Last Rights Page 6

  ‘Yes. All Mum’s money too.’

  ‘Such as it was,’ Pearl put in.

  ‘So neither of you has eaten?’

  ‘No.’

  I cut them some bread and spread some Marmite on it and, unlike most women I know, Pearl didn’t even try to protest. They must have been ravenous, both of them.

  ‘Don’t you have any family you could go to?’ I said to Pearl, once she’d finished her food. I knew she was an orphan, or so her mother-in-law had told me, but there had to be someone she knew. ‘Friends, maybe?’

  ‘No one I know would dare take us in,’ she replied. ‘Kevin’s family, well, they’re . . . they bully people, if you know what I mean. If Vi Dooley takes against you, you’re finished round our way. She never liked me. I got on with Kev’s brothers all right but that’s all finished now. They do what Vi tells them to do. They don’t have friends, me included, I suppose. The Dooleys only have each other and them as are scared of them.’

  I wondered why such an apparently decent woman had married into such a family. But maybe she had loved Kevin, for all his faults. Some women do like the brutal type after all. Or maybe when her first husband died she was left destitute and took the first offer she got from a man.

  ‘I’m an orphan, see,’ she went on. ‘Mum and Dad been dead for years.’

  ‘So, no brothers or sisters?’

  ‘I’ve sisters but not that I’ve seen for a long time,’ she said.

  I knew she wasn’t trying to make me take her in, she didn’t seem the type – and, anyway, I could hardly do that with the flat already busting at the seams. But at the same time I couldn’t put her and the girl out on such a chilly night with no real place to go.

  ‘You know, I do want to get all me kids back,’ she said. ‘They’re my kids, not Kevin’s mum’s, whatever she might like to think.’

  Her coat had been threadbare, probably, before the start of the war. Long and shapeless, it was covered with smudges of dirt, and what had once been a thick fur collar hung in wet and filthy strings down her back. Like her daughter, Pearl Dooley had bare legs, which were still blue with cold even though she was now inside. My sister Aggie, her of the lily-white skin, always dyes her legs with gravy browning when she hasn’t got any stockings. She even puts seams down the back with an eyebrow pencil, but if Pearl Dooley was in the habit of doing such things, she certainly hadn’t that day. Neither she nor Velma had anything in the way of luggage – only Pearl’s handbag.

  ‘Is there really no one you can go to, no one who will take the children in?’ I began. ‘Not an aunt or—’

  ‘Look, if you just want us to go!’

  ‘No, no.’ I tried to sound, as much as I could, reassuring. But she’d really flared at me and deep down I hadn’t taken kindly to it. I wasn’t averse to either her or her girl, in fact I was genuinely sorry for them, but that didn’t mean I wanted to take on two more hungry mouths.

  Pearl, seeming ashamed now of her outburst, put her head down and said, ‘I’m sorry, Mr Hancock, it’s just that . . . The only family I’ve got any notion of is my sister Ruby.’

  ‘Where does she live?’

  ‘Last I heard, which has to be more than five years back, she was lodging in Spitalfields.’

  ‘Do you know where?’

  She shrugged. ‘Not really. We’ve not stayed close. All I do know is she was staying, housekeeping like, for a bloke running a paper-and-string shop.’ She leaned forward so that only I could hear her whisper, ‘An old Jew.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Gawd knows whether she’s still there or not.’

  The sirens have what I think is maybe a unique effect on me. I don’t shake like some. I don’t run about or get hysterical. I just lose control of my speech. I stutter, stammer, drive myself and everyone around me mad. And during a raid it stays like that.

  Momentarily paralysed by my own lack of speech I just looked at Pearl and Velma with a stupid grin on my face. It was only when Nan came down from upstairs and Arthur called up from the yard that I started to move.

  ‘Mr H!’ I heard Arthur call. ‘Raid!’

  ‘Y-y-y—’

  ‘Frank, you’ve got to go up and get Mum!’ Nan said. ‘She’s stiff like a bloody tree. You’ll have to carry her.’

  ‘Mr H!’

  ‘Keep your hair on, Arthur, for Gawd’s sake!’ Nan yelled down the stairs. ‘Frank, will you go and get Mum?’

  ‘R-Right.’

  As I ran up the stairs I heard my sister say to Pearl, ‘You’d better come down our Anderson with us, Missus.’

  There isn’t much of the Duchess. She’s tall, like me, but she’s not much more than a bag of bones. She wasn’t even awake when I picked her up. But by the time we’d got outside, her slung over my back like a sack of coal, she’d come to enough to tell me to secure the horses as best I could. Poor buggers, I’d not got round to repairing their stable since the last raid. If I didn’t do something, and quick, they’d be out.

  ‘Francis, please, please stay,’ she said, as I laid her down on the little cot at the back of the Anderson.

  ‘Duchess, the h-horses,’ I said.

  ‘If the horses get out, they get out, poor beasts,’ she said. And then, her eyes wide with terror, she said, ‘Where is Doris?’

  ‘Gone home,’ Nan replied, and then, turning to Pearl Dooley and Velma, she said, ‘This lady and her girl are customers, Mum.’

  ‘Oh.’ The Duchess smiled. As I made my way back out of the shelter I saw her extend her hand to Velma, who shrank back into her mother’s arms. The Duchess is both dark and old-fashioned looking enough to be beyond the girl’s memory. Obviously like Nan, whom I’d caught her eyeing with suspicion earlier on, the Duchess was a foreigner and, to a kid like Velma, probably quite threatening. After all, who’s to know who is the enemy, eh? Some of them round here know so little: they couldn’t tell a German from a Russian, a Jew or even an Indian if their lives depended on it. As soon as everyone was in who should be, I closed the shelter door and went into the stable.

  My horses, both black, as undertaker’s horses should be, are called Rama and Sita. The Duchess named them, so she says, after the old Hindu gods. I bought them from a gyppo over in Beckton. They’re geldings, which means their coats are not top-notch, but they’ve nice quiet natures, except of course when they’ve got thousands of tons of high explosives falling about all around them. There was nothing to hear yet, beyond people getting down into their shelters, but the ‘boys’ were already agitated.

  ‘You should’ve made time to repair this stable,’ Ken said, as he walked in casual, as he always is with me, from the yard. ‘You’ll have to spend the whole raid in here with them now.’

  ‘Y-yes, I know.’

  My old oppo, Ken White. We joined up together in 1914, like a pair of bloody idiots. He lost his health and I lost my mind. But we survived – sort of. Horrified, like me, that the Empire is involved in another war, Ken’s taken to coming up from his billet at odd times for a chat. His wife died some years ago and he can’t work like he did, not with all the shrapnel inside his body, all the scars he got on the Somme. Quite often he’d be passing at night and sometimes he’d even come out running with me, still does. After all Ken, like me, knows what that’s about. Ken never goes down any shelter either.

  I rolled a fag for myself, stuck it in my face and then took hold of the boys’ bridles. Ken took himself off to the back of the stable where we store the hay and sat down, out of the horses’ line of sight. And then it began. The first explosion, deafening, rocked the ground beneath our feet. Rama tried to rear but somehow I managed to hold him. I could feel Sita’s body shivering beside me. Different, quieter personality. It’s always Rama causes damage to the stable.

  Being in there, trapped if you like with the horses, would have been unbearable without Ken. Even at the height of the raid, when all I could see through the cracks in the door was red and yellow flashes of flame, there was always Ken with his great selec
tion of the old songs, ‘Nellie Dean’ and his ‘Tipperary’, which still leaves a bitter taste even now, but it keeps me alert even if it’s only to curse at him. There’s something very dark about those old Great War songs, especially when they’re sung by a man with only half a face.

  In the morning I had to carry the Duchess back up to her room. If anything, she was even stiffer than she’d been the day before. In some areas it doesn’t matter what you do to try to make an Anderson watertight, it just carries on taking in water. Like a trench.

  Once again ‘Hancock and Sons’ had survived the latest attack from the air, so the Duchess and Nan said a quick little prayer to the Virgin Mary for that. The rest of us, including Pearl Dooley and Velma, started the business of picking up things that the blast had knocked on the floor, and when Aggie got back from Tate’s, the cleaning started. She’s a dab hand with the mop and brush, our Aggie, as was Pearl Dooley, who also mucked in. When Ag asked her to use our Hoover, though, Pearl looked at it like it was something off another planet. ‘I’ve never seen nothing like this before,’ she said, when Aggie demonstrated it for her. ‘It’s marvellous that, isn’t it? What a lovely place you do have here.’ Laughable really, given the state of our shop. But also a good indication that whatever bullying the Dooleys might do and whatever bunce that might bring them, it was probably the pub rather than the home that got the benefit.

  The Duchess, in her many hours cooped up with them, had told Pearl that she and Velma could stay with us for as long as they liked. She’s a very generous heart, my old mum. But I knew this wouldn’t go down well with either Nan or even the more generous Aggie, so when Doris eventually made it in, just before one, I took her to one side. We had no work booked for that day so after I’d telephoned Albert Cox and learned that Kevin Dooley’s body was to be held at his shop until the funeral, I had a word with her about taking Pearl and Velma down to Spitalfields to look for this sister, Ruby.

  ‘I don’t know of no shikseh staying with no paper-and-string man,’ Doris said, when I told her the information Pearl had given me. ‘Mind you, don’t mean it ain’t true. There’s quite a lot in that line of work.’

  She told me the name of one paper-and-string man she knew and said that talking to him might be a start.

  ‘Be better if you had a bit more Yiddish,’ Doris said, shaking her head at the thought of it. ‘There’s a lot down our way don’t do so well with English, Mr H, especially the old ones. They might not tell you anything even if they know.’

  I did think for a bit that I might take Doris with us. But then I had a better idea. ‘What the roads like, Doris?’ I said, as I ushered what were not an enthusiastic Pearl and Velma out of the door.

  ‘Bloody awful,’ she replied. ‘You’d do better walking today, Mr H. Mind you, go round Plaistow, round the back. I’d give Canning Town a miss, took it bad last night they did down there.’

  I knew that, I’d heard it myself, and from Albert Cox who was still, even after looking at the body, unconvinced that Kevin had been stabbed. In the night I’d even started to pray at one point for Hannah. To hell with the safety of Plaistow! And so, without another word to Doris, I set off with Pearl and Velma for Rathbone Street.

  The strain of enduring the previous night’s heavy raids was evident on Hannah’s face. But at least she was alive which was a big relief to me.

  Doris was right: Canning Town was a state. Bricks and rubble, some of it still smoking, everywhere. Firemen and wardens trying to move some of it out of the way, blokes standing staring up at houses that looked as if the slightest puff of wind would have them over. People’s belongings in the street . . . Tin baths, mattresses, mangles, fire irons, some old girl with a kiddy’s tricycle across her knees, gently stroking the handlebars with rough, swollen hands. Ordinary things take on importance when half your house has collapsed and you don’t know where you and your kids are going to sleep. For Hannah the most important things, she says, are her hats. She has about five, some with feathers, one made of some sort of shiny, stiff material, pleated into a kind of a fan shape. I like that one: it suits her. But this day she was tired so all we got was her plain black beret, which, nevertheless, looks very stylish.

  ‘I’ve seen that woman about in the market,’ Hannah whispered to me, as we passed in front of Canning Town railway station.

  ‘What? Pearl Dooley?’

  ‘Yes. I’m sure she knows me, knows what I do,’ Hannah said. ‘She something to do with that bloke Dooley you was telling me about the other day?’

  I’d not gone into much detail when I’d introduced the two women. Pearl wouldn’t go inside Hannah’s place for some reason and my girl, for her part, was just someone who was going to help us find Pearl’s sister.

  ‘She’s his widow,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, well, maybe that’s why she’s like that,’ Hannah said. ‘I mean, if I’ve seen her she must’ve seen me and if she knows somehow what I do . . . A lot of the “decent” women, especially them with husbands, hate us. See the way she’s looking at me!’

  Pearl Dooley did, it was true, give Hannah the odd ‘old-fashioned’ look. ‘Have you asked her whether her old man went out with tarts?’ Hannah whispered.

  ‘No, of course not!’ I whispered back. ‘I’ve told her you’re a friend. I said we need someone as speaks Yiddish so that’s what we’ve got. A friend who speaks Yiddish.’

  ‘Woman who lives down Rathbone on her own in one room. Yeah. Funny bleedin’ friends you’ve got, Francis Hancock!’ Hannah said.

  It made me smile. She wasn’t wrong there. We carried on walking.

  My dad, who’d known London well, always used to say that Spitalfields was a magical place. As a nipper I could never see it. Full of sweat shops, kids with dark eyes like my own, except bigger, hungrier and more suspicious. It always seemed dirtier and more closed in on itself than our manor. But Dad had a different take, which I suppose was helped by the fact that he could speak a bit of Yiddish. Where he learned it, I don’t know, but he was good with languages. I remember him speaking to the Duchess in Hindi when I was a kid. Having said that, it wasn’t only the language as helped him. In our profession people talk to you about big things, about life and death and what those words might really mean.

  Dad’s sister Eva worked up on Fashion Street years ago and sometimes he’d go over there to meet her. Somehow one day he got talking to a rabbi who then became a friend. Like Dad, he’s dead now. But when Dad was alive he used to tell me about this old bloke, stories that thrilled and made you shiver at the same time too. ‘You know the old Jews have ways of breathing life into stones,’ Dad would say. ‘Magic. They use it to protect their people. Christ knows, they need something, poor sods. There’s a story they tell about an old magical rabbi, somewhere like Warsaw I think it was, walked clean through the walls of his synagogue. Poles or whoever they were were out to kill him. But he just walked through this wall. Never seen again. It’s said, the Jews say, that he isn’t neither alive nor dead but something in between.’

  When Dad told me this, I was a nipper and I didn’t understand what he meant. But maybe now I do. It was, after all, a sort of magic that meant I survived the Great War. I can’t account for it any other way. Not that survival is quite the right word for what I’ve got now. Like that old rabbi out in Poland I’m something in between the state of living and that of death. I know that place the old Jew told my dad about because that’s where I spend most of my time. Just occasionally, with Hannah usually, I come alive.

  ‘So, what’s your sister’s name, then, love?’ Hannah was asking Pearl, when I eventually came back to the world around St Anne’s Church in Limehouse.

  ‘Ruby,’ Pearl said.

  ‘Ruby what?’

  ‘Er . . .’ She turned her head to look down what I think is one of the most strangely named streets in the whole East End, Three Colt Street, down beside St Anne’s graveyard.

  ‘What?’ Hannah was frowning. ‘Don’t you know your own name or—’r />
  ‘She could be married now,’ Pearl said, as she turned back to Hannah. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Yes, but if she isn’t married,’ Hannah continued, ‘she’ll have your old name, won’t she? So what was that?’

  Pearl turned her face away again and said, ‘Reynolds,’ as if she were ashamed of it in some way.

  Hannah, who had noticed this too, gave me a look before she said, ‘Right-o. As you like.’

  ‘I do,’ Pearl said, and we all lapsed into silence.

  After Limehouse we had to push up north into Stepney on account of a group of coppers blocking the road. There was an unexploded bomb somewhere down in Ratcliff and they were waiting for a team of sappers to arrive. A lot of these bombs the Jerries drop are faulty. When it first started happening, right from the start of the bombing, people would run for their lives. But now they just saunter off, moaning. Somehow, sometimes, the inconvenience of it all has got greater than their fear.

  We reached Brick Lane at just before six. It was already getting foggy and dark and all my old dislike of the place came flooding back into my mind. In the blackout I knew those hungry, suspicious eyes would take on an even more sinister look. Hannah wasn’t happy about speaking to Doris’s paper-and-string man, not for any other reason, or so she said, than she’d never heard of him. So we all followed her into a house that looked as though it was about to collapse into the ground. Not because it had been bombed, it was just so old and worn and dirty.

  Chapter Six

  Hannah didn’t tell me who the old couple were. I knew her parents were long dead and her only brother died in the first lot. Maybe this old man with his black skull-cap and long grey sidelocks was an uncle. Maybe the woman with eyes like a corpse, much of her face hidden behind a headscarf, was his wife. But Hannah never said. We went in, she talked – for what seemed like hours – they answered, in short, hard Yiddish sentences, and then we left. I got the feeling afterwards that there was little or no love lost between these people and my girl.