Winter of the World (44 page)

As soon as she could, Daisy got Eva to go with her to another room where they could talk privately. ‘Boy’s got a mistress,’ she said immediately. She showed Eva the condoms.
‘I found these.’

‘Oh, Daisy, I’m so sorry,’ Eva said.

Daisy thought of giving Eva the grisly details – they normally told each other everything – but this time Daisy felt too humiliated, so she just said: ‘I confronted him, and he
admitted it.’

‘Is he sorry?’

‘Not very. He says all men of his class do it, including his father.’

‘Jimmy doesn’t,’ Eva said decisively.

‘No, I’m sure you’re right.’

‘What will you do?’

‘I’m going to leave him. We can get divorced, then someone else can be the viscountess.’

‘But you can’t if there’s a war!’

‘Why not?’

‘It’s too cruel, when he’s on the battlefield.’

‘He should have thought of that before he slept with a pair of prostitutes in Aldgate.’

‘But it would be cowardly, as well. You can’t dump a man who is risking his life to protect you.’

Reluctantly, Daisy saw Eva’s point. War would transform Boy from a despicable adulterer who deserved rejection into a hero defending his wife, his mother and his country from the terror of
invasion and conquest. It was not just that everyone in London and Buffalo would see Daisy as a coward for leaving him; she would feel that way herself. If there was a war, she wanted to be brave,
even though she was not sure what that might involve.

‘You’re right,’ she said grudgingly. ‘I can’t leave him if there’s a war.’

There was a clap of thunder. Daisy looked at the clock: it was midnight. The rain altered in sound as a torrential downpour began.

Daisy and Eva returned to the drawing room. Bea was asleep on a couch. Andy had his arm around May, who was still snivelling. Boy was smoking a cigar and drinking brandy. Daisy decided that she
would definitely be driving home.

Fitz came in at half past midnight, his evening suit soaking wet. ‘The dithering is over,’ he said. ‘Neville will send the Germans an ultimatum in the morning. If they do not
begin to withdraw their troops from Poland by midday – eleven o’clock our time – we will be at war.’

They all got up and prepared to leave. In the hall, Daisy said: ‘I’ll drive,’ and Boy did not argue with her. They got into the cream Bentley and Daisy started the engine.
Grout closed the door of Fitz’s house. Daisy turned on the windscreen wipers but did not pull away.

‘Boy,’ she said, ‘let’s try again.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I don’t really want to leave you.’

‘I certainly don’t want you to go.’

‘Give up those women in Aldgate. Sleep with me every night. Let’s really try for a baby. It’s what you want, isn’t it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then will you do as I ask?’

There was a long pause. Then he said: ‘All right.’

‘Thank you.’

She looked at him, hoping for a kiss, but he sat still, looking straight ahead through the windscreen, as the rhythmic wipers swept away the relentless rain.

(vi)

On Sunday the rain stopped and the sun came out. Lloyd Williams felt as if London had been washed clean.

During the course of the morning, the Williams family gathered in the kitchen of Ethel’s house in Aldgate. There was no prior arrangement: they turned up spontaneously. They wanted to be
together, Lloyd guessed, if war was declared.

Lloyd longed for action against the Fascists, and at the same time dreaded the prospect of war. In Spain he had seen enough bloodshed and suffering for a lifetime. He wished never to take part
in another battle. He had even given up boxing. Yet he hoped with all his heart that Chamberlain would not back down. He had seen for himself what Fascism meant in Germany, and the rumours coming
out of Spain were equally nightmarish: the Franco regime was murdering former supporters of the elected government in their hundreds and thousands, and the priests were in control of the schools
again.

This summer, after he had graduated, he had immediately joined the Welsh Rifles, and as a former member of the Officer Training Corps he had been given the rank of lieutenant. The army was
energetically preparing for combat: it was only with the greatest difficulty that he had got a twenty-four hour pass to visit his mother this weekend. If the Prime Minister declared war today,
Lloyd would be among the first to go.

Billy Williams came to the house in Nutley Street after breakfast on Sunday morning. Lloyd and Bernie were sitting by the radio, newspapers open on the kitchen table, while Ethel prepared a leg
of pork for dinner. Uncle Billy almost wept when he saw Lloyd in uniform. ‘It makes me think of our Dave, that’s all,’ he said. ‘He’d be a conscript, now, if
he’d come back from Spain.’

Lloyd had never told Billy the truth about how Dave had died. He pretended he did not know the details, just that Dave had been killed in action at Belchite and was presumably buried there.
Billy had been in the Great War and knew how haphazardly bodies were dealt with on the battlefield, and that probably made his grief worse. His great hope was to visit Belchite one day, when Spain
was freed at last, and to pay his respects to the son who died fighting in that great cause.

Lenny Griffiths was another who had never returned from Spain. No one had any idea where he might be buried. It was even possible he was still alive, in one of Franco’s prison camps.

Now the radio reported Prime Minister Chamberlain’s statement to the House of Commons last night, but nothing further.

‘You’d never know what a stink there was afterwards,’ said Billy.

‘The BBC doesn’t report stinks,’ said Lloyd. ‘They like to sound reassuring.’

Both Billy and Lloyd were members of the Labour Party’s National Executive – Lloyd as the representative of the party’s youth section. After he had come back from Spain he had
managed to gain readmission to Cambridge University, and while finishing his studies he had toured the country addressing Labour Party groups, telling people how the elected Spanish government had
been betrayed by Britain’s Fascist-friendly government. It had done no good – Franco’s anti-democracy rebels had won anyway – but Lloyd had become a well-known figure, even
something of a hero, especially among young left-wingers – hence his election to the Executive.

So both Lloyd and Uncle Billy had been at last night’s committee meeting. They knew that Chamberlain had bowed to pressure from the Cabinet and sent the ultimatum to Hitler. Now they were
waiting on tenterhooks to see what would happen.

As far as they knew, no response had yet been received from Hitler.

Lloyd recalled his mother’s friend Maud and her family in Berlin. Those two little children would be eighteen and nineteen now, he calculated. He wondered if they were sitting around a
radio wondering whether they were going to war against England.

At ten o’clock, Lloyd’s half-sister, Millie, arrived. She was now nineteen, and married to her friend Naomi Avery’s brother Abe, a leather wholesaler. She earned good money as
a salesgirl on commission in an expensive dress shop. She had ambitions to open her own shop, and Lloyd had no doubt that she would do it one day. Although it was not the career Bernie would have
chosen for her, Lloyd could see how proud he was of her brains and ambition and smart appearance.

But today her poised self-assurance had collapsed. ‘It was awful when you were in Spain,’ she said tearfully to Lloyd. ‘And Dave and Lenny never did come back. Now it will be
you and my Abie off somewhere, and us women waiting every day for news, wondering if you’re dead yet.’

Ethel put in: ‘And your cousin Keir. He’s eighteen now.’

Lloyd said to his mother: ‘Which regiment was my real father in?’

‘Oh, does it matter?’ She was never keen to talk about Lloyd’s father, perhaps out of consideration for Bernie.

But Lloyd wanted to know. ‘It matters to me,’ he said.

She threw a peeled potato into a pan of water with unnecessary vigour. ‘He was in the Welsh Rifles.’

‘The same as me! Why didn’t you tell me before?’

‘The past is the past.’

There might be another reason for her caginess, Lloyd knew. She had probably been pregnant when she married. This did not bother Lloyd, but to her generation it was shameful. All the same, he
persisted. ‘Was my father Welsh?’

‘Yes.’

‘From Aberowen?’

‘No.’

‘Where, then?’

She sighed. ‘His parents moved around – something to do with his father’s job – but I think they were from Swansea originally. Satisfied now?’

‘Yes.’

Lloyd’s Aunt Mildred came in from church, a stylish middle-aged woman, pretty except for protruding front teeth. She wore a fancy hat – she was a milliner with a small factory. Her
two daughters by her first marriage, Enid and Lillian, both in their late twenties, were married with children of their own. Her elder son was the Dave who had died in Spain. Her younger son, Keir,
followed her into the kitchen. Mildred insisted on taking her children to church, even though her husband, Billy, would have nothing to do with religion. ‘I had a lifetime’s worth of
that when I was a child,’ he often said. ‘If I’m not saved, no one is.’

Lloyd looked around. This was his family: mother, stepfather, half-sister, uncle, aunt, cousin. He did not want to leave them and go away to die somewhere.

Lloyd looked at his watch, a stainless-steel model with a square face that Bernie had given him as a graduation present. It was eleven o’clock. On the radio, the fruity voice of newsreader
Alvar Lidell said the Prime Minister was expected to make an announcement shortly. Then there was some solemn classical music.

‘Hush, now, everyone,’ said Ethel. ‘I’ll make you all a cup of tea after.’

The kitchen went quiet.

Alvar Lidell announced the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain.

The appeaser of Fascism, Lloyd thought; the man who gave Czechoslovakia to Hitler; the man who had stubbornly refused to help the elected government of Spain even after it became indisputably
obvious that the Germans and Italians were arming the rebels. Was he about to cave in yet again?

Lloyd noticed that his parents were holding hands, Ethel’s small fingers digging into Bernie’s palm.

He checked his watch again. It was a quarter past eleven.

Then they heard the Prime Minister say: ‘I am speaking to you from the Cabinet Room at Ten Downing Street.’

Chamberlain’s voice was reedy and over-precise. He sounded like a pedantic schoolmaster. What we need is a warrior, Lloyd thought.

‘This morning the British ambassador in Berlin handed the German government a final note, stating that, unless the British government heard from them by eleven o’clock that they were
prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us.’

Lloyd found himself feeling impatient with Chamberlain’s verbiage.
A state of war would exist between us
: what a strange way to put it. Get on with it, he thought; get to the
point. This is life and death.

Chamberlain’s voice deepened and became more statesmanlike. Perhaps he was no longer looking at the microphone, but instead seeing millions of his countrymen in their homes, sitting by
their radio sets, waiting for his fateful words. ‘I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received.’

Lloyd heard his mother say: ‘Oh, God, spare us.’ He looked at her. Her face was grey.

Chamberlain uttered his next, dreadful words quite slowly: ‘. . . and that, consequently, this country is at war with Germany.’

Ethel began to cry.

1940 (I)

Aberowen had changed. There were cars, trucks and buses on the streets. When Lloyd had come here as a child in the 1920s to visit his grandparents, a parked car had been a
rarity that would draw a crowd.

But the town was still dominated by the twin towers of the pithead, with their majestically revolving wheels. There was nothing else: no factories, no office blocks, no industry other than coal.
Almost every man in town worked down the pit. There were a few dozen exceptions: some shopkeepers, numerous clergymen of all denominations, a town clerk, a doctor. Whenever the demand for coal
slumped, as it had in the thirties, and men were laid off, there was nothing else for them to do. That was why the Labour Party’s most passionate demand was help for the unemployed, so that
such men would never again suffer the agony and humiliation of being unable to feed their families.

Lieutenant Lloyd Williams arrived by train from Cardiff on a Sunday in April 1940. Carrying a small suitcase, he walked up the hill to T
ŷ
Gwyn. He had spent eight months training new
recruits – the same work he had done in Spain – and coaching the Welsh Rifles boxing team, but the army had at last realized that he spoke fluent German, transferred him to intelligence
duties, and sent him on a training course.

Training was all the army had done so far. No British forces had yet fought the enemy in an engagement of any significance. Germany and the USSR had overrun Poland and divided it between them,
and the Allied guarantee of Polish independence had proved worthless.

British people called it the Phoney War, and they were impatient for the real thing. Lloyd had no sentimental illusions about warfare – he had heard the piteous voices of dying men begging
for water on the battlefields of Spain – but even so he was eager to get started on the final showdown with Fascism.

The army was expecting to send more forces to France, assuming the Germans would invade. It had not happened, and they remained at the ready, but meanwhile, they did a lot of training.

Lloyd’s initiation into the mysteries of military intelligence was to take place in the stately home that had featured in his family’s destiny for so long. The wealthy and noble
owners of many such palaces had loaned them to the armed forces, perhaps for fear that otherwise they might be confiscated permanently.