London Pride (58 page)

‘They wouldn't, would they?' Peggy asked.

‘Not much, they wouldn't,' he said. ‘There's plenty a' tea leaves around. The war ain't converted 'em, it's just given 'em more scope.' That's right, he thought, talk about thieves and looters. That's better than dwelling on grief.

‘Did you get your ration books?' Peggy asked as they walked back to the fire. There were such a lot of things to be attended to when you were bombed out.

‘In me bag,' Joan said. ‘I always keep 'em with me, just in case.'

‘She's got her head screwed on, our Joanie,' Mrs Geary approved, patting Joan's hand because she looked as though she was going to cry again. Despite Jim's intervention, memories and grief were still washing all about them, unspoken but all the more potent for that.

‘I'm starving,' Norman said in his matter-of-fact way. His eyes were quite dry now and there was a little more colour in his face.

‘Time for supper then,' Peggy said, glad of his rescue. ‘What say we get some fish an' chips?'

‘I couldn't eat anything,' Joan said. ‘I'd be sick. It made my stomach shake seeing it all cut to bits like that.'

‘I could, Aunty Peggy,' Norman said quickly. ‘You could an' all, couldn't you, Yvey?'

And although Yvonne was still quiet and pale, she agreed that she was hungry.

‘That's settled then,' Mrs Geary said. ‘You could pop in to the off licence fer some beer, couldn't you, Peggy? And a bottle a' Tizer for the kids. My treat. I'd go mesself only these legs are giving me proper gyp tonight.'

It was a ramshackle meal, eaten out of the newspaper in the time-honoured way with pickled onions and lots of salt and vinegar. Joan picked at a few chips and told her bomb story over and over again until she'd made sense of it, and the rest of them ate every last crumb and even licked their fingers afterwards. Then Peggy began to organize them for the night.

‘Time you kids was in bed,' she said to the children. ‘I'll clear up all this paper and then we'll nip upstairs and get the camp-beds down. Better look sharp or we shall have the sirens going in a minute.' She was a warden again, back home in London, doing the job she'd done all through the war. ‘We'll put them under the stairs,' she said to Joan. ‘There'll just be room.'

Joan was worrying again. ‘We got no night things or nothing,' she mourned.

‘There's all Mum's things in the chest a' drawers,' Peggy remembered. ‘Sheets and clothes and underwear and everything.' She hadn't had the time or the heart to attend to them. ‘You could use some of them for the time being. Save 'em going to waste.'

‘What
would
she have thought of all this?' Joan sighed.

‘Just as well she can't see it, you ask me,' Mrs Geary said. ‘I'll tell you one thing though. She'd be glad to see you make use of her things. She kept 'em lovely. Always so particular she was. You use 'em, gel'.

So Flossie's sheets were taken from the cupboard and Joan found one of her nightgowns for Yvonne and an old blouse for Norman to wear as a night shirt, which made them all laugh because he looked so comical trailing about in it.

The sirens went as they were making up the beds, but by then their panic and tears were all forgotten, calmed by routine. There was such a comfort in housework and its familiar sensations, Peggy thought, and particularly in a raid, a sheet smoothing under her hands, the automatic neatness of a well-tucked corner, a whacked coal shooting sparks up the chimney to hang like red stars among the soot, the kettle whistling, tea falling fragrant into the cup, the rattle of their spoons and saucers echoed by the rattle of the trams in Church Street, small, comforting signs that life was going on despite the bombs.

‘We'll play cards,' she said as the noise of the raid got worse. ‘Take our minds off it.'

Watching her as she put up the card table and dealt the first hand, Jim was torn between pride and irritation. She coped with grief so well now, and her calm was admirable and catching. The kids were actually settling to sleep as though they were sure of safety, the cat was purring, Mrs Geary was unconcernedly drinking tea out of her saucer, even Joan was easing into a better state, and all these things were a direct result of that patient, stubborn courage of hers. But he knew with equal certainty that the self-same doggedness, the self-same sense of responsibility had already moved her away from him and their marriage and all the things they'd been planning together on the way home. And that was painful.

He stayed with them for as long as he could, but the raid was still going on when he had to leave. Peggy walked out into the hall to say goodbye. They stood in the jumble of luggage like a couple of refugees.

‘Goodbye, Tabby eyes,' he said, kissing her. ‘Write to me.'

‘Every day,' she promised, kissing him back.

‘You'll be all right?'

‘I'll be all right.'

It made him ache to kiss goodbye. Her lips were soft
and warm and her skin still smelt of the sea. ‘Oh God!' he said. ‘This is awful. I can't leave you.'

‘Go now,' she urged, pushing him gently towards the door. ‘You don't want to miss your train.'

But that was just what he
did
want. Why did the war have to come crashing in to pull them apart just when they were so happy together? This God-awful sodding war.

He travelled back to Hornchurch in a turmoil of conflicting emotions, love, anger, remembered happiness, pride that he'd rescued her from her misery dampened by annoyance that she was back in London and facing danger again, barely satisfied desire growling beneath a most rewardingly gratified compassion.

It was a difficult journey with wreckage on the line halting his train, the Underground running slowly, and the raid going on noisily above it all. It took him so long that he only just got back to camp in time and by then he was so tired and frustrated that sleep was impossible.

He lay in his uncomfortable bed at one end of the hut, listening to the snores and grunts and farts of his companions, and was miserably lonely. Tomorrow, he promised himself, as he turned from side to side for the twentieth time, tomorrow I shall find a flat. He
had
to, because he couldn't bear for them to live apart. Not now. Not after being together night and day for nearly a fortnight.

He didn't, of course, although he stormed into Horn-church the minute he was off duty and scanned the notice boards at every newsagent he could find. There was nothing in the
Exchange and Mart
either, but he comforted himself that at least he'd made a start.

‘Nothing yet,' he reported to Peggy when he wrote to her that evening. ‘Still, it's early days. I shall keep on trying. I miss you so much. All the time day and night. Especially night.'

The next day he took the Underground to Upminster and tried there. And was disappointed again.

‘No, sir,' one newsagent told him. ‘You won't find nothing here, and what there is you officers have took. We got a housing shortage.'

And another was quite scathing. ‘Little flat?' he said. ‘Do me a favour! There's a war on!'

But Jim continued his search, growing more and more dogged as his hope diminished. There must be something somewhere. One little room, that's all he wanted. But the longer he searched the more he knew in his bones that it was impossible. He'd known it all along. The camp was full of airmen mooching about in the evenings because they were parted from their wives and they all earned the same money as he did and they'd all rent rooms if there were rooms to rent. It was demoralizing.

He kept his true opinions hidden from Peggy, of course, because there was no point in them both being miserable. ‘Nothing yet but you never know, something might turn up tomorrow.'

But after three weeks of it he was morose with loneliness and disappointment.

It was just as well that Froggy Ferguson was on the camp, for Froggy was his usual cheerful self and full of high spirits.

‘Seen this?' he said at breakfast one morning.

‘What?'Jim asked.

Froggy pushed a rather battered magazine across the table towards him. It was a copy of the
Picture Post
, with a cover showing six plump toddlers sitting one behind the other on a slide, and a headline offering ‘A Plan for Britain'.

‘No,' Jim said, glancing at it. He'd been too busy to read anything, except the
Exchange and Mart
, and now he was too brassed off. But he made an effort to be interested. ‘Good, is it?' The
Picture Post
usually was.

‘A1,' Froggy said. ‘Just up your street. You ought to read it.'

Jim took the paper, without very much interest, but he didn't look at it again until late that evening after a long day in the hangars, and by then he was so tired he thought he would just flick through it before he went to sleep. But it turned out be such an absorbing issue that he was still reading it at lights out, and he read on eagerly the next morning, picking up where he'd been obliged to leave off, returning to it at odd moments during the day, digesting it piecemeal, one article at a time, eating the printed word like a man long starved of words and ideas. For what
words they were. And what ideas. It even took his mind off his miseries.

The entire magazine had been given over to a consideration of the sort of world that could and should be built when the war was over. It was heady stuff. There was an article on work, that argued that there should be jobs for everyone and that the banks should be controlled by the state; there was one called ‘Social Security' that urged a minimum wage for all working men and allowances for children and special forms of help from public assistance for people who were off work through no fault of their own because they were sick or unemployed; there were articles on town planning, home design, the use of the land, even leisure, written by none other than JB Priestley; and best of the lot, a marvellous piece called ‘Health for All' that was written by Julian Huxley, who made it meticulously clear that if we wanted a healthy nation the first thing we had to do was to ensure that everybody in it was properly fed, and that when that was done the next thing was to establish a National Health Service into which every worker would pay week by week while they were fit and earning, like a sort of insurance, and which would then allow anyone to be given the medical treatment they needed free at the time they needed it.

By supper-time Jim felt as if he had been introduced to another world. A world full of people who thought as he did. It was just what he needed, a vision of utopia, an unequivocal call for a better, fairer society, and beneath it all the understanding that this was what they were all fighting for.

That night he wrote a long letter to Peggy telling her all about it. It made a pleasant change from reporting failure. ‘Get a copy,' he instructed, ‘and see if you don't agree with it. It's exactly what I've been thinking all my life. Pass it on to old John Cooper when you've finished with it, with my regards. He'll love it. Oh Peggy, it will be such a brave new world when all this is over, a world we can be proud to live in, and we are the ones who will build it. Think of that.'

It took Peggy a great deal longer to read the magazine than it had taken Jim but that was because she had so
little spare time. She'd gone back to the wardens' post on the night after Joan was bombed out, and been welcomed with such obvious relief and pleasure that she felt quite proud of herself. They were such a good team and they worked so well together, no matter how difficult things were. And things were very difficult in those wintry days.

Ever since she'd been bombed out Joan had suffered from terrible nightmares. Baby stuffed ear-plugs in her ears and slept through everything, air raids, weeping, people crashing about in the dark, even the sirens, but Peggy and the kids were woken every time. And if the nights were usually disturbed the days were always overburdened, with running the house, endless queues for shopping and never ending worries about meals and rationing.

Joan tried to help her when she could but little sleep and long hours at the factory left her so exhausted by the end of the day that she was slow and clumsy. And Baby resolutely refused to set her hand to any housework at all. And Jim still hadn't found them anywhere to live.

‘I shall be glad when this war is over and we can start to build this brave new world,' she wrote to Jim. ‘It sounds wonderful.' But it all seemed a long way away, especially in her present state of exhaustion. ‘Perhaps things will be better in the spring. We might have found a flat by then.'

But he knew, as she did not, that the spring and calmer seas would bring a renewed danger of invasion and that Fighter Command was preparing itself for the next onslaught. In that miserable winter of 1941 their brave new world was a consolation but a very distant one. And although he wangled several thirty-six hour passes and cut across London to see her, feeding at her house and sleeping together, oh so happily, in his room at number two, he still couldn't find them a home of their own.

‘There's nothing to look forward to,' Sid Owen complained. ‘This fucking war'll go on for ever.'

‘Can't see no end to it,' Tommy agreed. ‘Fucking war.'

‘Look as if you're doing something,' their sergeant advised. ‘Fritz the mitts is on this morning.'

The platoon was planting potatoes in a bleak German field on a cold March morning and their particular guard was renowned for his short temper.

Sid bent to his task again. His face was pinched with cold and captivity and his hands were caked with mud, the nails chipped and cracked and black-rimmed. He looked down at them ruefully, very different hands to the ones he'd used so cleanly and with such pride in the bakery. And now the bakery was gone too, blitzed and gone. It was all horribly depressing.