The Safest Place in London

by Maggie Joel

  There had followed a succession of children, all of whom died before their second birthday until Samuel had been born in the last weeks of the old century and had thrived. Harry had come along six years later and that had appeared to be that until the exhausted Mary, in her forty-fourth year and believing that such things were now, thankfully, beyond her, gave birth to her last child, Joseph.

  During this period of uninterrupted pregnancies, births and deaths, Ely had worked for many years, though with little material gain, in the rag trade. Abandoning this vocation, he had dabbled in second-hand bookselling and the wholesaling of paper and parchment before becoming, in turn, a purveyor of spirits, of candles, of men’s walking canes and of pins for ladies’ hats and, finally, a supplier of hair—used in the manufacture of ladies’ wigs—which he had procured, in bulk and on the sly, from a man at the London’s mortuary.

  He disappeared for good one bleak and windswept dawn in late October in the first year of the Great War, leaving his two sons to speculate that he had been seized by the Kaiser’s spies and was languishing, forgotten, in some Prussian dungeon. It seemed more likely Ely had simply used the opportunity of a new war in Europe to up sticks and move on to pastures new and, perhaps, to start his third family, leaving Mary to cope as best she could.

  Mary’s last child, Joe, had been born while the ink was still wet on the Armistice, which was to say some four years after Ely’s disappearance, so the mathematical possibility of him being Ely’s son seemed to be approximately nil, a conclusion that his two older brothers had reached far earlier than Joe himself and with which they had squandered no opportunity to baffle and later humiliate him as he was growing up.

  Joe opened his eyes to a Sunday morning in Whitechapel just as he had as a small boy. In those days he had woken to the bells of St Dunstan’s at Stepney and St Mary Matfelon in Adler Street but today the dawn was still, eerie. The bells at St Dunstan’s had long been melted down for the war effort and St Mary’s had been destroyed by enemy fire in December 1940, so Whitechapel was silent this Sunday in wartime—more silent than in peacetime, at any rate.

  At first Joe had thought himself back at the naval hospital in Liverpool with the brine encrusted on his skin and the taste of saltwater still on his lips and the memory of his rescue still raw enough to seem like a miracle. But this was not the naval hospital in Liverpool. He was in the London Hospital and a nurse, on whose ghostly face he could not quite focus, told him he had lain insensible for eight days with a concussion from a piece of shrapnel. Eight days had passed since he had parted from Nancy and fled the tube station during an air raid. Joe threw back the sheets and staggered to his feet only to fall back down again in a wave of faintness and nausea. The nurse reprimanded him, and when he finally made her understand he needed water she left and did not return.

  He lay in an agony of thirst, enclosed in a vague and misty waking dream in which voices and people and smells and sounds wafted in and were swept away. Daybreak came and he only realised it had been night-time because someone opened the blackout shades and a shaft of light spilled into the ward, making him wince. He had a concussion, though he could remember nothing of it. He had a bandage around his head and when his fingers probed his temple he gasped and felt the nausea return. He decided to lie very still.

  When he awoke a second time, he remembered where he was. He moved very slowly, turning his head to one side and seeing that he was in an overcrowded ward, beds crammed one after another and some people on makeshift camp beds. He found that he was still in his clothes—or still in the clothes he had stolen when he had ditched his uniform. He found he was so weak he felt ill.

  ‘You have a concussion from a piece of shrapnel,’ said a nurse, holding a cup to his lips, and he drank greedily, feeling his lips swollen and cracked, an ugly taste in his mouth, and he tried to reach the cup with his shaking fingers to keep her from taking it away. He had already known that about the concussion and the shrapnel and he wondered if the nurse had come here before and told him. The order of things was confused and slippery in his head. He fell back against the pillow, content to lie and not think any more. But he did think—about the great bells that would never ring again. About the little girl with the red hairband and the white face who was downstairs in the mortuary, dead. And about the house he had grown up in right here in Whitechapel in the shadow of this very hospital and how, until now, he had never even set foot in this, the building within whose shadow he had grown up.

  It was a homecoming, of sorts.

  The man in the next bed had died. No one noticed. Joe had listened to the man’s increasingly shallow, laboured breaths until a gurgle somewhere in the back of his throat followed by a prolonged silence, a settling of his form beneath the sheets, suggested he had gone. No one came. There was no one at his bedside. There was no way to tell if the man was old or young, married or widowed, brave or a coward. The dead man’s hand slipped from the covers and hung down, a yellowish lifeless thing, the nails blackened, the fingertips nicotine-stained. Eventually a nurse came over and called out, ‘Mr Trent?’

  After that there was a flurry of activity. But no, not a flurry; merely a succession of persons coming and performing some necessary task and leaving, saying nothing. The body was removed, the sheets changed, the name on the chalk slate at the end of the bed rubbed out. No one spoke.

  A dead man in wartime.

  What name is written at the end of my bed? Joe wondered. For the first time he remembered to feel afraid. When, sometime later, a hospital administrator came to his bed with forms to be completed and questions for him to answer, a pencil poised to take down his replies, he feigned insensibility until she got up and left. This was a mistake, he realised, for he saw her a little while later talking to a policeman. No way to tell what they talked about. He ought to have given the woman a false name. A man with no identity is more interesting to the police than a man who has a name. But perhaps the administrator and the policeman were talking about Mr Trent or the weather or the raid (for there had been another raid the previous night and most of the people in the ward were here as a result of that). The administrator was the kind of middle-aged woman who before the war would have knitted baby clothing for other people’s babies and grown prizewinning petunias but who now had a position that allowed her to stalk the hospital corridors with a clipboard and a pencil and talk with authority to policemen. She turned and pointed through the door of the ward at Joe and the policeman looked to where she was pointing.

  Joe saw that his stay in the hospital was over. He waited for the dayshift to go off and the nightshift to come on and for the ward to settle down for the night, but it didn’t settle down for a man at the end of the ward became delirious and then distressed and finally aggressive so that a stream of nurses and a doctor and two burly porters came and went one after another and no one got a moment’s peace until the man was finally sedated an hour or so before dawn. When a quiet, of sorts, had at last descended and the people on the ward fell into a restless and exhausted sleep, Joe slipped from his bed and left.

  He did not have far to go. He walked along a corridor into a larger corridor and out through the front door and no one stopped him or questioned him. He went down the front steps and slipped away into the darkness just as the moon shrunk away below the horizon and a faint greyish tinge coloured the eastern sky.

  Monday morning.

  He came, in a remarkably short time, to Yalta Street, where he hesitated, waiting across the street, silently observing the house he had grown up in.

  Harry had said, Even if things go bad, don’t come here.

  But Joe had come, and in the greyish dawn it wasn’t much to look at, was it, the house he had grown up in? None of the houses in Yalta Street were much to look at. It was a mid-Victorian slum built by the benevolent board of the hospital for the poor of the district and adequate for a normal-sized mid-Victorian family of eight to ten to live, if not in comfort, then at least with some modicum of dignity. B
ut the houses had been subdivided by profiteering landlords so that each family-sized house soon housed three, four, sometimes five families, and what had once been a tight squeeze had, within a few short years, deteriorated into squalor.

  Joe looked up, studying the sky. He could hear the rumble of the furnaces in the hospital’s boiler rooms. If you gazed upwards from any point on Yalta Street the hospital filled your view, blocking out the sky and dwarfing the row of houses on the north side of the street, a constant and benevolent presence—and the place he had just run from. The distant rumble of the hospital furnaces was as familiar as the street itself, a street whose every cracked paving stone and overflowing drain, whose boarded-up windows and cheaply constructed and crumbing walls he knew without having to see them or touch them or smell them. In the old days you risked cholera and typhoid and worse just setting foot outside your front door, or so the elderly Mrs Levin maintained in her more lucid moments, her recollections of the street half a century earlier always colourful if not particularly accurate. But who was to say the old woman was not right? Her first summer here the Ripper had stalked the dark passages and alleyways, and if Mary Pendergast was still alive all these years later, who was to say the Ripper himself was not?

  Joe shivered. The hospital had been damaged badly in the first months of the bombing, and in the intervening years one street after another had been flattened yet Yalta Street had remained untouched, dodging every one of Hitler’s bombs; not a single building so much as had its windows blown out.

  Harry had said, Even if things go bad, don’t come here. But it seemed to Joe he had little alternative, and if a man could not turn to his family in a time of crisis then what was his life—was any life—worth? Joe thought it would be worth very little. And with this thought he crossed the street, his collar turned up and his head down low, slipping through the departing darkness like a memory.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  The village of Kirk Deighton was situated a mile or two northwest of Wetherby. Gerald Meadows had reached it after an arduous journey by train as far as Leeds then via an infrequent and meandering branch line train to Wetherby and finally a local bus the short distance to the village. From here he had slogged on foot and without the aid of signposts, all of which had been removed for the duration, along a country lane and a dirt track in the sleet of a northern Yorkshire winter to Spofforth Cottage. For this was the address Mrs Probart had supplied. This was the place to which his wife had fled, taking their child with her.

  ‘Mrs Meadows left that morning,’ Mrs Probart had announced. ‘But surely you knew?’

  No, Gerald had not known. There would be a letter from Diana making its way to Cairo where he had, until five days ago, been stationed. Or a letter had gone astray; letters did go astray in wartime.

  Spofforth Cottage turned out to be a snug, single-storey stone affair built into the hillside, its walls thick, its windows tiny, its doorways low, its stonework weathered so that it had a timeless quality to it, as if it had witnessed ancient wars, kings and queens come and go, dynasties rise and fall. It clung to a blustery hillside, the tussocky hills dotted with clusters of windswept, hardy sheep. A scattering of distant buildings suggested the cottage had once been part of a farm. Stone walls meandered in faltering, unrepaired lines up and down the hills and tumbled-down stonework was all that remained of some ancient outbuilding. The whole place had an abandoned feel to it. Yet the track from the lane was recently used, deeply rutted and muddy. The main part of the track continued on over the hill but a spur led across the tussocky grass past a collapsed stone wall and the remains of a gate to the door of the cottage.

  Gerald stopped at the gatepost. Snow had fallen a few days earlier and still lay, white and untouched, on the north-facing hillsides, yet despite the cold he was perspiring. It had taken him another day of his leave to get here and already the sun, which this far north was fleeting at best, was slipping away.

  Why had Diana come here, of all places? If she really was here—for he had begun to think of his family as a fairy tale that he had invented to get him through the war. But why here? She had no family nearby. She had never spoken of holidaying here as a child. They had never once come to Yorkshire during the ten years of their marriage. And yet this was where she had brought her daughter. Their daughter.

  ‘Don’t move! I’ve got you covered!’

  A double-barrelled shotgun was aimed squarely at him. Holding the shotgun was a squat, stocky, red-faced and pugnacious farmer in soiled boots, tattered overalls and a worn hat, eyes narrowed against the sleet. The man’s clothes, his face, the hands that gripped the shotgun had the same weather-beaten aspect as the sheep, as the ancient buildings, as the hillside itself, as though he had withstood endless winters out in the open with little or no shelter.

  ‘I’m looking for my wife,’ replied Gerald mildly, though he felt a blinding rage surge inside him at this fresh delay. ‘Perhaps you know her? Mrs Meadows? She has a small child with her. And, I say, perhaps you wouldn’t mind pointing that shotgun elsewhere?’

  The shotgun wavered and after a moment was partially lowered. ‘Aye, I know the lass,’ the man admitted. ‘Rented my cottage to her last week.’ And he nodded towards the squat stone building. ‘She never said nowt to me about no husband, though.’

  ‘That’s because she believed me to be abroad with my regiment. But as you see, I am returned and anxious to be reunited.’

  ‘Show us yer papers then,’ the man demanded, waving the shotgun’s barrel towards the place on Gerald’s person where he clearly imagined such papers to be.

  ‘If you were a sentry or a policeman I would certainly show you my papers, but as you are neither I shall do no such thing.’

  Gerald picked up his case and set off towards the cottage. He had just noticed a thin stream of black smoke coming from its chimney.

  ‘How do I know you’re not a Fifth Columnist, then?’ the man called out after him, his voice louder but at the same time becoming doubtful.

  ‘How do I know you’re not?’ Gerald countered.

  At this the man blustered, ‘Because I’m Inghamthorpe of Inghamthorpe’s Farm, that’s why! Been farming this land since George the Third were on’t throne.’

  ‘Really? You hardly look old enough,’ Gerald replied. ‘Now may we please get out of this filthy weather? I, for one, am heartily sick of it.’ And he turned once more towards the house. The fellow could shoot him; it was the only way he was going to be prevented from knocking on that door.

  But the man, Inghamthorpe, was not to be outdone: ‘AHOY THERE, MRS MEADOWS!’ he called out in a voice loud enough to send the nearest sheep scattering in panic, and Gerald saw a movement at the window, the twitch of a curtain.

  A moment later a bolt was drawn back and the rough-hewn timber front door creaked open.

  Diana stood in the doorway.

  No one spoke. She did not run and throw her arms around him. She did not exclaim. She did none of the things a wife might be expected to do in such circumstances, merely stood there dumbly and into the silence a crow, very high up in the sky, cawed loudly over and over.

  She was thinner and worn, her face wan with an odd, almost corpse-like pallor. She was wrapped inside a large winter coat, the collar pulled up and her arms hugging herself, and from within the folds of her coat her eyes searched his face, eyes he barely recognised. They were black, startled. But it was more than that; it was shock, the kind of shock he had seen many times etched on the faces of men trapped for hours under enemy fire. Now she moved, her mouth falling open. Her head went back, her eyes blinking. She shook her head as though disbelieving his presence here in the doorway and Gerald wondered, bizarrely, if his wife had thought him dead, if there had been some awful ministry cock-up and he had been reported missing, a casualty, for only that, surely, could account for her reaction.

  ‘Ahoy, Mrs Meadows! This fella claims to be your husband. That right? Can you vouch for him? Else I’ll be off t’police station thi
s minute and have him delivered t’authorities!’

  Diana turned, gazing at the farmer with his shotgun standing insistently and proprietarily a little way up the track, and it seemed to take her an extraordinarily long time to understand who he was and what he wanted.

  ‘Yes, it’s quite alright, Mr Inghamthorpe. This is Mr Meadows. This is my husband.’

  Her voice was strained, the words forced, unnatural. But it was a long time since she had last said, ‘This is my husband.’ Years, in fact.

  ‘Right you are, then,’ called the man, who even now seemed reluctant to depart. ‘I’ll leave you to it then, Mrs Meadows. You know where I am should you be wanting assistance.’

  They watched the man lumber away.

  And now, at last, it was just the two of them.

  ‘Gerald!’ she said, stepping outside to place her hands in his and squeezing them. ‘How marvellous! I cannot quite believe you are here.’ Her eyes had a sort of wild intensity, her words a frantic cheerfulness.

  How marvellous? I cannot quite believe you are here? They were like lines uttered by a second-rate actor in a third-rate play. Had he been away so long that she no longer knew him, no longer knew how to talk to him?

  ‘Diana.’ And he offered the same frantic smile but inside him something cried out in protest.

  ‘Well, come in, come in, out of this perishing cold!’ she said, pulling him into the cottage and closing the door.