The Safest Place in London

by Maggie Joel

  He looked tired. He looked hungry. But so did everyone. After a time, he pulled himself to his feet and limped towards the station entrance. He had no luggage, not even a gas mask. Perhaps he was meeting someone. Perhaps he had no possessions. He wore a suit that looked like someone had died in it.

  Joe paused in the entranceway to the station. It was the first day of February, a Tuesday morning at a little after nine o’clock, an overcast morning with the promise of rain. Pigeons roosted noisily high up in the roof struts, thin and wasted because in wartime there were less crumbs to fight over, and wary because sometimes the people far below got so hungry they ate pigeon pie for their tea. Joe lowered his gaze from the ceiling and observed the many servicemen and women crowded into the station. The only civilians were wives and girlfriends come to wave someone off and mothers come up to London with small children on shopping trips or excursions or dental appointments.

  So far no one had asked to see his papers.

  Harry had said to be careful of the mainline stations, the entrances were watched. He had said to enter through the Underground station or jump a train once it had pulled out of the station. He had said use Euston. Joe was at Euston but no one was watching the entrance. Everyone was hurrying from place to place or standing in the middle of the concourse staring up at the giant departure board on which a large number of the trains had the word CANCELLED beside them. It seemed to be a feature of wartime that you always got to see what you were missing, what you couldn’t have, what was no longer available. But some trains were running. The boat train departed on the hour for Liverpool and Holyhead, connecting with the Dublin steam packet. Why shouldn’t he just go straight up and buy a ticket and board a train? thought Joe. Why should anyone stop him?

  Why should anyone stop Septimus John Vasey?

  A young woman and her little boy hurried into the station, passing by so close the woman’s sleeve brushed against Joe’s arm. She did not pause, pulling at the hand of the reluctant child, a handbag and a basket and a parcel tied with string balanced in her other hand. ‘Come on! We ain’t got all day,’ she said, tugging the boy’s hand, and when her parcel slid from her fingers and fell to the ground Joe darted forward to pick it up. ‘Thank you,’ she said, and when he offered to carry it for her, ‘You’re very kind,’ putting a hand to her hair, adjusting her scarf as though she was not used to talking to strange men. And so they crossed the station concourse together, looking for all the world like an ordinary family, and no one gave them a second glance. At the ticket office signs in large hectoring black letters demanded, Is your journey really necessary? but despite this there was a long line of people queuing for tickets. Everyone’s journey, it seemed, was necessary.

  ‘Oi, mister. Why you got a walking stick when you ain’t limping?’ piped up the little boy, regarding Joe suspiciously. ‘Why ain’t you in uniform?’

  ‘Ssshh! Archie, none of your cheek,’ hissed his mother, clipping the child around the head. She smiled wanly at Joe. She wore a cheap coat that had seen many winters with a scarf tied around her head and knotted beneath her chin. Her shoes were soaked through and her legs were spotted with mud. She looked exhausted, but even as Joe thought this he caught her looking at him, at his walking stick, at the bandage, at the decrepit old suit, and wonder. He shifted the parcel to his other arm. He needed to say something to dispel her curiosity but he could think of nothing. So they did not speak. The line inched forward.

  A man at the front of the queue wanted to travel to Sheffield and was insistent he change trains at Stoke-on-Trent. The ticket clerk was equally insistent he change at Manchester and a stand-off now ensued with the man—the retired colonel type in worn tweeds with a clipped voice and a waxed moustache—threatening to send for the station manager. Joe watched and a cold sweat broke out all over his body. His fingers curled tightly around the papers in his pocket. A man in front of him opened a newspaper and began to read, clearly expecting to be waiting a while. Behind him the mother of the little boy was pointedly not looking at him now, perhaps regretting accepting his offer of help, and now she did glance at him, showing him that same wan smile, but the muscles at the corner of her mouth were hard. She could sense his discomfort. He needed to say something light-hearted, something grumbling, the sort of thing people said to each other when they were stuck in a queue. He could think of nothing.

  He stared at the back page of the man’s newspaper. A man had been stabbed to death in an Underground station. Police were appealing for witnesses but so far none had come forward.

  As suddenly as it had sprung up the stand-off ended, the retired colonel departing in fury, promising to write a letter to someone about something. In another moment Joe was at the front of the queue. He asked for a one-way ticket to Liverpool by the ten o’clock train. The clerk asked for no identification, did not so much as glance up as he punched buttons on his machine and printed the ticket. He took more notice of the coins he counted out than he did of his customer.

  It was done and Joe walked away clutching his ticket and the woman’s parcel, following them to the ticket barrier. The mother and her little boy were going to Chester, a different train to himself but from the neighbouring platform.

  ‘I can take this now,’ said the woman, holding out her hands for her parcel, offering another quick unsmiling glance. Joe gave it to her, happy to be rid of it. The parcel, the mother and child, had done their job. He no longer needed their cover.

  As he thought this he saw two MPs at the ticket barrier checking papers and he went cold again. The two MPs worked as a pair, silently and thoroughly unfolding each person’s identity card, their travel warrants, their train ticket, scrutinising each face implacably and handing back each item without a word. And perhaps there were MPs at each platform checking each passenger’s papers, though it was hard not to feel that it was simply this platform they had targeted and he had blundered haplessly into them.

  But he had papers. And they were genuine, if stolen. He was perfectly safe.

  But were they genuine? The coldness spread through his body, making it difficult to think. He had only glanced at the papers for a second or two in the darkened hallway in the brief moments after Harry had given them to him. Just enough time to read a name and no more. If they were a poor forgery—or even a bloody good forgery—he hadn’t noticed. Harry had given him no time to notice. He fought the urge to pull the papers out of his coat pocket right now and peer at them. They might be perfectly fine.

  But they might not.

  He was almost at the front of the queue and beside him the young mother made an impatient noise and attempted to undo the clasp of her handbag, letting go of the boy’s hand to free up her other hand. The boy stood perfectly still, ignoring his mother, watching Joe.

  His papers were genuine. He just had to bluff it out.

  ‘Are you a coward, mister?’ said the little boy, putting his head on one side and regarding Joe in his civilian clothes through unblinking, probing eyes.

  His mother had dropped her handbag. The little boy, the two implacable MPs looked on, making no move to assist her as she bent down, flustered and exclaiming, to retrieve all the spilled items. By the time she had gathered her things together and straightened up, the man in the civilian clothes behind her in the queue had gone, was already walking across the concourse into the crowd and was lost from sight, and the little boy was right, it was odd that he had a walking stick but no limp.

  The ten o’clock boat train to Liverpool that connected with the afternoon ferry to Dublin had gone. By the time it passed through London’s northernmost suburbs and crossed into Hertfordshire, Joe was already many miles away. He had abandoned the walking stick but the bandage on his head was genuine enough and he began to feel a little sick. There was a longish period immediately after he had fled the station of which he had no recollection. In the panic and confusion that he himself had created he had found himself somehow in Aldgate, and how much time had passed and how he found his way
there he had no idea. The rain had come down, suddenly and in great sheets, pounding on the pavements and splashing up beneath the brims of hats. He had taken shelter and come to himself crouched in a bomb site, a crater so vast and so wide he had wondered what great building it was that had once stood here. When it had occurred to him that this was all that remained of the Great Synagogue, destroyed in May of ’41, and where generations of Levins had clasped their Talmuds and recited their prayers, the realisation that this, of all places, was where he had stumbled in his panic, had struck him deeply—until he had remembered that Ely Levin was not his father and that, as likely as not, he had no more connection to this place than to any other place, and he had got up and moved on.

  The rain had stopped as suddenly as heavy rain does stop, the sun bursting through so that everything shone wetly and the despair that a sudden winter downpour could instil was mingled confusingly with a sense of hope.

  The train ticket burned a hole in Joe’s coat pocket. He had thrown his money away buying it and then he had bolted before he had even boarded the train. The stupidity of his actions hung over him as heavily as the sudden downpour had. Why had he thought he could just walk into a station and buy a ticket and board a train? The papers were good; he had just lost his nerve.

  But when he pulled the identity card out and studied it in the daylight he saw that the man’s date of birth was 1875. The holder of this card must be sixty-nine years old. Anyone looking at it would know at once it was stolen.

  In Yalta Street a stranger was standing in the doorway of his brother’s house. The front door was open a crack, and a man stood on the doorstep conducting some furtive conversation. For you didn’t stand like that in the doorway with the door almost closed and your collar turned up unless your business was furtive. Joe watched from across the street and after a short time the man slid away, walking quickly, head down. He passed right by Joe and Joe saw a long raincoat and a grey hat pulled low over an unshaven chin. He saw one arm of the raincoat hanging limp and empty and the arm inside the coat cradled in a sling.

  He saw that it was the plainclothes policeman who had been waiting for him at the docks a week ago.

  He stood and stared, unable to make sense of it. Could he have mistaken the man? He knew he had not.

  When the man was gone Joe went up to the house and knocked softly. It was opened immediately by Harry, who must have been standing right there, behind the door. Harry’s face did not change when he saw it was Joe returned, he simply reached out and hauled him into the house as he had done before, and slammed him against the hallway wall.

  ‘I told you not to come back!’

  ‘Them papers you give me are no bloody good!’

  Harry shook him a second time then abruptly let him go and walked away. Joe followed.

  ‘Don’t you get it? I’m saying I almost got caught! I got as far as the station but they was checking everyone’s papers—’

  ‘I told you not to go there!’ Harry turned back, his fists clenched, the veins standing out rigid in his neck. ‘I said jump a train or catch it from a smaller station. You’re a bloody fool. You deserve to get caught.’

  ‘You never said that! You said Euston was safe.’

  But Harry shook his head, denying all the advice he had given. Denying any responsibility. Joe thrust out a hand to stop him walking away again.

  ‘You have to help me. You got me into this situation.’

  Harry shoved a finger under his nose. ‘You take responsibility for your own actions. That’s the way it works. You knew what you was getting into.’

  ‘But I’m the one taking all the risk! I don’t see you out there risking your arse.’

  ‘No, you don’t. That’s because I ain’t the fool you are. Or Sammy. He’s just as much of a fool.’

  Harry stalked into the kitchen and yanked out a chair from the kitchen table, sweeping aside overflowing ashtrays, yesterday’s newspaper, a ration book, half-drunk mugs of tea, dirty plates. Joe followed.

  ‘Listen, Harry—’

  ‘No, you listen! You know nothing, Joe. We all take risks. All of us.’ He snatched up a packet of Pall Malls and began to light one. ‘You think an operation like this runs itself? You think there ain’t a dozen, two dozen blokes out there waiting to stab me in the back to take over my patch? Ready to sell me out for a packet of fags? People inside my own operation?’

  He took a long drag and blew out a cloud of smoke.

  The newspaper had reported a man stabbed to death in an Underground station. Was that Harry’s fate? Joe wondered.

  ‘There was a copper here when I arrived,’ he said slowly, still standing in the kitchen doorway. ‘A detective. Same one I see outside the docks a week ago.’

  Harry took a second pull on the cigarette, his eyes narrowing as he aimed a stream of smoke at the brown-stained ceiling. He made no reply.

  ‘I don’t get it, Harry. What’s he doing here?’

  ‘Course you don’t get it,’ said Harry quietly. ‘He’s bent. That copper’s bent. They all are. I slide him a few notes and he turns a blind eye.’ He looked up at his younger brother. ‘That’s how it works. You don’t run an operation like this without some copper knows about it and wants his cut.’

  Joe pulled out a chair and sank down into it. He realised he felt relieved. The policeman’s presence had rocked him; it had not made sense. Now it did make perfect sense. Now it was obvious.

  ‘How much d’you give him?’

  ‘A few notes. What’s it matter?’ Harry stood up. ‘Joe, you can’t stay here.’

  And so they were back where they had started.

  ‘Well, I ain’t going yet,’ said Joe. ‘Not till I get some grub and a wash and a kip. This is my home too.’

  He put his elbows on the kitchen table. It had been his home, once. Just because he no longer lived here and rarely came to visit didn’t mean it wasn’t still, wouldn’t always be, his home. He remembered that there had been no table here in the old days, just the sink and a mangle and rows of washing, grey and steaming and always damp. Harry had found this table on a bomb site the morning after a raid. It had been unscratched. Three years in the Levin household and it was scarred, chipped and stained like a butcher’s block.

  ‘Mum would want me to be safe,’ he said.

  At this Harry laughed. ‘Mum don’t know what century it is. She don’t care if you’re here or if you’re bobbing about in the sea or banged up in Wandsworth nick. You think she’s given two thoughts about our Sammy these last four years?’

  Joe said nothing. When he had left to join his ship early in 1940 his mother had refused to see him. When he’d come back in October her world had shrunk to the tiny upstairs room, the chair, the window and the starlings. And if she had any sense at all of time passing, it was time passing in another century before cars and telephones and wireless sets and aeroplanes and bombs dropping from the sky.

  ‘Family should mean something,’ Joe said, though what it should mean he did not know.

  ‘You wouldn’t be here otherwise. You’d be out on the street on your arse. And you wouldn’t have got them papers for free when everyone else pays four quid for them and don’t you forget it.’

  ‘I won’t forget them papers was no good and almost got me arrested!’

  ‘I ain’t got any more here! I told you that before. We been shut down. We’ve had to diversify, go offshore.’

  ‘Then what you paying the bent copper for?’

  At this Harry said nothing, just shook his head and smoked. He went to the window, pulled back the blackout as he had done the previous morning, but this time he pinned it up and let the grey light into the kitchen. Through the window a robin could be seen, perched on the slanting, falling-down roof of the outside lav, watching them. Harry finished the Pall Mall and stubbed it out, grinding the remains into a pulp.

  ‘Myra’s having a baby,’ he said. ‘And I can’t be banged up inside when it’s born. I can’t.’

  Joe slept
. One or two of the upstairs rooms still had beds in, still had the stained mattresses left behind by previous occupants who had departed in a hurry.

  When he came downstairs it was late afternoon and there was no sign of Harry, but Myra was seated at the kitchen table in a mustard-yellow dress and stockings, flipping through a magazine. A cigarette burned in her left hand. She glanced up at Joe’s arrival then down again. A heavy odour of frying fat and a pan still on the hob was evidence of a recent meal.

  ‘Harry gone out?’ Joe said.

  For a moment Myra did not reply. Then she looked up. ‘He told you to leave,’ she said. ‘Why you even here? This ain’t your home.’ She pulled on the cigarette and blew out a stream of smoke. ‘We don’t want you here. You’re in the way.’

  ‘Too bloody bad.’

  He pushed past her to search for something to eat. But her words had stung him. Was that how Harry felt too? He found the end of a loaf of bread in a bread bin. No marg. He tore a hunk off and began to chew. If Harry had told him to leave it was simply because his being here put everyone in danger.

  ‘I hear congratulations are in order,’ he said, leaning against the sink.

  Myra’s eyes narrowed and she blew out another thin stream of smoke. She did not look pleased. And it was hard to imagine Myra as a mother. He thought of his own mother as she had been when he was a child, middle-aged and already broken by the mean existence that was life in Yalta Street in two rooms with three growing boys and no husband to speak of. But what did it mean for any woman to be a mother? She had done their washing and patched their clothes and there had been food on the table most days. She had never worn silk stockings, though, or a mustard-coloured dress or had a net for her hair or smoked Pall Malls or sat around reading magazines. If she had, they would have gone without. But times were different now, he supposed. All the same, it was hard to imagine Myra as a mother.

  ‘When’s it due, then?’