Marriages are Made in Bond Street

by Penrose Halson

  Miss Easter had lost her income and was living on savings and on rent from her flat, which she had let to a Free French officer ‘who’ll convert it into a Gallic love nest, I daresay, but he does pay the rent.’ She was thirty-eight, and wanted to meet an older, settled, reliable gentleman of her own class: ‘Public school of course. I don’t mind if he’s divorced, though I should prefer him to have been the plaintiff. Children are all right, but not babies. Probably over fifty; too old to be called up. Tall and well dressed. Not a country squire with grimy fingernails and addicted to dogs and shooting, but not a dedicated townie nightclubber either. Church of England preferably, or Roman Catholic if he doesn’t expect me to go to church with him. And . . .’ Miss Easter hesitated, looking down momentarily and flicking her cigarette ash into the ashtray before continuing, softly but intensely, ‘and he must have honourable intentions. I am sick to death of dishonourable men.’

  Heather noted the sudden trembling of Miss Easter’s scarlet lips and quickly assessed her abrupt lack of assurance. She had no doubt that a woman as well presented, charming and socially adept as Miss Easter had encountered numerous men with dubious intentions. But she reassured her that those who came to the Marriage Bureau were seeking a wife, not an affaire or a mistress (though some were certainly fleeing from such entanglements). The Bureau would introduce Miss Easter to no man who was not, as far as could possibly be ascertained, a gentleman in all senses of the word.

  Only that very morning Heather had listened to the description of a woman uncannily resembling Miss Easter, by Colonel Champion, a fifty-four-year-old widower, educated at Eton and Sandhurst. He had fought with distinction in the Great War, but a limp from a bayonet wound had put paid to his army career. He had recently retired as a stockbroker to concentrate on charitable work for servicemen, and now wanted to marry a lady capable of providing social background for his ‘rather exceptional’ fifteen-year-old daughter.

  ‘He is a very doting father!’ smiled Heather. ‘He’s trying to make up for the girl losing her mother (in a car accident, sadly. She was driving). He’s interesting and humorous, old school but sympathetic. He does not, however, want a wife who is too much of a cocktail drinker, nor a chain-smoker. How much do you smoke?’

  ‘Oh, only five or so a day!’ said Miss Easter, a little too airily, thought Heather, whose sensitive nose twitched at the aroma of cigarettes lurking below her client’s lily of the valley scent. ‘Perhaps a few more since the bombing started. A cigarette steadies my nerves. But now I’m out of London I’m sure I can cut down.’ Miss Easter filled in her registration form and paid her five guineas.

  To Heather’s delight Miss Easter’s first meeting with the Colonel was such a success that she joined him and his daughter when he collected her from her boarding school. But there was one fly in the Colonel’s ointment. ‘They cut me out!’ he grumbled to Heather. ‘Those two girls spent the whole time talking about clothes and fashion and makeup – they took not a blind bit of notice of me!’

  ‘How perfectly dreadful!’ murmured Heather with a total lack of sympathy, as they both burst out laughing, and Heather accepted the bouquet of lilies held out to her with a heartfelt, ‘Thank you so much, m’dear, she’s exactly the girl for me!’

  Back in London, more and more people, particularly servicemen and -women, undeterred by the difficulties and anxieties of venturing into the West End, arrived at 124 New Bond Street. One who poured out his heart to Mary was a thin, gangly twenty-three-year-old who gazed at her with eyes of such an intense sea-greeny-blue that she felt as if she might drown: Tadeusz Nedza. ‘The Scottish peoples call me Teddy. I am coming to you but not because I am sex-starved. I am luff-starved. I vant a vife to luff, and to luff me.’

  Teddy had been born in the sad, beautiful Polish city of Krakow, to hotelier parents who wanted him to take over the family hotel. He dealt very pleasantly with the guests, including the foreign ones who were pleased that he spoke a smattering of their language. But in January 1939, with war threatening, he joined the Polish Army, to be trained in Morse Code so that he could take down intercepted German messages. When the Germans invaded Poland eight months later, he was captured.

  Teddy and a fellow soldier escaped, throwing the Germans off the scent by dodging and weaving through the city’s maze of little alleys, which they knew intimately. He was recaptured days later, and an exploding hand grenade, which killed his captors, badly damaged his legs. A Red Cross doctor – ironically, a German – saved them from amputation.

  ‘So you can see,’ he insisted to Mary, banging his fist on the desk, ‘I hate the German peoples, but one German I luff.’

  Mary sat in silence, aghast, as Teddy continued his saga. Pronounced healthy and due to be sent to fight in Germany, he bluffed his way out of the hospital wearing a doctor’s stolen coat and blessing his knowledge of German. He tricked a Gestapo officer who demanded his papers into falling to his death in an icy river. He outwitted slavering guard dogs, evaded wolves and survived sub-zero temperatures as he made his painful and lonely way to Hungary. There, he claimed to be a civilian, but his army haircut gave him away. Happily, friends came to the rescue with a ticket to a border river which he could cross into Serbia. From his breast pocket Teddy pulled a much-fingered ticket which he first kissed and then held out to Mary. ‘Look, see, here is the ticket, my ticket to freedom. It is most precious to me, it is – how you say – my line of life. This ticket I luff.’

  At last, emaciated from malnutrition and sea-sickness, Teddy had reached France on an overcrowded and leaking ship. In a decrepit car he and other soldiers set out for Brittany, but a bomb dropped by a German aeroplane killed the driver. None of the other soldiers could drive.

  ‘They said, “You haf been on driving courses – you must drive us,’” Teddy remembered, pointing his finger at Mary and fixing on her his brightest blue stare. ‘I told to them, “But I do not haf a permit to drive.” And they all laughed and shouted at me: “Who is asking for your permit to drive? Is Hitler demanding to see it?!” So I drove. It was a terrible journey, the roads very bad and everywhere refugees pushing their carts with their old dying peoples, and animals starving and furnitures.’

  At last, in June 1940, Teddy arrived in Liverpool, where he spent his first night in Britain fast asleep on a bench in the Anfield football ground, looked after by the Salvation Army. The next day he went by train to Scotland, where he joined the Polish Section of the British Army, had a glorious bath – ‘Luffly hot water! And soap! And a towel!’ – and set about taking down German messages and cracking the codes.

  Teddy became more and more expert at his work, and was promoted to instructor. He spent some time in London, discovering in Piccadilly’s American Hotel many other Poles eager to talk and drink and sing with him. Their convivial carousing left him feeling desolatingly lonely, homesick and lovesick. So when walking from the hotel to Oxford Street he saw the sign MARRIAGE BUREAU, on impulse he marched up the stairs.

  ‘I was knocked sideways by his story,’ recalled Mary. ‘He was so young, and he looked so fragile, all bone and muscle, not an ounce of fat, and those luminous turquoise eyes which seemed to see into my soul. But he had killed and escaped and starved and dared more in his short life than almost everybody in their entire lives. How I wanted to help! I could think of lots of young women on the books who were loving and practical, which was what he asked for. But I wanted to find him a true match. I didn’t quite envisage a young woman who had murdered an enemy, as Teddy had murdered his Gestapo man; but an equally strong girl who in the face of unspeakable odds would be courageous enough to do something equally nightmarish.’

  Mary put Teddy in touch with several young women. He was delighted, particularly with a Hungarian nurse whose prescient parents had fled to England in 1936. Ilma worked in a military isolation hospital where, to Teddy’s dismay, not long after meeting him she fell in love with a Hungarian patient, and sent a heartbreaking farewell letter to Teddy.

 
‘I luffed Ilma and she luffed me, but not enough,’ concluded Teddy, part angrily, part sadly, on a visit to London.

  When Gertrude Hart appeared, Mary uttered silent cheers. ‘I knew immediately, my bones told me, and you can’t deny, Heather, that I was right. She had “Mrs Nedza” written all over her. I was in a panic that after the interview she might not register, but thank heavens she did.’

  On her registration form, Gertrude described herself as ‘British, in the WRNS, age twenty-four, father a rancher in the Argentine (deceased), religiously tolerant.’ ‘British now,’ Mary noted, ‘but by birth a German Jewess, shy, quiet, strong, v. nice, v. difficult.’

  In 1935, when she was nineteen, Gertrude’s South American father had died suddenly from some ferocious local sickness. Her German mother had left the Argentine to return, with her daughter, to live with her frail parents, well-respected doctors, in Berlin, not realizing that it was the worst country in the world for Jews. On 9 November

  1938, Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass), the Nazis attacked Jewish homes, businesses and synagogues in a sadistic orgy of destruction and plunder. Thugs smashed thousands of windows, including one which crashed onto Gertrude’s grandmother. She died instantly, her head split wide open, spurting blood. When her grandfather bent to touch his wife, his heart failed and he dropped dead by her side.

  Hearing her mother howling like a banshee over her grandparents’ bodies, Gertrude seized a steel paperknife and rushed out of the house, brandishing it at the young Nazi standing outside the front door. He seized her wrist and, prodding her with his gun, pushed her back inside. There he released her, and whispered fiercely that he had been a medical student, a pupil of her grandfather’s, forced against his will to join the Nazis, and had been on his way to warn the old couple. Gertrude and her mother must escape: they must not waste a moment: they must go to England now!

  The two women took nothing, not even a suitcase, which would have advertised that they were leaving. All they had was the money for a train ticket to England. They arrived in London with no possessions, no home, no job, no friends, but were rescued by a Jewish charity and, after a spell in an internment camp, were cleared as ‘friendly aliens’. It was all too much for Gertrude’s mother, though, and her spirit flickered out, soon followed by her body.

  Gertrude joined the Women’s Royal Naval Service to serve the country to which she was endlessly grateful for taking her in. An orphan, she took pleasure in the familial comradeship of the navy and made friends with several other Wrens, but although no longer classed as an ‘enemy alien’ she felt herself to be a stranger. She was agonizingly lonely, longing to find a strong and loyal young man. She wrote on her registration form: ‘He would have a love of life and a big wish to live it fully with a wife he respects and loves. A man with morals and courage and sense.’

  Mary immediately put Teddy in touch with Gertrude, but as she was based in Portsmouth it was weeks before she could coincide with him in London. Mary was on tenterhooks, full of hope, but at the same time fearful that a meeting between a Pole and a German might prove disastrous. ‘They should be enemies, but oh, Heather, they are two of a kind, they will recognize each other, they will understand each other. I know, I simply know!’

  ‘We shall see,’ was all Heather would say. Privately, she placed great faith in Mary’s ‘bones’; but she was also learning that the most promising plans can go awry.

  Bombs continued to rain down on London. Though both Heather and Mary developed some immunity to the remorseless terror, sharing the ‘Blitz spirit’ with other Londoners, the daily strain and the nightly lack of sleep were beginning to tell. Mary, living in a flat in Piccadilly, daily walked past scenes of hideous desolation, arriving at the Bureau in a jumpy and nervous state that no amount of cigarettes could calm. Heather, usually more resilient, had been shaken to the core in October 1940, when Curzon Street House, very near her flat, had been bombed. The 1930s block of flats was used by the War Office, so soldiers were among the thirteen killed and thirty wounded. Heather knew some of them by sight, and had waved at them on her way to and from the office.

  Heather also had friends among the regulars of the Café de Paris, a favourite haunt for nightlife, and she was a fan of its charismatic black American bandleader, Ken ‘Snakehips’ Johnson. Being twenty feet below ground the famous Café was supposedly safe, but on 8 March 1941 a bomb whistled down a ventilation shaft and exploded in front of the band, blowing Snakehips’ head off his shoulders, shearing off the legs of dancers, bursting the lungs of diners. Compounding the horror, looters were seen cutting off the fingers of the dead to steal their rings.

  Bombs near home and bombs near the office: in April 1941 high explosive bombs fell in Brook Street and Woodstock Street, just round the corner. Immediately around New Bond Street, the Blitz hit Bruton Street, the Burlington Arcade, Conduit Street, Dover Street, Oxford Street (John Lewis almost entirely destroyed, Selfridge’s severely damaged) and Old Bond Street. On the night of 16 April, a parachute bomb fell on Jermyn Street. The next day Mary and Heather held a small party in the office to celebrate the Marriage Bureau’s second birthday.

  The evening after the party, sitting in the office wondering gloomily how they could carry on, the match-makers perked up at the sound of a familiar voice.

  ‘Blimey, you two girls didn’t oughter be still here. It’s late, you should’ve gone ’ome. You look done in, you could do wiv a nice cuppa an’ some grub an’ a gasper. Lucky I come round. I said to meself, I said, Alf, Jerry’s bin payin’ partickerly ’orrible visits this week, so just you drop in an’ see your girls is all right!’

  Always chirpy and concerned, Alf was a middle-aged Special Constable who had registered with the Bureau and then taken a proprietorial interest in the welfare of ‘my marriage girls’. As he patrolled Bond Street and around, he dropped in frequently to check on them and regale them with stories.

  ‘I bin ’avin’ a terrible time,’ Alf grinned. ‘Down Shepherd Market there’s an ’ole lot of prostitutes, poor girls. I’m sorry for ’em, they’re that desperate, they ain’t got no money an’ they’re daft with fright an’ the spivs an’ the pimps an’ the black market boys an’ the pickpockets don’t never stop cheatin’ ’em. They ’ates ’itler for ruinin’ their trade. The minute the siren starts it’s my job ter get ’em off the streets to their ’ome or into a shelter, but they don’t want ter go, they want ter keep tryin’ for anuvver punter even when the bombs’ve started, you wouldn’t credit it. So I have to chase ’em off. If they gets back ter their ’ome before I catch ’em they can’t be persecuted, see. They’re scrubby little things, but some of ’em can’t half run. It’s good exercise fer me, but—’

  ‘Well, Alf,’ interrupted Heather, ‘you need exercise if we’re going to find you the nice wife you want, because she’ll be after some fit and healthy fellow who’s handy in the house and the garden!’

  ‘I know, I know. But you better ’urry up an’ all an’ find ’er cos I don’t want ter keep running fer ever. There was a girl yesterday, can’t ’ave bin more ’n fifteen, I’d say, skinny little madam, face made up to ’ell and falling out of ’er frock, if you know wot I mean, she had them high heels but she ran quick as a rabbit, till she caught ’er ’eel on a lump of rubble an’ fell flat. I ’elped ’er up an’ she’d twisted ’er ankle, so I ’eld ’er arm while she ’obbled to ’er ’ome. Effin’ an’ blindin’ she was all the way – I was shocked, an’ I’ve ’eard a fing or two, I can tell you. She nearly fell down the area steps, but I ’ung on to her an’ left ’er in ’er ’orrible dirty room, stinkin’ of cats an’ cheap old perfume an’ other nastier fings not for you girls’ ears. She tried to get me ter come in, but I knew wot ’er game was and I was gone before you could say Jack Robinson!’

  Alf poured cups of tea, handed round his cigarettes and was about to launch into another story when the office door opened and in slunk little Nancy Patch. The last time she had been in touch had been to announce her
impending marriage to Trevor Potts, and to tell Mary that her sister Elsie was happily corresponding with Fred Adams in Australia; so Mary was startled as Nancy, cowering and trembling, opened her mouth to speak, but burst into violent tears which racked her slight frame.

  ‘Oh, Nancy, what on earth is the matter? Has something gone wrong between you and Mr Potts?’

  Gasping and straining to control her voice, Nancy closed her eyes, then opened them in a wild stare. ‘He-he-he’s dead. Trev’s copped it. And Elsie too. We was all in the h-h-house and the siren went off and Trev and Elsie rushed out to the sh-sh-shelter up the road but they was too late and the b-b-bomb got them. Killed Trev straight off. I’d been and left my p-p-purse in the house so I was a bit behind and the b-b-bomb just missed me. They took Elsie to hospital and she die-die-died this afternoon.’

  Heather sat frozen and mute, overwhelmed by a sudden memory of Sundays in the school chapel singing the words ‘the sharpness of death’.

  Mary rose shakily from her chair and wrapped her arms round Nancy. They stood, swaying, clinging tightly together, tears streaming down their faces.

  Alf pulled the blackout screens down over the windows.

  In the darkening room, the sound of infinite sobbing was drowned out by the ghoulish wail of falling bombs.

  11

  Sex, Tragedy, Success and Bust Bodices

  In their first two years at the Marriage Bureau, Heather and Mary had learned when to ask a question and when to keep silent, when to give sympathy or advice or a warning, when to prompt a tongue-tied applicant and when to let her or him (usually a man) search for the words. Now, shocked and shaken themselves, they were at greater pains than ever to set their clients at ease, and found the difficulty was often not to persuade the hopefuls to relax, but rather to check the gush of words. The horrors of the bombing seemed to have toppled a great barricade of inhibitions. Clients now bent their interviewer’s ears with intimate details, in startling contrast to the restrained, understated behaviour of a year or so earlier.