The Londoners

by Margaret Pemberton

  The taller of the two was carrying a battered suitcase secured with string, his knee-high socks hanging in wrinkles around his ankles. Hanging on to his free hand was a small girl no more than three or four years old, her boxed gas mask hanging bulkily around her neck, her coat buttoned up lop-sidedly, her badly cut fringe so low across her eyes it was a miracle she could see where she was going.

  ‘Come on,’ she heard the taller figure say in an exhausted voice instantly recognizable. ‘Yer can’t lay dahn and cry again. We’re nearly ’ome now.’

  Kate sucked in her breath in disbelief and then broke into a run. ‘Billy! What on earth has happened? How did you get here from Cornwall? Who is with you?’

  As she raced towards them she saw him totter slightly and as he did so Beryl’s legs gave out on her completely and she fell down on her bottom, her tear-streaked face white with exhaustion.

  ‘Who is with you?’ Kate demanded, lifting Beryl up from the pavement and into her arms with difficulty. ‘Where are they? Why have they brought you home?’

  ‘No-one’s wiv us,’ Billy said, wiping his nose on his sleeve. ‘We’ve run away. It were ’orrible in the country. We ’ad to sleep in a shed with smelly animals and Beryl were frightened and we didn’t have enough to eat and . . .’

  ‘Dear God in heaven!’ Kate had only to look into his hollow-eyed face to know that he wasn’t spinning her a story to excuse his running away and returning home, but was telling her the horrifying truth.

  ‘The woman who said she’d ’ave us as evacuees only ’ad us ’cos she was forced to,’ Billy continued, as if this was sufficient to explain the appalling treatment he and Beryl had been subjected to. ‘She didn’t want us in the ’ouse ’cos she said we’d make it dirty.’ He shifted the cumbersome suitcase from one hand into the other, ‘and when Beryl cried ’cos she was ’ungry she clouted her.’

  ‘She hit her?’ Kate asked, aghast. ‘The woman you were billeted with hit Beryl for crying because she was hungry?’

  Billy nodded, ‘And she wouldn’t let us ’ave a light in the shed and when Beryl wet herself ’cos she were scared she were clouted again.’

  Over the last few weeks and months Kate had experienced roaring tides of rage over the way her father had been treated by his erstwhile friends. None of that previous emotion came remotely close to the ice-cold flood of fury that now enveloped her.

  Hitching Beryl a little higher and holding her secure with one arm, she took hold of Billy’s hand. ‘Come along, Billy,’ she said unsteadily, shaken to the core by the terrible knowledge that she was quite capable of murder. ‘Let’s get you and Beryl home, and warm and fed.’

  With the suitcase still banging against Billy’s legs and Beryl’s frozen hands wrapped tightly around Kate’s neck they trooped in the deepening gloom towards the bottom end of the Square, past Miss Godfrey’s carefully blacked-out windows, past Kate’s own home, past Mr Nibbs’s house, past the carefully tended winter-sweet at Miss Helliwell’s gate, its leafless branches heavy with fragrant flowers of waxy cream.

  A sound suspiciously like a sob came from Billy’s throat as they turned in the gateless entry of his home. With surprising regard for the strict black-out regulations, no chink of light showed from behind Mavis’s heavily curtained windows. There was no need for Kate to knock on the door. Billy let go of her hand and seized hold of the door-knob, turning it and nearly falling in his rush to be inside.

  ‘Mum!’ he cried, ‘Mum!’ Me and Beryl are ’ome and we ain’t never goin’ away again!’

  ‘They walked from the house they had been billeted in to Truro and then hitched a lift with a lorry-driver from Truro to Southampton,’ Miss Godfrey said an hour or so later.

  They were drinking mugs of tea in the Lomaxes tiny kitchen. Mavis’s screams, initially of joy at seeing her children again, then horror when they told her their story and finally vows to send their billetor to an early grave had brought all her neighbours, even those who lived as distant from her as Miss Godfrey, hurrying out of their homes to discover what on earth was going on.

  ‘I thought the Germans were here,’ Miss Helliwell confided, one hand pressed against her still palpitating heart. ‘I told Esther to feign dead. Even Germans wouldn’t rape a dead woman, would they?’

  Albert Jennings stared at her, momentarily diverted from the prospect of purloining Ted’s motor bike and side-car and hurtling there and then down to Cornwall, to wreak revenge on his grandchildren’s persecutor. It had never occurred to him that the aged Miss Helliwells were living in fear of being raped by the Hun. ‘I wouldn’t know,’ he said truthfully, ‘but I think they might have more on their minds when they first land. And if you’ll excuse me for saying so, even if they didn’t, I don’t think you and your sister would be first in that particular queue.’

  ‘What happened after they reached Southampton?’ Kate asked Miss Godfrey before the conversation became even more bizarre. She had been putting Beryl to bed while Billy had been telling his stupefied audience the details of his and Beryl’s ordeal and was still in the dark about how the two of them had made the two-hundred-and-fifty-mile journey home.

  ‘They couldn’t get another lift and they slept on the street and then in the morning a naval officer, on his way home to Richmond from Southampton, on leave, took pity on them and gave them a lift in his car.’

  ‘I’ll bloody kill ’er if I get my ’ands on ’er,’ Miriam sobbed, stumbling into the kitchen in search of a reviving mug of tea. ‘If Ted had been ’ome she’d stand no chance! ’E’d be ’alfway to Cornwall by now and by the time ’e’d finished with ’er she’d be lucky if she could even open the door to ’er bloody shed, let alone keep children in it in the middle of winter!’

  ‘What happened when they reached Richmond?’ Mr Nibbs asked. Within days of war breaking out he had volunteered as an Air Raid Warden and his official Air Raid Warden’s tin hat was strapped firmly beneath his chin lending him an air of authority.

  ‘They got on a tube train to the Embankment without paying and nipped off it and underneath the barriers and then they tried to get on the overground train to Blackheath the same way, only a guard cottoned on to them and ejected them before the train left Charing Cross station,’ Miss Godfrey said, contempt in her voice for the callous action of the guard in question. ‘After that they simply walked.’

  ‘All the way from Charing Cross?’ Kate asked, stunned.

  Miss Godfrey nodded grimly. ‘The billetor in question won’t get away with it, of course. I shall write immediately to Truro’s Evacuation Committee chairman and inform him of the scandalous conditions Billy and Beryl endured. I shall certainly ensure that no other unfortunate children are billeted with her. As far as I’m concerned, the woman deserves a prison sentence.’

  ‘Prison!’ Mavis shrieked, hurtling into the small crowded kitchen in search of her headscarf and coat. ‘Prison! Prison’s too good for her!’ She yanked her coat from off a hook on the back of the kitchen door. ‘Dad’s borrowin’ Ted’s motor bike and side-car and he’s takin’ me down there now! Tonight!’ She plunged her arms into her coat sleeves. ‘How dare she treat my kids like that? How dare she make my little Beryl sleep in a smelly old shed?’

  With hands shaking with fury, she snatched up her headscarf from the kitchen table. ‘Come on, Dad,’ she said to Albert, flinging the scarf over her peroxided, Victory-roll hairstyle and knotting it beneath her chin. ‘Mum’s going to stay with Billy and Beryl. Let’s be off!’ And without waiting for a reply she whirled out of the kitchen into the narrow hallway beyond.

  ‘I don’t fancy her chances,’ Mr Nibbs said from his position squeezed between the oven and the sink as Albert, clad in his Home Guard uniform, strode purposefully out of the kitchen in her wake.

  ‘Whose chances?’ Miss Helliwell asked, bewildered by the force of the passions surging around her.

  ‘That bloody billetor’s in Cornwall,’ Mr Nibbs said grimly. ‘She’d have an easier time facing Hitler and his
entire army than Mavis in the mood she’s in now!’

  By the time Kate left the Lomaxes’, accompanied by Miss Godfrey, she was almost convinced she had severely over-reacted in imagining that her neighbours were beginning to regard her as an outsider. The solidarity of high feeling about the way the Lomax children had been treated as evacuees, a solidarity in which she had been wholeheartedly included, made her feel once again an integral part of Magnolia Square’s close-knit community.

  Two days later the gossip over the garden fences was all about the Lomax children’s billetor’s near escape.

  ‘Albert told Daniel that Mavis had her by the hair and was dragging her by it towards the shed,’ Hettie said with relish to Miss Helliwell. ‘She was going to lock her up in it and if she had done, she’d have thrown away the key!’

  ‘And what happened?’ Miss Helliwell asked, her eyes like saucers, wondering if her sister’s heart would stand the strain of hearing this latest exciting instalment in the Lomax saga.

  ‘Some silly sod of a neighbour called for the police,’ Hettie said, her black hat tipped at a rakish angle, disappointment heavy in her voice. ‘Mavis is back home now and she says she’s never going to let the kids go away again. It’s not as if all the bombs we thought would be dropped on London have been dropped. Daniel says old Hitler is biding his time in the hope that he’s going to overrun France and that if he does, we’ll get the jitters and come to an arrangement with him.’ She snorted in derision at the very thought. ‘As if we would!’

  ‘As if Hitler will ever overrun France!’ Miss Helliwell said, equally staunchly. ‘How could he, with your Danny fighting out there and Ted in France as well and Jack Robson in the Commandoes?’

  ‘Now that Billy and Beryl are back home Mavis is findin’ food rationin’ a real ’eadache,’ Miriam confided to Miss Godfrey. ‘She never was what you would call a natural-born ’ousewife and this ’avin’ to register with one grocer for everythin’ is throwin’ her somethin’ shockin’.’

  Miss Godfrey eased her wicker shopping basket from one arm to the other and made a murmur of sympathy. That Mavis was not a natural-born housewife came as not the remotest surprise. No-one who knew her would ever have come to any other conclusion.

  ‘’Course, Nibbo latched on to the advantages straight away,’ Miriam said, a hint of bitterness in her voice. ‘’E no longer describes himself as a green-grocer, which is what ’e’s been for as long as I can remember. Ever since ’e got a sniff of what the government intended ’e began stockin’ sugar and tea and God knows what else and calling ’imself a grocer.’

  Miss Godfrey frowned slightly, ‘But that was quite sensible of him, surely?’

  ‘Oh, very sensible,’ Miriam said, her bitterness now blatantly apparent. ‘It means ’e’s not only cornered a captured market for rationed foods but that everyone who buys their food rations from ’im will also buy their unrationed greengroceries from ’im as well! After all, if you can buy everythin’ under one roof, why tramp down to the market for your fruit and veg?’

  Miss Godfrey, embarrassingly aware that three apples were nestling somewhere in her basket alongside her small supply of rationed tea, sugar and margarine, all of which had been purchased from Mr Nibbs, tried to adjust the basket so that its contents were not quite so visible.

  ‘I’m sure none of your previous market customers will desert you,’ she said, her conscience clear of hypocrisy because she had never shopped in the market but had always been one of Mr Nibbs’s customers.

  Miriam looked unconvinced and in an effort to move the conversation onto more neutral ground Miss Godfrey said, ‘Personally, I’m far more worried about meat rationing than the rationing of groceries. I’ve always shopped around for my meat and I’m not looking forward to the prospect of having to use one butcher week in, week out.’

  ‘Stockings!’ Carrie said to Kate, highly disgruntled. ‘How the hell are we going to manage if we can’t buy silk stockings for special occasions?’

  They were in Kate’s bedroom and Kate, who was holding a sleeping Rose lovingly in her arms, was unable to proffer a suitable reply. Ever since war had been declared there had been shortages of all kinds of commodities, but whereas neither she nor Carrie minded very much about food and petrol shortages, the near impossibility of obtaining silk stockings had hit hard.

  ‘We could begin wearing lisle stockings, I suppose,’ she said doubtfully.

  ‘Lisle?’ Carrie stared at her as if she had taken leave of her senses. ‘Lisle? We’d look like women of fifty! I might be married and a mum but I want to look like Betty Grable when I go out on the town! Not my mother or my mother-in-law or Miss Helliwell!’

  Kate grinned. With her square-jawed face and heavy dark hair, Carrie could never, in a million years, look like Betty Grable. She looked more like Katharine Hepburn or Claudette Colbert.

  ‘Leave looking like Betty Grable to Mavis,’ she said, easing Rose into a slightly more comfortable position in her arms. ‘Why don’t we follow the advice of the beauty article in last week’s Picture Post and simply make-up our legs with foundation cream and draw a line down the middle of the backs of our legs so that it looks like a stocking seam?’

  Carrie’s eyes widened. ‘Is that what it suggested?’

  Kate nodded. ‘According to the article there’s leg make-up and pencils made specially for the purpose, but until we can buy them we can make do with foundation cream and an eyebrow pencil.’

  Carrie had already reached for her handbag. ‘It’s an idea of genius!’ she exulted, beginning to rummage through it for her make-up purse.

  ‘Either genius or lunacy,’ Kate said, giggling and laying the still-sleeping Rose carefully down on the bed. ‘Have you found your foundation and a pencil? I’ll make-up your legs first and then you can do mine. Do you think it will fool anyone?’

  Carrie hitched her skirt up so that the pencil line could run from the back of her knee down to her ankle. ‘If it fools Mavis, even for five minutes, it’ll be worth it. I truly think Mavis would sell her soul for a pair of silk stockings!’

  By early April the situation on mainland Europe was so dire even Mavis had more on her mind than silk stockings. Hitler invaded Denmark and Norway. Denmark fell almost immediately and though a Norwegian Nazi sympathizer, Major Vidkun Quisling, proclaimed himself head of the Norwegian Government and ordered all resistance to Germany to cease, Norwegian forces refused to do so. Aided by British and French troops they began a desperate battle to oust the invader from Norwegian soil.

  ‘Let’s ’ope they succeed,’ Charlie Robson said to Kate as he crossed the Square, heading towards the Heath, Queenie at his heels. ‘If they don’t, Hitler will use all Norway’s ports as naval bases for the German fleet and then his ships will be able to sweep down on us any time they like.’

  Kate regarded him with a startled expression, taken aback by such a cogent explanation of the situation from a man usually inarticulate unless expressing an opinion on horse or greyhound racing.

  ‘I know that for a fact,’ he added, taking pity on her wonderment, ‘’cos Harriet told me.’

  In Norway, as with doomed Poland and Denmark, nothing got better; events only grew worse. By the end of the month British and French troops had no option but to withdraw from their precarious Norwegian footholds. With all but nominal resistance in Norway crushed, Hitler turned his attention from northern Europe to western Europe.

  Mavis, who had been listening to Reginald King and his Orchestra on the wireless, was the first person in Magnolia Square to hear the news. ‘We are sorry to interrupt this programme . . .’ a solemn voice began and seconds later Mavis was pushing up her sash window and yelling for the benefit of any of her neighbours who were within hearing distance, indoors or out, ‘That bugger Hitler’s just walked into France!’

  ‘And Belgium and Holland,’ Carl said later to Kate, grim-faced. ‘How much worse can things possibly get?’

  He found out how much worse things could get for hi
mself and for Kate next morning when it was officially announced that from now on, no matter what the mitigating circumstances, all male Germans and Austrians from the ages of sixteen to fifty were to be interned.

  ‘But it can’t apply to you, Dad!’ Kate said in anguish as her father opened drawer after drawer in his bedroom, taking out underclothes, pullovers, belts and braces. ‘Mum was British! She was a Londoner! You’re a Londoner now! You’ve lived here for over half your life!’

  ‘A policeman is waiting for me downstairs,’ he said, his voice unsteady as he began placing underpants and socks into a small suitcase. ‘All over Europe families are having to endure far worse partings, Kate. I’m not being taken into a German concentration camp, a Dachau or a Buchenwald, nor am I shortly going to be in battle in Belgium or Holland or France.’

  She sat down on the bed, ashamed of her near hysterical outburst; sick at the thought of how long it might be before he was allowed to come home again.

  Her father placed a copy of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, lent to him by Toby, into the suitcase on top of his clothes. ‘I’m sure we’ll be allowed to write to each other, Liebling. And perhaps you will be able to send me parcels occasionally and keep me supplied with books.’

  ‘Yes. Of course.’ She could hardly speak she was so terrified of distressing him further by breaking down into tears. ‘Where are you going? Will I be able to visit you?’

  He closed the suitcase lid. ‘I don’t know where I’m to be interned. I imagine it will be somewhere remote; certainly somewhere far from London.’

  The tears she had held in check with so much difficulty could be held in check no longer. They slid down her cheeks, falling on to her tightly clasped hands. ‘I’m going to miss you, Daddy,’ she said, as if she were a small child again. ‘I love you.’

  Very gently he reached down for her hands, taking them in his and drawing her to her feet. ‘I love you too, Liebling,’ he said, holding her close. ‘And everything is going to be all right. The next few days and weeks of the war are going to be crucial but they’re going to be crucial in the Allies’ favour. Evil never triumphs for long and Hitler will be stopped in his tracks before he can overrun France and long before he can attempt an invasion of Britain. You’ll see. Another few months and life will once again be normal.’