After the Mourning (2 page)

The bell over the front door rang and we both looked up to see a dark, thin man with a big moustache holding on to his cap in the doorway. He seemed embarrassed but I knew from experience that this was just the awkwardness that so many Gypsies experience when they move in
gaujo
society.

‘Horatio,’ I said. I walked forward to offer him a chair. ‘I hope you being here doesn’t mean a loss of some sort . . .’

‘Rosie Lee has finally gone,’ Horatio replied, as if I should have known both who she was and some of the circumstances surrounding her passing.

Doris put the ledgers on the floor while I said, ‘I’m very sorry for your loss, Horatio.’

‘Died sudden, Mr Hancock,’ the Gypsy said, without any obvious emotion, ‘so nothing was done proper. It’s why we need you. We’ll pay.’

I heard Doris mutter words to the effect of ‘You’d better!’ under her breath, which I hoped Horatio hadn’t caught. People can have strong opinions about Gypsies, especially when it comes to money.

I tried to lead Horatio to a chair but he wouldn’t accept it. ‘If you’ll do it, Mr Hancock, we’ll have to go now,’ he said. ‘And you’ll need to bring a woman.’

I sat down and said, ‘Now, look, Horatio, what’s all this about? Was this Rosie a relative of yours?’

‘Yes.’

‘So . . .’

‘She died before we could wash and dress her, Mr Hancock,’ he said. ‘Now she’s gone, it’s too late. No Romany can touch her. One of your kind, a
gaujo
, must do it. But because you’re a man you’ll need a woman
gaujo
with you too. It’s our way. Them who’ve passed can be dangerous and need respect. And Rosie’s mum is foreign and they’re much more careful about tradition than us English men.’

‘I see.’ Most real English people consider the Gypsies foreign, wherever they were born, so Horatio’s way of speaking about the bereaved mother might have been seen as a little strange. But I’m used to him and the way he speaks, so I accepted that this woman, though yet a Gypsy, might come from somewhere I did not understand. ‘So where—’

‘They have their
’atchin ’tan
up by Eagle Pond,’ he said. ‘The Lees been stopping there in winter many long years.’

‘Christ Almighty, that’s in the forest!’ I said. ‘Miles away! Couldn’t you have got a firm from Walthamstow or Leyton out to do it?’

‘But we want you, Mr Hancock,’ Horatio said calmly. ‘Me and my family’ve known you and yours for a long time. The washing and the dressing has to be done by a
gaujo
we can trust. Then you must bring her here until the funeral.’

It was, of course, a compliment, even if getting up to Eagle Pond, which is on the edge of Epping Forest between Leyton and Wanstead, is no mean feat. Five miles if it’s an inch, and with wrecked buildings, unexploded bombs and the possibility of daylight raids always on the cards, going so far out of my manor – away from London and into Essex – wasn’t something I really wanted to do. But on the other hand Horatio had shod and exercised my horses for years. He’d never overcharged me and he’d always done a good job. On top of that, now that we had the motor hearse, it wasn’t as difficult to get about as it had been with just the horse-drawn carriage.

‘Well, seeing as it’s you, Horatio,’ I said. ‘But as for a woman to help me, both my sisters are out at the moment.’ Not that either my older sister Nancy or Agnes, the younger one, is accustomed to helping out regularly with the washing and dressing of our bodies. Our apprentice boy Arthur generally does that with me.

‘What about her?’ Horatio said, pointing straight at Doris.

‘Ah, well . . .’

‘Don’t matter that she’s a Jew,’ he said airily. ‘
Gauje
is
gauje
. Romanies don’t pay no mind to religion.’

Epping Forest, and that area of empty country just south of it called Wanstead Flats, has always been somewhere for Gypsies, travelling shows and the like to pitch their camps. Dad used to take us kids and our mum over that way years ago – sometimes we’d even go along with Nelson Smith, Horatio and his brother George Gordon. Our dad enjoyed the horse-riding stunts some of the Gypsies used to do, while Mum liked to buy baskets and be among women who looked as she did and still does. My mother – the Duchess, my sisters and I call her, on account of her very proper way of going on – comes originally from Calcutta in India. Dad was a soldier out there for many years until he came home with his very dark wife and little baby girl to help old Francis with the business. That Mum, despite being a ‘wog’, was a good Catholic like the rest of the Hancock family helped, but my grandmother never accepted her. Granny H, as we all called my dad’s mum, only ever took to fair-skinned, blue-eyed Agnes. Mum, Nancy and I were never really in the running for Granny H’s affections. Not that Agnes, or Aggie as she’s called at home, and I ever suffered much in any other event. But people other than Granny H could be unkind about the Duchess and Nancy. Their darkness has always stood them apart, except among the Gypsies. Up in the forest the Duchess could pass between the travelling folk without comment. ‘Of course, the Gypsies came from India long, long ago,’ my mother would say, as she smiled at the unsmiling women around her. ‘Their tribe is quite different from the rest of us, but India is where their journey began.’ I told Doris about this as I drove her and Horatio up through Leytonstone. Moving away, as we were, from the Germans’ prime target, the docks, both Doris and I became almost painfully aware of how much lighter the bombing had been in these areas. Most of those Victorian ‘villas’, as they’re called in Leyton and Forest Gate, were just as they always had been. They were and remain very smart. Down our way, the poor end, we were getting a lot more than our fair share.

‘Your mum ain’t no Gyppo,’ a scandalised Doris responded, as I parked the Lancia on the side of the Snaresbrook Road in front of Eagle Pond. ‘She’s a lady.’

I smiled. In spite of her agreement to come along and help me with this deceased Gypsy woman, Doris remained highly suspicious of those we’d come to assist. According to Doris and, she said, her husband Alfie too, Gypsies were ‘tea-leaves’ and ‘bandits’. ‘If it wasn’t for you, Mr H, and that Gyppo being your mate,’ she said, as she tipped her head towards Horatio, ‘you wouldn’t see me here for dust.’

In spite of being a rural-looking, wooded clearing on the edge of our tightly crowded London, ‘here’ was a poorer place even than we’d just come from. Not all Gypsies have those colourful covered wagons for which they are rightly famous. Some, like this group, use carts to move from place to place. They live in tents and in an English October that’s a bleak prospect. As we followed Horatio into their camp, those familiar suspicious dark eyes bored into me yet again. However, unlike my encounters with Gypsies in the past, this time was not characterised by any movement or offers of entertainment. They all, men and women, sat around their smoky wood fires crying and, in some cases, raking their fingers down their long, grief-stricken faces until they bled. On the outskirts of the group other people, obviously not Gypsies, watched the scene, baffled.

‘Christ!’ Doris said, as she moved in front of a woman whose face was wet with blood and tears and whose tattered clothes reeked of smoke, damp and leaf mould.

‘Romanies can’t do nothing until the body is buried,’ Horatio explained, as he headed towards a particularly small and mean black canvas tent. ‘No eating, washing, drink just tea and wine and smoke baccy.’

‘So you all do nothing?’ I asked, anxious, I must confess, to learn how they could manage like this.

‘Yes.’

‘But how do you—’

‘We pay the
gauje
to do most of it,’ Horatio said. ‘And those not of the family, we boil the kettles for the drinks, make the arrangements, get baccy.’

‘We? But you said you’re family to this girl, Horatio.’

‘I’m family in as much as all Romanies is family,’ he replied. ‘I can do things. I can get you . . .’ he pulled the front flap of the tiny, filthy tent to one side revealing the blood-soaked body of a girl and a familiar clergyman ‘. . . and the vicar. Important – man in touch with God should be first to see the dead one. It can calm the
muló
, the spirit, what can be wild with anger.’

On seeing the state of the corpse, Doris turned aside. The clergyman smiled. ‘Hello, Frank.’

‘Reverend.’

He came out of the tent, straightened, and we shook hands warmly. Ernie Sutton, Anglican priest of St Andrews, Plaistow, had been an early playmate of mine. Many was the time we’d swung together on ropes around lamp-posts as nippers. As the tent flap flopped down after him, Ernie took me to one side and said softly, ‘Rosie Lee, the deceased, died of cancer. At my insistence that chap Horatio got a doctor up here, a fellow called Wright from Leyton. But it’s all quite straightforward.’ He sighed. ‘The girl died naturally . . . if, of course, you can call death natural at her age.’

‘How old is she?’ I asked.

Ernie shrugged. ‘Sixteen, twenty at the most. And before you say anything else, Frank, she was married, in common with most Gypsy girls, and that is her husband over there.’

I looked towards the pond where a tall young man stood sobbing into the wind. At his feet stood a small, perplexed blond child.

‘It doesn’t help that half of Canning Town happens to be camping out here at the moment,’ Ernie said. ‘Gawping away. You’d’ve thought they’d seen enough misery, wouldn’t you?’

Canning Town is one of those manors that abut directly on to the Royal Docks – the Victoria, the Albert and the George. With Silvertown, Custom House and North Woolwich, Canning Town supplies most of the manpower for the docks as well as for Beckton gasworks, the Tate & Lyle sugar factory and lots of other industries beside the Thames. It’s been blasted to bits ever since the raids started in September. The bombed-out can be billeted elsewhere, but to go through all the official processes takes time and a lot of families have ended up in tents out in the forest. In that way, so they say, they can have some control over what happens to them and their nippers. If they let the authorities take care of them, more often than not the poor sods are given billets in the same area they came from, which means they’ll suffer raids every night again and have to go down into tiny damp air-raid shelters. Just thinking about it makes me sweat. If I was bombed out I might very well come out to the forest or the Flats. The police can say what they like about how gangsters and other unsavoury types do their business alongside the decent folk among the trees these days – but in the forest a person is out in the open.

‘Anyway, Frank, are you and Mrs Rosen . . .’ Ernie smiled briefly at Doris ‘. . . going to make a start?’

‘Er . . .’

‘I can bury her on Thursday, if that’s all right with you,’ he continued. ‘The Almighty and Jerry willing, I can do two o’clock in the afternoon.’

I was about to say I’d check my appointments when I got back to the shop but Doris, who knows everything about Hancocks, said that I could do that date and time, so we agreed it with Ernie, and with Horatio when he came over to see what we were about. Rosie’s family, he said, would be content with that.

Once Ernie had gone and Horatio had finished boiling a pan of water for us, Doris and I set to work on Rosie Lee. Someone, probably her husband, had put another set of clothes, which had obviously been the deceased’s Sunday best, beside the body in the tent.

‘Poor little thing,’ Doris said, as she walked gingerly around the body, settling eventually at its head. ‘All that blood!’

‘Mr Sutton said she died of cancer.’ I gazed at the young, if strained, face of the corpse before us – still not visibly at peace: great clots of blood lay like pieces of liver between her thighs. I’ve seen such poor women before. When cancer gets into a woman’s womb it’s a terrible, painful, bloody death. ‘Come on, let’s get her washed as soon as we can.’

Doris, who had never washed, dressed or even touched a dead body before, stuck out a hand for a cloth and said, ‘I’ll wipe her face.’

I let her do what she felt able to while I concentrated on the rest. After all, the Gypsies couldn’t see us and I couldn’t in all conscience put Doris through a full-scale washing of a corpse this bad. Cancer rots from the inside out, so little Rosie was far from wholesome. In a way, I suppose, I was deceiving the bereaved who, I knew, expected Doris to do most of the work, but I didn’t feel bad about it, given the circumstances. In this job you have to treat every corpse and every bereaved family differently – give them what they want, and do what’s best at the same time, if you can. If you can’t, you just have to do whatever’s possible.

After Doris and I had done as much as we could with the water we had, I went outside with the bowl to get some more from Horatio. He was squatting by one of the fires in the middle of the camp, watching the water pot suspended above it with rapt concentration. As I moved towards him I saw that a few of the non-Gypsy gawpers Ernie had pointed out had started to move beyond the edges of the travellers’ camp. The Gypsies seemed not to notice but I did, so I went over.

‘What do you want?’ I asked a particularly large old bloke with anchors tattooed on his forearms.

He frowned. ‘What you doin’ here?’ he said. ‘Ain’t you that undertaker from up Plaistow?’

People sometimes say the East End is like a collection of villages. There’s truth in that, especially if you’re bonkers and Anglo-Indian as I am. Even those who’ve never used our business know about Hancocks. I’m the village idiot.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’m here to remove a body from the camp. I think these people want to be left alone to grieve.’

‘There’s coppers about,’ the man said, ignoring me and moving ever more forwards. ‘Military, asking questions, going through things.’

In my experience, Military Police, rather than ordinary coppers, could mean only one thing. ‘They must be hunting down deserters,’ I said, my blood freezing. Back in my war, the Great War, deserters had been shot. I have done it myself. I have stood in a line with other soldiers and shot at boys who only did what the rest of us wanted to do. I can still see myself doing it sometimes, at night, in the dark. It’s not only the bombs I run from when the raids get going. My brain is much more dangerous than any Luftwaffe pilot.