Blitz (8 page)

It wasn’t the fall, of course it wasn’t. It was that wretched Bernie who had upset her, and she brooded over him as she spread the margarine and then fish paste to make the piles of sandwiches that would vanish in no time once the night raids
started in good earnest, as they very soon would. You could almost tell the time by those wretched planes. But it wasn’t the raids that had upset her, nor was it the fall. It was definitely Bernie; and the more she thought about him the more ferociously hard and fast she worked.

He was hateful, totally hateful, she told herself. To have come slinking around Jessie as he had, and to have been here in London for two years without her knowing it – and then a different sort of anger filled her. How could Jessie have been so devious with her? To have hidden the fact so well had been an act of downright betrayal, she thought hotly, a dreadful thing to have done to her –

But she couldn’t sustain her anger for long, not against Jessie. As she had said herself so piteously, what was a mother to do? The fact that Bernie had behaved disgracefully didn’t alter the fact that he was her son, and a much beloved one at that. It was inevitable that Jessie would try to protect him.

As long as he didn’t go near Chloe again, Poppy thought and then stopped spreading fish paste to stare sightlessly ahead. Chloe was hardly her problem any more. Since her marriage and that dreadful, indeed positively disgraceful and all too public divorce, she had lived in her own flat, a very handsome if rather small place, in Bryanston Square. She was her own woman now, for good or ill. How could it be otherwise? She was thirty-two, well beyond her stepmother’s control. But for all that Poppy felt a responsibility for her. When she had married Chloe’s father, in those dark and painful days during the last war, she had taken on Chloe too, like it or not. She had been a dreadfully spoiled child and remained so, whatever Poppy had tried to do for her, and though her affair with Bernie and the miserable outcome of it had brought her a little closer to her stepmother, still she had gone her own headstrong way; and Poppy sighed and bent her head again to her sandwiches.

Maybe it wouldn’t all start up again, she told herself then, trying to be optimistic. Chloe’s no longer the silly girl she had been a dozen or so years ago. What with her job at the War Office (what was it? wondered Poppy – something vaguely secretarial was all she knew, and that it seemed to give her an amazing amount of free time) and her special friends there, she had become a decidedly snobbish young woman. She went out and about only with senior officers, and rarely deigned to go
below the rank of major, though she would sometimes be seen with a captain. Lieutenants were certainly of no interest unless they happened also to be rich in their own right, or titled (and there had been one or two of those, Poppy remembered) so perhaps she would scorn a civilian like Bernie, even if he did try to make contact. Poppy cheered up then even more as another thought bubbled up; because he hadn’t attempted to do so yet and he’d been back from America for two years, maybe that boded well?

The sirens began their closer clamour then, and she lifted her head and waited fearfully and then almost at once the other noise began; the roar of guns from the ack-ack batteries that had been set up well to the north, in Hackney’s Victoria Park, and which were loud even at this distance. She sometimes doubted that they did any good; she had never heard of a plane being brought down by one of them around here, but it was like the searchlight that sprang up as the planes came over. They made people on the ground feel that at least someone somewhere was trying to fight back. The worst thing about the raids was the feeling of being so utterly helpless, crouching in shelters like terrified rabbits in burrows, while the Germans overhead sat there like scornful winged demons, raining down death and horror.

Heavens, she thought, I must be low to be thinking such morbid thoughts, and pulled back her shoulders and took a few deep breaths to restore her to her usual state of common sense. The aspirin had started to have an effect so that her knee just throbbed heavily now, but her mood had lifted a little; and it was just as well it had. There were more crumps as bombs fell somewhere fairly near and then she heard the shriek of the bells as the fire engines came thudding through the streets overhead.

They’ll start coming in soon, she thought, the walking casualties and the people caught outside the shelters and the workers and drivers – and she sighed, and checked that both the urns were full and bubbling and that she had the milk ready in the cups. Preparation, she always told her staff, was the key to fast service, and she had to be sure not to forget it herself, now she was working on her own. And for one brief moment she even regretted the absence of the egregious Mrs Crighton.

But only for a moment, because the door was pushed open as the first people arrived – a fireman leading one of his mates
who had a blackened face and whose eyes were half closed above swollen cheeks.

‘Got a blast from a gas flare,’ explained the fireman after he’d settled the injured man at a table. ‘Can you take care of ’im for us till the ambulance can take ’im? There’s bin a direct hit over at Fieldgate Street, by Vine Court. They’re digging ’em out now. The Warden’s post ’as gone an’ all – ’

She lifted her head quickly. ‘The Post? What about old Arthur?’

The fireman shook his head and began to make his way back to the door. ‘Sorry, ducks, but he was one of the dead ones. Three there was. Was he a friend of yours?’

‘Yes,’ Poppy said dully. ‘A friend of mine –’ And she looked over her shoulder at the tin hat Arthur had given her and which was hanging on the hook behind the side door and thought – please, don’t let him be dead because he didn’t have his tin hat –

‘Rotten luck it was,’ the fireman said. ‘Crushed right across his chest, he was. Never stood a chance, lying there looking just as he usually did, only with this bleedin’ great rafter across him.’

‘Not – not his head then?’

The fireman looked at her sharply. ‘No, love. Does it matter?’

‘He gave me his tin hat to get me back here safely – I was caught outside in the alert at five o’clock – ’

The fireman shook his head and opened the door. ‘Never give it a thought, ducks. He was wearing one.’ And went. And Poppy took a deep shaking breath and carried a cup of very hot sweet tea over to the man sitting so quietly slumped at the table.

He was shocked, but as far as she could see the damage to his face wasn’t too bad and as she went and collected cold wet cloths to put across his forehead and to pat on his flaming cheeks, she was grateful again for the nursing experience she had been given during the last war as part of her
FANY
’s training. First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, she thought as she worked on the injured man, and got a sudden vision of herself in the uniform, and then banished it. She was just a canteen supervisor in this war, one with a bit of first-aid training, admittedly, but only a caterer and cleaner-upper. She had enough on her plate without getting notions about getting back into uniform again. And she patted the grateful fireman on the shoulder and left
him to sip his tea as again the doors opened and another group of people came in.

From then on it was bedlam. She poured tea and refilled urns and made more and more sandwiches and was grateful when some of the men collected the used cups and saucers and plates for her and brought them back to be washed up. Being single-handed on a night like this was hell; but it did at least have the virtue of keeping her mind off other, more personal things.

Or did until around eleven, when one of the ambulance drivers, his face streaked with dirt and his uniform blood spattered, came and asked for ‘some tea and a bit of grub, ducky. I never got no dinner today on account I overslept after last night being such a bugger, beggin’ your pardon for the language, and I ain’t et nothing since ten o’clock this morning.’

‘Oh, dear,’ Poppy said and her face crumpled. ‘There was some mince and potatoes but that all went ages ago. I’ve only these few sandwiches left – ’

The man picked up one of the thin sandwiches mournfully and lifted a bread slice to inspect the filling.

‘Fish paste,’ he said lugubriously. ‘Nothin’ to eat since ten o’clock and all I get now is fish paste. Don’t it break yer ’eart? What I’d like to ’ave, if I could ’ave what I liked, would be a nice fried egg samwidge. My old Mum, she used to give ’em when I was tired and couldn’t eat a proper big dinner. “Eggs, Sid,” she used to say to me. “Eggs is nature’s treasury of food, eggs is. As full of meat as anythin’ could be an’ as good as steak.” An’ she’d fry me an egg in a nice bit o’ butter and put on a bit o’ pepper, you know, for a relish, and slap it between two big slices of new bread and I tell you, that was a meal that was.’ And he sighed. ‘Never mind, ducks. No eggs around these days for the askin’ is there? Not down ’ere in the East End anyway. All gone up West, I dare say, to the clubs and the fancy caffs where they can get big money for ’em. I’ll ’ave this and be glad to get it. Never say no if there ain’t somethin’ else to say yes to, my Mum used to say – ’

‘Your Mum talked too much, if you ask me,’ the next man in the queue growled. ‘I’ll ’ave one of your sandwiches missus, and be glad to get it. An’ a cuppa char – ta, ever so – ’

Eggs, she thought as she set to work to make another pile of fish paste sandwiches, spreading the thin pink mess as carefully as she could at high speed. Egg sandwiches – what a delight it
would be to give them to these exhausted hungry people when they came in. She could get a big griddle from home and have it ready on the stove; it wouldn’t take that long to fry eggs and put them into prepared bread and butter – well, margarine – and so give people the extra nourishment and pleasure they needed, doing the sort of dreadful jobs they had to do. And the figure of Bernie standing there in Jessie’s preparation kitchens and murmuring about eggs and butter and sugar rose in her mind and with it a sense of desolation. Was there to be no end to the bad effects that man could have on her, no end to his intrusiveness? Now he was tempting her to start to shop on the black market, and that was dreadful.

‘What’s so dreadful?’ A corner of her mind became a whisper so intense it was as though she could actually feel a hot breath on her cheek. ‘What’s so dreadful? You wouldn’t be taking it for yourself, would you? That
would
be dreadful, like the hateful Mrs Crighton pretending to be so virtuous while steadily stealing sugar from the stores. This would be for the people here and no one else. To make them a sustaining sandwich – that wouldn’t be such a crime, would it? Better the stuff comes here to you and the people who deserve it than goes off to the West End and the fancy clubs and caffs to fill rich men’s stomachs, rich men who were well out of reach of the bombing – ’

Her mind was still whirling with it all when the midnight shift turned up as they always did, in a tight cluster, having dodged their way through the raids to get there. They were close neighbours who lived at the other end of Mulberry Street, only a couple of hundred yards from the canteen, but it still took courage to venture out of their home shelter to get here, protected though this cellar was, and especially brave of Agnes Clewitt who was so typical a little spinster that Poppy sometimes thought she’d been invented rather than born like other people. But here they were and Joyce Jasper, the largest and noisiest of them, waved to her vigorously as they came in pulling off their coats and hats, for they always dressed as though they were to brave a blizzard even on the hottest of summer evenings.

‘I ’eard about that Madam Crighton leavin’ you in the lurch,’ she bawled cheerfully as she pulled on a large flowered apron. ‘Maria, she popped in an’ told me on ’er way ’ome. Old cow! I ’ope she gets a direct ’it, that I do. Not that she’s likely to get that, tucked up in bloody Bayswater like she is.’

Poppy, who also was safe from bombs tucked away in her old home in Holland Park which had suffered not a single raid, was uneasy at that.

‘That’s a bit much, Joyce,’ she said, trying not to sound too reproving. After all they were volunteers, and she needed them badly. She couldn’t be schoolmarmish with them. Too risky. ‘She’s not a nice woman, I know, but all the same – ’

‘That one, a direct ’it?’ Rose, a plump little woman who bustled about the place like a demented bee, gave a little snort. ‘Some fine ’opes! She’d frighten any bleedin’ bomb into goin’ straight back up where it come from.’

At which they all laughed and got to work, clearing tables and washing up, stacking up the clean plates, and peeling potatoes ready to make another pot of mince. It was dull fare, but they made it as savoury as they could, with some of the herbs and spices Poppy had brought from her jealously hoarded home stores, and the men and women who used the canteen seemed to enjoy it.

‘I’ll try to get some more meat tomorrow,’ Poppy promised as Rose tipped the last few pounds of pallid minced beef into the pot with some onions and carrots and sent savoury smells drifting through the air. ‘My aunt maybe has some – ’

‘See what else she’s got while you’re at it,’ Joyce called jovially from the washing-up sink. ‘Bit o’ butter and some sugar instead of this lousy saccharin stuff. Curls your teeth, that does –’ And Poppy managed a mechanical smile and escaped then into the roaring, burning, shrieking night outside.

This was the worst part of the journey home, always was. She had to get herself to Aldgate East Station to pick up the night bus that was going west. There were no more trains, of course; they stopped around ten thirty by which time the tube stations were jammed with sleeping shelterers. The authorities had tried to keep them out but had had to give up the unequal struggle, because several hundred determined Londoners clutching rugs and bottles of water and packets of sandwiches and storming each and every station were not easy to stop; and Poppy applauded them. There had been far too little shelter accommodation provided when all this started, and when shelters were destroyed what were people supposed to do? The Tube was a perfect answer to the people, if not to the authorities.