Last Rights (7 page)

‘Poor girl,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Sometimes I’d see her, she could hardly open her eyes for the swelling.’

‘He beat her up?’

‘Well, somebody must’ve,’ Albert said. ‘Always in the family way, always with a black eye, that one. It was either Kevin or
his mother, probably Kevin. I think the old girl got her fun making a dog’s life for poor young Velma.’

Velma, it turned out, was the one Vi Dooley had called the ‘basket’, the one who was from the younger woman’s previous marriage.
She was, Albert reckoned, about
fifteen. Not only had Velma had to clean up after her step-father and his mother, she’d had a lot to do with her nine half-brothers
and -sisters too.

According to Albert, having a lot of kiddies was important to Kevin. ‘Used to boast about what a man he was in any pub that’d
have him,’ he said, as he locked up the back of the hearse and climbed into the cab. ‘Bleedin’ idiot.’

‘Albert, you don’t think anyone could’ve killed Dooley, do you?’ I blurted, unable to keep it from him any longer.

‘What do you mean? If he hadn’t died from the blast?’ Albert replied. ‘I can’t think of many who’d want him to carry on living,
to be honest – apart from his mother and brothers, of course.’ He laughed. ‘Why, Frank?’

I had to tell him and so, with the exception of Hannah’s comments, I told Albert about what I’d witnessed at East Ham, who’d
said what and what I might have found on the body. But strangely to me, I must admit, he just shrugged, his eyes blank with
what looked like disregard. ‘So someone might have knocked him off? Probably with good reason.’

‘But, Albert,’ I said, ‘if he’s been murdered, whatever he was like in life, then . . .’

‘Marcus Cockburn said he died from the blast.’

‘Yes, but . . .’

Albert peered up at me hard. ‘Leave it, Frank,’ he said. ‘Do as you’re told and just get on with your life.’

It was almost word for word what one of our old sergeant majors had said to me when I’d questioned why a certain young man,
a supposed coward, was to be
executed by, among others, me. My next words to poor old Albert were therefore bitter and furious. ‘What? Like we did in the
first lot, Albert?’ I said. ‘When we were asked to shoot little kids who were a bit frightened? Their families never ever
told the truth about their sons? Living a lie? It matters how people die, it matters that those who killed them suffer – like
I do, like all of us suffer who went out there into the mud and the blood and killed people.’

Albert put his hand wearily to his forehead and said, ‘I know. Look, Frank, I’m sorry.’

‘Yes . . .’

‘But, quite honestly, from what you’ve told me there’s nothing we can do,’ he said. ‘Cockburn’s made his decision. All the
rest, what you’ve said, is just people’s stories and opinions. The toff doctor has spoken so the working class have to shut
up.’ He sighed and then he smiled. ‘Anyway, I’d better get him over to my shop before Jerry turns up.’

I felt my whole body turn to stone. I couldn’t remember when I’d had an unbroken night’s sleep. Suddenly, coming on top of
my anger and frustration, the thought of another raid made me panic. ‘You think he will? In this mist?’

‘Just because Hitler couldn’t get many of them out of their pits last night don’t mean he won’t shift himself to put on a
good show tonight,’ Albert said. And then, wearily, he added, ‘Who knows what Jerry’s thinking, eh, Frank? Certainly not the
bleedin’ Government. Bastards!’

It was more of a twitch than an act of conscious movement that made me look first over my shoulder and then back at Albert
once again.

‘Be careful!’ I said. ‘We don’t know who might be listening!’

‘Couldn’t care less,’ Albert said defiantly. ‘I don’t think it’s treason to call those who can’t seem to protect us or even
care a bunch of bastards. Do you?’

‘No, but—’

‘They can put me in the nick if they like,’ Albert said. ‘What you said about the deserters in the first lot was right, Frank.
And I tell you, it’s still them and us today. War or no war, the rich against the poor. I mean, all them poor Jews they interned
– Harry Rabin, poor old Davy Klarfeld. Yeah, right bleedin’ Nazis they are!’ And then with one finger up at my face to emphasise
his point, Albert said, ‘This is what all wars are, Frank, and that’s a class war just like the last lot!’

I’d hated the stupid upper-class officers in the first lot just as much as Albert hates the Government. But for some reason
I’ve never been able to find it within me to feel quite so political about it. For me justice, for want of another word, is
more personal, as in my concern over Kevin Dooley and what might have happened to him. Also, I know it’s because I’m afraid
of what people might think: I’m scared, like a lot of people, of being branded a Communist. After all, we might be at war
with the Nazis, but that doesn’t mean Churchill and the rest of them are going to let the country go like Russia.

When I did eventually speak I just said, ‘Yes,’ in that vague way people are used to getting from me sometimes.

But then Albert fired up his engine and I waved him on his way, my hand making vague patterns in the dim,
blacked-out mist. As the car disappeared through the gate, Albert called, ‘Here, Frank, let me have a look at Dooley myself
and I’ll speak to you tomorrow.’ I felt he was humouring me, but I thanked him anyway. After all, he didn’t have to do anything
about it.

Although it was chilly, I didn’t want to go inside immediately so I stood out for a bit, looking up at the grey, mist-streaked
sky above. If the Luftwaffe came tonight I knew I’d have to carry the Duchess down to the shelter before I set off on my usual
terrified travels. Somehow I’d have to keep my nerve for just enough time to make her safe. Then the picture show in my head
could do what it liked. Faces half eaten by rats, the scream that Georgie Pepper let out as he sank into the mud, the scream
that’s always just about to start again . . .

You have to be careful what you say these days but, like Albert Cox, if quietly, most people wonder what’s going on. Every
night without exception we’ve been pounded. Those who’ve been bombed out just wander more often than not – a lot of them looking
not unlike me. The dead out and about, looking for something to feed to their kids. I’ve even heard that some have gone up
into Epping Forest, sleeping out on the ground like gypsies. I know they can get help from the assistance people, with money
and billets and what-have-you, but I don’t think the authorities understand that it takes so much time. People have to get
over the shock of losing everything for a start-off. More often than not they’re hurt, sometimes in their minds where it doesn’t
show. I can see it in their faces: it’s like looking in a mirror sometimes.

I went inside soon afterwards and told Doris that she could go home. Now that Albert had picked up Kevin Dooley there wasn’t
anything left to do except shut up shop and wait for the sirens. No one really wanted to believe that anything untoward could
have happened to Kevin so I felt disquieted and quite alone as I started to lock up. It all felt, even through doubts that
I had myself, very wrong. I was just about to go up the stairs to the flat when I heard the knocking on the front door.

H
er Christian name was Pearl. She said I should use it rather than keep calling her Mrs Dooley. She and the girl, Velma, who
was a skinny creature anyway, looked as if they hadn’t eaten that day.

‘I’m so sorry, Mr Hancock,’ she said, as I took them both up to the kitchen, ‘but I didn’t know where else to go.’

‘It’s all right.’

‘You were so kind this morning when I come for my Kevin and . . .’ She started to cry. ‘No one else has had so much as a good
word . . .’

Velma put her arm round her mother’s shoulders as they followed me into the kitchen. Nan was washing a couple of spuds at
the sink when we arrived.

‘Who’re they?’ she said, when she saw the pale, distressed blonde and her hollow-eyed daughter.

I told her Pearl was a customer. ‘In a bit of a state,’ I said. ‘Put the kettle on, will you, Nan?’

She did, if grudgingly. Some people happily share short
rations, but not Nan, and as soon as the tea was made she went off up to the Duchess without another word.

‘I’m sorry,’ Pearl said, as she watched her go. ‘I never wanted to make trouble for you. Your wife . . .’

‘She’s my sister,’ I said, with a smile. ‘You just drink your tea.’ And then I watched as she and her daughter both drank
it down, scalding, almost in one gulp.

‘Mother-in-law chucked us out,’ Pearl said, once she’d finished. ‘Soon as I got back from here.’ I noticed that with some
tea inside her the colour of her face had improved.

Her daughter scowled. ‘Old cow!’ she said. ‘I hate her!’

‘Velma!’

‘Well, it’s true, I do hate her. She’s took everything!’

‘The later it got the more scared I was,’ Pearl said. ‘I know that me and Velma could go to one of them public shelters, but
I can’t really think straight at the moment, Mr Hancock, and so—’

‘The old cow took our coupons,’ Velma said bitterly. ‘Said she needed them to feed all the kiddies.’

‘Your brothers and sisters?’

‘Yes. All Mum’s money too.’

‘Such as it was,’ Pearl put in.

‘So neither of you has eaten?’

‘No.’

I cut them some bread and spread some Marmite on it and, unlike most women I know, Pearl didn’t even try to protest. They
must have been ravenous, both of them.

‘Don’t you have any family you could go to?’ I said to Pearl, once she’d finished her food. I knew she was an
orphan, or so her mother-in-law had told me, but there had to be someone she knew. ‘Friends, maybe?’

‘No one I know would dare take us in,’ she replied. ‘Kevin’s family, well, they’re . . . they bully people, if you know what
I mean. If Vi Dooley takes against you, you’re finished round our way. She never liked me. I got on with Kev’s brothers all
right but that’s all finished now. They do what Vi tells them to do. They don’t have friends, me included, I suppose. The
Dooleys only have each other and them as are scared of them.’

I wondered why such an apparently decent woman had married into such a family. But maybe she had loved Kevin, for all his
faults. Some women do like the brutal type after all. Or maybe when her first husband died she was left destitute and took
the first offer she got from a man.

‘I’m an orphan, see,’ she went on. ‘Mum and Dad been dead for years.’

‘So, no brothers or sisters?’

‘I’ve sisters but not that I’ve seen for a long time,’ she said.

I knew she wasn’t trying to make me take her in, she didn’t seem the type – and, anyway, I could hardly do that with the flat
already busting at the seams. But at the same time I couldn’t put her and the girl out on such a chilly night with no real
place to go.

‘You know, I do want to get all me kids back,’ she said. ‘They’re
my
kids, not Kevin’s mum’s, whatever she might like to think.’

Her coat had been threadbare, probably, before the
start of the war. Long and shapeless, it was covered with smudges of dirt, and what had once been a thick fur collar hung
in wet and filthy strings down her back. Like her daughter, Pearl Dooley had bare legs, which were still blue with cold even
though she was now inside. My sister Aggie, her of the lily-white skin, always dyes her legs with gravy browning when she
hasn’t got any stockings. She even puts seams down the back with an eyebrow pencil, but if Pearl Dooley was in the habit of
doing such things, she certainly hadn’t that day. Neither she nor Velma had anything in the way of luggage – only Pearl’s
handbag.

‘Is there really no one you can go to, no one who will take the children in?’ I began. ‘Not an aunt or—’

‘Look, if you just want us to go!’

‘No, no.’ I tried to sound, as much as I could, reassuring. But she’d really flared at me and deep down I hadn’t taken kindly
to it. I wasn’t averse to either her or her girl, in fact I was genuinely sorry for them, but that didn’t mean I wanted to
take on two more hungry mouths.

Pearl, seeming ashamed now of her outburst, put her head down and said, ‘I’m sorry, Mr Hancock, it’s just that . . . The only
family I’ve got any notion of is my sister Ruby.’

‘Where does she live?’

‘Last I heard, which has to be more than five years back, she was lodging in Spitalfields.’

‘Do you know where?’

She shrugged. ‘Not really. We’ve not stayed close. All I do know is she was staying, housekeeping like, for a bloke
running a paper-and-string shop.’ She leaned forward so that only I could hear her whisper, ‘An old Jew.’

‘I see.’

‘Gawd knows whether she’s still there or not.’

The sirens have what I think is maybe a unique effect on me. I don’t shake like some. I don’t run about or get hysterical.
I just lose control of my speech. I stutter, stammer, drive myself and everyone around me mad. And during a raid it stays
like that.

Momentarily paralysed by my own lack of speech I just looked at Pearl and Velma with a stupid grin on my face. It was only
when Nan came down from upstairs and Arthur called up from the yard that I started to move.

‘Mr H!’ I heard Arthur call. ‘Raid!’

‘Y-y-y—’

‘Frank, you’ve got to go up and get Mum!’ Nan said. ‘She’s stiff like a bloody tree. You’ll have to carry her.’

‘Mr H!’

‘Keep your hair on, Arthur, for Gawd’s sake!’ Nan yelled down the stairs. ‘Frank, will you go and get Mum?’

‘R-Right.’

As I ran up the stairs I heard my sister say to Pearl, ‘You’d better come down our Anderson with us, Missus.’

There isn’t much of the Duchess. She’s tall, like me, but she’s not much more than a bag of bones. She wasn’t even awake when
I picked her up. But by the time we’d got outside, her slung over my back like a sack of coal, she’d come to enough to tell
me to secure the horses as best I could. Poor buggers, I’d not got round to repairing
their stable since the last raid. If I didn’t do something, and quick, they’d be out.