London Pride (67 page)

‘It's non-stop manoeuvres nowadays,' Joan said. ‘It'll be this year, won't it?'

‘Looks like it,' Jim said laconically. ‘This calls for a celebration. Let's have a ding-dong.'

‘What, now?' Baby said, her eyes round with delight.

‘Now.'

‘But it's ever so late.'

‘No it's not,' he said. ‘It's just the right time.' Just the right time, he thought looking at his patient Peggy. It would do her good not to be looking after Baby all the time.

His posting to Tangmere was very short-lived. In March, while Peggy and Joan were sending out invitations to the wedding, he was sent to Friston, and wrote home to Peggy to tell her that the squadron now had new Spitfire Xll's with the most magnificent Rolls-Royce Griffon engines, and that he couldn't wait for his next long leave. In April he was posted to Devon, and by then it was plain that the invasion was imminent.

‘I shan't be back for the wedding after all,' he wrote to Peggy. ‘But I dare say Baby will be able to get spliced without my presence. I hope it all goes well. Write and tell me about it when it's over and done.'

Even though she went on telling everyone she was only going to have a quiet wedding, Baby invited all her workmates to attend and all her neighbours in Paradise Row, even Nonnie Brown and that awful Cyril, which Joan said was downright unnecessary. Then she went off on a shopping spree and spent all her remaining clothing coupons on a length of expensive white satin for a ‘proper' wedding dress and commissioned Mrs Roderick to make it for her.

There was hardly a moment when she wasn't busily planning something or other, buttonholes and bouquets from Ernest and Leslie, how to eke out the extra rations for the wedding breakfast, what Uncle Gideon would be wearing, because he had to look his best when he was giving her away, a bridesmaid's dress for Yvonne and special flowers for her hair, a pageboy's outfit for Norman which the little boy resolutely refused to try on, declaring it made him look ‘a proper sissy', even what tunes she wanted Mr Cooper to play at the wedding ding-dong.

‘It's a wonder she ain't got a ribbon for the parrot,' Mrs Geary said.

‘I'd keep quiet about it if I was you,' Mr Allnutt advised. ‘You might give her ideas.'

‘The only thing she ain't ordered up is the weather,' Joan said. ‘And she'd do that if she could.'

‘Well I hope it keeps fine for her,' Mr Allnutt said. ‘It is her day when all's said and done.'

Gary sent her a letter every day, saying how much he was looking forward to their wedding and how much he loved her, and she wrote back to him saying the same things almost word for word, because she wasn't very good at writing letters. And April passed from showers to storms.

‘Oh look at that rain,' she complained, as a torrent lashed against the windows. ‘It'ud better not rain on my wedding day, that's all.'

‘Write and tell the Met Office,' Joan advised. But Baby was already on her way out of the kitchen to pick up the mail.

Towards the end of April Gary wrote to say that his manoeuvres were due to start ‘tomorrow or soon after' and that he wouldn't be able to write for a day or two but that he and his best man would see her at St Alphege's Church at eleven hundred hours on 6 May. ‘Don't be late,' he urged, ‘or I shall be nervous.'

She took his instructions most seriously and wrote out a schedule of events for the wedding day. ‘Rise at 7.30 a.m. Breakfast 8.00 a.m. Pageboy and bridesmaid dressed by 10.00 a.m.'

‘She'll be lucky,' Norman snorted when he saw his instructions. ‘If she thinks I'm sitting about in that outfit all day she's got another think coming.'

‘You'll do as you're told, and stop arguing,' Joan said.

But he contrived to be out of the house running errands for Mrs Geary until nearly a quarter past ten on the wedding morning, while the bride was alternately dressing and yelling for him down the well of the stairs.

‘I'll swing for him if he ain't back directly,' she shrieked.

‘Here's yer uncle come,' Mrs Geary said from her seat beside the mirror. ‘My eye, you do look a swell, Mr Potter,' as Gideon, who was wearing his old brown suit and a new pork pie hat that didn't quite fit him, preened into the house.

After his arrival events began to go as planned. Yvonne was sent to tease Norman out of the corner shop and bring him back to be coaxed into the hated suit, and at five minutes to eleven precisely the bride made her appearance in the doorway resplendent in her white satin with a
bouquet of cream roses held to her bosom.

The bridal procession was very grand and noisy, as well it might be when the entire street was taking part. They marched down the middle of the road in a self-conscious, chattering parade, past the Earl Grey and up the passageway to the church. And in the south entrance they were met by the verger, who was lurking rather anxiously to tell them that the groom hadn't arrived.

Baby was put out but decided to be gracious. ‘The guests can go in,' she said, ‘and we'll take a turn round the church.' Let people see what a lovely bride she was. There was no harm in that.

So she and Uncle Gideon and her pretty bridesmaid and her scowling page walked all round the church, along Straightsmouth Street and up the alley and back through the High Street collecting admiring stares all the way. But the groom still hadn't arrived.

‘One more turn,' Baby said. ‘He'll have come by then.'

So they took another turn, this time walking at a snail's pace and causing quite a bit of comment, especially among the shoppers who'd witnessed their first appearance. But there was still no groom.

‘Perhaps you would care to wait in the vestry,' the verger suggested. ‘These things do happen. Wartime, you know.'

So they waited in the vestry. And waited. And waited.

By now it was a quarter to twelve and the congregation was audibly restive.

‘Where's he got to?' Baby said. The skirt of her lovely dress was all creased at the back where she'd sat down and her patience was beginning to crease too. ‘All that carry-on about me not keeping him waiting and now this.' She looked very disagreeable. ‘Stand still Norman, you're scuffing all your shoes.'

‘I've only got two,' Norman pointed out, with the devastating logic of the ten-year-old.

But she wasn't amused.

Finally when the clocks had all struck midday, the curate appeared to say that he was most frightfully sorry but the next wedding party had arrived and as they were due in the church at twelve o'clock he really would have to
ask her to make way for them.

‘But I ain't been married,' she protested, flushed with anger and humiliation.

‘Yes, yes, I know,' he said sadly. ‘But we can hardly marry you without a groom, can we?'

‘I shall stay here,' she said. ‘I shall stay here until he arrives.'

‘You may stay if you wish, of course,' he said, ‘but your party have already gone back to your house.'

The walk back home was the longest and most humiliating return of her life. She kept her head up and her eyes straight in front of her gazing at nothing, but her cheeks were scarlet and she was panting with distress, and when she got back to the house and had to step inside where all her guests were waiting for her, fury and shame rose in her like a hot tide. She was trapped, marked, rejected. How could this be happening to her? There was nowhere to go, nowhere to hide and they were all looking at her, laughing at her, mocking her. She put back her head and began to scream. And once unleashed the scream went on and on, higher and higher, while her guests fell back before her, shocked and deafened.

‘Just like her mother,' Mrs Geary said to the astonished assembly, as Joan and Peggy leapt towards her and half-led half-dragged her through the throng and upstairs into the relative privacy of her bedroom.

‘Don't,' Peggy begged. ‘Oh don't, Baby please. You'll make yourself ill.'

But her sister threw herself across the bed and went on screaming.

‘Leave her be,' Joan advised in a whisper. ‘I reckon she'll get over it better if she's on her own. It can't be much fun to be seen in a state like that, poor thing. Let's go down and explain to the others.'

‘How can we explain?' Peggy said. ‘What are we gonna say?'

‘Say he's been delayed,' Joan advised. ‘Train not running or something.'

But the guests were already listening to another explanation, which the sisters heard as they went down the stairs.

‘Jilted,' Nonnie Brown was saying with great satisfaction. ‘ 'S the same the whole world over. Can't face it when it comes to it, none of them, and off they goes. Men! Wouldn't give you tuppence for 'em. Leave you in the lurch soon as look at yer. 'S always the same. Cyril was the same. Weren't yer, mate?'

Cyril looked very surprised at this and so did his neighbours.

‘We might as well eat the food,' Peggy said, bringing in a plate of sandwiches from the kitchen. ‘It'll only go to waste else, even if he turns up tomorrow.'

‘Quite right,' Gideon said, stepping in to help her. ‘Long past my dinner-time. Whatcher got? I'll have a bloater paste.'

So they fed their guests and poured them beer and lemonade shandies and brown ale for Gideon and a nice port and lemon for Mrs Roderick, and the first embarrassment was eased away. Mr Allnutt said what a shame it all was, and Mrs Allnutt told them she was sure there was an explanation for it. ‘Something to do with the war,' she said. ‘Bound to be. Trains not running or broken down or something. He'll turn up tomorrow like Peggy says, you'll see. Poor boy. It ain't just Baby. It's as bad for him really.'

And although they didn't all believe in her excuses, most of the guests agreed with her if only for politeness' sake. At one o'clock the party from Dodds took their leave, saying how sorry they were and how much they hoped it would all turn out for the best, and once they'd gone the neighbours left
en masse
, shuffling out in renewed embarrassment, not knowing what to say. Gideon and Ethel were the last to leave, urging Joan to keep them posted.

‘Anything we can do, you know where we are,' he said.

‘Thanks,' Peggy said. But what could any of them do? They'd have to wait for the explanation, the same as Baby.

Joan began to gather up the dirty glasses. Now that the guests were gone they could hear Baby sobbing in the room above their heads.

‘What are we going to do with her?' Peggy wondered, glancing up at the ceiling.

‘Leave her be,' Mrs Geary said. ‘She'll get over it. She'll
probably get a letter tomorrow explaining it all.'

But Joan wasn't sure. ‘It makes me think of Mum and the way she went on that time,' she said.

‘If she ain't better by tomorrow,' Peggy decided, ‘we'll get the doctor to her.'

‘The letter'll do the trick,' Mrs Geary said.

But no letter came and Baby was still weeping two days later. By then Joan insisted that a doctor was necessary.

She came late that afternoon, a brisk young woman with a weary smile and no time to spare. She took Baby's temperature, which was normal, and her pulse which was normal, and looked down her throat, which she pronounced ‘normal for a woman who's been crying too much'.

‘There's nothing much the matter with you except hurt pride,' she said. ‘You should get up and get on with your life. That's my advice.'

‘Shouldn't she have some medicine?' Peggy asked as the doctor began to walk downstairs.

‘No,' the doctor said without looking back. ‘If she starts screaming again, slap her. And now if you'll pardon me I've got some real patients to attend to.'

‘What a perfectly beastly doctor!' Baby wailed. ‘Can't she see my heart's been broke? Oh how could he do this to me? That's what I can't understand. If he was here I'd give him such a piece of my mind. And he hasn't even written to me. He might have written. Oh, if I knew where he was …'

But Sergeant Gary Svenson was beyond her reach and her anger. Operation Tiger, the manoeuvre he'd told her about, had gone very badly wrong. Thirty miles out to sea, at half past one in the morning, the American landing craft and their two escorting destroyers had met up with a flotilla of German E-boats, which they hadn't expected and weren't prepared for. In the ensuing battle hundreds of Americans were killed. At the very moment when Baby was walking so unhappily back from the church, Gary Svenson's bullet-ridden body was being washed ashore. It was found at a place called Slapton Sands and, like all the other casualties of the incident, it was never reported. With the invasion so close too many other lives were at risk to let such a devastating secret out to the press.

But what was good for national morale was devastating to Baby. Despite the doctor's diagnosis she continued to suffer. She stayed in her room for the next ten days, with the blinds drawn and only the wireless for company, her hair uncombed and her face puffy with tears and pallid for lack of make-up. Mrs Geary said she had too good an appetite to be really ill, because she ate everything that Peggy brought up to her, but her woebegone appearance roused her sister's tender compassion.

‘I feel so sorry for her,' she said, ‘being jilted. And I'm sure she was jilted otherwise he'd have written. That doctor was heartless. I think she's ill with her nerves. Like Mum.'

But on the second Friday morning Baby had a visitor who improved her health quite dramatically. It was Mr Dodds, no less, and Mr Dodds had a question for his employee.

‘We need to know how we stand,' he said, when he'd waited for Baby to make herself presentable and had been ushered into the sick room, ‘
vis-à-vis
your reserved occupation. If you're not well enough to return to work on Monday we may have to make some other arrangements. For Miss Doris perhaps.'