The Second-last Woman in England

by Maggie Joel

  But Mum had said, we’re not attending Chapel.

  Jean had stared at her in astonishment. Not attending Chapel? They always went to Chapel. Even when Dad had done his back in, even when Mum had been bad with a fever. Always, always they went.

  ‘But why? Are you not well, Mum? Is it Dad? Do you want me to take the children to Chapel on my own?’ Jean had asked anxiously, a sense of something ominous creeping over her.

  ‘No, love, we’re quite well, your Dad and me, but something has happened. At your Dad’s work—though with God’s help, it will be all right.’ Mum had paused and frowned. ‘And I’ll not have you going off to Chapel on your own, it’s too far. Now, be a good girl and bring the children in out of the cold. They’ll catch their death.’

  She had stared in silence, noticing suddenly that Mum was distracted, her hair falling out of her hair net, her fingers twitching restlessly by her sides then reaching up to push her hair out of her face. But saying nothing. Instead Mum had turned and gone back into the kitchen.

  Jean had stood and waited. For what, she wasn’t sure.

  Eventually she had gone outside and brought in the children, hurrying them and ignoring their questions.

  ‘Are we not goin’ to Chapel, then, Jean?’ said Gladys.

  ‘But it’s my turn! It’s my turn, Mr Wolf!’ cried Bertie, half excited, half annoyed.

  ‘You never wait for your turn,’ said Edward. ‘And anyway, Mr Wolf would easily ’ave caught you, just you see if he wouldn’t!’

  ‘But why are we to go inside and take off our Sunday best, Jean?’ said Nerys, standing determinedly in the doorway.

  ‘Just you do what our Mum tells you, Nerys Corbett,’ said Jean firmly, counting the last child in through the front door and closing it shut behind them, and behind the cold February morning.

  ‘But what is it, Jean?’

  ‘If you know, you ’ave to tell us!’

  ‘I don’t know nothin’!’

  ‘She does know! Gladys, she does—and she won’t tell!’

  ‘Shut up, Nerys, I was with Jean when Mum come out the kitchen and Mum didn’t say nothin’!’

  ‘Gladys! Nerys! Stop it!’

  ‘I want to go outside and play!’

  ‘Well, you can’t, it’s Sunday.’

  ‘But we went out before and Mum said we could!’

  ‘Ow! Edward pulled my ’air!’

  ‘But why aren’t we goin’ to Chapel? Why aren’t we?’

  ‘It’s ’cause you’re an ’orrid little boy, Bertie, and God don’t want you in His ’ouse no more!’

  ‘That’s not true! That’s not true!’

  ‘Oh, put a sock in it, Bertie—’

  ‘SHUT UP! All of you! Don’t you understand? Somethin’ bad ’as ’appened! Somethin’ very bad!’

  Jean had left them, then, Gladys and Nerys and Edward and Bertie, and those had been her final words to them.

  She had gone back downstairs, angry and fearful. She would let Mum know that the children were all inside, that was what she would do. She had done her duty.

  The kitchen door had been open. She had seen Dad still sitting at the kitchen table. Dad, who was normally so active, so big, always moving, talking, laughing. Now he was sitting silently, unmoving. He had looked small. When he saw her, he had looked up, given her a look—sad, anxious? No, it had been more than that, a look that she had not been able to understand.

  ‘Dad?’

  But Dad had frowned and looked away.

  ‘Come inside, child,’ Mum had said. ‘And close the door for a moment, there’s a good girl.’

  Jean had come in and sat down at the table and a great fear had gripped her like a giant pair of hands tightly squeezing her stomach. She was about to be told what had happened, because she was the eldest. For a moment she had longed to be upstairs playing and squabbling with the other children.

  ‘What is it?’ she had said, and it had been important to sound normal. Calm. Grown up.

  ‘Well, love. There’s been a silly mix up at the dock—’

  ‘Not a silly mix up,’ Dad had interrupted gruffly. ‘I took somethin’. Let’s not beat around the bush, Gloria. I took somethin’ what wasn’t mine to take. Thou shalt not steal, says the Lord, and I stole. And I knew it was stealin’ and I stole anyway. I have failed you all and there’s no two ways about it. I have let you all down, and the Government, and myself. And the Lord.’

  Jean had listened silently, wide-eyed, appalled.

  ‘What your Dad’s saying is that—’

  ‘What I’m saying, girl, is that I got caught and I got the sack. There—I’m not proud of it, it’s a shameful thing to admit to, but there you are.’

  Jean had put her hand to her mouth while the kitchen, the world, spun uncontrollably around her. She had looked from one to the other to see what it meant, to read in their faces how this would affect them.

  ‘It’s unjust!’ Mum had burst out suddenly, ‘Your Dad took an orange, Jean, for you children. A single, solitary orange from the warehouse—it’s downright unjust, Owen. After all the years you’ve put in at that place, all the extra shifts, all through the Blitz—’

  ‘I broke the law,’ Dad had said quietly, his head down. ‘Just once, it’s true, but I got caught. And I was meant to be watching the place.

  I was there to keep the looters out. I let them all down. And last night the supervisor from the Ministry was there, otherwise no one would have noticed—except the Lord.’ He had bowed his head.

  ‘Will you … go to prison?’ Jean had said, the word dry as sandpaper on her tongue.

  ‘Oh, Owen!’ Mum had whispered, her voice breaking. ‘But you have a family to support! Owen, did you not tell him? What will we live on now? You’ve worked the docks eighteen years!’

  Dad had frowned. ‘I’ll not be going to prison, child. The supervisor dismissed me, but said he’d not call the police. We ought to be grateful, Gloria.’

  But he had glowered at the table in a way that she hadn’t seen since Father Bellamy had brought a Catholic to preach at Chapel one Sunday.

  ‘Grateful? I’ll not be grateful to anyone who dismisses a man for stealing food to feed his family!’ Mum had said, pounding the table in sudden fury. ‘What do they know, these men in their fine suits sitting in their offices in Whitehall? What do they know of our lives here? They tell us to make sacrifices—every day they tell us—but what sacrifices do they make? Living in their big houses with their servants! What do they know about what we have to put up with?’

  Jean had sat frozen to her seat, her stomach twisting in sickening knots. She had never seen Mum angry, never. And Dad so silent, so small. It was frightening.

  ‘I’ve a good mind to go round there—’

  ‘Enough!’ Dad had said, thumping the table, and Jean had cowered. ‘That is enough, Gloria. What’s done is done. There’s nothin’ more to be said about it.’

  And amazingly Mum had defied him.

  ‘No. You are wrong, Owen Corbett. You have to fight for your rights in this world, the Good Lord knows I am right. Go back to this supervisor and talk to him. Explain it to him—’

  ‘I said ENOUGH!’

  This time there was silence.

  Upstairs a loud thump followed by a howl of pain made them all look up.

  ‘Jean. You must be a good child,’ Mum had said then, barely above a whisper, her face pale. ‘We’ve told you what happened and there’ll be changes now, you can be sure of that. Go upstairs and settle the children while we decide what’s to be done.’

  So Jean had left the kitchen, but instead of joining her brothers and sisters she had gone outside. Out into the space and solitude of the cold February morning. Dad had stolen! It had been inconceivable! It had been too much to take in. It had been a sin against God. And yet—and yet, if you were starving? If your family was starving?

  It was wrong because others were starving too. Dad had said he wouldn’t go to prison … But would he go to Hell? Dad
was a good man! He was a good man!

  She had walked quickly away from the house, southward towards the river, going instinctively towards the Chapel because it was a Sunday morning and that was where you went on Sunday morning.

  We should go to Chapel, she had thought, pausing on a street corner. They’ll notice we’re not there, of course they will! And they’ll want to know why we’re not there. They’ll find out, someone will talk. And then what? Everyone would know. Pride was a sin. Forgiveness was heavenly. But Dad had stolen from the warehouse, from Government property—from the war effort. They would all know.

  It had been so very cold out and she had been wearing only her thin cardigan. Shivering, she had turned away from the street that led down to the Chapel, not knowing which direction to take. The street had been empty. It had still been early, only churchgoers out at that time, and late shift-workers returning home bleary-eyed, clutching empty sandwich boxes. A bird had burst suddenly into raucous song. A dog had barked somewhere in the distance.

  The rocket had appeared overhead with no warning. No air-raid siren sounded, people had no time to run onto the street, or to run from the street into a shelter. It had screamed overhead with a whistle, coming from the southeast, from the coast, all the way from Holland. She froze in her tracks, the blood running cold through her veins as it reached her, then passed her, and she sagged with relief. Not here then, not her, not this time.

  But then it had stopped. A second, two seconds later and Jean had seen it falling from the sky a little way to the north. And everything had stopped: sound, the wind, time itself.

  And a lifetime had passed and then the world had erupted.

  She had run. Run back the way she had come, along the deserted streets, tripping over a bottle, the kerb, her thin cardigan flapping, her shoes barely touching the pavement as she flew home.

  But there had been no home. There had just been a hole where that section of the street had been. A hole and smoke and flames and rubble. And oddly, at her feet, a shard of white bone china with the King’s head and the words ‘LONG MAY HE REIGN’ in fancy writing.

  They should have been at Chapel. If only they had gone to Chapel. If only.

  ‘You have to fight for your rights in this world, the Good Lord knows I am right,’ Mum had said. ‘Go back to the supervisor and talk to him. Explain it to him—’

  But Dad had shaken his head. Dad had not wanted to fight. ‘Wallis won’t change his mind. Why should he? You don’t know these people.’

  No, they did not know these people.

  But they knew their names. Jean knew his name: Wallis, the supervisor from the Ministry. Mr Cecil Wallis. And she remembered that name just as she remembered the man who had designed the V2 rocket, though she did not know his name, and the men and the women who had worked in a factory in Holland to build it—slaves, she now knew they had been, and yet still she blamed them—and the soldier, some young man whose mother loved him, stationed in northern Holland who had operated the equipment that sent the rocket up and over the coastline and across the North Sea and over Kent and all the way to Malacca Row, Stepney, so that it could destroy her family and her home. Oh yes, she remembered them all.

  But she knew only one name. And she had come across that name again in the most unexpected place—the Festival of Britain. Mr Cecil Wallis, a director of Empire and Colonial Lines. Right there in black and white.

  She had needed to know, all these years later, if Mum was right: did he have fine suits and an office in Whitehall? Did he live in a big house with servants? The office, it had turned out, was off Chancery Lane, a big important office in the city, easy enough to track down; and the house—she had followed him home from work—was big, and elegant, with many storeys and many rooms, situated in a tree-lined street in a very smart suburb. And yes, there had been servants, for on a certain day last September she had observed Nanny Peters emerge from the house.

  God had led her here as surely as He had led the Israelites out of the desert, yet she still did not know why.

  This morning Mr Wallis had asked her what her family were doing to mark the Coronation. Then, barely an hour later, he had dismissed her from his employ, as carelessly, as summarily, as he had dismissed Dad eight years earlier. He had hoped that she would not be too substantially inconvenienced.

  Outside the rain continued to fall and a police car drew up in front of the house and two policemen got out. The two policemen came up the steps and knocked on the Wallises’ front-door. A moment later they emerged from the house with Mrs Wallis and led her down the steps and into the car, then they drove off.

  Jean realised she was missing the Coronation.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  JUNE 1924

  Harriet and Freddie had travelled home to England from India in the June of 1924.

  On the evening of their embarkation their escort, Mr Stephens, had suggested they have tea and cakes at the Royal Bombay Yacht Club. It had been his treat. He had escorted the District Officer’s two children on this long and fraught journey from their home in Jhelum to the dockside in Bombay. Now, his mission accomplished, he had poured the tea and handed round the Battenburg cake with an air of satisfaction.

  They were due to sail to England on the ten o’clock tide.

  ‘Well, time we were off,’ Mr Stephens had said as the sun set in an orange glow in the west, and they made their way back to the ship.

  Only they hadn’t returned directly to the ship. Instead Mr Stephens had turned away from the quayside and taken them on a path that led into an ornate garden.

  Night had fallen, instantly and without warning as it did every night in India, though that never prevented Mother and Father and just about every European who had lived in England remarking upon it in wonder.

  ‘My God, the night falls quickly here,’ Mr Stephens had remarked, and yet they had continued into the gardens and a thick foliage of orchids and casuarinas, bamboo and tamarinds reared up on either side of them, making the night darker still. Over their heads mahogany trees towered and on the ground creepers snaked across the path. The cicadas shrilled so that the very air vibrated.

  Freddie was moody, hanging back, dragging his heels and not allowing anyone to hold his hand.

  Mr Stephens went back and spoke to him then he rejoined Harriet.

  ‘Freddie needs to spend a penny. I’ll take him to a discreet spot. Will you be all right here, Harriet?’

  Harriet wasn’t at all certain that she would be all right there on her own, in a strange garden, in a strange city, in the pitch dark. But she nodded because that was what one did. Then she had watched as Freddie and Mr Stephens stepped off the path and were swallowed up in the undergrowth.

  Now what?

  She waited. There was no one else in the gardens, so surely they would not have to journey too far to locate a discreet spot for Freddie to spend his penny.

  She waited.

  The shriek of some animal nearby made her jump and she whirled about trying to locate it. Tiny yellow spots of light flickered in the undergrowth—a mongoose perhaps. The air was thick with tiny flying insects, with animals. But this wasn’t the jungle—she had been in the real jungle where a snake, a scorpion, a leopard, a tiger, might jump out at you at any moment. This was just an ornate garden in a big, important city.

  The animal shrieked again. It was a monkey, most probably.

  Where were they? Ages had passed, simply ages!

  A sudden flurry of wings filled the air and a dark shape flew out of the trees. She jumped and for a moment the only sound was her heart beating. But it was only a bat.

  And then she heard another sound, a sound that wasn’t an animal at all. It was a thud, like something solid falling onto the ground, then a voice. A man’s voice. Distant. She couldn’t tell whose voice or what was said, but it came from the same direction that Freddie and Mr Stephens had taken.

  Harriet hesitated. Ought she to wait here as instructed? But if they were only a few yards a
way, why wait here? And what if something had happened?

  She waited for the length of another breath then set off down the path and into the undergrowth from where the sound had come. Her heart thudded uncomfortably in her chest as she pushed her way through the overhanging fronds. She would never have run through a real jungle in the dark, never! But this was just a garden in a big city. There were people all around. She only had to call out and someone would come running to help.

  She kept on pushing, blindly, her arms before her face to stop the fronds brushing against her. Then, quite suddenly, the trees parted and she was in a clearing. At the same moment the clouds slid apart and a near-full moon cast a pale yellow glow so that she could see quite clearly. And what she saw was a strange figure, a man—she assumed it was a man, it was a man’s height and wearing a man’s hat—standing in the centre of the clearing. And indeed the figure was wearing Mr Stephens’s hat and Mr Stephens’s umbrella was lying on the ground beside him. But the figure was misshapen. Horribly misshapen.

  She paused and a call, a greeting, froze on her lips. The figure groaned, put its head back—Mr Stephens’s head—and groaned.

  And then Freddie cried out. And that was the misshapen part of the figure. There was another figure—a much smaller figure, a child’s figure—on his knees before Mr Stephens.

  Again Harriet nearly called out and again the words froze on her tongue. The child’s head was buried in Mr Stephens’s lap, in his trousers, and the child was crying, sobbing, but something held him there, the man’s hand held him there, held him firmly at the back of his small head, held him firmly in place and the child was gulping for breath, sobbing.

  Freddie was sobbing.