After the Mourning (3 page)

‘I don’t trust no coppers, military or whatever,’ he said, as he thrust one meaty hand into his jacket pocket and brought out a pipe. ‘I don’t want to answer no questions off of no one. I’ll wait here until they’ve gone.’

‘I’ve just told you these people are—’

‘I won’t make no bother for the Gyppos,’ he said, as he lowered himself to the ground beside Horatio. ‘I ain’t got nothing against them.’

The Gypsy looked at me and nodded, then refilled my bucket from his pot. Not speaking to coppers of whatever kidney is something that East-Enders and Gypsies have in common. Although unspoken, it had been agreed that the man and whoever was with him could stay. It was the start of an association between the Gypsies and the bombed-out that was to have a big impact on all of us in the weeks to come.

When I went back into the tent, Doris said, ‘So, what happens between now and the funeral, Mr H?’

‘Once we’ve got Rosie cleaned up I’m going to put her in that nightgown over there,’ I said, pointing to a threadbare white garment that lay on the ground. ‘We’ll transport her in that.’

‘We not putting her in her best things, then?’

I lowered my voice. ‘I can’t clean her up properly here, Doris. If we put her in a nightdress now, we can take her Sunday best with us and I can put her in it back at the shop.’

‘Yes, but won’t they—’

‘I’ll bring the shell in here in a moment and we’ll put Rosie and the clothes inside,’ I said.

‘Well, Mr H, if you think that’s kosher . . .’

A few minutes later I left the camp with Horatio and went back to the hearse. We took the shell, a flimsy makeshift coffin we use until the right ‘box’ has been made, into the camp and through the flap of Rosie and her husband’s tent. As we passed, carrying the emblem of mortality, all of the Gypsies wailed loudly and the tearing of clothes and faces increased. This group, I noticed, were a mainly short and very dark bunch. There were a few blonds among them – there generally are in a big group – but not many. Few of these had ever bred with the
gaujo
.

Getting Rosie into the shell wasn’t difficult even if I only had Doris instead of my usual assistants, Walter and Arthur. The poor girl had been so eaten by the cancer there was nothing much left of her. Whether Doris would be able to carry one end of the shell and help me back to the hearse remained to be seen, though. Now that Rosie was inside it, I realised that not even Horatio could help me. However, his new-found
gaujo
friend with the tattoos was glad to lend a hand and we moved back towards the vehicle with a small woman in tow, her face a mess of scratches.

When we drew level with the car, Horatio nodded at her and said, ‘She’s Rosie’s mother. The dead can’t be alone before they return to the earth. She must sit with her. In your shop.’

‘What? For three days?’ I said.

‘Yes. She’ll not trouble you for food. Just a little tea sometimes and a cigarette,’ Horatio replied. ‘She’s foreign but she speaks some English. She can’t leave her daughter now. Not until the funeral.’

How I would wash Rosie properly and put her clothes on, I didn’t know. The little Gypsy woman climbed into the car with a determined expression on her heavy-featured face.

Doris turned to me and said, ‘So, what now, then, Mr H?’

Chapter Two

R
osie’s mother’s name was something queer and foreign but she said we were to call her Betty. She reckoned she was about the same age as my younger sister Aggie. I, at forty-seven, am the middle in age of my parents’ three children. Aggie is thirty-six and the mother of two nippers, currently evacuated to Essex. Her husband, a right fly-by-night in everyone’s opinion, went off with another woman a long time ago. By contrast, Betty Lee still had her husband who, she said, earned money from the activities of a dancing bear. The whole group were show-people – some of them, like Betty, and Rosie’s husband, Edward, had come originally from Rumania, or so Betty said. There were fortune-tellers, dancers, magicians and basket weavers. All eight of Betty’s remaining children were involved in one way or another.

‘My eldest girl, Lily, she has the Head,’ Betty said to the Duchess one morning, when the latter brought her some tea.

‘The head?’ my mother enquired.

It was two days since I’d brought Rosie and her mother back to the shop with me. Since Betty wouldn’t leave her daughter even when a raid was on, I’d had to tell her I wasn’t finished with Rosie. But she understood and she let Aggie and me wash and dress her daughter, and even watched when the Duchess gently brushed out the girl’s long black hair. Betty had deemed the result ‘beautiful’. She gazed at the corpse from across our little storage room.

‘It’s a great marvel,’ Betty said, her dull eyes seeming to give the lie to such an extravagant statement. ‘It talks, opens its eyes. When Rosie is in the earth you must come and see this great attraction.’

And then the wailing, which the Duchess had grown accustomed to, began again so she and I left Betty alone.

‘Betty reminds me of the mourners I used to see at Hindu funerals,’ my mother said, as we climbed the stairs up to our family’s flat. ‘Christians are so restrained by comparison.’

She wasn’t and isn’t wrong there – although ‘restraint’ isn’t a word I’d have used about any of the funerals I organised, with the exception of paupers’, until this last year. By that I don’t mean that there was a lot of emotion before this war began. That’s not the English way. But there was always a show. There were horses draped in black crêpe pulling the hearse, and mutes carrying huge ostrich-feather wands. Everyone attending was in full mourning and the memorial to the deceased was the biggest the family could afford. Not that many families could afford much, but they’d scrimp and pawn and beg for a funeral. This is a poor borough where generations of men and women have worked themselves to death. For years a slap-up funeral has been the one way that broken-backed dockers and women used up in childbirth can have their brief moment of glory. Now, thanks to Mr Hitler and his mates, that’s changed. With most of the women out at work as well as the men, there’s money for all these things but no time. You have to bury the dead quickly in case of a raid. There are no mutes, few horses and even fewer flowers. There seem to be a lot more tears, though. But when you’ve seen your old dad or your sister or your best friend blown to pieces in front of you it changes things – and people. I know.

When the Duchess, who has very bad arthritis, and I finally made it to the top of the stairs, we went into the kitchen and had our tea with my older sister Nancy. Nancy, or Nan as we call her, is a spinster. Bitter, because she feels the darkness of her skin has put the kibosh on anyone being interested in her for marriage, she spends most of her time looking after the Duchess and saying the rosary.

‘How’s that . . .’ Nan couldn’t think what to call Betty ‘. . . Gyppo?’

‘Tired,’ the Duchess replied, as she sat down and picked up her cup. ‘Keeping vigil is wearisome.’

‘I don’t know why,’ Nan said, as she watched me roll, then light a fag. ‘Ain’t like she’s praying or nothing, is it? Them type don’t have no religion.’

‘Ernie Sutton’s burying the daughter up at the East London,’ I put in, by way of information to my sister.

‘Oh.’

Of course, being buried an Anglican wasn’t and couldn’t be as ‘good’ as if the ceremony had been Catholic but it gave Nan pause, which was no bad thing. At that moment Aggie came bustling in, all perfume and blonde hair rolled up into a great big sausage at the back of her head.

‘Can I have one of your fags, please, Frank?’ she said, as she lifted my tobacco tin off the table in front of me.

‘Well . . .’

‘Ta.’ She laughed. Although her hair is dyed, Aggie has bright blue eyes and baby-fair skin. She works with a gang of other ‘girls’ down at Tate & Lyle’s sugar factory in Silvertown. Although I knew she was about the same age as Betty Lee, Aggie and the Gypsy couldn’t have been more different. For a start Aggie looked ten years younger. Nan, watching her sister roll a cigarette, sniffed ostentatiously. Aggie, who has always taken the view that it is better to attack than be attacked, said to her, ‘I like smoking. Mind your own beeswax.’

‘Agnes . . .’

‘Well, she’s always looking,’ Aggie said to the Duchess, with a shrug. ‘Everything I do she looks at! When I smoke, when I get myself ready to go out for a drink . . .’

‘You haven’t been to Mass.’

‘No, I haven’t,’ Aggie said to Nan. ‘I don’t believe in it. And, anyway, Frank don’t go either. My church is called the Green Gate,’ she continued, naming a local pub I knew she went to. ‘Like it or lump it.’

She poured herself a cup of tea and sat down next to me to drink it. A rare silence descended on the Hancock table, only broken by the Duchess, who said, ‘Agnes, you have probably been to more music halls and fairs in recent times than the rest of us.’ Nan snorted but we all, even Aggie, ignored her. ‘Have you ever heard of an attraction called the Head?’

Aggie frowned. ‘The Head? No. What—’

‘Betty says it’s a great marvel. Her eldest daughter has it. She has invited me to go and see it one day.’

‘The Head . . .’

‘Yes. I imagine it is a head on its own, as if separated from its body . . .’

‘Oh, it’s the Egyptian Head you mean,’ Aggie said. ‘I saw it at a magic show on the pier at Brighton before the war. My old man took me.’ She looked down quickly at the floor, then up again almost immediately, smiling.

‘So?’

‘It’s a head of a girl, if I remember rightly, in a box on a table. Opens its eyes and speaks.’ Aggie shuddered at the memory. ‘Creepy.’

I’ve always been interested in how tricks and illusions are done. My earliest experiences of magicians took place in Epping Forest where I watched turns performed by Gypsies and travellers. When I got older I watched magicians at the music halls and the odd end-of-the-pier show or on beanos out to Southend or Brighton. I’ve seen girls sawn in half, men and animals seemingly disappear and even a very good levitation act. But I’d never, at that point, seen a disembodied head. I admit I was intrigued. I’ve always thought that I should be able to work out how such tricks are done, but I’ve always lacked either the time or, since the Great War, the will to do so. After all, when you’ve already gone mad, as we all did in the end out on the Somme, who are you to decide what’s real and what isn’t?

‘You know Betty won’t come down the Anderson,’ Nan said to me, in that sudden, sharp way of hers.

‘Eh?’

‘The raid, last night,’ She gave an exasperated sigh. ‘She wouldn’t come down the shelter with us. Just sat there with her daughter, wailing.’

‘It’s their way,’ I responded simply.

And I knew anyway. As soon as the sirens went I made myself go and check to see what Betty Lee might want to do. The Duchess and the girls were already down the Anderson shelter in the backyard and I invited the Gypsy to join them. But she declined. ‘I cannot leave Rosie,’ she said, so I made ready to go outside as I usually do. I can’t be anywhere enclosed during a raid. I have to be out, running as a rule. Running from bombs and fire and my own memories of being enclosed, in a trench, in the last lot, unable to escape the terror of being buried alive. Because blokes did get buried alive back then. I’ve seen men and their horses sink and choke to death in the mud of northern France and Belgium. Just disappeared they did, into shell-holes the size of churches.

‘Well, when you get a chance, ask Betty what my fortune might be, won’t you, Frank?’ Aggie said, as she put her empty cup back on the table and stood up. ‘Find out if she can see a new pair of stockings anywhere on the horizon. I’m off to work now.’

I watched her go with a smile on my face. A lot of people, Nan included, think that Aggie is flash and cheap, but she’s a bright girl and, what’s more important, she has great heart. With her old man long gone off with another woman, her two kids in Essex and a job in the sugar factory next door to the Nazis’ main target, the docks, she’d have every right to be a bit grim. But Aggie takes what Mr Churchill says very seriously and she keeps her chin well up. ‘That Hitler can think again if he reckons he’s going to stop me going down the pub,’ she said, when the Duchess once suggested that perhaps going out in the evening wasn’t always a good idea.

Later on that day, in the early afternoon, Ernie Sutton came to visit Betty Lee to talk to her about her daughter’s funeral. They were not together for long, and at the end of it he told me, ‘She just wants that girl in the ground now. I don’t think she understands or cares too much how we do that.’

But, then, as Horatio had told me from the outset, Gypsies, or Romanies as he likes to call his people, don’t have too much to do with religion. It makes what happened shortly afterwards all the more barmy and just downright strange.

I don’t always go to wakes. I’m not always invited. But this time I was and I went. What had happened in the church had been what I’m used to in a funeral. However, behaviour at the graveside had been wild and this wake, I felt, in a Gypsy camp away from religion, was going to be even more different still. I wasn’t wrong. As we entered the encampment I saw a young boy set light to a large pile of women’s clothes on the outskirts of the area.

‘All the things of the dead must be destroyed,’ Horatio explained, when he saw me looking puzzled at the scene. ‘If you don’t then
marimè
will hang about.’

I frowned. My apprentice lad Arthur, who’d also decided to come to the wake, said, ‘What’s that?’

‘
Marimè
is bad things,’ Horatio said. ‘From the grave. Even speaking the name of the dead is bad.’ And then he went off to greet his brother, George Gordon, who was standing in the midst of a gaggle of black-clad old crones.

In reply to the confusion on Arthur’s young red face I said, ‘He probably means bad spirits.’