Coronation Wives

by Lizzie Lane

  I know you will do your best. The warmth of your humanity has stayed with me over the years and I thank you for letting me into your life.

  With warmest regards,

  Josef

  Warmest regards. Was that all he could say? Had she expected too much?

  Feeling slightly wounded by what she could only regard as the sort of signing off one would receive from a close friend, she ripped open the letter from Signora Carlotti. She read it quickly. The Signora was getting concerned. The boy was with strangers in a foreign land. He should be with someone who loved him.

  I’ll deal with it later, she told herself as she left the building. She also promised herself she’d make enquiries regarding the men on the building site regardless of what Brookman might think. Eventually that is, once she’d coped with the business of the day.

  Feeling single-minded rather than curious, she pushed her way through the early morning crowds on their way to shops, banks and offices.

  ‘Yoohoo! Mrs White! Mrs White!’

  Charlotte turned round. Mrs Grey was the only person she knew who didn’t use her full surname. And there she was, her face pink with effort, she rushed up, her hat tipping to one side and a shopping basket rattling with tins of Spam, beans and corned beef over one arm. She clapped her hand to her mouth before speaking, her eyes two chips of bright blue above her blotchy cheeks.

  ‘I forgot you were out this morning. Polly don’t have a key! She won’t be able to get in.’

  Charlotte glanced at her watch then unlocked her car. ‘Never mind. I can dash up and let her in. I’ve got time.’

  The traffic was light and although a bus had broken down on Park Street, Charlotte made good time. As she pulled up Polly was walking through the front gate.

  ‘I’ve got the key,’ Charlotte shouted and rushed breathlessly through the gate too. ‘Mrs Grey forgot,’ she explained. ‘I’ll let you in, but I’ve got to go out again. Can you manage?’

  Polly stood saucily, hands on hips. ‘No! Them dusters are a bit awkward to use and that whistle on the tea kettle gives me the willies.’

  ‘Sorry!’

  ‘You look all in. Fancy a quick cuppa?’ Charlotte’s watch told her she had enough time. Polly began to tell her how busy they’d been at the pictures the night before. ‘They ’ad Brief Encounter on last night. God knows, but it’s been on enough times. But there you are. Good film, though. Married woman carrying on with married man – at least – I think he was married. Real naughty. Lovely, though. Made me think of the first time I went to see it after the war. Remember who I was supposed to be seeing it with too.’

  Polly’s reference to adultery infiltrated Charlotte’s thoughts and the letters from Germany came into her mind. She asked, ‘Would you ever want to turn the clock back – or have the clock catch up with you?’

  Polly frowned. ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Well …’ Charlotte paused. What was the best way to put this? The same way she’d put it to Edna? ‘What if something or someone from your past came back?’

  ‘To haunt me?’

  ‘No. I mean actually came back and wanted to see you. Your American, for instance.’

  ‘Canadian.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Polly shook her head. Normally her blonde hair would flop over her eyes. Today it was tucked up in a turban and although there were more lines on her face than there used to be, she wasn’t bad for her age.

  Charlotte sighed. ‘Not an easy question, is it? Old loves. Old indiscretions.’ She looked down into her tea and clicked her neatly trimmed nails against the rim of the cup. What would she do? The funny thing was she ached for Josef to be here, but perhaps she was only feeling that way because it could not be so. The unobtainable was bewitching.

  ‘If Carol’s dad came back I’d have to let him see her,’ said Polly.

  ‘What about Billy?’

  ‘I’d talk to him first.’

  Polly tilted her head to one side, her eyes fixed on Charlotte’s face. ‘Got yer own skeleton in the cupboard then, Charlotte? Some bloke you ’ad a bit of a fling with come back to claim you for ’is own?’

  Charlotte almost blushed, but she was used to Polly trying to make her embarrassed. ‘No! Nothing quite like that.’

  And the strange thing was she was telling the truth. It wasn’t like that. The letter sitting in her bureau and the ones that had arrived this morning covered a very specific subject. But she couldn’t possibly pass it on until she had gleaned some idea of its likely effect. Edna and Polly had answered in a similar vein. She’d think upon their answers for now and make a decision when the time was right – whenever that was.

  ‘I must be off now,’ she said and headed quickly for the door before Polly could ask her anything else she didn’t want to answer. She needn’t have worried. Polly threw her a perfunctory wave and turned on the vacuum cleaner.

  After cutting through Ashley Down and onto the Gloucester Road, she took a left and entered the St Paul’s district of Bristol, a place of once superior merchants’ houses built in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

  Number 191 Little City Road was a four- or five-storey building with steps leading up to the front door and flanked by an ostentatious though crumbling portico. Another flight led down to a basement through a gap in a row of railings that leaned dangerously outwards, their iron spikes a hazard to passers-by.

  Charlotte peered up at it through the car windscreen. The area had gone downhill somewhat since its heyday, but this house looked worse than most. Raw brick showed where flaking stucco had finally fallen off. Net curtains dimmed from white to dog’s tooth yellow hung behind windows of scum-covered glass. Charlotte hazarded a guess as to what it was like on the inside and made a mental note to have it inspected.

  The three Polish men she was to take to new lodgings and jobs at Pensford, a mining village to the south of Bristol, greeted her with politely shy smiles as they piled into her car.

  ‘Nice to meet you,’ she said, and smiled back, barely managing to suppress the urge to wrinkle her nose. The stench of male sweat and mouldy clothes filled the car. Unthinking, she reached for the window handle then paused. What was she thinking of? She couldn’t possibly upset their sensibilities. It was her job to be friendly but efficient, to make them feel at home.

  She pushed in the clutch and pulled away from the kerb. Perhaps it might be an idea to run a class on personal hygiene. A vision sprang suddenly to mind. This is soap. This is a flannel. Upturned faces, both foreign and British men and women being told that if you didn’t bathe regularly you didn’t smell too sweet.

  Her attention was brought back to reality as the man sitting beside her dealt with the immediate problem.

  ‘We open window?’

  Charlotte breathed a sign of relief. ‘Yes. It is a little warm, isn’t it?’

  ‘No. We stink. The woman in there is dirty.’

  ‘Her house is dirty. So we are not clean,’ said a second man who had broad shoulders and a crumpled face that looked as though it had been slept in and refused to flatten out.

  ‘And she won’t use bath – won’t let us use it,’ said the one who had opened the window.

  At moments like these, Charlotte was ashamed to be British. Some landladies were pretty fair. Some, like this one by the sound of it, were less so, but beggars couldn’t be choosers. Notices were appearing in many boarding house windows saying ‘No Pets. No Poles. No Children’ and just lately ‘No Blacks’. Unlike the Eastern Europeans at least the latter had British passports. They didn’t have to carry a document around with ‘Alien’ stamped on it.

  Blasted woman! Well it would have to be dealt with. It took a right Tartar to deal with a Tartar in this profession – and she was it!

  ‘You must insist on using it,’ Charlotte proclaimed stridently as if her word alone was enough to break down the bathroom door. ‘A man is entitled to a bath after work. Either she complies or she won’t be getting he
r rent money. There cannot be any logical reason for her denying you a bath. Water is no longer rationed.’

  ‘That is so,’ said the first man who had spoken, ‘but coal is.’

  Charlotte frowned. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Her coal house is full for the winter so she keeps more coal in the bath,’ he explained nonchalantly.

  Charlotte noticed how he used his hands to add emphasis to what he was saying as his eyes took in the passing scene. He looked to be in his late twenties and had chiselled features. In the Hitler years, his looks would have been termed Aryan.

  ‘And in the kitchen, and in the cupboard in my room,’ echoed the man with the crumpled face.

  The third man, who had sunken dark eyes and prominent cheekbones, said something in Polish. The man who had explained about the coal grinned as he interpreted what he’d said. ‘He wants to know when he can have a proper home with a bath like he used to have. He will not worry about servants.’

  Charlotte’s eyebrows rose in surprise. ‘No landlady will supply servants!’

  The blond man explained. ‘You do not understand. He used to have servants.’

  ‘Oh!’ Charlotte concentrated on the road ahead. She was learning things about these people all the time. She was also learning more about her own people, and some of it was not very attractive.

  ‘Have you all had breakfast?’ she asked as she made off towards Bedminster and the Bridgwater Road that would take them out to the village of Pensford, one of the many mining villages fringing the south and east of the city.

  ‘Oh yes.’ It was the first one again. ‘Bread and jam.’

  ‘Is that all?’ This was terrible.

  They all nodded and told her it was so. Her anger at Mrs Halifax, the landlady, plummeted to new depths. Working men needed a decent send-off first thing in the morning. Perhaps the woman had compensated by giving them a packed lunch and it was hidden away in their pockets. But she wouldn’t ask just yet. She had to deal with the landlady at the new boarding house. It wouldn’t be fair to take her annoyance out on her and Charlotte prided herself on always being fair. She also had to deal with the foreman at the mine.

  A woman! A woman! She could see his face now, his mouth twitching as he fought to control the urge to spit or swear. He would hate having to deal with a woman, as if they were of a specific breed incapable of filling in a host of Government forms.

  You’ll be fine, she told herself, and immediately assumed the confident air of someone who knows how to handle people.

  Brent View Cottage was down a narrow lane, which left the main road on the right-hand side after entering the village and crossing over the river just past the Miners’ Institute.

  Charlotte checked the particulars filled in on the official form. The landlady’s name was Mrs Stanley. Hopefully she’d be an improvement on Mrs Halifax, though you couldn’t always tell on first sight of either the landlady or the lodgings.

  The large cottage was not chocolate box pretty like those set in the rolling hills of Devon or Dorset. This was a mining area, the tail end of the Welsh coal seams. Its no-nonsense construction reflected a hard industry where men still crawled on their bellies in the narrower parts of the seam and clawed the coal from the earth by physical force with a short-handled pickaxe.

  The cottage was heavily built of local pennant stone, its roof shading a fretwork weatherboard and set back windows. Scarlet geraniums glared through glass panes and bustled against the trelliswork that formed a porch around the door. It seemed well looked after.

  Charlotte breathed a sigh of relief though reserved judgement. But she was hopeful. Despite its austere construction, the place had a far sunnier aspect than the lodging house in St Paul’s. As if to confirm first impressions, the sun obliged by peering out from behind a cloud at the same time as Charlotte lifted the brass knocker and tapped on the door. A pair of bright, deep-set eyes set in a round, friendly face appeared. ‘Come in, me dears.’ The door was flung wide. Mrs Stanley was a woman of round body and ruddy complexion. Red veins ran together and glowed on each cheek, reminding Charlotte of the wooden Dutch dolls from many years ago, their facial features formed entirely by the vivid application of red and black paint. Red polka dots patterned the old-fashioned apron she wore, the same red as the geraniums, both brightly contrasting with her grey hair, which was gripped firmly by half a dozen steel pincers from the brow backwards on each side of her head. Flappers used the same contraptions back in the twenties to produce Marcel waves. Mrs Stanley was most definitely of that generation, but her head presently resembled an armour-plated porcupine.

  They stepped straight from the road into the sitting room where a brass fender glowed against an old-fashioned coal black range. Even though it was summer, a copper kettle puffed away merrily on a hot, black hob. Porcelain cups with gilt borders sat around a red-checked tea cosy in the centre of the table. Tea had brewed.

  Charlotte introduced the three men and Mrs Stanley wrote down their names phonetically, exactly as Charlotte pronounced them.

  ‘Jan, Ivan and Paul,’ Mrs Stanley stated after failing in her attempts to remember how to pronounce their surnames. Their first names were easier to remember.

  As they all made themselves comfortable in Mrs Stanley’s front parlour, Charlotte took the opportunity to ask the men if they’d been given a packed lunch. It turned out they hadn’t. She gave Mrs Stanley a pleading look and the woman nodded knowingly.

  ‘They’ll have a good packed lunch when they go down,’ she said emphatically. ‘Men ’ave got to be fed right doin’ a ’ard job like that.’

  Charlotte could have kissed her.

  They drank tea and ate digestives while waiting for Mrs Stanley to make up some food to take with them. Charlotte took the opportunity to study closely the place where the men would be staying.

  Mrs Stanley, she decided, didn’t fall into the same category as Mrs Halifax. The sitting room was furnished with old but solid mahogany furniture dating from the end of the last century. The walls were covered in green and brown Victorian wallpaper and there were thickly patterned rugs on the floor that had a vaguely oriental look about them. Despite the dark decor the room felt warm and the fresh smell of beeswax was evidence to its cleanliness.

  Photographs in ebony and plain wooden frames sat on the sideboard and hung from the wall above it on long chains that were hooked to a picture rail. Charlotte got up from her chair and studied a sepia print of a man in dark clothes standing on the deck of a ship.

  ‘My Ernest,’ Mrs Stanley explained bustling back into the room with the same sunny disposition as the geraniums sitting on the window ledge. ‘Merchant navy. Got torpedoed in the Mediterranean. ’Course, he was only young in that photo.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Charlotte said assuming he was dead.

  Mrs Stanley burst into laughter. ‘Oh no! You’ve got the wrong idea. He ain’t dead, me dear. Some Italians in a fishing boat rescued him and, as luck would ’ave it, an old maid with some money owned it. Took a fancy to ’im, she did. And what with that hot sun and warm sea, well, you can guess the rest. He had what he wanted out there and decided not to come home. But I keep his photo ’ere and use ’im as an excuse – just in case any bloke wants to move in on me. And I’m quite comfortable, you see. Ernest said I could keep the cottage though it’s been in his family for generations. But I do like meeting people. And I do like male company,’ she added with a salacious smirk. ‘That’s why I take in lodgers.’

  Charlotte was still smiling on the drive to the mine. Mrs Stanley had almost made her forget that she still had to face the foreman.

  ‘Nice lady,’ said Ivan who had again taken the seat beside her in the car.

  ‘Yes,’ said Charlotte. ‘I think so too.’

  Just as she had expected, the foreman at the mine was surprised at having to deal with a woman. Eyebrows thick as caterpillars beetled over his nose and, although she would stand her ground and make sure things were done properly, he made her
feel guilty at being there. Perhaps, she thought, the Poles would be better received if a man had brought them and couldn’t help feeling a little regretful on their behalf. But you insisted, she said to herself. You insisted you could manage and Mr Brookman had been fair enough to accept that. He was one of the few who didn’t mind whether it was a man or a woman sorting things out – as long as the job was done.

  The formalities were completed. Each man produced his identification, a book the size of a passport with the word ‘Alien’ stamped across the front. The foreman studied each one carefully before handing her ‘Authorisation to Employ’ slips for each one.

  Charlotte started to relax. Perhaps everything was going to run smoothly and she’d be away and back home more quickly than she’d expected. But then she saw the look on Ivan’s face. He was staring at something in the vicinity of the foreman’s tie and his face was white with anger.

  He grabbed the thin, grey book from Charlotte’s hand. ‘I am not staying here.’ His mouth was fixed in a firm, straight line. He spun on his heel and started to walk away.

  Charlotte was taken completely by surprise. ‘Why? What’s wrong?’

  Running after him on high but fairly sensible heels, she grabbed his arm before he got clean away and tried to reason with him. ‘This man has to look at your identification details before employing you. After that I have to take your book to the police station for stamping because you’ve changed both your address and your job. Do you understand that?’