The Londoners
Authors: Margaret Pemberton
For my daughter, Rebecca May.
A South London girl.
Contents
JULY
1933
‘Freedom!’ Kate Voigt said exultantly, raising her face to the hot afternoon sun. ‘Doesn’t it feel wonderful?’
Carrie Jennings swung an empty, much-battered school-satchel round and round in a huge arc. ‘It feels
blissful
,’ she agreed in deep contentment, tempted to let go of the
satchel and send it spinning into the stratosphere. ‘No more boring old uniform, no more tedious lessons!’
Kate grinned. ‘There may be no more lessons for you, but there’s going to be lots more lessons for me. The principal at the secretarial school said that shorthand was almost as
difficult as algebra.’
‘Then why study it?’ Carrie asked sensibly, shuddering at the memory of past maths lessons and deeply grateful that she would never have to sit through another one. ‘Why
don’t you tell your dad you don’t want to go to secretarial school? Why don’t you tell him you want to work down the market with me?’
‘Because I don’t,’ Kate said with the candour that was an honourable rule between them. ‘I don’t have the voice for it and besides, I couldn’t stand the cold
in winter. Do you remember your mum last December? She had so many layers of clothing on her that when she came home it took her an hour to struggle out of them and she was still
half-perished.’
‘There’s the summer though,’ Carrie said philosophically as they neared the end of the street in which Blackheath & Kidbrooke School was situated and stepped out on to the
Heath. ‘I’d much rather be down the market in summer than stuck in a stuffy office banging away on a typewriter.’
It was summer now and as Kate looked across the glory of the gorse-covered Heath towards the distant spire of All Saints’ Church and the higgledy-piggledy grey and red roofs of Blackheath
Village she couldn’t help but agree that Carrie had a point. It was a very minor point though. Much as she enjoyed occasional Saturday work helping Carrie on her father’s market stall,
she didn’t have the market in her blood and bones as Carrie did.
She knew, also, that the real work wasn’t weighing out fruit and vegetables and exchanging light-hearted banter with customers. It was trawling up to Covent Garden before dawn to buy in
produce and ferrying it back down the Old Kent Road to Lewisham Market by horse and cart hours before more conventional workers were even considering getting out of their beds. The very thought
made her shudder in exactly the same way Carrie had shuddered at the memory of maths lessons.
‘Even if I wanted to work in the market, Dad wouldn’t let me,’ she said truthfully as they walked over springy, coarse grass towards the south-west corner of the Heath.
‘He still isn’t happy about me doing Saturday work there and if it wasn’t that I was working for your dad he wouldn’t allow it at all.’
‘That’s ’cos he’s a teacher,’ Carrie said, unconcerned. ‘All teachers think market trading common.’
A slight frown creased Kate’s forehead. It was true that her father didn’t have an overly high opinion of market trading as a profession, but he certainly didn’t think
Carrie’s family common and she didn’t want Carrie thinking that he did.
‘My dad has a very high opinion of your family,’ she said firmly. ‘He was ever so pleased when your dad joined the pub’s cricket team. He says he’s the best bowler
they’ve ever had.’
Carrie grinned. ‘It comes of years of practice lobbing oranges and grapefruits. Are you going on the pub outing to Folkestone? It’ll be fun. Especially if the non-cricketers get up a
side to play the cricket team on the beach like they did last year.’
‘And especially if your gran takes her whippet with her again,’ Kate said, giggling. ‘He caught more balls than Dad did.’
They skirted an old gravel pit thick with gorse and Carrie said, ‘Talking of Gran, why don’t you celebrate school being finally over by staying for tea today? It’ll be bean and
barley soup,’ she added temptingly. ‘And fish.’
‘I can’t, Carrie. I’ve Dad’s dinner to get ready.’ There was genuine regret in her voice. Carrie’s Jewish grandmother was an absolute whizz in the kitchen and
the mere thought of her home-made soup was mouth-watering.
‘He won’t be home for another couple of hours,’ Carrie persisted. ‘You know he never leaves school till after six. You can eat with us and still be home in time to put
his dinner on the table.’
The temptation was too great to resist and Kate no longer tried. ‘I’ll have to be home by six, though,’ she warned as they crossed the road flanking the Heath, catching a
distant glimpse of the Thames as they did.
‘That’s OK,’ Carrie said easily. ‘It’ll give Gran plenty of time to find out what’s happening in your life and to give an unasked opinion of it.’
Giggling, they turned, still arm in arm, into the short road leading into Magnolia Square. The spacious Square, named after the magnolia trees that grew in several of its gardens, had seen
better days but its large Edwardian houses still retained an air of genteel dignity, a dignity that was enhanced by St Mark’s Church, the small, eighteenth-century church the Square had been
built around.
The short road leading into the Square from the Heath was Magnolia Terrace; the road leading out of it, Magnolia Hill. Lined with terrace houses, it curved steeply down towards Lewisham and its
busy High Street, ensuring that the southern, less smart half of the Square was known as ‘the Lewisham half’ while the other half, with St Mark’s Vicarage lording it on the
north-east corner, was known more grandly as ‘the Heath half’.
Kate and her widowed father lived on the west-hand side of ‘the Heath half’ and the Jennings family lived on the southern side of ‘the Lewisham half’ in a house abutting
the west-hand corner with Magnolia Hill.
As they walked towards it, they walked past the bottom of Kate’s garden and her elderly next-door neighbour said to her, pausing in her task of trimming her hedge, ‘Good afternoon,
Katherine.’
‘Good afternoon, Miss Godfrey,’ Kate responded guardedly. Miss Godfrey, though now long retired, had been headmistress of their primary school and, in Kate’s and Carrie’s
opinion, took far too much of an interest in their lives.
‘Arternoon, Miss,’ Carrie said with provocative carelessness.
Miss Godfrey paused in her task. ‘The word is
after
-noon, Caroline. Sloppy speech leads to sloppy thinking.’
Carrie bridled. ‘Not dahn the market it don’t,’ she said, allowing her speech to slip even further. ‘And dahn the market any other kind o’ speech ’ud be a
right ’andicap.’
Miss Godfrey clicked her tongue in annoyance. Ever since she had been a little girl Carrie Jennings had enjoyed having the last word and it was a trait adolescence hadn’t improved.
‘The ability to speak good English is a great asset in life, Caroline,’ she said reprovingly. ‘And it is something we can all attain. When Katherine’s father first found
himself in England he couldn’t speak a word of English. Now his English is perfect.’
She made it sound as if Kate’s father were one of her ex-pupils and Kate suppressed a spurt of indignation, saying stiffly, ‘There’s no need to skirt the issue of how Dad came
to be resident in England. Everyone knows he was a prisoner-of-war. And his English isn’t perfect. He speaks it with a German accent.’
‘And my Dad speaks it with a Cockney accent,’ Carrie added cheekily.
Miss Godfrey ignored her. ‘I was not skirting the issue of how your father came to be resident in this country, Katherine,’ she said, a slightly troubled expression entering her
eyes. ‘I was bearing in mind the revulsion the new German Chancellor’s Nazi policies have aroused and the consequent tide of British ill feeling against Germany and was merely being
tactful.’
Kate stared at her, bewildered. ‘I’m sorry, Miss Godfrey. I don’t understand the connection. My father isn’t a sympathizer of Mr Hitler. He never even visits Germany . .
.’
Carrie, sensing that Kate and Miss Godfrey were on the verge of a discussion that would be as long as it would be tedious, tugged her arm, saying impatiently, ‘Come on, Kate. If we
don’t get a move on you won’t have time to stay to tea.’
Miss Godfrey, too, had no desire to continue the discussion. Through her own carelessness it had veered on to a subject too delicate to be pursued in the street, as if of no more importance than
the latest Test Match score or the weather.
‘We’ll talk further another time, Katherine,’ she said, for once grateful to Carrie for having interrupted a conversation that was nothing to do with her. ‘Goodbye,
Caroline. Give my regards to your mother.’
As Kate and Carrie walked away from her, she stood for a long moment, her shears motionless over her privet, watching them. Even from the rear they made a handsomely distinctive pair. Both of
them were tall and slender, though there was an underlying robustness about Carrie that indicated it was a slenderness she would soon outgrow. Where Carrie’s untidy dark hair was held away
from her face by combs, Kate’s pale-gold hair was constrained in a single, thick, waist-length plait. It was a neat, sensible hairstyle and on any other girl Miss Godfrey would have approved
of it. She didn’t, however, approve of it on Kate. In her opinion, it made Kate look far too Teutonic.
Her frown deepened. Carl Voigt taught German at a local boys’ Grammar School and was highly intelligent. Surely he was aware that in the present political climate it wasn’t sensible
to draw attention to his daughter’s ancestry? Why, only that morning the
Daily Telegraph
had carried the most appalling report of the way Jews were being hounded in Germany, rounded
up and sent to concentration camps on charges so flimsy they would be laughed out of any civilized court of law.
With a heavy sigh she once more began to clip her hedge. What with godlessness raging in a country that had been the cradle of Protestantism, anarchy spreading like a forest fire throughout
Spain and Mussolini behaving like a madman in Italy, the world was becoming a very uncertain place. Almost as uncertain as it had been in the spring of 1914. Remembering how, when war had broken
out in the summer of that year, many German traders in London had had their shop windows smashed by Kaiser-hating neighbours who had once been their friends and customers, Miss Godfrey resolved to
have a tactful word with Carl Voigt. If he was blind to the ugliness inherent in human nature when arrant jingoism was let loose, she wasn’t. And to be warned was to be forearmed.