After the Mourning (8 page)

‘Yes. It’s amazing.’

Apart from Nan and Miss O’Dowd, we all chatted companionably until the Duchess suggested that perhaps Hannah and I might like to walk around while she sat with ‘the girls’. ‘You know that Lily’s father has a dancing bear,’ she said to me, as I bent down to bid her goodbye. ‘There’s plenty of card-reading and perhaps Miss Jacobs would like to see the Head.’

‘Yes, Duchess. We’ll see. Don’t get too cold out here, will you?’

‘Francis, please don’t fuss,’ she said as she waved us on our way.

I noticed that Hannah had frowned at my mention of the Head but I rolled my eyes to the sky and indicated that we should set off quickly while we could.

Once we were out of sight of my family I took one of Hannah’s hands.

‘Had your pocket picked yet, have you?’ she said.

I smiled. ‘No.’

‘How much they fleece you for a butcher’s at the dancing bear?’

‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘I haven’t seen him – this time. But I have spoken to Lily Lee.’

‘The Gyppo gifted with visions.’

‘If you want to put it like that, yes.’

‘She’s a fake,’ Hannah said. ‘And?’

I put my hand into my pocket and took out my fags. ‘I want to say yes,’ I said, ‘but not because of the visions. She just did a dreadful parlour trick for the Duchess and myself, a head on a table . . .’

‘Oh, the Egyptian Head. I know the bloke who does that,’ Hannah said dismissively.

‘Do you?’

‘David Green, calls himself the Wazir of the Pharaohs. His family lived next door to my auntie Esther in the Montefiore Buildings on Canon Street Road. Me and David was quite close as kids. Slimy thing when he grew up, mind. Been doing the halls with his magic act for years.’

Magicians are close about the secrets of their trade so I knew that if I asked, and even though I was a mate of Hannah’s, this Green bloke wouldn’t tell me how the Head trick worked. But I felt I’d like to see another version of it so that I had something to compare with what Lily was doing.

‘Do you know where David Green is playing at the moment?’ I asked.

‘No, but I can find out,’ Hannah said. ‘He ain’t no oil painting, though, David Green. You have been warned. Short, fat, bald and sweaty.’ She pulled a face. ‘Weird, he is, not in a nice way.’

She seemed disturbed, but then she said, ‘Not like you.’

It wasn’t easy getting away from the hordes in the clearing around the pond – there were even people camped among the trees. But after stepping over whole families of knitting women, not to mention numberless dirty-faced kids, we eventually came to a spot where we could be relatively private. I put my arms around Hannah and kissed her.

‘You know I charge extra for doing it out of doors, don’t you?’ she said, once I’d disengaged myself. ‘You get leaves and twigs in your clothes and up your wotsit.’

I laughed. I hadn’t paid Hannah in the accepted sense for years. I take her out, get her some coal, slip her the odd coupon when I can, and I’ve paid her rent on a couple of occasions when she couldn’t. But I never pay to sleep with her. I give her what I can and I’d do that whether she slept with me or not. I love her.

‘Oh, I don’t want to do anything, love,’ I said, as I cleared some grass for us to sit on under an oak tree. ‘Just being alone with you is nice.’

Hannah brushed away a few stray leaves before she sat down, pouting her red lips with distaste. She’s a proper city girl and not too fond of the countryside. But once we’d sat down and lit our fags, Hannah settled, and even sighed contentedly when I moved her head on to my shoulder. I was about to close my eyes for a few minutes when something caught my attention further and deeper into the forest. It started as a flash of red. It might have been anything – a bird, a discarded blanket blowing through the trees – but it was a person, wearing something red, and as it and the other less distinct body beside it moved closer, I saw that the red thing was Lily Lee’s dress.

‘Leave me be!’ I heard her say, followed by the low, if indistinct, rumble of a man’s voice in reply.

‘That’s the girl who has the visions,’ I murmured to Hannah.

Hannah looked in the direction of the voices, then turned back to me. ‘Who’s she with?’

I shook my head. ‘I don’t know.’

Closer to us now, I heard Lily again: ‘I’m saying nothing because there’s nothing to say! I can’t help you, leave me be!’

‘Lily!’ The voice was loud but it wasn’t unpleasant.

‘No!’

‘Lily, no one’s going to get hurt. I promise!’

‘No!’

She ran straight past Hannah and me, but she didn’t see us. Her dress was pulled down at the neck and I looked at Hannah, who returned my gaze knowingly. ‘Someone up to something she shouldn’t,’ she said.

But I wasn’t sure. What Lily had said to the man struck me as more of a refusal to give aid rather than lack of desire for sexual relations. Not that the man appeared to follow her. Maybe he knew that Hannah and I were in the area. Or maybe he didn’t want to get involved in the great mass of people we could now see swarming towards and around the young woman in red – hundreds of them, trying to touch her, asking her, ‘Has Our Lady told you when it’s all going to end?’ or ‘Ask Our Lady about our Derek, please – will you, Lily, darling?’

‘Christ, H, this is barmy,’ Hannah said.

‘Yes,’ I agreed. But inside I recognised that I felt different. Apart from the blokes I knew who claimed to have seen things in the first lot, I, like millions of old soldiers, know the story of the Angel of Mons. Quite what was seen by the British troops in the skies above that battlefield in 1914 no one can know. Some said it was an angel, some a whole company of the things; others had seen St George and there were even blokes who claimed it was all down to King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. But somehow the Hun were held back during that battle and thousands of our lads were spared. Whether it’s true or not hardly matters. The Angel of Mons gave people hope and, if you discount the enemy soldiers involved, it or they hadn’t hurt anyone. Lily’s Lady, Our Lady of the Pond or whatever people might choose to call her, seemed to me to be in the same category – or, rather, she was for the time being. A chill wind was sweeping into Epping Forest that wasn’t entirely due to winter coming on. Its origin, I felt, was in the uncertainty I’d experienced when I’d watched Lily having her first vision – the sense that I didn’t know what I was witnessing.

We left the forest at just before five. The light was beginning to go, and the Duchess and Nan were anxious not to be caught far away from home if or when the bombers came over. Neither of them had ever been inside a public shelter and they didn’t plan to do so now.

‘You can’t breathe in some of them places for the smell of, you know, the toilet,’ Miss O’Dowd said, to my scandalised sister, as we all made our way back to my car. ‘And there’s women down there no better than they should be, allowing men all sorts!’

Hannah and I, following the Duchess and the other two women, gripped each other, laughing silently. What Miss O’Dowd would have done had she known about Hannah I didn’t dare think about and as for my sister . . .

‘Oh, blimey, it’s a hearse!’ I heard Miss O’Dowd say, as we all turned into the Snaresbrook Road and she beheld the Lancia.

‘Well, you know our Frank’s an undertaker, Dolly,’ Nan said, in my defence.

‘I can’t get in no hearse! I thought you said your brother had a car!’

‘He does. It is a car,’ Nan said.

Miss O’Dowd crossed her arms across her chest and shook her curly red head in disapproval. ‘Oh, no, Nan,’ she said. ‘I can’t get in there. Hearses are for the dear departed. I’ll get the bus.’

‘It is getting dark, my dear,’ the Duchess said, as she tapped Miss O’Dowd’s arm. ‘I don’t think we should leave you here alone.’

‘I’ll be all right, Mrs Hancock,’ Miss O’Dowd replied, with only a tiny shudder at my mother’s foreign touch. ‘I’ve got me rosary and a St Christopher for journeys, and with Our Lady so close by, I can’t come to no harm, I don’t think.’

‘Not bothered that the visions might be part of that Gypsy magic the priests say come straight from the devil?’ I couldn’t resist asking.

Not that Dolly O’Dowd gave me an answer: she just stuck her nose in the air, told Nan she’d see her at Mass on Sunday, then headed off up towards the Eagle pub.

The Duchess shrugged, then turned to Hannah. ‘Well, you, I hope, will accept a lift, Miss Jacobs. It is so cold and damp now. If I recall correctly, you live in Canning Town, don’t you?’

Hannah accepted my mother’s offer so I drove back through Forest Gate, Leyton, through Stratford and back into the rubble and filth that is now the Royal Docklands. One other thing I noticed from that drive was that people get thinner the closer you come to the river. Further south from Canning Town, right on the Thames, had to be home to people who were all but transparent, I thought.

Chapter Six

S
tella Hancock is my dad’s older brother Percy’s girl. In her early fifties, like our Nan, Stella is a spinster who, until that terrible night for her in late October 1940, lived with Uncle Percy in New City Road, Plaistow. There’s a lot of women Stella’s age without husbands or children. Victims, you could say, of the Great War, although not all of them see themselves in that light. My cousin Stella is one who does, her single misery displaying itself as a propensity to ‘nerves’. It didn’t take a great stretch of the imagination to picture what the ARP found when they dug out the stair cupboard Stella had been hiding in when the house next door took a direct hit.

‘I’ve never seen nothing like it,’ the warden, a local tailor in his other life, said. ‘Stood up with her hands braced agin the ceiling of the cupboard, hair on end, pinny in shreds, her gob wide open like a bleedin’ cod.’

‘There’s no sign of anyone else, I suppose?’ I asked, as Doris came into the shop with tea for the warden, Johnny Webb.

‘You mean your Uncle Percy?’ The warden shook his head sadly. ‘No, sorry, Mr H. Just your Stella, I’m afraid. Barmy as a coot too, which is why she’s down the cop shop.’

I waited for Doris to go before I asked, ‘But why didn’t they bring her here? The police know our family.’

‘Coppers only managed to stop her screaming half an hour ago.’ Johnny moved his head close to mine. ‘Look, Mr H,’ he said, ‘it’s up to you. I’m just here to tell you because I think you should have the choice – you’re family. The coppers want to take your Stella up to Claybury. And we all know what that means.’ He sipped his tea noisily and appreciatively.

I breathed in deeply, then shuddered. Claybury is a grim Victorian asylum just to the north of Walthamstow. It’s where they take East-Enders when their minds break under the weight of the work and the poverty that follows almost everyone here from the cradle to the grave. With its ice-cold baths and the numerous other punishments available to the staff when patients fail to ‘behave’, Claybury is a place of nightmares for a madman like me. I know I could be put inside its walls within a heartbeat. Just one outburst in front of the wrong person would be enough. I felt myself sweat.

‘I’d better get over there, then,’ I said, as I took my jacket off the back of my chair and stood up. ‘Thanks for letting me know, Johnny.’ I shook his hand.

‘Oh, you’re welcome, Mr H,’ Johnny Webb replied, as he finished his drink and stood up too. ‘I’m so sorry I had to bring you such bad news. We’ll carry on looking for your uncle Percy, but . . .’ He shrugged.

‘I know.’

‘Well, I’d best be going and let you get on,’ he said. ‘Let me know how it goes with your Stella, won’t you, Mr H?’

‘I will.’

I patted him on the back as he left my dingy, boarded-up premises. A lot of people criticise the ARP and sometimes with good cause but, like any group of people, you have good, bad and on occasion villains too. Like most people, I’ve heard stories about wardens looting bombed-out houses. But that’s not Johnny Webb. Like me, he just wants to get on with his job and his life and make enough money to feed his family. Unlike me, he still has one window left in his shop.

‘You’ve got them two sisters up Green Street, Bella and Alice Goring, at twelve,’ Doris said, as she came back into the shop carrying the business diary.

Green Street, even using the horse-drawn hearse, is only a few minutes from the shop so if Arthur and Walter got busy preparing the vehicle and I got my skates on, I could get over to the police station to see how Stella was before the Goring sisters’ funeral. After all, if she was really bad I’d have to let them take her to Claybury. If she wasn’t I’d speak to the Duchess and the girls about her billeting in with us. They’d welcome her, I knew. Even if she was barmy they’d take her. I just wasn’t sure whether
I
could take her if she was screaming or crying all the time.

I put my hat on and said to Doris, ‘I’ve got to go out for a bit. I’ll be back at eleven.’

Doris frowned. ‘Yes . . .’

‘Tell Arthur and Walter I want the hearse and the horses spick and span by the time I get back,’ I said. ‘Make sure the lads are well supplied with tea, won’t you, Doris? It’s cold out there today.’

I know some of the blokes up at Plaistow police station. One of the constables, Fred Bryant, has held a torch for our Doris for some time. He knows she’s married but he pops in to ‘say hello’ from time to time. He’s more than a bit of an idiot. Not that I had come to see Fred this time. I went straight to his guv’nor, Sergeant Hill, who took me to a small room at the back of the building, which was quiet, he said.

‘We’ve one of the nurses from Samson Street Hospital with her,’ Sergeant Hill said, as he opened the door on Stella, who was staring straight ahead of her like a person in a waking dream. ‘She’s calmed down a bit now, but you’ll just have to see what you think, Mr Hancock.’

In her younger days, Stella had been blonde like our Aggie. Now her hair was a sort of soft grey, which wasn’t unattractive, even if the straight cut she had on it was far from flattering. But thin and largely disregarded, by everyone but her own, Stella was, like Nan, pretty worn down and haggard now. First I smiled at the little young nurse beside her, then took one of my cousin’s hands and said, ‘Hello, Stel, you’ve been in the wars a bit, haven’t you, love?’