The Londoners

by Margaret Pemberton

  Carrie giggled. Her mother always knew just who had done what, when.

  ‘And Nellie Miller from number fifteen isn’t as ’appy as she could be,’ Miriam continued, getting into her stride. ‘She says it’s all right every bugger that’s been fighting in Europe and the Middle East coming ’ome, but her nephew ’Arold is a prisoner of the Japs, and she doesn’t know when the ’ell ’e’ll be on his way ’ome.’ She crunched into a ginger biscuit. ‘The Red Cross did tell ’er just after ’e was first captured that ’e was ’elping to build a railway. It always seemed rum to me.’ She flicked ginger biscuit crumbs from her chest, adding in explanation, ‘’Arold was a milkman before he was conscripted, an’ apart from going on an annual train ride to Margate, ’e knows nothin’ about railways, and certainly wouldn’t know ’ow to go about building one!’

  Kate felt a pang of guilt. She’d been so ecstatic about Leon’s release as a POW, and his return home, that she’d forgotten Nellie Miller wouldn’t be similarly celebrating. ‘Let’s go and have a word with her,’ she said to Carrie. ‘It can’t be very nice for her, everyone celebrating, when Harold’s still a POW.’

  Carrie, well aware that, if they didn’t return to the street party, they’d have her mother with them for the duration, rose to her feet. ‘You have a word with her. I need to make sure Danny’s still keeping an eye on Rose. He seems to think that now she’s started school she doesn’t need watching so much, but given half a chance she’ll be down by the river with Billy and getting into goodness knows what kinds of trouble.’

  ‘Rose never gets into trouble,’ Miriam said, staunchly defending her favourite grandchild. She heaved herself reluctantly to her feet. ‘The trouble with you, Carrie, is that yer like to keep tabs on everyone a little too much. It wouldn’t ’ave done Danny any ’arm to ’ave stayed in the Army an—’

  ‘Can you pass me that basket, Miriam, please,’ Kate interrupted hurriedly. ‘I expect all the party sandwiches are gone by now and I might as well begin gathering up all the plates I loaned.’

  With a full-scale shenanigans between Carrie and her mother avoided, Kate hurried them out of the house and into the flag-and-balloon-bedecked Square. Trestle tables graced the front of St Mark’s. The church stood on a grassy island in the centre of the Square and both the island and the narrow road that encompassed it were thick with partying Magnolia Square residents.

  A piano belonging to Carrie’s mother-in-law, Hettie Collins, had been trundled out on to the pavement. Carrie’s sister, Mavis Lomax, was seated on top of it, belting out a rip-roaring version of ‘Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy’. Her peroxide-blonde hair piled high, Betty Grable fashion, her silk-clad, provocatively crossed legs showing an indecent amount of stocking-top.

  Nellie Miller, whose enormous bulk would have made two of the ample Miriam, was sitting in the front of Mavis’s appreciative audience, wedged in an armchair that had been specially wheeled out of the vicarage for her. In one hand she held a piece of string which was attached to a buoyantly floating red balloon. In the other was a slab of home-made mint and currant pasty. Ignoring the discomfort to her elephantine legs, she was tapping a foot up and down in time to Hettie’s exuberant piano playing.

  With not much more than crumbs and an occasional cake left on the crêpe-paper-covered trestle tables, children were no longer seated at them but running and shrieking everywhere. There was no sign of Rose, however, or Danny.

  ‘If he’s sloped off for a quiet game of billiards and taken Rose with him I’ll blooming kill him!’ Carrie said, fending off a big black Labrador that had bounded up to greet them.

  The Labrador was Kate’s and she said admonishingly as he threatened to knock both her and Carrie off their feet, ‘Down, Hector! Down!’

  Hector obediently sat and as he did so Kate caught sight of Leon. He was talking to Daniel Collins, Carrie’s father-in-law. Their little son, Luke, was laughingly straddling his broad shoulders and clutching on to his tight, crinkly hair. Matthew was clinging to one of his hands and chattering away to him ten to the dozen, while Daisy was holding tightly on to his other hand. Kate felt her heart turn over in her chest. God, but she loved him! For nearly three years he had been a prisoner of the Germans, transported to a prison camp deep in captured Russian territory after his ship had been torpedoed and sunk in Arctic waters. Unlike Nellie where Harold was concerned, she had never had any communication from either the War Office or the Red Cross, informing her that he was alive and a POW. All she had had was deep, sure, unswerving inner certainty. And what if she had been wrong? The very thought made her dizzy with horror. How would she have been able to face life if Leon had not returned to her? How would she have been able to wake and face each new day without Leon’s cheery good humour; his compassion and tolerance; his tender, passionate love-making?

  As if sensing the intensity of her thoughts, Leon turned his head slightly, looking directly towards her, his gold-flecked, amber-brown eyes meeting hers, his vivid, loving smile splitting his chocolate-dark face. She knew that people would be eyeing them with covert, prurient curiosity, because people always did. ‘Nice’ girls didn’t consort with black sailors, and they certainly didn’t have babies with them. Radiantly she smiled back at him, her eyes ablaze with love. Soon the street party would be over; soon the children would be bathed and in bed; soon they would be alone together and in each other’s arms, loving each other as they had burned to do all through the long, lonely years of their separation.

  ‘So who’s going to be married first?’ Nellie Miller called out to her. ‘You an’ Leon or the Vicar an’ his lady-friend?’

  With agonizing reluctance Kate broke eye contact with the man she loved with all her heart. ‘Me and Leon,’ she said without a second’s hesitation.

  Nellie grinned, displaying a mouthful of appallingly crooked and broken teeth. ‘I’m glad to ’ear it. It’s about time at least one of your whipper-snappers was made legit.’

  Kate crossed over to Nellie’s shabby armchair and perched on the arm. ‘They’re both going to be legitimized,’ she said as Hettie began playing a conga, and the throng around them exuberantly pushed and pulled themselves into a long conga line. ‘The minute we’re married, Leon’s going to adopt Matthew and we’re both going to apply to adopt Daisy. With a little luck, by the end of the year we’ll be an ordinary family.’

  Nellie looked across to where Leon was again talking to Daniel Collins, the children swarming around him like a band of boisterous monkeys. Daisy’s hair was dark and straight and fine, her blue eyes and magnolia-pale skin indicating she had more than a little Irishness in her blood. Luke was as dark-skinned as his father and, though his mop of curls wasn’t yet as tight and wiry as Leon’s, it would be when he was older. As for Matthew . . . Toby Harvey had been fair-haired and, as Kate’s hair was the colour of ripe wheat, Matthew’s colouring was as Nordic as a little Viking’s.

  Nellie chuckled. Whatever else the about-to-be-formed Emmerson family might be, it was certainly never going to be ordinary! ‘An’ who’s going to be matron-of-honour?’ she asked as the conga line noisily encircled her chair. ‘Yer can’t have both Carrie an’ Christina.’

  ‘Why not?’

  Nellie clicked her tongue. ‘Because though you can ’ave as many bridesmaids as yer want, you’re only supposed to ’ave one married friend as a matron-of-honour. So who’s it going to be? Carrie or Christina?’

  ‘Then it will have to be Carrie. After all, we’ve been best friends ever since we were toddlers. I’ve only known Christina since she came here as a refugee.’

  As the conga line danced its way down to the bottom end of the Square, she saw that Carrie had run Danny and Rose to earth, for they were walking hand in hand, with Rose skipping along in front of them, to where Leon and Danny’s father were still deep in conversation.

  ‘It’s ’ard to think of ’er as a refugee, ain’t it?’ Nellie said ruminatively. ‘I mean, it’s not as if she speaks like a foreigner, is it? There’s Ukrainian
s and Poles down in Woolwich can’t speak a word of the King’s English, poor bleeders. Gawd knows ’ow they manage, I don’t. Christina speaks it like a nob.’

  ‘Her gran was English,’ Kate said, remembering that her intention had been to sympathize with Nellie about her nephew’s continuing imprisonment by the Japanese, and that she hadn’t yet done so. ‘She was born and brought up in Bermondsey and went to school with Carrie’s gran. That’s why, when Christina came to England, she moved in with Carrie’s family.’

  ‘Well, she’s English enough now she’s married Charlie Robson’s son,’ Nellie said, who didn’t much understand why Christina’s Bermondsey-born grandmother should have wanted to go off and marry a Hun, even if it had been before the First World War when she’d done so. ‘Though it might be some time before Jack’s demobbed. Fighting in Greece last time anyone ’eard, wasn’t ’e? Commandos don’t ’alf get about. ’E’ll find Civvie Street pretty boring after rampaging all over Greece with knives stuck down his boots, and grenades ’angin’ from his belt.’

  ‘I came to sympathize with you about your nephew,’ Kate said, eager to accomplish her mission so that she could join Leon. ‘It can’t be much fun, everyone celebrating the end of the war in Europe, when he’s still being held by the Japanese.’

  ‘No, it ain’t,’ Nellie said frankly as Hector slumped at her swollen feet, patiently waiting for Kate to make a move. ‘But the Yanks’ll soon ’ave the Japs on the run and old ’Irohito’ll get his just desserts just like old ’Itler did. An’ when we ’ave a Victory over Japan party, I’ll be conga-ing with the best of ’em, bad feet or no bad feet. I can’t understand why Christina ain’t ’ere, you’d think she’d be dancin’ ’er ’eart out, wouldn’t yer?’

  Christina Robson had never felt less like dancing in her life. She stood on the far, north-west corner of the Heath, looking out over a superb view of Greenwich and the River Thames and, a little more distantly, the City and the glittering dome of St Paul’s Cathedral. London. It was the city that had given her refuge, and for that reason alone she would be grateful to it for as long as she lived. But she wasn’t merely grateful to it, she loved it. She loved its tree-shaded squares, its unexpected patches of green, its noise and its bustle and its friendliness. It had become her home, and she wanted no other. Why, then, did she continue to feel so dispossessed? Why did she feel as if she were never, ever, going to become a Londoner herself ? She was, after all, married to a south-Londoner. All her friends were south-Londoners. All her neighbours. Surely, by now, she should feel she was a south-Londoner by adoption?

  Despite the heat of the sun, she hugged her arms. She certainly hadn’t done so when Magnolia Square’s street party had been at its height. She had felt like the biblical Ruth amid the alien corn. Everyone else, with the exception of Nellie Miller, had been celebrating reunions or pending reunions. Though a general demob was still weeks, and possibly months, away, brothers and fathers, boy-friends and husbands, would soon be returning home en masse. Danny Collins, who had been a prisoner of the Italians, and Leon Emmerson, who had been freed by the Russians from a German prison camp, were both already home.

  Had it been the realization of all those reunions that had brought the past hurtling back to engulf her so cruelly? Or had it been the talk of weddings? The Vicar’s wedding to his rather surprisingly young, but extremely pleasant, lady-friend. Leon and Kate’s imminent wedding. Both weddings would take place in St Mark’s, as had her own wedding to Jack – and St Mark’s was an Anglican church, and she was Jewish.

  While her friends and neighbours had gossiped around her, she had stood with her back to one of the magnolia trees the Square had been named after, staring up at St Mark’s glittering spire, wondering what her father would have said, what her mother and grandmother would say – and it had been then, as, for the first time in ten years, she thought of her mother and grandmother in the present tense, that mental and emotional pain had sliced cripplingly through her. How could she possibly have thought of them as if they were still alive? How, after all that had happened in her homeland over the last decade, could she subconsciously have thought of them in the present tense, betraying vain hope that they had survived, that a reunion was still a possibility?

  Leon Emmerson might have walked jauntily into the Square after an absence of information indicating he hadn’t drowned over three years ago, but German-born Jews, Jacoba Berger and Eva Frank, dragged from their Heidelberg home and incarcerated in a concentration camp even before the war had begun, weren’t likely to be so lucky.

  Distantly, on the light summer breeze, came the sound of piano playing and discordant but exuberant singing. Magnolia Square’s street party was still going at full throttle. In a nearby shrub, two sparrows wrangled noisily. A butterfly alighted briefly on one of the shaking leaves and then flew off, the sun glinting on the scarlet markings of its wings. Christina’s fingers dug deeper into the flesh of her arms. Ever since she had escaped from Germany, she had schooled herself to accept that her mother and grandmother were dead. Why now, after all this time, had doubt begun to return? Certainly the news reports of the last few weeks had given no cause for hope. The first Allied troops into the camps had found horrors beyond imagining, and the estimate of the number of Jews who had died in them now ran into the millions. To entertain any hope that two women who had been imprisoned as long ago as 1936 could have survived was not only vain, it was ridiculous.

  Or was it?

  The sparrows flew off, still wrangling. A bee began to circle the bush, looking for flowers and pollen. Slowly, as she stood there, the hope she had suppressed for so many years began to take fierce hold. All over Europe displaced people would be struggling to make their way back to their homes. All over Europe, reunions similar to Leon and Kate’s would be taking place. What if her mother and grandmother hadn’t died in the concentration camp they had been taken to? What if, by some miracle, they, like Leon, had survived?

  ‘Hello there!’ a middle-aged woman she knew only by sight called out to her cheerily, a mongrel skittering at her heels. ‘I’ve just been told your vicar’s thinking of marrying again. Lovely woman Bob Giles’s first wife was. I remember the day she was killed. The first air raid of the war, it was. Such a shame, and her only a young woman too. Still, it’s nice he’s found happiness again.’

  With great effort Christina dragged her thoughts away from a ravaged Europe and the thousands upon thousands of displaced persons trailing the rutted road, their pathetically few belongings piled high in old prams and handcarts. ‘Yes,’ she agreed, smiling politely. ‘It is.’

  The woman would have liked to stay for a longer chat, but there was something about Christina Robson that was definitely not encouraging. She was polite enough, of course, but she wasn’t a friendly, jolly south-London girl, like her friends Kate Voigt and Carrie Collins. She was too reserved. Too deep. Which all came of her being a foreigner of course, and Jewish into the bargain.

  ‘Toodle-oo,’ she said amiably, making allowances for what the poor girl couldn’t help, adding as an afterthought, ‘your hubby will be demobbed soon I expect, or he will be if he doesn’t decide to make a career of commandoing. I’ve seen newsreels of Commando attacks. The Commandos were all guyed up in balaclava helmets with muck on the bits that show so they’d merge into the background, and they were bristling with knives and pistols. Should suit your Jack a treat. He always was on the wild side.’

  Christina made no comment. She didn’t want to think about Jack yet for a bit. Thinking about Jack was too unsettling, too intimidating. She would think about her mother and grandmother instead. She would think of ways she could try to discover what had happened to them, if they were alive or dead and, if they were dead, where they had died, and how. And if they were alive? Her throat was so tight she could hardly breathe. If they were alive she would find them. She would find them if it was the very last thing she ever did.

  Kate sidestepped a running toddler and joined Leon as he continue
d to chat with Carrie and Danny and Danny’s dad, Daniel.

  ‘. . . that kid should’ve bin a requisitions officer,’ Danny was saying, quite obviously referring to Billy and his private ammunition dump. ‘’E’s got a natural-born talent for scroungin’.’

  Kate slid her arm around Leon’s waist. The street party seemed to be going on for ever. When on earth would it come to an end? When would they be able to escape and have some privacy?

  His hand cupped her far shoulder as he hugged her close, his thoughts exactly the same as hers. As she leant her head against his shoulder, he looked down at her in utter love, his throat tightening in emotion. Christ, but she was beautiful! No woman he had ever seen had hair of such a rich, glorious gold colour. Or hair so long and lustrous. And she had waited for him. For over three years she hadn’t known whether he was dead or alive, but she had given birth to his son and had waited faithfully in fierce hope.

  ‘I love you,’ he whispered in her ear as their son continued to ride high on his shoulders, and Daisy and Matthew engaged in a giggling game of tag with Rose. ‘When the devil can we escape and be alone together?’

  Before she could make a response, Daniel Collins said genially to her, ‘Have you heard that you and the Vicar aren’t the only ones having weddings this month? Charlie Robson has just announced he’s going to marry your next-door neighbour. Funny old couple they’ll make, her a retired headmistress and a spinster and him a widower with a criminal past, barely able to read and write.’

  ‘They’ve been friends for a long time,’ Carrie said, wondering what Christina would think of her father-in-law’s rather surprising wedding plans.

  Danny ran a hand through his spiky, mahogany-red hair in baffled bemusement. ‘Wasn’t ’Arriet Godfrey Jack’s old ’eadmistress? And didn’t she once say Jack was more suited to a Borstal than ’er junior school? I wonder what ’e’s goin’ to think when ’e comes ’ome and finds she’s about to become ’is stepmother!’