All Fall Down

by Jenny Oldfield

  ‘It’s the sugar. The brewers can’t get it for love nor money.’ Annie was glad at least that the threatened closure of the pubs hadn’t happened. Their doors stayed open, even if supplies were strictly limited.

  Dolly leaned confidentially across the bar. ‘Come on, Annie, you know me. I won’t say nothing if you bend the rules.’ She’d spent the afternoon at Amy’s flat, looking after things while her daughter waited her turn in the rain outside the Co-op. Amy had come back with her twelve ounces of butter and her pitiful portion of bacon to last the three of them a full week.

  ‘You might not, Dolly, but every other thirsty blighter in the place would!’ Annie stuck to her guns. It seemed hard, but there it was. These days, the darkest of the year, when Christmas had come and gone and January crawled to a close, you had to put up with worse things than not being able to drink yourself into a stupor at the drop of a hat.

  ‘I thought they reckoned Guinness was good for you.’ Dolly stared miserably into her empty glass. She wore a headscarf, tied turban-style around her head, still in her overall after a session pickling beetroot for Amy. ‘How are we supposed to know if it’s good for you if we can’t get hold of it no more?’ She didn’t mind making do and mend, she didn’t mind saving paper, metal, even bones, for the war effort and, when they came the other day and took the iron railings from the allotment, she’d watched without a murmur, as was her patriotic duty. But when they cut off her supply of alcohol it dug deep. ‘I’ll give them “Up, Housewives and At ’Em!” ’ she grumbled.

  She needed something to take her mind off her privations, and it came in the shape of Dorothy O’Hagan, dressed up to the nines as usual, but in unexpected company. Her own Charlie stood there holding the door open, large as life, acting the gent, turning on the man-of-the-world charm in his dark slacks, yellow cravat and blazer. Dorothy should see him in the mornings, Dolly thought, unshaven and bleary-eyed, not a pretty sight since he’d come back to live with his mother.

  ‘What’ll it be?’ Charlie guided Tommy’s wife to the bar.

  ‘A pint of Guinness, please.’ Dolly tapped her glass too obviously on the polished bar top.

  He ignored her and asked George for two shorts, then escorted Dorothy to a quiet corner.

  ‘God knows what she’ll do when her clothes coupons run out,’ Annie observed, her differences with Dolly immediately forgotten. The two old women chewed over the morals of the younger generation.

  ‘Trouble is, Charlie’s on the rebound,’ Dolly confided. ‘He wouldn’t thank me for saying this, but he’d take up with anyone now that his divorce is going through. If you ask me, he’s getting his own back.’

  ‘Well, Dorothy ain’t no oil painting,’ Annie agreed. ‘Or if she is, I’d say the cracks are beginning to show.’

  Charlie Ogden found himself at a low ebb. His school had been closed down for the duration, and though many evacuated children were beginning to trickle back into the streets and parks of London, the school doors were still barred to them. They took their lessons in a half-hearted way in their own homes, taught by conchies and women.

  He was at a loose end and, when he looked at it from a distance, he saw that teaching was not the noble calling he’d once imagined. He’d gone into it after a false start with his job with Maurice Leigh in the early days of the cinema, thinking that all kids would share his own love of learning given half the chance, only to find that young minds were not blank pages to be filled with interesting facts and respectful attitudes. Instead, they were wilful wayward forces that ganged up in groups of thirty or forty to outwit anyone foolish enough to imagine they could be tamed. Put another way, every day in Charlie’s working life there was at least one grubby, mendacious youngster, minus homework, looking devil-may-care and glowering down at him from six feet of adolescent muscle and swagger. Disillusioned yet dogged, Charlie kept at it until the war intervened and his marriage collapsed. Now he was back at home, fortyish and nowhere.

  ‘Ta for the drink, Charlie.’ Dorothy raised her glass between bright red fingernails. She was enjoying the fact that all eyes were on them. ‘It’s more than I can get out of my old man these days.’

  ‘We’re all in the same boat.’ He realized she was on the make but he didn’t care. They’d bumped into one another on the doorstep, but she was trying to make it look like a set up thing, flaunting them as a couple to raise eyebrows.

  Automatically she took out a cigarette then looked helpless.

  ‘Light?’ He leaned across. She held his hand steady as she drew in the flame.

  ‘Ta, Charlie. You on your way somewhere nice?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Friday night; you should be.’

  ‘But I hate this blackout, don’t you? It don’t feel like you can enjoy yourself the same.’

  ‘Don’t you believe it.’ She described the dance halls that were humming with navy and RAF types.

  ‘Bit on the young side for you, Dot.’

  ‘Ta very much,’ she pouted. ‘I bet I could still show you a thing or two, though.’

  He grinned in spite of himself. Dorothy wasn’t his type, but she was nothing if not obvious.

  ‘Why not come up the West End with me?’ she asked.

  ‘You’ll show me a good time?’

  ‘I mean it. Ain’t no use nagging Tommy to come with me. He can’t stick this modern dancing.’

  Charlie considered the offer; not one that he would normally have touched with a bargepole. Dorothy was dressed to kill in an expensive maroon coat with a black fur collar draped around her shoulders, over a short black dress with a low neckline. A string of artificial pearls had caught in her ample cleavage.

  ‘Come on, Charlie, what you worried about? Not your reputation, surely.’ She kidded him along, a mixture of toughness and good humour. ‘Do you good to get out once in a while from what I hear.’

  He felt manoeuvred into a position where he could hardly turn her down without making himself look soft and narrow-minded. And maybe she was right; it was time for him to break out and enjoy himself. It didn’t mean anything, it wasn’t as if they were underhand. Just the opposite; everyone and his bleeding aunt was watching.

  ‘You hear wrong, Dot. I get out plenty.’

  ‘Well then?’

  ‘Righto. Finish your drink.’ He stood up ready to go.

  Slowly she smiled and stubbed out her cigarette, uncrossed her legs and collected her bag from under the table. He pulled back her chair and she stood up, slotting her arm into his as they crossed the room.

  Dolly looked daggers at them.

  ‘Ain’t nothing you can do,’ Annie sympathized, as the couple left the pub. ‘They’re both grown-ups, even if they are acting like little kids.’

  ‘I could knock their heads together, I could. And him so high and mighty when he wants to be. I’ve a good mind to drop him in it with Tommy, even if I am his ma, worse luck.’

  Annie kept her talking. She even slipped her a drink on the sly. If Dolly went and upset the applecart, things could turn messy. They all needed to pull together these days. Dorothy would have her fling with Charlie and it would all be over in a week, no harm done. She believed in common sense; Tommy himself was no angel, if it came to that.

  What’s up, Meggie? You missing those two brothers of yours?’ Hettie was upstairs in the living room over the pub, browsing through magazines for the latest fashion trends.

  ‘Not likely.’ She slung her gas mask over a chair and unbuttoned her mac.

  ‘What do you think of this?’ Hettie showed her a picture of an afternoon dress, ruched on the bodice and sleeves. The model wore a hat which framed her face Anne Boleyn-style, with a little veil.

  ‘Not bad.’

  She looked up. ‘Cat got your tongue, has it?’

  ‘Sorry.’ She was feeling down and she’d come to her aunt to ask for help. Now that it came to it, she was lost for words.

  ‘Nothing wrong at home, is there?’ Hettie knew they were bothered abou
t the company Meggie seemed to be keeping. She never brought her friends home, Sadie complained, yet she was never in. That must mean she was ashamed of something; either the plainness of her home circumstances or the friends themselves. At any rate she was leading two separate lives.

  Meggie shook her head.

  ‘Is it the war? Is it starting to get on your nerves?’ The endless false alarms weren’t doing anyone any good; nights were interrupted and conditions in the shelters primitive, all for nothing. People were calling it the phoney war, yet still they waited in dread for the real thing to start.

  ‘A bit.’ She slumped into a chair, turning words this way and that inside her head. It was no good. She would have to come out with it. ‘Auntie Ett, you knew my pa, didn’t you? My real pa.’

  Hettie closed the magazine. In a way, though the question came out of the blue, she wasn’t surprised. ‘Is that what all this is about?’

  ‘All what?’

  ‘You going narky on your ma. I knew it wasn’t like you.’

  ‘Who says I’m narky?’ Meggie’s dark eyes flashed.

  ‘I do. That’s it, isn’t it? You’re on your pa’s trail and you don’t want to let on.’

  ‘I wish I was.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘On his trail. I’ve been up Tottenham Court Road more times than I can count.’ She explained her conviction that she’d once set eyes on Richie Palmer in the Underground shelter. ‘I’ve been back ever so many times, Auntie Ett.’

  ‘By yourself?’

  ‘Not always. Sometimes Jimmie O’Hagan comes along.’

  ‘Good, I wouldn’t want you up Soho on your own.’ Hettie knew from her time in the Sally Army that the streets could be grim. ‘And you’ve seen this tramp only the once?’

  ‘Yes. There are hundreds of them everywhere you look, huddled up in the bunks, or just drifting along the platforms. Every time I see one I think, this is him! Then he turns around with his horrible old face and his stinking breath and it isn’t the same one after all. He gives me a mouthful for getting in his way and off he goes.’

  Hettie leaned forward to take her hands. ‘It won’t do you no good.’

  ‘Why? He ain’t dead, is he?’

  ‘Not as far as we know.’

  ‘Do you know how I could find him?’ She appealed from the bottom of her heart. Her lip trembled, she sounded desperate.

  ‘I don’t, darling.’ Hettie stroked her hair. It was natural for the poor girl to be curious, but she feared she would be in for a terrible shock. She didn’t think for a second that the man Meggie had glimpsed could be Richie Palmer, but the truth could be equally bad. Last heard of, Richie was drinking himself to death in the back streets of Stepney, lying low from the police. ‘And even if I did, don’t you think it should be your ma you were asking?’

  Meggie turned her head away sharply. ‘I can’t do that.’

  ‘Why not? You’ve always been close, you two. Sometimes I think you’re more like sisters than mother and daughter.’

  ‘That’s why. I know Ma too well; she ain’t coping right now. She misses the boys. I can’t go adding to her troubles, can I?’

  Hettie thought this through. ‘You’re a good girl, Meggie. But truth is always better than lies.’

  ‘I ain’t telling lies!’

  She meant the lie of omission. ‘But you ain’t telling her what you’re up to, see, and she’s worried sick about you. Come to that, it might be a relief for her to hear what all this is about.’

  ‘I can’t. I can’t tell her.’ Since she was small Meggie had been used to shielding her mother, who seemed somehow to live life on top of some sleeping volcano. There were times when she ‘wasn’t herself’, or ‘her nerves were bad’. Times when Meggie took charge of the boys and let her ma rest, not often, but the sense of Sadie’s fragility was strong in the house.

  Hettie sighed. Meggie was doing all the wrong things for the right reasons. ‘And I can’t tell you about Richie Palmer without going to Sadie and asking her first. That wouldn’t be right, see?’ She was scrupulous. She saw rumour and gossip as dangerous weapons.

  Meggie bit her lip. ‘I might as well ask her straight out myself.’

  ‘You might,’ her aunt said gently, insistently.

  ‘If you ask me she’s round the bleeding twist.’ Rob switched off the radio with a violent snap. These days he and Walter had to hang around a lot in their Meredith Court depot, waiting for the phone to ring. Walter had just dropped the bombshell news that Sadie was out with Meggie, combing the streets to find Richie Palmer.

  ‘What can I do?’

  ‘Put your foot down, that’s what.’ He wouldn’t have stood any such nonsense from Amy.

  ‘It ain’t that easy, Rob.’ Walter was on his way to check the sandbagging around the entrance to the Nelson Gardens shelter. He reached for his tin hat and got ready to go.

  Rob flicked his cigarette to the floor and ground it underfoot. ‘You mean to say they’re out looking for him right this minute?’ For a second he was speechless. ‘And you let them? I don’t know why you didn’t just take your taxi and drive them round, get it over and done with.’

  ‘Look, I ain’t saying I like what’s going on—’

  ‘Like it? I should bleeding well hope not.’ He worked himself up. ‘And what’s gonna happen if they do find him?’

  ‘They won’t, don’t you worry.’ Walter tightened his helmet strap under his chin, ready to step out into the raw, cold night.

  ‘Says you. If you ask me, we should’ve nailed him before now, right at the start when we found out his little game.’

  ‘Don’t drag it up, Rob. It won’t do no good.’ He felt suddenly weary.

  ‘It ain’t me dragging it up. It’s Meggie, ain’t it? And Sadie. She’s gone soft in the head if she thinks Palmer will welcome his kid with open arms.’

  Walter shrugged. ‘No need to rub it in.’

  ‘Sorry. But that’s what I mean, she ain’t taken you into account, has she?’ Rob’s old hatred of Richie Palmer had risen up and grabbed him by the throat. ‘After what he tried to do to you.’

  ‘She does think of me. She don’t sleep at night for thinking of me, and Meggie, and the boys. She’s worn to a shadow thinking of others. Don’t suppose it’s easy for Sadie; it ain’t.’ She’d agonized for weeks after Meggie had come in one night and announced that she wanted to find her real pa. ‘Coping with the war’s bad enough, without any of this on top.’

  ‘And didn’t Meggie think of that before she opened her big mouth?’

  Walter sighed. ‘Don’t go on, Rob. I just mentioned it in case they do manage to track him down. I didn’t want it dropping on you out of the blue.’ The truth was, he’d happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time when the so-called accident happened fifteen years earlier. Richie had messed about with the taxi’s brakes in an effort to get back at Rob, not him. If Walter hadn’t taken the cab out on the off-chance, it would have been Rob who’d ended up under the wheels of the tram. ‘Meggie don’t know every little thing that went on. Sadie’s kept it quiet all these years. All she knows is, her pa ran off. Now she says she wants to meet up with him before it’s too late.’

  ‘Too late for what? Maybe someone should tell the kid the whole truth.’ Rob lit up another cigarette.

  ‘No.’ Walter stopped in the doorway. ‘Don’t do that.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Sadie still don’t want her to know.’ It wasn’t nice to find out your pa had tried to kill your uncle and got your stepdad by mistake.

  Rob shook his head, diving for the ringing phone across the cluttered desk. ‘Bleeding mad.’

  He sat shrouded by smoke, cigarette dangling from his mouth as he took down details of the job. By the time he’d finished, Walter had buttoned up his heavy jacket and was gone.

  Walter didn’t like any aspect of the current search for Richie Palmer any better than Rob. He had plenty of time to think of it as he paced the dark streets, finding h
is way by the white bands painted around the tree trunks at the edge of Nelson Gardens. For a kick-off, he didn’t like to think of Sadie and Meggie out by themselves on these dark nights. After five months of waiting on tenterhooks for the German threat to materialize – for the gas rattles to sound, the fire bombs to land – it wasn’t so much that he thought any longer that they’d get caught in an air raid. By now everyone was jaded, irritable, even let-down, but certainly not afraid that Jerry would suddenly arrive out of the sky in a storm of gas clouds and a burst of flames.

  No, it was the blackout and what went on under cover of darkness. There were areas where it wasn’t safe to walk, yet Meggie insisted that Soho was the area to search. She’d got it into her head that her father had moved on from the East End, north of the river to the richer pickings of the theatre and club area. Reluctantly, after much soul-searching, Sadie had agreed they should look together.

  ‘What if she’s right?’ Walter had wanted to know. ‘What if Richie does turn up?’

  Sadie had stared back at him from hollow eyes, red-rimmed with sleeplessness. ‘He won’t,’ she assured him. ‘You know Richie; when he wants to vanish he does it good and proper.’

  ‘Well then?’ He wanted to hold her close so as not to see her fears.

  ‘Well then, let her look, get it out of her system. Where’s the harm in that? But I’d rather she had me with her, and I’m glad we know what she’s up to, at any rate.’

  ‘Righto, and what if Richie don’t turn up, like you say?’

  ‘Then at least she tried. And she won’t be so hard on herself after.’

  ‘Meggie? What’s she got to feel bad about?’

  Sadie had sighed and turned over in bed, her face away from him. Now Walter shone his torch over the wall of sandbags at the shelter entrance. He heard her reply loud and clear as if she stood next to him.

  ‘Meggie’s got it into her head that it was her fault Richie ran off in the first place. No, it ain’t sensible, I know, but that’s what she thinks; that there was something the matter with her that made her pa leave us in the lurch.’

  His duty done, Walter switched off his torch and headed for home. Absent-mindedly he checked the blackout as he went along Union Street and on to Duke Street. The odd car crept by, headlights hooded and dimmed. Gas mask posters hung in tatters from an old billboard, some wag had scratched a Hitler moustache onto the face of the blonde socialite beauty who bore the message, ‘Keep Mum, She’s Not So Dumb’. The Duke was already closed up for the night, Paradise Court was silent and empty.