Keeping My Sister's Secrets

by Beezy Marsh

  When the shop girl returned, she said, ‘Oh, I forgot to bring my coupons! Silly me!’ and got up and left her to clear up the mess.

  She was just about to get into the lift when she felt a hand on her shoulder and her heart sank.

  ‘Show me what you have in that bag, please, miss.’

  Three months; three miserable bloody months in Holloway and all for nicking one measly pair of shoes. The beak saw she had previous and said he needed to make an example of people like her, who were making a living on the black market. Well, that wasn’t true. She wasn’t making a living on it, she had lost all her stuff to a German bomb and was just trying to find something decent to put on her feet.

  HMP Holloway would have to provide that for the time being. Eva had to get used to the Victorian jail, with its echoing wings radiating from the centre and the constant clanging of iron doors. The floor of that centre was kept so highly polished you could see your face in it and you weren’t allowed to cross it directly. Only the governor could do that. The inmates had to walk around it or be put on report. The cocoa was the same, though, which she liked. Her family wrote letters, but the ones she liked most came from Jimmy. He just told her what was going on around Walworth and tried to make her laugh a lot. She tried not to think about it but the more he wrote, the more she missed him. Her mum came to visit, which she was grateful for, although she didn’t like her mother seeing her dressed in the drab prison dress, or the way the screws kept such a close watch over them. They weren’t allowed to hug or touch and she told Mum not to bother coming again because she missed her even more afterwards.

  The prison was buzzing with news that the Fascist leader Oswald Mosley and his wife were inside, living in a little house in the grounds. One of the girls she got to know said she had seen him sunbathing with his shirt off. Eva couldn’t get excited about that. She remembered him and his idiot followers stomping around in Bermondsey and getting a proper clipping. If he’d had his way, they’d all be talking German now.

  By the end of her sentence, she’d met Diana Mosley a couple of times because the governor decided she was a suitable candidate to go over and help clean the cottage for the Mosleys. Diana was polite enough. Eva just got on with her work and was grateful not to have to talk about politics because she felt sure she would have told Lady Mosley she didn’t care for her Fascist views.

  It was a beautiful summer day when she was released, a proper swelterer. She’d ticked the days off in her head, one by one, and when the warder opened her cell door and called her name that morning, she knew she was going home.

  With other inmates wishing her luck, she made her way across the landing and down to the little office, where all her personal effects were held.

  A grim-faced screw handed her back her belongings in a cardboard box and she went through them all and signed for them, before taking off her hated prison uniform and changing into her own clothes. She’d got used to wearing flat, regulation pumps and it felt strange putting her high heels on again. Stepping out of the prison gates, she glanced back over her shoulder and muttered, ‘Goodbye, good riddance, I won’t be back soon.’

  She went home to her mum in the Borough and then straight round to East Street Market. Jimmy was standing there, looking as handsome as ever, selling strawberries from his fruit and veg stall.

  ‘Well, hello Eva, it’s good to see you again,’ he said, giving her a smile which could light up the blackout.

  She sauntered over to him, as casually as she could. Her heart was beating faster and she could feel herself colouring up. It was silly, really; she was only chatting to Jimmy, for God’s sake. Eva helped him out on the stall a bit, and when it was time to call it a day, he pushed his barrow around the back alley and parked it up for the night and then got his bicycle.

  ‘Want a lift up to the snooker hall?’

  She nodded and he motioned for her to sit side-saddle on the crossbar, just as she did with Frankie when they were kids – only back then, Frankie had probably nicked the bike they were riding on.

  As they set off down Walworth Road, Jimmy began to whistle the tune to ‘Daisy, Daisy’ and then he started to sing, ‘Eva, Eva, give me your answer do . . .’

  She turned round and grinned at him. ‘Oh, leave it out, Jimmy!’

  But he continued: ‘I’m half crazy, all for the love of you . . .’ She felt herself blushing again.

  When they reached the snooker hall Gladys and some of the others were already outside, having a smoke.

  Eva hopped off the bike and, as Jimmy was parking it up against the wall, he looked into her eyes and said, ‘Well, will you, Eva? Will you give me your answer? I want you to be my girl.’

  She glanced down at the floor and then back up at him.

  ‘OK,’ she said. ‘But don’t make a big thing of it and go telling everybody, all right?’

  He smiled quietly to himself and nodded. ‘That’s fine by me, Eva. You can kid yourself, but we both know it’s serious.’

  When everyone had tired of cards, snooker and beer, Jimmy laid his coat down under the snooker table for them to lie on.

  In the darkness, he turned and kissed her. She kissed him back.

  26

  Peggy, September 1943

  ‘You don’t have to volunteer, you know. You’re married.’ Nanny Day’s needles clicked furiously as she knitted a jumper and bootees for Eva’s new little one, Beverley. The whole family had fallen head over heels for Eva’s Jimmy, who had proved himself to be a hard worker and a real provider, which Nanny Day was delighted about. She practically clucked with pride every time Eva brought the baby round and had reminded Eva, on more than one occasion that she’d always said the right man would persuade her to settle down.

  Nanny Day chuntered away into her knitting, ‘Eva and Kathleen are perfectly happy at home with their babies but that’s not enough for you, for some reason!’

  Peggy sighed. ‘I already have experience working for the Post Office and I need to do something.’

  She didn’t want to say that being at home every day and worrying about what danger George was putting himself in was making her feel depressed. Nanny’s generation just got on with it when the men went to war. They saw the home as the right place for a woman to be. Peggy had loved going out to work and now there was the chance for her to retrain as an operator in the Central Telephone Office up in town, she wanted to take it.

  ‘But it’s dangerous, going out to work over the water,’ said Nanny, pursing her lips. ‘The Germans have already dropped a bloody great bomb on the telephone exchange.’

  ‘Keeping the phone lines running is vital war work,’ said Peggy. ‘You know that. I’m not afraid to do it. I just think about how brave Jim is fighting in North Africa and God knows where else, and the same goes for George. I should be able to do my bit. And you know Gloria loves being with you. Some of what I do will be nights, anyway . . .’

  ‘Oh, that is just the living end!’ said Nanny Day, throwing her knitting aside and going over to fill the kettle. ‘You are going to be stuck in the middle of all the air raids! You’ll need more than a tin hat and a gas mask, my girl!’

  She clattered about in the sink, muttering to herself as she did so, ‘It’s good enough for them but not good enough for you, for some reason. I just don’t understand it.’

  Peggy sighed. They both knew her mind was made up. The war had been going for four years now and it showed no sign of stopping. The air raids were just part of everyday life and people had got used to sleeping in the Tube stations night after night. Spirits were high, with regular sing-songs down there and everyone sharing what they had to make life that bit more comfortable, but it wasn’t enough for her to hide away from the enemy like some rat in a sewer. She wanted to make a difference.

  The victory against Rommel at El Alamein had been a real morale boost and her brother Jim had fought bravely and was mentioned in dispatches. George had volunteered for a new battalion of paratroopers when he was out in Egypt
. The training appeared to involve the men hurling themselves out of an aircraft in the desert and anyone who didn’t suffer broken limbs got their red beret and their wings. George landed safely, thank God, and he had seen action in Italy already. Peggy understood why he wanted to do it; they had known for over a year that his brother Harry was a prisoner of war in German hands after Dunkirk and George wanted to bring him safely home to their mother.

  George was a Bren gunner in the 10th Parachute Battalion and was so fastidious about cleaning his gun that his comrades in the unit had nicknamed him ‘Rags’, which he didn’t mind. It was just in his nature: if he was going to do something, he would do it well. The regiment was biding its time in Sussex for the time being but she knew that couldn’t last and he would have to see action again soon. She hadn’t told him about volunteering for the Post Office but once she had got the job for sure, she would. He wasn’t the sort of man who would try to stop her, Peggy knew that much. That was one of the reasons she loved him.

  Peggy carried George’s most recent letter with her as she crossed the bridge and walked up into King Edward’s Buildings in the City towards the exchange. She remembered his wistful words off by heart: ‘Kiss Gloria every night for me and remember that everything I am doing is for you and her, Peggy.’

  She was used to the systems of the General Post Office, of supervisors and refresher courses, of steady learning on the job. Only this time, the emergencies would be real and the margin for error very slim. One crossed wire and someone could die, that much was made clear. A large poster on the wall was of a telephone dressed as a soldier in a tin hat at a jaunty angle, declaring: ‘I’m on war work! If you must use me, be brief!’

  The exchange itself was a mind-boggling array of wires and sockets, with a row of girls sitting in front, connecting parties to each other. A supervisor kept close watch and, if it was an emergency, listened in. Once or twice, Peggy overheard the supervisor say, ‘Shall I scramble?’ and she realized that she wasn’t talking about eggs.

  During her first day’s training, she found herself sitting next to Edna, her old boss from Acton, who had also volunteered. There was little time for chit-chat but Peggy noticed that Edna blanched when she saw her. At tea break, Edna sidled up to her and took her to one side, over in the little kitchenette.

  ‘Peggy, I just need to say something to you,’ she said. ‘You know, I have always found you a very sensible young woman, much more so than your silly friend, Susan, who went and got herself pregnant—’

  Peggy cut in. ‘Susan is dead. She died in an air raid a year ago, over in the East End.’ Edna’s lips pursed into an ‘O’. ‘So don’t you dare speak ill of her, Edna. She wasn’t silly, she was braver than you will ever know.’

  Peggy had tried to make sense of her friend’s sudden death but she couldn’t, so she’d just buried it and got on with her life. Now it was as if the floodgates had opened and there was no stopping her. ‘Susan went through hell. They locked her up in the mad house after they took her baby away but she pulled herself together and she’d got herself a nice little job and was doing just fine until the Germans landed a bomb on her aunt’s house.’

  ‘I am so sorry,’ said Edna, putting her hand on Peggy’s arm.

  Peggy snatched her arm away. ‘No, no, you are not sorry in the least. I know you were in favour of the Fascists, of Mosley and his lot, and that is what you are worried about, isn’t it?’

  Edna lowered her voice to a whisper, ‘Peggy, I don’t understand. I thought we were singing from the same hymn sheet. I was simply going to warn you that we need to be careful now, more than ever, about expressing any views which may be interpreted in the wrong way in the current climate.’

  ‘You disgust me!’ Peggy spat, her mouth twisting into a sneer of disdain. ‘I was never in favour of Mosley. I should have told you back then but I was too scared because you were the boss. Well, the war has made us all equal now, hasn’t it? I was going to the Mosley meeting to protest. If I had been as gutsy as Susan I would have done it, I’m sure, but it took me a while to get the courage up, Edna. I did it in the end; I joined the other Communists and we kicked Mosley and his followers right out of Bermondsey when they came on one of their stupid marches.’

  Edna looked as if she was about to faint.

  Peggy went on, ‘I won’t cover for you, you filthy Fascist. So I would get yourself out of here, before I reveal your true colours to the whole of the telephone exchange, if I were you.’

  The last she saw of Edna, she was grabbing her hat and coat, and heading for the door.

  Over the months which followed, Peggy worked her way up to being one of the most trusted operators at the exchange, always showing up for her shifts and volunteering to work overtime when other girls couldn’t make it. Her supervisors also noted her selflessness. Whenever the air-raid siren sounded, the younger girls were ushered down into the shelter in the cellar, but Peggy donned her tin hat and stayed on to run the telephone exchange with the men. As she was married, people treated her differently from the single girls and allowed her to make her own choice about taking shelter or working. Peggy relished the chance to do something useful. She wasn’t scared, not a bit. Rather than politely asking, ‘Which number, please?’ callers were greeted with, ‘Is this call of national importance?’

  On more than one occasion during an air raid, Peggy caught some posh woman trying to be put through to her grocer to complain about her weekly order and disconnected the call. The men she worked with still laughed about cutting off some lord or other who was trying to ring his tailor as the bombs dropped all around them.

  George had gone away on an important mission in Europe. He couldn’t say more, but Peggy now scoured the newspapers daily for any information. On 18 September she bought all the papers she could carry because of reports about a great ‘sky army’ which had landed in Holland. She knew George was among them, and imagined him floating silently downwards with his parachute, landing behind enemy lines. The days after that seemed to blur into one. She had no memory of getting up and going to work, but she knew she must have done. She lived for the drip-drip of news about the airborne invasion.

  The first reports were encouraging, about how a massed army of men in gliders and parachutes had taken the Germans completely by surprise, but as the days turned into a week, the reports got shorter and then bad news started to leak out. She cut out all the stories and pored over them after she’d put Gloria to bed. Nanny begged her to leave it alone, to stop reading, but she couldn’t.

  ‘You’re torturing yourself, Peg, please stop,’ she said, as Peggy read the story from the front page of The Times over and over. The headlines said it all: TANK BATTLE 5 MILES FROM ARNHEM, AIRBORNE FORCES FACE GRIM FIGHT. There were reports of reinforcements and supplies being flown in, but the paratroopers were effectively cut off. The thought of George being killed was too much. Peggy thought that she would know instinctively if he was. It was like Dunkirk; she had sensed then that he was in terrible danger but had never given up hope or feared him dead. People in the neighbourhood had strange superstitions about things like that. Mrs Avens back in Howley Terrace still talked about how a black cat sat on her doorstep and refused to budge on the day her son Johnny was killed on the beach at Dunkirk. Mrs Avens knew then that Johnny had died, she said so. Peggy played out the scene in her mind, imagining George hiding in the woods or by a river, trapped and trying to cross to safety, with his trusty Bren gun still by his side.

  Three days later, reports from the front line were carried in the newspapers, bringing news of the most tragic and glorious battle of the war being over. The survivors of the British airborne force had been ordered to break out of the forest near Arnhem and get back across the Rhine to join up with the Second Army on the south bank. Peggy spent the next two nights in the rocking chair, listening to the BBC World Service, waiting for any news. At first light, Nanny got up and made her a cup of tea. There was a knock on the door. Peggy couldn’t move. She sank her he
ad in her hands and began to cry.

  ‘I’ll get it,’ said Nanny overly brightly, bustling down the hallway. She came back carrying an official-looking letter, her face as white as the envelope in her hands. Peggy was shaking as she opened it; it was from the War Office. She was blinded by tears at first, so she couldn’t take it all in but it gave the incident date as 18 September – the day George had parachuted in to Holland. Just seeing his name, rank and number there in black and white didn’t make it real at all. Could they have got it wrong? She was hoping against hope. There was today’s date. He was confirmed as a prisoner of war, in German hands, location unknown.

  Eva and Kathleen came to comfort Peggy, bringing their daughters, Beverley and Della, to play with little Gloria. Eva had bought Gloria a set of peg dolls which Nanny Day had dressed up to be a whole family and Gloria carried the daddy one with her everywhere, which almost broke Peggy’s heart. Just having her sisters close at hand eased the pain of being parted from George and she leaned on them now, more than she ever had done when they were growing up. At least he was alive, they told her. And George being George, he would do everything he could to survive the war.

  Eva even tried to make her smile. ‘He’s probably converting the blooming Nazis to Communism!’

  Peggy had always been the eldest, the clever one, the one who had all the answers – but she didn’t have the answers to work this out. When she cried, they picked her up and forced her to carry on, for Gloria’s sake. She still went out to work – that, at least, gave her a focus other than the worry of what George might be going through in a prison camp.

  A new terror had arrived in the past weeks, in the form of lethal rockets, which Londoners nicknamed ‘doodlebugs’ because of the horrible whine they made as they flew overhead. More terrifying still was the silence as the engine cut out and they plummeted to the ground. Nanny Day was with Peggy and Gloria in the back yard at Cornwall Road when one appeared, sailing high over the rooftops, and there was no time to get to the shelter. Peggy prayed out loud: ‘Please God, don’t fall here!’ even though it meant the bomb would land on some other poor souls a few streets away. The engine whined on, across towards Bermondsey, and then cut out and fell from the sky. They all felt the shudder of the explosion. Peggy cried with relief that they were safe and in anguish for the victims a few streets away. Nothing about this war was fair, she felt that now, more than ever.