Perseverance Street (32 page)

‘I’ve been having a word with your father, Charlie, about this Italian chap.’

‘Mum, you haven’t told him about Christopher, have you?’

‘Of course I haven’t, although your dad’d sooner chop his right arm off than get you into any trouble. He obviously knows you’re helping Lily, and he doesn’t approve. He thinks you should leave it to the police.’

‘Yes, I’m aware of that, Mum. So, what were you talking about?’

Mary went quiet for a few seconds as one would before revealing a piece of delicate information. ‘Well, I mentioned that this Italian chap might have had help from British fascists who had avoided being interned.’ She stopped there, as if worried about what to say next.

‘Right,’ said Charlie, ‘and …?’

‘And the reason I mentioned it, was to see if he might be able to help.’

‘Help? In what way could Dad help?’

Mary lowered her eyes under the curious gazes from the others. She smiled down at Christopher, then lifted him up to her face and kissed his forehead. Her love for him couldn’t have been any more had she been his real grandmother. When Mary looked up at them again, her lips had tightened as if she was steeling herself for what she had to say next. She turned her attention to Charlie.

‘Many
years ago, your dad was a member of the British Union of Fascists – in fact he was one of their Black Shirts for four years.’

‘What?’

‘I’m afraid so.’

‘My dad a fascist? No, Never!’

Mary continued, her voice quiet. ‘Your dad was totally convinced that Oswald Mosley was right. He took me to a meeting once. Mosley was amazingly charismatic. Brilliant speaker, but there again so was Hitler.’ She looked at Lily and Dee. ‘We lived in London back then, which is why Charlie never fully acquired the Yorkshire accent.’

‘Did he convince you?’ Lily asked.

Mary shook her head. ‘No, not for a second, but I could see why he had so many followers. Tom and I argued about it night and day. It didn’t do our marriage much good.’

‘Mum,’ said Charlie, ‘how come I never knew about this?’

‘Because we never told you. To be honest, your dad and I were never really suited. We got married because …’

‘Because of me,’ Charlie said. ‘I had worked it out.’

Lily and Dee were now listening with interest, with both of them having married for the same reason. There was now a common bond between the three of them.

‘Yes, I thought you might,’ Mary said. ‘Don’t get me wrong. Tom Cleghorn’s a good man. In fact it’s probably because of him that I never remarried. I kept comparing other men to him and they didn’t come up to scratch. The trouble was, neither did your dad. This fascist nonsense was the last straw. I left him in 1933, a year after he joined.’

‘So,’ said
Charlie, struggling to take this in. ‘How long was he a member? How come he wasn’t interned in 1939?’

‘Tom left them well before then – in 1936. There was a big march in London that was opposed by communists, Jews and Irish dockers. A massive fight broke out and your dad apparently had a sort of road to Damascus moment. He ended up ripping off his black shirt and siding with the communists – typical Tom Cleghorn – he didn’t like the way things were going. He was arrested and ended up in a cell full of Jewish blokes. Good job he didn’t have his shirt on.’

She smiled at the memory. ‘You and I were living here by then, with your grandma and granddad.’

She looked at Lily and Dee and added, ‘They both died in 1939, within three months of each other.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ said Lily.

‘Oh, don’t be. Mum died first. Dad was no good without her – they had a beautiful marriage.’ She twinkled at Lily. ‘Some people do, you know. They left me with this house and quite a lot of money.’

‘Dad always reckoned he’d married above his station,’ put in Charlie. ‘Mum was privately educated, Dad was just a working-class charmer. Although he now runs a very profitable business.’

His mother
frowned. ‘Demolition wasn’t exactly the career I had mapped out for you. You could have been head of languages at one of the top public schools. Still could for that matter.’

‘I think I have a working-class soul, Mum,’ grinned Charlie.

‘You were telling us about Charlie’s dad,’ said Dee, eager to know where this story was going.’

‘Yes, of course. I read about the riots in the paper and knew Tom would be involved. The papers called it the Battle of Cable Street. The next thing I knew he was knocking on our door.’

‘What? He wanted to come back to you?’

‘Not specifically – I think he knew as well as I that we weren’t really suited. He took life far too seriously. Still does for that matter.’

‘Do you get on with him OK?’ said Lily.

‘Oh, yes. You’ve heard the old saying, “Absence makes the heart grow fonder” – in our case it’s distance.’

‘You were telling us about his fascist connections,’ said Dee, impatient that this story kept going off track.

‘Oh, yes. Well, Tom wanted a clean break from his life down in London. He left the British Union of Fascists and decided to come and live in Leeds to be near his boy. He asked if we could put him up for a few days while he got himself fixed up with somewhere to live.’

‘I remember that,’ said Charlie. ‘I wanted him to stay. Dad said it wouldn’t be a good idea but, if I wanted, I could go and work for him when he got his new demolition business up and running.’

‘You
said you’d mentioned to him about this Italian chap being a fascist,’ said Dee.

‘I did, yes. I mentioned that it was highly likely that he’d been helped by local people with fascist sympathies.’ She looked at them, one by one. ‘He told me about a Yorkshire farmer who lives in a place called Thorpe Newton, which isn’t far from Malton. He reckons this farmer’s a died-in-the-wool fascist.’

‘And Dad knows him, does he?’

‘He met him just once at a party rally in London about ten years ago,’ said Mary, smiling at a memory. ‘It was the name Thorpe Newton that stuck in Tom’s mind. Apparently Tom had two best pals at school, Edwin Thorpe and Tommy Newton. They got up to a lot of mischief together and the names Thorpe, Newton and Cleghorn were often linked by their teachers when investigating misdemeanours.’

‘Did the man’s name stick there as well?’ asked Dee hopefully.

‘I’m afraid not. Tom reckons it’s a family farm and the man’ll still be farming there. I’ve looked Thorpe Newton up on a map and it’s only a small village just off the A64. There can’t be too many farms near there.’

‘If he’s a member of the BUF he’ll have been interned, surely,’ said Charlie.

‘Not necessarily, according to your dad. Plenty of them escaped the net and with this man being a farmer it’s doubtful they’ll have looked too hard at him. On top of which it’s more than likely he’ll have kept his politics secret from his neighbours. Two hundred miles away in London he could shout his rubbish as loud as he liked, but it’d have got him into no end of trouble in a small village in Yorkshire.’

‘Do
we know what this man looks like?’ Lily asked, feeling her excitement mounting. It seemed that the door to Michael’s whereabouts had creaked open another inch.

‘Yes, he’s apparently a very big man. Needed a haircut, red face, big nose, well over six feet – six foot six maybe, with a build to suit. Probably in his forties by now. Liked his drink and after a couple of pints he was quite intimidating, according to Tom. Not a man you’d want to get on the wrong side of.’

‘Oh, great,’ said Lily, knowing what Charlie was like.

Charlie was smiling. He was glad his dad had come through with something useful. He hadn’t given up hope of them getting back together.

‘Well,’ he said. ‘If he’s not the one who was helping Mancini he probably knows who was. There can’t be too many fascists around that area. It’s just a question of persuading him to tell us what he knows.’

The three women exchanged glances. All of them aware of Charlie’s capabilities, and the punishment if he was caught.

‘Tread carefully, Charlie,’ warned Mary.

‘Don’t worry, Mum. I know what I’m doing.’

Two of the women were already worrying.

A phone call
to Jimmy confirmed that a lot of German prisoners were working on farms in the Thorpe Newton area, as had the Italians, but it was unlikely that Mancini would have worked there, with him being an officer.

‘I wouldn’t have expected him to work there,’ said Charlie. ‘In fact I wouldn’t expect they wanted to be seen together. Someone might have put two and two together and taken a closer look at the farmer. Are there any pubs in the Thorpe Newton area where this bloke might do his drinking? I gather he likes a drink.’

‘There’s only one pub in Thorpe Newton, the Star and Garter. I’ve had a few pints in there myself. Yeah, quite a few farmers get in. It might be an idea to call in and ask the landlord if he knows anyone who fits that description, but you’ll have to do your own asking, Charlie. This thing’s nearly cost me my stripes.’

‘Sorry about that, mate. Star and Garter at Thorpe Newton, do you say? Must try and remember that.’

Thorpe Newton was half a mile off the A64, just a few miles east of Malton. Charlie took Lily there in his van, leaving Dee to work her stall and Mary looking after Christopher. The road took them though the centre of York, a city Lily had only ever passed through, on a couple of coach trips to the coast with Larry. She persuaded Charlie to stop there for a while so she could take a look around. They drove past the Knavesmire – York racecourse – now a POW camp, then he took the van into the city centre and parked. Lily linked his arm as he showed her the Shambles, York Minster and Clifford’s Tower, inside which, in 1170, a hundred and fifty Jews were burned to death by the anti-semitic citizens of York. As Charlie told her the story Lily nodded, as if understanding the plight of the Jews.

‘I
kind of know what it’s like to be ostracised from society,’ she said, looking up at the tower perched on top of a high mound. ‘Maybe my neighbours would have tried to burn my house down, if I’d still been living in it.’

Charlie put an arm round her and she leaned into him. To both of them it felt right, but to Lily it also felt like betrayal of her dead husband and her missing son. She gave a short laugh.

‘Or am I being paranoid?’

‘Dunno,’ said Charlie, still holding her to him. ‘People do things they regret when it’s too late.’

‘Like sending Michael off with two people I hardly knew?’

‘Lily, I didn’t mean that.’

Her shoulders slumped. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry. It’s just on my mind every minute of every day.’

‘Which is why I’m trying to do something about it. We need to get Michael back so that you can get on with your life.’

She looked
up at him and smiled. ‘And then what? What do you have in mind for my life, Mr Cleghorn?’

Was she offering him a way to open up about his feelings for her? He was painfully aware of the turmoil boiling deep within her. That might confuse her; even turn her against him if he made any sort of advances.

‘I want whatever you want, Lily. It’s important to me that you get your happiness back.’

‘Charlie. I think that’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me.’

Anyone? Would that include Larry?
Charlie hoped so but didn’t say it.

They went to a café by the River Ouse for lunch. So far it had been the best day Lily had had since Larry went away. There was colour back in her cheeks and a spark about her that Charlie hadn’t seen before but he reckoned it had always been there; suppressed by the horrors of her recent life.

They both had roast beef and Yorkshire pudding – a rare delight in those days of rationing. Charlie suspected he might have a tough time ahead of him that afternoon and he’d always hated going into battle on an empty stomach. If this farmer did indeed know anything at all about the Italian officer and Lily’s son, Charlie was prepared to do whatever it took to extract from this man every piece of information he had. It was with this thought in mind that he wondered at the wisdom in bringing Lily along.

She’d insisted; that’s why she was here. And there was no way he could have told her she couldn’t come lest she witnessed a side of him she might not like. After they’d both cleared their plates he looked at her and said, ‘Lily, what we’re about to do might take some sort of force from me.’

‘I
suspected it might,’ she said.

‘Does this bother you?’

‘It will if you get hurt, Charlie.’

‘Hopefully it won’t come to that, but I want you to bear in mind one thing. If it comes to any sort of confrontation it’s not Charlie Cleghorn you’ll be seeing, it’ll be me putting on my psycho act. It took me a while to perfect it, and I know it’s scary, but it’s just an act, nothing more.’

‘Really? Are you a good actor?’

‘In the army it was part of my job to get information out of people. I was quite good at it.’

Lily thought about the information he’d got from Randle. ‘Yes, I imagine that’s true.’

‘But it’s just an act … to get Michael back.’

Lily got up to go, feeling that her enjoyment of this day was going to take a turn for the worse.

The Star and
Garter was an old coaching inn situated right in the middle of Thorpe Newton. Over the one hundred and seventy-five years of its existence it had changed its name three times to keep up with modern trends. Fifteen years previously it had been called the Eagle but the new, and present, landlord thought a double-barrelled name might have a bit more class. Charlie and Lily arrived at half past five, just as it was opening for evening trade. Charlie had planned it thus. He wanted an empty pub to give him a chance to chat to the landlord without interference from customers. The pub was empty apart from one local who had managed to beat them through the door. Charlie ordered a pint of John Smith’s for him and a brandy for Lily. The landlord was an amiable chap, happy to have a bit of unexpected custom, and quite chatty.

‘You don’t sound as if yer from round ’ere.’

‘I’m originally from London,’ said Charlie. ‘I was stationed in Eden camp for a while and I thought I’d call back to see a few old pals.’