Everybody's Somebody

by Beryl Kingston

  ‘I don’t like this,’ she said to Jim. ‘Let’s get out of here.’

  ‘We’ll have a job,’ he said, looking towards Marine Parade. It was crowded with people, hundreds of them and mostly men, all in ordinary working clothes and all standing still and looking towards the pier with determined expressions on their faces.

  ‘My God!’ she said. ‘Where did they come from?’

  Jim didn’t know. But it was obvious why they’d come. As soon as the head of the marching column left the pier, the crowd surged forward, mocking their chant with one of their own, ‘Mos-lee! Mos-lee! Chuck the blighter in the sea!’ and completely blocking their way. Several of the boys in the crowd produced peashooters and fired them and for a few minutes there was a lot of pushing and shoving as the two sides faced each other. Then half a dozen policemen arrived, brandishing truncheons, and by dint of pushing and threatening they made a way for Mosley and his henchmen to walk through. But as soon as they’d gone the gap closed up again and the rest of the marchers were left to fight their own way through, which they did with ugly ferocity, punching and kicking. Rosie saw a woman thrown to the pavement and one man being attacked by four of Mosley’s men, two of them pinioning his arms while the others punched him.

  ‘Hang about!’ Jim said suddenly. ‘That’s my sarge! God damn it all! I’m not ’aving this!’ And he was off into the crowd before Rosie could stop him, using his shoulders to force a way through, quick-footed as a lion, his mane tawny in the streetlights, his spine determined.

  She watched as he reached the punching gang and saw him pick the largest of them and fell him, just as he’d done in Trafalgar Square all those years ago. Then there was a confusion of shouts and punches and she saw that he’d taken on a second assailant and hurled him to the ground too and that the man they’d been using as a punchbag had shaken himself free and was fighting alongside him. It all happened so quickly he was back beside her almost before she could take it all in and the punchbag man was with him, bleeding from a cut over his eyebrow but beaming all over his face.

  ‘You’re never gonna believe this,’ Jim said happily to his family, ‘but this is my sarge from the war. Best man in the army. Never knew yer name, Sarge or I’d introduce yer.’

  ‘Jack,’ the sergeant said, shaking Rosie’s hand. ‘Jack Johnson. Pleased ter meetcher.’

  ‘My sarge from the war’ stayed with Jim and Rosie until they were satisfied that his cut had stopped bleeding, while the noise of the street fight roared to the north of them and Mary and Gracie watched him round-eyed. Then he said he ought to be getting back, ‘or they’ll think I’m desertin’ of ’em, poor beggars.’ But he didn’t go until Jim had torn two pages out of Rosie’s pocket diary so that they could exchange addresses and had discovered that his old wartime mate lived in Hackney.

  ‘Jest up the road,’ he said, his face delighted. ‘That’s no distance. Come an’ see us. ’Ave supper. Bring the missus.’

  So having sorted that out, the two men grinned at one another and parted. Jim talked about it all the way home. ‘What a turn-up fer the books,’ he said. ‘Fancy findin’ my ol’ sarge. I can’t believe it.’

  Rosie was pleased to see him so happy but the other things she’d witnessed that evening worried her too much to share his feelings. She’d never seen a street fight before, and it shocked her to think that grown men could behave so violently. They should have had enough fighting being in the war, she thought. She had to remind herself that the war had been over for fifteen years, so a lot of them would have been children when it was going on and wouldn’t have known what it was like. Our poor Tommy would ha’ been thirty-two this year if he’d lived, she thought. And that made her feel uncomfortably old and for several miserable moments pitched her back into her terrible yearning grief again.

  That night she had a searing nightmare in which the robot men were pulling her children apart, limb from limb, and she was tied to a wheel and couldn’t stop them. She woke weeping and in a muck-sweat, and it took Jim nearly an hour to comfort her calm again. ‘They’re such dreadful men,’ she wept. ‘They look as if they’d be capable of anything. All those kickin’ feet and their horrible arms stuck up in the air like that, what ent natural, and their horrible cruel faces. And when you think what Hitler’s doing.’

  ‘Don’t cry,’ Jim said, cuddling her. ‘I’ll look after you. I looked after my ol’ sarge, now didn’t I?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, sniffing and trying to smile. ‘You did.’

  ‘Well there you are then.’

  But the images were still toxic in her mind and she couldn’t shake them away, although she tried to keep cheerful so as not to upset the girls, who were busy cooking mince pies now that school was over, and Christmas was so close. It wasn’t until the afternoon post arrived that she recovered her balance.

  The third letter she opened was from Edie who was bubbling about the success of the play and said she was ‘ever so glad you got off in good time last night’ explaining,

  ‘there was a fight here in Worthing after you’d gone. Ever so bad it was. There was hundreds in it, so they say all over South St and the Arcade and everywhere. Some of them got up on the roof of the Arcade and pulled off a great chunk of stone and threw it down. Imagine that. They could’ve killed someone. It’s a real mess. I went down this morning and had a look and there was stones and all sorts everywhere.’

  ‘Tell her we were there,’ Gracie said, ‘and we saw it all.’

  ‘Tell her Dad saved his sergeant’s life,’ Mary said.

  ‘That’s a bit of an exaggeration,’ Rosie said, feeling they had to be accurate.

  But Mary wasn’t having that. ‘No it’s not,’ she said, sticking up her chin. ‘It was four onto one. They could have killed him. And our dad rescued him.’

  They wrote the letter between them, passing it from one to the other, and the tale was told in all its heroic and fully embellished detail. When it was finished Rosie added a postscript.

  ‘The sergeant is coming to have supper with us soon, so we shall hear more about it then.’

  Then they made up the kitchen fire so that they’d have a warm house to come home to and walked it down to the post-box together.

  It was a good Christmas with such stirring tales to be told. Kitty came over on Boxing Day with her two boys and without the Monster and listened to every detail. ‘’E allus was a firebrand,’ she said, ‘even when ’e was a nipper, stickin’ up fer me an’ poor ol’ Ma. D’you remember him in Trafalgar Square that time Rosie? You never saw nothink so quick.’

  So naturally that story had to be told too, even though Jim tried to put her off. His daughters were thrilled, and George and Bobby listened with their mouths open.

  ‘You ought to have a medal,’ Mary said.

  But he said he’d rather have another slice of ham and held up his plate.

  Christmas eased them into January, which was dark, dank and drizzly and in the middle of the month Sergeant Johnson wrote to Jim as he’d promised, and a date was set for his visit. Jim was fidgety with excitement, wondering if they could run to a Sunday joint and coming home from the market with a tin of pineapple to make ‘somethin’ special fer afters’. And when their guests arrived, he and his sarge spent the first five minutes grinning at one another like loonies and hitting one another’s arms the way they’d done before, until Rosie begged them to stop before they did one another a mischief.

  ‘It’s always the same with him, when he meets up with his old mates,’ Mrs Johnson said. ‘I’m Minnie, by the way, which he’d ha’ told you if he hadn’t been so busy thumpin’ your feller.’

  At which the two men subsided somewhat, and Jim remembered his duties as a host and took their coats and hats and hung them on the landing and they all went into the kitchen for their supper. It was a lively meal. The conversation never stopped, because although Jim and Jack didn’t say anything about their time in the trenches, which she’d expected, they had a lot to tell one another abo
ut their families and their jobs.

  Jack read gas meters. ‘I wouldn’t say it was a barrel a’ laughs,’ he said, ‘but it pays the rent.’

  ‘Which is all you can say for most jobs,’ Jim told him, cheerfully. ‘’Cept fer Rosie’s. She’s an artist’s model.’

  Jack and Minnie were very impressed. ‘Straight up?’ he said.

  So Rosie told them about it, in entertaining detail, which impressed them even more. Their admiration made her feel so swollen-headed she was quite relieved when the meal came to an end, and the girls had been sent to bed, and she could take her guests to the front room to sit round the fire on her nice new settee and roast chestnuts and change the subject. But naturally, now that the girls were out of earshot, the conversation moved on to the punch-up in Worthing.

  ‘Who were those awful people?’ Jim wanted to know. ‘Where did they all come from?’

  ‘British Union of Fascists,’ Jack told him, ‘an’ a right load a’ blighters they are.’

  ‘I can’t stand the sight of ’em,’ Minnie said. ‘Give me the creeps they do. Wouldn’t touch ’em with a bargepole.’

  ‘They put the wind up me,’ Rosie confessed. ‘I don’t mind telling you. All that marching about an’ shouting. It’s like the Germans. I can’t see any difference between ’em. I hope they don’t start burning books. Or building concentration camps.’

  ‘I reckon it’s play-actin’,’ Jim said, hoping it was true. ‘That’s all. Dressin’ up in uniforms an’ poncin’ about, feelin’ important. They was off PDQ when we stood up to ’em.’

  ‘Only wish it was a play, ol’ son,’ Jack told him, peeling a chestnut. ‘Trouble is, it ain’t. They means business. That Mosley bloke reckons we’re all gonna turn Fascist same as the Jerries an’ the Eyeties, an’ he’s gonna be another Hitler. Turn Fascist an’ beat up the Jews. That’s the size of it. You should see the sort a’ things they do in the East End. That’s why we was there, tryin’ to stop the beggar.’

  ‘He couldn’t do it though, could he?’ Rosie said. ‘I mean surely nobody’d vote for him here.’

  ‘Wouldn’t put it past ’em,’ Jack said. ‘He’s got the Daily Mail behind ’im, yer see. That Lord Rothermere’s all for ’im. There’s articles about how wonderful he is nearly every day a’ the week. An’ ’e funds the beggar so ’e’s not short of a few bob. More’s the pity. They vote for ’is lot in Worthing. ’E’s got a man called Budd elected to the council. The Mail was cock-a-whoop. They said Worthing was the Munich a’ the South.’

  It was an intriguing and informative conversation and it went on until past eleven o’clock, when Minnie gave her husband a nudge and said they’d have to be going.

  ‘He’s a good bloke,’ she said to Rosie, ‘but he’ll talk till the cows come home. Never knew such an ol’ jaw-me-dead.’

  ‘You can always come again,’ Rosie told her, ‘now you know where we are.’

  ‘Wild horses wouldn’t keep us away,’ Jack said, and grinned at her.

  ‘Maybe we could invite ’em next week,’ Jim said, when they’d gone.

  ‘I’d rather you didn’t,’ Rosie said. ‘It’s Mary’s exam an’ I think she’s worried about it.’

  He made a grimace. ‘Never,’ he said, disbelievingly. ‘She’s a tough little thing. Like her sister.’

  But Rosie had doubts and, when the morning of the examination arrived, she knew she was right, because Mary looked so pale and ate so little. She said goodbye to her father when he went to work and kissed Gracie goodbye when she left for school, but she didn’t smile. She just sat looking at the food congealing on her plate.

  ‘You’ve lost your appetite,’ Rosie said as she took the plate away.

  Mary nodded. ‘I don’t feel much like eating this morning,’ she admitted.

  Rosie sat down beside her daughter and put an arm round her shoulders. ‘What’s up?’ she said. ‘You worried about this scholarship?’

  Mary kept her eyes down and her face looked so drawn it tugged Rosie’s heart. ‘You won’t be cross with me if I fail, will you?’ she said.

  ‘Cross?’ Rosie said. ‘The idea! ’Course I won’t. If you did fail, which I very much doubt, I’d give you twice the cuddles and twice the treats to make up for it.’

  And at that Mary threw her arms round her mother’s neck and burst into tears. ‘I’ll do my very, very best,’ she wept. ‘I promise. My very, very, very best.’

  Rosie kissed her hair and hugged her while she cried. Then she got a flannel and cleaned the tears from her poor girl’s face.

  ‘Now,’ she said, ‘I’m going to walk down the road with you an’ keep you company. Not to the school. Don’t worry. Just to the main road or until you meet up with your friends. All right?’

  And it was all right. Mary seemed quite glad she was there, and Rosie was comforted to be able to look after her. Not that it stopped her worrying. She fretted all morning, picking things up and putting them down, unable to settle to anything. It was as bad as it had been when Gracie took the exam. But she just had to bite her nails until Mary came home. It was a great relief to hear her footstep on the stairs.

  ‘How did you get on?’ she asked, speaking before she’d thought whether it was sensible or not.

  Mary smiled at her, looking almost like her old self. ‘It was all right,’ she said. ‘Some of it was easy. Can I play out when I’ve had tea?’

  And that was that. Then there was nothing to do but wait for the results like they’d done before. There was the last gypsy to be painted, which kept her occupied for a week or two, but for most of the time she did her housework mechanically, tried not to worry too much and worried all the time. When the end of term arrived bringing the familiar brown envelope, she was in such a state her hands were shaking as she opened it and she had to read it twice before her brain could take it in.

  Mary had passed the examination with distinction, just like her sister, and had won a scholarship to attend an LCC grammar school. A list of schools was enclosed.

  Once her worry had lifted, Rosie could see that spring was beckoning to them from the parks and gardens. The sky above her head was richly blue, the daffodils danced, they had enough money for rent, school uniforms, new shoes, even the occasional trip to the seaside. All was well with their world. Out in the wider world the news was nowhere near so good, but she didn’t take any notice of it. Let that horrible Hitler rant and roar. It was nothing to do with her. Let Mussolini scream that Italy needed an empire. It was nothing to do with her. Even when the Daily Mail shouted that the BUF was holding a rally at Olympia on the seventh of June and that it was going to be the biggest and most important political event of the year, she took no notice. It was nothing to do with her.

  But she was wrong. There was a member of her family in the audience that night and one she might have expected to be there if she’d given it any thought.

  Chapter 24

  Mr Herbert Matthews had a seat in the stalls for the Fascist rally at Olympia that night and, from the moment he entered the arena, he’d been thrilled and uplifted by the implacable pounding power of it all. It was exactly as a political meeting ought to be. The whole place was hung with flags, Union Jacks alternating with the bold black and yellow of the Fascist banner; there were powerful amplifiers all around the hall blasting out the most wonderful patriotic music, and thousands of black-shirts lining the aisles, standing to attention, neat and well-groomed and detached, like soldiers on parade, and in the middle of it all, a huge, high stage heavily draped in apricot drugget and spot lit by a row of huge arc lamps, waiting for the Leader. And what a wonderful thing it was when he arrived, looking so tall and noble, as he strode through the crowd. This is the man who will save us, Herbert thought. A great man. And he settled down to absorb every word he said.

  ‘This meeting,’ Mosley said, his voice wonderfully clear, ‘the largest indoor meeting ever held under one roof in Britain, is the culmination of a great national campaign, in which audiences in every city
of this land have gathered to hear the fascist case. The slow, soft days are behind us, perhaps forever. Hard days and nights lie ahead. There will be no relaxing of the mind and will. The tents of ease are struck, and the soul of man is on the march.’

  He was given such a loud cheer that it made Herbert’s ears ring. But then some fool in the gallery started shouting. ‘Fascism means murder!’ over and over again. How uncalled for! Didn’t do him any good though. The great arc lamps swung round and fastened on him like a searchlight, and then the black-shirts moved in and punched him to the ground and dragged him out. Serve him right, the dirty Red, Herbert thought. And he turned round to enjoy the speech again. But now there were other people jumping to their feet and shouting, three more in another gallery and some in the stalls. The lights swung from one to the other and the whole place seemed to be on the move with black-shirts running in to deal with them and jumping over the seats to do it and men shouting and women screaming. It was absolutely disgraceful. But the leader took it calmly and, when the last of the Reds had been dragged away with blood pouring from his head, he spoke out boldly and said just the right thing. ‘We shall not be deterred. You are not hurting us. We are hurting you.’ Oh he was wonderful! Wonderful!

  At the end of the evening, Herbert went home feeling twice the man he’d been when he entered the hall and more than twice as powerful. By the end of the week, he had joined the BUF. And the next Saturday, he went on a march in full uniform all through the East End. It was absolutely thrilling. The pavements were lined with sturdy-looking policemen there to make sure the Yids were kept in their place — and quite right too — and they had the street to themselves nearly all the way and marched along chanting and shouting. At one point a gang of yobs tried to push into the march, shouting their silly slogans — Reds and Yids of course, the usual sort of rabble — but they soon had them sorted out. The boys had their knuckle dusters on in seconds and laid about them right and left and the police were absolutely splendid, wading in with their truncheons. He felt so powerful it was as if he’d doubled in size. This is the way to go on, he thought. We’ll show ’em.