was persuaded upstairs to see the baby after the midwife’s visit at the end of the second afternoon and he was plainly delighted with her, because he and Froggy spent a long time hitting one another on the back and pretending to box one another, until Megan protested that they were setting the poor little thing a very bad example, at which they settled down in the two basket chairs and embarked on a discussion of the sort of education system Great Britain should introduce after the war. Megan went to sleep in the middle of it, but Peggy listened to every word.
‘Every single child should have the chance of a full education,’ Jim said earnestly. ‘A grammar school education. The best you can get. And at the state’s expense, with grants for poor kids. Why should you be debarred from an education because your old man can’t pay? That’s barbarous. Your Winnie should go to a grammar school whether you’re rich or poor.’
‘You ought to speak at our next current affairs meeting,’ Froggy said. ‘You’d go down a treat.’
‘I might at that,’ Jim said. ‘I been thinking about it.’
‘What is it?’ Peggy asked.
‘A sort of debating society, I suppose you’d call it,’ Jim told her. ‘Discussing the sort of society we want when the war’s over. ABCA send us pamphlets about it and the officers set it up.’
‘Who’s ABCA when they’re at home?’
‘Army Bureau of Current Affairs,’ Froggy explained. ‘Morale boosters.’
‘Then you should,’ Peggy said. ‘You’d be just the one for it. When’s the next meeting?’
Jim was yawning. ‘Tomorrow evening,’ he said. ‘And, before you start, they’ve got a speaker.’
‘Are you going?’ she asked.
‘No, we’re on leave.’
‘I think you should,’ she urged. ‘It sounds just the thing.’
‘Wouldn’t you mind?’
‘No, course not. I’ll stay with Megan and the baby. You go. You’d enjoy it.’
So after some deliberation the two men went to their meeting.
They returned in a state of high excitement, rushing up the stairs to the bedroom, throwing themselves into the chairs, their faces flushed, bright-eyed and glowing.
‘Guess what,’ Froggy said, throwing his cap in the air. ‘Jim was the speaker.’
‘Gosh!’ Megan said. ‘Why?’
‘The real speaker didn’t turn up,’ Jim said. ‘Ill or something. I sort of stepped into the breach.’ He was still amazed at his daring, remembering the breath-stopping moment when he’d looked down at the ranks of faces turned toward him and realized that they were all waiting to hear what he was going to say. What he was going to say. Imagine it.
‘Gosh!’ Megan said again. ‘How did it go?’
‘Rather well,’ Jim admitted, looking massively proud of himself.
It had actually gone down much better than ‘rather well’. He hadn’t had any really clear idea what he was going to say when he stood up and made his offer, but the topic was education, and the officer who introduced him had spoken in the drawling tones of the public school, and that provided just enough resentment to stiffen his resolve and show him where he ought to start.
‘I come from Paradise Row in Greenwich,’ he said. ‘We got a big school just round the corner, where they teach you the three R’s and send you out in the world to be factory hands and skivvies. Up on the heath there are public schools where the rich send their kids to learn Latin and matriculate and be sent to universities. And just up the road there’s a grammar school called Roan’s, where ordinary kids can go if they pass the scholarship and their old man’s got enough money to afford the uniform. They take thirty boys from Greenwich every year. They used to tell us it was the thirty brainiest boys. But I can tell you different. It ain’t the thirty brainiest, it’s the thirty brainiest who can afford it.’
They were looking at him eagerly, agreeing with him.
‘And another thing,’ he said. ‘If they can take thirty brainy children, why not thirty-five, or forty, or sixty? Who decides which brainy children go to grammar school and which don’t? Where do they draw the line? And if it comes to it, why should they draw a line at all? Nobody draws a line for the rich kids. They get the best of everything whether they’re brainy or not. But for poor kids it’s like the pigs going to market in the nursery rhyme. This clever kid gets an education, this clever kid gets none.’
He was warm with nerves and enthusiasm, and his heart was still beating like a drum, but his audience were with him. He could feel it. Their support rose towards him through the fug of cigarette smoke.
‘So what d’you think we ought to do about it?’ one man asked.
‘I’ll tell you,’ he said. And did, outlining all the plans he read about in the Picture Post and adding a few of his own for good measure. ‘We need a new type of school,’ he said, ‘a new kind of education system. That’s what we need.’
‘He’ll end up a politician,’ Froggy said to Peggy, when they’d relived the entire meeting for her benefit. ‘You see if I’m not right. They were cheering him come the finish and stamping on the floor.’
‘I knew it,’ Peggy said with delight. ‘I knew you’d do it.’
‘And he’ll do it again,’ Froggy said. ‘Won’t you, Jim? Now you’ve started.’
By the end of that leave Jim had been booked up for three more sessions, and had plainly and happily embarked on a career as a public speaker. He said he was really bucked and Peggy was so proud of him she felt twice the size.
After such an eventful holiday it was an awful comedown when their leave finished and Megan’s mum arrived to take over the job of looking after Megan and the baby. This time it was especially sad to pack her bag ready to be driven to the station.
‘But you’ll come back, won’t you?’ Megan said, pretty among the pillows.
‘Whenever I can,’ Peggy promised. ‘I got to keep an eye on Winnie, ain’t I, and see how Jim’s getting on with this ABCA business. I shan’t be able to keep away.’
But although neither of them knew it then, her next journey was to be a very long one, for in August the squadron was posted to Harlech in north Wales.
After a full year of married life Froggy was distraught to be leaving Megan and the baby, and swore he didn’t know how any of them would make out. But Corporal Jim Boxall, public speaker, knew exactly.
‘Thirty-six hours are useless,’ he wrote to Peggy, ‘so I shall wangle a fortnight by running two leaves together and then I’ll book a room in a pub for us. Hang the expense. We’ve earned it. I don’t intend to live for month
s and months without you. I love you too much. Anyway it’s time we started to live like the nobs. The first of the changes, eh? If I’m going to talk about them I ought to start living them.’
After such a forceful invitation how could she refuse? So it was all arranged and she took a fortnight’s leave and travelled to Wales to join him. It was like journeying to a foreign country, all these great hills and porters calling out the rolling unfamiliar names of the stations.
It was just as well that Jim was there to meet her, for Llanbedr didn’t sound a bit like the way it was written.
They walked along a street bounded on one side by a fast-flowing grey river and on the other by a terrace of grey stone cottages each with two gables and a neat tiled porch before the door. The women they passed nodded and smiled and it was amazingly quiet after the noise of London. They could hear Peggy’s train puffing away from them across the bay.
‘It’s all under water at high tide except the road and the railway,’ Jim said. ‘We’re staying by the crossroads. That pub down there. See? Down those steps.’
It was an idyllic leave, the first time they’d been entirely on their own together since their honeymoon. They walked in the wild hills and ate together in the pub, really rather well considering the state of food supplies, and they talked. They decided where they would live – in London of course – and how they would educate their children – in one of Jim’s new schools of course – and what jobs they would do in peacetime. ‘Something a bit better than a garage hand,’ Jim said. ‘I’ve had men’s lives depending on my work ever since the Battle of Britain. I shan’t settle for anything less important than that.’ And at night they cuddled together in a huge tumbling feather-bed and loved and slept as they pleased with no raids or duties to prevent them. Every night for twelve nights. Peggy said she felt like a proper old married woman again.
‘Very proper,’ he said. ‘How could you be anything else, when you’re married to me?’
It was their last morning and they were still lazing in bed. The sun had been up for hours and was already strong, casting patterns of brightened colour across the counterpane of their rumpled bed and edging Jim’s contented profile with shining white light.
‘You’ve got a halo all round your face,’ Peggy said, tracing the bright flesh with her fingers, down the lumpy ridge of his broken nose, over his lips, that looked so hard and felt so soft, down that stubborn jutting chin, loving every inch.
‘Saint Jim,’ he grinned at her, catching her fingers and kissing them.
‘Not after all the things you’ve just been doing,’ she laughed back.
‘And you haven’t?’ he teased.
He was sending such love towards her from those dark-lashed eyes that she felt quite weak to see it. ‘Three more hours,’ she said, glancing at her watch and trying to be practical. ‘What shall we do this morning?’
‘As if you didn’t know,’ he said gathering her towards him.
Oh a perfect, perfect leave. And they even managed to extend it for a few more precious minutes because he travelled back with her as far as Harlech. As they kissed goodbye through the carriage window, they were so easy with love and sunshine that they felt as though they were only parting for the day, like a married couple setting off for work in the morning to be reunited at night.
It wasn’t until the train had pulled out of the station and she found herself alone in the compartment with seven strangers that Peggy felt the misery of their parting, and then partly because she had to keep it hidden and partly because it was such a sharp contrast to the happiness she’d been feeling for nearly a fortnight, it stayed with her all the way back to Greenwich.
If only Hitler hadn’t been born, she thought. If only there hadn’t been a war. We could have settled down in Paradise Row like Arthur and Lily. I might even have had kids, like Megan and Froggy. But it was no good thinking like that, she scolded herself, trying to be sensible. There was a war and they all had to fight it. But she missed him achingly, this new famous Jim, and she thought of him all the way home, no matter how hard she tried to think of other things.
CHAPTER 36
‘I’ve had such a funny letter from Sid,’ Joan said, taking it from her handbag and holding it out for her sister to see. ‘He wants some more snaps of the kids he says, because what was it? – “I’m missing out. Yvonne nearly eleven. She was seven when I went away. I am missing out on all this. And Norm such a little lad. There will have to be some changes when this war is over and I come home again. A better life for you and me and the kids. We been talking about it, me and the lads. There will have to be some changes.” What d’you think of that?’
‘He’s quite right,’ Peggy said. ‘There will. That’s what Jim says too.’ She’d just come home after an eight-hour duty and she was tired and grubby and needed a wash and a nice long sleep, but she made an effort to answer because she knew how much Sid’s letters meant to poor Joan.
‘It’s the first time he’s ever wrote home like this,’ Joan said, caught between being puzzled and pleased. ‘It’s good he’s thinking about the war ending. Least that’s more cheerful than going on about how bad the food is all the time. But I can’t think what’s got into him, talking about changes. What do you think he means, changes? What d’you think he wants to change?’
‘They might be changes for the better,’ Peggy said, putting on the kettle for some hot water.
‘D’you think so?’
‘Oh yes,’ Peggy said. ‘There’s gonna be a great change for the better once this is over, you’ll see. Stands to reason. When you’ve been bombed and shot at and seen your friends and relations killed it changes you. We ain’t so meek nowadays. War’s made us tough. If there was a general strike tomorrow we’d win it this time. Oh yes, there’ll be changes. You won’t see us going back to unemployment, and kids without shoes and half starved, an’ “yes sir, no sir, three bags full sir”, not after all we’ve been through.’
‘I never knew you felt so strongly about it,’ Joan said, quite surprised by her sister’s vehemence.
‘Just because I don’t say much don’t mean I don’t think,’ Peggy said.
‘But what about this letter?’ Joan said, looking at it again. ‘What about Sid? Sometimes I don’t think I shall know him when he does come home.’
‘Cross that bridge when you come to it,’ Peggy advised. ‘Remember what Dad used to say? Never trouble trouble till trouble troubles you. Where’s Baby? Need I ask.’
‘Up the Palais,’ Joan said making her disapproving grimace. ‘I shall be glad when they send these Yanks off to do a bit of fighting.’
‘Perhaps they have a closed season and don’t fight in the autumn,’ Peggy said.
It was September 1942 and the fourth year of the war. Jim and Froggy were promoted to sergeants but still in Harlech, Megan and Winnie were still on their own in Vine Cottage, Peggy was still on her own in Greenwich but things were happening all around them, some of them momentous. Yvonne had gone up to the Senior Girls at the beginning of the month and was very pleased with herself, and Pearl had got her ‘call-up’ papers and decided to join the Land Army, and at the end of the month Arthur came home on leave with the news that he reckoned he was going to be sent to Africa.
Lily wasn’t pleased to hear it. ‘It won’t do him any good out in a desert with all that sand,’ she said to Peggy, when his leave was over and he’d gone back. ‘He can’t stand the heat, you know. Never could. It brings him out in a rash.’
‘I expect they’ll look after him,’ Peggy said. ‘They’re bound to take doctors.’
‘Oh Christ, Peg,’ Lily said, her face crumpling into tears. ‘What if he’s shot? There’s terrible fighting going on out there. What if he’s shot?’
‘He ain’t gone yet,’ Peggy tried to comfort. ‘They mightn’t send him. He could have got it wrong.’
But he hadn’t. The Allied armies were on the move at last, going over to the offensive, preparing for invasion. Although none of
them knew it then, he was to be part of an operation code-named ‘Torch’ which was designed to crush Rommel’s renowned panzer divisions between two Allied armies, British and American, working together for the very first time.
That winter was dominated by two massive battles, one in Russia, round the great city of Stalingrad, and the other in Egypt round a small town called El Alamein. Paradise Row followed the fortunes of both with breathless attention, tuning in to the nine o’clock news every night for the latest bulletin, hoping almost against hope for the victory they all wanted and needed so much.
The war in the desert seemed to have been going on for ever, with the British troops advancing and retreating over the same barren land until the names of Mersa Metruh and Sidi Barrani and Tobruk were as familiar as Bisto and Sunlight soap. But in August a new general had been sent out to put an end to retreats. His name was Bernard Montgomery and before long he was spectacularly successful.
Battle began on 24 October. ‘Great tank battle in desert’ the papers said, and it was clear from the tone of the wireless announcers that something decisive was going on. Peggy and Joan and Mrs Geary listened to every bulletin and even Baby took an interest. And on 5 November good news came at last.
‘Rommel routed,’ the Daily Mirror cheered. ‘Huns fleeing in disorder’. And they quoted the official communiqué from the British Headquarters in Cairo. ‘The Axis forces in the Western Desert, after twelve days and nights of ceaseless attacks by our land and air forces, are now in full retreat.’ The Allies had a victory.
Three days later Operation Torch began and British and American troops were successfully landed on the coast between Casablanca and Algiers, and Private Arthur Walters was among them.
Lily was so worried she lost weight visibly. And naturally the campaign was followed avidly by everybody in Paradise Row. Despite their concern for ‘young Arthur’ it was marvellous to watch the Jerries being steadily pushed back on both fronts, nipped between the two armies. Soon pictures of burnt-out German tanks began to appear in the papers and comforting shots of captured German troops looking exhausted and dispirited with their hands in the air.
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