‘We shall need their ration books,’ Peggy said, practical as ever.
‘Oh come now,’ Mr Ray said again. ‘There’s no need for that. Is there, Mother?’ For Mrs Ray had walked into the sitting room to see what was going on.
‘The children are going home,’ Peggy told them. ‘If you’ll get their ration books. Mrs Ray, we’ll pack their bags.’
That news put both the Rays into an obvious panic. ‘No, no,’ Mrs Ray said, her long face twitching as she searched through a drawer in the sideboard. ‘We’ll pack, won’t we, Father? We wouldn’t dream of putting you to the trouble. Here’s the ration books.’
‘No trouble,’ Jim said, walking straight past them and out into the corridor towards the stairs. ‘Up here is it?’
‘No,’ Mr Ray said, following him. ‘No, no. I forbid it.’
I’ll bet you do, Jim thought pounding up the stairs. ‘In here is it?’ he asked his hand on the nearest doorknob.
‘No it is not,’ Mrs Ray said icily. ‘That’s our room. You can’t do this.’
But Jim was throwing open the other two doors on the landing. Bathroom. Lumber room. Up the next flight with Peggy at his heels and the Rays puffing protestations after them. One door. That’s it.
The sight and smell of that dark attic room shocked him so much that he stood where he was for a second just taking it in, stained mattress, stinking pot, naked light bulb, dirty brown blankets, no furniture, no sheets or pillow cases, just their two pathetic suitcases full of dirty clothes that the poor kids had obviously tried to keep as tidy as they could for they were all folded up. ‘No wonder you didn’t want us to see this,’ he said to Mr Ray.
‘They’re very naughty children,’ Mr Ray said. ‘Always dirty, aren’t they, Mother? We’ve done our best.’
‘We’ll pack for you,’ Mrs Ray said, trying to put her body between Jim and the sight of the bed. ‘You don’t want to do that.’
‘Hop it,’ he said to her. ‘Come on, Peggy. The sooner they’re out a’ this the better.’ And he began to fling the few clothes that had been left on the bed into the nearest case. ‘I’ve never seen such a pig heap. You ought to be ashamed of yourselves, letting kids live like this.’
Mr Ray tried to draw himself up to his full height, always a difficult thing for a stout man to do. His jowls were quivering with outrage. ‘You dare to come in here,’ he shouted, ‘breaking in, accusing us. You don’t stop to think what we’ve had to put up with. We took your filthy children in when nobody else would have them, let me tell you. Slum children, that’s all they are. Worse than animals. More than any decent God-fearing people could stand. You ask anyone in the village.’
‘Out my way,’ Jim ordered as he and Peggy put the last of the smelly clothes in the cases. ‘There’s a jersey in the corner, Peg. And what’s this?’
There was a piece of rock-hard pastry under the pillow.
‘That’s his gingerbread man, poor kid,’ Peggy said. ‘Must bring that. It’s his treasure.’
‘I forbid this,’ Mr Ray said, and he blundered forward as though he was going to barge them both out of the room with his belly.
It was a great mistake. Jim seized him by the scruff of his neck and flung him to one side. It was such a sudden and violent movement that the older man was caught off balance and fell backwards right into the damp centre of the mattress.
‘Mother!’ he yelled. ‘Stop them! Mother! Do something!’
But Mrs Ray was crouching by the window with her hands over her mouth.
‘Look what you’ve done,’ her husband shouted. ‘I’m soaking wet. My trousers are ruined. You’ve got piddle all over my best trousers.’
‘Think yourself bloody lucky it ain’t rammed down your throat,’ Jim said, closing the second case.
‘I’ll have the law on you.’
‘No you won’t,’ Jim said calmly picking up the cases. ‘Because if you do we’ll report you to the NSPCC for assault and battery. Come on, Peggy. We’re finished here.’
It was a marvellous journey home, so full of relief and happiness and excitement, it was over almost before they were aware it had begun. Jim was purring with the success of their expedition, Joan sat between her two smelly children and cuddled them all the way, and Peggy put her head on Jim’s shoulder and took her cat-nap in satisfied exhaustion.
‘Bath,’ Joan promised happily when they all arrived at New Cross Gate. ‘Clean clothes, a nice meal. What d’yer fancy?’
‘Fish an’ chips,’ they said with one voice.
‘Thanks ever so much for coming with me,’ she said to Jim and Peggy.
‘What are neighbours for?’ Jim said, and Peggy kissed her and hugged the kids.
By now Peggy was looking very tired. ‘Bed for you,’ Jim said, as they climbed aboard the Greenwich train.
‘You got a one-track mind,’ she teased him sleepily.
‘Who’s fault’s that?’
It was true, Peggy thought, as she settled her head on the rough cloth of his tunic and began to drift to sleep again. I was wrong about sending the kids away. She knew that now and was pained by the knowledge, because she’d been so free with her advice and Joan had taken it so trustingly. I have been smug, she thought, as the train rocked her soothingly against his chest. Smug and wrong. Wrong about the kids, wrong about us. And before sleep sucked her downwards she made up her mind to put things right.
‘We’ll have a ding-dong,’ Mr Allnutt said. ‘A welcome-home ding-dong. Poor little beggars. We can keep the doors shut an’ nail the black-out down.’
‘An’ invite the Warden,’ his wife said, smiling at him. A ding-dong would be lovely. Just the right thing. They hadn’t had a get-together for months. Not since the war broke out. High time they started up again.
It was a riot. John Cooper said he’d never heard such a noise and the parrot was so happy it nearly choked itself trying to squawk, sing and swear at the same time. They sang ‘The more we are together’ and ‘Knees up Mother Brown’ and ‘The Lambeth Walk’ and Mr Brown played ‘There’ll always be an England’ on his mouth organ and because there were so many people singing the words the tune was almost recognizable, and they ‘Rolled out the Barrel’ and Percy was allowed to stay up late to be with Norman and Yvonne who were the guests of honour and the heroes of the hour.
‘You can ’ave whatever you like,’ Mr Allnutt promised them. ‘Top brick off the chimney.’
But they both said they’d rather have shrimps and Uncle Gideon said he’d cut off and get them directly.
‘Be a treat to get some air,’ he grinned. With the windows blacked out, the door tightly shut, and so many people singing and dancing, the heat in the little room was unbearable. ‘Turn out the light. I’m going to open the door. Anyone else want ter get out?’
There was a scramble at the open door as dark figures emerged into the street, and two of them were Peggy and Jim.
‘Where’s our lovebirds off to?’ Mrs Roderick’s voice said out of the darkness.
‘Same as you, Mrs R,’ Jim said. ‘Breath a’ fresh air.’
‘I’m off home to get me glass,’ Mrs Roderick said. ‘I don’t like drinking out of other people’s. Mind how you go. Don’t forget the shelter.’ It was pitch dark out in the street, and their little pocket torches only gave a pool of faint light immediately in front of their feet.
Jim and Peggy walked arm-in-arm down the inky street until they came to the boot scraper beside the front door of number two.
‘Has she gone?’ Jim asked, peering back for the flicker of Mrs Roderick’s torch. There was no light in the street at all. ‘Good,’ he said, fishing the key through the letter-box. ‘We’ve got the house to ourselves.’
And a bed to spread out on in the back room he rented from his sister, and a lock on the door to keep the world at bay.
‘You had this all planned, didn’t you?’ she teased as he drew the lock to. They’d kissed all the way up the stairs and they were both breathless with a heady combinati
on of desire and anticipation.
‘Correction,’ he said, ‘I had it all hoped.’
She put her arms round his waist and kissed him lovingly. When they drew apart the question on his face was too clear to need words.
‘Yes,’ she said, switching out the light.
Afterwards he opened the black-out curtains and they lay side by side on his crumpled bed and smoked in lazy contentment, watching the burning tips of their two cigarettes swimming gently up and down like two red fireflies in the darkness. They could hear the ding-dong below them, the piano sounding quite clear above the babble of cheerful voices.
‘OK?’ he asked.
‘Yes, very OK. Hunky-dory.’
‘I love you so much,’ he said, stroking her hair with his free hand.
‘More than you did before?’
‘Much much more.’
Lying like this, so warm and easy, with her head on his shoulder and his finger in her hair, she couldn’t think why she’d made them both wait so long. Reason told her she ought to have waited until they were married, that she ought to feel ashamed, but she didn’t, she felt wonderful, with that amazing pleasure still echoing, spreading languorous waves of well-being all through her.
‘If I stay here much longer I shall go to sleep,’ she said.
‘Go to sleep then. I’ll let you.’
‘They’ll miss us.’
‘No they won’t. Not in that crush.’
‘I can’t stay here all night.’
‘You could. All night and every night if you wanted.’
It was a tempting idea but it had to be resisted. ‘If we did that they’d all know. I couldn’t bear anyone to know, Jim.’
‘They won’t,’ he assured her. ‘We’ll be so discreet they won’t know a thing. Like spies.’
‘You’d make a lousy spy,’ she laughed.
He pretended to be annoyed. ‘I’d make a first-rate spy.’
‘With your face?’
‘What’s wrong with my face?’
‘Nothing,’ she said, kissing it. ‘I love it. Not very good at hiding your feelings though, is it? Even old Mrs Roderick calls us the lovebirds. God! I wouldn’t want Mrs Roderick to find out. Think how she’d gossip.’
‘No one’ll find out,’ he said, sitting up reluctantly. ‘We’ll go back to the ding-dong in a minute. When they’re making a racket. They’re a bit quiet just now.’
So they knocked at Mr Allnutt’s door when the company were in full voice singing, ‘If it wasn’t for the ’ouses in between.’ And just as he’d predicted, nobody paid any attention to their return. Percy was fast asleep on his father’s shoulder, Joan was cuddling both her nice clean sweet-smelling children, Mrs Roderick and Flossie were on their third port and lemon, ‘Well if you can’t run to a bit of extravagance in wartime when can you?’ and Cyril Brown was arguing with Mr Allnutt and Uncle Gideon and John Cooper.
‘Another two months, that’s what I give it,’ he was saying. ‘Two months an’ it’ll be all patched up an’ we can get back ter normal.’
‘Get away with you,’ John Cooper said. ‘You mean to tell me we’d stand by an’ let Hitler run all over Europe?’
‘Jack next door’s got his call-up papers,’ Gideon said. ‘That don’t look like the end of it to me.’
‘We don’t know the half of what’s going on behind the scenes,’ Cyril Brown persisted. ‘There’s peace plans all over the shop. The Pope’s working on it, an’ the Queen of Holland and the King a’ the Belgians, an’ that feller Roosevelt. Oh no! We’ll patch it up. I’d lay money. We don’t want ter fight the Germans. We got too much in common.’
‘Like an air force and an army,’ Mr Allnutt said wryly. ‘You do talk out the back a’ your neck sometimes, Cyril.’
‘Two months,’ Cyril said, nodding wisely. ‘You mark my words. April May it’ll all be over. You’ll see headlines in the paper by May.’
Sure enough there were headlines in the paper. On 10 May the Evening Standard declared, ‘Nazis invade Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg: many airports bombed. Allies answer call for aid. RAF planes are in action.’
The phoney war was over and the fighting was about to begin.
CHAPTER 25
The Stuka screamed towards them out of an immaculate blue sky, the shrill note of its engine rising higher and higher as it dived. At the first sound of its approach people on the crowded road had begun to scatter, now they were running pell-mell, scrambling into ditches, falling in panic, their faces distorted with fear, shouting orders, yelling and screaming, here a man pushing his children before him with both hands, there a woman with a baby clutched to her breast, old men stumbling bleary-eyed, dogs barking frantically, soldiers taking cover behind their carriers, families crouched together along the flanks of deserted cars, as the killer plane bore down upon them, its guns spitting fire.
Sid Owen had his rifle at the ready, like the rest of his platoon, but he had to concentrate to hold it steady because fear was making him shake. The plane was nearly overhead. They could see its blunt nose cone, the black crosses on those bent wings, the pilot grinning behind the glass cover of his cockpit, as his guns cut a red swathe through the mass of bodies on the road below him.
‘Fire!’ the sergeant yelled into the uproar. But the order was unnecessary. Most of his men were already blazing away, aiming in sheer fury at this huge obscene untouchable target.
Two bombs were falling, twisting in the air as if they were bouncing.
‘Take cover!’ the sergeant’s voice yelled. But there wasn’t any cover. Only the trailer and the dust of the road. Sid just had time to fling himself to the ground and cover his head with his hands before the first bomb exploded, lifting the earth under his chest and filling his mouth with dust. Then the second, further away, as grit and debris fell in a stinging shower, punching his shoulders, spattering the road, crunching against the roof of a nearby car.
‘Take cover!’ Sid said bitterly to the boy lying beside him.
The boy was weeping. ‘Fucking war!’ he said. ‘Fucking Stukas! Fucking Frenchies.’
‘You all right, Tommy?’
‘Fucking war,’ Tommy wept. But he didn’t seem to be bleeding.
Sid got to his feet, surprised by how stiff and tired he felt all of a sudden. The road was full of wreckage and bodies. And it was horribly quiet. Even the dogs weren’t barking.
He lit himself a fag and offered one to Tommy. ‘There y’are, Tommy,’ he said, “ave a drag.’
‘Ta, mate,’ Tommy said, taking the cigarette gratefully, his fingers trembling. He was doing his best to recover although his eyes were bloodshot and swimming with unshed tears. ‘Fucking ’ell, Sid! That was close. I thought I was a goner that time.’
People were moving again, crawling out of the ditches, running to the injured, weeping with grief and shock. There was blood everywhere, pumping out of wounds, seeping into dark pools under fallen bodies, even splashed along the side of their carrier. And the keening of grief was as terrible as the scream of the Stuka. A woman rocked the blood-red body of her baby in her arms, two small children sat beside the dead body of their father, huge-eyed and silent, too stunned to speak, an old man wandered aimlessly among the wreckage picking up shoes, dogs sniffed the corpses, one of the carriers was on fire belching black smoke, a soldier was being sick, leaning against the trunk of a pollarded tree, his face greeny-grey above blood-stained khaki.
‘Let’s be havin’ yer,’ the sergeant said, appearing from behind the carrier. ‘Render assistance, you two.’
‘Where d’yer want us ter start?’ Sid asked. How could you render assistance after a massacre?
There was an old woman struggling to right a cart that had been tossed onto its side in the middle of the road.
‘Start with her,’ the sergeant said. ‘We can’t none of us move till that cart’s out the way.’
There was a medical orderly attending to the soldier and some other people trying to staunch a woman’s head wou
nds with her shawl. Two lads were carrying the dead to the side of the road.
Tommy and Sid walked through the scattered bags and bundles to the cart. ‘Leave it to us, gran,’ Sid said to the woman. And she stood aside for them, meekly obedient.
‘You ask me,’ Tommy said as they heaved the cart onto its wheels, ‘the Dutch had the best idea. Give in. Let the buggers take what they want.’
‘They might want London,’ Sid said.
‘They could have it, as far as I’m concerned.’
‘You ain’t got kids, Sunshine,’ Sid said. ‘It’s different when you got kids.’
Ever since he’d arrived in France he’d known the truth of that, in a vague unspoken sort of way. Now, standing here in the bloody aftermath of this attack, the knowledge was certainty. Jerry was cruel and ruthless, and if there was anything he could do to stop them crossing the Channel and attacking Joan and his kids he’d do it. What a bloody good job he’d signed the kids up for evacuation. They were well out of it in the country. ‘It’s different when you got kids.’
‘Let’s get moving,’ the sergeant said.
‘What about them, Sarge,’ Tommy said, looking at the two dusty bodies by the side of the road.
‘Never mind them,’ the sergeant said. ‘Can’t do nothing for them, can yer? Right then. Let’s be ’aving yer.’
The section began to climb aboard the carrier, and while he waited his turn Sid fished in his pocket for another fag. As he withdrew the packet it dislodged the letter he’d been writing to Joan that morning. Was it really only that morning? It seemed a lifetime.
The crumpled paper drifted down into the dust. ‘BEF France.’ he’d written. ‘My dearest Joan. Quiet today. Lovely weather.’
That’s a laugh, he thought, reading the words as he lit his fag. No point in picking the letter up. It was out of date now. He’d write another when he got the time. If he ever got the time. As he climbed into the driver’s seat he could hear heavy gunfire to the south and the occasional rattle of machine-gun fire.
‘Fuckin’ war,’ young Tommy growled, climbing in behind him.
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