All Fall Down Read online

  ‘Fair enough.’

  ‘And don’t leave that jacket slung on that chair.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ he repeated nastily. It made no difference that he would find her clothes on the floor of the bedroom, her pots of make-up and lipsticks open on the dressing-table. He’d stopped arguing, but he couldn’t disguise his tone of voice.

  ‘Anyhow, I can’t see how you expect Jimmie to behave himself, the way you carry on. You never tell anyone what you’re up to, do you?’

  ‘Must run in the family, then.’

  ‘Well, do you?’

  ‘That’s ’cos I never get up to anything. I work too bleeding hard, keeping you in nylon stockings. I’m always in the bleeding shop.’

  ‘Or at the Duke.’

  ‘Can’t a man have a drink?’ He was weary, sick of it; the well-worn track of their bickering. They would soon come full circle, he knew. So he went for the whisky bottle in the sideboard, which was also part of the routine.

  ‘One drink or ten?’

  ‘As many as I like.’

  ‘And treat the whole pub while you’re at it.’

  He shrugged, knocked back the drink and felt it burn his throat.

  ‘I know your game. Buy a round, tell a few jokes, good old Tommy O’Hagan. Then come staggering home, fit for nothing.’

  ‘I’m not staggering, am I? Look, can you see me stagger?’ He went up close to her chair, while she made a show of shrinking back in disgust.

  ‘No wonder I don’t like to be here.’ She pushed him away.

  ‘That’s right, you go off and enjoy yourself.’ He walked away, keeping his back to her. ‘Get your glad rags on, why don’t you? You’ve still got time if you’re quick.’

  But Dorothy let the challenge drop. She sat drooped forward, lethargic and bitter. Minus her make-up and smart clothes, and without the fire of resentment fully stoked, she looked all of her forty-five years. Her eyes seemed to be growing smaller, there were lines underneath them and a downturn to her once full and attractive mouth. Her figure too was slackening, though her legs were still good. Sometimes Tommy would find her in front of the bathroom mirror, examining herself from every angle, obviously angry at what she saw. He glanced over his shoulder and felt an unexpected pang of sympathy, which he warded off by going for his jacket.

  ‘Where are you off to now?’ Involuntarily she grasped the arms of her chair.

  ‘To fetch Jim, why?’ A thought struck him. Was she scared now that it was dark? Planes could come more easily under the cover of darkness and drop their terrible cargo; it stood to reason.

  ‘Yes, of course, to fetch Jimmie!’ She made it plain that she didn’t believe a word.

  ‘Look, I am, right? I want him here to talk through what to do in one of these air raids one more time. Knowing him, he won’t bother with his gas mask or nothing. He needs to get his head screwed on, so we don’t have to worry.’

  ‘That’s right, worry about him, why don’t you?’ She threw the jibe at him, which might have been genuine jealousy once; her feeling left out because of the attention he gave to his kid brother. But now this was just another well-worn groove. Since this was a bad day, however, a day that would transform all their lives, he made an effort.

  He went across again and crouched beside her. ‘I worry about you as well, you know that. I don’t want nothing to happen to you neither.’

  She looked at him with disbelieving eyes. ‘Sure?’

  ‘Sure I’m sure.’

  ‘Sometimes I think you want me dead and out of the way.’

  ‘Well, I don’t.’ He leaned forward and kissed her on the cheek. ‘All right?’

  ‘Sometimes I think to myself I wouldn’t mind if I was dead.’ Her eyes filled up, her voice choked.

  ‘Yes you would, Dot. You’ve got a lot going for you if you did but know it. Nice place to live, no money worries, freedom to come and go.’ That’s what she’d said she wanted when she married him. ‘We’ve got a lot going for us.’

  She reached out and pulled his head towards her, kissing him greedily.

  After a bit, he settled her back in the chair, stroking her cheek. ‘All right?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Now I gotta go and find that bleeding kid.’ He stood up.

  She tugged at his hand, but she knew when not to push her luck. Or maybe she didn’t want him enough to protest any more. Instead she let his hand drop and went for the packet of cigarettes.

  Tommy left quietly. Jimmie might be round at the Davidsons’ place, chatting with Meggie, or he could be holed up somewhere less salubrious with his gang of mates, hanging round outside the skittle alley on Union Street, or in a dodgy pub. One thing he was sure of; by the time he found him and hauled him back home, Dorothy would have dragged herself off to bed and be fast asleep.

  The day after war broke out, Sadie let Annie and the rest of the family know that they had decided to send the boys out of London. This coincided with many other families in the Court making the same decision, and by the day after, the Tuesday, thirteen local children were prepared, suitcases packed, gas masks at the ready, to join Operation Pied Piper.

  ‘You know you’re doing the right thing,’ Hettie assured Sadie. They’d arranged a send-off from the Duke, where Annie would say goodbye to her grandchildren.

  ‘If they were just that bit older . . .’ Still Sadie agonized. ‘If only I knew they could take care of themselves.’

  ‘Then they’d want to stay, like Meggie, and you wouldn’t get a say in it.’ Hettie knew that Meggie had turned a deaf ear to all entreaties for her to leave town.

  ‘Or if I could be sure they’d get somewhere nice . . .’ She’d heard that some country families only offered billets for the sake of the eight and sixpence a week. Some didn’t even want the kids that were landed on them.

  ‘It ain’t a holiday camp,’ Annie told her. ‘And beggars can’t be choosers.’ She’d packed two carrier bags full of bully-beef, condensed milk and biscuits, little treats they could eat on the way or hand over to their new families. ‘What we can be sure of is these boys know how to behave. They won’t show us up.’

  She went and brushed Geoff’s hair back from his forehead. He submitted, then ruffled it forward as soon as her back was turned.

  ‘Where’s Walter got to?’ Sadie stood in her fawn coat, a nicely patterned rayon scarf tied at her throat, her dark hair fashionably pinned back. She wanted the boys to be proud of their mother as she stood in the crowd on the station platform waving them off.

  ‘It’s too early.’ Hettie went and looked down the street. She spied an upright, spruce figure heading their way, crossing the street from the pillar box opposite. ‘Here’s Frances come to say goodbye.’

  Their oldest sister had promised to take the morning off from her work dispensing prescriptions at the chemist. The whole family wanted to back Sadie’s difficult choice; after all, the government, the newspapers, everyone, was telling mothers to be brave and self-sacrificing.

  As she’d made her way by bus from Walworth to Southwark, Frances saw how many families had taken the advice to heart. Hundreds of small children sat trussed up in as many clothes as they could get on their backs, nursing their suitcases, looking expectantly down from the top decks for the first sight of trains that would carry them far away. She came in now, brisk but kind, with gifts of chocolate and comics.

  Geoff rushed to rip open the silver paper of his chocolate bar and cram the contents into his mouth.

  ‘Save it for later,’ Frances told him, slipping it quietly into his carrier bag. She was his godmother, not nearly so stern with him as might have been expected of a childless woman in her fifties. In fact, she spoiled him. Annie said so, ‘Frances is going soft in her old age.’ A charge that she was sure could never be levelled against his grandma.

  ‘I just saw Rob’s taxi at the top of Duke Street.’ Frances unbuttoned the jacket of her tailored two-piece suit. It was grey and trimmed with rich brown fur. ‘He said to say c
heerio from him, Amy and Bobby, and to give the boys half a crown apiece.’ She gave the coins to Sadie to hand on, then she turned her attention back to her nephews. ‘Now, Bertie, you’re to look after Geoff and make sure he doesn’t get lost. And you’re to write to your ma and pa the minute you get safely stowed.’

  Bertie took his responsibility gravely.

  ‘Do you have pen and paper?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Well, here’s half a dozen first-class stamps. Make sure Geoff writes what he can as well. We’ll all be waiting to hear how you settle in.’ She tucked the stamps into an envelope and slid it into his gaberdine pocket. ‘And remember, work hard and do well at school.’

  ‘School?’ Geoff echoed, standing beside his big brother.

  ‘Yes, there’ll be a school in your new village, didn’t you know?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘Well, there will be. And you must be a good boy, Geoff.’

  ‘With a new teacher?’

  ‘A new teacher and a new classroom. Everything will be new.’

  ‘What’ll happen to my old school?’

  ‘They’ll close that down, I expect. Just for a bit, till the war ends. Don’t you worry, you can come back home and go to the same school again just as soon as it’s safe.’ She squeezed his shoulder and smiled at him.

  But Geoff’s fancy took an unexpected turn. ‘If I stayed here and they closed my school, that means I needn’t go no more!’ The idea appealed. He began to rev his lips, like an engine starting, then spread his arms like aeroplane wings. ‘No school, nee-yah!’ He swooped across the room. ‘Nee-yah, nee-yah, pow! I’m the RAF!’ He banked and curved back towards Frances.

  ‘And I’m your commanding officer.’ She put out an arm to ground him. ‘And I say it’s a new school for you, Corporal Davidson. The RAF doesn’t take boys who can’t read and write, you know.’

  Reluctantly he agreed for his wings to be temporarily clipped as Walter came racing upstairs two at a time.

  ‘The cab’s outside, I left the engine running,’ he told them. ‘Give me the cases, Bertie, there’s a good boy. Come on, Sadie.’ He didn’t want them to linger over fond goodbyes.

  Frances gave each boy one last hug and handed them on to Hettie, who pushed them finally into Annie’s arms. The ordeal over, Bertie and Geoff shot downstairs.

  ‘You sure you got everything?’ Annie dashed away a tear. Sadie nodded. ‘Off you go then. And don’t make a meal of it when you get them on that train. You mind you see them off nice and bright.’ She sent them on their way, then joined Frances and Hettie at the window.

  Walter’s black cab drew away from the kerb and joined the flow of traffic heading north, across Blackfriars Bridge, along the Embankment, cutting across the top of St James’s Park towards Paddington.

  Chapter Three

  As the Indian summer gave way to October winds that stripped the park trees bare, Dorothy O’Hagan was among the many women who got over their initial fright on the day war broke out and soon resumed their everyday concerns. For some it was coping with increasing food shortages as the flow of goods through the docks dried up. Housewives ran out of sugar and had to beg or borrow, giving rough treatment to the women in fur coats who drove over from the West End with their chauffeurs to buy up remaining stocks. They sent them packing, with fleas in their ears, as they themselves joined the lengthening queues for butter and eggs.

  For Dorothy, however, protected from hardship by Tommy’s good connections in the docks, her preoccupation was what to wear at night, in case the sirens should sound and they were to find themselves over in Nelson Gardens for the duration. She took to going to bed in her underthings, wearing her best rayon slip, with dress, coat and shoes at the ready. Her bag was packed with comb, lipstick and vanity mirror, where others might take a torch and the latest issue of Woman’s Weekly. During her daytime routine of occasionally serving in the shop or, more likely, flitting round to her friends’ houses to listen to gramophone records and discuss the latest Fred Astaire film, she would wear a chic little black saucer-shaped hat with a small veil, a deep purple two-piece in soft wool, nipped in at the waist, black fishnet cotton gloves and a pair of high, shiny, open-toed shoes.

  Barrage balloons looming overhead could soon be ignored and even the wail of the siren came to hold less of a threat, as time after time the warning proved to be a false alarm. It was a case of crying wolf too often for people to take much notice, even of the shout of, ‘Put that light out!’ from an irate warden, or of the fifty-pound fine threatened against careless talk. Cartoons of Hitler with his little toothbrush ’tache and slicked-back hair further boosted their confidence. That they would soon be hanging out their washing on the Siegfried Line, as the song boasted, no one doubted.

  By November, Tommy was beginning to suspect that Dot was actually thriving on wartime conditions. She’d fallen for the line that life, what there was left of it, was for the living. She went out to the proper dancehalls once Lorna Bennett had cottoned onto the fact that she could easily be persuaded to stand the younger women their entrance money to the Paramount, or even the Windmill. She came home long after the official eleven o’clock closure time, humming a Mantovani waltz or, more irritatingly, a sentimental number by Gracie Fields about sending a letter to Santa Claus, ‘to send back my Daddy to me.’ In reality, she never took a blind bit of notice of the people suffering around her, or of him and Jimmie under her nose.

  One night Jimmie came home from a day’s casual work on the docks and proudly dumped his gas mask on the kitchen table.

  ‘What’s this?’ Dorothy frowned and poked at it with her long fingernail.

  ‘Open it and see.’

  ‘What would I want with your horrible nose-bag?’ Still, she lifted the lid in case the contents were worth having.

  ‘Go on, lift it out.’ Jimmie winked at Tommy.

  She hooked her finger round the rubber strap, slowly drawing it out. The mask held something slimy and heavy. Blood dripped from the glass eye sockets. Dorothy screamed and dropped it. ‘What the hell’s that?’

  ‘Frozen pigs’ hearts. I smuggled them through. Make a tasty supper with them, you can.’

  ‘Dirty beast. Dirty, filthy little animal!’ She turned on Tommy. ‘See what he’s done?’ Blood trickled onto the tablecloth. ‘He’s done it on purpose.’

  ‘For God’s sake,’ Tommy muttered at her and swept the meat away. He chucked it straight in the bin.

  ‘What the – ? Other people would give their eye-teeth for that.’ Jimmie genuinely hadn’t reckoned on her reaction.

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t. And don’t you never do nothing like that to me again, you hear?’

  ‘Why, what did I do?’

  She ignored the question. ‘You’ll be out on your ear if you do. You ain’t fit to live in a decent house.’ Her face grew savage and contorted.

  At last Jimmie took offence. ‘You can stick your decent house,’ he shouted back and swiped the gas mask onto the floor. The glass splintered as it spun against her feet. He seized his work jacket and pulled it roughly back on.

  ‘Where you off to now?’ Tommy tried to stand in his way, half thinking it was best to let Jimmie go and give him a chance to cool down.

  ‘Out.’ He shoved past. ‘And you can ask her what she thinks she’s doing in a decent house herself. From what I heard, she don’t belong in one neither!’

  Slamming the door, he left Tommy face to face with Dorothy and raced off to Bobby Parsons’ place to see if he would help drag Meggie away from her telephonist books up to the Astoria, where they could forget their cares amidst the lush carpets and padded seats, to the strains of the Wurlitzer, into a silver-screen world of white tie and tails.

  Clark Gable had done his bit with ‘Frankly, my dear . . .’ and reduced Scarlett O’Hara to pouting silence for once, when the sirens started up and the manager quickly appeared on-stage. He apologized for the interruption. ‘Please feel free to come back afterwards,’ he s
aid cheerfully, ‘once we get the all-clear.’

  There was no panic as the audience filed out, Meggie, Jimmie and Bobby among them. They made for the nearest shelter at Tottenham Court Road, crowding down the escalators onto the platforms; the first time that the three had sought refuge in an Underground station.

  ‘Here, no need to shove,’ Bobby protested, knocked aside in the race for a comfortable bunk. Built in his father’s mould, with a boxer’s physique, but with his mother’s light blonde hair, he grabbed hold of the culprit; a dirty tramp wrapped in a grey blanket, unshaven and probably riddled with lice. Squeamishly Bobby backed off. The tramp spat and climbed up to a top bunk.

  ‘Leave him be,’ Meggie said uneasily, suddenly aware of the sprinkling of down-and-outs amongst the theatre-goers and the more well-to-do.

  ‘You’re right, he ain’t worth bothering with.’ Bobby affected nonchalance, hands in pockets. ‘Might catch something off him if you go too near.’

  ‘It ain’t that.’ The surge of the crowd carried them on. They left the spitting tramp behind, but had to step over two more already asleep on the floor. Instinctively Meggie held her breath.

  ‘What you looking at?’ One of the tramps opened his eyes a fraction and snarled at her.

  Hurriedly she turned and caught up with the others.

  ‘You all right? You ain’t shaking, are you?’ Jimmie waited. ‘What did he say?’

  Beside the heavyweight Bobby, Jimmie was something of a flyweight. His readiness to square up to the half asleep bag of bones made her smile. ‘He ain’t said nothing, Jimmie. It’s just me.’

  They found an unoccupied corner at the far end of the platform. A train rattled by as the boys took off their jackets and spread them on the floor. ‘You scared?’ Bobby, too, was surprised by Meggie’s reaction. She sat down with her knees hunched to her chest, arms wrapped round her legs.

  ‘No, I ain’t,’ she flashed back.

  ‘That’s more like it. Fancy a fag?’ He handed round his packet of five.

  As Jimmie and Bobby played the big men, their faces hidden behind a screen of smoke, mouths puckered, eyes narrowed, Meggie took another cautious look round. A second train flashed by, rolling on the tracks, its lighted windows flickering, clickety-clack. For a moment she wanted to confess what had startled her; it was the tramp on the bunk, the wasted old man in the blanket, staring out of a once handsome face. Behind the stubble, beneath the grey-white skin, she glimpsed a young man, perhaps once well set-up with wife and family, now a hollow shell, a husk. There was something in his eyes as they rested momentarily on her, in acknowledgement of her tall, slender figure, her rich auburn hair; a reflection of his own eyes in her deep brown ones.