The Safest Place in London

by Maggie Joel

  Joe had come barrelling along the street one afternoon in October in his sailor’s uniform with his kitbag over his shoulder and a big grin on his face hiding whatever uncertainty hid beneath, and Nancy had imagined a hundred times what that moment would be like, what they would say to each other, but it turned out there was nothing to say for she had burst into tears and run at him. That had surprised her, that surge of emotion. Where had it come from? There had been no warning of it. She had not cried when he’d left nor at any time since, even when she’d heard he’d been torpedoed but was safe. It had not seemed real. She had felt—nothing really, only a sort of dull amazement.

  Yet there she was in the street, holding on to him and sobbing.

  But later, after she had run out to him in tears, he had stood in the kitchen not knowing what to do with himself, taking up so much space and neither of them finding the right words. The distance between them seemed too great. He was not hurt in any way that she could see, other than the sunburn and blisters, but he spent the first week at home trying to count all the men who had died, counting fretfully on his fingers, remembering each name. But never when she was in the room, never when he thought she was watching him. He sat in the armchair with his sleeves rolled up and read the paper, he went to the pub and drank watery wartime beer, he rolled his cigarettes and in the evenings he listened to the wireless and, when the news came on, he railed against the politicians and the government and the navy and the Admiralty and anyone, really, who sat in an office and made decisions while he was out there getting his arse shot off. She liked that: his fury, his energy. But apart from that first moment when she had burst into tears and run at him, they had forgotten how to be close.

  And Emily, born seven months after Joe had left and now more than three years old, was a stranger to him as much as he was to her. Her demands, her constant presence, seemed to surprise him, and sometimes it was funny and other times it made him furious. At night, when Joe wanted what any man wanted after three years at sea, Emily’s sleeping there in the same room with them infuriated him, but he had grown up in a small house with many people, they all had, and her presence quickly became familiar to him.

  Emily greeted the sudden appearance of a dad with a mixture of disdain and open hostility that lasted up until the first tins had arrived. For Joe had got himself signed on at the dockyard, unloading the few convoys that made it past the German U-boats. He was supposed to be on sick leave and there he was putting in shifts at the dockyard. Nancy was furious. But it was hard to be angry with the extra money—and that wasn’t all. After his first shift Joe came home with two tins of peaches and a tin of Carnation milk wrapped in a sack. How he’d done it without being caught she didn’t know and she didn’t ask. They ate the peaches and drank the Carnation and sent him back for more.

  But that would stop now Joe had gone.

  This morning she had scrubbed the front step and Emily had played in the bomb wreckage in the street outside as Joe had flung his things into his kitbag. It was all new, his kit; he had lost everything in the ship that had been torpedoed so the navy had given him new stuff. It didn’t look new—it looked like a hundred sailors had used it before him—but she made sure it was clean at least. Joe placed his new sailor’s hat on Emily’s head and laughed at her. He didn’t tell them the name of his new ship and Nancy had not wanted to know because his last ship had been torpedoed and it seemed like bad luck. Seeing him in his uniform for the first time, Emily went suddenly shy. She understood he was departing—that huge, heavy kitbag was hard to ignore—but what did it mean when you were three? By the end of the day she would have forgotten him.

  ‘Right then.’ Joe placed his kit on the floor. He had shaved, making a better job of it than usual, as though he wanted to make a good impression on his new ship. ‘Em, you mind you look after your mum,’ he said, tweaking her nose, and instead of looking outraged Emily regarded him wordlessly, silenced by the uniform and the kitbag and an awareness of something terrible but unspoken.

  ‘You got everything?’ Nancy said.

  ‘Think so. You’ll be alright, then, will you?’

  ‘’Course we will. We’re used to it, ain’t we, Em?’

  Emily nodded uncertainly.

  ‘Don’t do anything daft,’ Nancy added.

  ‘’Course I won’t. Right then . . .’ And he had picked up his kitbag, slung it over his shoulder, and kissed them both goodbye.

  Nancy had stood at the door with Emily and together they watched him till he had turned the corner.

  Nancy scanned the sea of faces on the platform above. The man in the raincoat whom she had noticed earlier had gone from his spot in the entranceway. Perhaps he had crossed to the Westbound platform or gone back up to the street. Perhaps he had found the person he was searching for. She shivered, knowing with a sudden and certain conviction that the man was a policeman and for the first time she was glad Joe had left. She placed a hand softly against her stomach. She was pregnant again but she had not told Joe before he had gone.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Another bomb exploded somewhere up on the surface and Diana ducked—it was impossible not to, though no one else did. She studied the dial of her watch but was unable to calculate how many hours they had been down here—one hour, two? Nor could she work out how many hours more they were likely to remain. The explosions overhead and the space between the explosions prevented her brain from undertaking even the most rudimentary calculations. She gave it up. And meanwhile more and more people and their children, their bedding, their belongings, their elderly parents surged onto the narrow platform above that was designed only to take workers to the docks and weekend shoppers up West.

  If they took a direct hit it would be carnage.

  The woman in the headscarf and her child were so close Diana could see the brand of cigarette the woman smoked, the stitches on the red woollen hat worn by the little girl, could smell on their clothes the chip fat from their last meal. Their very proximity alarmed her. The woman had smiled at her but the smile was cold. Unfriendly. Diana had looked away. This was a public shelter and the bombs made no distinction between one person and another but her presence, she could feel, was not welcome. If it came to calamity it would not be herself and Abigail they would rush to help. So many people seated very close by. She kept her gaze dully neutral but even so she felt eyes on her, crawling over her inch by inch, noticing.

  Abigail was dozing. Her head lolled against Diana’s lap, eyes half closed, safe in the twilight place between sleep and waking. If Diana had come alone she might not have got on the wrong bus, she might have made it home and be opening her front door at this very moment, taking off her hat, pulling off her shoes. But she had brought Abigail, putting them both in danger. And it was not merely that she had exhausted the babysitting goodwill of Mrs Probart. It was to provide herself with a cover, an excuse to come up to town, because a mother and child were, somehow, less conspicuous than a woman on her own.

  Perhaps it was not too late to leave? She imagined herself gathering up their things and simply walking out. She presumed no one would stop them.

  Another explosion sounded high above and her arms closed tightly around the little case and around Abigail and she waited, her eyes closed. The explosion rumbled away finally into nothing and with it any hope that they might leave before dawn. She would not think about it. She would think, instead, about Gerald, who was surely having a worse time of it than they were. She would think of their suffering, hers and Abigail’s, as something that must be borne for his sake. She tried to imagine where Gerald was, what he might be doing at this very minute—standing atop a sand dune with a pair of field glasses or at an officers’ club drinking pink gins or inside a tank barking out orders to a subordinate—but it never seemed quite real. She never quite believed in it, in Gerald as a soldier. Even after three years it still seemed so improbable, so unlikely. In her mind he was dressed as he had been the first day she had met him: forever in tennis whites
in the summer of 1928.

  They had met at a tennis party in Ruislip in the expansive gardens of an Edwardian villa on the edge of the golf course. Marian Fairfax had invited her. Marian, who moved in somewhat higher circles than Diana (her father being a specialist at a London hospital and her mother being distantly related to an air marshal), was an old school friend whom Diana had not seen a great deal of in the seven years since they had both left school. Diana, under no illusions about her social worth, had been invited that day on the strength of her backhand, which was unrivalled among her particular set and had won her as many admirers as it had lost her friends. Even so, she had only received the invitation when another friend of Marian’s, a girl called Bunny, had dropped out at the last minute.

  They were a party of eight, four teams of mixed doubles, and strawberries and gin and tonics were served on a silver tray by a man in a spotless white coat. For Diana—who had left a rather average school in Pinner with a handful of minor exam passes and enrolled in a local secretarial college, where she had done moderately well, and now worked in the front office of a local solicitor’s firm—the strawberries and the gin and tonics and the man in the spotless white coat with a silver tray were like a glimpse of some exotic coastline seen from the deck of a ship far out to sea. And yet she was acutely aware of her social worth so that the strawberries, which were better than any strawberries she had ever tasted before, stuck in her throat and turned to ash in her stomach; the gin and tonics, though intoxicating, burned like acid; the man in the white coat looked down his nose at her even as he served her with polished deference. She hated it, she wanted to leave as soon as she had arrived, and yet the thought of returning to the dreary little flat above her parents’ shop seemed like a slow death.

  She was paired that day with a man called Ed whose wife, Phyllis, had been paired with some other man. Whether this deliberate splitting up of couples was strategic or merely a part of the fun Diana was uncertain. Her partner, Ed, a vigorous-looking fellow with very black hair, inspected her through narrowed eyes and remarked, ‘I understand you possess a sound backhand,’ and though his words suggested a compliment they were delivered in such a way that he might have been commenting on an alleged and rather shameful misdemeanour rather than her sporting prowess. A little bewildered by her partner’s tone and rather wishing the man had been paired with his wife, who in turn had been paired with a tall and nice-looking young man with wavy dark hair and very definite eyebrows and a ready smile, she nevertheless acquitted herself admirably and they easily enough won all three of their matches and were set to play another couple in the ‘final’. The wife and her tall, nice-looking partner had proved a fairly hopeless combination and were now sitting out as vocal onlookers, so that Diana wished she was seated next to the nice-looking man, whose ears stuck out, but in an endearing way, she decided. But she was in the final and he was an onlooker—though he appeared more taken up by his gin and tonic and by the wife of the man called Ed than by a girl with a sound backhand who lived above a shop in Pinner. She would try extra hard, Diana resolved. And then she resolved that she would not try at all because she suspected a man found it unattractive if a young lady tried too hard, particularly at physical activity.

  She was aware of the sweat stains under her arms.

  It was not her finest set of tennis. The man called Ed becoming increasingly cross, the wife who made sarcastic calls from the sidelines, the man in the white coat with the silver tray whom she could see always in her peripheral vision walking back and forth across the lawn, the nice-looking man with the eyebrows who clapped and said, ‘Oh bad luck,’ when she sent an easy forehand thundering into the net—all of it put her off.

  She would never be asked back. She had a sound backhand but when the time had come, when the pressure was on, she had buckled. She had been found wanting.

  Their opponents—a couple named Cecily and Johnny who seemed to know Ed and were unconcerned by his increasing irritation and who, by comparison, appeared to be having a marvellous time—played brilliantly. As Ed and Diana moved swiftly towards an inevitable defeat, Diana’s sound backhand finally deserted her and Ed’s patience deserted him. He snatched at a volley that by rights was hers and sent the ball straight at the girl, Cecily, who was crouched on the far side of the net ready to pounce. The ball caught her squarely in the face and she keeled over backwards.

  ‘Good God—Cee, are you alright?’ cried her partner, running over, and there followed a lengthy delay while icepacks were produced and sympathetic words spoken. Eventually, Cecily’s wellbeing assured and nothing more life-threatening than a black eye and colourful bruise being the upshot, the match was declared over and, as the other couple had forfeited, Diana and Ed were declared winners. Diana felt this a little unjust and said so but Ed didn’t hear her.

  Standing in the conservatory dabbing sun-reddened and perspiring faces with towels and quaffing great quantities of chilled lemonade, the acerbic wife, Phyllis, walked up to her husband, Ed, and said, in a voice that hushed the room: ‘You hit that ball at poor Cee on purpose.’

  ‘What a ridiculous thing to say!’ he countered, barely looking at her, but a hush fell over the room.

  ‘It’s not ridiculous. We all saw it. You did it deliberately.’ Phyllis somehow managed to sound both bored and spiteful, and if her objective had been to provoke her husband she succeeded, for he rounded on her now, taking her by her arm.

  ‘How dare you accuse me?’ he demanded, his fingers closing tightly around her upper arm so that she gasped in sudden pain. He let her go at once, throwing his towel to the floor and walked off.

  A horrible silence ensued. The wife rubbed her arm and gave a high-pitched, frightened little laugh that only made things worse, then she too left, making some excuse to their host.

  Afterwards, everyone was a little stiff and formal and the fun had gone out of the day, and Diana began to wonder if she too might offer some excuse and depart.

  ‘That was rather beastly, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Oh!’ she said, because the tall, nice-looking man with the ears and the eyebrows and the ready smile had sought her out to offer her a fresh lemonade and to make a comment on what had happened and he had the most marvellous voice, sort of solid and comforting, just like the man on the BBC. ‘Yes. Yes, it was, rather.’

  ‘Look here, I’m thinking of pushing off. Party seems to have ended somewhat abruptly. Can I give you a lift? I’m Gerald, by the way.’

  It must be nearing midnight. A hurricane lamp hung from the ceiling swinging crazily and Diana attempted once more to read the time on her watch by its light but gave up.

  An elderly woman with swollen ankles sporting a volunteers’ armband appeared on the platform’s edge bearing a tray of sausage rolls and hot cocoa in mugs, and the way she loudly and coarsely spruiked her wares suggested she spent her daylight hours out on a market stall. When the woman saw Abigail she fell silent. She gently stroked Abigail’s pinched face, then she reached over and patted Diana’s hand before moving on. As though she could sense their fear. Their isolation.

  They ate ravenously, wolfing down the rolls and licking their fingers for every last crumb. With food in her stomach, Abigail dozed, but Diana could not sleep.

  She thought about her old school friend Marian whom she not seen again since that afternoon in 1928, and Marian’s friend, the girl called Bunny, whose decision to drop out of the tennis party at the last minute had changed the course of Diana’s life. It was a little humbling and a little frightening to realise how one’s destiny might be shaped by something so small, by someone else’s decision.

  She thought of her vegetable garden, which had failed.

  After the first year of the war the wonderful Mr Baines had gone to live with his elderly sister in Cirencester, they’d had a series of early winter frosts and the soil had proved too chalky. The failure of the garden would have been inconsequential enough under ordinary circumstances, but in wartime it had assumed catastrophic p
roportions.

  It was the reason she had come up to London.

  The chalk was the main source of the problem, for the Chilterns was, essentially, one very long chalk escarpment that ringed the outer rim of London from Watford to Uxbridge. And yet they had brought it upon themselves, she and Gerald, choosing to live in a place that was not merely built on chalk but positively boasted about its chalkiness; ‘Chalfont’, they discovered, meant a chalk spring. This had seemed perfectly delightful in 1930 when they toured the pretty little village preparatory to buying a house here. Now, when the beautiful begonia beds had been dug up to make way for marrows and carrots and running beans, the chalk was the stuff of nightmares. Other women tossed and turned at night haunted by ration books and clothing coupons. Diana lay awake fretting about her vegetable garden.

  And yet other people’s gardens did not seem to suffer the way hers did. When one peered into the neighbours’ gardens one saw broad beans as tall as golf clubs, tomatoes as shiny as jewels, carrots as abundant as—well, as carrots had been before the war. Everywhere she saw gardens brimming with bounty. But at The Larches nothing seemed to grow. And yet that first autumn when they had dug up the flower beds and sowed vegetables, there had been a decent enough crop. The second year the results had been disappointing. This last autumn the crops had failed altogether. Baines had left instructions. It had seemed straightforward enough. Diana had sowed when he had told her to sow, she had planted, she had fertilised, she had watered. She had watched as the shoots wizened and died, as no shoots appeared at all, as the chalky earth coughed up a tomato the size of a marble, a solitary dwarf carrot, a runner bean fit only for a doll’s tea party.