Their Finest Hour and a Half (23 page)

What could be worse than buttons? wondered Edith. Zips, she supposed, with their near-instant access to whatever they were concealing. Though, on second thoughts, the noise of a zip was unmistakeable, so perhaps Verna was implying a sort of non-specific fumbling sound, the muffled scrabble of a hand searching in a pocket. For a bus fare, perhaps, or . . .

It was Verna's repeated phrase, ‘You know what I mean, don't you Edith?' that sent her thoughts along such unhelpful byways. Because, as a matter of fact – and in spite of her long-term residency on the outskirts of the bubbling Cauldron of Sin – she
didn't
know. It seemed that there were those who, like her cousin, saw sex everywhere, and there were those who, like herself, managed hardly to see it at all, and this was not through any very deliberate avoidance.

‘I was coming back along Mudd Street after dark on Monday,' said Verna, ‘after the salvage meeting, and I heard a noise from a doorway, not a
nice
noise, if you know what I mean, Edith, and—' There was the jangle of the shop bell, and Verna rose with alacrity. ‘That'll be Mrs Campion about the skirts,' she said. ‘I shan't be long.'

Edith worked on. Occasional snatches of conversation drifted through from the shop: the terrible cost of perms, the state of the chapel roof, the fall of Benghazi. After half an hour, the subject of skirts had yet to be broached, and Edith lobbed the completed trousers into the ironing basket, and stood up and stretched. A shadow by the open doorway moved suddenly.

‘Hello Myrtle,' said Edith.

There was a pause, and then the figure of Myrtle Furse eased into view. ‘I wasn't spying.'

‘It doesn't matter. I wasn't doing anything worth spying on,' said Edith.

‘I was seeing if Mum was here.'

‘She's talking to a customer.'

‘Good. May I sit and watch you?'

‘Of course, if you'd like to. I'm only going to unpick a frock.'

Myrtle dragged a stool across the floor. She was a large girl for twelve (an ‘early developer' as her mother delicately put it), and she moved with an apologetic, round-shouldered gait that did nothing to decrease her visibility. She had small hands and feet, dainty features in the middle of a wide pink face, and a great frizz of dark hair. Her adenoids were enlarged, and until their removal (‘the doctor says they have to ripen') she spoke in an unlovely monotone. Verna's expression when she looked at her daughter was one of permanent exasperation, as if she had ordered a bolt of ciré marocain, and a length of canvas had turned up instead.

‘How was school today?' asked Edith.

‘The nit nurse came and Joyce Hodson had to go home, she caught them off an evacuee. I like the buttons on your cuffs,' she added, stroking one with a fingertip. ‘They look just like liquorice drops.'

‘Thank you.'

‘And did you buy them in
London
?' As ever, the word was invested with breathy awe.

‘I did, yes.'

‘Whereabouts?'

‘In a shop called Mrs Beck's in Dean Street.'

‘Is that near anywhere famous?'

‘It runs into Shaftesbury Avenue.'

‘Shaftesbury Avenue, the heart of London's glamorous theatre land.' The phrase – one of many that she'd swallowed whole from magazines – was delivered with utter seriousness, and Edith coughed, to hide her smile.

‘It doesn't look particularly glamorous at the moment,' she said. ‘There aren't any lights outside the theatres, you know.'

‘Yes, but it's still . . .' Myrtle shook her head, unable to express the vastness of her vision. She opened her satchel and took out the
A-Z
that a visitor from London had once left under a Badgeham beach hut. Myrtle, mooning along the sands one afternoon after school, had found it, opened it and been transported into a world where the high street didn't end at a salt marsh, and where you could take a bus from one royal palace to another, via a zoo. She consulted it daily, dipping in at random in much the same way as her mother dipped into the Bible, seeking inspirational verses. ‘I was looking at the area around Piccadilly Circus this lunchtime,' said Myrtle, with easy authority. ‘Did you ever go there?'

‘Oh yes,' said Edith, thinking of the dreary cocoon of sandbags that protected Eros from blast damage, of the soldiers who loitered outside Lillywhite's and wolf-whistled the shop girls. ‘Lots of times.'

‘And have you seen any stars of stage or screen, stepping out of a taxi on their way to one of the many fashionable eating houses?'

‘I'm afraid not. Though I did see Mr Gandhi once, on the steps of St Martin-in-the-Fields.'

Myrtle left a brief pause, in lieu of interest. ‘I was thinking . . .' she said.

‘Yes?'

‘When you go back to London . . .' She looked at Edith with sudden anxiety. ‘
Are
you going back?'

‘Oh yes.'

‘I mean, I don't want you to, I wish you wouldn't go, but when you do go, well, can I come and visit you? Just for a day. I could get the train from Norwich and—'

‘Is that you, Myrtle?' called Verna from the shop. ‘Come here, please.'

Myrtle sighed, and put away her almanac. ‘
Errands
,' she said, gloomily. There were only nineteen streets in Badgeham and she knew them all.

Edith shook out the folds of a sand-crêpe dress that needed re-modelling, and took out her stitch-ripper. So when
are
you going back? she wondered, guiding the wicked little hook along the seam.

She certainly had no intention of working as Verna's junior for the rest of her life, and Madame Tussaud's had been very understanding and had said that they would hold her job open if she wanted to return. ‘
How's the shell-shock?
' Dolly Clifford had asked in her last letter. ‘
My next door neighbour told me about her uncle's cousin who was bombed out in October. He was a jeweller and he went straight back to work, setting diamonds, and then someone slammed a door and he dropped a stone worth £3,000 and it fell through a crack in the floorboards and they never found it again. He's in a mental hospital now
.' The Kings and Queens gallery had been closed for eight weeks after the bomb had fallen, but had now re-opened and there were more visitors than ever, in spite of the raids. ‘
Nora's fallen in love with a Polish sailor she met in the Chamber of Horrors. She says she can't even spell his name, but he wants her to go back with him after the war and live on his pig farm. I am stepping out with our shelter warden. He says we should make the most of our time, as Hitler's ordered a 400-ton bomb that's built into a glider and once that drops we'll be for it. Did I tell you that admission charges went up in January?
'

The Badgeham siren had only sounded twice since Edith had arrived, and both had been false alarms. The Londoners who'd stayed had suffered fifty-odd night raids in a row before Christmas, and a fair few sharp ones since then. God knows she was glad to have been out of it, but somehow it wasn't the thought of the raids that constricted her chest whenever she thought of returning; it wasn't even the disorder or the filth or the awfulness of having to find new accommodation. It was the insidious feeling that, war notwithstanding, she'd be returning to precisely the same spot on precisely the same road that she had left five months before.

She always thought of it as a road. Verna's mother – Edith's aunt – had owned a picture that had fascinated Edith as a child, and the title had been THE TWO ROADS – one of these the broad, slippery path to hell (lined with pothouses and gambling dens), and the other the narrow, steady climb to paradise, where the only distractions were the good deeds waiting to be done. At the centre of the picture stood two children, apparently pondering which route to take. It had implied that at some point in life there would be a choice – a fork, a crossroads, an opportunity to at least glimpse a little sinfulness, a flash of gaiety, if only from a distance. But Edith's own blameless track seemed to possess unfairly high hedges, and she'd plodded along without ever managing to catch sight of a wider view, for she wasn't like Dolly, who managed zestfully to wring the drama out of every step, or Verna who never seemed to doubt her own purpose and destination – or even Myrtle, who at least had spotted a Shining City somewhere above the hedgerows. The flight to Norfolk, the drama that preceded it, were in danger of being nothing more than a spell on the grass verge, when what she really needed was a Damascene revelation. Or even a ladder.

The shop bell rang as Myrtle left on her errands. Edith detached the dress bodice from the skirt, and began to unpick the underarm seams. She found herself matching the snap of the stitch-ripper to the scrape and thud of Mr Furse's spade; the sounds fitted together nicely: one could almost sing ‘Tea for Two' to the rhythm. After a while, the nagging drone of an aircraft joined the other two noises, slightly spoiling the tune, and then, with the brute finality of someone stamping on a gramophone record, the colossal roar of the battery began, followed immediately by a tiny, dangerous whine that emanated from the glass just above her head; Edith hastily put down her sewing and grabbed a bolt of flannelette.

‘I've got it,' she called, opening the door to the garden. The plane, from the local aerodrome, was flying just to the north of the village, a red-and-yellow silk target trailing far behind it on an invisible wire.

‘Can you manage?' shouted Verna's husband Roy, pausing over his spade.

‘I can manage.' She slid the bolt of flannelette on to the last panel of the glass roof and weighed it down with a trio of bricks. The tiny vibration stopped.

‘Well done,' shouted Roy.

He straightened up, welcoming the interruption, and they both watched the plane describe a leisurely figure of eight high to the north of the village. If any of the bullets were hitting the target then they were leaving no trace.

‘Ah well,' said Roy, bending to his task again, ‘it'll be back again tomorrow, no doubt.'

Edith returned to the lean-to and shut the door, minutely decreasing the noise of the guns. She had just sat down again when the shop bell jangled violently, and a moment later Myrtle galloped into the lean-to. ‘You'll never guess what they told me at the butcher's,' she said, panting. ‘It's the most exciting thing to happen in Badgeham
ever
 . . .'

March 1941

The bathroom on the first floor of the Crown and Anchor was not the ideal place in which to practise vocal exercises, but since it was the only private area available to Ambrose, he really had no choice. There was a little too much reverberation created by the large number of hard surfaces, but the ceiling was surprisingly high, and by tilting his head back he could achieve quite a decent effect. Plosives, in particular, came out well.

Well, that was better; the words bounced back like billiard balls. Of late, he had noticed a hoarse edge to his voice – not the roughness of a throat infection, but a sort of dry creak, like that of an unoiled door. Neglect, of course, was as threatening to a delicate instrument as abuse, and there had been whole days recently (sometimes several days in a row) during which his vocal cords had rusted, unused. He couldn't risk laryngitis on the very first day of location filming.

He gargled and then began on a volume exercise, taking the syllable ‘ha' from the barely audible to a ringing shout and then back again, and he was on his fourth repetition when a door crashed open somewhere along the corridor outside and a series of heavy footsteps approached the bathroom.

‘It's occupied,' called Ambrose.

‘I know it's fucking occupied,' shouted someone with a cockney accent. ‘It's occupied by some bastard who thinks that it's hilarious to shout at the top of his fucking voice at half past six in the fucking morning.' Whoever it was rattled the handle with brutish strength.

‘I'm very nearly finished,' said Ambrose.

‘No you're not, you're completely fucking finished, and if I hear the fucking word “kettle” one more fucking time then I'm going to find one and shove it up your arse sideways.'

It seemed prudent to wait until King Kong was back in his den before exiting the bathroom, and Ambrose spent a useful few moments trimming his fingernails. This, then, was what happened when cast and crew were thrust into the same milieu.

‘Accommodation's tight so we're all mucking in together,' the production manager had said, as if there were some sort of virtue in the idea, and what was the inevitable result? Mutual misunderstandings, and the nightly prospect of watching electricians at the very next table in the dining-room eating peas with a spoon.

All remained quiet outside, and Ambrose cautiously slid the bolt and passed quickly along the landing. He had, at least, been allocated the best room that the hostelry could offer, although this tiny victory had been undermined by the fact that another bed had been inserted into one corner. It had remained unoccupied until the early hours of the morning, when he had awoken to the sound of drawers opening and closing and the bobbing of a torch-beam across the carpet. ‘Sorry,' someone had muttered, ‘only just got here.'

That someone was sitting up in bed, polishing a pair of spectacles, when Ambrose re-entered the room. The blackouts had been raised and the first grey light showed a round-faced man in his thirties sporting a terrible haircut.