London Pride (42 page)

‘I know how she feels,' Joan said.

‘Mr Chamberlain's speaking at eleven o'clock don't forget,' Mrs Geary said quickly, changing the subject before Joan could get upset again.

‘Put the wireless on,' Flossie said to Baby, who was standing near the sideboard where the radio stood.

So they had light music while they drank their tea and washed the cups and saucers and set about peeling the vegetables. And by the time the announcer introduced the Prime Minister just before eleven fifteen they were all feeling much easier and happier. Big Ben struck the quarter and the weary reedy voice of their leader spoke to them across the air waves.

‘I am speaking to you from the Cabinet Room at 10 Downing Street,' he said. ‘This morning the British Ambassador in Berlin handed the German Government a final note stating that unless we heard from them by eleven o'clock that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland a state of war would exist between us. I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received and that consequently this country is at war with Germany.'

‘Oh God!' Baby said. ‘Just when I've had my hair permed.'

‘Well that's it I suppose,' Mrs Geary said. ‘We can't say we didn't know it was coming.'

‘Now what?' Joan said to Peggy. ‘What happens next?'

What happened next was a series of public announcements. The blowing of whistles and the blaring of horns were now forbidden ‘as these could be confused with air raid warnings', theatres and cinemas were to be closed down ‘to minimize the chances of a large crowd being killed by a single bomb'.

‘Oh lovely!' Mrs Geary said.

‘Now,' the wireless went on, ‘an announcement about food.'

But the announcement didn't come. There was a long silence in which they could hear papers being shuffled about and somebody whispering. Then the National
Anthem began to play. It hadn't got further than ‘God save our gracious king', when the air raid sirens began to wail, rising from a low growling note into an anguished howl and then descending and rising again, and again, and again.

‘Oh my dear good God,' Flossie said, jumping up. ‘They're here already. Quick! What shall we do? Oh my God, whatever shall we do?'

Peggy put on her tin hat and assumed command. ‘Take your coats,' she said, trying to sound calm even though she didn't feel it. ‘Go straight to the shelter,' She was half-way to the door.

‘Quick!'

‘What about Polly?' Mrs Geary said. ‘I can't leave Polly.'

‘I'll bring him if there's time,' Peggy promised.

And to everyone's surprise, she did, but only after she'd shepherded all the inhabitants of the street into their damp brick fastness in the middle of the road. Mr and Mrs Grunewald came under protest and Nonnie Brown refused to enter at all unless she could bring her gin bottle with her, and John Cooper had to be carried bodily into the shelter by Mr Allnutt and Mr Brown because his wheelchair was too wide to push through the entrance.

It was dark, dank and smelly inside, and the slatted seats were damp to the touch.

‘We shall all be killed!' Flossie moaned over and over again. ‘I can feel it in my bones. My nerves'll never stand this you know. I shall be a nervous wreck.'

Leslie was weeping.

‘Oh do shut up,' Ernest said, frowning at him. ‘You make matters worse with all that boohoo.'

‘Shut up yourself,' Leslie said. ‘You don't know how I feel.'

‘Try some gin, darling,' Nonnie Brown said drunkenly, waving the bottle at him.

‘Let's have a song,' Peggy suggested, trying to remember the advice she'd been given in all those ARP lectures.

‘Song?' Leslie said. ‘You must be joking!'

‘Bloody, bloody, bloody bugger!' the parrot squawked.
‘Aark! Sod that! Aark! Aark!'

‘Oh Christ,' John Cooper said to Mrs Geary, almost laughing, ‘that bloody bird of yours!' and then they all began to laugh, in peals of hysterical guffaws that were almost sobs. Even young Percy joined in, clinging round his mother's neck but giggling weakly. And the parrot shrieked at them all above the din.

They were making so much noise that at first they missed the rising note of the all clear.

‘Blimey!' Mr Allnutt said. ‘Twenty minutes. That was quick.'

They stumbled out into the summer sunshine. There was no sign of an air raid anywhere as far as they could see, no dead bodies, no bombed buildings, no smoke, only a strong smell of burning potatoes.

Leslie gave a shriek and rushed into number five. ‘Now look what you've made me do,' he yelled to Ernest. ‘Dinner'll be ruined I hope you realize.'

‘Oh yes, of course. It's always my fault,' Ernest said following him. ‘Everything's always my fault. I started this war I don't think.'

‘Well really,' Mrs Roderick said with icy disapproval, ‘What a way to go on. Here we all are in danger of our lives and they carry on like that. I don't know what the world's coming to. I'm glad some of us manage to control ourselves.'

The Furnivalls walked back into their house at Mrs Geary's pace.

‘I wonder where they went,' Mrs Geary said. ‘Must'a gone somewhere. That stands ter reason and they ain't come here.'

‘Thank God for that,' Flossie said. ‘We don't want 'em. My nerves couldn't stand it.'

‘Now what?' Baby asked.

‘Dinner first, while it's hot,' Mrs Geary said. ‘Then I suppose we shall all have to wait and see.'

As she followed her family back into the house, Peggy was secretly rather pleased by the way she'd acted. It was true that they hadn't been in any real danger, but none of them had known that at the time. She'd done all the right things in the right order, despite her fear, and nobody had
panicked. It was quite a feather in her cap. She didn't say anything about it, of course, because she didn't want to brag, but it was rewarding just the same.

‘I shall have to get a job,' Joan said to her as they were eating dinner. ‘I can't stand this waiting about, and if we're going to have air raids it'll give me something to think about.'

She started work at a local munitions factory the following morning. But they all had a lot of waiting about to do before any munitions were to be used in action.

After such a dramatic start to the war the days that followed were rather a come-down. Instead of the much dreaded, long expected bombing, nothing happened. In fact if it hadn't been for the newspapers nobody would have known there was a war on and soon even the newspapers were calling it a phoney war. Hitler's invasion of Poland continued unchecked and there was a ship sunk somewhere out in the Atlantic, but it was all too far away to disturb the residents of Paradise Row.

However as the weeks passed they began to learn what it was going to mean to live in a ‘state of emergency'. They were told to carry gasmasks with them everywhere they went, they were issued with numbers and identity cards, which didn't please Mr Brown at all, and ration books which John Cooper said was a damn good idea, because at least they'd all have fair shares if food was rationed, and they had to accept the new chore of ‘doing the black-out' every dusk and dawn, and the new hazard of trying to travel about in total darkness.

Old Mr Allnutt went out to post a letter on the third dark night and got knocked off his feet by a passing cyclist he hadn't seen. He came home with a ripped jacket, a grazed face and a chipped tooth, which he endured stoically, but after that he said he'd had enough of the blackout to last a lifetime and he'd stay indoors of an evening now until the war was over. The ding-dong was cancelled ‘for the time being' which made their lives extremely dull.
And they grew so accustomed to the flood of Government leaflets that were posted through their letterboxes that most went straight into the nearest drawer unread.

‘ 'Nother one a' them “Don't do this, don't do that's” ' Mrs Geary would say when she saw a buff paper lying on the doormat. ‘Bloody cheek. Who do they think they are?'

Peggy felt rather differently about all this information because it was issued by the Civil Defence and she knew how useful it could be. So she kept all their leaflets in a neat bundle in a shoe-box in her bedroom, just in case. And that meant that she was the person the neighbours referred to when they wanted to know what was being planned.

‘Ask our Peggy,' Flossie would say proudly. ‘She's our warden you know.' She'd quite forgotten how vehemently she'd opposed the ARP in the first place. Now she was all for it.

As the uneventful regimented days passed into uneventful regimented weeks and months, Peggy became steadily more useful. Without air raids to justify it, the black-out was a constant source of irritation and friction. The call ‘You're showing a light!' was usually followed by a row and as the months passed the Wardens grew more and more unpopular. But Peggy seemed to be able to coax her neighbours into good behaviour without shouting at them, so it was Peggy who was sent to persuade the recalcitrant citizen.

She was issued with a uniform now that she was a full time member of the ARP and that pleased her too, for it was smart and businesslike, a dark blue battledress with ‘warden' on the shoulder in gold lettering and the letters CD beneath a crown on the left breast pocket, and dark blue trousers which were warm and practical especially on night duty, even if they did scandalize Mrs Roderick. Besides, being in uniform made her feel closer to Jim, who wrote to her every other day and came home to see her whenever he had leave. In fact, taken all in all, her life was remarkably happy despite the war.

She did have one worry, that was true, but it was a private one, and her anxiety was tempered and confused
by such extraordinary pleasure that it was difficult to know how to respond to any of it.

Part of the trouble was the enveloping darkness of the black-out. By the time Jim came home on his first forty-eight hour leave of the war the theatres and cinemas had been opened again so they were able to go to the pictures as usual, but their walk home was in almost total darkness and there were shop doorways every black inch of the way to tempt them to stop and kiss again. Not that they needed much temptation, especially as kissing standing up was even more pleasurable than kissing in the back row of the pictures. That night their love-making progressed by delicious and gradual degrees until they were both sore with ungratified desire.

Peggy protested each new embrace because she wasn't sure how far they ought to go. ‘I'm sure we shouldn't,' she said into the muffling warmth of his tunic.

‘Go on,' he urged. ‘Who's to see us? You want to don't you?' And when she had to admit she did, ‘Well then.'

‘What if it's wrong?'

‘It doesn't feel wrong does it?' he said, nuzzling into her neck.

‘No,' she admitted, because it didn't. Not at the time. It was only afterwards that she wondered. And by then it was a bit late.

On his second short leave he came to collect her with an old raincoat over his arm, and that evening instead of going to the pictures they strolled into the park to walk and talk among the trees, and finally to sit on the raincoat and watch the sunset.

‘This time next year we'll get married,' Jim said. ‘I should've got my props by then.'

As a proposal it wasn't the most romantic thing she'd ever heard. ‘Got your props?' she asked.

‘I shall be an LAC.'

‘Oh well as long as I know,' she laughed at him.

‘I should be on five bob a day by then,' he said, ‘and we shall get marriage allowance of seventeen bob a week. We could manage on that, couldn't we?'

‘I expect so.'

‘That's what we'll do then.'

‘And where are we going to live?' she asked.

‘Oh, we'll travel about,' he said easily ‘Like a pair a' gippos. You get moved about a lot in the RAF. You could come with me.'

Peggy considered this briefly. It wasn't an inviting prospect. It would mean leaving her family and her friends and living out of a suitcase all the time. ‘Perhaps the war'll be over by next year,' she said. ‘Then they wouldn't have to move you about so much.'

‘Some hopes,' he said. ‘We shan't see the end a' this for a long time.'

‘We might if they got on with it,' Peggy said. ‘All this pussy-footing around. I don't know what they're playing at.'

‘You let 'em pussy-foot as long as they like,' he said. ‘The longer this phoney war goes on the better. They're delivering Spitfires and Hurricanes as fast as they can get them off the production line, but we haven't got anywhere near enough.'

It had grown dark as they talked. Now they could only see one another if they sat very close together. The grass was black, and there was no sign of the trees except for an occasional feathery outline silhouetted against the sky when the moon swam out of its cloud-cover.

‘Why are we talking?' he said. ‘Why don't we lie down?' And he spread the raincoat invitingly over the dead leaves.

They lay side by side and kissed one another in their private darkness. There wasn't a sound among the trees and no light except for the intermittent moon. They could have been alone in the middle of the countryside and he was holding her so tightly she could hardly breathe, his hand in the small of her back urging her closer and closer.

‘Love you, love you, love you, love you,' he said, the way he always did, kissing and fondling. And then he was lying right on top of her and the pleasure of it was so acute it was making him groan.

To be urged on by such strong sensation was so tantalizing it took an effort of will for Peggy to speak. But she had to make the effort, because she wanted him so much it was making her dizzy and she knew that if she didn't stop him soon they might go too far.