‘Stop gawping, Em! And hold still.’
Nancy spat on her handkerchief and wiped it vigorously over her child’s squirming, resistant face. She could remember how it felt having your face scrubbed. It was something her own mother had done.
It was the only thing she did remember. Everything else about her mother, the exact circumstances of her own existence, she had heard second-hand and had woven together into a sort of whole. There was a town, remote and coal-blackened, on the Northumberland coast, where a quarter of the menfolk had been killed in pit disasters and where her mother, a girl called Jessie Keys, had been born in the final weeks of the old century. Perhaps wishing more for herself than early widowhood, the young Jessie Keys had departed the mining town in the early years of the Great War and headed south, arriving in the sprawling and squalidly overflowing streets of the capital, where she had taken up the post of scullery maid in a Mayfair household. There she had remained until it was discovered she was carrying excess baggage beneath her suddenly snug-fitting maid’s uniform, and she was hastily turned out.
The excess baggage came courtesy of Charlie Blyth, a youthful employee of the Royal Mail whose job it was to deliver telegrams to the Mayfair household. Perhaps Jessie had thought it an omen that Charlie shared his surname with the remote and coal-blackened town she had spent her first fifteen years trying to escape and the last four yearning for, but he had proved to be a disappointing suitor. As the unfortunate Jessie had squeezed the baby out of her tired body in the upstairs room of a Shoreditch boarding house under the watchful eye of a sympathetic landlady, Charlie Blyth was crossing the Irish Sea en route to Dublin, or perhaps America, and was never heard of again.
With the war over and the flu epidemic sweeping across an already-ravaged Europe, Jessie, unwed and unemployed, had turned her hand briefly to seamstressing before discovering more profitable employment that could be conducted in the comfort of her own bed. On a bitterly cold November night, following a day on which the sun had failed to rise above the rooftops, she had died, painfully and wretchedly, of consumption, leaving four-year-old Nancy in the care of the sympathetic landlady.
This was the sum of Nancy’s knowledge of the woman who had, however fleetingly, been her mother, and much of that was supposition, blank spaces filled in by her own imagination.
‘Mu-um! Stop!’
Emily had put up with the vigorous rubbing of her face as long as any child could be expected to do so and she threw up her hands to fend off her mother’s ministrations. Giving up, Nancy picked her up and planted her on top of a sandbag, straightening the red woollen hat which had almost come off during their headlong flight, sweeping the hair out of Emily’s face. If there was anything of Jessie Keys in her grandchild’s face, Nancy could not tell, as she had no photographs of her long-dead mother and she could not remember her face.
Emily, seated atop the sandbag, was too young to remember the first weeks of the Blitz, the terror, the panic, the utter unrelenting chaos. Now bunks lined the walls of the platform, though you had to get down here at four in the afternoon to grab one, and there were latrines, though you tried your best to avoid using them, and there were shelter wardens ticking off names on clipboards. There were trestle tables already piled high with tin mugs and three huge urns waiting to be lit by the women from the Women’s Voluntary Services. Now it was a way of life and they had got used to it, Nancy supposed.
She watched two very elderly sisters in matching hats and woollen mittens spread a picnic rug on the ground and settle down to knit. You might have thought they were enjoying a day out on Clacton seafront were it not that they paused in their knitting every so often to swig something fortifying from a shared thermos flask. An elderly Jewish man passed by carrying a small, battered case as though he was embarking on a voyage, muttering in agitated Yiddish, searching for someone, searching for a place to sit, but there was no place to sit and no one called out to him.
Poor old sod, thought Nancy, but she didn’t make room for him. She had just spotted a man in a raincoat standing motionless some distance away at the platform entrance, his hands thrust deep in his pockets, hat pulled down low so that a shadow fell across his face. The man’s eyes slid from left to right, his head unmoving as though he was searching for someone he didn’t wish to find. Nancy thought of the figure she had seen in Odessa Street earlier, the figure that had melted into the shadows when she had looked at him. It seemed unlikely it was the same man. Even so, she looked away.
The drone of enemy bombers was suddenly directly overhead and down on the platform the hum of conversation ceased. A whine, louder this time, was followed by the familiar whooo-osh then caroomph as the first wave dropped.
Phee-oow!
Car-oomph!
The first bombs hit their targets. They hit something, at any rate, and Nancy closed her eyes and felt the breath pump in and out of her mouth very quickly and her head start to ache as though there was something inside her that needed to burst out. Tonight everything seemed heightened, sharpened, and it was only partly due to the raid.
She opened her eyes to see the two sisters on the picnic rug engaged in a bizarre tug-of-war over the thermos flask. She could smell their terror. It did not get any less frightening, just because you were old and at the end of your life. She had found it heartbreaking in the first months of the Blitz seeing elderly men and women who, having endured a lifetime of drudgery and hardship, must now spend their final years being bombed in a tube station. But she no longer thought this. She no longer noticed.
‘Mum, I’m hungry!’ Emily said, moving restlessly, rubbing her tummy, pulling a dismayed and pitiful face.
‘We’re all hungry, darling,’ Nancy sighed for they had neither of them had their tea and it would be hours yet before the ladies from the WVS came round with their sausage rolls and cups of tea. And in the meantime the chips were on the kitchen table, already cold. If the two of them survived the night, if the house survived, they would be having cold chips for their breakfast—it would not be the first time. Last winter things had got so bad they had existed on dripping and lemon rind, sucking it till just a piece of yellow skin remained to be chewed then swallowed and, when they had run out of fuel for the stove, on raw potatoes, standing at the kitchen table because they had used the chairs for firewood, surrounded by rows of empty tins and jars that claimed to contain flour and sugar and butter and lard but almost never did (a cruel echo of a more plentiful time), with an unreliable gas ring that had finally failed when an incendiary had hit the nearby gasworks. Eventually the kitchen table too had been chopped up and Nancy had had to stand at the sink to squeeze the last out of a pile of watery grey tea-leaves. Emily had had a half-starved, animal look about her—but all the children looked that way. Nancy had lain awake wondering how they would manage.
Then Joe had come home on leave and everything had changed.
An explosion caused the air to reverberate and again all conversation ceased, eyes raised upwards. Dust and earth dribbled from a crack in the ceiling. A moment later a long low rumble signalled the collapse of a building above. After a moment the rumble faded and everyone took a deep breath and got on with what they were doing.
Nancy lit a fresh cigarette. She could sit it out: the bombs and Emily’s hunger. She had done it before. The cigarette would calm her. She watched out of the corner of her eye the smartly dressed woman who had arrived late, flustered and panicked, with her child, and who was now seated awkwardly on the floor, her legs curled beneath her and looking as out of place, Joe would have said, as the King and Queen walking into the pawnbroker on Hackney Road.
The little girl was perched on her mother’s lap clutching a teddy bear and at the mother’s side was a small blue case, the handle of which the woman clasped as though it contained her jewels—and perhaps it did. She had no blankets or pillows or bedding or warm clothing with her, or indeed anything that might be of the least use for a night in a shelter. Clearly she had not expected to get caught in an air raid. The tweed coat she wore, the smart little hat and silk stockings, the polished black court shoes and long elegant gloves over long elegant fingers suggested she was on her way to a cocktail party or shopping in Bond Street. The fur at her collar was smooth and sleek and moth-free, even if it was prewar.
Posh, but not wealthy, Nancy decided. And not pretty, either, despite her posh outfit. In fact, she looked a bit like Mrs Wallis Simpson and there was living proof, if you needed it, that you could have all the money and all the best clothes in the world and still not look very pretty. Though there was something—what was it? dignified, perhaps?—about this woman that somehow compensated. And her neck was as beautifully slender as a swan’s. She was well past thirty, perhaps nearer forty, which was odd for the mother of such a little girl. But the plainness accounted for that: clearly she had been overlooked by every man she had met until, late in life, some man had come along, had taken pity perhaps—or that was how it seemed to Nancy, who had married at nineteen. The woman’s gaze seemed very far away but the look of controlled panic on her face was unmistakable.
The woman chose that moment to look around and, caught staring, Nancy nodded at her, softening her eyes into a smile she did not feel.
The cigarette was finished. Emily had fallen into a restless sleep, her eyelids flickering from side to side as though tracking the aircraft high above, and Nancy reached down and brushed a strand of hair from her face. Emily was easier to love when she was asleep; perhaps all children were. Her face was still streaked with dirt and Nancy stifled the urge to spit on her handkerchief a second time and try to wipe the remaining dirt off, for she was oddly aware of the smartly dressed woman sitting a few feet away whose child was plump and spotless, her chestnut hair sleek and shiny and held in place by a natty little hairband. The coat she wore was a tiny perfect copy of her mother’s coat, and on her feet were the kind of shoes Princess Elizabeth might have worn—smart and shiny with little silver buckles on top. Nancy looked at her own child, who was dressed in clothes salvaged from bombsites. But Emily was asleep, dead to the world as the world tore itself apart above her, and what did it matter if her face was dirty?
Nancy leaned her head back against the wall of the tunnel, feeling some small part of her unwind, and wondered if Joe’s ship had sailed yet. She closed her eyes as an immense weariness overcame her and somewhere in the space between dreaming and not dreaming she saw a vast gunmetal-grey warship slip silently away from the dockside and out to sea. The ocean was gunmetal grey too and the sky—indeed, her very dreams were gunmetal grey. She saw the ocean, smooth and calm and safe, a haven, and the horizon, towards which the ship sailed, was a place of calm serenity.
A baby began to scream and she sat up. She would not sleep, it was too early yet and, besides, she did not even know if Joe’s ship had sailed. Not that it made any difference—Joe had gone and she would not see him again perhaps until the end of the war, if he made it that far.
The fact of his departure was a sharp ball of pain inside her that came and went, sometimes no more than a dull ache and other times catching at her throat and taking her breath away. At this moment it filled her up, squeezing the life out of her, but after a moment or two it lessened.
Joe had left that morning, three months’ rest and recuperation ending abruptly with the arrival of his recall papers for his new ship just when she had got used to having him around. His ship was due to depart on the evening tide and where it was headed she had no idea and she doubted Joe did either. His last ship had been torpedoed somewhere between Iceland and Greenland and he had spent three days adrift in a lifeboat. The entire ship’s company had died, he had said, dozens of men, though neither the papers nor the wireless had reported it. He had been picked up by a passing merchant ship and spent a fortnight in a hospital at Liverpool, then they had sent him home to recuperate. That had been October. Joe had been at sea three years. She had worried that they wouldn’t know each other, or worse, wouldn’t like each other. They had been married so short a time before his call-up that they were still getting used to each other when he left. She worried that what he had gone through—three days adrift in a lifeboat, the ship’s company lost—would affect him. But hadn’t she witnessed dreadful things herself? Limbs blasted across a street, burnt torsos belonging to people she had once known, a baby burned black in a fire . . . So then, they were neither of them the same people they had been when they had met and married. But it worried her all the same.
Joe had come barrelling along the street one afternoon in October in his sailor’s uniform with his kitbag over his shoulder and a big grin on his face hiding whatever uncertainty hid beneath, and Nancy had imagined a hundred times what that moment would be like, what they would say to each other, but it turned out there was nothing to say for she had burst into tears and run at him. That had surprised her, that surge of emotion. Where had it come from? There had been no warning of it. She had not cried when he’d left nor at any time since, even when she’d heard he’d been torpedoed but was safe. It had not seemed real. She had felt—nothing really, only a sort of dull amazement.
Yet there she was in the street, holding on to him and sobbing.
But later, after she had run out to him in tears, he had stood in the kitchen not knowing what to do with himself, taking up so much space and neither of them finding the right words. The distance between them seemed too great. He was not hurt in any way that she could see, other than the sunburn and blisters, but he spent the first week at home trying to count all the men who had died, counting fretfully on his fingers, remembering each name. But never when she was in the room, never when he thought she was watching him. He sat in the armchair with his sleeves rolled up and read the paper, he went to the pub and drank watery wartime beer, he rolled his cigarettes and in the evenings he listened to the wireless and, when the news came on, he railed against the politicians and the government and the navy and the Admiralty and anyone, really, who sat in an office and made decisions while he was out there getting his arse shot off. She liked that: his fury, his energy. But apart from that first moment when she had burst into tears and run at him, they had forgotten how to be close.
And Emily, born seven months after Joe had left and now more than three years old, was a stranger to him as much as he was to her. Her demands, her constant presence, seemed to surprise him, and sometimes it was funny and other times it made him furious. At night, when Joe wanted what any man wanted after three years at sea, Emily’s sleeping there in the same room with them infuriated him, but he had grown up in a small house with many people, they all had, and her presence quickly became familiar to him.
Emily greeted the sudden appearance of a dad with a mixture of disdain and open hostility that lasted up until the first tins had arrived. For Joe had got himself signed on at the dockyard, unloading the few convoys that made it past the German U-boats. He was supposed to be on sick leave and there he was putting in shifts at the dockyard. Nancy was furious. But it was hard to be angry with the extra money—and that wasn’t all. After his first shift Joe came home with two tins of peaches and a tin of Carnation milk wrapped in a sack. How he’d done it without being caught she didn’t know and she didn’t ask. They ate the peaches and drank the Carnation and sent him back for more.
But that would stop now Joe had gone.
This morning she had scrubbed the front step and Emily had played in the bomb wreckage in the street outside as Joe had flung his things into his kitbag. It was all new, his kit; he had lost everything in the ship that had been torpedoed so the navy had given him new stuff. It didn’t look new—it looked like a hundred sailors had used it before him—but she made sure it was clean at least. Joe placed his new sailor’s hat on Emily’s head and laughed at her. He didn’t tell them the name of his new ship and Nancy had not wanted to know because his last ship had been torpedoed and it seemed like bad luck. Seeing him in his uniform for the first time, Emily went suddenly shy. She understood he was departing—that huge, heavy kitbag was hard to ignore—but what did it mean when you were three? By the end of the day she would have forgotten him.
‘Right then.’ Joe placed his kit on the floor. He had shaved, making a better job of it than usual, as though he wanted to make a good impression on his new ship. ‘Em, you mind you look after your mum,’ he said, tweaking her nose, and instead of looking outraged Emily regarded him wordlessly, silenced by the uniform and the kitbag and an awareness of something terrible but unspoken.
‘You got everything?’ Nancy said.
‘Think so. You’ll be alright, then, will you?’
‘’Course we will. We’re used to it, ain’t we, Em?’
Emily nodded uncertainly.
‘Don’t do anything daft,’ Nancy added.
‘’Course I won’t. Right then . . .’ And he had picked up his kitbag, slung it over his shoulder, and kissed them both goodbye.
Nancy had stood at the door with Emily and together they watched him till he had turned the corner.
Nancy scanned the sea of faces on the platform above. The man in the raincoat whom she had noticed earlier had gone from his spot in the entranceway. Perhaps he had crossed to the Westbound platform or gone back up to the street. Perhaps he had found the person he was searching for. She shivered, knowing with a sudden and certain conviction that the man was a policeman and for the first time she was glad Joe had left. She placed a hand softly against her stomach. She was pregnant again but she had not told Joe before he had gone.