All Fall Down (29 page)

‘Just reach up for a sec, Tommy, see if you can grab my hand.' She kept hers deep in the shaft, stretching her fingertips. ‘Then I'll believe it's really you.'

Tommy climbed on the safe and reached out. Their hands touched. ‘See.'

‘I love you, Tommy, whatever happens. I want you to know.'

‘Tell me when I get out.'

‘I don't blame you if you hate me, only it wasn't my fault, not all of it.'

‘Slow down, Edie, I hear you.'

‘I'm sorry.'

‘No, it was me. I went mad when I saw you with him. I never gave you a chance.' Her hand, small and warm, held fiercely to his.

‘I wrote to him, did you know?' Better late than never. At least she'd done the right thing in the end. ‘No, course not. How could you?'

‘When?'

‘The day I chucked my job. I'm getting a divorce, Tommy.'

‘You never told me.' It was him clinging onto her hand now, as realization crashed down on him.

‘You never gave me the chance.' In the silence and the gathering dusk, Edie had to decide what to do next.

‘Listen, Tommy, I'll go for Walter and George. You stay put.' Finally she made him release her hand.

‘I ain't going nowhere.' He slumped down.

Then she tore herself away, climbed over the mound and ran down the street. She hammered at the doors of the Duke, called for the men to bring shovels and pickaxes. ‘He's alive, he's alive!'

‘Who?' George opened up. For a second he held a glimmer of hope that Annie had made a monumental mistake in identifying Ernie.

‘Tommy. He's trapped in his basement. I just spoke to him. Get Walter, come quick!'

January 25th, 1941. Royalty were to visit the stricken community. It was almost as big a boost as a tour of the blitzed streets by Churchill himself, when he would march along with his entourage. ‘Are you downhearted?' he would ask. Homes were gone, every last vestige of a lifetime's scrimping and saving. ‘No!' came the rousing reply. Business as usual. Winnie would raise his hand in salute, cigar clamped between his teeth, jaunty in his homburg hat
and dickie-bow. The people would run alongside to keep up, burst through the cordon of militia men and politicians, the women smiling gaily and waving at the news photographers.

But today it was a royal party, a time for compassion, for dignified endurance. Southwark had been badly affected by the great fire on Duke Street, and still the raids went on, night after night. The people needed recognition, a kindly ear for their troubles, a chance to mourn their dead. The visit was scheduled for ten o'clock, before the VIPs moved on to Kentish Town to talk to victims there.

‘Are we ready?' Annie gathered the family mourners on the pavement outside the pub. Upstairs, the undertakers were standing by.

They lined each side of the door; Rob upright in his dark suit, looking older but still strong. He'd come through one war, though he'd been badly injured. He owed his life to George Mann, standing opposite him now. George had stood by him then. He'd married into the family and helped them out of other difficulties since. George was one in a million. Rob stood tall, Amy and Bobby at his side.

The women were all dressed in black. It took Ernie's funeral to bring Jess down from the North, with Maurice, Mo and Grace. The children were grown-up beyond recognition, as smart and well-to-do as anyone could wish. Frances stood with Annie, her husband, Billy Wray, quietly on her other side. Then there was Hettie with George, Sadie with Walter, Meggie, Geoff and Bertie.

Where they found their courage no one knew. Other mourners were openly in tears; Dolly, Edie and those who had known and looked out for Ernie ever since he was little, when they would give a belt around the ear to anyone found teasing or mocking him, or would set him on the right road for school. Later, they recalled Ernie on his delivery bike, working for Henshaws, taking bread, eggs and butter to doorsteps along Duke Street, Meredith Court and beyond. Never a mistake, always on time, always cheerful. And later still, as a fixture behind the bar at the Duke; methodical, reliable. When his pa grew too old and frail to do the heavy cellar work, Ernie had come into his own.

This was the boy they'd saved from the gallows after a bloody murder that had shocked and horrified the whole neighbourhood. A brutal stabbing. The police had arrested poor Ernie because they were too lazy to look for anyone else and Ernie happened to fit the bill. But no one believed it; throughout the trial and the guilty verdict, they knew that he was innocent. Ernie would never have harmed a fly. The courts had believed them at last and issued a reprieve.

And yet Hitler had got him in the end. There was no justice; the poor and helpless suffered most in this war.

They grieved for him, and for Annie especially, who had been through a lot in her long life, who had loved Ernie as her own son, a boy-man with a gentle heart.

‘Ready.' Annie nodded to the undertaker's man.

The message went upstairs to the pallbearers. The mourners waiting in the snow and ice of a freezing January morning.

They carried the heavy coffin, a plain wartime one, down the stairs on Ernie's last journey from his home to the church and on to the cemetery. They brought him out into Duke Street, into the old-fashioned hearse drawn by black horses wearing plumes and fine harnesses, a splendid affair amidst the sandbags and rubble.

‘He deserves the best,' Dolly whispered. Charlie was out of hospital, getting back on his feet. He'd insisted on going with her and Dorothy to the church. ‘Annie will want to give him a good send-off, for Duke and the rest.' She shook her head in sorrow.

Once the coffin was safely stowed, the hearse moved off and the procession formed behind, ready to follow on foot. Annie came at the head, flanked by Rob and George, her eyes fixed firmly on the shiny black carriage. The rest of the family came after, dry-eyed, sombre.

‘You sure you can make it?' Edie asked Tommy as he fell in with the procession on the slow march to the church. They'd pulled him out the night before, just three hours after the boys' discovery. He was suffering from the after-effects of cold and hunger, but nothing worse. He shrugged off any fuss, said that all he wanted
was to get back to normal. Last night they'd gone back to Edie's and made up their differences.

He nodded. ‘I'm one of the lucky ones,' he reminded her.

At the top of the road, where the cortège had to turn right onto Union Street, the undertaker drew to a halt. Army personnel had put up a roadblock: they must wait for the royal visitors to pass. Word went down the procession; VIPs were to be allowed through. So they stood and waited, black figures against frosty mounds of brick and metal, the horses standing patiently, the hearse gleaming in the sharp sunlight.

The royal party approached in an open-topped car, preceded by military vehicles, accompanied by a crowd of pressmen and enthusiastic onlookers. They were set to sail past the mourners from Duke Street. But the driver received a signal to stop. The pack of cameramen grew excited as two of the visitors stepped from the car. Bulbs flashed, there was a crush along the pavement, for a moment a sense of confusion and possible disruption.

The members of the royal party approached Annie and spoke quietly to her, commiserating with her for her loss. They said they knew that kind words did little to compensate for her suffering, but they hoped she would accept their condolences. No one escaped unscathed; no family, no individual. They prayed nightly for the war to end, they would pray for her and her brave stepson. Annie shook them by the hand.

Then they returned to their car. The order was given to take down the roadblock and let the funeral cortege pass through.

It was as if the whole world had turned out to pay their last respects to Ernie. Those who never knew him stood by silently, kings and commoners alike. The hearse moved on with its solemn burden. In silence they bowed their heads. Annie and her family walked on.

Part Three

Ashes in the Sea

June 1941

Chapter Eighteen

‘We shall get used to it,' was the grim response among East Enders. But the residents of Duke Street and Paradise Court were sadly mistaken if, after Ernie Parsons' funeral, they imagined things could not get worse.

On a single night in the middle of March 1941, seven hundred and forty Londoners had been killed in the Blitz. In mid-April a thousand more civilians were lost; on the 10th of May, almost one thousand five hundred, with eighteen hundred injured. Westminster Abbey, the Tower, the House of Commons had all been hit, and brown smoke once more blotted out the sun.

Like the Windmill Theatre, the Duke of Wellington's proud boast that it never closed held up during the worst of the bombing, though the pub felt bleak and empty without Ernie. They wondered that it could make such a difference to the place, both his loss and a general despondency as the war dragged on towards the end of its second year.

‘It ain't the shortages I mind,' Dolly complained to Charlie and Dorothy, as they sat glumly in a corner of the bar. ‘I can take all of that. What I can't understand is why it all has to happen on our own doorsteps. In the old days we used to send the boys off to war and we never had to worry about those that stayed home. These days we all have to kip down inside these bleeding metal cages under the stairs in case Jerry comes and blows us to smithereens, even old girls like Annie and me.' The government had recently brought out the Morrison shelters as the latest good thing.

‘Put a sock in it, Ma.' Charlie didn't want to hear her moans.
Back to full fitness after the nightmare explosion at the church, he nevertheless preferred to steer the talk away from daily dangers. He was determined to be upbeat, to count his blessings, which included having Dorothy come to stay in the Ogden house after her flat was demolished in January. He gave short shift to his mother's gloomy prognostications.

‘At this rate there'll be nothing left of the old East End by the end of the year.'

‘A good thing too.' Dorothy sat calmly smoking. She'd learnt to deal with Dolly by being mildly provocative. ‘About time they knocked these old places down; nasty rat-infested blocks of tenements, most of them.'

‘You speak for yourself.' Dolly took a morose pull at her pint of stout. ‘My house has never had a rat over the front doorstep, has it, Annie?'

‘No self-respecting rat would dare set foot in your place, Dolly.' Annie was reminded of days before the First War, when she had lived down the end of the Court in her own little terraced house. She used to pay young Ernie a penny for every rat he caught.

‘I still say give me a nice little modern semi any day,' Dorothy insisted.

‘There'll be none of them left neither, if Herr Hitler gets his way.'

‘Ma!'

‘No, she's right, Charlie.' Dorothy didn't often agree with Dolly. The two women managed to tolerate each other within the same four walls, but they thrived on minor conflict. Dorothy took every opportunity to imply that Dolly should take more of a back seat in Charlie's life. Though he was a middle-aged man, she still poked her nose into what he ate, what he wore, whether or not he stayed out late. Dolly's only defence was that she'd poked her nose in all her life, and wasn't about to stop now.

‘Blimey.' He took to his beer. ‘You two ain't ganging up on me, are you?'

‘I mean, if it goes on at this rate we'll none of us have a roof over our heads and that's a fact.'

‘Well, as it happens, I don't think it will.' He took Dorothy up on this.

‘What?'

‘Go on at this rate.' He kept bang up to date with the war news. ‘I heard on the wireless that Hitler's gone and invaded Russia.'

‘So what?' She paid fresh interest, while Dolly vacated her seat to go and commiserate with Annie over a vanishing way of life; the old streets, people pulling together, everyone knowing everyone else.

‘Russia's a big country. Have you looked at an atlas lately?'

‘You reckon he's bitten off more than he can chew?'

‘I'm saying he'll have his work cut out.' He didn't see how the Germans could keep on sending planes over the Channel, or at least not as many as at present. Russia's misfortune might well prove a blessed relief to the poor, battered cities of Britain.

‘I only hope you're right.' She stubbed out her cigarette. ‘Do you fancy coming to see a picture with me later?' These days, since settling down with Charlie, Dorothy's tastes had become more homely. She stood up, gave him a peck on the cheek and pulled on a pair of cotton gloves.

‘Might do. Where are you off to now?'

‘To the hairdressers. I'll see you later.'

‘You will if you're lucky.'

‘Cheek.'

He winked and watched her go, smart in her summer frock and white high-heeled sandals.

‘Watch where you're going.' Dorothy stepped aside in the doorway as Meggie rushed downstairs. ‘No need to ask where you're off to in such a hurry.'

‘Sorry.' Meggie flew out of the door.

‘He ain't worth it,' Dorothy called after her, guessing the reason behind her hurry.'

She glanced back, grinning. ‘Oh, yes, he is!'

Ronnie had telephoned Meggie to say that he had forty-eight hours. Would she meet him off the train? It was Saturday midday; a beautiful early summer's day. She wore a dress altered for her
by Hettie, One with turquoise flowers on a white background, a swirling knee-length skirt and a narrow waist.

‘He ain't, believe me.' Dorothy smiled wistfully after the girl, tucked her bag under her arm and set off up the street to have her hair done.

The day was special for Meggie and Ronnie. It was their first meeting since his ship had gone down in the Med two weeks earlier. They'd fished him out, one of only a dozen survivors. She'd heard the news on the wireless. A convoy attacked. Serious casualties. A day of doubt and torture, then a two-word telegram addressed to her at the Duke: ‘OK – Ronnie.' She'd wept with relief when Hettie brought it down to her in the Court.