London Pride (59 page)

‘We've been here ten months,' Tommy said. ‘Ten fucking months. What are they playing at back home? Why don't they invade France and send the buggers packing?'

Sid looked across the damp fields to the foreign rooftops miles away between the hills. ‘If we knew where we was, we could make a run for it,' he said.

‘And get shot down?' the sergeant reminded him. ‘Not bloody likely. ‘Sides, how far d'you think you'd get in that rig? Have a bit a' common.'

‘We could strangle Jerry an' nick his uniform,' Sid suggested.

The prisoners all round them began to join in the game.

‘Garrotte a guard.'

‘Fix old Fritz.'

‘We could live off the land.'

‘Travel by night, hole up during the day.'

‘Get to the Channel. Nick a boat.'

They'd had the same conversation innumerable times since they arrived in the camp and they all knew it was an impossible fantasy. Yet they returned to it again and again, because it fed them with the hope they needed to keep going and because it reminded them that one day they would be free men again.

‘And what d'you think you'd live on, you great daft Arabs?' the sergeant asked.

‘Our wits, Sarge?' Tommy offered, wiping his forehead with his sleeve.

‘Since when you ever had any wits?' the sergeant mocked. ‘Gaw dearie me. You try living on your wits ol' son, that'ud be the quickest way to the firing squad. No, no. All we got ter do is stick it out. Hang on. Tide'll turn in the end you'll see.'

But it didn't seem to be turning at the moment. It all seemed to be running Hitler's way, as the Camp Commandant was gloatingly happy to tell them, at length, in broken English, and at every available opportunity.

They heard that London had been bombed flat, that Coventry, Plymouth, Glasgow, Bristol, Birmingham, Southampton had been reduced to rubble, that the German armies were invincible wherever they went, that because the ‘poor fool English' had decided to escort their merchant vessels to England in convoy they were being picked off and torpedoed one by one. ‘Sitting ducks you understand' and that ‘as a consequence' the populace was starving. ‘You vill soon be beaten to submission,' he said. ‘You vill see.'

‘Submission my arse,' Sid would growl when each diatribe was over. But it was demoralizing just the same. Particularly as they had no other source of information.

‘Wonder what my ol' girl's doing,' he said to Tommy as they stooped to the potatoes again. ‘I've almost forgotten what she looks like, it's been so long.'

‘I dunno,' Tommy said. ‘Not planting spuds, that's for certain.'

Sid would have been surprised and annoyed if he'd known. She was taking delivery of a Morrison shelter, which was the newest idea in air raid protection and had been designed for people who had no room for an Anderson shelter in their garden. This one was an indoor shelter, a huge reinforced box like a cross between a double bed and a cage, and she'd ordered it to protect the kids. She and Peggy had arranged a day off work to receive it, which was just as well because it was an enormous thing, almost too big to squeeze into the house, even in its dismantled state.

It took the combined sweat and effort of four people, Joan, Peggy and both delivery men, to manoeuvre it into the kitchen and bolt it together, and when the job was finished it filled the room.

‘Bli' me!' Mrs Geary said when she saw it. ‘Where's the kitchen gone?'

‘We'll put a cloth over it and use it as a table,' Peggy said. Their old gate-leg table was pushed against the window, diminished to a shelf.

Baby was appalled. ‘For heaven's sake!' she said. ‘We ain't got room to swing a cat.'

‘Can't say I've ever wanted to,' Peggy teased her, stroking Tom's tabby head.

But the kids were thrilled.

‘It's like a little house,' Yvonne said, crawling into it at once. ‘Ever so cosy.'

‘Better than the cupboard?' Joan grinned at them.

‘Heaps!' Norman said, settling onto the mattress. ‘Ain't it big! I bet we could all sleep in here. Like sardines.'

And he was right. There was room for all of them to lie down side by side and sleep in security if not exactly in comfort, so when the raids were bad and the bombers were overhead, the entire household, cat and all, squeezed into their protective cage until the danger was past.

Jim was at Catterick and he wasn't pleased to hear what they'd been doing either.

When he knew he was being posted there he'd been rather pleased about it, because although it would mean
that he couldn't get home to Peggy on a thirty-six hour pass, a new place might give him the chance of a flat somewhere. He'd spent every spare moment on his first four days scanning the local papers and tramping the streets. But his search was as futile in Catterick as it had been in Hornchuch and for the same reasons.

‘A little flat, two rooms, bed-sit, anything would do,' he'd asked, over and over again.

But the answer was always the same. ‘Sorry. No. Don't know of any. Your officers take what little there is, you see.'

One newsagent promised to let him know if anything came up, but by now he had very little hope. When her letter arrived describing the shelter he received it as another disappointment. It made him aware that she was steadily adapting to their life apart and that he was beginning to accept that it was very unlikely that they would ever be able to live together properly. But he tried to see the sense of what she was doing and wrote back as approvingly as he could.

‘Just as well you've got it with the spring coming, just in case AH has another bash at invasion. At least we're better prepared this time. The new Spitfire Mark V is fitted with two cannon and a superb engine. Once we get that it'll be a match for anything. Chin up! The blitz can't go on for ever. I'll get a place for us sooner or later, you'll see.'

But the bombers were still getting through and although they didn't arrive every night, especially when the weather was bad, there was a dusty weariness about London that winter, an exhausted dogged resignation. They'd been under attack for six months now and as far as
they
could see the blitz
could
go on for ever. Food was short and getting shorter. In March the meat ration was reduced to l/10d a week and the butter ration was down to a mere 4 ounces.

But at least the Furnivall/Geary household felt safer in its new shelter. And when spring came there was no invasion, although in April the Luftwaffe made two such ferocious attacks on London that they were soon being referred to as ‘the Wednesday' and ‘the Saturday'. All the
front windows in Paradise Row were blown out and part of Mrs Roderick's roof caved in. But there was no invasion. And then it was May and fine weather and rumours began to spread that the invasion barges had been removed from the Channel ports. Strong sunshine striped their dusty roofs with colour, broken glass suddenly gleamed rainbows, the bomb sites were bright with weeds and there were no raids for a week, for ten days, for a fortnight.

‘Where's Jerry?' Londoners asked each other. ‘Where's 'e got to?'

‘Perhaps he's given up,' Mr Allnutt hoped.

‘And about bloody time too,' John Cooper said.

But then, just as they were all beginning to relax, Megan came to call with some rather upsetting news.

‘My Dad's going back in the army,' she told Peggy. ‘Company sergeant-major to train the new recruits. He's got married quarters so Mum's going with him, she says.'

‘What'll you do?' Peggy asked, feeling the pang of parting even before she heard her friend's answer.

‘Dunno,' Megan said. ‘I could get a room somewhere, I dare say. I wouldn't like to leave London. Not now.'

‘Cross yer bridges when you come to 'em,' Mrs Geary advised. ‘When's he going?'

‘End a' July,' Megan said. ‘Not long.'

‘Oh well,' Mrs Geary said. ‘Lots could happen before the end of July.'

And lots did, although finding a room for an airman to rent anywhere near an RAF station was still totally and miserably impossible. On 2 June clothes were rationed, on 10 June Norman was sent home from school with chicken-pox, and two days later Yvonne joined him in their sticky cage with her own uncomfortable crop of spots. As there were no more raids and the weather was extremely hot, Peggy and Joan set up two beds for them in Mrs Geary's old room upstairs, where it was marginally cooler, and where they would have a great deal more space in which to suffer.

And when the illness reached the itchy and irritable stage Mrs Geary hobbled upstairs with the wireless to keep them entertained. From then on the three of them
spent most afternoons listening in to
Workers Playtime
and Vera Lynn and
Sandy Macpherson at the Cinema Organ
. And at the end of the month their little box brought them a piece of extraordinary news.

Peggy was on night duty and had just come home from a long shopping expedition. She'd queued at the butchers, the bakers and the grocers and now her back ached and all she wanted was a nice long sit-down.

Mrs Geary was watching out for her in her double mirror.

‘Guess what!' she said leaning out of the window and calling down. ‘Hitler's gone the other way. It's just been on the wireless.'

‘Gone the other way from what?' Peggy said, putting down her basket.

‘Why the other way from us,' Mrs Geary said leaning on the window-sill. ‘He's invaded Russia.'

‘Never!' Mr Allnutt said, stepping out of his front door to join in the conversation. ‘What's he gone and done a thing like that for?'

‘He's got a lot a' Germans to feed,' Mr Cooper said from his perch outside number four. ‘He's after the Ukraine.' That's what he's after. All that corn they grow in the Ukraine.'

‘I don't reckon he's all there,' Mrs Geary said. ‘I wouldn't want ter take on the Russians. Not if it was me.'

But Peggy was seeing the implication of the news. ‘Then that's why he's stopped bombing us,' she said. ‘He was getting ready to go an' bomb them, poor devils.' Perhaps the blitz really was over, thank God. If he'd turned on the Russians he wouldn't go on bombing London. She felt quite limp with the relief of it. It was marvellous news! It almost made her believe that Jim would find them somewhere to live.

‘You heard the wireless, Mrs Roderick?' Mrs Geary called. ‘Hitler's gone the other way.'

It was a swift and brutal campaign, a summer
blitzkrieg
first powering through the Baltic states and Poland and then swarming into Russia itself. There were rumours of entire Russian armies being cut off and captured, reports
of ‘stiff fighting', maps showing the long arrows of the German advance. It was like the conquest of Holland and Belgium and France all over again only on a grander scale.

In England the Government were soon organizing Tanks for Russia' schemes and munition workers were being urged to put in Sunday overtime ‘for our Russian allies'. And Fighter Command went over to the offensive, with the result that Jim and Froggy were told that their Squadron were being posted to Merston in Sussex at the end of July. They were to take delivery of brand new Spitfires, and fly sorties over the Channel and the French coast.

Jim was relieved to be nearer London and Froggy said he thought it was wizard.

‘Merston,' he said to Jim. ‘Good show! I've always wanted to go there.'

‘Never heard of it,' Jim said. ‘What's so special about Merston?'

‘You wait,' Froggy grinned, his wide mouth stretching right across his face. ‘You just wait.'

And as he'd obviously made up his mind not to say anything more the subject was dropped.

They arrived in Merston on a bright summer day at the end of July and as far as Jim could see there was nothing remarkable about the place at all. It was simply a bare airfield with the usual hangars and huts set in the middle of the usual flat fields where the corn was already ripening in dust dry earth and the sky was a hard dazzling blue and filled the usual ninety per cent of the landscape. There was an ancient pub at the end of one runway which the pilots commandeered and rechristened ‘The Old Wicker Chair' because they spent their time sitting on just such chairs out in the pub garden. But apart from that it was just the same as all the other airfields they'd used, a functional space in the countryside bristling with fighters.

‘Ready?' Froggy said, appearing in the door of the hut as soon as he came off shift. He was wearing a silk scarf and looked very full of himself.

‘What for?' Jim said, rather wearily. He'd been working hard and could have done with a bit of a kip.

‘Come on,' Froggy said. He was dancing on his toes in
his eagerness to be off.

So Jim went with him. Out of the camp, into the narrow lane between brambles and nettles, past the farmhouse, past the pub, over a scuffed intersection of lanes and pathways, past a village school where the children were playing some sort of skipping game, ‘Charlie Chaplin went to France and taught the ladies how to dance', and on along an overgrown pathway between overhanging trees and bushes grown so thick it was almost impossible to squeeze between them.

‘It'ud better be worth it,' Jim complained as a branch whipped back from Froggy's eager passage and hit him across the side of the face.

‘There!' Froggy said. ‘What d'you think of that?'

They were standing in front of a small flint cottage, which had obviously not been lived in for a very long time. The paintwork had originally been green but now it was so faded it was almost white and in the more exposed places it was beginning to flake away from the wood, the windows were grey with grime, the letter-box red with rust, and the cottage garden was growing a luxuriant crop of hip-high weeds.

Jim grimaced. ‘Not a lot,' he admitted.