England's Lane (2 page)

On the small table in that vile little room, I had set out all of my things. Coty powder and lipstick. A little bottle of scent that Eunice had given to me—Paris Soir. I still have the bottle, kept it all these years. There is a tiny very dark residue at its base, and the label now is yellowed. My brand-new nightgown—so terribly pretty. Pink, with little satinette bows at the neckline and a sort of ruching to the cuffs. Saved up coupons for, oh—it seemed like just ever. I didn't even get to putting it on. He just came at me, Jim. He still was wearing his boots. This was not, I remember thinking, how Clark Gable would generally go about things. Anyway—never mind: it was over.

Up until this time, I had been living with Eunice in a couple of rooms with kitchenette and shared bathroom above Amy's the hairdresser in England's Lane. She had begged me not to do it—marry Jim. But I didn't listen. I don't know why I didn't listen—hers was the only opinion I would have respected, and always I knew how very much she loved me. It's not as if I even wanted to, particularly. She didn't have a boyfriend, Eunice—and that was very surprising in itself, because she was always the better-looking of us,
and by a good long way. Two years older than I, and quite the beauty. All the mashers would give her the eye—but it was always me she linked arms with, me who went with her to the Odeon, the Gaumont, the Empire. I only realized—how very stupid I was—I only realized after my ridiculous wedding that I would be living apart from her, that no longer would we be able to share our sisterly little rituals—and that instead I'd be with Jim, in the flat above his ironmonger's. In the very same street—that was the funny thing. Maybe that's how we came to meet …? I honestly can't remember. Anyway, the ironmonger's was all boarded up for the duration, and he was away in the army, thank God. So I did go on living with Eunice. It was all as if nothing had happened. “Yes,” she said, “but when the war is finally over, it'll be different. I'll lose you. When Jim comes home.” I looked at her with love. I took her hand and touched her hair. “Well,” I said. “Maybe he won't.”

But he did, of course. Many didn't, so very many didn't, but Jim was only in Minehead, you see. And so he did. But before all that of course, there was the bombing. God knows we had already had to withstand so very much ceaseless bombardment. It is really so awfully hard—impossible, really—to explain to anyone who has not themselves been through such a thing … but after a while, when you've had night after night of it, there comes upon you a sort of peace, an inner serenity. Sounds so mad—but I talked to Eunice about it, one of those terrible nights, and she agreed with me, Eunice, she agreed with what I said. At the very start of the war, back in '39, we all of us were quite terrified, of course. Even on the day that Chamberlain told us that now we were at war with Germany—beautiful morning, warm summer sunshine, it's not at all a day you could ever forget—within hours the blessed siren was setting up its wailing. Londoners, I think, they all thought that their number was up. Nothing happened, though—nothing happened
for a good long time, and that's when people started laughing about it all. Calling it “the phony war” and saying that the blasted politicians had worried us half out of our wits, and all for nothing. I knew quite a lot of people—Marion, who sometimes worked in Mr. Levy's greengrocer's, Eunice's friend from work, and another woman I used to meet most mornings on the train—who straightaway went to collect their children from wherever they had been evacuated to, and only just a few weeks earlier. But soon it started. There was nothing phony about it then. And once it had begun, no one could ever see an end to it. Except when London would be engulfed in a firestorm, and all of us must die: it's only a matter of when.

I suppose, though, that it was the very regularity of the bombing that after a while made us see things quite differently. We had got through another night somehow—well hadn't we? So who's to say we can't do it again? There entered into our standard resilience a reckless sort of bravado: Come on Hitler! Do your worst! We can take it! All that sort of thing. Which I think, on reflection, is far from healthy, overall. When the Blitz took grip, Eunice and I, at the first great mournful rising moan of the siren, would pick up the battered old suitcase that we always kept packed with all our little essentials, and hurry to the cellar. It was, of course, quite awful down there. Well it was where we kept the coal, after all, and all sorts of broken chairs and other bits of rubbish you never have time to get rid of. We had put down a few blankets and there was a hurricane lamp and a paraffin heater that always made me feel so very queasy. And piles of old
Womans
and
Woman's Own
s from the salon just above us. I may be painting a cozy little picture, but believe me, it was very far from that. We really hated sitting down there—and more often than not it would be for the whole of the night: only at dawn would you hear the all-clear. And so one evening, later
than usual, when it all started up again, Eunice and I, we just looked at one another, and I think we must have had exactly the same thought at the identical moment. “Blow it,” she said. “I'm not going down. I just can't face going down there again. I'm staying here. If they get us, they get us.” I had just washed my hair, I remember, and was trying to dry it with a towel in front of just the one bar of the fire—that meter, I am telling you, it just ate up the shillings. And so we didn't. We simply stayed upstairs, trying not to wince at the whistle and then the crumping of bombs, some of then falling really rather close. At the summit of Primrose Hill, you see, which is awfully near, there were anti-aircraft guns, and always these were a target. And from that night on, we never went down to the cellar again. So you see what I mean: reckless, very, and goodness we were lucky, because Mr. Lawrence, the newsagent, he took a direct hit, completely took the roof off, and he's only just three doors down. He wasn't hurt, though—just a few scratches miraculously, thank the Lord.

We were very different, really—my sister and me. Well we were in some ways, anyway—mentally generally in tune, more like twins in that respect—but she was always so much more … how can I say? Feminine, I suppose, for want of a better expression. Very dainty in the movement of her hands—always smelling sweetly of Lily of the Valley. She had a way with tweezers that made her eyebrows always just so. She even used eyeshadow, which I thought was very racy. Me, I could never really be bothered. I'm not saying I wasn't always very nicely turned out—my costumes were very becoming, and I could never abide a laddered nylon. But with Eunice, her grace and beauty seemed to come from within—all the cosmetics merely a perfectly natural extension of it, if that isn't contradictory. And when it became clear, early on in the war, that all we women were required to do our bit, I didn't at all mind being shunted off to Hayes every morning on the five o'clock train, there to inspect
twenty-five-pound field guns, if you please! And we were even sworn to secrecy as to the exact location. But Eunice, oh dear me no: she was having none of all that sort of very unladylike malarkey. She eventually secured a job in Marshall & Snelgrove for the duration, advising hard-put housewives on how best to eke out their precious clothing coupons—taught them how, in terms of dressmaking, making do and mending—to quite literally cut their coat according to their cloth. Often she'd bring home a few remnants and fashion them into the most extraordinary creations: flair, that's what she had. Me, I would just have consigned all those very unpromising scraps of material to the duster drawer.

And so we went along. I had more or less forgotten that I was a married woman: it didn't seem real to me. Often Eunice and I would go to a Lyons' Corner House or maybe a matinee at the pictures with a couple of lads—but they were very nice fellows: never a hint of monkey business, nothing of that sort. You could trust a boy in those days. Eunice, of course—she could have had any man she tipped her hat at, but she was never really very interested, much to all the soldiers' very visible disappointment. It would happen one day, she said. One day, Milly, when I'm not even looking, then the right man for me will come my way, and I'll know it—I'll just know it, the moment I look at him. And that, you know, is just exactly the way it happened.

David, his name was—a very nicely educated young man just two years her senior. He taught English and history at a boys' preparatory school in Fitzjohn's Avenue. I took to him immediately—and although the schooling that Eunice and I had had was nothing particularly special, nothing too out of the way, I have always upheld the supreme importance of a good education. Youngsters, they need to be led out of themselves—they need to be astounded by possibilities. I always did vow that if ever I were to be blessed with children
(a thing I yearned for—and the only point of getting married in the first place, so far as I could see) then I would move heaven and earth to make sure that they got off to the very best start in life. David lived just a few streets away with a couple of bachelor pals, both of them teachers—and one of them, Thomas, made it perfectly clear that he regarded me as something rather out of the ordinary. We had picnics on Primrose Hill in the shadow of the guns, the four of us. Thomas would read us poems—Clare, Keats, that sort of thing. It was a happy time, in the midst of dangerous days. Then the war, it just came to an end. I don't know that we truly believed it ever would. And suddenly now it was VE Day—and oh that was a time, that was a time and no mistake. All the emotions you'd expect: the laughter, the happiness. And then the crying. Confusing—it confused me, and I suppose I could hardly be alone in that. It was then that I told Thomas that I was in fact married. It had not occurred to me to do so earlier, just as I am sure it had not so much as crossed his mind that I might be. He was very civil about it all, I must say. Such a very nice young man. Frightfully handsome. Still think of him sometimes. So anyway, that was the last I ever saw of Thomas … and then I got a telegram from Jim. He was coming home the following Tuesday from Minehead. When he would reopen his ironmonger's in England's Lane and we both would live (“so very cozy,” is the way he put it) in the flat above, as man and wife. I stared at the telegram for such a long time. It contained no fewer than three errors of spelling. When I saw him again, I realized I had not thought of him at all. He had very recently grown a sort of mustache, which was repellent. He wears it still. His demob suit, gray pepper-and-salt, was rather too small. He puts it on when people get married … he puts it on if someone should die.

David and Eunice were married in 1947, and one year later little Paul was born. David by this time was a deputy housemaster at a
small private school just outside of Reading, and they all lived in the dearest little cottage there. Eunice and I, we didn't see nearly so much of each other as I would have liked—but there: she had a husband, a home and a little boy to look after, so I quite understood. I never really had a chance to get at all close to little Paul, not at first—saw him only at Christmas and a few odd days over the summer holidays when I'd go down and stay with them. In a way that was maybe a good thing because by this time it had been made clear to us that Jim was not able for fatherhood. There had been tests. So that was that, really. No point crying about it. Many during the war had to overcome far worse things than that. So you just muck in and carry on, don't you? Nothing else for it.

David and Eunice had been out for a spin in the brand-new dark blue Humber that David was paying for on the hire purchase scheme. In her letters, Eunice told me how every Sunday morning he would be washing and then waxing it, buffing it up with a shammy to a bright and mirror shine. I was in the cottage taking care of Paul; Jim was back in London in the ironmonger's, doing whatever it is that Jim habitually does there; I never did ask him to accompany me, and he had never offered. I had not before been in the cottage all on my own, and I was admiring all of Eunice's little knickknacks and the way she had made each of the rooms so very welcoming and gay. They had a gramophone and everything. Soon they were going to put a down payment on a refrigerator. I was nervous, I remember, about being in sole charge of an infant—because Paul, he could only have been eighteen months, not even eighteen months old in those days. But Eunice had told me not to worry—that once he was fed and changed, he was as good as gold. And he was, he really was—good as gold: no trouble at all.

When I answered the door, the policeman—he had tears in his eyes. He asked me to sit down, and he seemed himself upon the
brink of collapse. In the days that followed, those terrible days and nights that followed, I was given a few more dribs and drabs of awful information. The car had veered off the road—some said to avoid an oncoming lorry, though other reports suggested defective steering on the Humber—and careered into the parapet of a bridge across a river. The car just hung there, literally in the balance, as the local police had tried to locate the necessary machinery and expertise to right and steady it so as to be able to cut the passengers from amid the twist of the thing. They both, dear souls, had sustained injuries: more than that I was not told. And then the balustrades just suddenly crumbled—buckled, gave way, the car pitching over the edge in the full sight of the despairing and helpless police and ambulancemen. After far too long, frogmen were sent into the water, but by that time, of course … but I pray, you know—I still do pray that Eunice, my dear dear sister Eunice, was no longer conscious as the car just teetered there. Her thoughts, otherwise, would have been far too terrible for me now to even contemplate. To know that Paul was to be left all alone … and that the child within her would now never be born; she had been hoping for a little girl, and she was going to call her Margaret. When the policeman had left the cottage … I decided to postpone the welter of tears, to close the door, if only for a short time, on all the racking agony to come … and I went to look at Paul, asleep in his cot. And although I neither touched him nor made even the slightest noise, he woke up immediately. He looked full at me, and smiled. It was Eunice's smile, and I had fallen in love with him.