London Pride (33 page)

I've upset him, she thought, recognizing hurt pride. ‘All right,' she said, trying to soothe him. But when she looked over the fence he'd gone indoors.

They went to the Empire Cinema that Friday as they'd planned. It wasn't a success. When he'd asked her out, in that magical sunshine with the sea and the rest of their lives dazzling before them, he'd imagined how it would be, sitting in the darkness watching the flicker of the screen side by side. He'd thought how he'd cuddle her. He'd even hoped he might kiss her goodnight. The reality was miserably different.

They sat discreetly apart, contained within the plush arms of their seats and not speaking. In the interval he bought her an ice-cream and tried to make conversation, but apart from discussing the film there didn't seem to be much else to say. And then horror of horrors Megan Griffiths came giggling down the aisle to join them with a grinning gang of people they used to know at school.

‘Hello!' she said. ‘Fancy seeing you two here. I didn't know you was coming tonight, Peggy. We could've all come together if you'd said. Remember Spotty? He said not to come over, daft ha'porth, in case you was courting. There you are, Spotty, what did I tell you? They're neighbours. They're not courting, are you?'

They tried to remember Spotty and agreed that they weren't courting. And when Megan dragged the hordes back to their seats for the second half they were more embarrassed with one another than ever. By the time they'd walked home through the stifling heat of yet
another airless night they were quite relieved to part company.

‘Thank you for coming with me,' he said politely as she fished the front-door key through the letterbox on its string and fitted it into the lock.

‘Thank you for asking me,' she said.

I shall never get to kiss her goodnight now, he thought unhappily as he pulled the string of his own door key. Damn that Megan and her stupid Spotty. And he went straight up to bed in a very bad mood.

The next two weeks were miserable. On the day the works finally closed he went down to the pub with all his workmates, got drunk for the first time in his life, and regretted it bitterly when he woke with a throbbing headache the next morning. But hungover or not he was up at the usual time and out on the street the minute he'd eaten his breakfast. Somehow or other he would find another job, no matter how badly paid or how objectionable. There were bills to be met and Mum and the girls to be looked after. He couldn't sit idle.

By the end of the week he was working part time in a local warehouse sweeping floors. The week after that he helped a local window cleaner who'd injured his shoulder in a fall and said he ‘couldn't face the top floors yet awhile'. And so he continued, accepting whatever was on offer, enduring whenever there was nothing at all, and keeping out of the house so that his father wouldn't know what was happening, because he had enough to contend with without the old man making scenes. By the time September came round it was clear to him that he couldn't afford to enrol for the second year of his course in Economics, and for several days he was miserably cast down, because he'd lost his education as well as his job.

But then the weather broke at last with a day of rain, marvellous, soft, sweet-smelling rain. It was such a change after that long stinking drought that people came out of their doors and stood in the street with their faces upturned to enjoy it. Old Mrs Geary opened her window and leaned so far out of it that Pearl and Peggy were afraid she'd fall.

‘No fear,' she said. ‘I got a good strong instinct fer self
preservation, don't you worry. Ain't it grand, eh?'

And the parrot, who was sitting beside her at the window, agreed, with a cacophony of squawks and obscenities.

‘Let's go up the park,' Pearl said. ‘It'll be gorgeous up the park.'

So she and Lily and Peggy went to the park and as Jim had just come home they took him along too, to stroll under dripping trees and skip over damp earth and watch the grass recovering before their eyes.

‘Just look at that,' Pearl said. ‘It's all going green again. I never seen nothing as quick as that.'

It encouraged them all, this sign that nature could heal so rapidly.

‘You'll get another job soon,' Peggy said to Jim, when Pearl and Lily had gone rushing off to be showered under another tree, ‘you'll see. Things'll change.'

‘They're changing already,' he told her, ‘but all in the wrong direction. The more people there are out of work the less money there is to spend, the less money to spend the fewer goods made, fewer goods made fewer people employed to make them. It's a vicious circle.' He'd read enough about economics to understand that. ‘Nothing'll change until the government starts to employ people, like they're doing in America in the Tennessee Valley. Even Herr Hitler knows that.'

‘Oh don't let's talk about Herr Hitler,' Peggy said. ‘Not in all this lovely rain. Things'll change here too, you'll see.'

‘Only if we make them change,' he said almost fiercely. ‘It's no good enduring things. You got to take action.'

Action, she thought, it's always action with him. ‘Is that what you're going to do?' she asked.

‘The minute I can figure out what action to take, yes. It ain't fair, Peg, grinding people down like this. There ought to be work for everyone, more and more of it, not less and less.'

She was looking at him with such pity that he had to change the subject, ‘Next time we come for a walk,' he said, wiping the rain from his eyebrows because it was dripping into his eyes, ‘let's leave the girls behind.'

They took a lot of walks in Greenwich Park that autumn,
sometimes on their own and sometimes with Joan and the baby. It wasn't the same as the romantic intimacy of the cinema, but at least, as they told one another with cheerful frequency, they were spared the company of Megan and the impossible Spotty, who turned out to be Miss Griffiths' latest pash, although what she saw in him neither of them could possibly imagine.

Despite his hunger for action odd jobs grew more and more difficult for Jim to find. In October he worked for ten days helping the park keeper burn the autumn leaves, in November he went back to the warehouse for a day or two, but it wasn't until January that he found a permanent job and then it was one without a future. One of the garages in Blackheath that serviced the cars of the well-to-do advertised for an odd-job boy, and as he seemed quick and willing they took him on. He was still there in April and by then he'd learned so much that the manager had increased his pay and was allowing him to strip the engines.

Now, at last, he could afford to ask Peggy out properly.

It was a great disappointment to him that she refused his offer.

‘I'm ever so sorry,' she said, ‘but I can't. Not just yet. Joan's going to have another baby you see. It's due in three weeks time and I'm going to look after Yvonne.'

He knew about the baby of course because he'd seen the pregnancy developing. ‘Oh,' he said, controlling his expression with an effort. ‘I see. Later then.'

‘When it's born,' she promised.

But when it was born she spent all her spare time over in Deptford helping with the housework.

‘Poor Joan,' she said. ‘She's got enough to do looking after two babies without doing all the housework as well.'

Privately Jim thought she was being just a bit too unselfish, but he didn't say anything because it wasn't his business and because he suspected that she wouldn't take any notice of him if he did.

The babies were so pretty, that was the trouble, so pretty and so loving. Yvonne was twenty months old when her brother was born and just beginning to talk. She could say ‘Mum-mum-mum' and ‘Dadda' and ‘More p'ease', and while she was staying at Paradise Row and sleeping
with her aunty Peggy she said ‘Weggy' as clear as clear to the delight of the entire household. She was a sturdy little girl with plump legs and a stolid way of walking. Her face was still round with her father's high wide cheekbones and her mother's decided nose and large greeny-brown eyes that were very much like Peggy's. The dark hair that had pleased Joan so much when she was born had lightened to a pale nut-brown and now it was long enough to cut into a short bob with a fringe, which Flossie said made her look a proper little girl. Naturally Peggy adored her.

And now there was another pretty baby, her brother Norman, born on the last day of May 1934, more than a pound heavier than his sister and with a very healthy appetite, dark-haired and dark-eyed and in Peggy's opinion totally delicious.

‘You are lucky,' she said enviously to Joan as the baby suckled and Yvonne lay on the bed between them with her head on her mother's knees. ‘To have two babies like this. I wish it was me.'

‘It will be,' Joan said easily.

‘I'll have to get married first,' Peggy grinned.

‘You don't want to be in too much of a hurry to get married,' Joan said. ‘Take your time an' choose a really good man. That's my advice. Someone to look after you, like Dad used to do.' It was the nearest she'd got to admitting that Sid wasn't the best husband alive, and she looked away from her sister when she'd finished speaking to show that she didn't intend to continue into a confession. Sid had taken this second baby quite well, all things considered. He hadn't told her to get rid of it this time, and he hadn't complained much when early morning-sickness made her slow with the housework.

In fact she was beginning to wonder whether he wasn't getting quite fond of little Yvey, bringing her little iced cakes from the bakery and mending her toys and patting her soft hair with those blunt hands of his, looking down at her with that sheepish expression he wore when he was feeling affectionate and didn't know how to put it into words. No, there was a lot of good in Sid Owen if you knew where to look for it, so she ought to be loyal.

‘That'ud take a lot of doing,' Peggy said, understanding
the words and the distancing look. ‘Dad was special.' And rather to her surprise she found she was thinking of Jim Boxall, sensible Jim who knew about cats and kittens and didn't mind talking about babies, Jim Boxall who looked after his mum, and cleaned the drains and the lavvy every night, Jim Boxall who had fine blue eyes and long tender eyelashes and was desperate for a job. ‘Very special.' I wonder whether he'll ask me to the pictures again.

He did but not until the middle of June and by then Paradise Row had something very peculiar to talk about.

It was Mrs Geary who noticed it first.

‘Come up here, Mrs Furnivall,' she called one fine Tuesday morning, when Flossie was preparing the washing downstairs in the scullery. ‘Come an' see this.'

‘What is it, Mrs Geary?' Flossie called back. ‘I got a lot to do.'

‘Foreigners, if I'm any judge,' Mrs Geary said. ‘Come an' see. Only look sharp or they'll be gone.'

So Flossie came up to see.

There were two odd-looking men walking up the street towards the corner shop. They were dressed entirely in black, in long, flapping overcoats and grubby black trousers, and their hats were low crowned with a wide flat brim like a black dinner plate. Both were bearded and both looked extremely pale, but the most peculiar thing of all was the way they wore their hair, in two long thin ringlets hanging past their ears and right down onto their coats.

‘Jewboys,' Mrs Geary said. ‘Bet you anythink.'

The two men walked into the corner shop.

‘Now watch,' Mrs Geary said.

They watched for quite a long time. But nothing happened.

‘Exactly,' Mrs Geary said when Flossie remarked on it. ‘Nothing does. Nothing happened last time. There was three fellers and a woman went in last Thursday and they never come out neither. Thought I was seeing things, that's why I watched 'em this time.'

‘They can't have disappeared,' Flossie said leaning out of the window to get a better look. ‘They're probably taking a long time because they can't speak English.'

As they watched, Mrs Roderick came out of her house and walked down the road in her straight-spined way towards the shop. ‘Packet of pins,' she explained. ‘I always seem to be out of pins.'

They waited until she came back again.

‘Anyone else in the shop?' Mrs Geary asked casually.

‘Only me,' Mrs Roderick said. ‘Very slow this morning he says.'

‘There you are,' Mrs Geary said triumphantly. ‘What did I tell you? Something's going on. I'm going down to see what it is.'

So Flossie left the washing and they both went down.

The shop was empty just as Mrs Roderick had told them. There was only Mr Grunewald standing behind his counter among the biscuit boxes and the tins of condensed milk and the cards hung with bootlaces.

‘Good morning,' he said hopefully.

‘I'll take half a pound a' Bourbons,' Mrs Geary ordered. A little extravagance would put him in a good humour.

The biscuits were weighed.

‘Got company have yer?' Mrs Geary said casually as the paper bag was passed across the counter. ‘We seen 'em come in.'

Mr Grunewald's face fell from friendly smile to guarded anxiety in an instant. ‘You won't say nothink, will you Mrs Geary. I wouldn't want the rent man to … Not that there's anything … if you know what I mean. They don't pay rent or nothing like that.'

‘Course not,' Mrs Geary assured him. ‘You know me, Mr Grunewald. You can ‘ave who you like in the ‘ouse. No concern a' mine. We was just wonderin' who they was.'

‘They're from Germany,' Mr Grunewald explained. ‘Friends of friends. They stay one night, maybe two. That's all, you got my word.'

‘Visiting?' Mrs Geary probed.

Mr Grunewald swallowed hard and decided to take this lady into his confidence. He'd known ever since his first refugees arrived two weeks ago that sooner or later the street would find out. At least Mrs Geary was likely to be sympathetic. Not like that Mr Brown.