‘Our main job up in the forest is to find deserters and those foreigners attempting to avoid internment,’ he said. ‘With regard to the latter, we discovered a couple called Feldman some days ago, but there is still one German missing.’
The Gypsy, Martin Stojka.
‘And because this “person” is one of their kind, we understand that some native Gypsies might be helping him,’ he continued. ‘The Lees have been in my sights for some time.’
‘But you haven’t found this person with them?’ I said.
‘No. But my fear is that they have used the tragedy involving their daughter to cover up this individual’s escape.’ He leaned forward. ‘Williams didn’t kill that girl. They did, the family, that brother-in-law . . .’
‘That’s nonsense! Why would the Lees kill their own daughter?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said hysterically. ‘They’re Gypsies – who knows?’
‘But Dr Craig has said—’
‘Williams was set up by the Gypsies!’ Mansard stared down, wild-eyed, at a very frightened Charlie. ‘You’re coming with me,’ he said. ‘You’re going to tell me where your family and Stojka are or I swear—’
‘He’s only a boy!’ the Duchess cried, roused to anger.
‘He’s a filthy Gypsy, is what he is!’ Mansard said, as he roughly grabbed one of Charlie’s wrists.
‘Oi!’ I put my hand across Mansard’s, an action greeted by one of his blokes aiming a revolver at my head.
‘Hancock, this is a matter of national security,’ Mansard hissed, as he pulled the boy towards him.
‘Mr Hancock!’ Charlie cried.
I tried to keep a hold on the lad but Mansard wrenched him out of my grasp.
‘Where are you taking him?’ I asked, as I watched the boy being dragged towards the door.
‘Mr Hancock, come with me!’ Charlie pleaded. ‘Let Mr Hancock come with me!’
‘Christ Almighty, boy, I’m only taking you back to your camp!’ Mansard told him.
‘Well, let me go with him, then,’ I said. The captain obviously thought that Charlie had information about the whereabouts of his family and possibly this Martin Stojka too. I was afraid he wouldn’t be too careful about how he got to it. ‘Captain Mansard?’
He turned back to me with cold, hard eyes. ‘This is not a job for a civilian,’ he said. ‘And we don’t need an undertaker – at least, not yet.’
As the MPs propelled Charlie towards the top of the stairs, he caught hold of Nan’s apron. ‘Miss Hancock, please!’
Nan, who hadn’t been comfortable with what she had seen so far, now reacted to the fear in the boy’s eyes. ‘Oh, come on,’ she said, ‘he’s only a kid. Could be a raid any minute! Where’s your Christian hearts?’
Captain Mansard pushed the boy away from her and said, ‘Probably quite near my Christian lungs.’ And then he raised his cap briefly to my sister while his men picked up Charlie and carried him down the stairs.
The last thing I heard the child say was, ‘Mr Hancock, don’t let our Lily be alone, will you?’
Even before I heard the front door of the shop close behind them I was chastising myself for not having done more to protect the child. Whether or not Mansard was right about the Lees shielding Stojka was immaterial. Charlie was too young to be guilty of anything beyond doing what adults wanted him to do. And although I knew that what Mansard was up to had a point, and was probably quite right, I was worried about the methods he might use. He obviously didn’t like the ‘Gyppos’ and would not, I felt, be anything like gentle with young Charlie or any of the other Romanies the Lees had left behind to go God alone knew where.
But within seconds the sirens went, and other considerations took hold. Stuttering, as I do when a raid is on, I picked up and took my mother down to the Anderson in the yard. Closely followed by Nan, we both called to Aggie, whom we still couldn’t hear moving about up in her bedroom.
‘A-A-Ag,’ I shouted. ‘C-c-c-come . . .’
‘Agnes!’ Nan yelled. ‘Get here!’
Our feet made a thundering noise as we pounded down the stairs, followed after a while by Aggie, muttering, ‘All right, I’m coming, keep your bloody hair on!’
Once all three, plus Stella, who had been brooding in the shelter ever since I’d shouted at her earlier, were settled and I’d satisfied myself that the horses were securely tethered in the stable, I went back into the shop as the first set of explosions lit up the sky above the Royal Docks. All the treasures of the Empire, it is said, are in those warehouses around those vast bodies of water. I thought of them on fire – of great hands of bananas, enormous sacks of sugar and grain, and of the rats that fed on all that, cracking and screaming and disappearing for ever into the mouth of the flames. It made me want to run. Oh, God, did it make me want to run!
But I didn’t. I went into the room at the back of the shop where Alfie Rosen was now hidden inside his coffin and where Lily Lee still lay uncovered. There I, a gaujo and really not worthy, had a go at batting back the bad spirits from Lily for Charlie. But the dark shapes I saw in the corners of the room were familiar rather than the exotic things I imagined the Romanies had. They were the endless screams of men whose heads flew off as soon as they put them over the tops of the trenches, they were horses’ legs cracking under the weight of the Flanders mud like twigs. They were things that were devilish because they were so horribly human.
As the bombing reached its height about an hour later and the ground shook beneath me in an endless earthquake, I bent down low over Lily Lee and whispered, ‘I – I w-won’t let them g-get you, Lily. Y-y-you will be s-safe with me.’
And then I placed the coffin lid over her lest the ceiling should come down and damage her.
Chapter Twelve
There is a very sad story associated with the Jewish cemetery on Buckingham Road, Forest Gate. Known as the West Ham cemetery, the site is enhanced by a large, round mausoleum that was built to take the body of a young woman called Evelina de Rothschild. Married to Ferdinand, of the famous banking family, poor Evelina died in childbirth in 1866 and was mourned by her husband for the rest of his life. The mausoleum is a testament to Ferdinand’s grief, which apparently turned the poor man into a recluse. It was a rather fitting place for a young and much-loved person like Alfie Rosen to be interred.
There must have been hundreds of mourners. My lad Arthur, whose aunt Flo works in the heart of the Jewish East End at one of the sweat-shops on Fashion Street, reckoned that almost every tailor and seamstress in the area had downed tools to come out for Alfie Rosen. At half past three on a winter afternoon, with Jerries expected any minute, that was quite something.
Once I’d got Doris, her mum, her sisters and Herschel Rosen to the cemetery and lowered Alfie’s coffin into the hole, I stood with my lads by the Rothschild mausoleum. After all, once Rabbi Silverman began his prayers we’d all be at sea, not having any grasp on Hebrew. All I knew was that once it was all over the male congregants would fill in the grave as opposed to the Christian custom of paying others to do it for us. The only non-Jews in the thick of the congregation were my mother and sister Nan. The Duchess held on to the arm of Doris’s mother, Sadie Mankiewicz, another long-standing widow like herself. Only Aggie didn’t make it, not because she didn’t want to but because she had to work. If you’re in munitions or food production, like Aggie, that’s a reality of your life. Nothing can interrupt the war effort.
‘Poor Doris Mankiewicz,’ Hannah whispered into my ear, when she reached my side to stand next to me.
I looked down at her and said, ‘What you doing here?’ My girl knew Doris a bit on account of their both coming from the same area, and through me, of course. But with Hannah and things Jewish, there is and always will be a problem.
‘Weren’t Sadie Mankiewicz and her family cut me off when I went with that boy,’ she said. ‘That was my parents and the rest of the frummers. This lot here ain’t like that.’
Hannah’s parents were, and alwa
ys had been, very religious or frum Jews so her going off with a Gentile had effectively separated them from her. Doris and her people were not religious and therefore not nearly so scandalised. Alfie Rosen, like a lot of young Jewish men, had been totally anti-religion, and a considerable number of his mates in the congregation carried Communist flags.
While the rabbi did his stuff I watched Doris. White and, for once, thin-looking, she was being literally held on her feet by one of her younger sisters. There are no flowers at Jewish funerals so there’s little to look at except the other mourners – and the awful coffin down its dreadful hole.
‘Doris wants to come back to work tomorrow,’ I whispered to Hannah, ‘but I said no.’
Hannah shook her head. ‘Well, I wouldn’t expect her to sit shiva, not being frum, but even so.’
‘It’s the shock,’ I said. ‘She can’t see any other way to carry on except the normal one, as if Alfie was still alive.’
‘We put our dead away too quickly,’ Hannah said. ‘People can’t tell whether they’re on their heads or their heels.’
‘It’s traditional.’
‘Yeah,’ she said, I thought with some bitterness in her voice once again. ‘Yeah, it’s traditional.’
And then the men, starting with a weeping Herschel Rosen, began to shovel earth on top of Alfie’s coffin. It’s a terrible thing to bury your child. My dad, who’d seen most things in this business in the course of his life, never got used to it and neither will I. After the oldest of Doris’s brothers-in-law had taken his turn with the shovel I went over to pay my last respects and gladly take my place at filling in the grave. Arthur and Walter did their bit and, as I watched them, I said goodbye and ‘Thanks, mate’ to Alfie in my head. He’d been a good sort and as I turned to Doris yet again, that fear for her future gripped me in the way it had when I’d first been told of Alfie’s death.
I went back briefly to Herschel Rosen’s small flat in Spitalfields for the subdued thing that passes for a wake among the Jews. But I couldn’t stay – or, rather, I didn’t want to – so I left the horse-drawn hearse with Walter so that he could take the Duchess and Nan home and made off in the car. Hannah had bade farewell to everyone at the cemetery but we had arranged to meet on our own back at the shop. Just occasionally, usually when someone close to me dies, I have a need to feel alive again, just for a while. There’s only one way I know of, I’m ashamed to say, that I can do that. But, then, in my own defence, not just any woman will do. I have to feel passion. Just to do ‘it’ would be disgusting. But that’s never the case with Hannah.
Not daring to go inside the empty home of my fathers, I took Hannah into my arms in the pitch-black darkness of the backyard. I began to feel myself becoming excited when suddenly I heard a voice that was neither mine nor Hannah’s.
‘Mr Hancock!’ it hissed. ‘Mr Hancock!’
It was a child’s.
‘What is it?’ Hannah said, as she felt my body move away from hers. ‘What’s wrong?’
Suddenly I felt excited in a different way. ‘It’s—’
‘Mr Hancock, it’s me!’
‘Charlie?’
I couldn’t see him but the yard was very dark and Charlie Lee, like me, is a dusky person.
‘Yes!’
Two startled eyes came out of the gloom towards me.
‘What’s going on?’ Hannah asked.
‘It’s Charlie, Lily the Gypsy’s brother,’ I said. ‘He’s—’
‘Come out of nowhere at an important time, H,’ Hannah said, a little tetchily, as she smoothed her skirt down towards her knees. I began to wonder, as Charlie got closer to me, whether I was still disarrayed myself. But hearing his voice so suddenly had done much to cool my ardour.
‘Charlie, did Captain Mansard let you go or—’
‘I run away,’ the boy said. Now that he was very close I could see that his clothes were even more dirty and torn than usual. He smelt strongly of damp and earth.
‘What about your mum and dad, your brothers?’
Charlie looked quickly at Hannah, then back at me.
‘It’s all right, Charlie,’ I said, ‘Hannah, Miss Jacobs, she’s a friend.’
Even through the gloom I could see that he was giving me a right old-fashioned look. Whether he’d seen us out together before up in the forest I didn’t know, but I was well acquainted with the fact that Gypsy boys are rarely little innocents, even at Charlie’s time of life. He’d known what we’d been doing.
‘So, your mum and dad and your brothers . . .’ I pressed.
‘Safe. I see ’em. But I never took that gaujo captain to ’em,’ Charlie said proudly.
‘So they’re . . .’
‘Mr Hancock, what the gauje soldiers say about the Romany from Germany ain’t true.’
‘Martin Stojka?’
‘Sssh! Sssh!’ Charlie hissed. ‘Don’t know who might be listening!’ He lowered his voice still further. ‘The Germans are killing our folk. The Gentleman, as we call him, he’s on the run.’
I didn’t know what he meant, really. After all, whether Stojka was a Nazi or not, he was only to be interned, as far as I knew. He wouldn’t be sent back to Germany and, as horrible as internment no doubt is, all this trouble was hardly in proportion to what would happen to him in the end. I took Charlie and Hannah inside the shop and made us all a cup of tea. I know it doesn’t solve anything, but I’m a Londoner and making tea at times of crisis is what we do.
‘Mum and Dad have got him hid,’ Charlie said, as he rolled himself a fag on the kitchen table. ‘I know where they is but they ain’t told me about the whereabouts of the Gentleman. The less I know the better, they say.’
Had Mansard been right about the Lees and their involvement with Stojka all along? I wondered. ‘So why are you here?’ I asked, taking in the somewhat sour expression on Hannah’s face.
‘They want to get the Gentleman out of the forest and out of London,’ Charlie said. ‘A car does it quickest, my dad says, and you’re the only person we know with one.’
Hannah, who had been shaking her head for some seconds, said, ‘Are you soft in the head, boy? Blimey, if the MPs are out looking for someone there’ll be roadblocks all over the shop!’
‘Dad said you could put the Gentleman in one of your coffins,’ Charlie said to me. ‘Only you folk have cars as can take body boxes. Them don’t get stopped by the coppers.’
Mr Lee had obviously thought this through without, however, considering that I might refuse my assistance. Hannah was right: with the MPs after him, Stojka was unlikely to get away and if I were to be found with him I could be tried for treason. ‘No, Charlie,’ I said, ‘I can’t do that. It’s far too risky.’
Charlie’s face screwed up into a scowl. ‘But the Nazis are after him, Mr Hancock!’
‘No, the Military Police—’
‘They’m sent by the Nazis, my dad said!’
‘But, Charlie, the Nazis aren’t here, leastways not yet.’
‘No, but there’s traitors ain’t there?’ Charlie said. ‘Traitors sent them soldiers after our Gentleman!’
‘What? Captain Mansard? I know he’s not always very polite, but—’
‘He’m a murderer!’ Charlie said.
‘What?’
‘Weren’t Sergeant Williams what killed our Lily, it were him – Captain Mansard,’ the boy said.
‘Look, Charlie,’ I said, ‘I don’t know what your mum and dad are doing or what they’ve said to you, but Dr Craig told me he was certain that Sergeant Williams had killed your Lily. I know it’s hard to bear because Sergeant Williams has himself passed on—’
‘H!’
There was real fear in Hannah’s eyes as she gazed at something over my shoulder towards the kitchen door. I turned and saw my old mate Horatio Smith.
‘Hello, Horatio,’ I said, then stopped when I saw what he had in his hands. It was a kukri knife, just like the one some Gurkha bloke had given my old dad up in northern India. Where the Gypsy had
this one from or why he had it, I couldn’t imagine.
‘You’re a good man, Mr Hancock, and it would pain my soul to hurt you, but I will if I must,’ Horatio said, as he stood in the kitchen doorway with the kukri knife outstretched. ‘We need your hearse car for our Romany brother.’
‘Give it to him, H,’ Hannah said, her eyes bright with fear. ‘I don’t know what any of this is but just give it to him!’
‘If it were that easy we wouldn’t’ve been disturbing you, Miss. We’d have just took the thing ourselves,’ Horatio said baldly. ‘But we don’t drive, leastways not motor cars.’
‘Horatio,’ I said, ‘I don’t know what’s going on here so I’m not prepared to drive – at least, not with Hannah, Miss Jacobs.’
I knew, of course, that despite our many years’ acquaintance he would put that kukri up to my neck, and he did. Every man’s loyalty is greatest when it is to his own, whatever and whoever that might be.
‘I’m sorry and all that,’ Horatio said, as he moved the knife away from my neck, ‘but you have to help us. On your feet now.’
As I stood up I said, ‘I just hope you’re right about this Gypsy “brother” of yours not being a Nazi.’
Horatio and Charlie exchanged a look.
‘Oh, he ain’t no Nazi, Mr Hancock,’ Horatio said. ‘Can’t tell you no more’n that, but he ain’t a German, I can tell you.’
It didn’t make me feel any better but at least whatever I was going to be asked to do was something I was almost entirely ignorant about. Whether or not that would save me from a traitor’s death, should the police catch us in the act, I didn’t know.
Horatio, standing in front of me, said, ‘Let’s go.’
I paused to draw breath, and Horatio dropped, suddenly and dramatically, unconscious to the floor in front of me.
‘Stella!’
When you haven’t always lived with people you don’t always remember that they’re there. This applies particularly when said people are a bit barmy.
‘He was gonna stab you!’ Stella said, as she placed the large saucepan with which she’d hit Horatio on the kitchen table. ‘I couldn’t have that.’
After the Mourning Page 14
