After the Mourning (10 page)

T
he following day was so hard it almost killed me. Like most people now, I’m getting used to hiking across piles of rubble. When every night and some days bring wave after wave of German bombers what can you expect? Even working in a shop without any daylight and only intermittent gaslight is something you can get used to. The workload isn’t, because in my line of business a lot of work means a lot of death.

We started in the morning with one old boy from Upton Park and a box full of God-knows-what that was supposed to be an ARP warden from five minutes down the road. I’d known him a bit so after that one, which was held up at the East London, I felt I had to put my head around the door of the wake. The warden’s wife, a plump, toothless woman in her thirties, seemed to want to cry on my shoulder rather more than she should so getting away wasn’t easy. I hadn’t slept the previous night so I was tired even then. The old fellow from Upton Park had been very big, and with only Arthur and Walter fit to bear – often we have Doris’s husband Alfie, or members of the deceased’s family – I’d had to turn to and help.

By the time we got to New Barn Street to pick up the body of an old girl who had died a natural death, I was even more tired and quite sore about the shoulders. Arthur, who had just learned to drive the motor hearse, was in a mood because everyone that day had requested the horses and the last thing I needed on top of all that was the Luftwaffe. Walter was about to put Charlotte Twigg’s coffin lid on when the sirens went.

‘Jesus, not again!’

I shot him a stern look. Charlotte’s daughter, Esmé Dixon, was in the room and didn’t look amused.

‘Better get down your Anderson, Mrs Dixon,’ I said, as I ushered both her and Walter out of the small family parlour.

‘But what about Mum?’ the woman asked, as she staggered shakily into her long, dark hallway.

It wasn’t the first time that had happened so I was ready for at least one of the relatives to want to take the dear departed down to the shelter with the rest of the family. The first time I’d had to restrain one grieving son until he came to his senses.

‘I’d be obliged if you could find some room in your Anderson for my two lads,’ I said, as I pushed Walter and Arthur out towards the scullery before me.

‘But Mum . . .’

‘Your mum’s dead, love,’ I said, as gently as time and events allowed. ‘My lads are alive.’

She looked at me with fury, then told one of her sons to take Arthur and Walter down to the shelter. I thanked her, then made my way back to the hearse.

‘What about you?’ she called after me.

‘My place is with the horses,’ I replied, which, of course, was in part the gospel truth. Our geldings Rama and Sita have nice quiet natures, especially Sita, but when the bombs start coming down the poor things get very scared. ‘It’s all right, boys,’ I said, as I unshackled the horses from the hearse. ‘Come on.’ I took their bridles and walked them forward out of the way of the empty carriage behind. ‘Come on, my good boys.’

My horses trust me, but those first explosions, which were taking place down at Silvertown, made them bare their teeth and roll their eyes. ‘Sssh.’ I held their bridles tightly, pulling their flanks in towards my body. Even though we weren’t touching I could feel their sides trembling with terror. Inside my head the things that remain from the trenches started to scream and rave as the bombs descended over the East End, and all I could see in front of my eyes was blood. Rolling down my face, pouring into a gutter that was not a gutter any more but a trench full of the bloated dead faces of all my old mates from 1914. With the horses in tow I couldn’t run, however much I might have wanted to, so the three of us shuffled around in the middle of New Barn Street, moving in strange uneven circles. We must have resembled some hellish animal turn at the circus.

I suppose that, from beginning to end, the raid only lasted an hour. But holding on to the horses while I temporarily lost my mind had taken its toll. When finally, and only with help from Walter, I managed to get the boys tethered to the hearse again, my shoulders ached something rotten. As I bent down to pick up the few little bunches of flowers that had been on the hearse before the raid, Arthur came over and said, ‘Mr H, you’d better come inside the house. Something terrible’s happened.’

The late Charlotte Twigg’s parlour was now almost unrecognisable. Just over an hour before, the oak sideboard had been set with the bottles of beer and ginger wine all ready for the wake. Now it had been smashed in half by a hissing gas pipe, which hung from the back wall like an angry snake. The hard chairs that had been lined up around the wall were splintered to matchwood. Worst of all, however, Esmé Dixon and her daughter Ruby were screaming their heads off because Charlotte Twigg had been blown clean out of her coffin and up against the window, which had let in light from the yard. With her head out of the now empty casement and her legs dangling over the remnants of the sideboard, Charlotte Twigg looked like a broken rag-doll.

‘Gawd help us!’ Esme Dixon screamed. ‘Bloody Jerries! Look what they’ve done to Mum!’

Charlotte’s coffin had ceased to exist so I knew I’d have to go back to the shop and see if we had another suitable for her. ‘Get these ladies out of here while I try to sort this out,’ I said to Arthur. The boy nodded, then began gently to lead the women out into the glass- and metal-strewn yard.

Just before the Heavy Rescue boys arrived to deal with the gas and the general devastation along New Barn Street, I walked over to where Charlotte Twigg hung and grasped one of her cold, smashed hands. I said nothing out loud, but in my head I promised her that it’d be all right in the end, that I’d get her to where I knew she needed to be. The dead have to be protected on their last journey – the living can so often put the kibosh on it with their violence and selfishness. This is what I do. It is almost entirely why I exist.

As I walked back out into the street, I heard one of the ARP wardens talking to a copper. ‘Virgin Mary up Epping still ain’t put a stop to the Luftwaffe, then,’ he said, laughing.

‘Oh, that’ll all die a death soon, you mark my words,’ the copper replied, also with a chuckle in his voice.

But one bombing raid wasn’t going to change what was going on up in the forest – the promise of Lily’s vision was too powerful for that. Hannah, who had been, unbeknownst to me, up in the forest when the raid was on with her friend Bella, was to tell me about it later that evening. When, drawn and exhausted, I got home after my day from hell, she was waiting for me in the shop.

‘Them military coppers took that Gypsy camp apart today,’ Hannah said, once Doris had given us tea and gone off home. ‘People were going bonkers.’

‘Well, the Gypsies . . .’

‘And the rest of them too,’ Hannah said. ‘Women screaming as how it was sacrilegious and suchlike. Some blokes even tried to fight the coppers – there’s so much feeling for this “miracle” thing up there. But they done it anyway. The officer in charge, he just bowled in and had all the Gypsies’ tents down in a couple of minutes.’

‘Even Lily’s?’ I asked.

‘So people said. I never got close enough to see for myself,’ Hannah replied. ‘But those as did said that the girl just stood there and let this officer knock her tent down with his stick.’

I thought about the table with the Head and asked, ‘What was in Lily’s tent? Do you know?’

‘Well, that was queer,’ Hannah said, as she sipped her tea, and then lit a Woodbine. ‘After what you said about that Head, I thought people would be able to see at least something of it. But, no. Apart from a few rags, the tent was empty so I heard. People were amazed by the girl’s poverty. Some of them mad old Irish bags you get round here were going on about how that proved Lily had to be a saint. You Christians don’t half set a lot of store by having nothing!’

I smiled.

‘Mind you, what I did see, afterwards, was that Military Police officer and he was none too pleased,’ Hannah continued. ‘I heard him talk about the Gypsy you told me about, that German, to one of his men. He said that catching him was all that mattered and that if he found out any of the Gypsies or anyone else had been lying to him they’d be for the high jump.’ Hannah pulled a face. ‘I didn’t like him, H, that officer. Some bloke told Bella it was him what found the Feldmans.’

Sergeant Hill up at Plaistow had told me about Captain Mansard and his need to find the Gypsy Stojka. It occurred to me, not for the first time, that perhaps Stojka was more than a rather leery Gyppo who just happened to be a German too. There had to be reasons for basically attacking the Gypsy camp in opposition to all the ‘faithful’ up in the forest, who now considered Lily and her people to be almost at one with God Almighty. I wondered, too, whether this action by the MPs was just one of many. After all, I had never found out who Lily had been talking to when she’d run away crying from someone when I’d been up at Eagle Pond. Maybe Mansard, Williams or another of their blokes had pressed her on the subject of Stojka. Although why they would think she might know something I couldn’t imagine. Lily and her folks were – except Betty and Edward, who were Rumanians – English Gypsies, as far as I knew. They certainly weren’t German. There was no reason, Gypsy blood aside, why they should know this Stojka chap at all.

‘So how was it up at the camp when you left?’ I asked Hannah. ‘Are the MPs still up there?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Last me and Bella saw, they were watching the Gyppos put their tents back up again. It was quiet, but not a good atmosphere. I got the feeling the coppers won’t move now.’

‘They’re between the Gypsies and the people?’

‘Yes.’

I shook my head in despair. ‘Well, that’s all very good until Lily starts having her visions again,’ I said. ‘If the MPs try to keep them back from “their” Virgin there’ll be hell to pay. There’s some right hard nuts up there, and what with the MPs having rifles . . .’ I sighed. ‘As Ernie Sutton said to me only yesterday, someone, he thinks a clergyman, needs to talk to the Gypsies and find out what’s really going on – if that’s possible, of course.’

‘Gyppos are close.’

‘Yes, I know, but if the MPs are putting pressure on them they might welcome some help. They might need it. I think I’ll speak to Ernie.’

There was a great deal of doubt in Hannah’s eyes, but I picked up the telephone receiver to see whether I had a line or not and when I found I had, I called the Reverend Ernie Sutton without further ado. In spite of my tiredness, just one hour later I found myself driving Ernie and Hannah slowly through the dusky blacked-out streets, over to Eagle Pond and the unusually subdued Gypsy camp.

‘We don’t know anything about this man you speak of,’ Mr Lee said, in answer to my question about Martin Stojka. ‘These soldiers here,’ he pointed to the group of MPs on the perimeter of the camp, ‘they just come and tear our tents down.’

‘Because they’re looking for Martin Stojka, yes,’ I replied. ‘He’s a German Gypsy. Didn’t Captain Mansard ask you about him?’

‘No.’ Mr Lee turned his face away from me as he spoke. ‘No one said nothing, just smashed up the camp.’

I noticed that Lily’s tent, unlike the others, was still flattened out on the damp ground. ‘Where’s Lily?’

The Gypsy shrugged.

‘And the Head?’

‘Alive.’ Then, turning to Ernie, he said, ‘Would you like a beer, Reverend? We can have no fire because of the German aeroplanes, but if you want to come into my tent you will be welcome. The season grows cold at night now.’

Ernie smiled. ‘Yes, thank you.’ As we followed Mr Lee towards his tent, he said, ‘Maybe he’ll talk when he’s not being watched.’

‘Maybe,’ I agreed, as I glanced at the many Military Police who surrounded the camp. Only with great reluctance had they allowed Ernie and me in to see the Gypsies. Ernie’s position as a vicar had secured it for us in the end. But they hadn’t allowed Hannah to enter and she was, I knew, waiting with the ‘faithful’, anxious to get back to her home and ‘work’.

Mr Lee placed a bottle of Mackeson in Ernie’s hands and led us into his tent, which, like his daughter’s, was damp and covered with strange pieces of animal bone and feather. Before we had a chance to sit down he said, ‘As you are men who work with life and death, I can tell you things.’

Ernie and I positioned ourselves on a long pile of rags.

‘Yes, I know the military men are looking for a Romany from Germany,’ Mr Lee said, as he rolled and lit a short, dark fag. ‘But they don’t tell me.’

‘Then how do you know?’ I asked.

‘From my daughter Lily.’

Did the girl, I wonder, now have the gift of mind-reading as well as being a visionary? ‘How did Lily know?’

‘The young sergeant, Williams, told her. He is in love with my daughter. He bothers her sometimes,’ Mr Lee said, in that matter-of-fact way a lot of Gypsies in this country seem to have. So maybe it had been Williams I had heard talking to Lily the first time I’d been up to the Pond with Hannah. Perhaps their encounter had been of a romantic nature.

‘So why do the MPs think that you or Lily or anyone in your group would know about the fugitive Martin Stojka?’

‘Because he and us are all Romanies,’ Mr Lee replied. ‘
Gauje
believe we all know one another. They also think we have powerful magic, that we can do impossible things.’

‘Well, to be fair, having a head with no body that can talk is pretty magical,’ I said. ‘And now this “miracle”—’

‘I don’t know nothing about that,’ the Gypsy cut in quickly. ‘What Lily sees is given only to her. I don’t know why.’

‘Between ourselves do you think that her vision is of the Virgin Mary?’ Ernie asked. ‘Honestly?’

Mr Lee shrugged. ‘There’s just horses, bears and the road in my life,’ he said. ‘If people choose to believe something, that is their business. If my daughter has religion, that is something that she alone knows. You’ll need to speak to her.’