London Pride (37 page)

‘Why,' Peggy whispered. ‘Did he pay the rent?' But she realized as she asked the question that of course he'd paid
it. It was just the sort of thing he would do.

The flit was over in twenty minutes for poor Mrs Boxall had very few belongings to move and Mr Boxall was frantic to be off.

‘Where are they going?' Peggy asked as the two bent figures trundled their cart down the road towards the pub. ‘She didn't say,' Mrs Geary whispered. ‘Lily'll know. Time we was getting back to bed. It's parky sitting here. You wouldn't be a love an' just pop down an' get me some fresh water would you? I'd go mesself only these legs are giving me gyp.'

‘Two rooms down by the gasworks,' Lily told them when she came visiting that Saturday. ‘Nasty pokey little rooms they are. Ought to be slum clearance. I'm so cross. All these years we've kept her comfy and now see what's happened. He can't even manage the rent.'

‘Your poor Mum,' Peggy commiserated. ‘Is she all right?'

‘She says she is,' Lily said. ‘But I don't know.'

‘Have you told Jim?' Peggy asked. ‘He'll be upset.'

‘Now that's a funny thing,' Lily said. ‘I sent him a postcard straight away, ‘cos that's what I thought too and he wrote me back a most peculiar letter.'

‘Peculiar?' Peggy echoed. ‘What was peculiar?'

‘He said we was all adults now an' we all had to make our own decisions an' live our own lives.'

‘That's not like Jim,' Peggy agreed, wondering at it.

‘He said he'd go over and see how she was next time he gets leave and sent his love an' all that sort a' thing but…' She looked perplexed, her blue eyes troubled.

‘What'll happen to next door?' Peggy said deciding to change the subject. ‘Will you an' Arthur take it?' That'ud be lovely. To have Pearl and Lily next door again and without their awful father.

‘I asked him,' Lily said, ‘and he says we could just about afford it, but he couldn't bear it. Not to live in the same house where Dad was always lammin' into us. He says it would remind him. You got to see his point.'

So she and Arthur and Pearl stayed where they were for the time being and Peggy's two new neighbours were a couple of elderly men who ran a small flower shop off the
High Street. They were called Mr Crosier and Mr Budleigh but were soon known to everyone by their Christian names, which were Leslie and Ernest.

Peggy wrote a full description of them to entertain Jim. ‘They're a funny looking pair. Ernest is a big man and rather fat and he's got long straight white hair and he wears wrinkly jumpers and sagging trousers, and Leslie is short and ever so neat, quite dapper really, with a toothbrush moustache and an army haircut. Never a hair out of place. They're as quiet as church mice most of the time and then they suddenly break out into a screaming row and rush about the house slamming doors. Then it all goes quiet and they're back to being mice again. Leslie threw his dinner into the garden yesterday and I'm sure I could hear poor Ernest crying afterwards. They've put up net curtains and scrubbed the front step and now they're clearing all the rubbish out of the garden and planting dahlias in the flowerbeds. Imagine that.'

‘I shan't know the place,' Jim wrote back.

There were other changes in the road too. Just after Leslie and Ernest moved in, the electricity board arrived to instal electricity in all the houses. Mrs Roderick didn't like it because she said electric light was bad for the eyes, but Mrs Geary and Mr Allnutt were delighted, he because he could now use an electric soldering iron, ‘think of all the useful jobs I can do with that', she because she could buy one of the new wireless sets that you plugged into the mains.

In August, while Hitler was prancing about at his Olympic Games in Berlin, two more changes came to Greenwich. The clearance of the slums in Thames Street finally got underway and a block of splendid new flats began to rise in Creek Road.

And in September Mr Bertie Allnutt took a job in Slough in one of the new firms that the government had commissioned to make aircraft parts. It was much better paid than the job he'd been doing in Deptford and it gave him the chance to buy his own house like one of the nobs. After a cheerful farewell ding-dong, he and his family left Paradise Row in high spirits and a battered van. Now there was another empty house in the street and this time
Arthur and Lily took it on, with Pearl as their lodger to help them out with the rent.

Peggy thought it was lovely to have them back and even lovelier when Lily told her that she was expecting in the spring. ‘Does Jim know?' she asked.

‘Not yet,' Lily said. ‘I'll tell him Christmas time. They must let him home for Christmas this year surely. Now he's got somewhere to stay.' Last Christmas he'd have been on his own in the house with Mum and Dad, and Dad was always at his most disagreeable at Christmas time, so they could all see why he wouldn't have wanted that.

But in the middle of December he wrote to both his sisters and to Peggy to tell them that he was half-way through the course and would be staying on camp until it was finished. ‘I shall have some leave in the spring,' he said. ‘Just think. When you next see me I shall be a fully-qualified Flight Mechanic.'

The letter made Peggy feel bleak. This would be his second Christmas away from home and he didn't seem to mind. He never said he missed – well – any of them. Not that he should. There was no reason why he should. But it would have been so nice if he had.

But his sister answered her letter cheerfully. ‘When you next see me,' she wrote, ‘I shall be a fully-qualified mother.'

‘That'll bring him if nothing else does,' she said to Peggy and Pearl.

The three of them were busy in the kitchen of number two making a shepherd's pie. Peggy had been invited to supper that evening and had accepted on condition she was allowed to help with the cooking.

‘Seamus O'Donavan's got a job making gasmasks with his mum,' Pearl told them. She was mincing onions and weeping copiously.

‘I'd've thought they'd got enough of the things by now,' Lily said.

‘We're all to have one,' Peggy said, adding milk to the mashed potatoes, ‘so the paper says.'

‘I wish it wouldn't,' Lily said. ‘It's enough to give you the creeps all this talk of war and gasmasks and bombs and everything.'

‘It makes you wonder what'll happen next,' Pearl said, wiping her eyes.

‘My baby'll happen next,' Lily said, patting her belly.

But she was wrong.

That spring when the sky was pleasantly blue, the market stalls were yellow with daffodils and the gardens round the park were bold with the bloom of white and purple lilac and the long golden ringlets of laburnum, the newsreels were full of monochrome horror.

A little market town in Spain had been bombed by Franco's German aeroplanes. It was called Guernica and the day Franco had chosen for its destruction was market day when its streets would be crowded with shoppers. The newsreels showed horrific shots of men and women terribly injured, children screaming, houses blown to pieces, and bombs falling like grotesque eggs from the belly of terrible planes. ‘Heinkels,' the commentator said, ‘and Junkers.' The names were as ugly as the aircraft. The attack started at half past four in the afternoon, and from then on the town was bombed and machine-gunned by wave after wave of aircraft flying in every twenty minutes until a quarter to eight. There was nothing to stop them and nowhere to hide. The carnage was dreadful.

This time Flossie came home from the cinema in a state of collapse and took to her bed for the next two days, prostrated with nerves, which Mrs Roderick said was hardly to be wondered at. ‘Showing such things,' she said angrily, ‘in the middle of the afternoon when you're not expecting it. It ought not to be allowed.'

But Peggy was profoundly moved by what she'd seen.

‘I feel I should be doing something about it,' she wrote to Jim, ‘only I don't know what.'

‘Cheer up,' he wrote back. ‘We're developing a plane that will be more than an answer to the Heinkels, if we can get enough of them built in time.'

He had meant it to be an encouraging letter but Peggy was cast down by it. What if we can't get them built in time? she thought. And for several weeks her dreams were riven with the scream of falling bombs and the terror of children she couldn't help.

But then Lily's baby was born, a small skinny boy with
a bald head and his father's face. He was called Percy after his paternal grandfather and Lily declared him the prettiest baby alive, but Mrs Geary told Peggy privately that she thought he looked ‘like a skinned rabbit, poor little beggar. Though I dare say he'll grow out of it in time. They usually do.'

Jim came home briefly for the christening and stayed at number two with his sisters, which he said was quite a treat even if young Percy did spend rather a lot of the night crying to be fed. ‘But I dare say he'll grow out of it,' he said to Peggy.

There were rather a lot of things for this baby to grow out of, and his skin wasn't one of them. He remained thin and fretful for the first six months of his life, putting on weight very slowly and to the continual concern of his mother and father. But at last he was strong enough to sit up in a high chair and take mouthfuls of lightly boiled egg or a spoonful of custard. And that was such a relief to Lily that she grew quite lightheaded.

‘Now he's sitting up he'll be a different child,' she promised. ‘We shall have him dancing at the ding-dong in no time.'

That December the New Year ding-dong was held in the Earl Grey, because Mr Allnutt had had the flu and his wife said he was to give himself a chance to recover instead of rushing about organizing a party.

‘No one'll mind,' she said. ‘You'll see.'

And nobody did. Although the party had quite a different flavour. They wore paper hats and sang the old songs but their hearts weren't in it. Perhaps it was because it had been such a difficult year with the threat of war so close and so many people in the street involved in war-work in one way or another.

Mrs Roderick said she'd be jolly glad to see the back of it. ‘1937,' she said. ‘What with one thing and another, it's been a perfectly dreadful year. Almost as bad as ‘36.'

‘Has it?' Baby said, examining her red nail-varnish. ‘I thought it was all right. Not exactly thrilling but all right. You had a coronation.'

‘Oh yes,' Mrs Roderick agreed heavily. ‘We had the coronation but think what we had to endure beforehand,
with the Prince of Wales such a disappointment to us.'

‘Oh that,' Baby said, dismissively.

‘Yes, that,' Mrs Roderick told her. ‘It isn't even two years since poor old King George passed away, and if you ask me it's just as well he did when you consider what's been going on ever since. The poor man must be turning in his grave. Turning in his grave.'

‘Yes well… ‘ Baby said, trying to get away.

But Mrs Roderick was determined to give vent to her grievance. She held on to Baby's skirt and continued with her lecture. ‘To get himself mixed up with an American was bad enough,' she said, ‘but a married woman, like that Mrs Simpson. Well really! And she's so ugly. You could understand it if she was a beauty. Fancy giving up the throne of England for a woman like that. I can't imagine what he sees in her. She looks as though she's been run over by a bus.'

‘Yes, well… ‘ Baby said again, sending frantic glances to her mother to be rescued.

‘And now there's his poor brother got to be king and I'm sure I don't know how he'll make out stuttering the way he does, poor man. I think it's a scandal.'

‘Yes,' Baby decided to agree. ‘It is. Shall I get you another drink, Mrs Roderick? That glass looks jolly empty.'

Over by the piano Uncle Gideon was talking about the Spanish Civil War to Mr Allnutt and Mr Cooper.

‘A bad business,' Mr Allnutt was saying, sympathizing with the Spanish government. ‘They won't be able to hold out against Franco much longer, not with Hitler sending him planes and guns. We could've stopped that, surely to goodness.'

It's a rehearsal,' Mr Cooper said. ‘That's what it is. They're testing all those planes. Trying 'em out for the real thing when they invade Hungary or Austria or poor old Czechoslovakia.'

How boring they all are, Baby thought. I wish Jim was here. And she remembered again how jolly good-looking he was in his uniform and wondered whether he'd got himself a girl out on his RAF base. She didn't actually fancy him herself because he was more like a big brother really, but
he was useful to flirt with and she didn't want someone else to have him.

Flossie was grumbling to old Mrs Allnutt that it was perfectly dreadful the way the government was going on. ‘Making gasmasks,' she grumbled, ‘building aeroplanes. You'd think they want a war. Why don't they go over and talk to that Hitler, that's what I want to know? Talk to him and make him stop all these awful things he's doing. That's what they ought to do. He's only a silly little man when all's said and done.'

Peggy was sitting by herself in a corner alone with her thoughts. We are all drifting, she thought, drifting nearer and nearer to a war we don't want and we can't avoid. It was futile and terrible and inevitable and it made her want to cry. Whatever 1938 had to offer, she was sure it would be difficult and painful.

‘Aye. It's serious,' Mr MacFarlane said. ‘There's no way oot of that.'

The morning's copy of the
Daily Herald
lay on the counter before him. ‘Czechoslovakia crisis,' it said. ‘Chamberlain flies to Germany. Hitler speaks.'

‘That's all we ever hear,' Megan complained. ‘Hitler speaks. Hitler speaks tomorrow. Hitler speaks Wednesday. Speech by Hitler. And where is this Sizzek place anyway? I can't see why it's so important.'