The Londoners (31 page)

‘I don’t,’ Charlie said as he bent down and picked up a twig, throwing it for Queenie to run after. ‘Leastways, I don’t like ’em when there’s nothing
else with ’em. I like steak and kidney puddin’ and bacon and eggs and liver and dumplin’s. And,’ he added darkly, ‘I like Christmas puddin’ stuffed with currants
and raisins and brandy and candied peel.’

‘Then you’re out of luck,’ Kate said starkly, looking across the barren Heath and wondering where Carrie and Rose had disappeared to. ‘All you’re likely to get
plenty of, out of that little lot, are dumplings!’

Even when they reached the far side of the Heath, and Kate looked back towards the Village, she could see no sign of Carrie or Rose.

Heavy-hearted, she walked with Charlie into the Square. When they reached her gate he said with unusual perception, ‘’Ope you don’t mind me saying so, petal. But you look a bit
down in the dumps. I’d have a snifter of the old medicinal if I was you. ’Ave you got some in? ’Cos if you ’aven’t, I could let you have a drop out of my store
cupboard.’

Not remotely surprised that Charlie had a plentiful supply of whisky secreted away, Kate shook her head. ‘No thanks, Charlie. Though I appreciate the offer.’

Charlie looked relieved. ‘Then make yourself a cup of char,’ he said kindly. ‘A cup of char is a wonderful pick-me-up. ’Arriet swears by ’em.’

Promising she would do so, she let herself into the house, deeply grateful for Hector’s storm of welcoming barking as he rushed to meet her. With Hector in the house, the house
wasn’t as ringingly empty as it had been in the first few weeks after her father had been interned.

‘Have you missed me?’ she asked unnecessarily as she bent down to him, fondling his ears as he licked her face in a frenzy of delight.

Ellen had told her that she would catch germs from Hector if she allowed him to demonstrate his affection in such a manner. She had been uncaring. Now, knowing herself robbed of Carrie’s
friendship, she was even less caring about germs. What she needed was affection and Hector gave it.

‘Come on,’ she said to him, standing upright again. ‘I’ve cajoled some tripe out of the butcher for you.’

As she walked into the kitchen, Hector charging enthusiastically ahead of her, she reflected that apart from Charlie, and possibly Mavis, the only friends she now had were Ellen Pierce and
Harriet Godfrey.

She began cutting the tripe into small pieces. Ellen Pierce was in her late forties and couldn’t be described as being anything other than middle-aged and the Lord alone knew how old
Harriet Godfrey was. Despite her derring-do as a voluntary ambulance driver she had long been retired and had to be nearer to seventy than she was to fifty.

She scooped the tripe into Hector’s bowl and set it down on the floor. Her relationship with Carrie had always been as close as if they had been sisters. Tears glittered on her eyelashes.
Ever since she could remember she had always thought of Carrie as
being
her sister. Friendship had never seemed a strong enough word for the bond there had been between them ever since
they had met at nursery school. And now, though Carrie had not said so specifically, Kate knew that deep, committed friendship on Carrie’s part had been withdrawn.

Snow had begun to fall quite heavily against the kitchen window and she walked desultorily into the sitting-room, wondering if she dare deplete her small stock of coal by lighting a fire.

On the mantelpiece, in the silver frame she had so carefully shopped for, Toby smiled across at her from her favourite photograph of him. It had been taken only a few weeks before he had died.
He was leaning against the wing of his Hurricane, his hands casually in his pockets, one foot nonchalantly crossing the other at the ankle, just as he had stood at the door of her office the first
time she had set eyes on him. He was in uniform, his sheep-lined flying jacket unzipped, his thick tumble of fair hair falling low across his forehead. And he was looking directly into the camera,
his eyes full of laughter, his smile so dear and familiar that for a heart-stopping moment it was as if he were in the room with her.

Icy fingers tightened on her heart. He wasn’t in the room with her. He would never be in the room with her again. Grief, so raw and deep it was beyond containment, convulsed her. She began
to weep and as the snow-laden sky outside the window darkened into dusk, she continued to weep, her heart breaking, hugging her breast as though holding herself together against an inner
disintegration.

She was proved right in her assumption that when Carrie had turned her back on her and walked away from her in Tranquil Vale, she had been turning her back on all the years of
friendship that had previously bonded them so closely.

November gave way to December and Carrie didn’t knock on her door. Occasionally Kate would see her from a distance with Rose, and sometimes with Bonzo as well. Always, another figure was
with them, companionably linking arms with Carrie. Always, that person was Christina Frank.

As Christmas drew nearer, the air raids, which had once seemed as if they might be slackening off, increased yet again in intensity. They also differed from the earlier raids in their tactics.
Incendiary bombs began to be dropped in far greater numbers than previously, sometimes as many as three thousand in a single raid. Fires raged throughout London and there were times when Kate could
hardly remember what it was like to breathe in air unpolluted by smoke and the fumes of sulphur.

Harriet Godfrey was on almost constant call and, far from the long hours and harrowing nature of her work proving to be too much for her, thrived on the danger, driving with panache through
blacked-out, hazardously cratered streets strewn with glass and rubble, often doing so when a raid was in progress and bombs were falling.

‘I shall be on duty on Christmas Day, Katherine,’ she said to Kate a few days before Christmas. ‘So many of the other volunteer ambulance drivers have families and it seems
only fair that, if possible, that day should be covered by those of us who live alone.’

Kate envied her her busyness. She, too, would much have preferred driving an ambulance or a fire engine or helping to man the phones at an ARP centre. She had, over the last few weeks,
volunteered her services everywhere possible and had been turned down as a driver due to her now obvious pregnancy and been rejected at the ARP centre due to the stigma of her surname.

‘And Ellen won’t be spending Christmas Day with us,’ she said to Hector as she surveyed the fake Christmas tree she had unearthed from the small spare bedroom where suitcases
and other miscellaneous items were kept; ‘She’s looking after too many stray and frightened bombed-out animals to be able to leave them and spend the day with us.’

She opened the ancient cardboard box that her father had kept the tree’s decorations in for as long as she could remember. ‘So we shall be on our own,’ she said, beginning to
unwrap a bauble from the sheet of newspaper her father had carefully wrapped it in. ‘It’s going to be just you and me Hector.’

Though her inner strength of character and defiant attitude towards life had enabled her to cope with her ostracism by neighbours and former friends, the prospect of a Christmas spent without
human companionship was agonizingly dispiriting. Christmas was a time for families. She should have been spending it with her father, but her father had now been moved to an internment camp on the
Isle of Wight. And she should have been spending it, mentally if not physically, with Toby. If he had still been alive they would now be married and even though the war situation would have ensured
that their chances of spending Christmas Day together would have been remote, at least she would have known that, wherever he was, he would have been thinking of her.

She hung the bauble on the tree and then, as always when longing and grief for Toby threatened to overpower her, she folded her arms over the comforting mound of her stomach. She had the baby to
look forward to. Doctor Roberts had told her that, in his judgement, she would give birth during the last week of February or the first week of March.

‘Fortunately first babies give plenty of warning that they are on their way,’ he had said to her reassuringly. ‘I had to drive through a hail of incendiary bombs to one young
mother last week. It was her third baby and didn’t have the manners to await my arrival. By the time I got there it was to find I’d risked life and limb for nothing. The baby was
wrapped in a shawl in his mother’s arms looking, if I may so, extremely smug.’

Unwrapping another Christmas tree decoration, Kate wondered what the circumstances of her own confinement would be. Whenever an air raid caught her out at home, and not at the canteen, she sat
it out in the Anderson shelter with Hector, the loneliness of such hours exacerbated by the knowledge that no-one else in Magnolia Square was enduring the aerial bombardment in such isolation.

In their Morrison shelter, Miss Helliwell and her sister had each other for company. Leah Singer and Christina Frank and Billy and Beryl and Bonzo, all crammed communally in the Jennings’
Anderson shelter. Hettie had begun accompanying Miriam to the public shelter at the bottom of Magnolia Hill, where a rowdy crush and a sing-song were guaranteed comforters through the agonizing
hours until the all-clear siren sounded. Charlie Robson remained in his own bed during the nights when raids were bad.

‘I’m as safe there as anywhere, petal,’ he had said fatalistically to Kate. ‘If a bomb ’as your number on it, it’ll find you wherever you are. And if one of
the buggers ’as my number on it I might as well die in the comfort of my own bed as in a perishin’ cold Anderson shelter or crammed next to Miriam and ’ettie and their
perishin’ knittin’ needles.’

If she hadn’t been pregnant and had the baby’s safety to think of, Kate might have emulated him. When she was at the canteen, and when the raids were at their height, she had used a
public shelter along with the canteen’s other voluntary workers. Now, however, she no longer made the difficult trip into Deptford.

Ever since her surname had become public knowledge at the canteen she had been made to feel unwelcome. The cratered streets she had to negotiate to reach Deptford had also begun to deter her.
Ordinarily she wouldn’t have given them a thought, but she was now nearly seven months pregnant and she didn’t want to risk a heavy fall and a miscarriage.

She adjusted the decorations on the Christmas tree, surveying them critically, wondering if she was foolish in not ending the loneliness of the hours spent in the Anderson shelter by joining
other local people in the public shelter.

A small, glittering, silver bell was making the decorations on the left side of the tree unequal to those on the right-hand side and she hung it more centrally. If she went into the public
shelter she risked meeting with the same kind of abuse she had suffered in Mr Nibbs’ shop. Miriam and Hettie certainly wouldn’t make her welcome and, as she had already painfully
discovered, it was possible to be far more lonely in a hostile crowd than on her own.

‘I’ll stick to the Anderson, Hector,’ she said as she draped tinsel over the tree. ‘And I’ll keep my fingers crossed that the baby doesn’t decide to make its
arrival when there’s a raid on!’

On Christmas Eve, returning from a visit to her new grocer in Lewisham, Kate saw Carrie and Christina ahead of her. They were obviously deep in conversation and occasionally
Kate heard the faint, familiar sound of Carrie’s infectious laughter.

A pang, almost of physical pain, knifed through her. Though Carrie was no doubt still worrying frantically about Danny’s whereabouts and welfare, she had family and friends to comfort her
and offer a companionship that took her mind, however intermittently and temporarily, off her anxieties.

Her own footsteps slowed. She had had to queue a long time at the grocer’s for her weekly rations and an even longer period of time at the butcher’s. Her back ached and the baby in
her womb felt as heavy as lead. It was bitterly cold and as she hadn’t enough clothing coupons to buy a new winter coat, one that would wrap over the lump that was the baby, she had had to
keep moving the buttons on her existing coat. In the early months of her pregnancy this ploy had been satisfactory, but was so no longer. A heavy, knee-length, hand-knitted scarf filled in the gap
where her coat no longer met and fastened, but it wasn’t an ideal solution and she was not only tired, but cold.

The distance between herself and Carrie and Christina lengthened. They turned off Lewisham High Street into Magnolia Hill, companionably arm in arm, and Kate’s footsteps became even
slower. Christmas Eve. Even though last Christmas had been the first Christmas of the war, it had been heaven in comparison. Last Christmas her father had been at home. Last Christmas Toby had been
alive. It began to sleet and within minutes she could feel the damp seeping through her headscarf. Hector looked up at her miserably, not understanding why she didn’t stride out vigorously
for the shelter of home, or even break into a sensible run.

‘Sorry, Hector,’ she said, reading his thoughts and transferring her wicker shopping-basket from one hand to the other, ‘but I don’t want to catch Carrie and Christina up
and don’t think I could, even if I tried. I’m tired and my back aches.’

With the wind blowing the sleet stingingly against her face, she turned the corner into Magnolia Hill. A middle-aged woman she knew only by sight nearly walked into her, coming from the other
direction. Taken by surprise, Kate smiled apologetically as she side-stepped her bulk out of the woman’s way. ‘Sorry,’ she said to her. ‘It’s miserable weather
isn’t it?’ and then, remembering that it was Christmas Eve, she added, ‘Merry Christmas.’

The woman paused for a moment before walking on, staring at Kate hard. No answering smile touched her mouth. ‘I don’t speak to Krauts,’ she said through gritted teeth.
‘And I hope you have a piss-miserable Christmas!’

Shock, as fresh as if the insult had been the very first she had received, almost robbed Kate of breath. She had been born in Magnolia Square. Her mother, and her mother’s parents, and her
mother’s grandparents and goodness knew how many other generations on her mother’s side of her family, had all been born and bred in South London. How could her neighbours be so
unreasonable as to treat her as though she were a German-born, German spy? She’d never even
been
to Germany. She didn’t know a word of the language apart from the words of
endearment her father sometimes used when speaking to her.