London (164 page)

The surprise came just after the old lady had left, when Mr Silversleeves took the couple to one side. “My mother has entrusted me with your wedding present,” he explained, “and I am to hand it over to you in person. It is a cheque.”

It was for six hundred pounds.

“But . . . I can’t!” Jenny cried. “I mean, just for doing my job and looking after her . . . .”

“She is most insistent that you accept it,” he said. “Those are my instructions.” And he gave her a particular smile which she could only have understood had she known what, when he, too, had protested at the amount, the old lady had told him.

So Jenny and Percy were married and bought a little house up in Crystal Palace. It pleased Jenny that she could look right across London to the place where the old lady had been so good to her.

A still greater surprise to them both, however, occurred the following spring. At first Jenny said nothing. After another month, a little alarmed that something was wrong with her, she went to see a doctor. When she told him it was impossible, he assured her that it was not. And when, that night, she consulted Percy, he first stared, then burst out laughing.

For his own part, he knew that he had lied to her about his ability to have children, but the other part he had not foreseen and their son was born that summer.

The eminent Mr Tyrrell-Ford of Harley Street had been talking through his hat.

THE BLITZ

1940

MORNING

“I was born lucky, I suppose.” By rights Charlie Dogget should have been dead some hours ago.

The sun was already up. Overhead there was a pale blue sky. Charlie looked up as they drove across Tower Bridge and saw dozens of seagulls wheeling about over the river and filling the air with their cries. He and the other firemen had taken their helmets off, glad after their long, hot vigil to feel the cool morning air on their faces. Behind them smoke was still rising from the fires all over the East End and the City. They had just endured another night of Hitler’s Blitz – and, in Charlie’s case, they had seen a miracle.

But then when you thought about it, things had always turned out all right for the cheerful cockney with the white flash in his hair. Even in the hard days in the East End, he had always seen the bright side. Take his father and his Auntie Jenny. “Your rich Auntie Jenny doesn’t want to know us any more. Never even invited us to her wedding,” his father would always say. It was a refrain he had heard a thousand times. But she used to send them Christmas presents and to Charlie her very existence was a sort of inspiration. If one of the family could get out of the East End and get on in the world, then so, he felt, could he.

He could understand why his father and most of the men he knew were bitter. There wasn’t enough regular employment in the docks and even when you got a job, you weren’t safe. One day his father had been sacked for just looking at a foreman. “What are you looking at me for?” the foreman had shouted. “You’re off!” And his father had never been able to work in that yard again. It was the same all over the docks and people heard that conditions in other industries, like the mines, were even harsher.

Of course, if you had a skill, life could be much better. His best friend when he was a boy had become a plasterer. He had an uncle in that trade who’d got him into a company where he’d served his apprenticeship. He’d done well and was living outside the East End now. But Charlie never quite had the patience for something like that. “I’ll take my chances in the docks,” he’d said. “You’ll never get out,” his friend had told him. But he was wrong there. “I got kicked out, and into a better life,” Charlie would declare cheerfully.

His marriage to Ruth – what a row there had been! It was one thing for his father to have Jewish friends in Whitechapel, but when he fell for Ruth, that was quite another matter. Some of his own friends warned him: “They’re still foreign, Charlie. They’re not like us.” But the real trouble came from Ruth’s father. He was a small, bald man with pale blue eyes, who had his own little business. He had always been friendly enough before, but now he would start shouting whenever he caught sight of Charlie. “‘A thief’ he called me,” Charlie reported. “Said I was stealing Ruth from her faith.”

“He’s right, actually,” his father had pointed out. “You’d better leave it alone, son. You’re meddling where you shouldn’t.”

“Doesn’t seem to worry Ruth,” Charlie replied.

When they had married, Ruth’s family had cut her off entirely. Even her childhood friends deserted her, and she had told him: “Charlie, I want to get out.” It was Charlie’s friend the plasterer who had come up with an acquaintance with lodgings in Battersea: three upstairs rooms in a house just below what had still, until a generation ago, been the open fields of Lavender Hill. Both of them had been nervous about the move. Charlie wasn’t sure what it would be like moving into an area where he wasn’t known and as for Ruth, she had never lived in a place which had no Jewish community, though as fair-haired, blue-eyed Mrs Charlie Dogget, she fitted in easily.

Once again, Charlie felt he’d fallen on his feet. While Ruth got a job at a piano factory nearby, he found work on the buses. And best of all, after a year or two, he managed to get them a nice little house to rent in the safest part of the area. The Shaftesbury Estate was a well-run community of workmen’s houses, set up by the philanthropic Lord Shaftesbury for respectable workers and artisans. By the time their first child was born, things were looking up for Charlie.

In general, however, things were not all that much better for the working man. The Trades Unions had slowly improved things for working folk, and their representatives, the Labour Party, had become so numerous in Parliament that they could now be in a position to form a government. But in the difficult years after the Great War jobs were still scarce, money short. Some people hoped for a complete change to a socialist state and Charlie had heard a wonderful speech once by a man called Carpenter, a member of the socialist Fabian Society, who had promised a bright new world. But like most Londoners of the working classes, Charlie was a bit sceptical. “I don’t know about a revolution,” he would say, “but I’d like to see some better pay and conditions for the working man.”

Only once had he come out on a big strike and that was the General Strike of 1926. The whole Trades Union movement had done so in sympathy for the coal miners who they felt, with justification, were being shabbily treated. “We’ll come out, of course,” he told Ruth. “I mean you have to.” But he had a feeling it wouldn’t do any good. He had been a bus conductor on the 137 route then, that went south from central London all the way out to Crystal Palace. The day before the strike he had taken a pair of brothers down from there. Respectable working men, he remembered, one a tailor and one a clerk.

“If you stop working, we shall walk to work,” they had told him. “You won’t stop us.” If the tailors and clerks and the rest of them were against the strikers, he didn’t think they’d get far. The bright young things of the upper classes also did their bit to break the strike. He had been walking with another busman up on Clapham Common when they had seen a 137 bus careering around it, driven by a young man and with a fair-haired girl conductor hanging gaily out of the back. “There’s no passengers,” his friend had remarked. “People are expressing solidarity with the working class.” But Charlie was not so sure. Would anyone get on, with that young idiot driving, he wondered?

The General Strike collapsed in less than ten days. Slowly, however, there were some signs of improvement. Modern factories like the Hoover factory, or the huge Ford Motor works east of London had been bringing jobs and steady wages to the capital. Houses had electricity, country roads were properly surfaced, people were driving cars – though as the smell in any London street would tell you, there were still plenty of horses and carts about. Progress was being made, inch by inch. There was still a Union Jack, and an empire, and a king, a good and modest fellow on the throne. “It’s not all bad, is it?” Charlie would say.

On this September morning they turned west at the southern end of Tower Bridge and drove along the line of the Thames. They passed Westminster and looked across at the comforting sight of the great tower of Big Ben. As they came to Lambeth they could see the four huge chimneys of Battersea Power Station a mile ahead of them across the railway lines and goods yards of Vauxhall.

And the vehicle that these gallant firemen were driving was, like the majority of fire vehicles in the Blitz, a London taxi.

In shape and dimensions it was actually a motorized version of the old horse-drawn hackney cab: roomy inside and highly manoeuvrable. Fitted up with ladders on the roof and pulling a trailer pump behind, it dodged about the burning streets rather effectively. Anyway, it was all that the Auxiliary Fire Service had. AFS volunteers like Charlie had been given a rigorous training by the London firemen so that, when the war began, a number were taken on at once as full-time members at three pounds a week. There had been teething problems: Charlie and his fellow recruits had been stationed for a while in an old building near Vauxhall where they had all caught fleas and scabies. More hurtful to morale had been the suggestion, in the early months of the war, that the auxiliary firemen had volunteered to dodge the army, and many had actually left. But the last few days were giving the despised firemen the chance to show their mettle. For in September 1940, a year after the war was officially declared, Hitler began his famous offensive to bring England to its knees: the Blitzkrieg upon London.

Charlie could remember the Kaiser’s war very well. There had been some Zeppelin raids on London then which had seemed shocking at the time. They’d all known of course that this time it would be a very different story, but even so, nothing could have prepared anyone for what was now taking place. The Blitz was not just a raid: it was an inferno. Night after night the bombs rained down on the docks. Sugar refineries, tar distilleries, more than a million tons of timber blazed, exploded and sent up walls of fire that the men in the converted taxis could scarcely hope to quench. But the most terrible fires of all that grim September had been the huge cylindrical tanks of oil that poured black smoke up into the atmosphere for days on end, and that could be seen almost a hundred miles away in the West Country.

Up on the roof of one oil tank last night, Charlie had not heard the warning cries of the men below. The first he saw of the Messerschmitt was when it was about five hundred yards away and coming straight for him. More from instinct than anything else, he did the only thing he could and pointed the hose at the pilot as he came. No one was sure how it was that Charlie was still there three seconds later as the fighter wheeled up into the air again.

“That’s funny! I thought being a fireman was supposed to be safer than going in the bleeding army,” he remarked cheerfully as he came down. But as they made their way back to Battersea that morning the thought did occur to his friends that a man can only have just so much luck, and Charlie seemed to have used up rather a lot of his last night.

AFTERNOON

“Something wrong?”

Normally Helen slept another hour into the afternoon, so when she appeared in the drawing room at Eaton Terrace at only two o’clock, her mother looked up sharply. “Rest some more,” she continued.

“I can’t sleep.” There were rings under her eyes.

“Ah.” Violet said nothing for a moment, then gently enquired: “Same trouble as the other day?”

Driving an ambulance in the midst of so much horror and death, it was not surprising that Helen should occasionally be haunted by premonitions of death. Most of the time, she told her mother, she was too busy to think about it, but sometimes such thoughts visited her and she would give her mother’s arm an extra little squeeze of affection as she went off.

“You’ve had these feelings before,” Violet said softly. “And here you still are.”

“I know. I think I might go for a walk. Would you mind?”

“Of course not. Off you go.” A moment later, hearing the door bang, Violet was left alone with the silence. Only after a long pause, during which she heard nothing but the quiet ticking of the clock, did she allow herself to sigh.

She had lost one child already. Must she lose another?

Henry. Henry who had never forgiven her for the campaigning which had made him suffer at school, Henry who had supported old Edward against her when, in the eighteen months that she had been in and out of prison, the old man had Helen with him at Bocton. “He’s given the family a home,” he had said to her bitterly. “You haven’t.” Yet despite that, it had been Henry who had come to visit her in prison. No one else from the family had.

Over a quarter-century had passed since that time, yet to Violet now, at the age of seventy, it seemed only too painfully close. She had been imprisoned three times. A sort of fever gripped many in the movement at that time. Enraged by the cynical contempt shown by even the Liberals, some of the movement had turned increasingly to acts of carefully calculated outrage. Several houses, including Lloyd George’s, had been burned down. Emily Wilding Davison had even thrown herself in front of the king’s horse during a race and been killed. With her father implacable at Bocton and her sons against her, she remembered telling a colleague: “I may as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb.” A week later at a demonstration she had been arrested again. Three months in prison that time, but in company with a dozen other women she knew. What a camaraderie they had felt! Soon after they were released, they had all been put in gaol again – six pale, determined women, shamefully treated in their fight against a cruel injustice.

Henry had come to see her then. A week later – dear God, she would remember
that
to her dying day – they had gone on hunger strike. She had never known what real hunger could feel like. And then the awful force-feeding: the powerful hands dragging open her clenched jaw; the threats to break her teeth. That cruel tube rammed down her throat, the awful searing agony, her throttled screams, the raw, burning pain that remained in her throat, hour after hour, until they came to do it again. The third time she fainted.