London Pride

by Beryl Kingston

  ‘One down and two to go,’ Mrs Geary said cheerfully as they pinned the paper to the wall.

  But it wasn’t quite as easy as that.

  The next headlines were all about the Germans moving into northern Italy and taking Rome, and as the weather got colder the campaign was bogged down in mud and mountains, and days went by without any news of a victory.

  ‘Why ain’t we advancing no more?’ Yvonne asked her mother.

  ‘Don’t ask me,’ Joan said. ‘I’m not a general.’

  Aunty Baby said she didn’t know either, but that was no surprise to either of them because Aunty Baby never knew anything and anyway she was always out with that funny-looking American of hers.

  ‘We’ll ask Aunty Peggy,’ Norman decided, when November began and the armies still didn’t seem to be getting anywhere.

  But for once Aunty Peggy’s answer was no help to them. ‘Poor devils,’ she said. ‘Wars are awful. I shall be jolly glad when this one’s over.’

  ‘There ain’t any victories no more,’ Yvonne said.

  ‘No,’ Peggy agreed. ‘They have to fight ever such a long time for a victory. You just think of them fighting out there in the rain, and all them Russians at Kiev all this time, and the Americans fighting the Japanese. It’s going on all over the world. There’s never any end to it.’

  She looked so woebegone and worried that Yvonne took action at once to cheer her up. ‘Go and put the kettle on,’ she said to her brother. ‘Aunty Peggy wants a cup a’ tea.’

  And a very good cup it was. But it couldn’t soothe Peggy’s worries although, naturally, she pretended it had.

  The trouble was that the ARP News, the paper that brought all the latest information to ARP personnel, had just reported something so alarming that she didn’t want to believe it. The Germans, they said, were threatening reprisals against Great Britain by means of a secret weapon more deadly and destructive than the most powerful high-explosive bomb. ‘There is the possibility,’ they warned, ‘that we shall soon have to face a period not unlike that encountered in the heaviest blitzes. We would do well to prepare ourselves.’

  Not long after this initial warning other snippets of news about a German secret weapon began to appear in the national newspapers. The Daily Express carried a report from Stockholm that hundreds of ‘pilotless planes’ were being built, and the Daily Telegraph spoke of ‘evidence of a secret weapon, crewless, radio-controlled and loaded with explosives’ and added that the building sites of these new robot planes were currently being bombed.

  ‘What do you think?’ Peggy asked Jim when he came home on one of his short leaves at the beginning of December.

  ‘All very likely,’ he said. ‘But not to worry. We shall be invading in the spring, bound to be, and if they have got robot planes the launching sites will be one of the first places we shall liberate.’

  ‘Well I hope so,’ she said. ‘We’ve had enough without robots.’

  ‘Hang on till the spring,’ he advised, carefully lowering his cap onto the hair he’d just been combing. ‘Now are we going to the flicks or not?’

  ‘Never trouble trouble,’ she said, smiling at him. He was quite right. It might never happen.

  Preparations for the invasion of France went ahead all through that winter. A new Allied Expeditionary Air Force was formed specifically for the invasion and the RAF 2nd Tactical Air Force took over the bulk of Fighter Command and became part of the new force. There was constant activity in the south of England as convoys of army vehicles all brightly marked with the circle and star of the new Liberation Army, clogged the roads. And military manoeuvres took place on every acre of open heathland.

  Froggy’s squadron was equipped with Typhoons whose job was to be shooting up enemy vehicles and tanks and Jim’s was sent on sweeps of the Channel. And in December Bomber Command, urged to it by Air Marshall ‘Bomber’ Harris, began a series of raids on Berlin.

  Nonnie Brown and Cyril were delighted and spent most of the Christmas ding-dong lauding Bomber Harris to the skies. But Peggy felt they were making a mistake.

  ‘If we bomb their capital city and they really have got a secret weapon,’ she said to Joan, ‘don’t you think they’ll be more likely to use it?’

  ‘I hope to God they don’t,’ Joan said. ‘There’s no way a’ knowing though is there?’

  ‘Not till they drop the things,’ Mrs Geary said cheerfully. ‘Is anyone going out for more stout?’

  But although no one in Paradise Row knew it at the time, the secret weapons weren’t ready, so it wasn’t a robot plane that attacked London at the end of that January. Retaliation was by more conventional means. On the night of 22 January the sirens went at eleven o’clock and the bombers stayed overhead until five in the morning. On 29 January, they returned again, this time when Peggy was on duty. And then during the first two weeks of February London was raided every night. It was, as people were soon saying, a regular ‘little blitz’, and although it wasn’t as devastating as the blitz itself had been, because the raids were shorter and the bombers fewer in number, it came as a nasty shock just the same because the Germans were using a new type of bomb. It was called a firepot and consisted of a canister containing over two hundred incendiary bombs that were released a layer at a time during its fall, so as to produce a cascade of bombs that would cover a very wide area.

  For the first week Peggy was on night duty and so she saw the descending shower of fire bombs at uncomfortably close quarters. It took as many stirrup pumps as they could muster to deal with so many potential fires in the two minutes it took them all to land and explode and their descent was noisy and very frightening.

  But at least there were more searchlights now, panning across the sky with their huge white beams, and the antiaircraft units put up such a barrage that the sky was full of colour like a firework display, with flares hanging in lurid clusters and tracer shells scrawling high red parabolas across the darkness. And for all their fury the raids were soon over.

  At six Paradise Row the children slept in the shelter, the windows were boarded up as soon as the sirens went, and Joan and Baby and Peggy brought their mattresses downstairs again.

  ‘Just like old times, eh?’ Joan said as she made cocoa for the three of them, standing in the kitchen with one ear cocked for the squeal of a falling bomb.

  ‘Damn Germans,’ Baby said. She was sitting on her mattress putting her hair in curlers. Her face was greased with night cream and she was concentrating furiously, scowling so hard that little gobbets of cream were squeezed between her eyebrows.

  ‘Oh my giddy aunt, look at you,’ Joan said, coming back into the room with three mugs on a tray. ‘If your Yank could see you now.’

  ‘Well he can’t,’ Baby said, taking a mug. ‘Ta.’

  ‘Just as well,’ Joan said. ‘What’s on the wireless, Peg?’

  Peggy was consulting the Radio Times. A broadcast was a good idea. It would take their minds off the raid. She was still on stand-by and quite likely to be called out again so she couldn’t go to bed for several hours yet.

  ‘No don’t let’s,’ Baby said.

  ‘Why not?’ Joan asked her, putting out her hand for the magazine.

  ‘Well…’ Baby said, looking at them thoughtfully. ‘The thing is … The thing is I’ve got something to tell you. Well not exactly tell you, I mean. The thing is …’

  ‘Spit it out,’ Joan said. ‘It’s that Yank, ain’t it?’

  ‘Well yes,’ Baby admitted. ‘He’s asked me to marry him.’

  ‘Good God!’ Joan said.

  ‘Well you needn’t sound so surprised,’ Baby objected, pouting. ‘I ain’t that bad a catch. He says I’m beautiful. The cutest girl he’s ever seen, he says.’

  ‘He ain’t seen you in curlers,’ Joan pointed out.

  They’ll fight in a minute, Peggy thought, and she intervened at once to prevent it. ‘Do you want to marry him?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Baby said. ‘I do. It’s about time I was mar
ried. Everybody else is.’

  ‘Everybody else ain’t,’ Peggy said, rather tetchily, because she was tired and it was such a silly reason to get married.

  ‘Well you and Joan are,’ Baby said, unabashed. ‘So why not me?’

  ‘You don’t love him though, do you?’ Joan said.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Baby said, carelessly. ‘I like him. He’s not like all the others, always grabbing at you and trying to touch you where they shouldn’t and getting all hot and sticky and everything. Anyway I think all this love business is overrated. How do people know when they’re in love? Tell me that. I think they’re making it all up half the time.’

  ‘You know when you love someone,’ Peggy said, ‘because you put them first without thinking about it. You ought to know that, Baby. It’s what Dad done with us.’

  ‘Quite right,’ Joan said. ‘That’s what I do with my kids. It’s just what I do.’ How wise Peggy was sometimes. ‘I must’ve been following Dad without knowing it.’

  ‘You wouldn’t get very far going on like that these days,’ Baby said, rolling up her next lock of hair. ‘Not with men anyway.’

  ‘Like what?’ Peggy said.

  ‘Not thinking. Doing things without thinking.’

  ‘You don’t have to think,’ Joan explained. ‘You just act natural. It’s an instinct.’

  ‘I always think about things first,’ Baby said. ‘Always. I couldn’t just do things without thinking about it first. That wouldn’t be natural to me. Besides, what if I was to end up pregnant?’

  ‘You’ll end up pregnant if you get married,’ Joan reminded her. ‘Most of us do.’

  ‘It’s all right if you’re married though, ain’t it?’ Baby said, bitingly. ‘It’s when you ain’t there’s trouble. And that’s what comes a’ doing things without thinking. Asking for trouble.’

  ‘Don’t you dare start on about that,’ Joan said. ‘I’ve had enough to put up with on that score without you starting.’

  ‘Let bygones,’ Peggy intervened quickly. ‘Are you going to marry this Gary of yours?’

  ‘What do you think, our Peggy?’ Baby asked. ‘Should I?’

  For the first time in her life Peggy gave advice that wasn’t entirely unselfish. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I think you should, all things considered. I think he’d make a very good husband for you.’ And inside her head she was happily planning. With Baby off my hands I could leave Joan and the kids more often and go off and stay with Jim. I might even run to a hotel somewhere. That would be a real treat. ‘When does he want it to be?’

  ‘Well we ain’t fixed a date,’ Baby admitted. ‘We was just talking about it.’

  ‘I’d fix a date pretty quick if I was you,’ Joan advised. ‘There’s ever so many weddings these days. If you don’t get organized you won’t find a church to take you.’

  ‘Oh there’s no rush,’ Baby said lightly. ‘We’ll think about it come the spring I expect. Anyway we couldn’t have a wedding with all this bombing going on, could we?’

  The all-clear began to growl up into the reassurance of its long steady note.

  ‘Well it’s not going on now, thank heavens,’ Peggy said. ‘I’m for some shut-eye. You can tell us what you decide when you’ve decided.’

  The little blitz was over by the middle of February. And at the end of the month when Jim came home on a thirty-six hour pass before being posted to Tangmere, Baby and Gary appeared at number six late one Saturday evening, hand in hand like children, to announce that they were going to get married in May.

  ‘We’ve been to church,’ Baby said. ‘An’ we’ve seen the vicar. It’s the first Saturday in May.’ She was glowing with excitement, clinging to Gary’s blunt hand. ‘Just the family. And everyone at Dodds of course.’ It would do them good to see her triumph. ‘You’ll come won’t you, Jim?’

  ‘If I can get leave,’ Jim said. ‘There’s quite a lot going on these days you know.’

  Gary gave him a conspiratorial smile. ‘You can say that again, Bud,’ he said.

  ‘He’s going on manoeuvres in April,’ Baby explained. ‘That’s why we’ve chosen May.’

  ‘It’s non-stop manoeuvres nowadays,’ Joan said. ‘It’ll be this year, won’t it?’

  ‘Looks like it,’ Jim said laconically. ‘This calls for a celebration. Let’s have a ding-dong.’

  ‘What, now?’ Baby said, her eyes round with delight.

  ‘Now.’

  ‘But it’s ever so late.’

  ‘No it’s not,’ he said. ‘It’s just the right time.’ Just the right time, he thought looking at his patient Peggy. It would do her good not to be looking after Baby all the time.

  His posting to Tangmere was very short-lived. In March, while Peggy and Joan were sending out invitations to the wedding, he was sent to Friston, and wrote home to Peggy to tell her that the squadron now had new Spitfire Xll’s with the most magnificent Rolls-Royce Griffon engines, and that he couldn’t wait for his next long leave. In April he was posted to Devon, and by then it was plain that the invasion was imminent.

  ‘I shan’t be back for the wedding after all,’ he wrote to Peggy. ‘But I dare say Baby will be able to get spliced without my presence. I hope it all goes well. Write and tell me about it when it’s over and done.’

  CHAPTER 38

  Even though she went on telling everyone she was only going to have a quiet wedding, Baby invited all her workmates to attend and all her neighbours in Paradise Row, even Nonnie Brown and that awful Cyril, which Joan said was downright unnecessary. Then she went off on a shopping spree and spent all her remaining clothing coupons on a length of expensive white satin for a ‘proper’ wedding dress and commissioned Mrs Roderick to make it for her.

  There was hardly a moment when she wasn’t busily planning something or other, buttonholes and bouquets from Ernest and Leslie, how to eke out the extra rations for the wedding breakfast, what Uncle Gideon would be wearing, because he had to look his best when he was giving her away, a bridesmaid’s dress for Yvonne and special flowers for her hair, a pageboy’s outfit for Norman which the little boy resolutely refused to try on, declaring it made him look ‘a proper sissy’, even what tunes she wanted Mr Cooper to play at the wedding ding-dong.

  ‘It’s a wonder she ain’t got a ribbon for the parrot,’ Mrs Geary said.

  ‘I’d keep quiet about it if I was you,’ Mr Allnutt advised. ‘You might give her ideas.’

  ‘The only thing she ain’t ordered up is the weather,’ Joan said. ‘And she’d do that if she could.’

  ‘Well I hope it keeps fine for her,’ Mr Allnutt said. ‘It is her day when all’s said and done.’

  Gary sent her a letter every day, saying how much he was looking forward to their wedding and how much he loved her, and she wrote back to him saying the same things almost word for word, because she wasn’t very good at writing letters. And April passed from showers to storms.

  ‘Oh look at that rain,’ she complained, as a torrent lashed against the windows. ‘It’ud better not rain on my wedding day, that’s all.’

  ‘Write and tell the Met Office,’ Joan advised. But Baby was already on her way out of the kitchen to pick up the mail.

  Towards the end of April Gary wrote to say that his manoeuvres were due to start ‘tomorrow or soon after’ and that he wouldn’t be able to write for a day or two but that he and his best man would see her at St Alphege’s Church at eleven hundred hours on 6 May. ‘Don’t be late,’ he urged, ‘or I shall be nervous.’

  She took his instructions most seriously and wrote out a schedule of events for the wedding day. ‘Rise at 7.30 a.m. Breakfast 8.00 a.m. Pageboy and bridesmaid dressed by 10.00 a.m.’

  ‘She’ll be lucky,’ Norman snorted when he saw his instructions. ‘If she thinks I’m sitting about in that outfit all day she’s got another think coming.’

  ‘You’ll do as you’re told, and stop arguing,’ Joan said.

  But he contrived to be out of the house running errands for Mrs Geary
until nearly a quarter past ten on the wedding morning, while the bride was alternately dressing and yelling for him down the well of the stairs.

  ‘I’ll swing for him if he ain’t back directly,’ she shrieked.

  ‘Here’s yer uncle come,’ Mrs Geary said from her seat beside the mirror. ‘My eye, you do look a swell, Mr Potter,’ as Gideon, who was wearing his old brown suit and a new pork pie hat that didn’t quite fit him, preened into the house.

  After his arrival events began to go as planned. Yvonne was sent to tease Norman out of the corner shop and bring him back to be coaxed into the hated suit, and at five minutes to eleven precisely the bride made her appearance in the doorway resplendent in her white satin with a bouquet of cream roses held to her bosom.

  The bridal procession was very grand and noisy, as well it might be when the entire street was taking part. They marched down the middle of the road in a self-conscious, chattering parade, past the Earl Grey and up the passageway to the church. And in the south entrance they were met by the verger, who was lurking rather anxiously to tell them that the groom hadn’t arrived.

  Baby was put out but decided to be gracious. ‘The guests can go in,’ she said, ‘and we’ll take a turn round the church.’ Let people see what a lovely bride she was. There was no harm in that.

  So she and Uncle Gideon and her pretty bridesmaid and her scowling page walked all round the church, along Straightsmouth Street and up the alley and back through the High Street collecting admiring stares all the way. But the groom still hadn’t arrived.

  ‘One more turn,’ Baby said. ‘He’ll have come by then.’

  So they took another turn, this time walking at a snail’s pace and causing quite a bit of comment, especially among the shoppers who’d witnessed their first appearance. But there was still no groom.

  ‘Perhaps you would care to wait in the vestry,’ the verger suggested. ‘These things do happen. Wartime, you know.’

  So they waited in the vestry. And waited. And waited.

  By now it was a quarter to twelve and the congregation was audibly restive.