Survivor

by Lesley Pearse

  Henry was as good as his word. On 2nd April, Mariette received a brief letter from him asking her to contact Mr Perry at Prinknall and Forbes, in Chancery Lane. Henry wrote:

  He could use a secretary who can also speak and write fluent French. While most of his clients are English he has a few French ones, and he anticipates more coming to him in the next year because of the situation in France. I think this might be the perfect position for you.

  After being interviewed, Mariette was not so sure it was a position she wanted. Firstly, it would mean she would have to leave Mr Greville. He might be a bit oily but she’d grown used to his ways, and had even come to like him. Secondly, she didn’t like the bumptious Mr Perry, who spoke down to her, one little bit. He was fat, with a red shiny face and foul breath, and she couldn’t possibly imagine even sitting near him let alone changing her initial opinion of him.

  But she took the job because she needed it, and it was easier to get home to Bow from Holborn than from Baker Street.

  Mr Greville was unexpectedly pleasant when she gave in her notice. ‘I half expected it,’ he said. ‘I knew two days’ work a week wouldn’t be enough for you now. But tell me about the new job? I do hope you haven’t gone for work in a munitions factory just because the pay is good.’

  She told him that it was in a solicitor’s office, and that she would be doing some French translation work.

  ‘I’m pleased for you,’ he said. ‘To be honest, I have been thinking of giving up this office anyway. I could easily do everything from the factory. I wish you well, Miss Carrera. You’ve been a very good secretary, and I shall miss you.’

  But Mariette regretted taking the new position almost from her first day. The other clerks, typists and secretaries were a chilly and snobbish bunch of women who clearly were never going to welcome anyone new to their little clique. She heard a couple of whispers about her speaking French, and the fact that she was from New Zealand, it seemed both those things were strange enough for them to decide to ignore her.

  It was during her second week that her ability to act as an interpreter was tested for the first time. Mr Perry called her into his office to translate for a new French client who only spoke a smattering of English.

  Mrs Dupont was Jewish. Her doctor husband had insisted she must flee Paris with their two children just a few days before the city fell to the Germans. He was fearful of the rumours he’d heard about Jews being rounded up and sent to work camps and thought they would be safer in England with relatives.

  Since arriving in England, Mrs Dupont hadn’t heard a word from her husband. One of her relatives had given her Mr Perry’s name, hoping he could help her find out what had happened to her husband.

  Mariette had no problem translating the woman’s story, or Mr Perry’s reply that he would do his best for her. She took down all the details of Dr Dupont, exactly as her employer asked, but she couldn’t help but wonder why one of Mrs Dupont’s relatives here in London, who presumably spoke good English, hadn’t accompanied her to speak on her behalf. If they had, they might have sensed from Perry’s rather curt responses that he wasn’t very sympathetic towards her plight.

  If Mr Perry had let Mariette leave his office at the same time as he said goodbye to Mrs Dupont and showed her out, she might have been able to speak to the distressed woman and suggest she contact the Red Cross too. Unfortunately, Mr Perry kept her back to dictate an urgent letter to another client, and so the opportunity was lost.

  ‘Do you think the Gestapo have arrested Dr Dupont?’ Mariette asked him once the dictation was completed.

  ‘I think it’s highly unlikely,’ he said airily. ‘The chances are he sent his wife off to England for his own ends. You know what the French are like.’

  Mariette’s mouth opened to remind him that her father was French, and that he would only send his wife away if her life was in danger, but she stopped herself. She needed this job. And besides, she could get some advice from one of the Jewish people she often met in the shelter, and then pass that on to Mrs Dupont.

  As spring slipped into summer Mariette often felt that, if it wasn’t for Joan and the other friends she’d made in the East End, she would leave London and find somewhere to live away from the danger of bombs. The latest kind of bomb was a mine dropped by parachute. Some of these were as large as pillar boxes; they drifted down on the wind, exploding on impact with devastating results. Just two could obliterate a whole street.

  On 20th April there was the worst air raid since December. Johnny reported that a record 1,500 fires were started by incendiaries that night, even before a rain of over a thousand high-explosive bombs and parachute mines swept the capital. Eight London hospitals were hit, part of Selfridges caught fire, and a 500lb bomb crashed through the northern transept of St Paul’s Cathedral. Three days later, the bombers were back in force, concentrating on the East End, as if they hadn’t inflicted enough punishment there already.

  In early May, Mariette and Joan saw a newsreel at the cinema which showed the Australian, New Zealand, British and Polish troops retreating from Thermopylae, in Greece. Mariette knew her brother Alexis was there. It was reported that 7,000 men had been taken prisoner, and she was terrified he might be amongst them.

  On 10th May, the bombers were back in force, using the full moon to guide them to their targets. They knocked out every main-line station and destroyed over 5,000 homes, leaving great swathes of London without gas, electricity and water. On the morning of the 11th, Joan and Mariette staggered wearily out of the shelter to find a pall of brown smoke blotting out the sun. So many streets were impassable that, for many people, it was impossible to get to work. Mariette struggled through, only to find the office locked up. A huge fire blazed in City Road. It was a gin distillery, and the alcohol made it difficult to put the flames out. In south London the Palmolive soap factory was on fire; as firemen fought to put it out, the water turned to hot froth.

  Later that day, she and Joan heard that Scotland Yard, St James’s Palace, the Law Courts and many other famous buildings had been damaged – even the Tower of London had been hit by a hundred incendiaries.

  Johnny popped in fleetingly, a couple of days later, to tell Mariette that the Fire Service was to be nationalized, something he’d hoped would happen for a very long time. At present each local council brigade had different ranks, equipment and words of command, which made it difficult to put out a fire when men from two different brigades were firefighting side by side.

  Mariette wanted to be enthusiastic about his news, but she and Joan were more concerned by the frightening figure of one million people who had been made homeless, with only 129 small, ill-equipped rest centres to give them some kind of shelter. All the windows in Joan’s house had been blown out and, like so many others, they were without power, gas or water. They nailed boards over the windows, got water from a standpipe in the street, and considered themselves fortunate they still had a bed to sleep on.

  When Mariette heard that 50,000 soldiers had been rescued from the beaches in Greece, in what the press called a second Dunkirk, she offered up frantic prayers that Alexis was amongst them. Those prayers were answered when a letter eventually arrived from home, in June, and she learned he was safe. But Austin Roberts, a boy she’d been at school with, and the first boy to kiss her, had been killed. She might have dealt with far greater loss recently, yet the thought of Austin dying so far away from home really upset her.

  It made her blurt out to Joan that she’d had enough of London, and the war. ‘I can’t stand it any more. I can’t bear the sight of people picking through the ruins of their houses, the smell of fire, breathing in brick dust, and knowing that one of these nights it will be our turn to cop it. I’m going to move out of London before I go mad with it all.’

  As she might have expected, Joan made a joke of it. ‘Then join the bleedin’ Land Army,’ she teased. ‘You’ll look swell in that uniform with them big, baggy jodhpur things! Imagine all those randy old farmers trying
to have their way with you in hay lofts? You’ll love milking cows, mucking out stables and planting cabbages.’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind any of that – except the randy old farmers,’ Mariette shot back. ‘I hate seeing all the bomb sites, hearing nothing but sad news, and struggling to make a decent meal out of nothing.’

  ‘Come on now, you know you’d miss queuing for rations that ’ave all gone by the time you get to the ’ead of the queue! And you’re forgetting how much you love all the nights in the shelter next to a farting drunk.’

  ‘You’ve got me there, I would miss all that,’ Mariette giggled.

  ‘Just to cheer you up even more, they’ve just rationed clothes an’ all. So even if we ’ad any money for new ’uns, we wouldn’t ’ave the blinkin’ coupons,’ Joan reminded her.

  Mariette laughed. ‘You know, Joan, you are the only thing I’d miss in London. Well, maybe Johnny too. But I think he’s gone off me, he hardly ever comes round these days. And when he does, all he can talk about is fires.’

  ‘Why don’t you let ’im get ’is leg over?’ Joan, as always, didn’t mince her words. ‘That’ll take ’is mind off fires, and you’ll both be ’appier. And don’t make out you’re saving yourself till you get ’itched. I knows you’ve done it before.’

  ‘I don’t want to do it with him,’ Mariette admitted sheepishly. ‘All this time I’ve been using the excuse that there’s been no opportunity, but that is just an excuse. I don’t feel that way about him.’ She told Joan then about Morgan, and how she was always burning up to do it with him. ‘That’s how you should feel about a man, isn’t it?’

  Joan grinned. ‘Yeah, ducks, that is ’ow you should feel.’

  ‘But he turned out to be nasty. He tried to force himself on me, in a park, just before he joined up. He couldn’t read and write very well, and the last I heard he was leaving hospital in Folkestone after getting wounded at Dunkirk.’

  To her surprise, Joan laughed. ‘Christ Almighty, you can pick ’em!’ she said. ‘What was a posh girl like you doing with a gypo who can’t read or write? But I reckon ’e only tried to force you that night cos ’e felt like ’e was going to lose you.’

  Mariette laughed then. ‘That was the quickest route to it.’

  ‘Yeah, maybe, but blokes think with their cocks, luv. Something you said or did made ’im feel uneasy. It could’ve been cos ’e knew you was shocked that ’e couldn’t read well, or the gypsy thing. Maybe ’e even thought ’e might be killed in the war. So ’e wanted to put ’is stamp on you, like a dog does when it piddles on a lamppost.’

  Mariette giggled at that explanation but, as crude as it was, there was a kind of sense to it.

  ‘Well, I’m never going to know the answer to that. All he left me with is a picture in my head of his handsome face, and the memory of how good sex can be,’ she said. ‘But getting back to Johnny, what should I do about him?’

  Joan looked thoughtful. ‘Well, if you don’t feel that way about Johnny now, then you ain’t never goin’ to. So you ought to pack it in with the poor bloke. It ain’t fair to keep stringing ’im along.’

  ‘I don’t know how to. He was such a good friend when the Blitz was at its worst, and I don’t want to hurt his feelings.’

  ‘You know what they say, that “you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs”? Well, it’s the same with this. But you’ll ’urt Johnny more if you carry on ’olding ’im at arm’s length. Besides, from what I’ve seen of Johnny the fireman, ’e looks after number one. I can’t ’elp thinkin’ the main reason ’e’s still ’anging on to you ain’t cos ’e loves you madly but cos of who you are.’

  ‘I’m not anyone,’ Mariette said with some indignation.

  ‘Come off it! Compared with everyone else around ’ere you’re a toff! You’re a secretary, you speak French and you’ve got class. And when the war’s over, you’ll be going ’ome. Johnny’s got the idea your folks are rich.’

  Mariette scoffed at Joan’s cynicism. But once she was alone and gave some thought to remarks Johnny had made in the past – how often he talked about rich people and the opportunities to be made in wartime – she began to think Joan could be right.

  After the devastating air raid on 10th May, there was a lull. After months of almost continual nightly raids, no one could really believe it wouldn’t start again tonight or tomorrow. But gradually, as the streets were cleared of rubble and broken windows were replaced, people allowed themselves to think that the Blitz really was over and that Hitler was too busy attacking Russia to be bothered with them any more.

  The weather was good, so when Mariette and Joan weren’t helping out at the rest centre in the old factory in the evenings, they often went to a pub, the pictures or a dance hall. If Johnny wasn’t on duty, he often went with them, and Mariette put aside both her idea of moving out of London and of telling Johnny that he should find another girlfriend. It wasn’t that she’d had a change of heart about him, just that she felt she should wait until he had proved himself, one way or another.

  One weekend, Mariette went down to Lyme Regis with Joan to see her children. She was enchanted by the beauty of Dorset and the sleepy little seaside town.

  Ian and Sandra were delightful children. Their lengthy stay with Mr and Mrs Harding had given them advantages that, with the best will in the world, Joan could never have given them. Ian was going to attend the grammar school from September, and nine-year-old Sandra seemed equally bright.

  Both children had Joan’s wiry physique, and her joyful nature. It was obvious the Hardings loved them as if they were their own, yet they welcomed Joan and Mariette too as part of their extended family. Joan called them ‘posh folk’, but Mariette recognized them as being just ordinary country people, with the kind of values she had been brought up with. The children’s cockney accents had been softened with a Dorset burr, they had excellent manners, and their skin glowed and their hair shone from all the good food and the peaceful environment.

  ‘As much as I miss ’em,’ Joan said soon after they arrived at the Hardings’ comfortable and attractive home, ‘I’d rather they was ’ere and ’appy.’

  The children led Mariette and their mother up to the cliff top for a picnic which Mrs Harding had prepared. To the two adults, the hard-boiled eggs, slices of a delicious chicken pie and home-made bread were a feast. The Hardings had over twenty chickens, and Ian regaled them ghoulishly with how he’d watched Mr Harding wring the neck of the one that was now in the pie.

  It was beautiful on the cliff top, with the warm sun on their skin, the sea as blue as the sky above, the clean fresh air and the long grass waving in the gentle breeze. Both the children lay on their backs with their heads in Joan’s lap. Mariette watched the way Joan tenderly stroked their heads, her face soft with love for them, and fervently hoped that Rodney, her husband, would come home safely and the little family would be reunited.

  ‘Can we come and live here for ever when the war’s over and Dad comes home?’ Ian asked, almost as if he’d picked up on Mariette’s thoughts. ‘Mr Harding said they could do with a good mechanic down here, and Dad is a good one, isn’t he?’

  ‘Yes, ’e is, love, and I’d like that,’ Joan replied, and her face took on a dreamy expression. ‘Imagine when they’ve taken the barbed wire and the mines off the beaches? I could get you buckets and spades and go paddling with you. Maybe your dad could take up fishing too. And we’d live in a nice little cottage with chickens in the garden.’

  ‘That sounds like my childhood back home,’ Mariette said, and a wave of homesickness washed over her. ‘I wish I had a magic wand and could end this horrible war. And then all of us could have what we want.’

  By Sunday evening, when Mariette and Joan travelled back to London on the train, they were both sunburned, with fuller stomachs than they’d had for a long time. But the two friends were very quiet.

  Mariette knew Joan was dreaming of that little cottage, and perhaps thinking how she could make that dream a reality.
Mariette was silently sharing her friend’s pain at having to leave her children, and wondering when it was that she had changed from being entirely self-centred to caring so much.

  After ten weeks of peace, on 27th July, the air-raid siren went off just as Mariette and Joan were about to go to bed. They looked at one another in astonishment.

  Joan waved a clenched fist skywards. ‘You bastards,’ she yelled. ‘We thought you ’ad better things to do than plague us again!’

  ‘Maybe it’s a false alarm,’ Mariette said, but she tipped the cocoa she’d just been making into a Thermos flask and put it into the basket they always kept ready for air raids.

  Joan ran upstairs and scooped up a couple of blankets. ‘At least it’s warm tonight,’ she said as she came down. ‘Of course, the downside to that is there’ll be fleas in the shelter and stinky armpits.’

  Within five minutes, they were in the shelter sitting side by side on the hard bench. There were no strangers tonight, only locals. They were mostly women, but there were a few men who were past conscription age.

  ‘Sounds like miles away,’ Edna, who lived a few doors down from them, remarked when they heard the first distant thud of bombs. ‘I wish I’d stayed in me own bed.’

  Edna’s remark was a common one. Many people had given up going to the shelters after the first few weeks of the Blitz. They were convinced that, if it was their time to die, it would happen whether they were in a shelter or not. But a great many other people were so frightened by the raids that they had taken up almost permanent residence in the tube. Bethnal Green station was a very popular one because it was so deep underground and because it could hold thousands of people.