Survivor (29 page)

She told him that it was in a
solicitor’s office, and that she would be doing some French translation
work.

‘I’m pleased for you,’
he said. ‘To be honest, I have been thinking of giving up this office anyway.
I could easily do everything from the factory. I wish you well, Miss Carrera.
You’ve been a very good secretary, and I shall miss you.’

But Mariette regretted taking the new
position almost from her first day. The other clerks, typists and secretaries were a
chilly and snobbish bunch of women who clearly were never going to welcome anyone
new to their little clique. She heard a couple of whispers about her speaking
French, and the fact that she was from New Zealand, it seemed both those things were
strange enough for them to decide to ignore her.

It was during her second week that her
ability to act as an interpreter was tested for the first time. Mr Perry called her
into his office to translate for a new French client who only spoke a smattering of
English.

Mrs Dupont was Jewish. Her doctor
husband had insisted she must flee Paris with their two children just a few days
before the city fell to the Germans. He was fearful of the rumours he’d heard
about Jews being rounded up and sent to work camps and thought they would be safer
in England with relatives.

Since arriving in England, Mrs Dupont
hadn’t heard a word from her husband. One of her relatives had given her Mr
Perry’s name, hoping he could help her find out what had happened to her
husband.

Mariette had no problem translating the
woman’s story, or Mr Perry’s reply that he would do his best for her.
She took down all the details of Dr Dupont, exactly as her employer asked, but she
couldn’t help but wonder why one of Mrs
Dupont’s relatives here in London, who presumably
spoke good English, hadn’t accompanied her to speak on her behalf. If they
had, they might have sensed from Perry’s rather curt responses that he
wasn’t very sympathetic towards her plight.

If Mr Perry had let Mariette leave his
office at the same time as he said goodbye to Mrs Dupont and showed her out, she
might have been able to speak to the distressed woman and suggest she contact the
Red Cross too. Unfortunately, Mr Perry kept her back to dictate an urgent letter to
another client, and so the opportunity was lost.

‘Do you think the Gestapo have
arrested Dr Dupont?’ Mariette asked him once the dictation was completed.

‘I think it’s highly
unlikely,’ he said airily. ‘The chances are he sent his wife off to
England for his own ends. You know what the French are like.’

Mariette’s mouth opened to remind
him that her father was French, and that he would only send his wife away if her
life was in danger, but she stopped herself. She needed this job. And besides, she
could get some advice from one of the Jewish people she often met in the shelter,
and then pass that on to Mrs Dupont.

As spring slipped into summer Mariette
often felt that, if it wasn’t for Joan and the other friends she’d made
in the East End, she would leave London and find somewhere to live away from the
danger of bombs. The latest kind of bomb was a mine dropped by parachute. Some of
these were as large as pillar boxes; they drifted down on the wind, exploding on
impact with devastating results. Just two could obliterate a whole street.

On 20th April there was the worst air
raid since December. Johnny reported that a record 1,500 fires were started by
incendiaries that night, even before a rain of over a thousand
high-explosive bombs and parachute mines swept the
capital. Eight London hospitals were hit, part of Selfridges caught fire, and a
500lb bomb crashed through the northern transept of St Paul’s Cathedral. Three
days later, the bombers were back in force, concentrating on the East End, as if
they hadn’t inflicted enough punishment there already.

In early May, Mariette and Joan saw a
newsreel at the cinema which showed the Australian, New Zealand, British and Polish
troops retreating from Thermopylae, in Greece. Mariette knew her brother Alexis was
there. It was reported that 7,000 men had been taken prisoner, and she was terrified
he might be amongst them.

On 10th May, the bombers were back in
force, using the full moon to guide them to their targets. They knocked out every
main-line station and destroyed over 5,000 homes, leaving great swathes of London
without gas, electricity and water. On the morning of the 11th, Joan and Mariette
staggered wearily out of the shelter to find a pall of brown smoke blotting out the
sun. So many streets were impassable that, for many people, it was impossible to get
to work. Mariette struggled through, only to find the office locked up. A huge fire
blazed in City Road. It was a gin distillery, and the alcohol made it difficult to
put the flames out. In south London the Palmolive soap factory was on fire; as
firemen fought to put it out, the water turned to hot froth.

Later that day, she and Joan heard that
Scotland Yard, St James’s Palace, the Law Courts and many other famous
buildings had been damaged – even the Tower of London had been hit by a hundred
incendiaries.

Johnny popped in fleetingly, a couple of
days later, to tell Mariette that the Fire Service was to be nationalized, something
he’d hoped would happen for a very long time. At present each local council
brigade had different ranks,
equipment
and words of command, which made it difficult to put out a fire when men from two
different brigades were firefighting side by side.

Mariette wanted to be enthusiastic about
his news, but she and Joan were more concerned by the frightening figure of one
million people who had been made homeless, with only 129 small, ill-equipped rest
centres to give them some kind of shelter. All the windows in Joan’s house had
been blown out and, like so many others, they were without power, gas or water. They
nailed boards over the windows, got water from a standpipe in the street, and
considered themselves fortunate they still had a bed to sleep on.

When Mariette heard that 50,000 soldiers
had been rescued from the beaches in Greece, in what the press called a second
Dunkirk, she offered up frantic prayers that Alexis was amongst them. Those prayers
were answered when a letter eventually arrived from home, in June, and she learned
he was safe. But Austin Roberts, a boy she’d been at school with, and the
first boy to kiss her, had been killed. She might have dealt with far greater loss
recently, yet the thought of Austin dying so far away from home really upset
her.

It made her blurt out to Joan that
she’d had enough of London, and the war. ‘I can’t stand it any
more. I can’t bear the sight of people picking through the ruins of their
houses, the smell of fire, breathing in brick dust, and knowing that one of these
nights it will be our turn to cop it. I’m going to move out of London before I
go mad with it all.’

As she might have expected, Joan made a
joke of it. ‘Then join the bleedin’ Land Army,’ she teased.
‘You’ll look swell in that uniform with them big, baggy jodhpur things!
Imagine all those randy old farmers trying to have their way with you in hay lofts?
You’ll love milking cows, mucking out stables and planting
cabbages.’

‘I
wouldn’t mind any of that – except the randy old farmers,’ Mariette shot
back. ‘I hate seeing all the bomb sites, hearing nothing but sad news, and
struggling to make a decent meal out of nothing.’

‘Come on now, you know you’d
miss queuing for rations that ’ave all gone by the time you get to the
’ead of the queue! And you’re forgetting how much you love all the
nights in the shelter next to a farting drunk.’

‘You’ve got me there, I
would miss all that,’ Mariette giggled.

‘Just to cheer you up even more,
they’ve just rationed clothes an’ all. So even if we ’ad any money
for new ’uns, we wouldn’t ’ave the blinkin’ coupons,’
Joan reminded her.

Mariette laughed. ‘You know, Joan,
you are the only thing I’d miss in London. Well, maybe Johnny too. But I think
he’s gone off me, he hardly ever comes round these days. And when he does, all
he can talk about is fires.’

‘Why don’t you let ’im
get ’is leg over?’ Joan, as always, didn’t mince her words.
‘That’ll take ’is mind off fires, and you’ll both be
’appier. And don’t make out you’re saving yourself till you get
’itched. I knows you’ve done it before.’

‘I don’t want to do it with
him,’ Mariette admitted sheepishly. ‘All this time I’ve been using
the excuse that there’s been no opportunity, but that is just an excuse. I
don’t feel that way about him.’ She told Joan then about Morgan, and how
she was always burning up to do it with him. ‘That’s how you should feel
about a man, isn’t it?’

Joan grinned. ‘Yeah, ducks, that
is ’ow you should feel.’

‘But he turned out to be nasty. He
tried to force himself on me, in a park, just before he joined up. He couldn’t
read and write very well, and the last I heard he was leaving hospital in Folkestone
after getting wounded at Dunkirk.’

To her surprise, Joan laughed.
‘Christ Almighty, you can pick ’em!’ she said. ‘What was a
posh girl like you doing with
a gypo who
can’t read or write? But I reckon ’e only tried to force you that night
cos ’e felt like ’e was going to lose you.’

Mariette laughed then. ‘That was
the quickest route to it.’

‘Yeah, maybe, but blokes think
with their cocks, luv. Something you said or did made ’im feel uneasy. It
could’ve been cos ’e knew you was shocked that ’e couldn’t
read well, or the gypsy thing. Maybe ’e even thought ’e might be killed
in the war. So ’e wanted to put ’is stamp on you, like a dog does when
it piddles on a lamppost.’

Mariette giggled at that explanation
but, as crude as it was, there was a kind of sense to it.

‘Well, I’m never going to
know the answer to that. All he left me with is a picture in my head of his handsome
face, and the memory of how good sex can be,’ she said. ‘But getting
back to Johnny, what should I do about him?’

Joan looked thoughtful. ‘Well, if
you don’t feel that way about Johnny now, then you ain’t never
goin’ to. So you ought to pack it in with the poor bloke. It ain’t fair
to keep stringing ’im along.’

‘I don’t know how to. He was
such a good friend when the Blitz was at its worst, and I don’t want to hurt
his feelings.’

‘You know what they say, that
“you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs”? Well,
it’s the same with this. But you’ll ’urt Johnny more if you carry
on ’olding ’im at arm’s length. Besides, from what I’ve seen
of Johnny the fireman, ’e looks after number one. I can’t ’elp
thinkin’ the main reason ’e’s still ’anging on to you
ain’t cos ’e loves you madly but cos of who you are.’

‘I’m not anyone,’
Mariette said with some indignation.

‘Come off it! Compared with
everyone else around ’ere you’re a toff! You’re a secretary, you
speak French and you’ve got class. And when the war’s over, you’ll
be going ’ome. Johnny’s got the idea your folks are rich.’

Mariette scoffed
at Joan’s cynicism. But once she was alone and gave some thought to remarks
Johnny had made in the past – how often he talked about rich people and the
opportunities to be made in wartime – she began to think Joan could be right.

After the devastating air raid on 10th
May, there was a lull. After months of almost continual nightly raids, no one could
really believe it wouldn’t start again tonight or tomorrow. But gradually, as
the streets were cleared of rubble and broken windows were replaced, people allowed
themselves to think that the Blitz really was over and that Hitler was too busy
attacking Russia to be bothered with them any more.

The weather was good, so when Mariette
and Joan weren’t helping out at the rest centre in the old factory in the
evenings, they often went to a pub, the pictures or a dance hall. If Johnny
wasn’t on duty, he often went with them, and Mariette put aside both her idea
of moving out of London and of telling Johnny that he should find another
girlfriend. It wasn’t that she’d had a change of heart about him, just
that she felt she should wait until he had proved himself, one way or another.

One weekend, Mariette went down to Lyme
Regis with Joan to see her children. She was enchanted by the beauty of Dorset and
the sleepy little seaside town.

Ian and Sandra were delightful children.
Their lengthy stay with Mr and Mrs Harding had given them advantages that, with the
best will in the world, Joan could never have given them. Ian was going to attend
the grammar school from September, and nine-year-old Sandra seemed equally
bright.

Both children had Joan’s wiry
physique, and her joyful nature. It was obvious the Hardings loved them as if they
were their own, yet they welcomed Joan and Mariette too as
part of their extended family. Joan called them
‘posh folk’, but Mariette recognized them as being just ordinary country
people, with the kind of values she had been brought up with. The children’s
cockney accents had been softened with a Dorset burr, they had excellent manners,
and their skin glowed and their hair shone from all the good food and the peaceful
environment.

‘As much as I miss
’em,’ Joan said soon after they arrived at the Hardings’
comfortable and attractive home, ‘I’d rather they was ’ere and
’appy.’

The children led Mariette and their
mother up to the cliff top for a picnic which Mrs Harding had prepared. To the two
adults, the hard-boiled eggs, slices of a delicious chicken pie and home-made bread
were a feast. The Hardings had over twenty chickens, and Ian regaled them ghoulishly
with how he’d watched Mr Harding wring the neck of the one that was now in the
pie.

It was beautiful on the cliff top, with
the warm sun on their skin, the sea as blue as the sky above, the clean fresh air
and the long grass waving in the gentle breeze. Both the children lay on their backs
with their heads in Joan’s lap. Mariette watched the way Joan tenderly stroked
their heads, her face soft with love for them, and fervently hoped that Rodney, her
husband, would come home safely and the little family would be reunited.