London Pride (47 page)

‘I'm sorry I'm late,' Joan said. ‘It's been a rush job. 'Lo Peggy. Oh dear, I am being a nuisance. Perhaps I should stop going to work.'

‘You're not being a nuisance,' Flossie told her. ‘So you can just stop worrying about it. And if you take my advice you'll go on earning as long as you can. Oh I know you can live on a soldier's pay. I lived on a soldier's pay for years and years. But you can't live well on it.'

That was true, Joan thought. The pay at the factory was very good. Double what she'd been earning with that horrid old Miss Margeryson. In fact she was better off now than she'd ever been, and now that the kids were home she didn't mind how horrid the work was. She'd bought new clothes for the kids this summer and new shoes and there was plenty of money for food and still some left over
for a dress for herself.

‘Earn while you can,' Peggy said. She was on night duty that week so she was in uniform ready to go out. ‘That's one good thing coming out of this war, with so many men in the forces they've got to pay women a decent wage to do the work.'

‘I'd give it all up to have Sid home and safe,' Joan said.

‘He'll write soon,' Peggy said giving her a hug. ‘You'll see.'

But he didn't and the news got worse by the day.

It was always the same and always bad. The Germans were advancing. They'd taken Amiens and Abbeville. They'd reached the English Channel. They were pressing on to Boulogne, surrounding Calais.

On 21 May the wireless reported optimistically that British armoured divisions had been gathered at a place called Arras, that a break through was being attempted and that fierce fighting was going on.

‘Arras again,' John Cooper said. ‘Poor buggers.'

And it wasn't long before they heard that the poor buggers had been defeated.

Now it was plain that a full-scale retreat was in operation. Rumours grew by the hour, all of them alarming. The British army was surrounded, cut off, defeated. A whole battalion had been massacred. The soldiers were burning their lorries and setting fire to petrol dumps. There was no hope for any of them. They were being captured in their thousands. The Fifth Column were at work all over France.

The days passed, prickly with apprehension, as people all over Britain waited for news, crowded about their wireless sets, living in abeyance from one bulletin to the next. It was as if their lives had no consequence beyond the outcome of this struggle. Joan grew gaunt with worry. It was seventeen days since the German invasion but it seemed like months. She'd had one letter from Sid in all that time, and that was a brief postcard to say that he was well, that he hadn't been injured and that he sent his love to the kids.

‘He could be anywhere,' she worried to Peggy, when her sister came visiting one evening late in May. ‘What are they doing? That's what I want to know.'

The news of what they were doing broke the following morning.

Calais had surrendered, the Belgian army had capitulated to the Germans just before dawn and the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force had begun. Troops were being taken from the beaches at a place called Dunkirk. Regular bulletins would be broadcast throughout the day.

They were broadcast during the next nine momentous days as ships great and small converged on those distant beaches, and the massive rescue operation continued. Horrific tales filtered through rumour to England. The German air force was bombing and strafing at will, there was only a handful of RAF fighters there but they were working miracles, the whole of Dunkirk was ablaze.

But then other stories began too. It wasn't just the Royal Navy that was at Dunkirk. The army was being taken off the beaches by civilian ships too, a miscellaneous fleet of fishing boats and ferries, pleasure boats and steamers that had been gathered in secret at dead of night and crossed the Channel in a great armada to help with the rescue. Mrs Roderick was full of it when she came to call for Flossie for their weekly trip to the pictures.

‘The Thames has been denuded,' she said. ‘There's hardly a boat to be seen. Went through at midnight so Mrs Bertleman was telling me. The
Royal Sovereign's
gone and the
Royal Daffodil
and the
Gillyflower
. It's amazing!'

‘That'll do it,' Mrs Geary said. ‘Island race, you see. All sailors at heart we are. That'll do it.'

‘Course, they'll never get them all home,' Mrs Roderick said. ‘Not with the best will in the world. They got millions of men out there.'

‘If they get half of 'em out it'll be a miracle,' Flossie said. ‘Are they going to broadcast any more tonight d'you think?'

‘Bound to,' Mrs Geary said. ‘Be on the nine o'clock news?'

‘Then I think we'll give the pictures a miss,' Flossie said to Mrs Roderick. ‘See what they say.'

‘Quite right,' Mrs Roderick agreed. ‘We'll have a game of cards. Baby'll make up a four, won't you, Baby?'

So they played cards.

‘Where's your Peggy?' Mrs Roderick asked as she picked up her first hand.

‘Up the Post,' Flossie said. ‘On duty.'

‘Jim's not home then?'

‘No.'

‘Where is he posted these days?'

None of them knew where Jim was.

‘Didn't Peggy say?' Mrs Roderick asked.

‘She don't say much these days,' Mrs Geary said, arranging her cards.

‘Why should she?' Baby said rather tartly. Mrs Roderick was a jolly sight too fond of gossip. ‘You don't have to be talking all the time. Jim don't say much either.'

‘Strong silent type,' Mrs Roderick approved. ‘It's being in the RAF I expect.'

They would all have been surprised to know that Jim Boxall had been talking non-stop since six o'clock that evening.

His squadron had been transferred that day from Catterick to Hornchurch to replace a squadron that had been in action over France during the retreat. There was a lot of repair work to do and they'd started on it as soon as they arrived.

He'd swung into his billet at the end of that first afternoon in the hangars, flung himself across his bed, lit a fag and closed his eyes with weariness when a familiar voice said, ‘Jim Boxall or I'm a Dutchman,' right in his ear.

It was Froggy Ferguson. Still very recognizably Froggy Ferguson, wide of mouth, bolting-eyed, and grinning. ‘ 'Lo Frog,' Jim said. ‘Fancy seeing you here. I thought I'd got shot of you back in Uxbridge.'

‘You don't get shot of me so easy,' Froggy grinned.

‘So what you doing here?'

‘I'm a sparks.' And sure enough there were the sparks on his tunic sleeve. A qualified wireless operator and mechanic, no less. ‘Come for a beer.'

It was a cheerful reunion. They hadn't seen one another since those first days in Uxbridge, nearly five years ago, so they had a lot of gossip and scandal to catch up on. Froggy
seemed to know everything there was to know about their old oppos.

‘Remember old Tammy Shanter? Saw him in Debden last summer. He's got a wife and two kiddies. And Jock? He's training to be an air gunner.'

And he was also very knowledgeable about the airfield and the squadron that had just gone to Catterick.

‘They've been flying sorties over the beaches,' he said. ‘Bloody shambles by all accounts. They've got the entire British army camped out on the sand apparently, standing in queues waiting to be taken off. All the roads into Dunkirk are jammed solid. So full of trucks they look like khaki rivers from the air, so one of our chaps was saying. Your lot are going over tomorrow.'

‘Yes, I know,' Jim said. ‘Will we get them all off?'

‘It'll be a miracle if we do.'

But the miracle continued, as people all over Britain held their breath and said their prayers and tuned in to the BBC.

On 28 May 17,000 men were taken safely off the beaches, on 29 May it was over 47,000 and during the next two days more than 100,000 came home. Soon pictures of the returning army were filling the papers and wives were receiving letters and telegrams from the British ports.

But Joan heard nothing.

Yvey and Norman scanned the papers every day for the first sight of their father, convinced that they would see his picture sooner or later, walking up a gang-plank or waving cheerfully from the deck of a troopship, but they were always disappointed.

‘He can be as cross as he likes if he'll only come home,' Norman said.

‘Perhaps he'll come tomorrow,' Yvonne hoped.

But the days passed and it was 4 June and the papers were cheering that over 338,000 men were home and dry, that the last soldier had been lifted from the beachhead, the last little ship had limped to port.

And still there was no news of Sid Owen.

Joan was bleak with distress.

‘It's the not knowing,' she said to Peggy. ‘He could be
dead somewhere out there. How would I know? People say they left dead bodies all over the place. Didn't even stop to bury them.'

‘It's early days yet,' Peggy tried to comfort. ‘You think how many men they've brought back. It could take weeks to sort them all out. I'll do Norman's school shirt, shall I?' She'd come to supper that evening, but being Peggy she was helping out with the ironing while Joan cooked their cauliflower cheese.

‘He could be wounded,' Joan said, stirring the sauce.

Peggy thought it was safe to allow that and better than thinking he was dead. ‘Yes, he could,' she said. ‘In a hospital somewhere waiting for someone to write a letter for him. Very likely.'

‘He wasn't always the best husband alive,' Joan said. ‘Had a right pair a' fists on him sometimes, to tell the truth, but I wouldn't wish this on him. Not for the world.'

‘Course not,' Peggy said, removing Norman's shirt from the ironing board and folding it neatly.

‘I don't think I shall ever hear,' Joan said. ‘I'm beginning to give up hope.'

‘You mustn't give up hope,' Peggy said. ‘None of us must give up hope. We've all got to keep going.'

It was Churchill's message that evening too. As Peggy and Joan were washing their dirty plates, the House of Commons was listening soberly to the Prime Minister as he told them that the fight would continue.

‘We cannot flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air. We shall defend our island whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing-grounds, in the fields, in the streets, and in the hills. We shall never surrender.'

Ten days later the German army entered Paris, and two days after that the French front collapsed and Maréchal Pétain became president of France. Now it was simply a matter of time before the country was handed over to Hitler.

And on the morning after the final fall of France Joan got the letter she'd been waiting for.

She saw it on the doormat as she was taking the
children downstairs on their way to school. A small ominous-looking envelope with foreign markings on it. Oh God, not the offficial letter, she begged. Please God not that.

‘Just a minute,' she said to the children, heart pounding. ‘I'll just read this before we go.'

It was addressed in Sid's clumsy handwriting and had been sent through the Red Cross from a prisoner of war camp, somewhere in Germany.

‘He's all right,' she said to the children, struggling to control herself because they were standing so still and looking so solemn and anxious. ‘He's been wounded. Not much. A flesh wound he says. He's a prisoner. He's all right.'

And then they both tumbled into her arms to kiss her and hug her and they were all crying with relief.

‘We'll have a ding-dong,' Flossie said. ‘We've something to celebrate now. I'm so glad you've heard. What a relief.'

It was a curiously happy celebration. They should have been cast down by the serious state of the war or dismayed by the loss of their last ally but they weren't.

‘If you ask me,' Mrs Geary said finishing her gin, ‘we're a jolly sight better off without allies. All they ever do is give in all the time. Lily-livered lot.'

‘Shameful,' Mr Allnutt agreed. ‘At least now we all know where we are.'

‘It'll be a long fight,' Leslie warned.

‘Never you mind,' Ernest said. ‘We're all in it together. That's what counts. Hitler needn't think we're finished because we're not. We'll show him.'

‘There'll always be an England,' Mr Brown declaimed, rosy with patriotism and four pints of beer.

So naturally John Cooper played the song and they all sang it.

‘There'll always be an England, and England shall be free.

If England means as much to you as England means to me.

Red, white and blue, what does it mean to you?

Surely you're proud, shout it aloud, Britons awake.

The Empire too, we can depend on you.

Freedom remains, these are the chains nothing can break.'

By the end of the evening they were in a mood of unquenchable optimism.

‘We'll show the buggers,' they said to one another as they kissed goodnight. ‘They needn't think they've got the better of us.'

It was a mood they shared with more and more people as June blazed into an English magnificence of peaceful roses, honeysuckles and warm light evenings, a mood that spread by some curious national osmosis until there was hardly a man or woman the length and breadth of the country who wasn't touched by it. The army was home. The rescue at Dunkirk had been a miracle. We would fight better on our own.

There was a cocky cheerfulness in the streets, lots of jokes and leg-pulling, jaunty whistling and easy laughter. It even affected the way people walked, heads up, shoulders back, with a strut and a swagger as if they were marching to stirring music.