They went on with the packing in silence though Cissie coughed occasionally as the dust rose from the folds of fabric, and Hannah looked at her anxiously. She was looking haggard these days, every minute of her fifty years, and was a little thinner then she used to be, but she had refused to see a doctor and there was little Hannah could do to make her.
‘That’s it then.’ Cissie straightened her back and looked around the empty showroom. ’they can take this as soon as they like. I'll do a check, shall I?’
‘I'll come too,’ Hannah said. Cissie looked at her sharply and said nothing, but nodded and together they came out of the workroom and began to go from floor to floor down through the old house.
It looked mournful in the June sunshine thrown through the tall windows, the pale patches on the walls where pictures had hung and bare boards on the stairs where once the thick pile carpets had been. Mirrors, drapes, everything had gone, packed up and sent for storage out to High Wycombe.
‘Although,’ Hannah had said, ‘Why High Wycombe should be any safer than London, I don’t know. They could as easily bomb there as here.’ But they had gone on, systematically stripping the Buckingham Palace Gate house of every sign that Mary Bee Couturiere had filled it with busyness and work and purpose for fifteen years.
‘That’s it, then,’ Cissie said when at last they stood on the steps. ‘I'll be there in the morning with the keys to let the men pick the stuff up, and then I'll leave the keys at Artillery Lane. When will you be there?’
‘As soon as I get through at Whitehall. It looks as though its going to be ATS uniforms, rather than WAAF ones.’
Cissie grimaced. ‘Pity. I like the blue bette than khaki. That was one thing about the last do. Striped print and red and blue capes - it was a pleasure to work on, sort of. This time, all khaki, oh, well, was machst du? That’s the way it is. G'ey g'zint Hannah. See you tomorrow.’
Hannah watched her go and thought again how ill she looked, and made up her mind to phone Lenny tonight. A good boy, Cissie’s Lenny, successful and busy in his accountancy office for Cissie had done him proud when it came to education, and living in great comfort in a handsome solid house in Willesden with his handsome solid wife and handsome solid children; a good boy who cared still about his mother, although his wife sniped at her a good deal, finding her East End voice and her raucous East End offensive to her sense of propriety. Nice Jewish women didn’t behave like that, Lenny’s wife thought, and was busy rearing her two daughters to be nice Jewish girls with a liking for silk underwear and respectable addressed and refined accents and disdain for their tough old grandmother.
Grandmother, Hannah thought now, as she turned and began to walk up towards the park. I'm a grandmother. It doesn’t seem to bother Cissie, it never did, but maybe it’s different when you actually see your own grandchild, hold her, know her.
She remembered herself suddenly, with the baby Mary Bloomah in her arms, sitting on a box in the ice cold dimness o the Antcliff Street house, feeding her a memory so sharp she almost felt the small mouth pulling her nipple, and she shivered, in spite of the warm sunshine, pulling her jacket across her chest and walking faster.
The park was lovely, alive with people on this hot afternoon, and she felt the smell of hot crushed grass and roses and syringa drift into her, enjoying the way the heat came and went on her face as she moved under the trees with their great leaf carapaces. Even the busy squads of men toiling over the digging of trenches and the filling of earth bags couldn’t detract from the loveliness of the afternoon; and she wouldn’t let them. They had lived with doubt and fear and then let-down for almost a year now. They had steeled themselves for bombs that had not come, and for battles which had not erupted, and now all the preparations seemed rather pointless, and far from alarming.
Even when she was at Whitehall, sitting in those vast echoing offices with those polite murmuring men talking about the methods of supply and collection that wold be used when she started her uniform making again, she could not believe in this war. It wasn’t like last time, when the casualty lists and the constant flurry of wounded soldiers at the railway stations were a constant reminder of what was going on over the Channel.
But as she reached the far side of St James’s Park and began to walk towards Admiralty Arch, she knew she was deluding herself and she knew why. It was a real war. Germany had moved into Holland two months ago now, and since then there had been nothing. Silence, total silence and the only way she could cope with it was by pretending it wasn’t so. Really, he wasn’t there, her Charles. He had not gone there to see Henk and make plans for joining the left wing forces in Germany. He hadn’t told her that he had heard of things happening to Jews in Germany that had to be taken seriously, had to be dealt with. It wasn’t true, it couldn’t be. She had told him that, passionately, when the first refugees had begun to arrive, filling peoples heads with tales of persecution.
‘I don’t believe it,’ she said. ‘They look all right, well fed and dressed and, they aren’t like the people I knew in the bad days, Charles! Then they hadn’t clothes to call their own, hardly, when they arrived at Tilbury with just a bag of bits and pieces, and starving into the bargain! These are cultured people, well fed,’ she repeated. ‘It’s not true, it’s not true.’
But of course of was. The old fires were smouldering again just as they were when her father had been a boy, at home in the shtetl in the old Pale, so long ago. For months now, even before Hitler had marched into Poland, they had been busy, the Lammecks and Damont women, the Rothschilds and Sassoons and Abrahams, the rich and safe ones, collecting money, arranging for friends to be scooped up and brought out of Germany and Poland and Czechoslovakia and Lithuania and Estonia and wherever else the could. It was bad and might get worse yet.
‘No,’ she whispered into the trees above her head in St James' Park as she walked on, faster, ignoring the way the exercise beaded her upper lip with sweat. ‘No. It’s not all right. He’s gong to be all right. He'll be home soon.’
She tried to see him, tried to imagine him coming through Paultons Square toward number 22, his curly hair riffling in the breeze, his injured leg kicking out to the left as it had ever since the battle of Teruel in Spain, when his knee had been shattered by rifle fire and left him permanently stiff. At least that had brought him safe home then and though she had wept for him she had been glad too, for it meant, she had told herself, an end to it all. He would stay here, be ready to admit he’d done enough, might even learn to forget Marie and be happy with someone nice, marry, have babies.
But of course it wasn’t like that. He wasn’t going to come home to Paultons Square for he was still there in Holland had been there almost six months and there had been a total silence from him since May 10th.
Germans in Amsterdam. Soldiers with rifles and heavy grey helmets and heavy grey uniforms and heavy grey faces in Amsterdam. She could not imagine it, and tried to distract herself from her fears by remembering the Amsterdam she had fallen in love with in the spring of 1935 when Marcus had take her there for one of their rare holidays.
They had taken the car, the big Bentley, crossed the Channel at Dover and had driven briefly through the north of France and on through the Flemish countryside to the Netherlands and the bulb fields. She could still remember it, the sea of colour and the great waves of scent that had broken over their heads. She had been drunk with daffodils, giddied with hyacinths and tulips and jonquils and narcissus and by the time they had passed Rotterdam and the Hague and come rolling through the flatness into Amsterdam she had been giggling and silly and he too had been skittish, making dreadful puns and roaring with laughter at them.
They had gone on like that all the time they were there, behaving like silly children as they walked though the streets of Amsterdam, leaning over the canal bridges to watch the barges beneath. The bells of the Westerkerk, as they walked slowly along the Prinsengracht, had made her cry deliciously, at not a sad crying, but a happy moist emotionalism that,
he told her, laughing, was sheer chocolate-boxery and she had laughed as well as cried and told him he was absolutely right, and that she was full of tinsel too, and held his hand and walked on over the cobbles, deeply happy.
And now there were German soldiers in those tall thin houses with the bell gables and the hooks above to carry up goods to the high floors, and in the restaurants with the fat waiters who waddled everywhere, almost falling over their too-long white aprons, and at the herring stalls on the corners of the bridges in the Dam Square and on Waterlooplein.
And in the tight narrow streets of the old city where the Jews lived. They had gone, she and Marcus, almost accidentally to a service at the Spanish and Portuguese synagogue at the Jonas Daniel Miejerplein, but because either of them was particularly anxious about synagogue attendance, but because they had happened to be walking there that Saturday morning and seen the people go in, dressed in their best hats and shining with soap and virtue, and almost without consulting each other had followed them, They had parted, she to sit in the gallery above and he to sit below in borrowed tallis and his very English bowler hat on his head, and listened dreamily to the singing and prayers and come out blinking into the noonday sunshine, responding happily to the nods and smiles of the other congregants, and gone to eat a vast Dutch lunch which was anything but kosher with no sense of guilt or embarrassment. It had felt so right, so comfortable, so natural. As she walked now through St James’s Park in London five years later, where men in khaki sweated over filling bags with earth ready to protect buildings when the German bombs came, she remembered those Dutch people in their half circle city of water and cobblestones and bells and tried to imagine it filled with German solders. And could not. It was as thought her mind could no take hold of the vision of that water-shimmering city being anything but flower filled anti carillon-echoing and happy in the sunshine and she knew she felt so because of Charles. While Amsterdam remained in her mind a peaceful place it was possible to face the fact, the cold bitter fact, that Charles was there and had not sent word since May 10th.
She reached Whitehall in time to almost collide on the steps with Marcus, who had arranged to meet her there. They went together to the third floor of the War Office, where they were to settle the plans for turning Artillery Lane into a uniform factory again. He looked a little pale. She took his arm and held it close for a second, and he smiled at her reassuringly.
‘Darling, I’ve had a cable,’ she said.
‘Marie?’
‘A girl, That’s all it says. Nothing else. I came from Los Angeles, not San Francisco, so you were right, they have moved. I wish they’d let me know!’
‘She’s still getting the money through all right,’ Marcus said, and squezzed her hand. ‘We'll hear soon enough if there’s anything really wrong. At least they let us know about the baby, Grandma Hannah! Never mind, darling, I still love you.’ He kissed her cheek briefly, somewhat to the shock of a passing clerk, and led the way into the office.
They went afterwards to one of the Uncle Alex’s tea shops in the Strand and sat opposite each other sipping the thick brown brew that had made so large a part of Uncle Alex’s fortune. After a while she put her cup down and said, ‘Marcus - I think we're going to have to move, don’t you?’
He looked at her briefly and smiled. ‘I knew if I waited you’d see it. It’s not going to be easy if the bombing does start, and - well, its a responsibility. I thought it might be better to try to fix a flat somewhere nearer the factory.’
She grinned at him. ‘Psychic. As ever. I talked to Cissie about it. We can convert half the top floor into quite a neat flat, she says. Now’s the time to do it while there are still some people around to do some work. Marcus, I'm not wrong, am I? It is going to get worse, isn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ he said after a moment, and put down his cup. ‘Yes. I’ve been talking to people, War Office and Defence. There’s no question of it. Dunkirk was a bad business, bloody marvellous but bad. And Hitler’s sure to follow it up. The ones in the know are getting ready for a big push. Quite what it'll be we don’t know, but it'll be big. So, we’ve go to make plans accordingly. And being near the factory is a good plan.’
‘Is it near enough for you? To Lammeck Alley, I mean?’
‘I'll be spending more time in Whitehall than Lammeck Alley,’ he said. ‘I … ‘ He looked at her sideways. ‘I tried to join the air force but they wouldn’t have me. I'm young enough, just, they had another job for me.’
‘Thank God,’ she said and closed her eyes. ‘Oh, Marcus, I’d have … how could you without telling me? After last time, I - ‘ she shook her head, her throat filling with tears so that she couldn’t speak.
‘I know. That’s why I had to try. As it is, I'm getting a unformed job, but they'll never let me out of London, so don’t panic. Army. They're putting me in as a major. Supply and munitions.’
He reached over the table and took her hand.
‘If … if they try to send you to France… ‘ she shook her had again, still choked and this tim he laughed, gently.
‘Darling, it isn’t that kind of war any more. No one’s digging trenches in Flanders or round the Marne. They’ve pushed us out of France, and it’s going to be a long time before we get back there. I'm certain of that. We won’t sort the Germans out in mud baths this time. This time it'll be different, God help us all. And I'll stay in London, where I'll be safe, with you. As safe as any of us can be, I promise.
63
‘All right, all right,’ Cissie said distractedly, and reached for a rag from the pile in the corner to wipe the woman’s face and then hugged her briefly. ‘I know what it’s like, believe me I know. Mine went last week. But they're better off gone, believe me, better off.’
The women sniffed again thickly, and began to weep once more, the tears rolling down her face unchecked. Cissie looked at Hannah and grimaced.
‘Let her go home,’ Hannah said softly. ‘She'll be better of there. Let Milly go with her.
They sent the woman home, and the machines began to whirr again, but the pall of emotion still hung over the wide factory floor. It had been a dreadful morning, and Hannah shared the woman’s misery even though she herself had not had a child involved in the exodus.
They had gone from Stepney Green station, the children, all those over five with their big handwritten labels tied to their coats and their gas masks in cardboard boxes strung over their shoulders and bouncing on their bottoms as they walked with their suitcases and bags of food and sweets and apples clutched in their hands. They had looked bewildered, some of them, and a few had been crying but most of them were just as children always were, noisy, excited by the fuss going on around them, unaware of what it all meant, even the big ten- and eleven-year-olds. All was orderly until the evacuation officials herded the children off down to the platform and onto the trains and refused to let the mothers seeing them of come any further, when one by one the women burst into wailing. The children, looking back saw, then what was happening, and began to cry too, and then it was an inferno of noise, of sobs and shouts and tears, and a few children turned and ran back, dodging the officials' arms, and found their mothers and clung to them and refused to go. Hannah saw one look a her child, a black-ringleted plump little girl of about seven, and then sideways at the other mothers around her and began to back away out of the crowd, taking her child with her.
‘I don’t care!’ she has cried shrilly as one of the evacuation officials came bustling up to try and take the child away from her. ‘I don’t care, they ain’t sent no bombs yet, have they? So they won’t send none now! And even if they do, it’s better we should be together. A bomb’s got your name on it, what difference you're here or you're in Devon! it’s got your name on it! Mr Shirley’s staying here with me.’
But there had been only two or three like that. The train had pulled out with its load of labelled children and the women had been left standing on the bridge watching the empty rails glinting in the sunshine and th
en, slowly, gone back to their homes or to their jobs. Hannah had been there to help transport the children of her workers from Spitalfields, and now she filled her car with the mothers who belonged to her and drive them back, silent, trying not to think of Marie and her baby, of Charles, of Cissie’s three grandchildren now on their way to America, of all the other shattered families who were almost the first casualties of this war.
Life had become unbearably hectic as she tried to run the factory while reorganizing so many other aspects of daily living. The Paultons Square house had been closed. Bet had gone to live with her sister Edie and her husband in Whitby ('And I know it’s a sin and a crime to say it, but I don’t like her, reely don’t, not the way I like you and Florrie,’ she had wept. But I got to go, because they can’t run their business now the boys ‘ve gone to the army and and George’s heart isn’t what it was so I got no choice, but oh, Mum, I'm that miserable.’) and Florrie had set to work to make the flat at the top of the factory habitable.
It was tiny, with just a small living room and a bedroom for Marcus and Hannah and a boxroom for Florrie to sleep in with a slip of a kitchen alongside. Florrie grumbled mightily about it all, but coped, somehow, and Hannah and Marcus had moved in one lunch hour, so that they would lose as little working time as possible. The furniture had been put into storage, and so had the silver and china and all the ornaments and paintings they had collected over the fourteen years of their marriage, leaving the flat spartan and cheerless; but they were there so rarely, only sleeping and eating, that they hardly noticed.
Hannah had put the factory on a three shift system in order to increase output and from five a.m., when the machines went on as the first workers arrived, until midnight, when they were switched off at the end of the third shift, she was there supervising the cutting, the distribution, the sewing and the finishing, as well as dealing with the usual office work. Cissie had tried to argue to say she would work longer hours but Hannah had been adamant.
The Running Years Page 63
