Dead to Me Page 23

  ‘That’s not true!’ Verity exclaimed. ‘No one is afraid of me.’

  ‘No? Well, that might have been true in the past, but you’ve got a backbone of steel now, and it would be a brave person who would go against you,’ he said with a shrug. ‘I noticed it as soon as I came back here. I guess having to deal with moving from Hampstead and the way your mother was had a lot to do with it. Your Aunt Hazel was a difficult woman too, God only knows how you put up with her. Look at what you’ve done here: got the bathroom put in, decorated the rooms, new carpet on the stairs and stuff. You’re still only a kid, but you did all that on your own.’

  His admiring tone made her anger fade. She hadn’t expected that he would remember what the house had been like when Aunt Hazel lived alone, much less notice that Verity had improved it. She hadn’t expected him to appreciate the difficulties with her mother and aunt, either.

  He picked her plate of dinner off the stove and put it down on the table for her. ‘Eat up, you’ve had a long day,’ he said.

  He hadn’t given her a real explanation about why Amy left, but right now she was very hungry and had expected to have nothing more than cheese on toast for supper, so it was really good to be given a hot meal. The sausages, fried onion and mashed potato smelled wonderful and she began to eat.

  ‘Was Amy really scared of me?’ she asked after a little while.

  ‘Not scared like she thought you’d hit her or anything like that, but aware she seemed stupid next to you with all your reading and knowledge of world affairs. I told her you never thought of her like that, but I think she’d already made up her mind she’d be happier going home to her mum, and she didn’t tell you in case you were cross with her.’

  ‘Why would I be?’ Verity felt a bit bewildered. ‘I can understand her wanting to be in her own home. I never really understood why she came up to London anyway.’

  Archie shrugged. ‘She was like most young girls, she wanted adventure and independence, but she soon found out it isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Now let’s see if we can get along better, love. There’s hard times coming soon.’

  Upstairs in bed later, thinking on what Archie had said, much to her surprise Verity felt a warm glow. It was good to think he was admiring of her, and she especially liked him saying she had a backbone of steel. He’d never seemed to like anything about her when she was a child. She wondered what Miller would make of it all. He’d once said she sometimes reminded him of a puppy who had been ill-treated, shying away from people, always wary and on her guard, but at the same time so much wanting to be loved.

  She wished she did know Amy’s address in Southend so she could write and say what a good friend she’d been and how, although she was going to miss her, she was glad she was home where she’d be happier. She didn’t like to think of anyone imagining they were inferior to her.

  Before she fell asleep she reflected that in a day or two she’d have to make Archie see that he’d got to contribute towards the household expenses. It was all very well him getting a bit of black market food now and then, but she needed a regular sum from him.

  Worries about Amy and Archie no longer ranked as important when night-time bombing of London began. Night after night it continued, throughout September, people starting to call it the Blitz, as the newspapers had used the world ‘blitzkrieg’ to describe saturation bombing.

  At first it was utterly terrifying, like all hell had been let loose above. The deafening bangs, the fires that flared up wherever shrapnel fell, the way the very earth shook made people want to run from it, yet at the same time their legs often became leaden with fear, so they couldn’t move.

  Verity had been told by several people that they had been caught outside a bomb shelter when an air raid began and all they did was crouch down, their hands over their heads, as if that would save them.

  Although they had the Morrison shelter at home, and Verity and Amy had practised getting in there many times, now Amy was gone Verity wouldn’t use it. She left it to Archie and took herself off to the brick-built public shelter on Lee High Road when the siren went off. She thought it was preferable to be with her neighbours and have a hand to hold, or some chatter to distract her, rather than be squashed into the cage with a man she still didn’t entirely trust.

  People said you could get used to anything, and that was certainly true of the bombings. As the weeks passed, everyone became far less fearful. They learned to identify by the sounds outside how close a bomb was, and some became so good at it they could almost pinpoint the road it had hit. They learned to take little comforts with them: a deckchair, blankets, food and a hot drink in a Thermos. Some women were organized enough to have a primus stove with them. Verity often played cards with the bigger children because, if left to their own devices, they tended to squabble or pester their mothers.

  It wasn’t until the night Hither Green Station was hit that they fully experienced the real perils of bombing. The noise was deafening – not just the bomb but the ack-ack guns too. The shelter shook, and brick dust and plaster rained down on them all.

  Cowering in the shelter, they believed the bomb had landed right outside in Lee High Road, and even feared that their shelter was covered in rubble and they’d been buried alive. It was such a relief, when the all-clear finally came and the ARP warden opened the door, to see daylight – even if the air was full of smoke and dust, like thick grey talcum powder all over everything.

  Someone came along then and told them the station had been hit and that a whole row of terraced houses in Fernbrook Road next to it had been flattened. While everyone in the shelter was very glad the bomb had missed them, many of them had a friend or relative in Fernbrook Road, and went straight there to see what they could do.

  As it happened, Verity and Beryl were sent there the very next morning to mend the telephone wires, and the destruction they saw was truly terrible.

  Just a few parts of the interior walls remained, with bits of broken furniture, mirrors and pictures strewn around. Rugs and clothes were in tatters, strewn across the still-smoking rubble, waving in the breeze like some kind of weird confetti.

  Some of the people who had lived in the bombed houses were just standing there motionless, white-faced and red-eyed, so stunned to see their homes flattened and their belongings buried in the rubble that some couldn’t even respond to questions. Four adults and two children had been killed. Two of the adults had been in a shelter but had run back to their homes to get something. The other little family had been in their own Anderson shelter in their garden, but it hadn’t survived the direct hit.

  Verity and Beryl had only been at the site for half an hour mending the telephone wires when the Civil Defence men dug the bodies out. The two children were so small they put them on one stretcher, and both men carrying it had tears washing a clear path through the brick dust and plaster on their cheeks.

  In the days that followed, it soon became clear that it was London’s docks and the railways that the bombers were keenest to target. They could follow the gleam of the River Thames in moonlight; Verity imagined that, from above, it was almost as good as a floodlit runway for the pilots. She supposed railway tracks gleamed almost as brightly. But that certainly didn’t mean people could feel safe if they weren’t living by the docks or a railway.

  The bombers dropped their loads indiscriminately.

  So no one was safe.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Archie was feeling quite content in Weardale Road, especially now he’d got rid of that silly goose Amy. She was another one who asked too many questions. Verity didn’t, in fact she didn’t talk that much at all. She worked long hours, and most nights she went to the shelter, which he liked because it meant he could go to a card game, or have a few drinks without her even knowing he’d left the house.

  But he needed to find some real money so he could move on. Despite what he’d told Verity, he was still wanted by the police, but he felt smug that they were just too tied up with war-related
crime to concern themselves with looking for him. If he could get enough money, he could go to Ireland until the war ended, then he would go to South Africa, for good.

  He had a plan for that. It had come to him just a couple of days earlier as he was walking up through Blackheath. He had intended to go down through Greenwich Park to the Isle of Dogs to see an old pal who always knew where the good card games were.

  Quite by chance he glanced into a jewellery shop window, and to his surprise saw the big silver pheasant that had been given to him by his parents. It was possible it was merely an identical one. But his father had always claimed it was unique and pointed out his father’s initials GLW – Gerald Lawrence Wood – right by the hallmark underneath.

  Archie had assumed that all the silver and other valuables were seized by the bailiffs when the house was taken. But it seemed Cynthia must have been cannier than he thought, if she’d kept a few things back.

  He went into the shop, and told the little Jewish shopkeeper that he’d had a silver pheasant just like this one stolen from his house five years earlier.

  ‘Of course, I’m not saying that it is my pheasant,’ he said, not wishing to alarm the old man. ‘Mine had my grandfather’s initials GLW engraved on it.’

  The old man opened the catch on his shop window and took the pheasant out. ‘It’s a beautiful piece, but I shouldn’t have bought it, people don’t have the money now for such frivolities.’ He turned it upside down and gasped. ‘My goodness me, it has got those initials on it. I shall have to contact the police, I have never knowingly bought stolen goods.’

  ‘I certainly didn’t wish to bring any trouble to your door,’ Archie said. ‘I was just surprised to see it. Can you remember who you bought it from?’

  ‘I do indeed,’ said the old man. ‘It was a very pleasant young lady, she said she and her mother were having money problems. I bought many things from her, all of them sold a long time ago now, except the pheasant. I can’t believe she could be a thief.’

  ‘She might not have been, maybe she had been asked to sell it for someone else. Does she live around here?’

  ‘I did assume so. It’s usually local people who bring me things to sell.’ The old man paused, as if suddenly remembering something more. ‘Oh dear, I think it is possible I may have been duped a second time by that young lady! You see, a couple I know well came in to see me a couple of months ago and mentioned in passing that someone had broken into their house in The Glebe while they were away. A silver cream jug was taken, along with some cash. And that young lady with the pheasant sold me a cream jug too.’

  Archie’s heart soared. An idea was forming in his head which could be the answer to all his problems. ‘What did she look like?’ he asked.

  ‘A pretty, blonde girl. But when she brought me the pheasant she was wearing a gymslip, so she could only have been about thirteen. I cannot imagine such a sweet-faced girl breaking into a house. And where did you say your house was?’

  ‘Over in Highgate,’ Archie lied. ‘Some of the slum children around Holloway are adept at burglary from the age of nine or ten. She was a smart girl to bring it over here to sell.’

  ‘Oh, she was no slum child,’ the old man said. ‘She was very well spoken and polite. But what shall we do about this? I bought the pheasant in good faith. Shall we call the police to decide what is to be done?’

  ‘I don’t think that’s necessary,’ Archie said. ‘You might find yourself being charged with receiving, and I wouldn’t want that on my conscience. Suppose you either give me back my pheasant or twenty pounds for my loss, and we call it quits.’

  He saw the old man’s face tighten and his eyes narrow, and fully expected him to say that he was going to call the police. But instead he sighed. ‘I’ll give you the money,’ he said. ‘I have a good reputation in Blackheath, and I wouldn’t want anything to spoil that.’

  Archie left the shop with a spring in his step. He had something to hold over Verity now, and twenty quid. A good day’s work, all in all.

  Verity’s plan to go to Scotland had to be postponed once everyone became aware that the Blitz wasn’t going to stop within days. The bombers came every night that the skies were clear enough for the pilots to see. That meant there would be many telephone wires needing mending or replacing the next day, and Miss Haig wasn’t giving anyone time off for anything as frivolous as a holiday.

  Many people couldn’t bear the noise or the danger and left their London homes to go and live in the countryside. Other less fortunate folk merely packed their children and a few provisions into a pram or cart and walked out of London to spend the nights in fields or woods. Even being cold or wet was preferable to waiting for a bomb to drop.

  Verity could understand that degree of fear. She realized from talking to people that everyone had their own mechanism for dealing with it. Some people stayed in their houses, claiming if a bomb had their name on it nothing would save them. Others went into open spaces or parks, convinced they’d be safer there. Verity’s way was to run to cower in the shelter, surrounded by people she would never have chosen to spend a night with, and she blocked out the terrifying bangs and thuds by pretending she was in Babbacombe, going down to the beach through the woods.

  If she concentrated hard enough, she could recall the smell of damp soil, taste salt on her lips, and feel the wind in her hair. In such moments Ruby was always there grinning at her, slender in her blue shorts and white blouse, her hair a storm of red-gold curls. She would imagine them both racing down the last hundred or so yards to see the sea, and once Verity had that view before her of turquoise water, black rocks and small boats bobbing on their moorings, she could hold it there in her mind regardless of what was going on around her in the shelter. She didn’t smell the baby with the dirty nappy, or hear the man in the corner coughing his lungs up. She didn’t even mind that the old lady sitting next to her had fallen asleep on her shoulder.

  Sometimes the vision was strong enough for her to believe that Ruby would eventually contact her and that Archie would get bored and move on somewhere else.

  It was only in the early morning, when the all-clear sounded, that her spirits flagged and made her face the truth that Ruby was never coming back, and Archie was never going to leave.

  One Sunday morning in early October the all-clear siren went off at five, and Verity staggered out of the shelter with stiff legs and an aching back. The weather was surprisingly mild for October and although it was still dark, it felt warm. But drifting smoke coming from the east suggested it was the City of London which had got a pasting last night. The smell was one Verity had grown used to after air raids. A combination of smoke, brick dust, plaster, gas, often mixed with sewage when a bomb had damaged the pipes, it was acrid and caught the back of her throat.

  The smell was strong enough that she half expected somewhere close by had been bombed. But as far as she could see in the gloom, the houses and shops in Lee High Road were undamaged, and there was no rubble in the road, or air-raid wardens and Civil Defence men gathering to rescue people. She breathed a sigh of relief, as she did every time she came out of the shelter to find she still had a home. As it was Sunday she could get a few hours of proper sleep, before tackling Archie.

  People called out goodbye and, ‘Enjoy your Sunday!’ to her as she crossed the road to go home. She hadn’t spoken to any of these people before the air raids began – most of them she’d never even seen before. She wasn’t much of a talker, at least not when she could hear bombs dropping close enough to make the shelter quiver, but she listened to her neighbours and they’d become almost like family members. If one of their number missed a night in the shelter, they discussed where he or she might be. When Vera Friar, a rather bossy woman, was reported to have been hit by a bus on a very wet day in August and taken to Lewisham Hospital, a small party from the shelter, Verity included, went to see her.

  Archie scoffed at community spirit. He said it was nosiness, not concern, and he bet these same people who
she felt were her friends had been nasty about her mother killing herself. Verity thought he was probably right about that, but people were pulling together now when it was needed, and that was what counted.

  Verity found Archie was still fast asleep in the Morrison shelter, lying on his back, snoring, his mouth gaping open, still fully dressed. He usually went back to his bed upstairs when the all-clear sounded, but by the stink of whisky coming from him she knew he’d got drunk last night and fallen into such a deep sleep that he didn’t hear it.

  That made her angry. Whisky was difficult to get hold of, even for people with money, and if he could afford to buy it, then he could pay for his keep. She filled the kettle, making as much noise as possible, even kicking the shelter as she walked past it to get the milk from the pantry. She had put the milk bottle in a bowl of cold water with muslin draped over it to keep it cool, yet despite her efforts it had gone off. That made her angry too, because it meant she’d have to use tinned milk and she hated the taste of it in tea.

  There had been half a bottle of Camp coffee in the cupboard. Beryl had snobbishly called it ‘poor man’s coffee’, because it was a coffee essence made from chicory, but Verity quite liked it, especially made with tinned milk. But when she found that was gone too, her anger spilled over.

  ‘Wake up, you useless good-for-nothing,’ she snarled, banging on the shelter. ‘The milk’s gone off and you’ve used all the Camp. When are you going to do something for the common good?’

  He woke up with a start and as he sat up, banged his head on the table top.

  ‘What’s all the commotion about?’ he asked, rubbing his head. ‘Why aren’t you in bed?’

  ‘Because, you great lump, I was at the shelter all night, because bombs were dropping. I get home here to find the place stinking of whisky. And I can’t have tea, because the milk’s gone off, and I can’t have Camp, either, because you’ve used it all.’