The Londoners

by Margaret Pemberton

  Charlie was polkaing a pearl-earringed, tweed-garbed Harriet down the length of the pavement, much to Beryl and Billy’s open-mouthed astonishment.

  Miriam and Albert were doing one of their famed knees-ups.

  It seemed that everywhere she looked people were in happy couples or if, like Mavis and Christina, their menfolk’s arms weren’t yet around their waists, they were radiantly confident that they soon would be.

  ‘I have an announcement to make!’ Bob Giles said, satisfied that everyone had a drink of some kind in their hands and taking advantage of a brief pause in Hettie’s enthusiastic piano-playing.

  ‘’E’s gettin’ married!’ Billy shouted through a mouthful of cream cake. ‘The vicar’s gettin’ spliced!’

  ‘No I’m not, Billy,’ Bob Giles said easily as Ruth Fairbairn flushed scarlet. ‘Though I might very well be doing so in the near future. The banns are going to be called tomorrow, however, for two of our friends and it’s fitting that this joyous celebration today should be crowned by the news of their happiness.’

  Kate’s eyes shot towards her father and Ellen. Surely her father would have told her first? Or had he wanted it to be a happy surprise for her?

  ‘Raise your glasses please,’ Bob Giles said, beaming around at his flock, ‘to Harriet and Charlie! And may they know years and years of blissful married life together!’

  Utter bedlam broke out. Hettie sprinted from her place at one of the tables back to the piano and began thumping out a deafening rendering of ‘Here Comes the Bride’. Daniel put his fingers in his mouth and uttered a piercing whistle that had every dog in the vicinity running madly in his direction. Nibbo began whirling his football rattle. Miriam ran up the length of the tables to where Charlie and Harriet were sitting and to Harriet’s astonishment and Charlie’s bemusement planted huge kisses on their cheeks.

  Kate’s eyes met Carrie’s. ‘I told you so,’ Carrie called across to her laughingly. ‘Though I bet it’s something Moshambo didn’t know!’

  Despite the sickening apprehension in her heart Kate laughed back and then her eyes went beyond Carrie, down to the bottom end of the Square, and her laughter faded. An athletic-looking, broad-chested figure had just turned into the Square from Magnolia Hill. Though the sun was in her eyes she could see that he had a kit-bag over his shoulder and that he was in naval uniform.

  The blood drummed in her ears. He was dark. Very dark.

  ‘How about giving us a song, Kate,’ Nibbo was demanding. ‘How about “We’ll Meet Again”?’

  Kate wasn’t listening to him. Her heart was hammering so hard she thought it was going to burst. It was Leon. It had to be Leon. It couldn’t possibly be anyone else.

  ‘Let’s ’ave somethin’ with a bit more oomph to it,’ Mavis said, standing up from the table in a cotton leopard-printed skirt so tight it fitted like a second skin and peep-toed sandals so high it was a miracle she could walk in them. ‘Lift me on the Joanna, Nibbo, and I’ll give you “Boogie-Woogie Bugle Boy”.’

  ‘What’s the matter, Mummy?’ Luke was saying, pulling on her dress. ‘Why are you looking so funny? Why won’t you sing for Mr Nibbs?’

  Very gently she lifted his hand away from her skirt. He’d come home. He’d said he would come home and he had. How could she ever have doubted him? She took a couple of steps forwards, her legs so shaky she was terrified they were going to let her down.

  She saw Leon’s face split into a wide, joyous smile. She saw him toss his kit-bag over the nearest garden gate and break into a run.

  ‘Leon!’ she cried and then, her legs shaky no longer, she was running, running as she had never run in her life before. As he sprinted towards her and the gap between them closed she felt as if her heart was going to burst.

  ‘Oh, Leon! Leon!’ she gasped, hurtling into his arms. ‘You’re home! You’re home!’

  As her hands slid up around his neck and he crushed her against him she knew absolute joy. From now on nothing and no-one would ever part them again. From now on they were going to be a family. From now on their love was going to be a refuge and a peace that no hardship or trouble would ever be able to storm.

  His mouth was hot and sweet on hers. Their tongues touched and slipped past each other. Dimly, in the distance, she was aware of a storm of cheering and whistling. Somewhere on the Thames tug-boat horns blasted. ‘See, the Conquering Hero Comes’ was being played loud and hard on the piano.

  When at last he raised his head from hers, she looked up into his dear, kind, sunny-natured face and said in a voice thick with love, ‘We have a baby, Leon! We have a son!’

  ‘I know,’ he said, his voice raw with emotion, all the love he felt for her blazing in his amber-brown eyes. ‘I received your letter the morning we were torpedoed. It’s been in a pocket next to my heart every day and night since.’

  He raised his head slightly, looking towards the groaningly laden tables and the bunting and the balloons, saying with a catch in his throat, ‘I think it’s time you introduced us.’

  ‘His name is Luke,’ she said, as with their arms around each other’s waists they began to walk to where their family and neighbours were waiting for them, ‘and he was two years old last September.’

  As Daisy and Matthew began to run towards them holding on to the hands of a toddler with a mop of unruly dark curls and an instantly recognizable beaming smile, and as Charlie led the throng in the Square in an exuberant rendering of ‘For He’s A Jolly Good Fellow’, neither Kate nor Leon had the slightest shadow of doubt that they were the luckiest and happiest two people in the whole wide world.

  Magnolia Square

  the second novel in Margaret Pemberton’s

  The Londoners trilogy, is out now.

  1945: the war is over, and the inhabitants of Magnolia Square are looking forward to their men coming home and their lives returning to normal. But, for some, the end of the war brings serious problems.

  Kate Voigt is finally able to marry Leon Emmerson, a Londoner like herself, but of mixed race. When old man Harvey, a powerful and wealthy figure in South London and great-grandfather to Kate’s son Matthew, hears of the match, he is determined that young Matthew should not be raised by Leon. Slowly, insidiously, he begins a plight to wrest Kate’s son away from her.

  For Jewish refugee Christina, who has recently married commando Jack Robson, peacetime has brought its own special torment. She is convinced that her mother and grandmother have somehow escaped the terrors of the Holocaust and are alive. But her determination to find them could put everything – even her marriage – at risk.

  The first chapter follows here.

  Chapter One

  ‘Blimey,’ Carrie Collins, née Jennings, said graphically to her best friend Kate Voigt as they escaped from the exuberant street party, paper Union Jacks on sticks still in their hands, ‘have you ever known a day like it?’

  ‘Never!’ With her eyes shining, her face radiant, Kate led the way into her sun-filled kitchen, making straight for the stove and the kettle that sat on the top of it. ‘The war is over, Carrie! Over!’

  As Carrie plumped her Junoesque figure exhaustedly into the rocking-chair that sat on top of a gaily coloured rag rug, Kate carried the kettle over to the sink. ‘Or it’s nearly over,’ she amended, turning on the tap, ‘because the war in the Far East can’t go on for much longer, surely?’

  Outside, in the Square, the VE party was going at full throttle with ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ being sung with gusto by all their friends and neighbours. Carrie beat time with her Union Jack, saying with unabashed frankness, ‘Bugger the Far East, Kate. All that matters to me is that no-one we know or love is still fighting. My Danny and your Leon are already home, thank God. And what’s more, they’re staying home!’ The muffled strains of ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ merged into ‘We’ll Meet Again’, and she put her Union Jack down on the nearby kitchen table, the sunlight glinting on her wedding ring as she did so.

  Kate sat the kettle on the gas hob and
then, leaning her slender weight against the stone sink, said musingly, ‘But what are they going to do for jobs, now they’re home? I know your Danny’s been working at the biscuit factory, but I don’t suppose he wants to stay there for ever. And I’m not sure Leon will be able to go back to working on the river. Every demobbed merchant seaman in London will be looking for work as a Thames lighterman.’

  Carrie didn’t know what the chances were of Leon being able to return to his pre-war job, but she did know what she felt about Danny’s future work prospects. ‘I don’t care what Danny does as long as we can be together,’ she said fiercely, the radiant vivacity in her sea-green eyes replaced by passionate intensity. ‘I don’t want us to live like we did before the war, when he was a professional soldier and always away at Catterick or somewhere even further north, and me and Rose were at home with my mum and dad and gran. This time, whatever he does and wherever he goes, me and Rose go too.’

  Kate’s eyes widened in alarm. ‘But you won’t be going anywhere, will you, Carrie? Even if Danny gets a better job, it will be a local job, won’t it?’ The thought of Carrie moving away from the Square they’d both been born and brought up in horrified her. What would she do without being able to rely on her daily chats and giggles with Carrie? Ever since she could remember, Carrie’s noisy, boisterous, laughter-filled home at the bottom end of Magnolia Square had been a second home to her.

  Her own home had always been happy, but it had been quiet. Her widowed, German-born father was intellectual by inclination and introspective by nature, and in contrast to her own sedate home life, Carrie’s part-Jewish, market-trader family had been a revelation to her. Leah, Carrie’s gran, cooked like a dream and thrived on histrionics, indulging in them with relish. Bonzo, her dog, seemed to think barking and howling was a way of justifying his existence. Carrie’s big-hearted goy father, Albert, was so used to hollering out his wares down Lewisham Market that he no longer seemed to know what a normal speaking voice was. ‘Speak up a little louder, why don’t yer,’ Carrie’s mother, Miriam, was always saying to him in loving sarcasm after he had bellowed some comment to her, ‘they can’t ’ear yer in Purfleet!’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Carrie said starkly. ‘Danny’ll just have to take what he can get, and it might mean moving north of the river.’

  Despite her alarm at the thought of Carrie moving out of the Square, a smile twitched the corners of Kate’s generously shaped mouth. Like all south-east Londoners, Carrie spoke of the Thames as if it was a divide as great as the English Channel.

  Kate’s waist-length, wheat-gold braid of hair had fallen over her shoulder and she flicked it back, saying, ‘I can imagine a lot of things, but I can’t imagine living anywhere but in Magnolia Square. Where else in London is so near to both the river and high, open heathland?’

  Carrie, who much preferred the hustle and bustle of Lewisham’s High Street and market, to Blackheath’s nearby, gorse-covered Heath, said a little indifferently, ‘Nowhere, I s’pose. Are you going to brew that tea today, Kate, or wait until next week?’

  With a grin, Kate returned her attention to the kettle, lifting it off the hob and scalding out the waiting teapot. She was wearing a pre-war, ice-blue cotton dress which she had frugally renovated, but the original cap sleeves and full gathered skirt made her look more like a young girl fresh from the schoolroom than a woman in her mid-twenties: a woman who, though still unmarried, was mother to three young children.

  Amusement gleamed in Carrie’s eyes. As a child, she’d always been the careless, harum-scarum one, the one most likely to find herself in trouble. Yet it had been quiet, well-brought-up, well-spoken Kate who had found herself literally ‘in trouble’ within a couple of years of leaving school.

  As Kate put three caddy spoonfuls of tea into the warmed teapot, Carrie’s eyes flicked to the photograph propped high on the kitchen dresser against a little-used cream-jug. Toby Harvey had been handsome – and brave. Only twenty-three, he had died engaging his Spitfire in combat with a Messerschmitt above the bloody beaches of Dunkirk. The heroic circumstances of his death had protected Kate from too much censure when Matthew had been born eight months later, and there was certainly no censure when, the Blitz at its height, she had given a home to bombed-out, orphaned, lovable little Daisy. Carrie’s wry amusement deepened. No, it hadn’t been Matthew’s illegitimacy or her unofficial fostering of Daisy that had set the cat among Magnolia Square’s pigeons. It had been Kate’s subsequent love affair with Leon Emmerson that had sent shockwaves vibrating far and wide.

  ‘Do you want a ginger biscuit with your cup of tea, or have you stuffed yourself to sickness point on VE party jellies and cakes?’ Kate asked, breaking in on Carrie’s thoughts.

  ‘I only had one helping of jelly,’ Carrie said defensively, ‘and I never got near the cakes. Your kids and Rose and our Billy and Beryl saw to that!’

  Billy and Beryl Lomax were her niece and nephew and, because her happy-go-lucky, pleasure-loving older sister hardly ever bothered to reprimand them, or keep an eye on them, they were a constant source of despair to Carrie. She said now, helping herself to a biscuit as Kate set a tin in the middle of the scrubbed wooden table, ‘I don’t suppose you’ve seen Billy’s latest acquisition to his personal ammunition dump, have you? He only dragged it home this morning. God knows where he found it. It’s at least four feet long and has fins on it. One of these days he’s going to pilfer something that’s live and the whole bloomin’ Square will go up in the biggest bang since the Germans bombed the oil refineries down at Woolwich.’

  Laughter bubbled up in Kate’s throat. She had a soft spot for the Square’s acknowledged tearaway, and whenever he embarked on one of his escapades he often did so provisioned with her home-made scones and buns.

  ‘It’s all right you laughing,’ Carrie said darkly, dunking a ginger biscuit into her steaming cup of tea. ‘You don’t live next door to him. You’d think, now that he’s thirteen, he’d be starting to show a bit more sense, but instead he’s fast on the road to becoming an out and out hooligan, and it’s all Mavis’s fault. As a mum, that sister of mine’d make a perishin’ good bus driver . . .’

  ‘Hallooo! Anyone ’ome?’ a familiar voice carolled out in carrying tones from the front of the house and the open doorway.

  Carrie raised her eyes to heaven. She loved her mother dearly, but the tart repartee they so happily indulged in was based on the mutual pretence that they drove each other to distraction.

  Without bothering to wait for an answer, Miriam Jennings barrelled through into the kitchen. ‘What the bleedin’ ’ell are you two doin’ hidin’ away in ’ere when the biggest party of the century’s takin’ place in the Square?’ she demanded cheerily, her hair still in metal curlers even though the party was at its height, a gaily patterned wraparound pinafore tied securely around her ample figure. ‘Our Mavis is just about to let rip singin’ a bit o’ Boogie-Woogie an’ she wants all the audience she can get.’ She eyed the teapot with enthusiasm. ‘And is that tea fresh, because if it is I’ll ’ave a cuppa.’

  ‘Yes, it is, and no, I’m not coming out to watch Mavis make an exhibition of herself,’ Carrie said crossly as her mother pulled out a kitchen chair and plonked herself down on it.

  As Kate obligingly took another cup and saucer down from the dresser, Miriam looked around her. Satisfying herself that no-one else was in the kitchen, she said a trifle exasperatedly, ‘I thought I might have found Christina ’ere. Gawd knows where she’s ’ared off to. There’s been no sight or sign of ’er for the past hour.’

  ‘Christina’s a grown woman, Mum.’ Carrie’s hand hovered over the biscuit tin as she wondered whether, with her ever-expanding hips, she should treat herself to another biscuit. ‘And she’s never liked crowded get-togethers,’ she continued, deciding that one more couldn’t possibly make much difference. ‘She’s probably gone off for a walk and taken Bonzo with her.’

  ‘She ain’t taken Bonzo ’cos yer dad’s just ’ad to throw a bu
cket o’ water over ’im to stop him doing rudies to Charlie Robson’s Alsatian bitch.’

  Kate made a choking noise. Carrie said disbelievingly, ‘’Ow the hell could Bonzo try to copulate with Queenie? He’s only a whippet, for God’s sake!’

  ‘’E might be only a whippet, but ’e’s a game little bugger.’ Miriam heaved her bosoms up over the edge of the table so that she could reach the biscuit tin more easily. ‘An’ ’owever much Christina ’ates knees-ups, you’d think she’d be the ’eart and soul of this one, wouldn’t yer? She is both German and Jewish after all. If she doesn’t want to celebrate the Nazis being thrashed into surrenderin’, wot will she ever want to bloomin’ celebrate?’

  Neither Kate or Carrie attempted to answer her. Though they were each other’s best friend, Christina was their closest other friend and, despite being their close friend, she was an enigma neither of them truly understood.

  Miriam, aware that she had drawn a blank where Christina was concerned, blew on her tea to cool it, saying grudgingly, ‘It’s nice to ’ave five minutes’ peace and quiet after all the ruckus that’s goin’ on outside. I told the Vicar the church bells nearly deafened me when ’e rang ’em when peace was declared and that ’e’d no need to ring ’em again, but ’e said as ’ow as St Mark’s stood in the middle o’ the Square, it was only right St Mark’s bells should ring when the Square was ’avin’ its VE party.’

  One of Carrie’s two tortoiseshell combs had come adrift and she pushed an unruly mass of near-black hair away from her face, re-anchoring it. ‘Your eldest daughter will be doing her Billie Holiday impression by now,’ she said meaningfully as she did so, ‘and you did say she wanted all the audience she could get.’

  ‘Mebbe she does, but I’m comfy now.’ Miriam folded her beefy arms and rested them on the table. ‘There’s beer and shandy and lemonade runnin’ like rivers outside, but there ain’t no decent tea, not since the Vicar’s lady-friend accidentally dropped a washing-up cloth into the urn.’