Sure and Certain Death

by Barbara Nadel

‘Ripper,’ the red-headed man said. ‘Killed another woman last night.’

  I leaned towards him and said, ‘Where? How do you know?’

  ‘Tilly talked about it,’ Fred Dickens said. ‘Talking nonsense!’ Then he turned to Ronnie Arnold, slapped him on the arm and said, ‘She’s a drunk! What you listen to her for? You should keep away from Tilly, like I told you!’

  ‘Fuck off!’

  They started to fight.

  I didn’t know who Tilly was or how she knew what these men claimed that she did. But I wasn’t going to find anything more out from either of them and so I left. I didn’t have long to wait to discover what the truth of the matter was, however. As soon as I got back into the shop, Doris pulled me to one side and said, ‘Mr H, a woman’s been killed up Plashet. They say she’s had her liver cut out and the skin peeled completely off her back! Can you imagine?’

  Having seen the body of poor Nellie Martin, unfortunately I could.

  By early afternoon, gossip had it that the Plashet victim was a fifty-one-year-old woman called Marie Abrahams. Because Plashet is to the north of Plaistow, and comes under East Ham actually, it’s not a place me and mine know too well. However, because the surname was, I at least imagined, Jewish, it wasn’t long before Doris was making contact with her friends and family living out that way. And so by the early evening we knew that poor Marie had in fact been a Jewish lady, that she’d grown up in Stepney and that she and her father hadn’t gone to live in Plashet until just before the start of the Great War.

  ‘My cousin Betty went to school with her,’ Doris said as she picked up her handbag and her gas mask and made ready to go home to Spitalfields.

  ‘Jewish Free School?’ I asked.

  ‘Where else?’ Doris smiled and then her face fell very quickly once again. It was only a few months since her husband Alfie had died in a raid, and so she still had sudden, quite disconcerting, patches of melancholy from time to time.

  ‘Doris . . .’

  ‘The coppers are all over the house up Plashet,’ Doris said as she pulled the shop door open and began to step outside. ‘Took this Marie’s old father away, they say.’

  ‘He was in the house when his daughter was murdered?’ I asked.

  ‘Poor old bloke’s simple, apparently,’ Doris said. ‘Off his nut, you know.’

  And then she left. I looked down at the copy of the Evening News Arthur had brought in for me earlier and saw, with no surprise, that there was no mention of any murder anywhere. Same as Nellie Martin, Violet Dickens and even poor old Dolly O’Dowd. Censorship is used to cover up stories that might depress the population at large, bring down the mood of the war effort. It means that the East End is often alone in its mourning – its children bombed to bits in their own schools, whole dockside manors emptied of all human life. I don’t care if the King and Queen come and visit us down here every day, we’re on our own in the East End, I don’t mind what anyone says.

  As I shut up the shop I thought about poor Marie Abrahams’s father. ‘Simple’ was how Doris had described him, but that covered a multitude of sins. Was the old man retarded or senile or was he just really, really shocked? If he had been in the house when his daughter was hacked up and skinned, was it surprising the old man was not himself? I wondered whether the police had taken Mr Abrahams away for his own safety and sanity, which had to be part of the reason certainly. But were they questioning him too? And if they were, what, or who, more to the point, had he seen? One thing that was starting to worry at my brain was the seeming fact that all the women killed so far had gone quietly to their horrible deaths. Nobody round and about had heard anything even resembling a scream on New City Road around the time it was thought Nellie Martin had died. Violet Dickens, living in what was now the middle of nowhere with two alcoholics, didn’t count, but no one had heard Dolly O’Dowd die or even seen anyone go into her house. Now, apparently, Marie Abrahams had been slaughtered while her father was in the house with her. The murderer was getting in and doing his business very easily and very anonymously. Even if all the victims knew the killer, why was he not being spotted by anyone else?

  ‘Hello, Frank.’

  The door I’d just shut opened and my cousin Stella walked inside. Stella, who is the daughter of my dad’s brother Percy, was bombed out last October. Uncle Percy died in that raid and Stella, a funny old spinster at the best of times, went a bit shell-shocked for a while afterwards, which is why she now lives with us. For the past couple of weeks, however, she’d been staying with my dad’s sister Hester down in Margate. Thin and plain, Stella, who is just a bit older than Nan, is generally a very pale creature. But as soon as she came across the threshold I noticed that unusually she had a bit of colour in her cheeks.

  ‘Sea air must have done you good, Stella,’ I said as she hunched her way over towards me.

  ‘Yes,’ she said flatly, like she does. ‘Couldn’t get down the beach though because of all the wire and the mines and that.’

  ‘Well, it’s the coast, isn’t it?’ I said. Then, as it occurred to me how odd her presence in the shop was, I said, ‘Was the back gate closed?’

  The girls and the Duchess and to a large extent Walter and Arthur use the gate in the back lane into the yard to get to the rooms behind the shop and up to the flat. It was unusual for Stella to come in from the street.

  For a moment Stella looked away, and then she said, ‘Well, I didn’t like to . . .’

  Walter sometimes has a few bottles of beer in the yard before he goes home of a night. Sometimes he has more than a few, and when he does that, he gets loud and not a bit intimidating – particularly to nervous middle-aged spinster ladies.

  ‘Was Walter drunk, Stella?’ I was prepared to go and read him the riot act. I can’t do without him but at the same time I won’t take any nonsense.

  ‘No, no, Frank, it’s not that,’ Stella said. Then she sighed a little before putting one of her hands on my arm. ‘Nancy and Aggie were in the yard when I came along,’ she said. ‘Frank, Nancy was crying. Crying so her heart would break. They never saw me and so I left. Aggie was trying to comfort her.’

  It had to be about Dolly O’Dowd, in which case Aggie was probably the best person to comfort Nan. But there was a niggling doubt in my mind about this even then. I was very tense that evening until the girls came in from the yard, and with good reason.

  I’d just made the Duchess a cuppa and taken it to her in the parlour when Aggie, pushing a still tearful Nan in front of her, came into the kitchen.

  ‘Cuppa?’ I said as I held the teapot up for my two sisters to see.

  ‘No thank you, Frank,’ Aggie said. She pushed Nan rather roughly, I thought, into one of the chairs at the kitchen table and said, ‘We have to talk to you.’

  I poured myself a cup and then lit up a fag. ‘What about?’ I said. ‘Dolly’s funeral’s all in hand and . . .’

  ‘It ain’t about Dolly O’Dowd’s funeral,’ Aggie said as she too lit up a fag and then sat down next to Nan. Nan, I noticed, didn’t look at Aggie as she did any of this. But then Nan can sometimes be awkward with our younger sister. Pretty, blonde and always up for a good time, Aggie likes to wear what Nan describes as ‘racy’ clothes – short skirts and dresses and tight little jackets that show off her figure. Nan finds this unacceptable in a woman who has children and is still officially married even though her old man is off with another woman.

  Aggie it was, therefore, who turned to Nan. ‘You gonna tell him or am I?’ she said harshly.

  ‘Tell who?’ I said. ‘Me? And what?’

  Nancy began to softly sob. Aggie stared at her with tight lips, and then she looked up at me and said, ‘She knows all the women what’ve been murdered.’

  ‘What . . .’

  ‘Even this Jewish girl they found today,’ Aggie said. She looked across at Nan and said, ‘Knew her too, didn’t you?’

  Nan just hung her head. I sat down opposite her and began to tell her I’d suspected as much because of he
r reluctance to tell me about the fact that she’d been to school with Violet Dickens. Now of course I knew that Violet had been to New City Road . . .

  ‘Oh, that ain’t all of it,’ Aggie said with a lot of aggression in her voice. She and Nan don’t see eye to eye a lot of the time, but this was downright nasty as far as I could see.

  ‘Aggie,’ I said, ‘let her speak . . .’

  Nancy snapped her head up and looked me straight in the face with her tear-soaked eyes. ‘Frank,’ she said, ‘you have to remember we was all just girls at the time. You was already at the front and . . .’

  ‘Hang on a mo,’ I said. I didn’t understand what she was talking about and I said so. ‘You talking about the Great War, are you, Nan?’

  ‘Yes.’ She put her head down again now. Nan had been twenty-four when the Great War began. She, like me at the time, had been an enthusiastic supporter of it. Dad, who’d lived a bit and seen what had happened with the Boers in Africa, hadn’t been so keen. Nan and myself were proved the fools. Her maybe, as I was shortly to find out, more so even than me.

  ‘So . . .’

  I could see that she was really struggling. Words were there but they just wouldn’t or couldn’t come out of her mouth. Eventually, unable to take it any longer, Aggie said, ‘She was a White Feather girl, Frank. Her and the others, they all did it together.’

  I felt nothing at first. It can be the way of things when a shock is so great it’s almost unbearable. All but one of the mates I joined up with in 1914 died in the trenches and I don’t think I really broke down over any of them. It was all too unimaginable for that. Like this.

  ‘Frank, I . . . We was young and silly and . . .’

  ‘You sent men to their deaths!’ Aggie said to her. ‘You and all them other silly bitches! What did you think you was doing?’

  Nan began to cry again, but Aggie just went on.

  ‘Giving every bloke out of uniform a white feather to tell him you think he’s a coward?’ She put one fag out and then immediately lit up another. ‘Nancy, men not fit enough to walk across London Bridge went off and enlisted because of stupid women like you! They died!’

  ‘Aggie . . .’

  ‘Frank, I have only just found out,’ Aggie said to me breathlessly. ‘She never told no one, and with good reason! Dad would’ve been furious. I’m furious. What you must think of her . . .’

  The White Feather movement, as it came to be known later on, began in September 1914. A retired admiral from Folkestone organised thirty women to present white feathers to any man of serving age they saw out of uniform. All fired up by stories of rape and murder as the Germans invaded Belgium, these women saw themselves as doing essential work shaming cowards in defence of innocent civilians – themselves, they imagined, included.

  The white feather itself, as a symbol of cowardice, comes from cock-fighting. I’ve never been to such a thing myself, but it’s said that some cockerels have white feathers in their tails which they show when they ‘turn tail’ as it were, when giving up a fight. ‘Showing the white feather’ therefore is showing your fear and cowardice in the face of the enemy.

  Once I’d been approached by a White Feather girl, when I was home on leave. I was out of uniform at the time because I wanted and in fact needed to forget about the bloody trenches for the sake of my sanity. It was early 1916, I’d been fighting for just over a year, and most of my mates were already dead. When the woman gave me the feather I was first stunned, then I felt such violence in me that I had to just run away from her as fast as I could. I’d wanted to rip her head off. It hadn’t occurred to me that maybe I might try to explain my situation to her or perhaps even shock her by telling her tales of men drowning in mud and giant rats feasting on corpses. I’d just wanted to end her.

  I looked over at my older sister and saw immediately the fear in her eyes.

  Aggie put a hand on my shoulder and said, ‘Frank . . .’

  ‘You have to tell the coppers about this,’ I said to Nancy.

  ‘What, about me being involved?’

  ‘You’ve got to tell them who was in your . . . your group,’ I said. ‘If that is why these women are being killed . . .’ I stopped to swallow. My sisters both looked at me, knowing that I wanted to say so much more about how that made me feel. ‘Women are in danger.’

  ‘Including her!’ Aggie said as she looked across at Nan, and then she added, ‘How could you be so stupid? All the men who could fight were doing so! Your own brother was out there, for Christ’s sake!’

  Nan has never been one to back down when Aggie has a go at her. She changed from weeping misery to outright fury. Her face, reddened already by crying, became almost purple with rage. ‘What do you know, Agnes!’ she screamed. ‘You was just a kid at the time! Our men were fighting for their lives against the Hun and yet there were blokes all over this country who were too weak and too cowardly to do their duty!’

  ‘Oh, and it was up to you and a load of other mad bitches from West Ham to go out and put that right, was it?’ Aggie said. ‘Christ, you make me sick, Nancy! Sick!’

  ‘What is going on?’

  We looked up and saw the Duchess standing in the kitchen doorway. She must have been disturbed by all the shouting.

  ‘Nancy?’

  As soon as she saw the Duchess, Nan began to cry once again. My mother looked over to me for answers, but I couldn’t give her any. I didn’t know what I felt at that moment – about almost anything. I ran out of the kitchen, down into the yard and headed west towards Canning Town.

  Chapter Six

  I was in Hannah’s bed when the sirens went off. Dot Harris, her landlady, has an Anderson in the back yard of the house she shares with Hannah and the other ‘old girls on the game’, as Hannah calls them. Not that Dot ever bothers to use it, or in fact any of the other women either. Prostitutes, even when not actually working at the time, are a fatalistic bunch. But that said, I asked Hannah if she wanted to go down the shelter anyway.

  She shook her head. ‘No. But H, if you want to go out running . . .’

  I’m generally pounding the streets during raids, but this time I was so exhausted, mainly by the emotions I was feeling, that I said I’d really rather stay put.

  ‘I’ve one of them tins of vegetable soup we can share if you like,’ Hannah said as she pulled a small saucepan out of the inside of her range and then put it up on the hob. She only has one damp little room in Dot’s house, but it does have a range and so Hannah can always have heat and hot – or rather more usually lukewarm – food and drink almost whenever she wants it.

  ‘That’d be nice,’ I said, as I reached one naked arm over to the table at the side of the bed and picked up my fags and matches.

  ‘Capstan?’

  ‘No, not for the moment,’ Hannah said as she rifled in the small cupboard over her sink and took out a tin of Heinz soup. God alone knew where she’d got that from, but I knew better than to ask. Like it or not, my lady friend is a prostitute and so her life is made possible often by means I prefer not to think about. After a bit of a struggle with the opener, Hannah got the tin undone and then poured its contents into the pan on the range. She added a bit of water from the kettle to make the soup go a little further.

  ‘I know you’re feeling angry at the moment,’ she said as she stood by the range and stirred the soup with a wooden spoon. ‘But I know you and so I know how much you love your family.’

  I’d told her about Nan just before she’d pulled me into her bed and made it all, temporarily, better. Now, in the calm that always follows our lovemaking, she was getting me to talk about it. She’s a very wise lady, my Hannah. It’s one of the many reasons why I love her.

  ‘Your Nancy was a silly girl,’ Hannah said. Outside, the drone of Luftwaffe bombers could now just be heard. ‘But a lot of girls were silly then. There was what I suppose you could call love of soldiers among them.’

  ‘Not all girls handed out white feathers,’ I said as I lit up my fag and then
lay back down in her bed once again.

  ‘No, I know that,’ Hannah said. ‘And H, I can see why you’re angry, believe me. But however you feel about it, you’re going to have to talk to Nancy.’

  ‘I don’t want to!’

  ‘No, I know you don’t, but you’re going to have to!’ Hannah looked over at me with a very straight, no-nonsense expression on her face. ‘If, as you think, this killer is going after the White Feather girls in Nancy’s old group, then she could be in danger. And whatever you might feel about her now . . .’

  ‘I could kill her myself!’

  ‘Whatever you say now,’ said Hannah, shouting above the roar of the Heinkels and Messerschmitts up above, ‘you do love her and . . .’

  A massive explosion from somewhere very, very near cut short Hannah’s words as the blast threw both her and the saucepan in her hand across the room. Stark naked as I was, I jumped out of that bed and ran over to her. The gas was out by this time but I could just make her out as she groaned at the foot of the door leading on to the landing.

  ‘Hannah!’

  For a few seconds she made no further noise. I began to panic.

  ‘Hannah!’

  ‘Christ Almighty, H!’ I heard her say. ‘Bloody . . .’

  Another explosion that was far too close rocked the house again and I heard the sound of something splintering somewhere up above. Either the plaster on the ceiling or the boards up above were under strain from the blast.

  Dot Harris from downstairs called up, ‘Hannah love, you and Mr Hancock all right, are you?’

  I heard Hannah take a deep breath and then she yelled, ‘Yes, Dot, all all right here!’

  ‘Fucking Nazis!’ Dot said, and then I heard what was obviously the sound of her shuffling back into her parlour once again.

  ‘Hannah . . .’

  ‘Well, all I can say, H, is that it’s a good job that old range don’t work properly,’ Hannah said breathlessly. ‘Being covered in cold soup, I can stand. Hot soup . . .’

  ‘Hannah,’ I said as I began to pull her up to her feet, ‘are you hurt?’