The Londoners (55 page)

‘Danny!’ she shrieked. ‘Oh my good God!
Danny!
’

No-one had ever seen Carrie run so fast. She streaked past her gate and past Mavis’s gate, her mass of dark hair tumbling around a face radiant with joy.

Daniel, who had been trimming his garden hedge, dropped his shears.

‘It’s our Danny!’ he said disbelievingly and then, raising his voice, ‘Hettie! Hettie! Come quick! Danny’s home. Our boy’s come home!’

‘It was lovely to see them both,’ Hettie said later to Miriam, dabbing her eyes dry with the corner of her pinafore. ‘He just swept her off her feet and it
was as if he’d never been away.’

‘Well, let’s ’ope Kate’s fella comes ’ome soon and sweeps ’er off ’er feet,’ Miriam said, not wanting to think of anyone grieving when their two
families were so happy. ‘It’d be a sin and shame for ’er to ’ave to bring up three kiddies on ’er own, especially when one of ’em’s an orphan she took in
out of the kindness of ’er ’eart.’

On Saturday morning the weather was glorious. Daniel and Bob Giles hauled trestle tables out of the church hall and set them in a long continuous line down the grass outside
the church. Miss Godfrey and Miss Helliwell fixed white sheets of paper to them with drawing-pins to serve as tablecloths. Nibbo was in and out of every house gathering up every wooden chair he
could find. Danny and the landlord of The Swan rolled a great barrel of beer out of The Swan’s cellars and up Magnolia Hill, placing it strategically outside the rose-covered ruins of what
had once been the Misses Helliwells’ home.

‘Do you think fifteen of these are going to be enough?’ Hettie asked the world at large as she ferried a bowl of quivering multi-coloured jelly from her kitchen to the paper-covered
tables, a Union Jack jauntily pinned to her hat.

‘They’ll do for me, Hettie,’ Nibbo said, depositing his latest haul of chairs beside the top table, ‘but I don’t know what everyone else is going to
have!’

Charlie was trundling Hettie and Albert’s piano down their garden path. ‘Whereabouts do you fink this should go?’ he queried. ‘It ain’t ’alf ’eavy. Do
you think I should just leave it ’ere, near the gate?’

‘I need some more teapots!’ Nellie Miller bellowed. ‘An urn’s all right if everyone’s filing up to it, but for a do like this I need teapots!’

Leah put a huge plate of almond whirls next to one of Hettie’s mammoth bowls of jelly. ‘I’m doing some chicken,
gedempte
, just the way Carrie and Danny like it,’
she said to Hettie. ‘And some blintzes with cream cheese and jam. And bagels.’

Mavis plonked a bottle of lemonade, a bottle of cream soda and a bottle of raspberry fizz down on one of the tables. ‘That’s our Billy seen to,’ she said, crimson-painted nails
flashing as she dusted her hands together. ‘Now why the ’ell couldn’t someone have had the sense to invite some Americans? Gawd knows what they might have brought with ’em.
They might even have brought some blueberry pie!’

Kate put a huge plateful of bread and butter next to Leah’s almond whirls. She had barely slept the night before. For hour after hour she had lain awake thinking of Leon. Had she been
foolishly stubborn in clinging so long to the belief that he had survived the sinking of his ship? Ever since they had been children Carrie had told her she was as stubborn as a mule. Had her
stubbornness, this time, led her into living in a fool’s paradise? Had she been wrong in believing that Leon was still alive? Was he dead, and had he been dead for three long years?

‘Let’s ’ave some balloons tied to the backs of the chairs and the trees,’ Nellie ordered, looking remarkably like Henry VIII as she stood full square on the grass, her
hands on her massive hips and her swollen legs straddled. ‘And what about a bit o’ bunting? We must ’ave a bit o’ bunting.’

Emily Helliwell was wheeling Esther out of Nellie’s garden and Kate went to help her negotiate the clumsy wheelchair down the kerb and into the road.

‘Thank you, my dear,’ Esther said sunnily. ‘Isn’t it a beautiful day? It reminds me of our celebrations for the Relief of Mafeking.’

Kate smiled in response but her heart was aching. How would she get through life without Leon as her lover and her friend? How would she survive if she never saw his crinkly dark hair and dusky
face and sunny smile ever again?

‘Oh, Leon!’ she whispered passionately beneath her breath. ‘I
need
you! Come home! Oh, please,
please
come home!’

‘It’s about time this party got under way,’ Albert said, putting boxes of drinking straws at strategic intervals down the length of the tables. ‘Let’s get the kids
sat down before Billy Lomax scavenges all the fairy-cakes. Play a tune on the Joanna, Hettie. What about “Knees Up Mother Brown” for starters?’

Kate stood near the top trestle table, the only one not singing lustily. Ellen Pierce had come over to Magnolia Square for the day to join in the celebrations. She visited often and Kate knew
that Ellen came not only to see her, but to see Carl. There were going to be wedding bells there soon, perhaps even sooner than for Bob Giles and Ruth Fairbairn.

Carrie and Danny were standing with their arms around each other’s waist, little Rose clinging on to Danny’s hand as though she was never, ever, going to let him go.

Charlie was polkaing a pearl-earringed, tweed-garbed Harriet down the length of the pavement, much to Beryl and Billy’s open-mouthed astonishment.

Miriam and Albert were doing one of their famed knees-ups.

It seemed that everywhere she looked people were in happy couples or if, like Mavis and Christina, their menfolk’s arms weren’t yet around their waists, they were radiantly confident
that they soon would be.

‘I have an announcement to make!’ Bob Giles said, satisfied that everyone had a drink of some kind in their hands and taking advantage of a brief pause in Hettie’s enthusiastic
piano-playing.

‘’E’s gettin’ married!’ Billy shouted through a mouthful of cream cake. ‘The vicar’s gettin’ spliced!’

‘No I’m not, Billy,’ Bob Giles said easily as Ruth Fairbairn flushed scarlet. ‘Though I might very well be doing so in the near future. The banns are going to be called
tomorrow, however, for two of our friends and it’s fitting that this joyous celebration today should be crowned by the news of their happiness.’

Kate’s eyes shot towards her father and Ellen. Surely her father would have told her first? Or had he wanted it to be a happy surprise for her?

‘Raise your glasses please,’ Bob Giles said, beaming around at his flock, ‘to Harriet and Charlie! And may they know years and years of blissful married life
together!’

Utter bedlam broke out. Hettie sprinted from her place at one of the tables back to the piano and began thumping out a deafening rendering of ‘Here Comes the Bride’. Daniel put his
fingers in his mouth and uttered a piercing whistle that had every dog in the vicinity running madly in his direction. Nibbo began whirling his football rattle. Miriam ran up the length of the
tables to where Charlie and Harriet were sitting and to Harriet’s astonishment and Charlie’s bemusement planted huge kisses on their cheeks.

Kate’s eyes met Carrie’s. ‘I told you so,’ Carrie called across to her laughingly. ‘Though I bet it’s something Moshambo didn’t know!’

Despite the sickening apprehension in her heart Kate laughed back and then her eyes went beyond Carrie, down to the bottom end of the Square, and her laughter faded. An athletic-looking,
broad-chested figure had just turned into the Square from Magnolia Hill. Though the sun was in her eyes she could see that he had a kit-bag over his shoulder and that he was in naval uniform.

The blood drummed in her ears. He was dark. Very dark.

‘How about giving us a song, Kate,’ Nibbo was demanding. ‘How about “We’ll Meet Again”?’

Kate wasn’t listening to him. Her heart was hammering so hard she thought it was going to burst. It was Leon. It had to be Leon. It couldn’t possibly be anyone else.

‘Let’s ’ave somethin’ with a bit more oomph to it,’ Mavis said, standing up from the table in a cotton leopard-printed skirt so tight it fitted like a second skin
and peep-toed sandals so high it was a miracle she could walk in them. ‘Lift me on the Joanna, Nibbo, and I’ll give you “Boogie-Woogie Bugle Boy”.’

‘What’s the matter, Mummy?’ Luke was saying, pulling on her dress. ‘Why are you looking so funny? Why won’t you sing for Mr Nibbs?’

Very gently she lifted his hand away from her skirt. He’d come home. He’d said he would come home and he had. How could she ever have doubted him? She took a couple of steps
forwards, her legs so shaky she was terrified they were going to let her down.

She saw Leon’s face split into a wide, joyous smile. She saw him toss his kit-bag over the nearest garden gate and break into a run.

‘Leon!’ she cried and then, her legs shaky no longer, she was running, running as she had never run in her life before. As he sprinted towards her and the gap between them closed she
felt as if her heart was going to burst.

‘Oh, Leon!
Leon!
’ she gasped, hurtling into his arms. ‘You’re home! You’re
home
!’

As her hands slid up around his neck and he crushed her against him she knew absolute joy. From now on nothing and no-one would ever part them again. From now on they were going to be a family.
From now on their love was going to be a refuge and a peace that no hardship or trouble would ever be able to storm.

His mouth was hot and sweet on hers. Their tongues touched and slipped past each other. Dimly, in the distance, she was aware of a storm of cheering and whistling. Somewhere on the Thames
tug-boat horns blasted. ‘See, the Conquering Hero Comes’ was being played loud and hard on the piano.

When at last he raised his head from hers, she looked up into his dear, kind, sunny-natured face and said in a voice thick with love, ‘We have a baby, Leon! We have a son!’

‘I know,’ he said, his voice raw with emotion, all the love he felt for her blazing in his amber-brown eyes. ‘I received your letter the morning we were torpedoed. It’s
been in a pocket next to my heart every day and night since.’

He raised his head slightly, looking towards the groaningly laden tables and the bunting and the balloons, saying with a catch in his throat, ‘I think it’s time you introduced
us.’

‘His name is Luke,’ she said, as with their arms around each other’s waists they began to walk to where their family and neighbours were waiting for them, ‘and he was two
years old last September.’

As Daisy and Matthew began to run towards them holding on to the hands of a toddler with a mop of unruly dark curls and an instantly recognizable beaming smile, and as Charlie led the throng in
the Square in an exuberant rendering of ‘For He’s A Jolly Good Fellow’, neither Kate nor Leon had the slightest shadow of doubt that they were the luckiest and happiest two people
in the whole wide world.

1945: the war is over, and the inhabitants of Magnolia Square are looking forward to their men coming home and their lives returning to normal. But, for some, the end of the
war brings serious problems.

Kate Voigt is finally able to marry Leon Emmerson, a Londoner like herself, but of mixed race. When old man Harvey, a powerful and wealthy figure in South London and great-grandfather to
Kate’s son Matthew, hears of the match, he is determined that young Matthew should not be raised by Leon. Slowly, insidiously, he begins a plight to wrest Kate’s son away from her.

For Jewish refugee Christina, who has recently married commando Jack Robson, peacetime has brought its own special torment. She is convinced that her mother and grandmother have somehow escaped
the terrors of the Holocaust and are alive. But her determination to find them could put everything – even her marriage – at risk.

The first chapter follows here.

‘Blimey,’ Carrie Collins, née Jennings, said graphically to her best friend Kate Voigt as they escaped from the exuberant street party, paper Union Jacks on
sticks still in their hands, ‘have you ever known a day like it?’

‘Never!’ With her eyes shining, her face radiant, Kate led the way into her sun-filled kitchen, making straight for the stove and the kettle that sat on the top of it. ‘The war
is over, Carrie!
Over!
’

As Carrie plumped her Junoesque figure exhaustedly into the rocking-chair that sat on top of a gaily coloured rag rug, Kate carried the kettle over to the sink. ‘Or it’s nearly
over,’ she amended, turning on the tap, ‘because the war in the Far East can’t go on for much longer, surely?’

Outside, in the Square, the VE party was going at full throttle with ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ being sung with gusto by all their friends and neighbours. Carrie beat time with her
Union Jack, saying with unabashed frankness, ‘Bugger the Far East, Kate. All that matters to me is that no-one we know or love is still fighting. My Danny and your Leon are already home,
thank God. And what’s more, they’re
staying
home!’ The muffled strains of ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ merged into ‘We’ll Meet Again’, and she
put her Union Jack down on the nearby kitchen table, the sunlight glinting on her wedding ring as she did so.