The Londoners (47 page)

Carrie nodded, looking regretfully towards the kettle. She was in her bus conductress’s uniform and on her way to work and didn’t have time to stay for a cup of tea.

‘That’s right. The last couple of raids broke their nerve. A bombed-out East End woman has already moved into the house. She seems a good sort but she’s got shockingly
ulcerated legs and moves at a snail’s pace. God only knows how she manages to reach a shelter when there’s a raid on.’

‘I don’t,’ Nellie Miller said breezily to Kate. ‘When the Jerries are overhead I just stay in bed and curse the buggers.’

She was sitting on a dining-chair in her handkerchief-sized front garden enjoying the warmth of the May weather. ‘I can’t sit in a deck-chair,’ she said to Kate, shifting her
heavy weight a little more comfortably on the hard wooden chair. ‘If I sit in a deck-chair it takes nine strong men to haul me out of it again!’

A fly landed on one of her elephantine-like, grossly disfigured legs. She swatted it away. ‘Nasty creatures. Anything suppurating attracts ’em. My legs should be bandaged, by rights,
but I can’t manage it meself. It takes me all my time to put me shoes on let alone bend over long enough to put bandages on.’

‘Then how do you bathe them?’ Kate asked, concerned.

‘With bloomin’ great difficulty,’ Nellie said darkly.

Kate transferred her wicker shopping-basket from her right hand to her left hand. She’d never done any nursing but she knew that ulcerated legs should be bathed regularly and then kept
scrupulously dry and clean.

‘I’ll do them for you, if you like. Shall I come down and do them later this afternoon, about four?’

Nellie’s heavy jowls trembled emotionally. ‘Bless you, dear. Would you really? It’s not a favour I’ve ever liked to ask of anyone because they’re not a very nice
sight. In fact, they’re a bloomin’ ’orrible sight and they often stink to ’igh ’eaven, but if you’re sure you don’t mind . . .’

‘I don’t mind,’ Kate said as Hector, who had been waiting impatiently for her to continue with their walk down to Lewisham High Street, finally ran out of patience and began
running in circles around her. ‘Is there anything you want from the market? Any fruit or veg?’

‘I wouldn’t say no to a couple of nice apples. And I could do with some potatoes bringing in. Thank Gawd there’s some things that aren’t bloomin’ rationed. What I
wouldn’t give for a nice piece of fruit cake stuffed with sugar and butter and eggs and currants and raisins and candied-peel!’

As May progressed, fears that Hitler was on the brink of launching an invasion force increased. On the tenth, London suffered the worst air raid of the war. In brilliant
moonlight over five hundred German planes dropped hundreds of high-explosive bombs on the city and over 100,000 incendiary bombs. The Houses of Parliament were hit and the chamber of the House of
Commons was reduced to rubble. The twelfth-century roof of Westminster Hall was set ablaze and the square tower of Westminster Abbey caved in. Big Ben was scarred, though the clock itself cheered
Londoners by continuing to keep perfect time.

‘Dear old Big Ben,’ Esther Helliwell said as her sister and Carrie lifted her gently back into her wheelchair after a long, harrowing night in the Morrison shelter. ‘The
Germans haven’t silenced
him
, have they? And they won’t silence our dear Mr Churchill either!’

London wasn’t the only city to have its heart nearly torn out of it. Portsmouth, Coventry, Liverpool, Belfast, Southampton, Hull, Plymouth, were all pulverized, with fires raging for days.
And then suddenly the night skies were empty. No sirens screamed into life. No ack-ack guns opened up.

‘It’s a bit bloody eerie, ain’t it?’ Albert Jennings said uneasily to Mr Nibbs. ‘What do you think it means, Nibbo? What do you think old Hitler’s up to
now?’

Nibbo didn’t know and neither did anyone else. Every night Londoners expected the
Luftwaffe
to return. Night after night they didn’t do so. Then, on 22 June, all was
explained.

‘German forces have this morning invaded Russia,’ a BBC newscaster announced portentously. ‘Hitler’s armies are believed to be sweeping towards Moscow.’

‘What an extraordinary move for Hitler to have made,’ Harriet Godfrey said to Charlie Robson as they walked companionably across the Heath together. ‘Another couple of raids
like the raids of May the tenth and I don’t believe Britain could have held out for much longer. Now, just at the moment when he should have seized his chance and attempted an invasion,
he’s turned his armies and his attention towards Russia.’

‘Well, while he’s doin’ that, ’e’s leavin’ us alone,’ Charlie said reasonably. ‘Do you fancy a quick drink in The Princess of Wales,
’arriet? Me throat’s parched.’

All through the summer a spirit of optimism reigned. Though the Germans were making substantial advances through Russian territory, they were meeting fierce and courageous
resistance.

‘The Russkies are proving to be pretty tenacious fighters,’ Daniel Collins said to Albert as they walked down Magnolia Hill together, Albert in his well-worn Home Guard uniform and
Daniel in his Auxiliary Fireman’s uniform. ‘With them as allies we might just win the day, Albert.’

Harriet also thought that Britain and her Allies might win the day. ‘Or at least we will if the Germans fail to capture Moscow before the Russian winter sets in,’
she said to Kate. ‘Remember Napoleon? He was defeated by the Russian winter. Pray God Hitler is as well!’

Kate listened as tensely as anyone else to the news broadcasts charting the fierce fighting taking place in Russia, but her real interest wasn’t in what was happening in
Russia, but what was happening on the high seas of the Atlantic.

On one of her kitchen cupboards she had pinned up a map cut from a newspaper. It showed the various convoy routes across the Atlantic and also the routes German battleships and U-boats could be
expected to take and the air range of German aircraft. In imagination she tried to be with Leon aboard his battleship but it was an impossible task. His letters to her were constantly cheerful and
totally uninformative of what his day-to-day life was like.

Over the weeks and months she did glean some information however. She learned that a convoy could comprise of as many as sixty ships and that it was the slowest ship that set the pace. She also
learned that escort ships such as Leon’s took the convoys out to a given point and then sent them on their way, returning as escort for incoming convoys. Other information was far more
important to her. In every letter he told her that he missed her; that he couldn’t wait to be striding into Magnolia Square again, past the Jennings’ and the Lomaxes’ and Miss
Helliwell’s, towards her front gate.

Her visits to Somerset took on a regular rhythm. Sometimes Joss Harvey was there, sometimes he was not.

‘You’d think Mr Harvey would be too old to be the active boss of a company as big as Harvey’s, wouldn’t you?’ Ruth Fairbairn said to her as she put clean laundry
away in a chest of drawers decorated with nursery-rhyme characters and Kate dangled a gurgling Matthew on her knee, ‘but he’s up in London part of every week supervising what he says
are colossal rebuilding programmes.’

Lance Merton also visited her with regular frequency. Sometimes he took her and Daisy and Hector into Kent for a picnic, sometimes they simply went for a walk in Greenwich Park
or across the Heath. On one occasion he told her he was in love with her. She had crushed his hopes as gently as possible and, believing she had done so only because she was still grieving for
Toby, Lance had accepted the rejection with good grace. Unknown to Kate it was not, however, a rejection he regarded as being final.

In October the submarine war in the Atlantic claimed the lives of more than seventy American sailors when a U-boat attacked a US battleship on convoy duty west of Iceland.

‘I didn’t know the Yanks were helping us out in the Atlantic,’ Charlie Robson said to Kate, his collarless shirt stuffed any-old-how into the broad leather belt holding up his
trousers.

If there was one aspect of the war that Kate was knowledgeable about it was the war in the Atlantic.

‘They’ve been helping out for a while now, Charlie,’ she said, giving Queenie a friendly pat. ‘Or as much as they can without coming into the war themselves.’

‘And why the ’ell don’t they?’ Charlie asked, mystified. ‘Why the ’ell don’t they get properly pitched in and stop shilly-shallying?’

Two months later all shilly-shallying was over. On 7 December the world woke to the news that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbour. Four days later Mavis was once again acting
as the local town-crier by leaning out of her bedroom window and shouting at the top of her voice,
‘Now I know Hitler’s bloody mad! He’s just declared war on
America!’

‘The Yanks will soon sort the Jerries out,’ Nellie said confidently as Kate knelt at her feet and dusted her ulcerated legs with antiseptic powder. ‘I’m
rather partial to a Yank meself. Or I am if they all look like Clark Gable!’ She stretched her left leg out so that Kate could begin bandaging it. ‘That boy of Charlie Robson’s
looks a lot like Clark Gable, doesn’t ’e? Christina showed me a photograph of ’im in ’is Commando gear. Very tasty, I thought. She said ’is brother was killed in
Spain. Did you know ’im, dear?’

‘Yes,’ Kate said, thinking of the teddy bear that sat on her dressing-table and of a sunny, carefree, laughter-filled day on the Heath. A day that now seemed to belong to another
lifetime.

‘She’s a nice girl, that Christina,’ Nellie said as Kate fastened the bandage at her knee with a safety-pin. ‘A bit quiet o’ course. She doesn’t ’ave
the go about ’er South London girls ’ave. Still, she’s ’ad a lot to put up with, losing ’er family in those terrible camps.’

She paused, looking down at the top of Kate’s head and her long braid of sun-gold hair. ‘I take it you and she ain’t exactly on friendly terms, dear?’ she said at last,
her kindly eyes troubled. ‘It’s silly, ain’t it? You’re not a bloody Nazi an’ I don’t suppose your dad is either. Life’s too short to ’old grudges
against people who don’t deserve to ’ave grudges ’eld against ’em an’ I told ’er so. Would you like a nice cup o’ tea when you’ve finished
bandagin’ me up? Me legs are so much better since you started lookin’ after ’em you’d never believe it. Angel’s ’ands you ’ave, an’ I told Christina
so.’

‘I’m going to be home for Christmas,’
Leon wrote in his plain, firm handwriting.
‘Then I’ll be off the Atlantic route and on another
ship on the Arctic route to Murmansk and Archangel.’

She knew that convoys had been ferrying precious supplies to the beleaguered Russians ever since September. And she knew that the dangers they faced, being within German air striking distance
for much of the way, were even more perilous than the dangers facing them on the Atlantic.

She hugged his letter to her breast. She would worry about the Arctic run to Murmansk and Archangel later. He had written that he was coming home for Christmas! Home! Was that truly how he
thought of herself and Magnolia Square? And if it was, did it mean that the guardedness in his letters was merely because he was unsure of what her response might be if he was to be more frank? Was
he nervous of saying what was in his heart in case he didn’t meet with a like response, just as she had been nervous in the hours after Matthew was born?

‘Oh, but we’re going to have a
wonderful
Christmas,’ she said to Daisy, knowing that where she and Leon were concerned, the time for nervousness and caution was at an
end. ‘Leon’s coming home and you’re both going to love each other on sight and we’re going to have the best Christmas ever!’

Part of that best Christmas was the
Luftwaffe’s
continued absence from London. It meant that Matthew need no longer stay in Somerset. He could come home.

‘I don’t agree with you, young lady,’ Joss Harvey said brusquely. ‘The war is far from over and London is far from being out of danger. Matthew is settled here.
Disturbing his routine and returning him to London is not in his best interests.’

‘I’m the one who knows what my son’s best interests are,’ Kate retorted, noting with interest that he was now referring to her as ‘young lady’ not
‘young woman’. ‘Our agreement was that Matthew would stay in Somerset until it was safe for him to return to London. At the moment it is safe. And he’s coming home with
me.’

Joss Harvey sucked in his breath, his face purpling. For a few seconds he didn’t speak, his inner battle obvious, then he said tightly, ‘If that is your considered decision then of
course I can’t overrule it. I would suggest, however, that you wait until after Christmas before taking Matthew back to London. It would be typical of the Germans to make a surprise attack on
Christmas Day when they would imagine we would be least prepared for it. And I would appreciate one Christmas at least with my great-grandson.’

It was disconcertingly near to a plea and Kate hesitated. There was a glimmer of sense in what he was saying. It
was
quite possible that the
Luftwaffe
would pay London a
Christmas visit. And despite all his forcefulness and apparent good health Joss Harvey was an old man. The Christmas coming might be the last Christmas he would be able to spend with Matthew.

‘All right,’ she agreed, knowing that she could afford to be generous. ‘As long as it’s quite understood that when I visit in February I take Matthew home with
me.’

‘Absolutely,’ he said, unable to conceal the depth of his relief. ‘Would you like a whisky? Have you seen anything of Lance, lately?’

When Christmas Eve dawned Leon had still not walked into Magnolia Square, his kit-bag on his shoulder. Kate refused to panic. He had said he would be home for Christmas and he
was a man who kept his promises.

‘Let’s go down to the market,’ she said to Daisy, wrapping her up warmly in a coat and Fair Isle beret and scarf. ‘If we’re lucky Mr Jennings might have some nice
apples on his stall.’

With Hector at their heels they set off, walking down towards the bottom end of the Square and Magnolia Hill. As they reached Miss Helliwell’s magnolia tree Kate’s tummy muscles
tensed. Miriam Jennings was walking towards them, Rose and Jenny at either side of her, holding her hands. And with them was Christina.