The Safest Place in London

by Maggie Joel

  After Dunkirk everything had changed. Gerald had got his call-up papers.

  ‘I’m jolly good at figures, but Lord knows what use they’ll make of me in a uniform,’ he had observed as she had kissed him goodbye at the station. She had wondered the same thing. He was fit enough—the tennis saw to that—but in a battle? She hoped, she trusted, the military would have the good sense to keep him behind the front lines.

  He had been attached to a tank regiment.

  And she had been proud but uncertain—what did joining a tank regiment mean? She could not picture what it might entail, what exactly he might be doing. At least he would not drown in rough seas, and for that she was grateful, though she supposed he could suffocate or be burned alive inside a tank. It had seemed important for his sake to minutely consider these things, but she found it hard to imagine either of these two scenarios with any clarity. She had put it out of her mind because she found she could not live in this state of muted panic (though other wives seemed able to) and, though it seemed disloyal, she had resumed her life, or tried to. There was one complication: she was seven months pregnant.

  They had been married ten years by then and though there had been two other pregnancies both had miscarried in the first few months, the last one four years ago. This one, coming as it had out of the blue, had appeared—seemingly against all expectations—to be heading towards full term. They had been realistic about its chances from the first, not speaking of the child’s future, making no preparations in their home for a new arrival—not even a cot—taking nothing for granted. Yet as each month had progressed and nothing had gone wrong, they had taken to sitting side by side of an evening, holding hands, not speaking, looks exchanged every now and again.

  And then, with two months to go, the army had swooped in—cruelly, sadistically it had seemed—and taken him from her right when she had needed him most. She was utterly alone but she would make the baby survive, if only by sheer force of will. And she was not alone in one sense: wives all over England were in the same position, though other wives had mothers and sisters and in-laws. She had none of these, and Gerald’s parents had died out in Ceylon when he was at boarding school. He had an elderly aunt somewhere near Inverness, but what use was that? Diana had been alone. And yet when the time had come there had been a team of nurses and a wonderful midwife who had said she was doing splendidly. She did do splendidly: she had produced a perfect, a beautiful baby girl. She had named her Abigail, after Gerald’s mother. Gerald had just completed his initial training and had been allowed forty-eight hours leave to visit her and the new baby. When he had arrived, so strange in his army uniform, leaning over the cot to stare at the tiny thing they had produced together, he had been unable to speak. At the end of his leave he had said, ‘Well, whatever happens, now I shall just have to make sure I return in one piece.’

  But with the war now in its fifth year there appeared to be no end in sight. Abigail had celebrated her third birthday last September much as she had celebrated her first and her second and looked destined to celebrate her fourth—which was to say, fatherless. Diana made an annual visit to Timms Photographic Studio in Amersham, where the elderly Mr Timms sat the protesting Abigail on a settee and tied a handsome bow around her hair or handed her a toy monkey or placed a puppet on his hand to distract her while he took her photograph: a photograph that would find its way, via the British Forces Post Office, to Gerald, wherever he might be—in his tank in the desert, or back at company headquarters or in an officers’ mess in Cairo . . . she had not the least idea. But he always got it eventually and in his reply he marvelled at how she had grown—no longer a baby but a little girl!—and that was perhaps the hardest part to bear, for Abigail had grown, was growing, almost daily and Gerald was missing it. The last time she had visited Timms it was to find that old Mr Timms had died and his boy had taken over the business although, as the boy had just received his call-up papers, it seemed likely there would be no more photographs for the duration.

  Beside her, cross-legged on the ground, Abigail sat absorbed, smoothing the fur out of Teddy’s two small round amber-coloured glass eyes—for he had become a little ruffled in their headlong flight—but now she looked up and said in a loud voice, ‘Mummy, you lied! You said we went to the pantomime but we didn’t!’

  ‘Abigail, it hardly matters—’

  ‘I want to go to the pantomime! Why can’t we go to the pantomime?’

  It had been a mistake, Diana realised, to bring Abigail with her.

  And the little girl in the red woollen hat watched them, her gaze never wavering. Diana felt something cold pass through her body. She wished the little girl would stop staring.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  ‘Stop gawping, Em! And hold still.’

  Nancy spat on her handkerchief and wiped it vigorously over her child’s squirming, resistant face. She could remember how it felt having your face scrubbed. It was something her own mother had done.

  It was the only thing she did remember. Everything else about her mother, the exact circumstances of her own existence, she had heard second-hand and had woven together into a sort of whole. There was a town, remote and coal-blackened, on the Northumberland coast, where a quarter of the menfolk had been killed in pit disasters and where her mother, a girl called Jessie Keys, had been born in the final weeks of the old century. Perhaps wishing more for herself than early widowhood, the young Jessie Keys had departed the mining town in the early years of the Great War and headed south, arriving in the sprawling and squalidly overflowing streets of the capital, where she had taken up the post of scullery maid in a Mayfair household. There she had remained until it was discovered she was carrying excess baggage beneath her suddenly snug-fitting maid’s uniform, and she was hastily turned out.

  The excess baggage came courtesy of Charlie Blyth, a youthful employee of the Royal Mail whose job it was to deliver telegrams to the Mayfair household. Perhaps Jessie had thought it an omen that Charlie shared his surname with the remote and coal-blackened town she had spent her first fifteen years trying to escape and the last four yearning for, but he had proved to be a disappointing suitor. As the unfortunate Jessie had squeezed the baby out of her tired body in the upstairs room of a Shoreditch boarding house under the watchful eye of a sympathetic landlady, Charlie Blyth was crossing the Irish Sea en route to Dublin, or perhaps America, and was never heard of again.

  With the war over and the flu epidemic sweeping across an already-ravaged Europe, Jessie, unwed and unemployed, had turned her hand briefly to seamstressing before discovering more profitable employment that could be conducted in the comfort of her own bed. On a bitterly cold November night, following a day on which the sun had failed to rise above the rooftops, she had died, painfully and wretchedly, of consumption, leaving four-year-old Nancy in the care of the sympathetic landlady.

  This was the sum of Nancy’s knowledge of the woman who had, however fleetingly, been her mother, and much of that was supposition, blank spaces filled in by her own imagination.

  ‘Mu-um! Stop!’

  Emily had put up with the vigorous rubbing of her face as long as any child could be expected to do so and she threw up her hands to fend off her mother’s ministrations. Giving up, Nancy picked her up and planted her on top of a sandbag, straightening the red woollen hat which had almost come off during their headlong flight, sweeping the hair out of Emily’s face. If there was anything of Jessie Keys in her grandchild’s face, Nancy could not tell, as she had no photographs of her long-dead mother and she could not remember her face.

  Emily, seated atop the sandbag, was too young to remember the first weeks of the Blitz, the terror, the panic, the utter unrelenting chaos. Now bunks lined the walls of the platform, though you had to get down here at four in the afternoon to grab one, and there were latrines, though you tried your best to avoid using them, and there were shelter wardens ticking off names on clipboards. There were trestle tables already piled high with tin mugs and three huge urns
waiting to be lit by the women from the Women’s Voluntary Services. Now it was a way of life and they had got used to it, Nancy supposed.

  She watched two very elderly sisters in matching hats and woollen mittens spread a picnic rug on the ground and settle down to knit. You might have thought they were enjoying a day out on Clacton seafront were it not that they paused in their knitting every so often to swig something fortifying from a shared thermos flask. An elderly Jewish man passed by carrying a small, battered case as though he was embarking on a voyage, muttering in agitated Yiddish, searching for someone, searching for a place to sit, but there was no place to sit and no one called out to him.

  Poor old sod, thought Nancy, but she didn’t make room for him. She had just spotted a man in a raincoat standing motionless some distance away at the platform entrance, his hands thrust deep in his pockets, hat pulled down low so that a shadow fell across his face. The man’s eyes slid from left to right, his head unmoving as though he was searching for someone he didn’t wish to find. Nancy thought of the figure she had seen in Odessa Street earlier, the figure that had melted into the shadows when she had looked at him. It seemed unlikely it was the same man. Even so, she looked away.

  The drone of enemy bombers was suddenly directly overhead and down on the platform the hum of conversation ceased. A whine, louder this time, was followed by the familiar whooo-osh then caroomph as the first wave dropped.

  Phee-oow!

  Car-oomph!

  The first bombs hit their targets. They hit something, at any rate, and Nancy closed her eyes and felt the breath pump in and out of her mouth very quickly and her head start to ache as though there was something inside her that needed to burst out. Tonight everything seemed heightened, sharpened, and it was only partly due to the raid.

  She opened her eyes to see the two sisters on the picnic rug engaged in a bizarre tug-of-war over the thermos flask. She could smell their terror. It did not get any less frightening, just because you were old and at the end of your life. She had found it heartbreaking in the first months of the Blitz seeing elderly men and women who, having endured a lifetime of drudgery and hardship, must now spend their final years being bombed in a tube station. But she no longer thought this. She no longer noticed.

  ‘Mum, I’m hungry!’ Emily said, moving restlessly, rubbing her tummy, pulling a dismayed and pitiful face.

  ‘We’re all hungry, darling,’ Nancy sighed for they had neither of them had their tea and it would be hours yet before the ladies from the WVS came round with their sausage rolls and cups of tea. And in the meantime the chips were on the kitchen table, already cold. If the two of them survived the night, if the house survived, they would be having cold chips for their breakfast—it would not be the first time. Last winter things had got so bad they had existed on dripping and lemon rind, sucking it till just a piece of yellow skin remained to be chewed then swallowed and, when they had run out of fuel for the stove, on raw potatoes, standing at the kitchen table because they had used the chairs for firewood, surrounded by rows of empty tins and jars that claimed to contain flour and sugar and butter and lard but almost never did (a cruel echo of a more plentiful time), with an unreliable gas ring that had finally failed when an incendiary had hit the nearby gasworks. Eventually the kitchen table too had been chopped up and Nancy had had to stand at the sink to squeeze the last out of a pile of watery grey tea-leaves. Emily had had a half-starved, animal look about her—but all the children looked that way. Nancy had lain awake wondering how they would manage.

  Then Joe had come home on leave and everything had changed.

  An explosion caused the air to reverberate and again all conversation ceased, eyes raised upwards. Dust and earth dribbled from a crack in the ceiling. A moment later a long low rumble signalled the collapse of a building above. After a moment the rumble faded and everyone took a deep breath and got on with what they were doing.

  Nancy lit a fresh cigarette. She could sit it out: the bombs and Emily’s hunger. She had done it before. The cigarette would calm her. She watched out of the corner of her eye the smartly dressed woman who had arrived late, flustered and panicked, with her child, and who was now seated awkwardly on the floor, her legs curled beneath her and looking as out of place, Joe would have said, as the King and Queen walking into the pawnbroker on Hackney Road.

  The little girl was perched on her mother’s lap clutching a teddy bear and at the mother’s side was a small blue case, the handle of which the woman clasped as though it contained her jewels—and perhaps it did. She had no blankets or pillows or bedding or warm clothing with her, or indeed anything that might be of the least use for a night in a shelter. Clearly she had not expected to get caught in an air raid. The tweed coat she wore, the smart little hat and silk stockings, the polished black court shoes and long elegant gloves over long elegant fingers suggested she was on her way to a cocktail party or shopping in Bond Street. The fur at her collar was smooth and sleek and moth-free, even if it was prewar.

  Posh, but not wealthy, Nancy decided. And not pretty, either, despite her posh outfit. In fact, she looked a bit like Mrs Wallis Simpson and there was living proof, if you needed it, that you could have all the money and all the best clothes in the world and still not look very pretty. Though there was something—what was it? dignified, perhaps?—about this woman that somehow compensated. And her neck was as beautifully slender as a swan’s. She was well past thirty, perhaps nearer forty, which was odd for the mother of such a little girl. But the plainness accounted for that: clearly she had been overlooked by every man she had met until, late in life, some man had come along, had taken pity perhaps—or that was how it seemed to Nancy, who had married at nineteen. The woman’s gaze seemed very far away but the look of controlled panic on her face was unmistakable.

  The woman chose that moment to look around and, caught staring, Nancy nodded at her, softening her eyes into a smile she did not feel.

  The cigarette was finished. Emily had fallen into a restless sleep, her eyelids flickering from side to side as though tracking the aircraft high above, and Nancy reached down and brushed a strand of hair from her face. Emily was easier to love when she was asleep; perhaps all children were. Her face was still streaked with dirt and Nancy stifled the urge to spit on her handkerchief a second time and try to wipe the remaining dirt off, for she was oddly aware of the smartly dressed woman sitting a few feet away whose child was plump and spotless, her chestnut hair sleek and shiny and held in place by a natty little hairband. The coat she wore was a tiny perfect copy of her mother’s coat, and on her feet were the kind of shoes Princess Elizabeth might have worn—smart and shiny with little silver buckles on top. Nancy looked at her own child, who was dressed in clothes salvaged from bombsites. But Emily was asleep, dead to the world as the world tore itself apart above her, and what did it matter if her face was dirty?

  Nancy leaned her head back against the wall of the tunnel, feeling some small part of her unwind, and wondered if Joe’s ship had sailed yet. She closed her eyes as an immense weariness overcame her and somewhere in the space between dreaming and not dreaming she saw a vast gunmetal-grey warship slip silently away from the dockside and out to sea. The ocean was gunmetal grey too and the sky—indeed, her very dreams were gunmetal grey. She saw the ocean, smooth and calm and safe, a haven, and the horizon, towards which the ship sailed, was a place of calm serenity.

  A baby began to scream and she sat up. She would not sleep, it was too early yet and, besides, she did not even know if Joe’s ship had sailed. Not that it made any difference—Joe had gone and she would not see him again perhaps until the end of the war, if he made it that far.

  The fact of his departure was a sharp ball of pain inside her that came and went, sometimes no more than a dull ache and other times catching at her throat and taking her breath away. At this moment it filled her up, squeezing the life out of her, but after a moment or two it lessened.

  Joe had left that morning, three months’ res
t and recuperation ending abruptly with the arrival of his recall papers for his new ship just when she had got used to having him around. His ship was due to depart on the evening tide and where it was headed she had no idea and she doubted Joe did either. His last ship had been torpedoed somewhere between Iceland and Greenland and he had spent three days adrift in a lifeboat. The entire ship’s company had died, he had said, dozens of men, though neither the papers nor the wireless had reported it. He had been picked up by a passing merchant ship and spent a fortnight in a hospital at Liverpool, then they had sent him home to recuperate. That had been October. Joe had been at sea three years. She had worried that they wouldn’t know each other, or worse, wouldn’t like each other. They had been married so short a time before his call-up that they were still getting used to each other when he left. She worried that what he had gone through—three days adrift in a lifeboat, the ship’s company lost—would affect him. But hadn’t she witnessed dreadful things herself? Limbs blasted across a street, burnt torsos belonging to people she had once known, a baby burned black in a fire . . . So then, they were neither of them the same people they had been when they had met and married. But it worried her all the same.