Eva, March 1942
‘I am not leaving this bed again for Adolf bleeding Hitler!’ cried Eva, pulling the bedclothes over her head and turning over.
Mum tugged at the sleeve of her nightdress. ‘Come on, Eve! We can’t stay here, it’s dangerous. The siren has gone again.’
A dog was barking its head off in the street and their neighbour downstairs shouted up to them, ‘Are you two coming or not?’ They’d already spent half the night in the Anderson shelter while Jerry dropped his bombs all the over the borough.
‘Honestly, Mum, I’ll be fine. It’s probably a false alarm. It’s getting light out there now,’ said Eva, whose head was killing her. She had made a bit of a night of it with Gladys down the pub. ‘You go, I’ll come in a minute.’
Her mother sighed and Eva heard the front door click shut. She’d just about had enough of the Blitz.
The next night, she and Gladys wandered over to the snooker hall after the pubs had chucked out, taking a pillow and a quilt each from the flat. It would be better than that dank hell-hole at the bottom of the garden, at least.
A bunch of blokes at the bar turned round and there were a few wolf whistles. Eva ignored them, laying out her bed beneath the snooker table. Then she made her way to the bar.
‘I’ll have half a Guinness, please,’ she said to the bartender.
‘Can I get that for you?’
She turned and came face-to-face with a tall bloke with sandy-blond hair and sparkly eyes. It was Jimmy, a friend of her brother Frankies. She’d met him once before when he came to the flat with a message for her mother. She had liked him straight away but didn’t want to let him know that. It troubled her a bit and she didn’t want to turn into one of those soppy girls who thought that men walked on water.
‘I’ll get it myself, thanks,’ she said.
‘Suit yourself,’ he said. ‘Just let me know if you need anything. Me and the lads will take care of you girls.’
Gladys was standing there with her tongue practically hanging out. Eva nudged her in the ribs. Jimmy was quite gorgeous but he probably knew it and there was no need to make it obvious that she fancied him, was there?
‘Well, we can take care of ourselves, can’t we, Gladys?’
Gladys nodded shyly. ‘We might need some help.’
Eva rolled her eyes and went over to the pool table.
A bit later on, just before the air-raid warning sounded, Jimmy came over to her again. ‘I hope I didn’t offend you by asking to buy that drink. I realize you can take care of yourself, Eva.’
‘Been looking after myself my whole life,’ she said, looking him straight in the eye.
‘I meant to tell you, I run a fruit and veg stall down East Street, so if you are ever passing and need anything . . .’
Eva smiled at him. He was all right really. Perhaps he didn’t fancy himself after all. ‘That’s very kind of you, Jimmy. I’ll bear that in mind.’
She was just settling down under the table when there was the most almighty explosion from the other side of the street. The force of the blast blew the windows out in the snooker hall, sending glass flying everywhere.
‘Oh my God!’ screamed Eva. ‘Mum!’
She crawled out from the table and scrambled to the window, cutting her feet on broken glass in the process. The house over the road – her house – was missing half the roof and the exposed timbers were well alight, with flames leaping into the night air. Her bedroom had been reduced to rubble, collapsing onto the flat of the lady downstairs.
‘Jesus Christ!’ said Eva, running down the stairs from the hall, leaving a trail of blood behind her.
The firemen were there in minutes, training their hoses on the blaze. Outside in the street was a scene of absolute pandemonium, as people came out of the surrounding houses. Rescuers were already inside, wading through the rubble, shifting bits of masonry. Children were crying and the firemen were trying to keep people away. She ran forwards. An air-raid warden shouted at Eva, ‘Get back!’
She started to tussle with him and he took hold of her by the shoulders and yelled into her face, ‘Is there anyone inside?’
She had lost her voice. She tried to speak but she was shaking too much. She looked down at her feet and saw they were cut and bleeding.
Out of nowhere, she felt an arm around her shoulder, steadying her, and a voice said, ‘I think her mother might be in there. Is that right, Eva?’ It was Jimmy.
‘The shelter, there is a shelter in the back garden,’ she spluttered.
‘All right, all right, keep back now,’ said the other man from the ARP; they always worked in pairs. ‘I’ll go and see.’
He legged it round a side street and over a garden wall. About ten minutes later, he emerged with Mum, wearing her best fur coat and mink stole – there was no way she was leaving that behind for the Germans to bomb – and the woman from downstairs, with her little yappy dog.
‘All accounted for here: they were safe in the shelter,’ said the ARP to the fireman. ‘There’s no one inside, thank God.’
‘Will you be OK?’ asked Jimmy, giving Eva a little squeeze. He produced her shoes from behind his back. ‘Well, there you go,’ he said. He had brought them down from the snooker hall for her.
She brushed her hair out of her face and looked up at him. ‘Yes, I think so, thanks all the same.’ Being bombed out was such a common occurrence. Some people fell apart but Eva wasn’t going to be one of them.
‘You know where I am if you need to find me, Eva. Perhaps I’ll see you back at the snooker hall tomorrow night?’
She nodded. He was very nice but she didn’t want to give him any funny ideas. It wasn’t as if she was desperate or anything, even if she had just lost her home. Eva linked arms with her mum and they made their way to a rest centre run by the Women’s Voluntary Service in the school round the corner, where they were given a bed for the night and a cup of hot, sweet tea and a biscuit.
Mum drank up and then allowed herself a few tears. ‘We’ve lost everything, Eve,’ she sobbed. ‘I told you staying in that bedroom was bleeding dangerous.’
‘I know, I know,’ Eva soothed. ‘You were right and I was wrong. But we have got each other and whatever you want, I will go and hoist it for you, I promise.’
As she fell into an uneasy sleep on the world’s most uncomfortable camp bed, Eva could only think about one thing: Jimmy, with the sparkly blue eyes.
The next morning brought a visit from a familiar face: Mr Pemberton, from the Poor Law.
‘Oh bloody hell,’ said Eva under her breath. ‘That is all we need.’
‘Good morning, Mrs Fraser and Eva,’ he said, with a tight little smile. He looked older and thinner than Eva remembered. Trust him to turn up like a bad smell when disaster had struck.
‘I suppose the Poor Law will tell us we are not deserving enough, even though we don’t have a roof over our heads,’ muttered Eva, loudly enough for him to hear. She also wasn’t about to point out that her mother was no longer called Fraser, in case he went back and blabbed to her dad about it.
He looked hurt. ‘No, no, it’s not like that,’ he said. ‘We are all in this together. We’re called the Assistance Board now. You’ll be rehoused. In fact, I’ve found a flat down in Tabard Street in the Borough which might suit and we can give you a grant for some basic furniture. I realize it cannot replace things you have lost . . .’
‘You have no idea,’ said Eva, thinking of all the best bits of Gamages she had pinched and displayed on the mantelpiece.
‘But it will go some way at least towards making your new home comfortable.’ He sat down next to her mum. ‘Mrs Fraser, I’m only telling you this because we have known each other a long while now, but I have some china and things I no longer really need because, well, my wife died at the start of the war and I am on my own these days.’
‘Oh, goodness, Mr Pemberton, I’m so sorry,’ said Mum, clasping his hand in hers. ‘I hope she didn’t suffer . . .’
‘No, it was a stroke: sudden and unexpected.’ He was welling up. ‘Although I’m sorry to say it, I’m almost glad she has not had to live through the things we’re seeing today. You’ll have to spend a few more nights here in the rest centre and then we can get you moved into Tabard Street.’
He lowered his voice, so that the family sitting at the next table wouldn’t overhear. ‘The clothes and household goods I can give you are far superior to anything you can get from the WVS and I would really like you to have them. It just seems the least I can do now.’ Mum nodded, as he wiped tears from his eyes. ‘Good, well, that’s settled then. There’s a mobile washing service in a van around the corner, which can take in any laundry you may have, and packs of essential personal items such as combs and toothbrushes from the Red Cross. It’s not much but we are trying to make things as comfortable as we can for you.’
‘Thank you, Mr Pemberton, that’s very kind,’ said Eva, who could hardly believe she was saying those words. Times had certainly changed in Lambeth.
Kathleen came over that afternoon with as many things as she could spare, but she didn’t have much herself as she tended to live in her AFS uniform these days. She had confided to Eva, though, that her days in the Fire Service might be numbered because she’d skipped two periods now. Albert was thrilled about it but mainly because Kathleen would be back at home all day, she told Eva with a little shrug. Kathleen seemed excited about the baby but not as much as Eva had expected.
‘Come on, Kathleen, what’s up?’ said Eva, offering her a sip of WVS tea. It always fell to Eva to get the truth out of Kathleen, who could be a bit of a dark horse about her feelings.
‘I’m scared, if the truth be told, about what having a baby will be like. Not just the pain of the birth and all that, but they are so tiny and delicate, aren’t they? What if the baby gets sick, or really ill, like little Billy from down the road?’
‘Oh, Kathleen, I reckon every mother feels worried about their baby but poor old Joe and Mary never had two brass farthings to rub together, so no wonder their little Billy got so poorly. You will have me, Peggy and Mum and Nanny Day to help look after you. The whole family will chip in. Your baby will never go without and I will always be there for you, I promise, sister to sister.’
Eva held her hand and they hugged for a moment. She only had the clothes she was standing up in but she knew, if it came to it, she would take them off her back and give them to her sisters, in their hour of need.
Kathleen smiled at last, reassured that Eva would be there for her. She reached into her pocket and pulled out some clothing coupons.
‘I’ve heard that Colliers down the Elephant has some stockings in – fancy popping along there later?’
They queued up for some stockings, along with half the neighbourhood, but in the end it was just one pair each.
Eva thought about getting some stuff from the tallyman but when she saw him, he was hawking a few bits of old tat on a barrow. His precious van had been burned to a cinder by an incendiary bomb, along with all his best stock. There was nothing else for it: she would have to go to work up in town. She had barely pinched anything since her prison sentence. It had upset her, being away from home like that and, because of the war, the authorities took law-breaking so much more seriously, even for petty offences like shoplifting.
She felt bad that she hadn’t been to see Alice Diamond since she got out but now she’d been bombed out, she had bigger fish to fry, Alice would understand that. Eva decided she’d hoist a few nice things which the Forty Thieves could sell on, as a kind of peace offering for her absence these past few months.
Later that day she set off for Selfridges with a sense of trepidation in the pit of her stomach and Gladys’s spare shoplifter’s drawers under her dress. Gone were Selfridges’ beautiful shop window displays of furs and glamorous evening gowns. In their place were mannequins sporting the latest in government-approved Utility wear – hard-wearing, practical and, in Eva’s opinion, not very stylish. She’d even seen some pictures in a magazine of women wearing coats made out of a bedspread. As if she’d ever go out looking like a bleeding bed!
Eva longed for the days when the rails were full to bursting and the shop was rammed to the rafters with punters, elbowing their way through to get to stuff; not least because it made her job easier. Now it was like a wasteland: a few sad rails of drab dresses and coats, stockings guarded by a fierce-looking woman and walkers everywhere, keeping an eye out for people pilfering. These were desperate times and amateurs fancied they could turn a quick profit by nicking stuff and selling it on the black market but, as Alice always pointed out, it took years of practice to be a good hoister.
After rifling through a few pinafores, she decided that the thing she and her mother needed most were shoes – not a popular choice for the hoister because they were actually quite difficult to nick; they were bulky, for a start. Eva started the usual process of asking for one pair of shoes, then another and not quite making up her mind about what to buy. Once she had a good half-dozen pairs out on the floor in front of her, she kicked a pair under her seat and when the shop assistant went to the store cupboard to get something in a different colour, she nudged them into her open shopping bag.
When the shop girl returned, she said, ‘Oh, I forgot to bring my coupons! Silly me!’ and got up and left her to clear up the mess.
She was just about to get into the lift when she felt a hand on her shoulder and her heart sank.
‘Show me what you have in that bag, please, miss.’
Three months; three miserable bloody months in Holloway and all for nicking one measly pair of shoes. The beak saw she had previous and said he needed to make an example of people like her, who were making a living on the black market. Well, that wasn’t true. She wasn’t making a living on it, she had lost all her stuff to a German bomb and was just trying to find something decent to put on her feet.
HMP Holloway would have to provide that for the time being. Eva had to get used to the Victorian jail, with its echoing wings radiating from the centre and the constant clanging of iron doors. The floor of that centre was kept so highly polished you could see your face in it and you weren’t allowed to cross it directly. Only the governor could do that. The inmates had to walk around it or be put on report. The cocoa was the same, though, which she liked. Her family wrote letters, but the ones she liked most came from Jimmy. He just told her what was going on around Walworth and tried to make her laugh a lot. She tried not to think about it but the more he wrote, the more she missed him. Her mum came to visit, which she was grateful for, although she didn’t like her mother seeing her dressed in the drab prison dress, or the way the screws kept such a close watch over them. They weren’t allowed to hug or touch and she told Mum not to bother coming again because she missed her even more afterwards.
The prison was buzzing with news that the Fascist leader Oswald Mosley and his wife were inside, living in a little house in the grounds. One of the girls she got to know said she had seen him sunbathing with his shirt off. Eva couldn’t get excited about that. She remembered him and his idiot followers stomping around in Bermondsey and getting a proper clipping. If he’d had his way, they’d all be talking German now.
By the end of her sentence, she’d met Diana Mosley a couple of times because the governor decided she was a suitable candidate to go over and help clean the cottage for the Mosleys. Diana was polite enough. Eva just got on with her work and was grateful not to have to talk about politics because she felt sure she would have told Lady Mosley she didn’t care for her Fascist views.
It was a beautiful summer day when she was released, a proper swelterer. She’d ticked the days off in her head, one by one, and when the warder opened her cell door and called her name that morning, she knew she was going home.
With other inmates wishing her luck, she made her way across the landing and down to the little office, where all her personal effects were held.
A grim-faced screw handed her back her belongings in a cardboard box and she went through them all and signed for them, before taking off her hated prison uniform and changing into her own clothes. She’d got used to wearing flat, regulation pumps and it felt strange putting her high heels on again. Stepping out of the prison gates, she glanced back over her shoulder and muttered, ‘Goodbye, good riddance, I won’t be back soon.’
She went home to her mum in the Borough and then straight round to East Street Market. Jimmy was standing there, looking as handsome as ever, selling strawberries from his fruit and veg stall.
‘Well, hello Eva, it’s good to see you again,’ he said, giving her a smile which could light up the blackout.
She sauntered over to him, as casually as she could. Her heart was beating faster and she could feel herself colouring up. It was silly, really; she was only chatting to Jimmy, for God’s sake. Eva helped him out on the stall a bit, and when it was time to call it a day, he pushed his barrow around the back alley and parked it up for the night and then got his bicycle.
‘Want a lift up to the snooker hall?’
She nodded and he motioned for her to sit side-saddle on the crossbar, just as she did with Frankie when they were kids – only back then, Frankie had probably nicked the bike they were riding on.
As they set off down Walworth Road, Jimmy began to whistle the tune to ‘Daisy, Daisy’ and then he started to sing, ‘Eva, Eva, give me your answer do . . .’
She turned round and grinned at him. ‘Oh, leave it out, Jimmy!’
But he continued: ‘I’m half crazy, all for the love of you . . .’ She felt herself blushing again.
When they reached the snooker hall Gladys and some of the others were already outside, having a smoke.
Eva hopped off the bike and, as Jimmy was parking it up against the wall, he looked into her eyes and said, ‘Well, will you, Eva? Will you give me your answer? I want you to be my girl.’
She glanced down at the floor and then back up at him.
‘OK,’ she said. ‘But don’t make a big thing of it and go telling everybody, all right?’
He smiled quietly to himself and nodded. ‘That’s fine by me, Eva. You can kid yourself, but we both know it’s serious.’
When everyone had tired of cards, snooker and beer, Jimmy laid his coat down under the snooker table for them to lie on.
In the darkness, he turned and kissed her. She kissed him back.