The Londoners (2 page)

‘Silly old bat,’ Carrie said dismissively the minute they were out of Miss Godfrey’s hearing. ‘Why does she make such a song and dance over everything? Do you think now
I’ve left school Mum will let me have my hair permed and would you cut it for me and come with me to the hairdressers when I go?’

‘I would, but not willingly,’ Kate said, her mind still on Miss Godfrey’s peculiar remarks. ‘What if it makes your hair frizzy? Even worse, what if it falls
out?’

Carrie giggled, ‘Or turns my hair green? That would be a laugh, wouldn’t it. Mum would have ten fits.’

All the houses in the Square had a short flight of broad, shallow stone steps leading up to their front doors and in the summer many residents sat out on them in order to enjoy the sun and to
survey the comings and goings of their neighbours. As a consequence, Kate’s and Carrie’s conversation was punctuated every few yards by the necessity of returning greetings and
answering questions about their general welfare.

‘I’m very well thank you, Mr Nibbs,’ Kate called out now in answer to a middle-aged, stocky man’s enquiry. ‘And you’re right. Today was my last day at
Blackheath & Kidbrooke. I’m starting secretarial school in September.’

Mr Nibbs, proprietor of Nibbs High Class Fruit and Vegetables, Blackheath Village, and enjoying his weekly half-closing day, grinned. ‘When I want a secretary then I’ll know where to
come,’ he said jovially.

As they continued to walk towards the bottom end of the Square, Carrie said in high amusement, ‘You note he didn’t speak to me? He regards my dad as his arch-enemy. Not surprising
when you consider the amount of trade Dad manages to take away from him. Now about my hair. Do you think if . . .’

‘You goin’ to babysit for me tonight, Carrie?’ A buxom young woman called as she sat shelling peas on the top step of a house on the Square’s southern side, a house far
shabbier than any of the previous houses. ‘Ted’s in the darts championship an’ he wants me there to cheer ’im on.’

‘An’ wot if I said I wasn’t?’ Carrie shouted back in like manner. ‘Would it make any difference?’

Carrie’s elder sister grinned, ‘Not an ’a’p’orth. I’ll see you seven, sharp.’

‘Bloomin’ cheek,’ Carrie said crossly as they continued on their way. ‘I hate babysitting for Mavis. She never has Billy in bed. When I babysat last Wednesday she
hadn’t even fed him.’

Kate, who had no family in the world apart from her father and was deeply envious of Carrie’s warm-hearted, if slip-shod, extended family, said placatingly, ‘I bet she left you money
for fish and chips though.’

With bad grace Carrie admitted that Mavis had, indeed, left money for fish and chips and money for a bottle of ginger beer also.

‘It’s still a flippin’ liberty,’ she said as they turned in through the next gateway. ‘Why should I be the one to go tramping down to the fish shop?’

‘Why complain?’ There was mischief in Kate’s black-lashed blue eyes. ‘It gives you a chance to look over the local talent, doesn’t it?’

‘If you mean the gang that hangs around the chippie you’ve got to be joking,’ Carrie said without too much sincerity. ‘Danny Collins was there last Wednesday, flaunting
off his new army uniform. If that’s the kind of reject the army are taking God help us if there’s ever another war. We’ll stand no chance!’

Her momentary flare of bad humour vanquished, she giggled as she opened a front door almost bare of paint. ‘The Robson boys were there as well, full of how they’re going to follow in
Danny’s footsteps only to hear them, they’re going to be Marines!’

Jack and Jerry Robsons’ widowed father, Charlie, was the acknowledged local villain and Kate said dryly, ‘It’ll be better than them following in their father’s footsteps
and ending up in prison!’

As Carrie hooted in laughter her gran called out from the kitchen, ‘Carrie? Is that you already? Who do you have with you? Half the street?’

‘No, Gran,’ Carrie said, throwing her hated and now defunct school blazer over the first chair she came to. ‘Only Kate. She’s staying for tea.’

Leah Singer came barrelling out into the narrow hallway, a capacious apron tied around her ample waist, her blouse sleeves pushed high above her elbows, an uncommonly plump whippet at her heels.
‘Kate! It’s a
brocheh
to see you! How are you?’

‘I’m fine thank you, Mrs Singer,’ Kate said, sidestepping the dog and shrugging her arms out of her blazer and looking in vain for somewhere to hang it.

Carrie relieved her of the trouble by taking it from her and flinging it over a nearby clothes-horse full of airing ironing.

‘Then come into the kitchen and get some good food inside you,’ Leah said, beaming. ‘I’ve got a
bissel
of the best fried plaice you’ve ever tasted.
Don’t stand there like a
nebbish
, Carrie. Wash your hands and sit down at the table.’

They followed her back into the kitchen and Kate felt the rosy glow of well-being that always suffused her whenever she entered the large room that, thanks to Leah Singer’s industry, was
the heart of the Jennings’ home. Exotic packets of dried foodstuffs crammed the open shelves beside the stone sink. A large smoked sausage hung enticingly from a hook in the ceiling. On the
baking board covering the boiler was a pile of still oven-warm bagels with rich golden-brown crusts and on the kitchen range the contents of a frying pan sizzled, while beside it a pan of soup
simmered, filling the room with a mouth-watering aroma.

‘So, you’re big girls now?’ Leah asked rhetorically as she began ladling the soup into bowls and they washed their hands with hard pink soap. ‘No more school? No more
homework?’

‘Kate will probably still have homework,’ Carrie said, drying her hands on an off-cut of towelling hooked under the sink. ‘She’s going to secretarial school in
September.’

Leah handed her the soup bowl and drew in an admiring breath. ‘Secretarial school! That’s what you should be doing Carrie, my girl. Better sitting in a fine office than shouting and
touting like a fishwife in Lewisham High Street.’

‘I’m like my dad,’ Carrie said equably as she sat down at a deal table scrubbed almost white, ‘I like shouting and touting.’

Leah, never reticent about voicing her disappointment in either Carrie’s father’s non-Jewishness or his occupation, merely clicked her tongue in exasperation much as Miss Godfrey had
done only a little while earlier.

‘You could do so much better for yourself,
bubbehh
,’ she said, following Kate to the table and sitting down next to her. ‘Typing, sewing, hairdressing. Anything but
the market.’

‘I don’t have the patience to learn to type,’ Carrie said truthfully, ‘and besides, even if I did, nothing I ever typed would be spelt right. As for sewing and
hairdressing, I’m a
klutz
in both departments, which is why Kate’s going to come round at the weekend to cut my hair so that I can have it permed.’

Her announcement had the desired effect. The subject of her going to work in the market was immediately forgotten as Leah remonstrated long and loud on the insanity of putting chemicals onto
perfectly healthy, God-given straight hair.

Conversations between Leah and Carrie were always lovingly volatile and Kate let the ensuing argument wash over her, giving Bonzo, the whippet, an occasional pat as he nuzzled against her legs,
hopeful of a tit-bit.

As Carrie protested that it was only sense to improve on nature whenever possible and Leah declared that if Carrie had been meant to have curly hair, she would have been born with curly hair,
Kate thought back to her conversation with Miss Godfrey. It really had been most peculiar, not least because of the intensity of Miss Godfrey’s manner. It had been almost as if she had been
afraid of something, something she couldn’t quite bring herself to put into words.

‘. . . and then the next thing you’ll be doing is peroxiding it like Gloria Swansong,’ Leah was saying as she stacked the empty soup bowls and carried them across to the
sink.

‘It’s Swanson, Gran. Not Swansong,’ Carrie said with a giggle, adding teasingly, ‘it’s a good idea though. What do you think, Kate? Should I peroxide it before I
have it permed, or after?’

Kate looked at Carrie’s mane of almost blue-black hair and said in amusement, ‘I doubt there’s enough peroxide in the world to lift your hair to blonde.’

‘We might be able to get it to go red, though,’ Carrie said, enjoying herself hugely. ‘Do you think it would make me look like Maureen O’Sullivan in
A Connecticut
Yankee
? All wild and untameable?’

Leah snorted in disgust. ‘A
nebbish
is what you would look,’ she said, putting plates of fried plaice in front of them. ‘Better you go bald than go red!’

Carrie shrieked in horror and Kate laughed, slipping Bonzo a surreptitious piece of fish.

Leah sat down again and this time it was her turn to do the teasing, ‘And bald is what you’ll go if you work down the market,’ she said, giving Kate a wink Carrie didn’t
see. ‘For why do you think all those market women wear headscarves,
bubbelah
? It’s because all that fresh air makes them bald, that’s for why.’

Kate and Carrie shouted in laughter and the laughter continued as the subject of home-perming and baldness gave way to a discussion as to whether Bonzo should be allowed on the Folkestone trip
and, if he were, if he should go as an official member of the pub cricket team.

At last Kate said regretfully, ‘It’s nearly six. I have to go. Thank you for a marvellous tea, Mrs Singer.’

‘I have to go as well, Gran,’ Carrie said, pushing her chair away from the table. ‘I’m babysitting for Mavis and I want to get round there early enough to make sure
she’s bathed Billy and fed him.’

As Kate followed Carrie out of the kitchen and down the hall towards the front door, she picked her blazer up off the cluttered clothes-horse and said, ‘Do you want me to call for you
tomorrow at the usual time or are you going up to Covent Garden with your mum and dad?’

Carrie gave an exaggerated shudder. ‘After a late night baby-sitting for Mavis? You must be joking! Eight o’clock will be quite early enough for me tomorrow, thank you very
much.’

They stepped out into Magnolia Square and looked towards Mavis’s top step. It was empty.

‘Which could mean she’s already getting Billy ready for bed,’ Kate suggested optimistically.

‘Or that she’s resting with a cup of tea and a ciggie after shelling the peas,’ Carrie said darkly. ‘Honestly, how Ted puts up with her I don’t know. Dad says the
Pope should make him a saint.’

Albert Jennings’s high opinion of his son-in-law was well known to Kate. Mavis had always been what Albert described as ‘a bit of a handful’ and he had been vastly relieved
when Mavis had married a level-headed, even-tempered young man who brought home an enviable pay-packet as a docker.

‘See you tomorrow then,’ Kate said to Carrie as they reached Mavis’s front gate.

Carrie nodded, ‘Dad says there’s a glut of cherries at the moment so don’t bother with breakfast, we’ll be able to stuff ourselves all day.’

When they had been much younger, permission to help themselves to the produce had been one of the ways Albert Jennings had tempted them into spending long Saturdays helping out on the stall and
even though he now gave them handsome wages for the hours they worked, it was a perk that still continued.

As Carrie walked up the Lomaxes’ front path Kate hooked a thumb under the collar of her blazer and swung it over her shoulder. She liked the Square at this time of an evening. It possessed
a mellow, friendly air. Men were coming home from work, the greater proportion of them walking into the Square from Magnolia Hill and the general direction of the river and the docks; children were
making the most of the precious interim between teatime and bedtime, gathering around lampposts for games of chequers or hopscotch or long-rope skipping; women who had the leisure to do so, like
Miss Godfrey, were trimming hedges and dead-heading flowers.

From the garden of the house tucked into the south-west corner of the Square, a frail, apparently disembodied voice said pleasantly, ‘Isn’t it a lovely evening? The vibrations are
perfect for contacting the dear departed.’

Kate stopped walking and faced a head-high bush of frilled white roses. ‘It’s a lovely evening, Miss Helliwell,’ she agreed as two heavy trusses of blossom were parted by a
pair of rheumatically afflicted, blue-veined hands.

Miss Emily Helliwell, Palm-Reader and Clairvoyant, beamed at her. ‘I’ve been in touch with Chopin all afternoon. Such a dear, dear man and so sad there has never been a rose named
after him. Something golden, I think, would be very suitable. A cross between
Star of Persia
and
Gloire de Dijon
perhaps?’

Well used to Miss Helliwell’s eccentricities, Kate replied gravely that she thought a rose on the lines of
Gloire de Dijon
would suit Chopin very well.

Miss Helliwell’s cat, an enormous creature even more well fed than Bonzo, darted out of the garden and began to brush himself sinuously against her legs. Kate bent down and scratched him
gently beneath the chin and Miss Helliwell said, ‘I’m afraid Faust has been very naughty today. He will chase birds and it does so upset my sister.’

Kate made a murmur of sympathy. Miss Esther Helliwell was bedridden and her great pleasure in life was to look out at the garden and its masses of roses.

‘Are you going to come in and have a few words with her?’ Miss Helliwell asked, her bright-eyed, wrinkled face hopeful. ‘Mr Nibbs called in this afternoon but I’m sure
another visitor would be very welcome. I can make a pot of tea and . . .’

‘I’m sorry, Miss Helliwell, I can’t,’ Kate said apologetically. ‘I’ll call in tomorrow, on my way home from the market.’

‘Evening, ladies,’ Daniel Collins senior said, striding towards them wearing an oil-spattered boiler-suit, a newspaper tucked beneath his arm. ‘Have you read what that bugger
Hitler’s doing now? Only rounding up everyone he doesn’t like and flinging them into camps. Very odd race of people, the Germans. No sense of moderation.’