by Mark Dunn
“Hey, you,” said Jerry, now towering over Maggie. “Do you remember me?”
“Of course I remember you,” replied Maggie, looking up for an eye-blink and then returning her attention to the record she’d casually plucked up to inspect.
“Struttin’ the Blues Away,” offered the blissfully bleary-eyed Bella Prowse. “That’s one of Reggie’s favorites.” (Not that Bella’s husband Professor Reginald Prowse would be in any condition to enjoy the selection. He had, quite some time earlier, entered alcohol-abetted dreamland in his favorite easy chair in a relatively isolated corner of the room.) “I love that one too. It’s the Atlantic Dance Orchestra. Do you know them?” The question was directed to Maggie, though it was repeated for Jerry’s benefit. “Do you know them?”
“I don’t know nothing except that I have to see this chickie”—pointing at Maggie—“before she flies the coop.”
“See me about what? Am I leaving?” Maggie looked up to see Ruth and Carrie, with Molly propped unsteadily between them, stationed near the front door. Ruth and Carrie were nodding exaggeratedly and making broad hand gestures indicative of departure.
“There’s something I want to give you—in parting,” said Jerry. His voice now sounded poised and friendly, although there was the hint of something else there: a childlike wishfulness, which couldn’t be easily dismissed.
Maggie’s resistance dissolved. “I’ll take it. What is it?” Maggie held out her hand, palm up. The hand wobbled.
“Not here. In private.”
Maggie was now sitting with her legs tucked delicately beneath her like a sleepy fawn in a glade. She gave Jerry her hand. He lifted her gently to her feet.
He led her to one of the bedrooms. He flung open the door. Inside was a young woman and man in a bunny hug, she seated in his lap on a chair.
“Beat it!” Jerry rumbled.
The command was speedily obeyed, the door slammed shut upon exit. And then, without a moment’s hesitation, Jerry Castle bestowed his “gift”: a kiss for Maggie to remember him by.
“You drive me wild. I gotta have you,” he said, after their lips had parted.
“I—I’m flattered you need me,” inhaled Maggie, while trying to catch her breath, “but I hardly know you.”
“Then find out about me. Let’s see each other. You say when. I’ll say where. Or versa vicea.”
“I don’t know. The room’s spinning.”
“I’m sweeping you off your feet.”
“No. I think I’m drunk. I think you put something in my lemonade.”
Jerry looked away in an attempt to conceal his smirk.
“Answer me! Look at me! Did you do something to my glass of lemonade?”
“I cannot tell a lie. I adulterated your lemonade.”
“You—”
“—turned your lemonade into adult lemonade.”
“Why?”
“I thought you needed a little loosening—”
Maggie’s hand met Jerry’s face before he could even complete his answer. He responded by pulling her roughly toward him and kissing her again. This kiss was delivered without affection or even passion. It represented only the brute desire to thoroughly control her in that assailing moment.
It was answered by yet another slap.
Followed, finally, by the emergence of a sly, devilish grin on the face of the victim, and the panting declaration: “I. Will. Have. You.”
“In. Hell,” returned Maggie, who then flailed blindly for the door, yanked it open, and half-marched, half-fled down the hallway to the parlor in a show of frazzled, trembling indignation.
The phonograph wasn’t playing “Strutting the Blues Away.” Instead, its speaker was blasting out the comical song “Yes, We Have No Bananas,” while Bella Prowse was eating a banana in contradiction of the lyrics, and Jane Higgins was being roused from slumber upon the sofa by three of her friends, each with one eye on the front door, and each looking conversely regretful over having to skidoo from the most interesting night of their young lives.
Chapter Fourteen
London, England, October 1940
The sign in the grocer’s window read:
Yes, We Have no Bananas
Nor onions nor oranges, sultanas, currants,
dried fruit of any kind, spaghetti, kippers & herring.
So please don’t bleeding ask.
Jane laughed; Molly, Ruth, and Carrie smiled. Maggie registered nothing. As We Five hurried along to take shelter, Maggie Barton was red-faced, brow-cinched, and broodingly silent. Once the public ARP shelter was reached and the friends settled inside, Maggie persisted in closing herself off from communication with everyone round her—both those she didn’t know and those four young women whom she did. Maggie was too busy recalling with revulsion exactly what Jerry Castle had said to her, had done to her outside the Hammersmith Palais.
And after the two had been getting on so well.
Jane had seen it. She’d been saying her own goodnights to Tom Katz and had noticed out of the corner of her eye the outlines of the ugly exchange: the vulgar overture, the harsh rejoinder. She’d then watched, now with her eyes targeted like a huff-duff antenna, as Jerry, taking drunken offense to the rebuff, pushed and then penned Maggie against the wall, where he took liberties in full view of other couples emerging from the ballroom. Jane was prepared to go and assist Maggie in removing herself from the man’s vile clutches when Maggie succeeded in doing that very thing on her own, but not without delivering retributive justice in the form of a hard slap to Jerry’s face.
It was a slap, which, curiously, prompted a smile, as if this—her expression of instantaneous hatred for him—was what he’d been after all along.
Jane had thought at the time: if this is how the bloke thinks he can win the affections of Maggie Barton, he’d best look elsewhere. Of We Five only Jane would have fallen for such brutish, caveman tactics, and only then because Jane would have given back as she got: cudgel-wielding caveman, meet cudgel-wielding cavewoman. But Maggie, and Jane’s other circle-sisters, weren’t cudgel-carriers. They hadn’t the leathery hide of the scrabbling London East Ender like Jane. They were much too staid and naïve to desire the attention of anyone but a gentleman—with special emphasis on the “gentle.” From what she’d observed outside the Hammersmith, Jane did have to admit, though, that modesty and girlish innocence hadn’t prevented her friend Maggie from asserting herself when need arose.
Thought Jane: “Huzzah for my friend Maggie Barton for standing up to the bloody lout!”
Up to then—up until this display of most deplorably bad behaviour on the part of Mr. Castle, behaviour which reminded Jane in retrospection of some beastly belch from the pulpit after a particularly inspirational sermon—the evening had proceeded quite swimmingly. It was such a night as none of the five had ever before experienced. Over the course of the three and a half hours spent in the company of the five young men who’d sought them there, Maggie and Jane and Carrie and Molly and Ruth had learned things about themselves, about their needs and their natures, which could not have been predicted only a few hours before.
And best of all: they learned how to have fun—the kind of fun for which the Hammersmith Palais was nationally famous.
Carrie and the hulking young Scandinavian named Holborne had taken to one another like ducks to a cool summer pond. Carrie’s love of music propelled her out onto the dance floor without a moment’s hesitation, and Will did a yeoman’s job of keeping in good step with her. They sat out only three or four dances through the long evening. Slowly and soulfully they gyred and dipped to both of the celestial serenades made famous by Glenn Miller. Elsetimes they jitter-jived like seasoned Lindy Hoppers to the more energetic numbers like “Woodchopper’s Ball.” This particular song was played as loudly as possible to cover the sound of the evening’s first Luftwaffe air attack. (Maggie had guessed wrong; it was the Ham-mersmith Palais’s custom never to evacuate its ballroom in the midst of a bombing raid. Regular custome
rs knew when they entered the palace each evening that this might very well be their last night on Earth, but, by Jove, at least they’d die happy!)
Whilst they were dancing, Carrie and Will, both of whom seemed to know the lyrics to every popular song, sang along with the orchestra, Carrie demonstrating her inarguable lyrical gift, Holborne’s own voice generally on-key and perfectly serviceable as amateur voices go. They concluded their tuneful tête-à-têtes with the antepenultimate number of the evening, “The Breeze and I” (“…they know you have departed without me, and we wonder why…”) Even more moving than this was the song which came next (which they listened to in respectful silence)—the movingly valedictory “We’ll Meet Again,” sung not by its famous interpreter, Miss Vera Lynn, who was presently abroad performing for the troops, but by a woman who looked and sounded very much like the U.K.’s beloved Miss Lynn, and who capitalized on this fact by calling herself Deirdre Lynn.
Molly, like many others in the crowd, could not keep herself from tearing up during the poignant “We’ll Meet Again,” though the song lost all of its personal relevance given that Molly was saying goodnight (and not goodbye) to a conscientious objector, who had a very good chance of meeting Molly not only on some sunny day but for that matter any day of the week, irrespective of the weather. Molly also wept when the band struck up for its last number of the evening, the patriotic “There’ll Always Be an England,” though in a very large room (the Palais was a great converted tram shed) with a very large number of men in uniform, We Five’s beaux for the evening stood out quite conspicuously in their civvies. As a result, they became recipients of judgemental stares and glares during both this song and the earlier rendition of “Bless ’Em All,” and specifically during the song’s pointed lyric, “You’ll get no promotion this side of the ocean.”
Molly was comforted through her tears by the tender ministrations of her demonstrably Molly-ravenous new boyfriend Pat, the two calling into serious question through their intermittent gaiety and unfettered physical familiarity with one another on the dance floor their assertion that they had only just met.
Neither Ruth nor Cain danced, but kept up a lively marathon rag-chew over topics ranging from the recently discovered Paleolithic cave paintings in southwestern France to whether or not the popular radio comedian Tom Handley was brilliantly funny or annoyingly overrated. Their relaxed and friendly chat was marred only by a look of passing indictment from Holborne—one totally lost on Ruth—which came when the band struck up the droll “Kiss Me Goodnight, Sergeant Major,” sung, as it always was, by a male vocalist.
The first kiss of the night—and one which met the approval of both participants—was shared by Jane and Tom and elicited the following exchange:
Jane: I don’t think I’ve ever been kissed by a Jew before.
Tom: My dear Miss Higgins, I would hazard a guess that you’ve never been kissed by an Anglican or a Catholic before either. Excepting, of course, your mother and father.
Jane: To tell you the truth, you’d be correct. But why don’t you be a gentleman and not spread this fact about?
Tom: I spread very little about these days, Miss Higgins. We Children of David try our best to keep our heads down as much as possible. That way Herr Hitler’s troops will have a little more trouble finding us when it comes time to cart us all away.
Jane: If Ruth were standing here she’d ask why, with other members of your faith quarantined behind fences in those bloody camps they’re talking about—why you don’t put on a uniform and join the fight to set them free.
To which Tom replied with a simper: “Oh, it’s only your friend Ruth who wonders this, is it? Then do be sure to relay my answer to her: ‘Tom Katz is a coward—a “fraidy cat,” as the Yanks say. He takes no pride in it, but it cannot be helped.’ Now, enough of this empty jawing. Give us another kiss and be quick about it.”
Which Jane did, enjoying the kiss terribly, though it troubled her that Tom had come to such comfortable terms with all the glaring defects to his character.
And as for Maggie and Jerry, the two had jollied and jousted with one another through most of the evening, each finding in the other one who fancied jesting with a hard edge but a soft wink… until that moment when Jerry Castle stopped winking and beheld his companion for the night with a suddenly predatory eye, this moment arriving without any warning whatsoever.
Of the five couples, only Maggie and Jerry had made no plans for seeing each other under decidedly more intimate circumstances later in the week. Or rather, Maggie and Jerry might have made plans, but the chance of this happening was dashed in an instant by Jerry’s sledgehammer approach to romantic conquest.
Inside the Hammersmith Palais de Danse (the original name given to this, London’s most popular nocturnal gathering spot, by the two enterprising Americans who opened it in 1919), one could almost forget from time to time that there was a war going on, or that London was being subjected to a series of nightly bombings, “the Blitz,” which was originally purposed to tear the heart out of the proud city and destroy the will of its armed forces to keep fighting and its citizens to keep stiffening their collective upper lip. But reminders did abound: not only did the walls and floor of the hall frequently judder and tremble and the nearby air raid sirens sing out in notes discordant with those being produced by the performing dance bands; and not only was the Palais clotted with young men in R.A.F., Royal Navy, Royal Marines, and British Army uniforms, but unfortunately, the refreshments offered up were also sadly indicative of this time of economy and sacrifice. Here at the Hammer-smith Palais could be found the very same restrictions and shortages experienced in other places throughout the kingdom, where people were required to be as creative as possible in the preparation of meals. In the kitchen of the ballroom that meant marge and Marmite sandwiches, and Spam on crisps, and “finger foods,” dominated by the flavor-deficient root vegetables, which all of England was planting and digging up in their backyards and public allotment plots.
Which was why Ruth was disappointed. And hungry. Even more hungry than usual. And hardly able to bear the intrusive redolence of the flaky, perfectly browned meat pie that was presently being devoured by the inexplicably well-provisioned middle-aged woman sitting next to her in the shelter.
Ruth wasn’t alone.
“You could have at least waited until the rest of us had nodded off,” said the man sitting beside her, “you cow.” The last was said under his breath, but the woman heard it nonetheless. Everyone seemed to have heard it. Someone said, “Hear, hear.”
“We’ll have no such talk as that,” said the shelter warden reprovingly. He was a lean, pinched-face man in his late sixties, and if he had not been a schoolmaster in his productive younger years, he could certainly have played the part convincingly in pictures.
We Five had been lucky to find seats in the shelter. The air raid siren had gone off just as they were haring off to catch the last train of the night. Assuming there wouldn’t be sufficient time to make it on foot to the station, they ducked into a public shelter and found they had a lot of company. Some of those huddled inside had arrived long before the latest cautionary wail and had brought with them blankets and Thermos flasks and decks of cards, intending to spend the whole night there, as many Londoners were doing these days.
Indeed, underground spaces of every size and description and degree of suitability were being converted into public shelters during that deadly autumn. Even tube stations throughout the city—especially those dug deep into the ground—were being commandeered, first without the approval of Underground administrators and later with their full cooperation, and turned into circumstantial safe havens, especially by those who lived in the vulnerable East End and by the thousands of other Londoners who did not trust their own basements and backyard shelters to offer adequate protection.
Carrie looked all about. No one seemed to be carrying a gas mask. After months and months of the “Phoney War,” in which Germany had been thought to be p
lanning a full-scale poisonous gas attack on British civilians, people had started to leave their masks at home. We Five had done just that, concluding that the oblong, fawn-coloured cardboard boxes wouldn’t prove too fetching an accessory for a night of sparkle and glamour upon the dance floor.
Carrie had a strong desire to pinch her nose to prevent the foetid assault upon her nostrils which came from the dishevelment of unshod feet and the discourtesy of underwashed bodies. She closed her eyes and vowed to simply endure her travails until the All Clear sounded.
But Jane’s spirits remained inflated and gay. “Except for what happened to Maggie,” she said to Molly, who sat next to her, “I’d say the evening was a topping success.”
Molly agreed with a nod whilst rolling her eyes with regard to those near her, none of whom, it seemed upon cursory inspection, came from the Hammersmith Palais ballroom. “I especially like the fine way it all ended up,” she answered sarcastically.
“Better to be here and to be safe, Molly,” retorted Ruth, who sat across from the two, “than to be roaming the streets only to be sliced up by flying bomb shrapnel, or perhaps even more buggery than that: take a direct hit to your person.”
As if on cue, there came the sound of an explosion quite close by. One of the women in the shelter emitted an abortive scream, which elicited a whisper-chorus of “there there”s from the concerned women who sat round her.
Another woman, who sat next to Ruth, turned to her and said severely, “I wish you wouldn’t talk that way with the children here.” She pointed to the children of reference. “It frightens them so.”
