The Past and Other Lies (31 page)

‘Really?’ replied Jemima in a bored voice, fetching herself a teacup off the dresser. Who did Janie think she was, telling her things about her own dad? Of course, Janie didn’t have a dad of her own. And she didn’t have a husband either, come to think of it. Rather a careless girl, Janie.

‘Dad a special constable?’ exclaimed Bertha. ‘Fancy!’

‘Yes, he went off first thing,’ said Mum proudly. ‘Over at Steyne Hall, that’s where they’re enrolling ’em. A Special Constable of the Metropolitan Police! What do you think of that?’

‘I think Dad’s been waiting his whole life for it,’ said Jemima, pouring tea into her cup.

‘Fancy!’ said Bertha again. And then, ‘Do you think he’ll get a uniform?’

‘Probably,’ said Janie. ‘Else how would folk know he was a special constable else?’ Herbert made a gurgling noise and began to regurgitate something.

‘’Course he won’t get a uniform,’ said Jemima, exasperated. ‘He’ll probably get some wretched little armband. Like the VADs in the War.’

This remark was met with a disappointed silence.

‘Well, never mind,’ said Mum cheerfully. ‘I expect he’ll get to guard something important and keep folk under control.’

‘Folk are walking to work—what’s he going to do? Help them cross the road?’

‘Really, Jemima, I don’t think you appreciate how dangerous it might be,’ said Mum indignantly. ‘Nora said she saw some young men attacking a bus in High Street earlier.’

‘I did!’ confirmed Aunt Nora, leaning forward eagerly. ‘And some of the young men looked quite
rough
. Dockers, I shouldn’t be surprised. There was some shocking language, I can tell you.’

‘It
is
a general strike, Aunt Nora,’ admonished Bertha, putting on her serious face. ‘It’s not tea at the palace. Men are fighting for their rights. You have to expect that kind of thing.’

‘What’s Matthew doing?’ inquired Jemima.

Bertha shuffled about in her seat. ‘He’s at the post office, naturally. The GPO isn’t on strike, you know. Folk still need to send letters and telegrams.’

‘And people have got to get to work but that doesn’t stop the buses and trams and trains being on strike.’

‘That’s different.’

But how it was different, Bertha did not elaborate on.

‘Your Matthew’s a very principled young man, Bertha,’ declared Aunt Nora, who obviously was a good judge of husbands.

‘He’s going to volunteer, too,’ said Bertha with a sideways glance at Jemima. ‘On the buses. As a driver. He drove ambulances, you know. In the War.’

Jemima hadn’t known and frankly she found it difficult to imagine her dull, ponderous brother-in-law dodging machine guns and mortars at the wheel of a rickety old ambulance on the Western Front.

‘At Portsmouth,’ Bertha continued (and Jemima thought, Ha! I knew it). ‘He’s going to go down to the bus garage after work to volunteer to drive on the early shifts. They’re enrolling people today.’

‘A bus driver!’ gasped Janie in hushed tones, as though Bertha had announced Matthew had signed up for the Secret Service and was being posted to Bolshevik Russia. But then, Janie had no husband of her own with whom to be impressed.

‘What’s young Ronnie up to, love?’ said Mum suddenly, as though she’d just remembered she had two sons-in-law.

‘I bet he’s excited,’ said Bertha rather too casually. ‘The big day, finally come...’ And as Jemima turned to her Bertha looked away and flushed.

‘The big day? An excuse for grown men to skip work and play about in the streets like schoolboys? Oh, he’s excited alright. I hope he doesn’t see your Matthew driving a bus, that’s all.’

‘Perhaps your dad will arrest him?’ suggested Janie in wide-eyed delight, and Jemima gave her a withering look.

‘How long do you think it will last, Alice?’ asked Aunt Nora of Mum. Why Aunt Nora thought Mum would know anything at all about it was a mystery to Jemima.

‘Matthew says they will be lucky if it lasts the week,’ said Bertha. ‘He said folk’ll just get fed up with the strikers and the strikers will just give up. That or there’ll be anarchy and the army will be called out. But either way it’ll be over by the weekend.’

‘
Anarchy!
’ said Jemima. ‘What does Matthew know of anarchy? He works in a post office!’

Bertha’s face darkened.

‘The post office is at the heart of a society’s communication network!’ she retorted, so pat that Matthew himself might have said it.

‘If it goes on too long there’ll be food shortages,’ warned Aunt Nora. ‘There were queues outside the butcher’s this morning. We’ve already begun rationing, haven’t we, Janie dear?’

‘Well, I don’t know about all this strike business,’ announced Mum, heaving herself to her feet, ‘but I’ve got the washing to start and your dad’ll still be home for his dinner at twelve.’

‘Shall we go and watch the strike?’ said Janie, holding Herbert out for Aunt Nora to take.

‘Watch it? What’s to see?’ said Jemima. ‘People hanging about waiting for the end of the world? I’d rather be stuck at home with Baby.’

And that was exactly where she was for the rest of the day, though it was true that she spent a large portion of it watching the street from her bedroom window. Not that there was much to see. By afternoon High Street was deserted and Jemima began to wish she’d made some arrangement to see Bertha. Even tea at Oakton Way with the odious Mrs Lake and the shrivelled-up Aunt Daisy was preferable to being cooped up all day in the flat.

By four o’clock things suddenly became more lively as the first workers began to drift back home again. By five, the street was teeming with a steadily increasing stream of pedestrians and a growing procession of vehicles. The noise and congestion grew alarmingly and onlookers stopped to watch, cheering loudly whenever a particularly colourful or overladen vehicle came into view.

At that point Jemima, unable to remain alone in the flat a moment longer, went next door and persuaded Mrs Avery to take Baby for five minutes then hurried down the stairs to join the throng. She almost ran straight into Bertha and Janie, who popped out of the side passage and were about to knock on the downstairs door.

‘Jem! Come on! Come and watch the procession!’ said Janie. ‘Everyone’s out watching!’

‘I know, I know. I can see it from my window,’ Jemima replied, but she allowed herself to be led out to the street and they took up a position in front of the butcher’s.

For an hour the noisy, colourful procession continued. At one point a scuffle broke out in front of the old fire station when a delivery van that had driven all the way up from the country tried to unload its goods and was met by a group of angry strikers. A carload of special constables came roaring up Gunnersbury Lane and screeched to a halt outside the shop, the constables diving into the scuffle to break it up. Dad wasn’t among them.

‘See? Armbands,’ said Jemima, pointing.

‘What a shame!’ said Janie, standing on tiptoe to see over the heads of two very large women with big hats. ‘I like a man in a uniform.’

You’d like just about any man at this moment, thought Jemima.

‘Look! A bus!’ cried Bertha, and Jemima rolled her eyes because it had come to this, the three of them standing in High Street, excited because a bus was coming along. And yet here she was craning her neck as much as anyone to see another double-decker General come careering round the corner, a Union Jack fluttering on its bonnet, swerving erratically and nearly running into the back of the fruit delivery van. It braked, almost stalled, then set off again, and through the cab window Jemima could see a very young-looking chap pulling desperately at the gearstick. Beside him, the window was smashed and paint was daubed on the side of the bus obscuring the
Gen
of
General
. One or two game passengers sat outside braving catcalls from the onlookers, and on the back platform balanced a youthful conductor in a gaily striped blazer, holding grimly onto the rear handrail and clutching his ticket machine.

Behind the bus ran a group of strikers in shirt sleeves and braces, keeping up a stream of abuse. They attempted to jump up onto the platform but with a neat swerve, whether deliberate or accidental Jemima couldn’t tell, the bus evaded them and plunged down Gunnersbury Lane. Which route the bus was following was a mystery and perhaps that wasn’t the point.

‘
Demo tonight! Demo this evening at Horn Lane Cinema!
’ cried a man in an armband who was working his way through the crowd handing out badly printed fliers, one of which he gave to Jemima. ‘Demonstration in support of the strike, tonight at six thirty sharp! Horn Lane Cinema!’ he said, moving off.

‘How daft! Do they think we have nothing better to do?’ said Jemima, dropping the flier on the ground.

‘Oh, do let’s go!’ pleaded Bertha.

‘I wish we had armbands,’ sighed Janie.

But her disappointment was quickly forgotten as the distant strains of a brass band could be heard further down the street. Around them the crowd strained to see. The sounds of the band grew louder and someone called out, ‘It’s the Band of the Royal Marines!’ and someone else shouted ‘It’s the Metropolitan Police Band!’ but as the band finally came into view a large banner identified the Acton Labour Party, led by the band of the National Union of Railwaymen, which wasn’t quite as good but everyone cheered anyway. The marchers strode proudly past, many of the men wearing their War medals, and there were women, too, among their ranks and Bertha waved excitedly as though she knew them all personally.

‘Careful, don’t want Mr Lake to see you cheering the enemy,’ remarked Jemima above the noise. Bertha pulled her hand down and bit her lip.

Afterwards everyone made their way to All Saints parish hall where an impromptu concert had been organised. The headline artists—a Miss Valda Langhorne, pianist, and a Mr Tommy Scarlet, comic and entertainer—failed to turn up because of the strike, so the vicar and Miss Morgan from the Women’s Institute had to improvise. Lots of people got up to do turns and sing songs and it was all very hilarious and at last Jemima could stand it no more and got up to leave.

Outside it was dusk and a small crowd had gathered in front of the parish noticeboard to read badly printed and hastily pasted-up copies of something called
The British Citizen
and something else equally makeshift called
The British Worker
and it didn’t take much brain power to decide which side had produced which newspaper. She couldn’t imagine why anyone was bothering to read either of them, when all that one paper was going to report was the glory of the noble workers and all the other paper was going to say was beware the Red Scourge.

‘Mrs Booth—Jemima!’

It was Matthew coming out of the darkness, wearing an armband.

Jemima stopped politely, raised her head and greeted him cordially.

‘Good evening, Matthew. Bertha said you were driving the buses,’ she said airily, making it clear such things did not impress her.

‘Indeed I have been—I enrolled after the evening sorting and have been out on the number 17C to Putney and back!’ He made it sound as if Putney were somewhere off in the African Veldt.

‘Does the 17C go to Putney?’ inquired Jemima suspiciously.

Matthew looked a little abashed. ‘No, I don’t believe so—not normally—but these are testing times. And my conductor was supposed to be navigating but he was a young chap from Taunton. Up here studying engineering. We ran the gauntlet, you know,’ he added, and Jemima was surprised to note a glimmer of excitement in his normally dull postal clerk’s eyes. ‘Quite a set-to we had at Hammersmith. Hooligans chucking bricks and so forth.’

‘You went to Putney...via Hammersmith?’

In the light from the streetlamp she saw him flush. ‘Testing times, Mrs Booth—Jemima.’

She wished he’d stop calling her ‘Mrs Booth—Jemima’. It was quite irritating.

‘Well, clearly it’s all very exciting,’ she observed, stifling a yawn. ‘However, I’ve got Baby to feed and Ronnie will no doubt be home and wanting his tea.’

Would
Ronnie be home for his tea? She wasn’t entirely sure.

‘Oh,’ said Matthew, ‘I oughtn’t let you go home alone, not with gangs roaming the streets,’ and he hesitated as though seeking someone from whom he could ask permission to accompany her.

‘Don’t bother, I hardly think a gang is going to roam into me. Anyway, Bertha’s in there...’ She indicated with her thumb the church behind her just as a raucous burst of laughter erupted from the direction of the hall.

‘Ah yes, I gathered this was where everyone was headed.’

Matthew hesitated, seemingly torn between an archaic sense of gentlemanly duty and a fear of what his wife might think of him going off without her. Jemima stood coolly by and watched his discomfort with interest.

‘It is rather dark,’ she said, looking around and giving a little shiver.

And that seemed to clinch it.

‘I’ll go and find Bertha and let her know I shall return once I’ve seen you safely home,’ and he scuttled off towards the hall.

Enjoying the idea that Ronnie might have come home and found her not there, and even more the idea that she might return home late with her brother-in-law in tow, Jemima waited impatiently for Matthew’s return. He did so after some minutes, apologising and, she could see, a little awkward.