All Fall Down

by Jenny Oldfield

  Bello:

  hidden talent rediscovered

  Bello is a digital only imprint of Pan Macmillan, established to breathe new life into previously published, classic books.

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  Contents

  Jenny Oldfield

  Dedication

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Part Two

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Part Three

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Copyright

  Jenny Oldfield

  ALL FALL DOWN

  Jenny Oldfield

  Jenny Oldfield is one of the most successful writers of popular fiction series for children. Trademarks of her work are compelling plotting and a sense of adventure and fun. Her latest series is Muddy Paws (Hodder). Ten-year-old cousins and best friends Lexi and Lily are poles apart when it comes to personality. They don't always see eye to eye . . . but they are united by their love for all animals and the summer holidays sees them conjure up animal mayhem . . .

  Jenny also writes fiction under several pseudonyms including the Dark Angel and Beautiful Dead trilogies as Eden Maguire. Young, Gifted and Dead and Killing You Softly appear under the name Lucy Carver, while in the Stardust Stables series Jenny writes as Sable Hamilton.

  Jenny was born and brought up in Harrogate, Yorkshire. Even as a child she wrote stories and made tiny books complete with illustrations. She still lives in Yorkshire and enjoys walking, playing tennis, riding and travelling.

  Dedication

  For my sister, Christine

  Part One

  Dark Days

  September 1939

  Chapter One

  The wireless kept up its steady hum in the corner of the living room as Sadie sat in a shaft of sunlight on a perfect September morning. In her mind’s eye she could see the slick crooner huddled over the microphone, oozing syrupy words to his lady love.

  Sadie sighed and looked up from her mending. ‘Bertie, turn that down, will you?’

  ‘Ma!’

  ‘Turn it down. I can’t hear myself think.’ She only had the wireless turned on for the Home Service News, not for the Cream in My Coffee, nor Tiptoeing Through the Tulips. She snipped her thread and examined the darned heel.

  ‘You can’t hear yourself think in any case,’ came Bertie’s smart reply.

  ‘No, but you’ll hear me box your ears soon enough.’ She rolled the pair of grey woollen socks together and turned back one ribbed end to make a neat parcel, then she tossed it to Bertie to catch. ‘Butterfingers.’

  Geoff lunged across the table and grabbed the socks before his brother could. Bertie leapt to his feet. ‘Gave me them here.’

  ‘Or else what?’

  ‘Or else.’

  Homework books scattered as the boys wrestled. At the opposite end of the table Meggie mustered all the dignity of her sixteen years. She wore her dark hair swept back from her forehead and hanging in a glossy roll to chin length. Her frock, printed with blue forget-me-nots and yellow daisies, with a neat white collar, was one of Sadie’s more ambitious sewing efforts on a machine handed down by her sister, Hettie.

  ‘How can I get any work done in this monkey house?’

  Meggie was studying to be a telephone operator. With her nice voice and quick brain, the Post Office had taken her straight from school. Sadie had high hopes that she would one day make something of herself.

  ‘You would if you went to your room.’ Sadie held her temper.

  ‘I don’t see why I should. You could make them two shut up just as easy.’

  Geoff and Bertie, faces red and shiny from their tussle, skidded the hearthrug against the polished fender.

  ‘Here.’ Walter stuck out a leg to stop them cannoning into his fireside chair. ‘Good job there ain’t no fire lit.’ He went back to his paper, and the Express’s ‘No War This Year Or Next’ column.

  Meggie closed her books and gave in with bad grace. ‘You’re no better than a pair of monkeys, you two.’

  The boys hooted and cat-called after her. ‘Miss High and Blooming Mighty, who’s she think she is?’

  ‘Vivien Leigh.’

  ‘Deanna Durbin.’

  ‘Dorothy Lamour.’ Geoff shimmied across the room after her. Bertie pouted and made wet kissing sounds.

  ‘Don’t try coming into the kitchen, I’m going to wash my hair.’ She slammed the door in their faces.

  ‘Oo-er.’

  ‘Friday Night is Amami Night!’

  ‘That’ll do, you two,’ Sadie warned.

  ‘Yes, let’s have some hush.’ Walter stood up to give the wireless a thump. The humming stopped, the valves crackled as he twiddled the tuning knob. In the short hush they realized the music had stopped, interrupted by the sonorous tones of the BBC announcer. It was just gone eleven o’clock on an unusually quiet Sunday down Paradise Court.

  ‘What’s he say?’ Sadie left off darning a fresh pair of socks and let them drop in her lap. She could hope right until the last second that it wasn’t what they feared, that the broadcast by the Prime Minister would bring relief from the worry about the shenanigans in Europe. She glanced at Walter for reassurance.

  ‘Pipe down,’ was all he said. He put his ear to the loudspeaker and went on twiddling the knob. ‘It’s Mr Chamberlain.’

  Geoff and Bertie stopped fighting. The wireless whined and whistled. A thin voice came wavering over the airwaves, deadly serious. Germany had considered the British request to withdraw from Poland, but the Prime Minister confirmed the worst. ‘I have to tell you that no such undertaking has been received and that consequently this country is at war with Germany.’

  Amy Parsons sat in her kitchen, mouth open. ‘Rob, did you hear?’

  ‘I heard.’ He pulled a hand down his face, dragging the tense skin.

  ‘It’s war after all.’

  ‘I heard.’

  ‘What about Bobby?’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘Gone swimming with his mates.’ The kids didn’t stay huddled round the wireless, crisis or no crisis.

  Amy started up. At just turned forty-three, she was bottle-blonde, solid and vigorous. No movement was tentative, no comment half-hearted when she was galvanized into action.

  ‘Where you off to now?’

  ‘To fetch him home. He never took his gas mask.’ There it was hanging from its string in its cardboard box from the door hook. She flung her coat over her apron and took down the mask.

  Rob flicked the butt of his cigarette into the grate. He stood up and stuck his head out of the window, checking the street below. Opposite, on the corner of the Court, stood the Duke of Wellington,
doors firmly closed. No one hung about on the pavement outside Henshaws, or by the Co-op further down Duke Street. It seemed that the whole of Southwark was glued to the wireless set. In the distance he saw four or five kids come running.

  ‘Keep your hair on, here he is now.’ Rob eased back from the window ledge, satisfied that the sturdy figure to the fore was Bobby heading home hell for leather. It hadn’t taken long for the news to get round. He saw with a shock which he only just managed to conceal that a barrage of air balloons was already rising silently into the clear blue sky like giant, ghostly whales.

  ‘Oh, Rob!’ Amy clutched the neck of her blouse and came to the window to watch. ‘Bobby, you come up here.’ Her voice broke the silence. ‘Quick as you can, you hear. It’s started. There’s a war on. Come quick.’

  Annie Parsons sat quietly with Ernie and Hettie, her grown-up stepchildren and George Mann, Hettie’s husband, in an upstairs room at the Duke. She was old – 76 this year – but not daft; had been expecting this for months. None of this ‘Peace in Our Time’ malarky. If he’d still been alive, Duke would have agreed and said that Hitler was twisting them round his little finger. The Prime Minister with his rolled-up brolly, stepping off this aeroplane and that, never stood a chance. He sounded brokenhearted, poor man.

  Now it was the turn of the King, broadcasting from Buckingham Palace, telling them what they already knew; that for the second time in the lives of most of them, Britain was at war, fighting for justice and liberty. ‘For the sake of all that we ourselves hold dear and of the world’s order and peace . . . high purpose . . . I ask them to stand calm, firm and united in this time of trial. The task will be hard. There may be dark days ahead . . .’

  ‘Ain’t it horrible?’ Hettie breathed.

  ‘Well, we’re ready for them.’ George hid his own apprehension. The jackboot would never march across British soil as it had over half of Europe. He and Walter Davidson had already trained as air raid wardens, and though they were too old to be conscripted they were still strong and willing. The blackouts were in place, the air raid shelters built.

  ‘Ready for what?’ Hettie’s eyes were wide with horror. She and George had no children to worry about, but she shook at the idea of bombs dropping on innocent heads, of all the young lives that would have to be sacrificed. Hettie was deeply religious; a sensitive, fine-looking woman of fifty, successful in her half of the dress-shop business she’d set up with her sister, Jess, always ready to count her blessings, not the least of which was steady, kind, unflappable George.

  ‘For whatever they fling at us.’ He put an arm around her shoulder.

  ‘You watch, they’ll close us down,’ Annie warned. She’d read it in the newspaper; a proposed emergency measure to shut the pubs up and down the country.

  ‘And if they do, they’ll have a riot,’ George predicted. ‘We’ll be open again within the week.’ He turned off the wireless with an abrupt twist of the wrist.

  ‘Who’d have thought it?’ Hettie felt marooned by the tide of events.

  ‘Anyone with a grain of common sense,’ Annie put in. Her pointed, lined face looked grim. ‘They said the last one would end it all, but it’s not in human nature.’

  ‘And what should we do?’ George tried to rouse Hettie. The first signs of total war, the barrage balloons, rose silently over the grey slate roofs. ‘Let them walk all over us?’

  ‘But are we sure he’s as bad as they say?’

  ‘Worse, I shouldn’t wonder.’

  ‘Who, Hitler?’ Annie considered the rights and wrongs. ‘Have you seen them Sieg Heiling?’ The newsreels in the cinemas gave a graphic picture of marching armies. ‘Maurice says it’s very bad for the Jews.’ Flickering black and white films showed a small man with a dark moustache, rousing the rabble to a frenzy of saluting and chanting. Sieg Heil, Sieg Heil.

  Hettie drew a deep breath. ‘What will Amy and Sadie do with the kids, do you think?’

  ‘That’s the ticket.’ George knew she was pulling round if she could start to think of others. ‘It’ll be up to them. A lot have already been evacuated.’

  ‘I can’t think what Sadie will do without the boys.’

  ‘Who says it’ll come to that?’ Annie shook herself, got up and straightened her skirt. ‘You never know, now that we’ve stood up to him and shown him we mean business, maybe it’ll knock some sense into him.’ Poland was one thing; even Austria and Czechoslovakia, but Britain was another. Hitler would have to sit up and take notice now.

  ‘And what about Meggie? Will she go too?’ Over the last few days, Hettie had watched the women and children in their school gaberdines, little cardboard suitcases in hand, troop off towards the muster points, ready for shipping onto trains at Paddington. She imagined a thousand tearful farewells.

  ‘Let’s wait and see,’ George advised, giving silent Ernie a cheerful pat on the shoulder.

  Suddenly into the silence of Duke Street came an ear-splitting wail. It rose from a deep groan, gained volume, whined overhead, penetrating the courts and alleys, putting an end to that eerie suspension of activity in the heart of London’s East End.

  ‘Air raid!’ Amy, in the flat above the ironmongers’ shop, shot a horrified glance at Rob. ‘Shelter!’ She turned to Bobby. ‘Double-quick.’

  Bobby looked to his father.

  ‘You heard.’ Rob limped to the door and handed him and Amy their gas masks. Once more, the whine of shells, their thud into soft earth the second before they exploded flashed through his mind.

  ‘You and all.’ As she slung the string around Bobby’s neck and bundled him out of the door onto the landing, she turned back. ‘Please, Rob!’

  ‘You seen my fags?’ He searched the mantelpiece and paused to rummage in a drawer.

  ‘Rob!’ The siren wailed on and on.

  ‘Hold your horses.’ People were running in the street towards the community shelter in Nelson Gardens, where a deep trench had been dug, covered with corrugated sheeting and earth, big enough to hold hundreds of people. No one round here had a garden with their own Anderson shelter; it was all tenements and courts. The nearest underground station, Borough, was too far to reach in time. ‘I can’t go till I got my fags.’

  Amy rushed back into the room. The cigarettes were on the shelf by the wireless. ‘Here.’ She flung them at him.

  ‘You go ahead.’ Shoving them in his pocket, he pushed her on. Bobby was already waiting at the bottom of the stairs.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Yes. You know why.’ He couldn’t run fast with his artificial leg. He had to hobble sideways down the stairs.

  ‘But, Rob.’ Amy held onto Bobby by the arm. He resisted. Outside the door, men, women and children fled towards the shelter, hatless, without jackets or cardigans, some in their stockinged feet. The planes could come, the bombs drop any second.

  ‘Go, will you!’ He clung to the bannister and cursed.

  ‘You’ll come quick as you can?’

  He nodded. ‘I’ll see you down there.’

  Amy dragged Bobby to the street to be caught up in the rush of feet, the wail of the siren. She had never in her life felt so frightened; sick in her stomach, heart pounding as she kept her eyes to the ground and tried to close her ears to the drone of aeroplane engines, the thud and crash of German bombs in the streets she’d known and felt safe in all her life. Now a terrifying jumble of noises and the sound of panicking feet echoed down Union Street under the clear blue sky.

  ‘Well, at least we’re in the final.’ Tommy O’Hagan drew long and hard on one of Rob Parsons’ Woodbines. In the dim light of the underground shelter watchful feces lined the benches and bunks, the men in waistcoats and caps, some in overalls, fresh from digging their allotments. Women hovered over their kids, wiped smudged feces with the corners of their aprons, smacked a bare leg, buttoned a cardigan.

  ‘How come?’ Tommy’s youngest brother, Jimmie, who lived with Tommy and his wife, Dorothy, was puzzled by the sporting phrase.

  ‘Well
, Hitler knocked out the Austrians, didn’t he? And the Sizzeks. Now the Poles. He beat the lot. I reckon that puts us in the final, don’t it?’ Tommy cut the crisis down to size. ‘Did you get to the match yesterday, Rob? The real one, the one that counts.’

  Rob shook his head. ‘I was out earning a crust.’

  That was another thing. War meant blackout. Blackout would keep people at home instead of hailing a taxi and going up the West End on a Friday night. It might even involve petrol rationing and then where would he and Walter end up? Out of business, that’s where. The years of the Depression had kept their taxi business small and run on a hand-to-mouth basis. Early dreams of making good with a fleet of new cars and a team of drivers had faded. They got by, that was all. And as Rob had sunk into middle age he’d grown gaunt and sour; lost his spark was how Amy put it.

  ‘You ain’t nothing to write home about neither,’ he reminded her.

  ‘Tough, ’cos I’m all you’ve got.’ She always held her own.

  ‘Ted Drake scored four,’ Tommy was telling him. ‘There was twenty thousand through the gates. Great game.’

  ‘Make the most of it.’ Rob had heard through Walter that they planned to turn the stadium at Highbury into an ARP centre the minute war broke out and that would be the end of Saturday football for the foreseeable future. ‘They say the whole team will volunteer and how many of them will come back in one piece?’

  ‘Cheerful Charlie, ain’t he?’ Tommy was put off his stride. Nevertheless he winked at Jimmie.

  ‘You’ll see,’ Rob warned. He wandered off to brood in a corner. ‘Not in these trousiz.’ Tommy shrugged.

  ‘Archibald, certainly not!’ Jimmie slung in his own wireless phrase. He shadow-boxed with his older brother. He was a skinny kid just like Tommy had been, in baggy grey flannel trousers and Fair Isle pullover, his grey shirt collar torn and frayed.

  ‘For crying out loud,’ Dorothy O’Hagan drawled. She sat, or rather perched nearby, on the ARP warden’s table, legs crossed, wedge-heeled shoe dangling from her free foot. Her face, lost behind a cloud of cigarette smoke, was heavily made up. ‘Can‘t you two put a sock in it?’