Gunner Girls and Fighter Boys Read online

  May nodded. ‘Nan, I wanted to talk to you about something.’

  ‘Your mother told me.’

  ‘I haven’t said what it is yet!’

  ‘No need. It’s ever since Jack. I know what’s going on. You’re scared witless of going in the bleedin’ army. But someone threatens you and your’n, and the worm turns. That’s the only thing’d get you out of Bermondsey.’ Her grandmother turned her dark, fathomless eyes on her. ‘I know you better ’an you know yourself.’

  May felt uncomfortable and looked away quickly. ‘And how would you know all that? Don’t tell me… you’ve seen it in the leaves!’

  ‘Do you want my advice or not, you cheeky cow?’

  ‘Sorry, Nan. You’re right. I’m frightened to go and I’m frightened to stay.’ She slumped back in her chair. ‘Oh, I’ll never cope away from home. I’m all up the wall.’

  ‘Well, love, I don’t want to contradict your mother, but it’s my opinion you’ll never be able to live with yourself if you don’t go, whatever your reasons might be.’

  ‘Really?’ May hadn’t seen this coming. ‘Well, can you see if I’ll be all right if I do go?’

  Granny Byron nodded. ‘Let’s get the kittle on.’ She went to boil water on the range; when the tea was brewed, so strong it was black, and they’d drunk it down, she took May’s cup, swirling the dregs around.

  ‘Ahh,’ she said, peering at the tea leaves. ‘Don’t tell me you’ve not got a bit of the Romany in you. Whether you know it or not, I reckon you can survive anywhere, sweetheart. You’ve just got to believe in yourself.’

  May couldn’t credit that she’d inherited any gypsy blood at all. But she was grateful for the encouragement and listened intently as her grandmother went on.

  ‘And there’s always this to consider: if you stay here, you could just as easily get bombed out, then you won’t have no home to go to anyway, will you? You might as well do what you can to protect it.’ Granny Byron sniffed.

  ‘I suppose you’re right. But what about the future – can you see where I’ll be in a year or two’s time, Nan?’

  Her grandmother sat back and picked up her old snuffbox, sniffing up a pinch and sneezing loudly. It was an outdated habit, which May hated, along with the old clay pipe that she insisted on smoking, and the peculiarly old-fashioned way she pronounced certain words. May had spent her childhood correcting ‘kittle’ to ‘kettle’ to no avail.

  ‘Ugh, Nan, when you givin’ up that habit, it’s disgusting!’ she complained.

  Granny Byron frowned. ‘I can’t do a reading without me snuff. What I see, darlin’, is this: a place with a lot of rain, pissin’ it down… and you’ll cross water, and I see fire, plenty of fire in the sky, and yes, love… there you are dressed in brown. And I see a feller… no, two, both in blue uniform.’

  ‘Two fellers? Navy or RAF? Am I going to marry one?’ May interrupted. But her grandmother frowned. She would only give a reading, never interpretations.

  ‘I couldn’t say, but here’s your heart… ahhh.’ The old woman held the cup at an angle to catch the light, then hesitated. ‘Well, that’s no surprise. It’s all hidden.’

  Her grandmother looked into her eyes, as if searching them for what she could not find in the leaves, then she nodded. ‘But that only means it’s hidden from yourself, love. One day, you’ll see it plain.’

  May found all of it infuriatingly vague. What was the use of pointing out to her the things she couldn’t see. It was all a load of old codswallop and she didn’t know why she’d bothered coming. But she had one more question that she couldn’t resist asking.

  ‘If I do go away, will I be coming home again?’ she asked, hands clenched tight beneath the table.

  Her grandmother put down the cup. ‘Only if you want to, love.’

  The reading was over and May wasn’t at all convinced she’d been told everything that was written in the leaves. For whenever Granny Byron saw bad things in the future, the only one she would reveal them to was Troubles. May had once asked her why she’d given the sweet little dog such an unfortunate name.

  ‘Because I tells him all the troubles they’ve got coming, when I dursn’t tell them! And then I tells him me own, ’cause no other bastard’s interested. And d’ye know what? That little dog don’t get a bit downhearted! No. He’s the only one fit to hear ’em.’

  Perhaps seeing her disappointment, Granny Byron took hold of her hand.

  ‘Listen here, gel. You can do more than you think. You’ve just got to toughen up a bit, be more like your old nan!’

  Her grandmother had certainly had a hard life, with her husband, whose parents had had delusions of grandeur and had given him the unusual first name of Lord, missing in prison on and off for most of her married life. She had brought up her children largely alone, which is what she was at the moment. Lord’s latest crime had been for petty theft, but he’d been given twice the normal sentence.

  ‘Have you heard when Grandad’s getting out?’ May asked.

  ‘Cocky old sod, done himself, didn’t he? Got an extra six months.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Well, the judge says to him, “What’s your name?” And your granddad says, all very polite, “Lord Byron, your honour.” “Oh, Lord Byron!” says the judge. “Is that by name or by title?” “Please yer fuckin’ self,” he says! “Please yer fuckin’ self” – to the beak! Bang goes the gavel. “Take him down! Six months extra for contempt.”’

  Shaking her head, her grandmother set the golden earrings swinging and May had to laugh at her incorrigible old tea leaf of a grandfather.

  ‘You make sure you don’t end up with a wrong ’un like him, May, that’s all I say.’

  ‘Well, there’s no one ever been interested in me, Nan, so I don’t think there’s much chance of that.’

  ‘Don’t you be so sure.’ She tapped May’s heart with a gnarled finger. ‘I’ve seen two in the leaves!’

  Just then there was a knock on the door and it was Mrs Green, come to find out if her husband were dead or alive. May hoped the woman would get more concrete proof than she had, for she wasn’t sure whether her grandmother’s words had helped her at all. As she left Dix’s Place, she felt as if she were walking forward into the night without a compass or a star to guide her.

  6

  Doing Time

  February 1941

  That painful first Christmas without Jack had passed, but the bitterly cold weather persisted into early 1941. It wasn’t until February that Peggy discovered George had lied to her about the hideous Bakelite clock. It turned out it wasn’t unique at all. She discovered this when there came a knock on the door at about eight o’clock. She wasn’t expecting any of her family and George was out. Much of her husband’s business was conducted at night, in the pub, or in warehouses and barges down by the river. The comings and goings of contraband were best executed in the dark and the blackout helped rather than hindered George’s business. Often he would come home in the early hours of the morning smelling of river fog and she knew he’d been helping to unload a boat full of cigarettes or whiskey. He always paid for it the next day, with a cough that had him doubled over, gasping for breath, but she’d given up asking him to leave the river work to others.

  She inched aside the blackout curtain that screened the front door. She was always so careful, but perhaps she was showing a light. The air-raid warden, Stan, who lived on the top landing, was a stickler for picking up every last chink. She opened the door a crack, letting a yellow curl of fog creep in. It was an opaque night; she hoped the weather had dissuaded the German bombers and she was glad not to be spending the night in the public shelter down in the courtyard. The sight of a policeman standing at her door could mean only one thing. She shivered. There’d been no air-raid warning, but sometimes a lone plane got through without being detected.

  ‘Who’s been hit?’ she asked.

  ‘Can I come in, Mrs Flint? It’s about your husband.’

  Pani
c seized her and without thinking she flung aside the blackout curtain. As the policeman stepped inside, she heard Stan shout from the courtyard, ‘Put that light out!’

  She was trembling from head to foot as the policeman quickly ducked through into the passage. Peggy felt for the wall, her legs buckling as the policeman caught her elbow. But she pulled herself up and led him into her living room. He sat in one of her brown leather armchairs, his helmet balanced on his knee as he looked around.

  ‘You’ve got a very nice home, Mrs Flint.’ He smiled. He was only young, certainly younger than herself. As she perched on the edge of the chair opposite she saw him glance up at the mantlepiece.

  ‘I’m afraid your husband won’t be coming home tonight.’

  ‘Oh no, I knew it, what’s happened to him?’ She stared at the constable, without seeing him. Instead a vision of George, broken and bloody beneath a ton of rubble, played like a newsreel to the pounding of her own heart.

  ‘Don’t worry, Mrs Flint. He’s not hurt.’

  ‘Oh thank God.’ She let out the breath she’d been holding. ‘I know there’s been no raid, but you hear of so many accidents in the blackout.’

  ‘He’s not hurt, but I’m sorry to tell you he is in bad trouble. He’s been arrested and we’re holding him overnight at Tower Bridge Police Station.’

  She’d always known George’s luck would run out, but somehow the war had deflected her attention. Surrounded by so many dangers, as they all were, just going about their daily lives, George’s occupational hazards had somehow been obscured. She’d felt that the police ought to be looking the other way, up at the night sky or searching out fifth columnists, rather than poking around in George Flint’s lock-up.

  ‘What’s he done?’ she asked.

  ‘He was caught transferring stolen goods into a van from a lock-up near Bermondsey Wall. The items came from a warehouse in Shoreditch, we believe.’

  The constable looked over at the mantlepiece again. ‘Clocks, hundreds of them. Matter of fact, they’re not unlike the one you’ve got up there, Mrs Flint,’ he said, pointing to the cream Bakelite monstrosity, with the nude woman on its pedestal.

  *

  After the policeman had left and she was on her own, Peggy put her old clock back on the mantlepiece. The young constable had taken the other one away. She sat down, listening to the seconds ticking, trying on her solitary state as though it were a new dress. She feared for George, imagining him in a damp prison cell, and yet she knew him – after a week, he’d probably be controlling the supply of prison blankets. He would be all right. But would she? As if to answer her question, the keening of the air-raid sirens drew her attention back to the war.

  She pulled on her coat, picked up her knitting and torch, lifted the gas mask from the hook, and after checking every light was off, hurried down to the public shelter at the bottom of the flats. By the time she got there it was full to bursting. She would have to try for the nearest railway arch shelter. She started running. Since the John Bull and Stainer Street bombings, she’d been wary of sheltering beneath the arches, but there simply weren’t enough public shelters, and sometimes there was no choice. People staked out their places early on in the evenings, not even waiting for the sirens to sound. Searchlights criss-crossed the night sky, lighting her way forward, and looking up, she saw tiny black dashes, stitching the beams together. Hundreds of bombs, falling like sleet. Suddenly she heard the unmistakable whistle of a bomb descending. Hurling herself on to the cobbled street, she covered her head. The explosion sent the stones rippling beneath her and windows from a nearby parade of shops shattered like a thousand chandeliers. Before the next bomb could fall, she leaped to her feet and ran, never stopping till she reached the railway arch. Not a moment too soon, she joined the crush of people inside, as the shock of another explosion ripped the night apart.

  Families and couples were already settled into little encampments. Some had placed makeshift mattresses on to the rough wooden sleeping benches; others were bedded down on the floor. Children covered in blankets slumbered, in spite of the chatter and laughter that reverberated around the brick vault. But adults had less chance of sleep. Some were knitting, others reading by the light of paraffin lamps, and in one corner someone with a piano accordion had started up a sing-song. Peggy pushed her way through, looking for an empty corner.

  ‘Come over ’ere, love.’ A woman surrounded by six children, lying top-and-tailed on the floor beneath a striped blanket, shuffled over, patting a corner of the blanket. ‘Plenty of room,’ she said, grinning.

  All night Peggy lay wakeful, curled on the edge of the woman’s blanket, listening to the alien snores and the fretful whimpering around her. It wasn’t fear of the bombs falling that kept her awake, nor the thought of George, locked up only a few streets away in Tower Bridge nick, though she did wonder if they would have a shelter there. What had really shaken her was the exhilaration she’d felt as she ran through the raid, which had far outweighed the fear. She was no fonder of bombs than the next person, so the only other explanation for it was that she was facing it alone. She had felt free.

  When daylight broke and the all-clear sounded, she stirred gratefully. Two smiling WVS canteen women entered the shelter with trays of buns and cups of tea.

  ‘How about this for five-star service? Tea in bed!’ one of them said, bending down to an elderly couple who were just sitting up and reaching for their dentures.

  ‘Oh, look at this, love.’ The husband shook his wife. ‘Better’n the Savoy in here.’

  Peggy thanked the woman whose blanket she’d shared and stepped round people packing up their bedding as she made her way outside, thick-headed, her mouth like sandpaper and her bones aching. A crowd of shelterers huddled round the WVS mobile canteen, while the woman serving struggled to keep up with the orders. After a night in the cold damp shelter, people’s faces brightened as they sipped from the steaming cups, warmed equally by the tea and the smile of the woman serving. Peggy joined the queue and when the woman handed her the tea, she asked, ‘Do you still need volunteers for these canteens?’

  The girl in the green overall raised her eyes. ‘Are you free to start now?’ she asked, laughing.

  After drinking down the hot tea, Peggy went straight to Southwark Park Road, without first going home. Her father received the news of George’s arrest with an expression of determined calm.

  ‘Well, he’s been good to us and we’ll stand by him,’ he said.

  But her mother was distraught. ‘Of course we will, but what about our Peggy, what’s she going to do without him?’

  They were talking about her as though she wasn’t there.

  ‘There’s cash in the house,’ she interrupted. ‘George’s got a bit tucked away, and he’s always told me to go to his mates if I ever get in trouble. You know George, everyone loves him.’

  ‘Well, if you find you can’t manage, you’ll just have to come home, love,’ her mother said.

  But Peggy doubted she would ever go home again. Besides, her sister wouldn’t thank her for crowding her out in the bedroom.

  ‘He’ll be out in no time,’ her father said, patting her hand but avoiding her gaze. They both knew it would be much longer than that.

  *

  George was sentenced to two years. It might have been less if it had just been the clocks. The police had found jars of Hartley’s jam and packets of tea and sugar in the lock-up, and they were clamping down on black marketeering of rationed goods. But worst of all they had found stolen ration books and identity cards. When she heard that part of the charge Peggy went cold. Her parents must never find out about it, for it was far too close to the crime that had robbed them of their last few days with Jack, and she doubted that their fondness for George would survive that knowledge.

  Peggy was allowed to go to his holding cell, before he was sent down. She hadn’t seen him since his arrest and she was shocked at the change in him. He sat, grey-faced and white-lipped, at a little table, a
policeman standing behind him. When he saw her, he attempted the old cheery smile, but his eyes told her the truth. George was frightened.

  ‘Princess, I’m sorry,’ he said, reaching out for her hand. ‘Suppose I should be grateful – it could have been longer. You’ll be all right, though. Just go to Ronnie Riley if you’re ever short. Ronnie’ll look after you.’

  ‘I’ll be fine, George, don’t worry about me. I can always go back to work.’

  ‘No! There’s no need for that,’ George protested, but he knew as well as Peggy that the £500 fine which came with the sentence meant that her life as the queen of the Purbrook Estate was at an end. She wouldn’t argue with him, not now.

  ‘Well, look after yourself in there, and if your breathing gets bad make sure you see a prison doctor.’

  She heard the constable give a small snort and looked up to see him smirking.

  ‘You’re entitled to see a doctor,’ she said firmly.

  George looked uncomfortable, but managed a smile. ‘Yes, darl, I expect we get sent up Harley Street for our annual checkups an’ all.’

  When she left him, she felt an odd mixture of guilt and relief. Guilt for all the times she’d balked at his controlling ways, relief at the sudden expansion she felt as the cell door snapped shut behind her. It was as if a confining corset had been released and finally she could breathe. It struck her as odd that just as George was beginning his prison sentence, she was being freed from hers.

  The next day she went to the labour exchange and signed up for war work. She filled in countless forms, name, age, marital status, husband’s occupation. And Peggy felt herself blushing. Although it hadn’t been her crime, she realized all at once that she would feel the stigma of George’s.

  ‘In prison,’ she whispered, hoping that the people waiting to be seen couldn’t hear. The woman filling in the form paused for an instant. ‘Previous experience?’ she asked, not looking up.

  ‘Atkinson’s.’