Peggy, September 1943
‘You don’t have to volunteer, you know. You’re married.’ Nanny Day’s needles clicked furiously as she knitted a jumper and bootees for Eva’s new little one, Beverley. The whole family had fallen head over heels for Eva’s Jimmy, who had proved himself to be a hard worker and a real provider, which Nanny Day was delighted about. She practically clucked with pride every time Eva brought the baby round and had reminded Eva, on more than one occasion that she’d always said the right man would persuade her to settle down.
Nanny Day chuntered away into her knitting, ‘Eva and Kathleen are perfectly happy at home with their babies but that’s not enough for you, for some reason!’
Peggy sighed. ‘I already have experience working for the Post Office and I need to do something.’
She didn’t want to say that being at home every day and worrying about what danger George was putting himself in was making her feel depressed. Nanny’s generation just got on with it when the men went to war. They saw the home as the right place for a woman to be. Peggy had loved going out to work and now there was the chance for her to retrain as an operator in the Central Telephone Office up in town, she wanted to take it.
‘But it’s dangerous, going out to work over the water,’ said Nanny, pursing her lips. ‘The Germans have already dropped a bloody great bomb on the telephone exchange.’
‘Keeping the phone lines running is vital war work,’ said Peggy. ‘You know that. I’m not afraid to do it. I just think about how brave Jim is fighting in North Africa and God knows where else, and the same goes for George. I should be able to do my bit. And you know Gloria loves being with you. Some of what I do will be nights, anyway . . .’
‘Oh, that is just the living end!’ said Nanny Day, throwing her knitting aside and going over to fill the kettle. ‘You are going to be stuck in the middle of all the air raids! You’ll need more than a tin hat and a gas mask, my girl!’
She clattered about in the sink, muttering to herself as she did so, ‘It’s good enough for them but not good enough for you, for some reason. I just don’t understand it.’
Peggy sighed. They both knew her mind was made up. The war had been going for four years now and it showed no sign of stopping. The air raids were just part of everyday life and people had got used to sleeping in the Tube stations night after night. Spirits were high, with regular sing-songs down there and everyone sharing what they had to make life that bit more comfortable, but it wasn’t enough for her to hide away from the enemy like some rat in a sewer. She wanted to make a difference.
The victory against Rommel at El Alamein had been a real morale boost and her brother Jim had fought bravely and was mentioned in dispatches. George had volunteered for a new battalion of paratroopers when he was out in Egypt. The training appeared to involve the men hurling themselves out of an aircraft in the desert and anyone who didn’t suffer broken limbs got their red beret and their wings. George landed safely, thank God, and he had seen action in Italy already. Peggy understood why he wanted to do it; they had known for over a year that his brother Harry was a prisoner of war in German hands after Dunkirk and George wanted to bring him safely home to their mother.
George was a Bren gunner in the 10th Parachute Battalion and was so fastidious about cleaning his gun that his comrades in the unit had nicknamed him ‘Rags’, which he didn’t mind. It was just in his nature: if he was going to do something, he would do it well. The regiment was biding its time in Sussex for the time being but she knew that couldn’t last and he would have to see action again soon. She hadn’t told him about volunteering for the Post Office but once she had got the job for sure, she would. He wasn’t the sort of man who would try to stop her, Peggy knew that much. That was one of the reasons she loved him.
Peggy carried George’s most recent letter with her as she crossed the bridge and walked up into King Edward’s Buildings in the City towards the exchange. She remembered his wistful words off by heart: ‘Kiss Gloria every night for me and remember that everything I am doing is for you and her, Peggy.’
She was used to the systems of the General Post Office, of supervisors and refresher courses, of steady learning on the job. Only this time, the emergencies would be real and the margin for error very slim. One crossed wire and someone could die, that much was made clear. A large poster on the wall was of a telephone dressed as a soldier in a tin hat at a jaunty angle, declaring: ‘I’m on war work! If you must use me, be brief!’
The exchange itself was a mind-boggling array of wires and sockets, with a row of girls sitting in front, connecting parties to each other. A supervisor kept close watch and, if it was an emergency, listened in. Once or twice, Peggy overheard the supervisor say, ‘Shall I scramble?’ and she realized that she wasn’t talking about eggs.
During her first day’s training, she found herself sitting next to Edna, her old boss from Acton, who had also volunteered. There was little time for chit-chat but Peggy noticed that Edna blanched when she saw her. At tea break, Edna sidled up to her and took her to one side, over in the little kitchenette.
‘Peggy, I just need to say something to you,’ she said. ‘You know, I have always found you a very sensible young woman, much more so than your silly friend, Susan, who went and got herself pregnant—’
Peggy cut in. ‘Susan is dead. She died in an air raid a year ago, over in the East End.’ Edna’s lips pursed into an ‘O’. ‘So don’t you dare speak ill of her, Edna. She wasn’t silly, she was braver than you will ever know.’
Peggy had tried to make sense of her friend’s sudden death but she couldn’t, so she’d just buried it and got on with her life. Now it was as if the floodgates had opened and there was no stopping her. ‘Susan went through hell. They locked her up in the mad house after they took her baby away but she pulled herself together and she’d got herself a nice little job and was doing just fine until the Germans landed a bomb on her aunt’s house.’
‘I am so sorry,’ said Edna, putting her hand on Peggy’s arm.
Peggy snatched her arm away. ‘No, no, you are not sorry in the least. I know you were in favour of the Fascists, of Mosley and his lot, and that is what you are worried about, isn’t it?’
Edna lowered her voice to a whisper, ‘Peggy, I don’t understand. I thought we were singing from the same hymn sheet. I was simply going to warn you that we need to be careful now, more than ever, about expressing any views which may be interpreted in the wrong way in the current climate.’
‘You disgust me!’ Peggy spat, her mouth twisting into a sneer of disdain. ‘I was never in favour of Mosley. I should have told you back then but I was too scared because you were the boss. Well, the war has made us all equal now, hasn’t it? I was going to the Mosley meeting to protest. If I had been as gutsy as Susan I would have done it, I’m sure, but it took me a while to get the courage up, Edna. I did it in the end; I joined the other Communists and we kicked Mosley and his followers right out of Bermondsey when they came on one of their stupid marches.’
Edna looked as if she was about to faint.
Peggy went on, ‘I won’t cover for you, you filthy Fascist. So I would get yourself out of here, before I reveal your true colours to the whole of the telephone exchange, if I were you.’
The last she saw of Edna, she was grabbing her hat and coat, and heading for the door.
Over the months which followed, Peggy worked her way up to being one of the most trusted operators at the exchange, always showing up for her shifts and volunteering to work overtime when other girls couldn’t make it. Her supervisors also noted her selflessness. Whenever the air-raid siren sounded, the younger girls were ushered down into the shelter in the cellar, but Peggy donned her tin hat and stayed on to run the telephone exchange with the men. As she was married, people treated her differently from the single girls and allowed her to make her own choice about taking shelter or working. Peggy relished the chance to do something useful. She wasn’t scared, not a bit. Rather than politely asking, ‘Which number, please?’ callers were greeted with, ‘Is this call of national importance?’
On more than one occasion during an air raid, Peggy caught some posh woman trying to be put through to her grocer to complain about her weekly order and disconnected the call. The men she worked with still laughed about cutting off some lord or other who was trying to ring his tailor as the bombs dropped all around them.
George had gone away on an important mission in Europe. He couldn’t say more, but Peggy now scoured the newspapers daily for any information. On 18 September she bought all the papers she could carry because of reports about a great ‘sky army’ which had landed in Holland. She knew George was among them, and imagined him floating silently downwards with his parachute, landing behind enemy lines. The days after that seemed to blur into one. She had no memory of getting up and going to work, but she knew she must have done. She lived for the drip-drip of news about the airborne invasion.
The first reports were encouraging, about how a massed army of men in gliders and parachutes had taken the Germans completely by surprise, but as the days turned into a week, the reports got shorter and then bad news started to leak out. She cut out all the stories and pored over them after she’d put Gloria to bed. Nanny begged her to leave it alone, to stop reading, but she couldn’t.
‘You’re torturing yourself, Peg, please stop,’ she said, as Peggy read the story from the front page of The Times over and over. The headlines said it all: TANK BATTLE 5 MILES FROM ARNHEM, AIRBORNE FORCES FACE GRIM FIGHT. There were reports of reinforcements and supplies being flown in, but the paratroopers were effectively cut off. The thought of George being killed was too much. Peggy thought that she would know instinctively if he was. It was like Dunkirk; she had sensed then that he was in terrible danger but had never given up hope or feared him dead. People in the neighbourhood had strange superstitions about things like that. Mrs Avens back in Howley Terrace still talked about how a black cat sat on her doorstep and refused to budge on the day her son Johnny was killed on the beach at Dunkirk. Mrs Avens knew then that Johnny had died, she said so. Peggy played out the scene in her mind, imagining George hiding in the woods or by a river, trapped and trying to cross to safety, with his trusty Bren gun still by his side.
Three days later, reports from the front line were carried in the newspapers, bringing news of the most tragic and glorious battle of the war being over. The survivors of the British airborne force had been ordered to break out of the forest near Arnhem and get back across the Rhine to join up with the Second Army on the south bank. Peggy spent the next two nights in the rocking chair, listening to the BBC World Service, waiting for any news. At first light, Nanny got up and made her a cup of tea. There was a knock on the door. Peggy couldn’t move. She sank her head in her hands and began to cry.
‘I’ll get it,’ said Nanny overly brightly, bustling down the hallway. She came back carrying an official-looking letter, her face as white as the envelope in her hands. Peggy was shaking as she opened it; it was from the War Office. She was blinded by tears at first, so she couldn’t take it all in but it gave the incident date as 18 September – the day George had parachuted in to Holland. Just seeing his name, rank and number there in black and white didn’t make it real at all. Could they have got it wrong? She was hoping against hope. There was today’s date. He was confirmed as a prisoner of war, in German hands, location unknown.
Eva and Kathleen came to comfort Peggy, bringing their daughters, Beverley and Della, to play with little Gloria. Eva had bought Gloria a set of peg dolls which Nanny Day had dressed up to be a whole family and Gloria carried the daddy one with her everywhere, which almost broke Peggy’s heart. Just having her sisters close at hand eased the pain of being parted from George and she leaned on them now, more than she ever had done when they were growing up. At least he was alive, they told her. And George being George, he would do everything he could to survive the war.
Eva even tried to make her smile. ‘He’s probably converting the blooming Nazis to Communism!’
Peggy had always been the eldest, the clever one, the one who had all the answers – but she didn’t have the answers to work this out. When she cried, they picked her up and forced her to carry on, for Gloria’s sake. She still went out to work – that, at least, gave her a focus other than the worry of what George might be going through in a prison camp.
A new terror had arrived in the past weeks, in the form of lethal rockets, which Londoners nicknamed ‘doodlebugs’ because of the horrible whine they made as they flew overhead. More terrifying still was the silence as the engine cut out and they plummeted to the ground. Nanny Day was with Peggy and Gloria in the back yard at Cornwall Road when one appeared, sailing high over the rooftops, and there was no time to get to the shelter. Peggy prayed out loud: ‘Please God, don’t fall here!’ even though it meant the bomb would land on some other poor souls a few streets away. The engine whined on, across towards Bermondsey, and then cut out and fell from the sky. They all felt the shudder of the explosion. Peggy cried with relief that they were safe and in anguish for the victims a few streets away. Nothing about this war was fair, she felt that now, more than ever.
It was a clear, crisp October day when Peggy finally received word from George. She recognized his neat, copperplate writing, in pencil. She traced each stroke with her finger, over and over, seeking some connection with him. The words were not the words he would have chosen, she realized that. He had probably been told to copy it down, sitting in a room with his fellow captives. But the very fact that he had written to her, managed to send word that he was alive, meant the world. The letter read: ‘I have been taken prisoner of war in Germany. I am in good health. Please do not worry. I will be transferred from this camp in a number of days so please do not write until I send word. George.’
Peggy knew she would have to hand it in to the War Office, because the authorities had told her that if she heard anything from him, she must do so without delay. But she held that note close for the rest of the day and put it under her pillow that night, just to have his words beside her for a moment longer.
Peggy blew out the candle and drifted into a dream about a chatty blue-eyed boy and a tall girl with dark hair, carrying a book under her arm, making their way down a cobbled street by the Thames. They wandered in a time between the wars, when children played without bombs falling from the sky and everyone knew their neighbours, even if they were all as poor as church mice and didn’t always get along.