After the Mourning (18 page)

As the bombing reached its height about an hour later and the ground shook beneath me in an endless earthquake, I bent down low over Lily Lee and whispered, ‘I – I w-won’t let them g-get you, Lily. Y-y-you will be s-safe with me.’

And then I placed the coffin lid over her lest the ceiling should come down and damage her.

Chapter Twelve

T
here is a very sad story associated with the Jewish cemetery on Buckingham Road, Forest Gate. Known as the West Ham cemetery, the site is enhanced by a large, round mausoleum that was built to take the body of a young woman called Evelina de Rothschild. Married to Ferdinand, of the famous banking family, poor Evelina died in childbirth in 1866 and was mourned by her husband for the rest of his life. The mausoleum is a testament to Ferdinand’s grief, which apparently turned the poor man into a recluse. It was a rather fitting place for a young and much-loved person like Alfie Rosen to be interred.

There must have been hundreds of mourners. My lad Arthur, whose aunt Flo works in the heart of the Jewish East End at one of the sweat-shops on Fashion Street, reckoned that almost every tailor and seamstress in the area had downed tools to come out for Alfie Rosen. At half past three on a winter afternoon, with Jerries expected any minute, that was quite something.

Once I’d got Doris, her mum, her sisters and Herschel Rosen to the cemetery and lowered Alfie’s coffin into the hole, I stood with my lads by the Rothschild mausoleum. After all, once Rabbi Silverman began his prayers we’d all be at sea, not having any grasp on Hebrew. All I knew was that once it was all over the male congregants would fill in the grave as opposed to the Christian custom of paying others to do it for us. The only non-Jews in the thick of the congregation were my mother and sister Nan. The Duchess held on to the arm of Doris’s mother, Sadie Mankiewicz, another long-standing widow like herself. Only Aggie didn’t make it, not because she didn’t want to but because she had to work. If you’re in munitions or food production, like Aggie, that’s a reality of your life. Nothing can interrupt the war effort.

‘Poor Doris Mankiewicz,’ Hannah whispered into my ear, when she reached my side to stand next to me.

I looked down at her and said, ‘What you doing here?’ My girl knew Doris a bit on account of their both coming from the same area, and through me, of course. But with Hannah and things Jewish, there is and always will be a problem.

‘Weren’t Sadie Mankiewicz and her family cut me off when I went with that boy,’ she said. ‘That was my parents and the rest of the
frummers
. This lot here ain’t like that.’

Hannah’s parents were, and always had been, very religious or
frum
Jews so her going off with a Gentile had effectively separated them from her. Doris and her people were not religious and therefore not nearly so scandalised. Alfie Rosen, like a lot of young Jewish men, had been totally anti-religion, and a considerable number of his mates in the congregation carried Communist flags.

While the rabbi did his stuff I watched Doris. White and, for once, thin-looking, she was being literally held on her feet by one of her younger sisters. There are no flowers at Jewish funerals so there’s little to look at except the other mourners – and the awful coffin down its dreadful hole.

‘Doris wants to come back to work tomorrow,’ I whispered to Hannah, ‘but I said no.’

Hannah shook her head. ‘Well, I wouldn’t expect her to sit
shiva
, not being
frum
, but even so.’

‘It’s the shock,’ I said. ‘She can’t see any other way to carry on except the normal one, as if Alfie was still alive.’

‘We put our dead away too quickly,’ Hannah said. ‘People can’t tell whether they’re on their heads or their heels.’

‘It’s traditional.’

‘Yeah,’ she said, I thought with some bitterness in her voice once again. ‘Yeah, it’s traditional.’

And then the men, starting with a weeping Herschel Rosen, began to shovel earth on top of Alfie’s coffin. It’s a terrible thing to bury your child. My dad, who’d seen most things in this business in the course of his life, never got used to it and neither will I. After the oldest of Doris’s brothers-in-law had taken his turn with the shovel I went over to pay my last respects and gladly take my place at filling in the grave. Arthur and Walter did their bit and, as I watched them, I said goodbye and ‘Thanks, mate’ to Alfie in my head. He’d been a good sort and as I turned to Doris yet again, that fear for her future gripped me in the way it had when I’d first been told of Alfie’s death.

I went back briefly to Herschel Rosen’s small flat in Spitalfields for the subdued thing that passes for a wake among the Jews. But I couldn’t stay – or, rather, I didn’t want to – so I left the horse-drawn hearse with Walter so that he could take the Duchess and Nan home and made off in the car. Hannah had bade farewell to everyone at the cemetery but we had arranged to meet on our own back at the shop. Just occasionally, usually when someone close to me dies, I have a need to feel alive again, just for a while. There’s only one way I know of, I’m ashamed to say, that I can do that. But, then, in my own defence, not just any woman will do. I have to feel passion. Just to do ‘it’ would be disgusting. But that’s never the case with Hannah.

Not daring to go inside the empty home of my fathers, I took Hannah into my arms in the pitch-black darkness of the backyard. I began to feel myself becoming excited when suddenly I heard a voice that was neither mine nor Hannah’s.

‘Mr Hancock!’ it hissed. ‘Mr Hancock!’

It was a child’s.

‘What is it?’ Hannah said, as she felt my body move away from hers. ‘What’s wrong?’

Suddenly I felt excited in a different way. ‘It’s—’

‘Mr Hancock, it’s me!’

‘Charlie?’

I couldn’t see him but the yard was very dark and Charlie Lee, like me, is a dusky person.

‘Yes!’

Two startled eyes came out of the gloom towards me.

‘What’s going on?’ Hannah asked.

‘It’s Charlie, Lily the Gypsy’s brother,’ I said. ‘He’s—’

‘Come out of nowhere at an important time, H,’ Hannah said, a little tetchily, as she smoothed her skirt down towards her knees. I began to wonder, as Charlie got closer to me, whether I was still disarrayed myself. But hearing his voice so suddenly had done much to cool my ardour.

‘Charlie, did Captain Mansard let you go or—’

‘I run away,’ the boy said. Now that he was very close I could see that his clothes were even more dirty and torn than usual. He smelt strongly of damp and earth.

‘What about your mum and dad, your brothers?’

Charlie looked quickly at Hannah, then back at me.

‘It’s all right, Charlie,’ I said, ‘Hannah, Miss Jacobs, she’s a friend.’

Even through the gloom I could see that he was giving me a right old-fashioned look. Whether he’d seen us out together before up in the forest I didn’t know, but I was well acquainted with the fact that Gypsy boys are rarely little innocents, even at Charlie’s time of life. He’d known what we’d been doing.

‘So, your mum and dad and your brothers . . .’ I pressed.

‘Safe. I see ’em. But I never took that
gaujo
captain to ’em,’ Charlie said proudly.

‘So they’re . . .’

‘Mr Hancock, what the
gauje
soldiers say about the Romany from Germany ain’t true.’

‘Martin Stojka?’

‘Sssh! Sssh!’ Charlie hissed. ‘Don’t know who might be listening!’ He lowered his voice still further. ‘The Germans are killing our folk. The Gentleman, as we call him, he’s on the run.’

I didn’t know what he meant, really. After all, whether Stojka was a Nazi or not, he was only to be interned, as far as I knew. He wouldn’t be sent back to Germany and, as horrible as internment no doubt is, all this trouble was hardly in proportion to what would happen to him in the end. I took Charlie and Hannah inside the shop and made us all a cup of tea. I know it doesn’t solve anything, but I’m a Londoner and making tea at times of crisis is what we do.

‘Mum and Dad have got him hid,’ Charlie said, as he rolled himself a fag on the kitchen table. ‘I know where they is but they ain’t told me about the whereabouts of the Gentleman. The less I know the better, they say.’

Had Mansard been right about the Lees and their involvement with Stojka all along? I wondered. ‘So why are you here?’ I asked, taking in the somewhat sour expression on Hannah’s face.

‘They want to get the Gentleman out of the forest and out of London,’ Charlie said. ‘A car does it quickest, my dad says, and you’re the only person we know with one.’

Hannah, who had been shaking her head for some seconds, said, ‘Are you soft in the head, boy? Blimey, if the MPs are out looking for someone there’ll be roadblocks all over the shop!’

‘Dad said you could put the Gentleman in one of your coffins,’ Charlie said to me. ‘Only you folk have cars as can take body boxes. Them don’t get stopped by the coppers.’

Mr Lee had obviously thought this through without, however, considering that I might refuse my assistance. Hannah was right: with the MPs after him, Stojka was unlikely to get away and if I were to be found with him I could be tried for treason. ‘No, Charlie,’ I said, ‘I can’t do that. It’s far too risky.’

Charlie’s face screwed up into a scowl. ‘But the Nazis are after him, Mr Hancock!’

‘No, the Military Police—’

‘They’m sent by the Nazis, my dad said!’

‘But, Charlie, the Nazis aren’t here, leastways not yet.’

‘No, but there’s traitors ain’t there?’ Charlie said. ‘Traitors sent them soldiers after our Gentleman!’

‘What? Captain Mansard? I know he’s not always very polite, but—’

‘He’m a murderer!’ Charlie said.

‘What?’

‘Weren’t Sergeant Williams what killed our Lily, it were him – Captain Mansard,’ the boy said.

‘Look, Charlie,’ I said, ‘I don’t know what your mum and dad are doing or what they’ve said to you, but Dr Craig told me he was certain that Sergeant Williams had killed your Lily. I know it’s hard to bear because Sergeant Williams has himself passed on—’

‘H!’

There was real fear in Hannah’s eyes as she gazed at something over my shoulder towards the kitchen door. I turned and saw my old mate Horatio Smith.

‘Hello, Horatio,’ I said, then stopped when I saw what he had in his hands. It was a
kukri
knife, just like the one some Gurkha bloke had given my old dad up in northern India. Where the Gypsy had this one from or why he had it, I couldn’t imagine.

‘You’re a good man, Mr Hancock, and it would pain my soul to hurt you, but I will if I must,’ Horatio said, as he stood in the kitchen doorway with the
kukri
knife outstretched. ‘We need your hearse car for our Romany brother.’

‘Give it to him, H,’ Hannah said, her eyes bright with fear. ‘I don’t know what any of this is but just give it to him!’

‘If it were that easy we wouldn’t’ve been disturbing you, Miss. We’d have just took the thing ourselves,’ Horatio said baldly. ‘But we don’t drive, leastways not motor cars.’

‘Horatio,’ I said, ‘I don’t know what’s going on here so I’m not prepared to drive – at least, not with Hannah, Miss Jacobs.’

I knew, of course, that despite our many years’ acquaintance he would put that
kukri
up to my neck, and he did. Every man’s loyalty is greatest when it is to his own, whatever and whoever that might be.

‘I’m sorry and all that,’ Horatio said, as he moved the knife away from my neck, ‘but you have to help us. On your feet now.’

As I stood up I said, ‘I just hope you’re right about this Gypsy “brother” of yours not being a Nazi.’

Horatio and Charlie exchanged a look.

‘Oh, he ain’t no Nazi, Mr Hancock,’ Horatio said. ‘Can’t tell you no more’n that, but he ain’t a German, I can tell you.’

It didn’t make me feel any better but at least whatever I was going to be asked to do was something I was almost entirely ignorant about. Whether or not that would save me from a traitor’s death, should the police catch us in the act, I didn’t know.

Horatio, standing in front of me, said, ‘Let’s go.’

I paused to draw breath, and Horatio dropped, suddenly and dramatically, unconscious to the floor in front of me.

‘Stella!’

When you haven’t always lived with people you don’t always remember that they’re there. This applies particularly when said people are a bit barmy.

‘He was gonna stab you!’ Stella said, as she placed the large saucepan with which she’d hit Horatio on the kitchen table. ‘I couldn’t have that.’

‘Stella, thank you,’ I said, still shocked at such violent action from my timid spinster cousin. ‘Thank you very much.’

Hannah, who had rushed over to the Gypsy as soon as he’d fallen, said, ‘Well, he’s alive.’ She handed me the
kukri
, which I put down on the table a long way from both Horatio and the boy.

Charlie Lee, who was standing behind me, now looked terrified. ‘You won’t hand us over to the coppers, will you, Mr Hancock?’ he asked nervously.

Hannah’s arms were around Horatio. When our eyes met she shrugged. I had that feeling I often get with Hannah that she knew what I was going to say and agreed with it. ‘I want to know everything you know about this foreign gentleman of yours,’ I said. ‘If you tell me the truth I may well help you in spite of what has happened here tonight. If he isn’t a Nazi, well . . .’

‘I know he’s important, the Gentleman, to Romany people, ’specially those what come from where Mum come from,’ Charlie said. ‘I know that if Hitler gets a hold of him again then that’s bad.’

I frowned. ‘Gets a hold of him
again
?’

‘Shall I put the kettle on now?’ Stella said. Of course, she didn’t know anything much, beyond the death of Lily Lee, about this situation so I had to get her away from us or vice versa as soon as I could.