The Londoners (18 page)

Kate poured boiling water into a teapot. ‘And I’m half-German,’ she said tautly, ‘and your family quite obviously can’t come to terms with that either.’

Carrie pushed the thick fall of her hair away from her face. ‘Forget the tea, Kate,’ she said, her voice drained of all emotion. ‘I’d better be getting back to
Rose.’

Kate nodded. She no longer felt in the mood for a cup of tea either. She felt more in the mood for a neat double whisky.

When Carrie had left the house, pushing the perambulator back down to the bottom end of the Square, Kate put on her cherry-red coat and, with a scarf around her throat and a beret crammed on her
hair, set off in the opposite direction, towards the Heath.

She was acutely aware of how much she missed being able to borrow Bonzo from Carrie’s grandmother and have him trotting at her heels; of how much she would miss, if she met Mr Nibbs or Mr
Collins, the cheerful repartee that had once existed between them; of how much she missed a friendly neighbourhood world that she had always taken for granted and which now was fast crumbling into
oblivion.

Once on the Heath she headed across it diagonally, having no destination in mind, wanting only the release of energetic physical exercise. Britain had now been at war with Germany for six
months. Millions of other lives had been disrupted out of all recognition; some destroyed for ever. Common sense told her that by comparison with what millions of civilians and soldiers were
suffering on mainland Europe, her own and her father’s situation was so negligible as to be non-existent. The knowledge didn’t stop the shock she was feeling, or the hurt.

Christina. If it hadn’t been for Christina’s arrival in the Jennings’ household none of this would have happened.

She strode savagely over the frost-tipped grass. The Cricket Club committee members hadn’t behaved as they had because of Christina’s influence. They had behaved as they had because
of a common bond and that common bond was the primaeval, instinctive closing of ranks against a member of another tribe when danger from that tribe threatened.

She crossed one of the narrow roads bisecting the Heath, gravel scrunching beneath her feet. Despite having regarded Britain as his home for twenty years and of having lived for all that time in
Magnolia Square, when the chips were down, as they were now between Britain and Germany, then her father was no longer perceived by their neighbours as being a member of their close-knit community.
He was an outsider. A misfit.

She stepped once again on to frost-tipped turf, the church of All Saints’, which sat squatly on the edge of the Heath at the upper end of Blackheath Village, only fifty yards or so
distant. If her father was an outsider and a misfit, what did that make her? Was she, too, going to suffer the same kind of blinkered ostracism? Was she going to become a misfit amongst the
community she had been born and brought up in?

She came to a halt, her hands deep in her coat pockets, staring up at All Saints’ slender spire, her face pinched with cold, her eyes resolute. If that was what the future held then she
would face it with the dignity that was so integral a part of her father’s nature. To react in any other way would be to let him down and she would never do that. Not for anyone. Not even for
Toby.

When she finally returned to Magnolia Square dusk was beginning to fall and as she crossed the road from the Heath she was at first uncertain of the identity of the two little
figures trailing wearily towards it from the top end of the Park from the Old Dover Road direction.

The taller of the two was carrying a battered suitcase secured with string, his knee-high socks hanging in wrinkles around his ankles. Hanging on to his free hand was a small girl no more than
three or four years old, her boxed gas mask hanging bulkily around her neck, her coat buttoned up lop-sidedly, her badly cut fringe so low across her eyes it was a miracle she could see where she
was going.

‘Come on,’ she heard the taller figure say in an exhausted voice instantly recognizable. ‘Yer can’t lay dahn and cry again. We’re nearly ’ome now.’

Kate sucked in her breath in disbelief and then broke into a run.
‘Billy! What on earth has happened? How did you get here from Cornwall? Who is with you?’

As she raced towards them she saw him totter slightly and as he did so Beryl’s legs gave out on her completely and she fell down on her bottom, her tear-streaked face white with
exhaustion.

‘Who is with you?’ Kate demanded, lifting Beryl up from the pavement and into her arms with difficulty. ‘Where are they? Why have they brought you home?’

‘No-one’s wiv us,’ Billy said, wiping his nose on his sleeve. ‘We’ve run away. It were ’orrible in the country. We ’ad to sleep in a shed with smelly
animals and Beryl were frightened and we didn’t have enough to eat and . . .’

‘Dear God in heaven!’ Kate had only to look into his hollow-eyed face to know that he wasn’t spinning her a story to excuse his running away and returning home, but was telling
her the horrifying truth.

‘The woman who said she’d ’ave us as evacuees only ’ad us ’cos she was forced to,’ Billy continued, as if this was sufficient to explain the appalling
treatment he and Beryl had been subjected to. ‘She didn’t want us in the ’ouse ’cos she said we’d make it dirty.’ He shifted the cumbersome suitcase from one
hand into the other, ‘and when Beryl cried ’cos she was ’ungry she clouted her.’

‘She hit her?’ Kate asked, aghast. ‘The woman you were billeted with hit Beryl for crying because she was hungry?’

Billy nodded, ‘And she wouldn’t let us ’ave a light in the shed and when Beryl wet herself ’cos she were scared she were clouted again.’

Over the last few weeks and months Kate had experienced roaring tides of rage over the way her father had been treated by his erstwhile friends. None of that previous emotion came remotely close
to the ice-cold flood of fury that now enveloped her.

Hitching Beryl a little higher and holding her secure with one arm, she took hold of Billy’s hand. ‘Come along, Billy,’ she said unsteadily, shaken to the core by the terrible
knowledge that she was quite capable of murder. ‘Let’s get you and Beryl home, and warm and fed.’

With the suitcase still banging against Billy’s legs and Beryl’s frozen hands wrapped tightly around Kate’s neck they trooped in the deepening gloom towards the bottom end of
the Square, past Miss Godfrey’s carefully blacked-out windows, past Kate’s own home, past Mr Nibbs’s house, past the carefully tended winter-sweet at Miss Helliwell’s gate,
its leafless branches heavy with fragrant flowers of waxy cream.

A sound suspiciously like a sob came from Billy’s throat as they turned in the gateless entry of his home. With surprising regard for the strict black-out regulations, no chink of light
showed from behind Mavis’s heavily curtained windows. There was no need for Kate to knock on the door. Billy let go of her hand and seized hold of the door-knob, turning it and nearly falling
in his rush to be inside.

‘Mum!’
he cried,
‘Mum!’
Me and Beryl are ’ome and we ain’t never goin’ away again!’

‘They walked from the house they had been billeted in to Truro and then hitched a lift with a lorry-driver from Truro to Southampton,’ Miss Godfrey said an hour or
so later.

They were drinking mugs of tea in the Lomaxes tiny kitchen. Mavis’s screams, initially of joy at seeing her children again, then horror when they told her their story and finally vows to
send their billetor to an early grave had brought all her neighbours, even those who lived as distant from her as Miss Godfrey, hurrying out of their homes to discover what on earth was going
on.

‘I thought the Germans were here,’ Miss Helliwell confided, one hand pressed against her still palpitating heart. ‘I told Esther to feign dead. Even Germans wouldn’t rape
a dead woman, would they?’

Albert Jennings stared at her, momentarily diverted from the prospect of purloining Ted’s motor bike and side-car and hurtling there and then down to Cornwall, to wreak revenge on his
grandchildren’s persecutor. It had never occurred to him that the aged Miss Helliwells were living in fear of being raped by the Hun. ‘I wouldn’t know,’ he said truthfully,
‘but I think they might have more on their minds when they first land. And if you’ll excuse me for saying so, even if they didn’t, I don’t think you and your sister would be
first in that particular queue.’

‘What happened after they reached Southampton?’ Kate asked Miss Godfrey before the conversation became even more bizarre. She had been putting Beryl to bed while Billy had been
telling his stupefied audience the details of his and Beryl’s ordeal and was still in the dark about how the two of them had made the two-hundred-and-fifty-mile journey home.

‘They couldn’t get another lift and they slept on the street and then in the morning a naval officer, on his way home to Richmond from Southampton, on leave, took pity on them and
gave them a lift in his car.’

‘I’ll bloody kill ’er if I get my ’ands on ’er,’ Miriam sobbed, stumbling into the kitchen in search of a reviving mug of tea. ‘If Ted had been
’ome she’d stand no chance! ’E’d be ’alfway to Cornwall by now and by the time ’e’d finished with ’er she’d be lucky if she could even open the
door to ’er bloody shed, let alone keep children in it in the middle of winter!’

‘What happened when they reached Richmond?’ Mr Nibbs asked. Within days of war breaking out he had volunteered as an Air Raid Warden and his official Air Raid Warden’s tin hat
was strapped firmly beneath his chin lending him an air of authority.

‘They got on a tube train to the Embankment without paying and nipped off it and underneath the barriers and then they tried to get on the overground train to Blackheath the same way, only
a guard cottoned on to them and ejected them before the train left Charing Cross station,’ Miss Godfrey said, contempt in her voice for the callous action of the guard in question.
‘After that they simply walked.’

‘All the way from Charing Cross?’ Kate asked, stunned.

Miss Godfrey nodded grimly. ‘The billetor in question won’t get away with it, of course. I shall write immediately to Truro’s Evacuation Committee chairman and inform him of
the scandalous conditions Billy and Beryl endured. I shall certainly ensure that no other unfortunate children are billeted with her. As far as I’m concerned, the woman deserves a prison
sentence.’

‘Prison!
’ Mavis shrieked, hurtling into the small crowded kitchen in search of her headscarf and coat.
‘Prison!
Prison’s too good for her!’ She
yanked her coat from off a hook on the back of the kitchen door. ‘Dad’s borrowin’ Ted’s motor bike and side-car and he’s takin’ me down there now!
Tonight!’ She plunged her arms into her coat sleeves. ‘How dare she treat my kids like that? How dare she make my little Beryl sleep in a smelly old shed?’

With hands shaking with fury, she snatched up her headscarf from the kitchen table. ‘Come on, Dad,’ she said to Albert, flinging the scarf over her peroxided, Victory-roll hairstyle
and knotting it beneath her chin. ‘Mum’s going to stay with Billy and Beryl. Let’s be off!’ And without waiting for a reply she whirled out of the kitchen into the narrow
hallway beyond.

‘I don’t fancy her chances,’ Mr Nibbs said from his position squeezed between the oven and the sink as Albert, clad in his Home Guard uniform, strode purposefully out of the
kitchen in her wake.

‘Whose chances?’ Miss Helliwell asked, bewildered by the force of the passions surging around her.

‘That bloody billetor’s in Cornwall,’ Mr Nibbs said grimly. ‘She’d have an easier time facing Hitler and his entire army than Mavis in the mood she’s in
now!’

By the time Kate left the Lomaxes’, accompanied by Miss Godfrey, she was almost convinced she had severely over-reacted in imagining that her neighbours were beginning to
regard her as an outsider. The solidarity of high feeling about the way the Lomax children had been treated as evacuees, a solidarity in which she had been wholeheartedly included, made her feel
once again an integral part of Magnolia Square’s close-knit community.

Two days later the gossip over the garden fences was all about the Lomax children’s billetor’s near escape.

‘Albert told Daniel that Mavis had her by the hair and was dragging her by it towards the shed,’ Hettie said with relish to Miss Helliwell. ‘She was going to lock her up in it
and if she had done, she’d have thrown away the key!’

‘And what happened?’ Miss Helliwell asked, her eyes like saucers, wondering if her sister’s heart would stand the strain of hearing this latest exciting instalment in the Lomax
saga.

‘Some silly sod of a neighbour called for the police,’ Hettie said, her black hat tipped at a rakish angle, disappointment heavy in her voice. ‘Mavis is back home now and she
says she’s never going to let the kids go away again. It’s not as if all the bombs we thought would be dropped on London have been dropped. Daniel says old Hitler is biding his time in
the hope that he’s going to overrun France and that if he does, we’ll get the jitters and come to an arrangement with him.’ She snorted in derision at the very thought. ‘As
if we would!’