London Pride (5 page)

Oh the relief of being back at home, in her own nice neat bedroom, with the light on the landing for her where it always was, and Joan and Baby asleep, the same as always, and Mum and Dad downstairs, the same as always, and everything quiet and peaceful and secure. She undressed quickly and slid between the covers into the chilly space beside her sister. And as if she knew how frightened she'd been, Joan turned over in her sleep and put out an arm to cuddle her.

It was wonderful to feel so safe again, with the great outer wall of the Tower like a strong defence behind her head, and the moat another defence beyond that, and Joan's arms round her waist, and Dad downstairs to keep all harm away from all of them. As she drifted off to sleep she was warm and easy in the certainty that while she lived in the Tower and her dear lovely old dad was there to look after her, nothing could ever really go wrong.

Flossie Furnivall was much younger than her husband. Twenty-three years younger to be exact. She had married him in a fit of youthful bravado when she was barely seventeen, to show her father and her older brother and sister that she was a cut above
them
and their dull country ways, and that
somebody
loved her even if her mother
had
died and left her.

It had been just a little too easy. All she'd had to do was stand by the kerb and look charming while the troops marched in and out of the Stoughton Barracks in Guildford. Sooner or later she invariably caught the eye of one of the handsome ones, for she was pretty in a piquant way, with her narrow foxy face and her fair hair fluffed and bushed about her temples in the very latest style, which she'd copied assiduously from the fashion plates in the drapery. She took care to accentuate her slender figure by wearing a tight leather belt and the elaborate summer blouse she'd made for herself from one of Mr Weldon's patterns, and she topped off the whole effect with her mother's beautiful floradora hat to frame her face and make everyone notice her. She knew the hat was a success from the violent way her father had reacted against it when she first put it on.

‘That's your ma's,' he growled.

She placated him by sweet-talk and flirtation the way she always did, because she was afraid of his ill-temper.‘Oh Dad!' she said sweetly. ‘You know she gave it to me.'

‘It looks ridiculous. You ain't a duchess, gel.'

‘Neither was Ma, and didn't she look the prettiest thing?'

He sighed and grimaced, temporarily defeated by her sweetness.

‘Well don't think you're gadding off to Guildford ‘fore your chores are done,' he said growling again.

But the chores were done. She'd been most particular about them. So there was nothing to stop her.

Company Sergeant-Major Furnivall of the Royal Fusiliers had been the fifth gallant soldier to offer to escort her that summer. He'd been in camp just outside the town and had come in one afternoon to look up some old South African comrades who were now stationed at the barracks, but he was so smitten by her pretty face that his friends never got their visit.

They were married three months later, she delighted by her new status and all the fuss and attention that went with it, he dazzled at his good fortune in finding a wife at just the right moment in his career when he was about to leave active service and take up his new post as a Yeoman Warder at the Tower.

‘You done well for yourself, gel,' her father had said at the wedding, and so she had, and all by her own efforts.

It wasn't until she arrived in the Tower as the pregnant wife of a new Yeoman Warder that she began to suspect that she might have made a slight miscalculation. For a start she found his lovemaking too regular and too demanding. Once a week would have been plenty, swollen as she was, every other night was too much and too exhausting. But perhaps even worse than that was the fact that she was well and away the youngest wife in the Casemates, and she had no mother to turn to for advice. The other wives were kindly but they were all very very old, and it made her feel inadequate to stand speechless amongst them while they talked of ancient campaigns and barracks they'd shared before she was born.

And she felt even worse when baby Joan was born and turned out to be a squalling brat who never left off crying. The other wives were all so much better at mothering than she was. Their children, who were mostly over ten years
old or already grown up, were all sensible and quiet and well-behaved like children ought to be, and their grandchildren never cried. Sometimes she was at her wits' end with the noise the baby made, especially at night, and Joe took to sleeping in the spare room. Which was a relief in one regard, but left her coping with the racket all on her own.

Her brother and sister came up to London to see the new arrival but they weren't any help at all and she never invited them again. Her sister Maud, who wasn't married and had no right to criticize, said that none of the babies she knew had
ever
cried, ever, and brother Gideon, who
was
married and had two children of his own, said he'd put the horrid little thing in the sausage machine if she belonged to him. He was training to be a butcher and it hadn't improved him.

Flossie tried everything she could think of, slapping the baby, shaking her, shouting at her, even leaving her in an upstairs room and ignoring her, but nothing seemed to make any difference. The only time she wasn't crying was when she was sucking, and she did
that
with a horrible intensity that reminded Flossie of Joe when he was making love, which didn't help matters. And besides, as Flossie reminded herself every time she withdrew her reluctant nipple from the baby's eager mouth, you're not supposed to feed a baby all day long. So the child went on screaming. And even when she was a twelvemonth she was still prone to horrible outbursts and usually at the most inopportune moments, when one of the other wives was looking.

But four years, two miscarriages and much heartache later Peggy was born and even though she was rather an ordinary-looking baby, with a bland round face and a nose like a Napoleon cherry, at least she knew how to behave, feeding decorously and sleeping like a model child. It was a great relief to both her parents to have an infant they didn't have to worry about. By this time Joan had grown into a peaky five-year-old with a foxy face like her mother and her father's sandy hair. She was still given to outbursts of temper and needed a lot of punishment, but at least she was controllable. And thanks to the doctor who
attended Peggy's birth, Flossie had discovered an answer to all her difficulties as Joe Furnivall's wife.

After losing two sons, Joe had insisted on Flossie seeing a doctor when she was pregnant the fourth time, and even though it was horribly expensive and she couldn't see the need for it, she made an appointment just to placate him. Not with either of the Tower doctors, of course, because they were a rough lot and thought aperients were the answer to everything, but with a new lady doctor who had set up her brass plate a mere hundred yards away, outside the walls.

She was a lovely lady, so attentive and sympathetic that Flossie soon felt she could tell her anything. And did. After a five minute examination the pregnancy was pronounced to be ‘quite perfect', and after a twenty minute conversation, the doctor told Flossie that although she was ‘physically very strong, my dear,' it was obvious that she was ‘suffering from nerves.'

‘I will prescribe a good nerve tonic for you,' she said. ‘You must take care of yourself, you know. Nerves are debilitating. And as to that other matter we were discussing, if your husband makes advances to you when you feel you can't bear it, you must tell him not to. You have a duty to yourself and the baby now.'

Flossie returned from the surgery a woman transformed. From then on she took spectacular care of her health, making sure that there were always copious stocks of nerve tonic in her bedside cabinet, besides all the most useful proprietary medicines like iron jelloids and Eno's Fruit Salts and Dr Cassell's famous tablets, which according to the advertisements were specially for nerve trouble and jolly good value at one and thruppence a box. And in addition to all that she now ‘indulged' her temper whenever anyone annoyed her, and she kept Joe at arm's length whenever she ‘didn't feel like it.'

It wasn't long before he grew accustomed to the fact that sex was now a Saturday night treat. And soon he and Joan were living in dread of ‘Mum's nerves' and would do anything rather than provoke an outburst.

Nevertheless, three years later, like a reward for her good health care and his patience, Baby arrived and Baby
was delightful, so soft and pretty with fair, curly hair and exactly the same expressions on her pretty face as her mother. Joe was secretly disappointed that she wasn't the son he wanted so much, but Flossie doted on her from the first moment, and fed her whenever she cried, and picked her up and petted her if she so much as whimpered. She was christened Barbara, but nobody ever called her anything except Baby, because she was so soft and pretty. And delicate too, of course, for she resembled her mother in everything.

Now that her life had acquired a pattern that was pleasantly dominating even if it wasn't always entirely agreeable, Flossie was often quite sorry for poor Joe. Of course it was much, much better for him not to go exhausting himself night after night. He wasn't getting any younger after all. Although there were times when he had such an awfully wistful look about him that she wished there was some way she could make amends for having to treat him so sternly. But then just as she was feeling quite well disposed towards him, he'd go and do something unkind like refusing to take poor Baby to the Ceremony of the Keys, or something stupid like dragging them all off to some ceremony or other in the pouring rain. And there was enough rain that autumn to remind her of that.

By the end of October the city was positively waterlogged and on November the first they were facing a flood. There were high spring tides that morning and by ten o'clock the Thames was lapping the walls of the Tower and threatening to overrun its banks.

The two girls came home to their midday meal full of excitement. Even Joan was animated. ‘A flood!' she said. ‘Think a' that. I'll bet there'll be lots of people drowned.'

‘Megan says it's going to come right in over the wall,' Peggy said, her eyes as round as pennies. ‘Is it, Dad?' The thought of torrents of water pouring over the walls was really rather alarming.

But the tone of her father's voice reassured her. ‘Be over the embankment I shouldn't wonder,' he said. ‘Eat up quick an' we'll go down and see.'

‘All of us?' Baby said hopefully.

‘All of you.'

Flossie was instantly irritated. Wasn't that just like him? Rushing off at a minute's notice. Not thinking. ‘They'll be late for school,' she protested, trying to deter him.

He wasn't put off at all. ‘No, they won't,' he said easily. ‘We'll only go a step. We'll have plenty of time to be there an' back before the bell.'

‘You'll catch cold,' she complained, trying again. ‘You just see if you don't. The flu's back, I hope you realize.' Ever since that terrible flu at the end of the Great War there'd been one epidemic after another and the newspapers had taken to publishing ghoulish lists of the numbers of dead every week.

But he pushed that objection away too. ‘We'll be all right, won't we girls? Put your macs on. And your Wellingtons.'

So they went to see the floods, which turned out to be marvellously exciting and not a bit frightening. The river was battleship grey and peaked all over with big white-tipped waves and wider than they'd ever seen it, and the clouds were so thick you couldn't see the sky, and the plane trees so wet that their trunks were black, and there was water simply everywhere. Down by Temple Underground Station the river was gushing through the gratings in fountains of dirty brown water so that people had to keep jumping out of the way, and on the embankment the waves were slopping over the wall. They went for a paddle where the pavements had been, and when they kicked it, the water came right up to the top of Baby's boots, and she didn't grizzle about it or even complain because they were with Dad and she knew Dad wouldn't let her make a fuss.

But the trams were the best of all. They were still running despite the floods, and they came rocking along the road one after the other like great red boats, trailing a choppy wake behind them and spinning up plumes of grey-white water on either side so that everybody got splashed. By the time the Furnivall family finally slopped back to the Tower Joan and Peggy were late for school, and they were all soaking wet.

‘What did I tell you?' Flossie grumbled. ‘Well don't
blame me, if you've all caught cold, that's all. You'll be taken ill as sure as fate. Just look at the state of your stockings. As if I haven't got enough washing to do without you making more. Go upstairs and change directly.'

‘I'm off,' Dad said quickly, and slid himself out of the door, wet feet and all, before he could be scolded too.

‘It's all very well for your father,' Flossie nagged as the girls escaped up the stairs. ‘A great strong man like him. He never takes cold.
I'm
the one that has to do all the worrying in this house.'

But she might have saved her breath, for she was worrying needlessly and nothing would stop Dad when he'd set his heart on a procession. He took them to the opening of Parliament, to a parade at Christmas, and to the royal wedding of the Princess Mary and Viscount Lascelles in February.

And then one Friday evening in June he arrived home with a hat box, so they knew he was planning yet another expedition.

‘What's that?' Mum said unnecessarily.

‘Open it,' Dad said beaming at her. ‘Special hat fer a special occasion.'

It was a lovely hat, red felt with a broad brim and two little pink feathers stuck in the ribbon.