After the Mourning (4 page)

‘What? Like mediums and that?’

I didn’t know. But Arthur was puzzled and obviously bothered, so I said, ‘Yes, just like mediums and that.’

Some of the food and drink for the wake had been prepared for the Gypsies by the family of the large bloke with the anchor tattoos on his arms I’d met on the day that Rosie died. He was called, I discovered, Sidney Clarke or ‘Nobby’, which he preferred. For such a rough-looking sort he seemed to have a good heart. ‘My missus and a couple of the other women from our manor done part of the spread,’ he said, as he stood with me gazing down at the food laid out on sheets on the ground. ‘Gyppos or not, they lost their girl and that ain’t good.’

Later he told me about the brother and father he’d lost when his parents’ house in Silvertown took a direct hit. No wonder he and his wife couldn’t bring themselves to go back to the docklands. It’s natural to want to be away from so much death. Maybe, I thought, the Gypsies had it about right when they wiped out the names and things of the dead.

Travelling people generally sit on the ground when they eat, especially when it’s a big do involving the whole lot of them. In fact, even non-Gypsies like Nobby sat once the beer came out, so I, too, got down on the grass that was, as grass is in October, none too dry. As funeral spreads tend to be now, it wasn’t elaborate but there was Spam, pickled onions, bread cut into sandwiches with potted meat, and some sort of cake that I didn’t touch. Ever since the rationing business began things like cake have contained some strange ingredients. I hear Nan talking about grating up carrots and parsnips and shoving in lentils, so I tend to give cakes a wide berth. There was some meat I was told was hedgehog. This is real Gypsy food from the countryside. I didn’t trouble myself with that either. But the weather wasn’t bad for the time of year, so I supped my beer and looked around at the Gypsies’ small village of tents and carts and at their big, contented horses. The scene recalled many happier times for me, and I was wondering idly where Mr Lee’s dancing bear and other attractions, the Head included, might be when my eye was caught by the deceased’s beautiful sister. Lily Lee was small, curvy, and, dressed from head to foot in black, looked exotic and mysterious. Not that those features alone single out a Gypsy girl. Lily Lee, though, had something else besides, a sort of delicate dreaminess to her eyes. It was something that made her beautiful rather than just pretty. She sat at the far end of the spread with her parents, her brothers, and sisters, and Rosie’s loudly weeping husband.

There wasn’t, or didn’t seem to be, any organisation, so people just tucked in as and when. Arthur and I sat with other
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, like Nobby Clarke, and talk was, as ever, of the war.

‘Them military coppers been all over this forest like a rash,’ Nobby told me, as he sank his third glass of stout. ‘They’ve got a whole list of men they want to get their hands on – spivs and gangsters a lot of ’em, but also deserters, poor sods, and a couple of foreigners too,’ he said, with a knowing tap of his nose.

Foreign spies – those creatures we have to avoid careless talk for. Nobby, I felt, had a quite different attitude to foreign spies than he did to deserters. It was one with which I was in accord. Spies are dangerous and need to be stopped but frightened boys should be left in the forest until this horror is over and done with. That’s what I believe.

We all tucked in and then, after a while, George Gordon rose and went to what had been Rosie’s tent. Alone, he took out plates, cups, pictures and jewellery, which he proceeded to smash in front of everyone. I imagined it was all part of the process Horatio had told me about – getting rid of the deceased’s goods for fear of bad spirits. Rosie’s father sat like an oak while this went on. Her mother and husband screamed. Again, just as it had been at the graveside when many of the mourners had thrown coins down on to the coffin while tearing at their chests and faces, it was raw and distressing. Rosie’s brothers joined in too, beating the ground with fists still wrapped around cigarettes, saying words only some of which I could understand.

‘They’re a lively lot, aren’t they?’ I heard Nobby’s missus say to Arthur. Not that I caught what Arthur might have replied because it was at this point that Lily screamed and sprang to her feet. Trembling with what looked like fear, she pointed a dirty finger at a tree.

‘She’s here!’ she said. ‘
Oh, dordi!
’

‘Lily!’ Rosie’s widowed husband shouted. ‘Lily!’

For what seemed like an age there was nothing but silence. No one around me ate, drank or moved. Some people were later to say that they stopped eating mid-chew, so alarming did the girl appear to all concerned.

I alone, I think, moved to look up at her. Lily’s face wore such an expression of terror that it was almost painful to see. ‘She’s here!’ I heard her say again, then something else in another language. Many of the Gypsy women hid their faces in their scarves, muttering until rendered mute by the strangeness of the situation. All other voices besides Lily’s became silent.

‘Our Lady,’ Lily said, her voice trembling as it formed the words, ‘is here!’

Now no one so much as breathed, or so it seemed.

Much to Nan and the Duchess’s disgust, the Church has not featured in my life to any great extent. Most of my old mates who were killed out in the trenches died deaths I still see in my mind, in red and black blood-drenched detail. Only one of my mates survived along with me and he’s left with half a face. Whether that’s any better than having only half a mind like me, I don’t know. But one thing I am sure about is that God didn’t help me get through any of it. That said, I know religion: I had it drummed into me at a very early age. I know who ‘Our Lady’ is.

Rosie’s husband was up on his feet now. ‘No,’ I heard him murmur. ‘No.’ He started to run towards Lily. I watched him and was probably almost as shocked as he was when he was brought up short by the actions of a red-headed woman, who had now thrown her arms around the Gypsy girl’s neck. This woman was
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, one of us. Later I found out she was a neighbour of Nobby Clarke and his missus.

‘A vision of the Virgin!’ she screamed at all of us present. ‘This girl has had a vision of the Blessed Virgin Mary! Well, for Gawd’s sake, act humble, you lot!’

Still no one spoke or moved.

Lily turned her head towards the woman and began, ‘No—’

‘Just like at Lourdes,’ the woman continued. ‘The Virgin—’

‘No!’ Lily turned back to the tree. ‘No, it’s Our Lady, ours, she’s come—’

‘To save us from Hitler!’ I heard someone else, another
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, say.

Yet again Rosie’s husband made to move towards Lily but this time a glance from the girl prevented him. He put his head down and just stood, his eyes, almost alone among that party, averted from the scene unfolding in front of us. People began moving forward, slowly at first.

‘What’s all this, Mr H?’ Arthur said, as suddenly the whole camp erupted into a great nightmare of Gypsies wailing, women rushing towards Lily trying to see what she was still so obviously seeing and
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men swearing as their beer glasses spilled over the ground, toppling under the weight of the feet of the faithful.

If I hadn’t been in company with so many others I could have thought that what was happening was just a part of my own madness. I sometimes hear, and even see, things left over from the Great War – a death rattle, a disembodied leg, a man’s scream of agony. But this wasn’t like that. This madness was real.

‘It’s a sign, is what it is,’ a rough woman said. ‘A bleedin’ wotsit, you know, a miracle.’

‘The war’ll end now she’s come. You’ll see,’ someone else said. I heard the distinctive sound of hymns being sung by several old women.

I looked at Lily Lee’s face over the heads of the many ‘faithful’ that had rushed towards her and thought,
I don’t know what this is
.

It wasn’t real, for me it just couldn’t be, but it wasn’t not real either. Lily was seeing something. I felt that if I could only get close enough I would glimpse a reflection of it in her eyes. I could see, or rather I sensed, that her people, the Gypsies, were feeling somewhat the same. There was no joy among their number, only confusion. Like me, or so I thought, they only pay lip service to religion. The poor buggers couldn’t understand what was going on. They’d buried Rosie as an Anglican yet here was her sister coming out with all this ‘Our Lady’ Catholic stuff. Ernie Sutton, though not a Catholic, would have known what to do or at least what to say, but he’d had to go back to the East London cemetery to bury a couple of little ’uns from Upton Park. It was diphtheria, not bombs, as took them, so Ernie said.

‘Well, this is a bit of a bleedin’ turn-up,’ Nobby Clarke said to me, as he watched his wife go over to Lily and gently touch her hair. ‘Barmy, if you ask me, mate. But, then, that’s women for you, ain’t it?’

‘Yes . . .’

I looked across into the trees and saw that the raised voices around the camp were beginning to attract attention. Men in uniform moved towards us with rapid, military steps.

Chapter Three

I
know a lot about desperation in wartime. In the first lot it mainly afflicted us soldiers. My own belief is that the human brain just isn’t capable of taking in the level of horror you find on a battlefield so it sort of switches itself over to a different channel, like changing the programme on the wireless, as we used to do before this war began. For some, that different programme is disappearing into a dream world but for others, like me, it’s running, or rather trying to run, as far away from that horror as it can. Some take refuge in their religion. I’ve fought beside blokes who could see the Virgin Mary or an angel right in front of their faces. Not even my mates were immune. Almost the last thing an old Jewish pal of mine said to me was that he’d seen a rabbi moving among the dead in the mud, all robed up and floating three feet off the ground. My pal, like the people who were now flocking to Epping Forest to see Lily Lee and her ‘miracle’, was convinced that what he had seen meant something good. He died the next morning and the Great War dragged on for another two years.

A lot had happened since Rosie’s funeral the previous Thursday. For a start-off, or so it was said, the Military Police had been obliged to cut down on their other duties in favour of crowd control. The forest around Eagle Pond was, apparently, packed out, not just with the inevitable crop of newspaper reporters but with thousands of Londoners and lots of other people from all over. Every one of them wanted the same thing: some sign from the Virgin Mary that the end of the bombing was at hand. No one wants to live with the fear we have – no one. It was a busy day for me the following Monday when I heard our family priest, Father Burton, enter the shop.

‘Hello, Father,’ I heard Doris reply, to the priest’s customary dour greeting. ‘Mr Hancock’s just about to go out. He’s laying to rest poor old Mrs Ewers – don’t know whether you knew her but—’

‘It’s not really Mr Hancock I’ve come to see,’ I heard Father Burton say. ‘It’s Mrs Hancock and Miss Nancy.’

‘Oh, well, that’s nice,’ Doris said. ‘The ladies like to have company, ’specially, yours, I know, Father.’

‘Just want to make sure that none of my parishioners is getting hoodwinked by this nonsense up in Epping Forest.’

‘Oh, the Gypsy with the—’

‘The Gypsy no one has been able to wrest from her filthy tent since her so-called vision last week,’ the priest said stiffly. ‘As if a savage like that would be granted the privilege of miracles! She’s not been to see a priest or a divine of any sort since this all began. It’s most irregular. How can the Bishop make a judgement about such a thing without talking to the person involved? Now, or so I hear, the Gypsy camp is awash with the ignorant and gullible, touching the tree the girl was staring at and, no doubt, being roundly fleeced by the Gypsies for doing so!’

‘I’ll go and tell Mrs Hancock you’re here, Father,’ Doris said, as she pushed her way through the black curtains at the back of the shop and into the place where we sometimes keep our deceased. Most people, of course, keep their dear departed at home with them until the day of the funeral. But sometimes, as in Rosie Lee’s case and with bombing victims too mangled for their families to bear, that isn’t always possible. So I have, not a nice posh Chapel of Rest like some more prosperous firms, but something as close as I can afford to it. I was just reaching over to retrieve the lid of May Ewers’s coffin when Doris went past me towards the stairs. Knowing how I feel about priests and suchlike, she mouthed at me, ‘Miserable old git,’ and I smiled.

The tiny shrunken woman in the coffin had been, it was said, a music-hall hall singer in the years before drink took up her every waking moment. I’d known her a bit and she was a loud, coarse and funny old girl. She’d had no family, which was why she was on her own with me in our room. Just before I put the lid over her dried-up old mug I leaned in to the coffin and said, ‘Tell you what, May, I’ll go up to the forest after work and see what’s going on for both of us, shall I? If Father Burton doesn’t like it, it must be quite a carry-on.’

I was intrigued, I admit. Work and family commitments had meant that I hadn’t been able to get far beyond the shop for some days. But now I had some time I resolved to go and find out what was going on. I thought I might also collect some twigs for the fire while I was at it.

I called out into the yard for Arthur to bring me a handful of nails.

You see some sights, these days, but nothing had prepared me for what met my eyes around Eagle Pond. There were thousands of them, men – some in uniform and some in civvies – women, children, mostly sitting when I arrived, in that way they do when they’re sheltering down the Underground. Waiting. The nippers were playing with their few little toys, occasionally whining, the women knitting, drinking tea, the blokes leaning up against the trees, smoking. It’s true that on the Underground fights do sometimes break out between people, women mainly, over choice little bits of platform, but when a raid is on it can be quiet like this.