All Fall Down (3 page)

Chapter Two

‘The worst of it is, we don't know where they'd get sent.'

Later that evening, Walter tried to come to terms with the idea of evacuating the boys to safety. Bertie and Geoff were already in bed, while Meggie sat at the table with her books, Sadie walked restlessly from window to fireplace and back again.

‘Right. We just pack them off at Paddington. They could end up anywhere.' Wearing a label; Robert Davidson, 9 years, 32 Paradise Court, Southwark. Geoffrey Davidson, 7 years. Ditto. ‘They might not even get the same billet.'

‘No, but Meggie could go and keep an eye on things.'

She heard her name mentioned, looked up sharply, but kept quiet.

‘Yes, and she could be in Kent, and they could be in Cornwall for all we know.'

‘They say it's for the best.' Walter fell silent.

The picture of their two boys, joining hundreds of thousands of other children in the exodus from London frightened them beyond words. Thousands of buses and trains crawling out of the capital to unknown destinations. Strange faces to greet them, strange bedrooms to sleep in. And what if they should never see them again?

‘Maybe just for the time being?' Meggie suggested a way out. ‘It doesn't have to be for long, just until we see how things work out here.' She knew of other families, friends at the post office, who'd waved their kids a cheerful farewell over these last few days. By all accounts, the young ones went off in high spirits, treating
the whole thing as an adventure. ‘Or maybe you could go with them, Ma?'

Sadie shook her head. ‘I'm needed here.' She'd signed up for munitions work and, anyway, she wouldn't leave Walter. ‘I can't be in two places at once.' She stopped by the window, looking out at an orange sky flecked with golden clouds and at the ominous, silent balloons. ‘Do you think they'll actually do it?' Her voice trembled. ‘Actually drop those bombs on innocent kiddies?'

Walter joined her. In the past he'd always been the one to comfort and support. He wanted to be kind, but the truth stared him in the face. ‘Everyone says they will, Sadie. I don't think we can risk it.'

‘We have to send them?'

He nodded gently.

‘Oh, Walter, it'll break my heart.' Tears spilled down her cheeks. She covered her face.

He put his arms around her.

‘Don't, Ma.' But Meggie wept too. ‘Don't let them hear you cry.'

‘Did you hear the one about the girl in the train during the blackout?' Tommy asked the gang at the bar. ‘It's pitch dark and she's sitting there with a crowd of RAF types and Tommies, all having a beer and a fag. All of a sudden out of nowhere comes the bird's voice; “Excuse me, but kindly take your hand off my knee – not you . . . you!” '

The Duke was bursting at the seams with dockers, railway workers and tradesmen each determined to show that Adolf couldn't keep a man away from his pint. Nevertheless, not one had ventured out minus his gas mask, already dubbed ‘nose-bag', ‘dickey-bird', or even ‘Hitler'. They slung them with careless bravado across their chests, the old men in white mufflers and collarless shirts, the younger in up-to-date trilbies and flashy silk ties. Tommy fell into the fashionable category in a double-breasted, brown pin-stripe suit and fawn hat with a snappy brim. After all, he had an image to keep up.

‘Where d'you hear that one, Tommy?'

‘On the bleeding wireless?'

‘ “Can I do you now, sir?” '

‘ “I don't mind if I do!” '

Smart responses clicked to and fro in the smoky atmosphere. Annie swiped glasses from the bar and wiped it clean, George served steadily.

‘I heard it from our Jimmie, if you must know.' Tommy tapped the bar rail with his toe. He'd noticed a crowd of girls come in, among them a couple from his own shop. He picked out Edie Morell, in charge of wages and accounts. She was all dressed up, with her honey-blonde hair piled high on her head, her dress tight over the bodice, falling in a bright swirl of tropical flowers to her knees.

‘You don't say,' said Charlie Ogden. He was home for the weekend from his teaching job in Welwyn Garden City, and miserable as sin according to his mother, Dolly. He and his wife of ten years had just decided to split up, and he planned to move out of his nice semi-detached house back into Paradise Court to live with her.

‘Get it, Charlie? Course, it's the poor old Tommy's hand she shoves away, not the pilot's. They don't get a look-in with the RAF around.' Tommy made room for the girls at the bar. Edie had recently palled up with her old school chums, since her husband, Bill, had enlisted, and they went about pretty much as they had in the good old days. Lorna Bennett in particular was regarded as fast, in her hip-hugging slacks and tight jumpers, with a striking dark pencil outline around her eyes and a bright crimson mouth. ‘What's it to be, girls?' He offered to buy them a round. ‘Something strong to steady your nerves?'

Lorna and the two others made a great show of deciding what they wanted to drink, while Edie quietly accepted a pale ale.

‘Whisky for me, please.' Lorna dug her friend with her elbow. ‘What's up? He's made of money, ain't he?'

‘More money than sense, if you ask me.' Annie came to give George a hand. She didn't approve of these good-time girls. In her day the market women would come in for a drink after work, but
their old men would be snug in another corner, not away fighting a war. She thought the young ones lacked respect.

‘Have one yourself, Annie.' Tommy's offer was guaranteed to shut her up. ‘You're looking like a million dollars tonight, you know that?'

She grunted. She kept to the style of her youth; long hair, now pure white and lifted into a bun, nice crisp blouse with pleats and tucks, navy-blue skirt of decent length. She would sometimes add bits of costume jewellery for a touch of colour, and she was always beautifully starched and ironed. ‘Flattery won't get you nowhere with me, Tommy O'Hagan. That'll be three shillings and threepence to you.'

‘Two and six to anyone else.' Lorna took her drink and laughed.

Not minding a bit, Tommy bantered for a minute or two before drawing up a stool alongside Edie. ‘What's new?' He leaned in close and offered her a light for her cigarette.

‘A war, that's what's new.'

‘Apart from that.' He was determined to stay cheerful.

‘I had a letter from Bill yesterday. His ship's off to Malta.'

‘But he'll get home beforehand, I expect?' Tommy knew that Bill often showed up on forty-eight-hour leave. He could always tell when it happened; Edie would come into work on a Monday quieter than usual. Apparently she missed him badly when he went back to barracks.

‘I don't know that he will, not now.'

‘Still, chin up. You know what they say, it'll all be over by Christmas.'

‘Yes, Christmas 1942,' she said mournfully.

‘But life goes on, don't it?' It was all very well for him to say this, he realized. At forty he was well past the age of conscription and he could expect to go on pretty much as usual, not minding too much what he read in the newspapers, Hitler-this and Hitler that, sticking to Radio Luxembourg rather than the stuffy Home Service. He even expected to turn a fast penny because of the war, as you could when certain goods were in short supply and you were well in with the dockers and the market men. He felt sorry
for Edie; her husband was of fighting age and, though they'd been married for five years, they had no children. She must be lonely in her Duke Street flat.

‘You're right.' She gave him a smile, then sighed as she stubbed out her cigarette. ‘I never used to smoke. I hate the smell it leaves behind, if you must know.'

‘You smell fine to me.' She did; it was the scent she wore. It smelt of roses or something similar. A lot of things about Edie reminded him of sweet flowers. Even at work he found it hard to forget that she was a beautiful woman, with her clear, grey eyes, straight nose, soft skin.

Edie blushed.

‘Here, Edie, it's your shout,' Lorna held up her empty glass from her table by the window. ‘We'll have one more here, then what do you say we head up West to a dance hall?'

She smiled at Tommy and stood up. ‘Thanks for the drink. See you tomorrow.'

‘Business as usual,' he promised, narrowing his eyes as the smoke curled up from his own cigarette. ‘Don't stop out too late, there's a good girl.' He overheard them discussing options; Joe Loss or Henry Hall, waltz or foxtrot, falling over themselves to be asked to dance by an RAF officer in a smart airforce-blue uniform.

As for himself, old codger that he was, it was time for an early night. He left the Duke, expecting to find only Jimmie at home above the shop. Dorothy was in the habit of going out to amuse herself at one of the more local hops, often only a pub room where the carpet was pulled back to make space for the dancers. There would be a gramophone in the corner, a jitterbug record or a soupy Bing Crosby number, and no shortage of couples crowding onto the bare boards.

He walked along the street between the new electric lamps, past the usual cars parked at the kerbside, the Baby Austins and the Morris Minors. There was a milk bar now, on the corner opposite Henshaws, all glass and chromium steel, with pink neon lights.

He caught his reflection in the window, a dapper figure with a lined and shadowed face. It was the harsh light, he told himself,
flinging his cigarette stub into the gutter. It made him look mean. When he came to his own expanse of plate glass, tastefully laid out with paint and wallpaper, dotted and striped matching curtain fabric, parchment lamps for the living room, white enamel Strings for the bathroom, with its own brightly lit sign reading
Ideal Home
, he gave a cynical shrug. Turning the key in the lock of the private entrance, he slammed the door behind him and went upstairs.

To his surprise he found no sign of his kid brother, but Dorothy sitting in a chair looking out-of-sorts. She was wearing a dressing-gown pulled tight across her chest, no make-up, and her blonde hair was scraped back from her face.

‘Where's Jim?' He dropped his hat on the sideboard.

‘How should I know?'

By which she meant, why should I care? Many of their rows these days were to do with them taking in Jimmie after his mother, Mary, died six years earlier. Jimmie had been only eleven at the time. Before that, Dorothy's gripes had been all about the money he spent on keeping his mother comfortable and happy in the old tenement down the Court. Since then, the objections over Jimmie poured out almost daily.

‘We need to keep an eye on him now there's a war on. We don't want him nicking off without telling us where.'

‘
You'd
better keep an eye on him, you mean.' She took a cigarette from the pack on the arm of her chair and lit it with a fancy silver lighter.

‘Fair enough.'

‘And don't leave that jacket slung on that chair.'

‘Fair enough,' he repeated nastily. It made no difference that he would find her clothes on the floor of the bedroom, her pots of make-up and lipsticks open on the dressing-table. He'd stopped arguing, but he couldn't disguise his tone of voice.

‘Anyhow, I can't see how you expect Jimmie to behave himself, the way you carry on. You never tell anyone what you're up to, do you?'

‘Must run in the family, then.'

‘Well, do you?'

‘That's 'cos I never get up to anything. I work too bleeding hard, keeping you in nylon stockings. I'm always in the bleeding shop.'

‘Or at the Duke.'

‘Can't a man have a drink?' He was weary, sick of it; the well-worn track of their bickering. They would soon come full circle, he knew. So he went for the whisky bottle in the sideboard, which was also part of the routine.

‘One drink or ten?'

‘As many as I like.'

‘And treat the whole pub while you're at it.'

He shrugged, knocked back the drink and felt it burn his throat.

‘I know your game. Buy a round, tell a few jokes, good old Tommy O'Hagan. Then come staggering home, fit for nothing.'

‘I'm not staggering, am I? Look, can you see me stagger?' He went up close to her chair, while she made a show of shrinking back in disgust.

‘No wonder I don't like to be here.' She pushed him away.

‘That's right, you go off and enjoy yourself.' He walked away, keeping his back to her. ‘Get your glad rags on, why don't you? You've still got time if you're quick.'

But Dorothy let the challenge drop. She sat drooped forward, lethargic and bitter. Minus her make-up and smart clothes, and without the fire of resentment fully stoked, she looked all of her forty-five years. Her eyes seemed to be growing smaller, there were lines underneath them and a downturn to her once full and attractive mouth. Her figure too was slackening, though her legs were still good. Sometimes Tommy would find her in front of the bathroom mirror, examining herself from every angle, obviously angry at what she saw. He glanced over his shoulder and felt an unexpected pang of sympathy, which he warded off by going for his jacket.

‘Where are you off to now?' Involuntarily she grasped the arms of her chair.

‘To fetch Jim, why?' A thought struck him. Was she scared now that it was dark? Planes could come more easily under the cover of darkness and drop their terrible cargo; it stood to reason.

‘Yes, of course, to fetch Jimmie!' She made it plain that she didn't believe a word.

‘Look, I am, right? I want him here to talk through what to do in one of these air raids one more time. Knowing him, he won't bother with his gas mask or nothing. He needs to get his head screwed on, so we don't have to worry.'

‘That's right, worry about him, why don't you?' She threw the jibe at him, which might have been genuine jealousy once; her feeling left out because of the attention he gave to his kid brother. But now this was just another well-worn groove. Since this was a bad day, however, a day that would transform all their lives, he made an effort.