The Safest Place in London Read online

  Also by Maggie Joel

  Half the World in Winter

  The Second-last Woman in England

  The Past and Other Lies

  First published in 2016

  Copyright © Maggie Joel 2016

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone:(61 2) 8425 0100

  Email:[email protected]

  Web:www.allenandunwin.com

  Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available from the National Library of Australia

  www.trove.nla.gov.au

  ISBN 9781743310601

  eISBN 9781742698601

  Set by Midland Typesetters, Australia

  Cover design: Lisa White

  Cover photography: Getty Images / @Stephen Carroll, Trevillion Images

  For my aunt, Anne Benson

  CONTENTS

  PART ONE UNDERGROUND

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  PART TWO OVERGROUND

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  AFTERWORD

  AUTHOR NOTE

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  SOURCES

  CHAPTER ONE

  Odessa Street was situated just north of Bethnal Green Road in London’s East End, part of the sprawling warren of terraces put up in a great hurry during the late Victorian period when the easternmost reaches of the city were full to bursting and needed somewhere to overflow. It was bordered at one end by the red-brick arches of the bridge that had once carried a branch line of the Great Eastern Railway, long since decommissioned and fallen into disrepair, and at its other by the Hero of Trafalgar public house, which had had no beer to serve since 1942 and had closed its doors, seemingly for good, a year later and now stood abandoned and boarded up, a magnet for looters, deserters and local children. The north side of the street was overshadowed by warehouses, repositories in a previous century for the bolts of woven cloth and French-polished cabinets bound for the West End, but more recently used as a temporary mortuary when the hospital was unable to cope.

  The occupants of Odessa Street came and went, sometimes in the dead of night when rent was owing, their numbers varying as births and deaths, new arrivals and hasty departures dictated. Number 42, located halfway along its length, was connected to the identical row of houses on the other side of the street by the lines of washing that permanently crisscrossed the slender space between and from which grey and never-quite-dry washing hung. It was, like its neighbours, a simply constructed dwelling consisting of two rooms up and down, with a privy in a tiny bricked yard outside and at some point a scullery had been added at the rear. Two families currently resided at number 42: the Rosenthals, who lived upstairs, and the Levins, who lived downstairs. There had been menfolk in Odessa Street at one time but at this present moment—January of 1944—the men were, for the most part, absent, Lenny Rosenthal being in Burma fighting the Japanese and Joe Levin having recently returned to convoy duty in the North Atlantic courtesy of His Majesty’s Royal Navy. And so the women and children were left to cope as best they could.

  On this particular day—a Saturday evening at a little after six o’clock—the wireless set at number 42 erupted with static, the electric light bulbs flickered and, a moment later, the air-raid siren began. Nancy Levin, serving tea in the kitchen, a pan of spitting chips clasped in both hands, her lips clamped around her cigarette, said, ‘Bugger,’ under her breath.

  She was a tall woman with a slimness that was only partly a result of wartime privation, deep-set green eyes and a heavy brow that hinted at Middle-European ancestry. One or two loose strands of long yellow hair were visible beneath a carelessly wound headscarf above very high, dramatically shaped eyebrows, a small nose and a mouth set hard.

  The fat in the chip pan had begun to congeal.

  Nancy Levin had recently turned twenty-four. A wife. A mother. She had, for a time, worked in a hat shop on Bethnal Green Road. She had dreamed of working in Bond Street. She had grown up in a boarding house less than a mile away and had twice seen the ocean, though on neither occasion had she bathed in it. She had never met her father and her husband had left that morning to return to the war.

  ‘Bugger,’ she said again. She turned off the gas and put down the pan.

  A small child, three years of age, was seated at the kitchen table watching in anticipation.

  ‘Don’t you touch them chips,’ warned Nancy, and she went out into the passageway to listen for the single long note of the all-clear. Out of sight of the child she closed her eyes and offered up a silent prayer:

  Not tonight; any night but tonight.

  The siren continued to wail. The all-clear did not sound and the chips, quietly sizzling in the pan, were destined never to be served. Nancy experienced the small wave of despair and anger that followed every failed prayer.

  ‘Right, that’s it, Em,’ she announced as the kitchen, the small child, the chips slid back into focus. ‘We’re going down the shelter.’

  Emily Levin watched the still-sizzling chips that were just out of reach and her mouth opened in mute protest then closed again in the way of one whose life has been lived entirely in wartime and for whom hope, inevitably, was crushed before it could properly flourish.

  Her mother left the kitchen and wrenched open the door to the cupboard under the stairs fumbling in the blackout in her haste to turn off the gas.

  Outside the siren continued to wail.

  When the raids had first started the sirens would go off when the German bombers were flying over the English coast. Now, and for reasons best known to themselves, Fighter Command waited until the bombers were approaching your district before alerting you. This meant that the time from hearing the siren to actually hearing the first low drone of the approaching German squadrons was no time at all. For eight months they had lived like that—September ’40 to May ’41—when every night there had been a raid and it seemed like the world had ended. Then, quite suddenly, the raids had ended and everyone had emerged, dazed and stupefied, into the world—which, it turned out, had not ended after all. And now the tide had turned. Now the BBC daily reported Allied victories in North Africa and elsewhere, Hitler had been pushed back to Italy, Hitler was on the back foot, and yet out of the blue there had been a raid last night and it looked likely there was
to be another one tonight. Somehow, the second time around, it was worse.

  Nancy emerged from the space under the stairs pulling on a man’s overcoat over her dressing-gown, as though she were someone for whom night and day held no distinction. She paused to glance at the ceiling. The Rosenthals occupied the two rooms on the upper floor but the top half of the house was silent and she had not seen or heard any of the numerous Rosenthal children nor Mrs Rosenthal herself all day. Nancy snatched up her own child, ramming a particularly ugly red woollen hat on Emily’s unwilling head, and with her free hand retrieved the bundles of blankets and bedding that had been put away months ago and hurriedly dug out again yesterday. Her final act was to whip out a compact from the pocket of the coat and a lipstick from the other pocket and, with a deftness born of practice, she applied the vivid red to her lips, peering with a critical eye at the result in the tiny mirror. (A man had once stopped her in Shoreditch High Street to take her photograph. She should be in films, he had said, she should be on the page of a magazine. He had handed her his card, though his intentions had turned out to be carnal rather than artistic.) Nancy snapped shut the lid of the compact and they left the house, locking the front door behind them as though there was every expectation that the house would still be there waiting for them in the morning.

  The siren had cranked itself up to a shrill scream and for the second night in a row Odessa Street braced itself for death to fall from the sky.

  The feeble winter day had long ago sidled into a protracted evening and Nancy shivered. Outside was as dark as only a British winter combined with a wartime blackout could be. Odessa Street was all but abandoned. Many people had left for good—bombed out and rehoused elsewhere, families who had lived in the area for three, four generations vanished with no forwarding address as though they had never existed, and whether they intended to return if the war ever ended, who knew? In most cases there was nothing for them to return to.

  A bucket of sand resided permanently on the doorstep of number 42 for use in case of a fire, though nowadays it was so full of cigarette ends its use as a fire retardant was questionable. Nancy sidestepped it, fumbling in the darkness to locate the mains tap to turn off the water just as the anti-aircraft gun in Victoria Park started up, abruptly drowning out the siren.

  Behind her, Emily let out a horrified gasp and turned to push her way back inside the house, ramming her tiny body against the locked door.

  ‘Em! What you playing at?’

  Nancy shot out a hand to grab her and Emily struggled to free herself, twisting and squirming and lashing out a foot that struck her mother in the shin. For the briefest moment Nancy imagined herself patient, sympathetic, loving. That was the kind of mother she wanted to be, the kind of mother she imagined her own mother had been. But the reality of it, motherhood during an air raid, was somehow quite different.

  ‘We ain’t got time for this!’ And she smartly slapped the back of Emily’s legs.

  ‘My blanket!’ Emily wailed, and in the moonlight her face was white and stricken.

  Cursing, Nancy unlocked the door and ran back into the house. After a brief but frantic search she located the filthy scrap of scratchy brown blanket that Emily had not slept with since she was a baby but that now, inexplicably, she would not be parted with, and returned with it to her distraught child.

  ‘Next time we go without it. Next time I go without you!’

  Emily rammed the piece of blanket to her cheek, a fierce look on her face, and made no reply.

  But at last they were ready and Nancy grabbed her child’s hand. ‘Come on,’ she said, swinging their arms as though as they were going down the shops because she felt guilty about the slap. ‘Herr Hitler wants to bomb us but he won’t catch us, will he?’

  ‘Mum, he might,’ Emily replied, for she was a realistic sort of child. And she was still smarting about the slap and the near disaster with the blanket.

  And in this vein they set off at a grim pace down Odessa Street in the blackout, trying to remember where the worst of the debris and craters and potholes were. Nancy had a torch but the blackout shield she was obliged to cover it with meant she could see almost to the end of her toes but no further. The few remaining residents of Odessa Street could occasionally be seen, shadowy figures overladen with belongings and children, dodging the craters and the debris of a house that had been bombed the night before. The Auxiliary Fire Service and the salvage crews and decontamination squads still worked to contain the damage and the air was thick with smoke that rose in vast plumes hundreds of feet into the night sky. Earlier in the day they had been ankle deep in water from all the fire hoses and a family of ducks had sailed down the street, oblivious to the chaos all around.

  Their pace quickened as they reached the destroyed house but once past they slowed.

  ‘Mummy, what about our tea?’ said Emily, who had been preoccupied and silent for a time.

  ‘It’ll get cold.’

  ‘Will somebody steal it?’

  ‘They might. And if they don’t, well then we’ll have it for our breakfast.’

  Emily considered this. ‘I hope no one steals it.’

  ‘So do I,’ said her mother, and thus finding something they could agree on they hurried on their way in silence.

  The anti-aircraft gun had stopped and around them the street itself now fell silent as though the last building in London had collapsed. A single searchlight silently swept across the night sky and mother and daughter paused to gaze about them. As the searchlight moved to another part of the sky and the street fell into darkness once more, Nancy took a firmer hold of her child’s hand and set off again, not wishing to linger. There were other sorts of people out after blackout as well as air-raid wardens and salvage crews. As she thought this she saw a solitary figure on the other side of the street—unmistakably a man—standing perfectly still as though there was no raid, as though he was watching them. Nancy swung her torch so that it was pointing directly at him and the figure merged into the shadows, as silently and swiftly as a rat, and was gone. Yet the sense that he had been watching them—watching her—persisted. The distant droning of enemy aircraft sounded on the wind and a moment later the AA gun burst into life again. Their pace quickened as they hurried beneath the arches of the disused railway and turned the corner, and soon they could see the entrance to the tube station ahead. The shriek of a falling explosive sounded in another street and was followed by a muffled thud. This was the signal to abandon any pretence of not running. Nancy felt her heart crashing against her ribs. She could be quite calm, she had discovered, scrambling over bomb debris in her own street, but when the station was in sight, when she could see the flight of steps disappearing underground and they had begun to think about being safe but they were not quite safe yet, that was when it was hard to breathe, that was when her heart crashed painfully. It only lasted a minute, maybe two, and no one else needed to know. Emily did not need to know—or perhaps Emily did know; perhaps Emily always knew when her mother was frightened.

  They passed the Salmon and Ball public house, closed and shuttered up in the darkness, and there was a stream of people all around now, pushing and slipping in icy sludge that was already turning to frost. No one spoke. A large woman wrapped in a dirty grey blanket blocked their way and to stop the panic that was bubbling up inside her Nancy squeezed Emily’s hand. ‘Not far now,’ she said. ‘Nearly there.’ But her words were lost in the drone of aircraft above and the ack-ack-ack of the AA gun followed by another explosion somewhere off to the west, Shoreditch perhaps, or the City.

  Emily pulled urgently on her hand, impatient with the shuffling old woman, but there was nothing to be done about it. The station entrance was a bottleneck, made worse because Bethnal Green had never been an operational station, was still under construction at the start of the war, unfinished and never opened, the tracks not laid yet, the escalators not functioning. The crowd surged forward and they plunged down the short flight of steps. Nancy propelled Emil
y through the turnstiles and onto the escalator.

  The escalator was very long and very steep, reaching down into the depths of the station, offering safety if you concentrated and kept your footing, a horrible death by suffocation in a crush if you did not. Nancy reached out, feeling with the toe of her foot in the dimly lit cavern for the edge of the next step.

  Once they were down and inside the station they would be safe.

  CHAPTER TWO

  A short distance away another mother and daughter were hurrying towards the same shelter.

  Mrs Diana Meadows of The Larches, Milton Crescent, Chalfont St Giles in Buckinghamshire had got on the wrong bus. She had thought they were heading west. Instead their bus, in the blackout and displaying no route number, had carried them east, and by the time they had realised it they were halfway to Shoreditch. They had swept up their belongings and leaped from the bus and now found themselves on an unknown street in the disorientating confusion of the blackout with no possibility of getting home that night.

  Then the air-raid siren had gone off.

  Diana Meadows let out a little gasp of dismay. The eerie wail of the siren—a sound utterly unknown in the pleasant and leafy environs of Buckinghamshire—shattered the darkness and filled her with terror. She could not move. Let it be a false alarm, she prayed. All around her people had begun to emerge out of the dark. Faceless and fleeting, they passed and were gone, like ghosts, but she could not move. She could not join them.

  She was thirty-nine years old and she wore a tweed coat from Liberty that had beaver at the collar and cuffs. It was prewar, of course, but everything was—everything of quality anyhow. She had had her hair set at the hairdresser in Amersham only the day before and the stiff new curls sat unwillingly beneath the smart little hat she had placed on her head on leaving the house. She had powdered her nose. She had studied her profile in the hallway mirror, and had registered with a disappointment that had become habit a small, almost snub nose and a chin a little too long, lips a little too thin, eyes a colour that could never quite be pinned down. An English face, plain and serviceable, but never beautiful. But her hair was set. And her hat was smart. Her gloves too—slender and fawn-coloured and fastened with little buttons at the wrist. But no one who passed her on this dark street wore gloves. No one wore smart little hats. Her coat—a tweed coat from Liberty—had become invisible. Or she had become invisible inside it.