England's Lane Read online

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  © 2012 by Joseph Connolly

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  ISBN 978-1-62365-325-5

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  New York, NY 10019

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, institutions, places, and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons—living or dead—events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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  By the same author

  Fiction

  POOR SOULS

  THIS IS IT

  STUFF

  SUMMER THINGS

  WINTER BREAKS

  IT CAN’T GO ON

  S.O.S.

  THE WORKS

  LOVE IS STRANGE

  JACK THE LAD AND BLOODY MARY

  Non-fiction

  COLLECTING MODERN FIRST EDITIONS

  P. G. WODEHOUSE: AN ILLUSTRATED BIOGRAPHY

  JEROME K. JEROME: A CRITICAL BIOGRAPHY

  MODERN FIRST EDITIONS: THEIR VALUE TO COLLECTORS

  THE PENGUIN BOOK QUIZ BOOK

  CHILDREN’S MODERN FIRST EDITIONS

  BESIDE THE SEASIDE

  ALL SHOOK UP: A FLASH OF THE FIFTIES

  CHRISTMAS

  WODEHOUSE

  FABER AND FABER: EIGHTY YEARS OF BOOK COVER DESIGN

  To Patricia

  CONTENTS

  In the Beginning …

  Chapter 1 You Are Mad and I Am Right

  Chapter 2 It’s Truly Very Clean

  Chapter 3 That’s the Way it Goes

  Chapter 4 Anything Not Familiar

  Chapter 5 A Day Unlike Others

  Chapter 6 He Knows Nothing

  Chapter 7 Best Interests

  Chapter 8 We All Need Help

  Chapter 9 More the Merrier

  Chapter 10 Merely a Matter of Convenience

  Chapter 11 Flesh and Blood

  Chapter 12 Got to be a Man About It

  Chapter 13 The Art of Persuasion

  Chapter 14 Are You All Right?

  Chapter 15 All I’ve Ever Wanted

  Chapter 16 Spilled Milk

  And in the End …

  In the Beginning …

  I am a capable woman. And no, I don’t really believe that it’s vain of me to say so. Coping, when your own life and that of everyone around you is daily in danger, is really not so very terribly admirable. I am a capable woman, yes—but so very many of us had to be, during the long dark days of the war. We had to have strength. Rather surprisingly, it grew within you—the mind and body, I think, they come to sense its necessity. I drew upon it very largely in order to try to overcome the loss of my sister, who was dearer to me then than anyone on earth. This, though, all of this, it came a few years after. At a time when I foolishly believed that death and dying were over and done with. And I needed even more strength then, and of quite a different sort, to deal with the strangeness that emerged from her terrible passing—so very unexpected was this bright new love that ripened and burst inside of me (so shocking, and just unstoppably) for Paul, the little boy, hardly more than one year old, whom she left behind her. The pain from loving him, from knowing now that to me he is just quite utterly everything there is in the world, can simply stop my throat, and yet somehow it is charged with such sweetness. The agony of anxiety for his every moment fills me with warmth, a wash of warmth in which I nearly luxuriate, so happy am I to have it: and then I feel guilt for that.

  Yes: guilt for that—and I suppose … no, not suppose, I don’t suppose it, of course I really do know why. Because I carried within me the knowledge that never would I have that, a child, and then suddenly one came to me, so how could I ever deserve it? Eunice, my sister, he was lost to her, and so was her very own life. That must have been the worst of her dying—she had had time to think of it, I know. That must have been the worst of her dying—knowing that soon she must leave him. And now he’s mine. So yes: guilt for that.

  To me, the war itself was not really so appalling as afterward—everything that happened, all that I felt, when finally it was over. I had married Jim in 1940 when he was home from leave—one day he had been given, just a one-day pass—and I am being neither flippant nor willful, please do believe me, when I tell you that I really can’t remember exactly why I did that. The reasoning behind it. Not love. No—not love. Well obviously no, not that. A few of us, quite a few of the girls who were working in munitions, were happily doing it. Sounds so terribly silly now—a gang of young women who barely even knew one another debating and then deciding between themselves that on the whole they might as well go ahead and do it: get married. There never seemed to be a shortage of eligible young men, most of them soldiers. One girl, Una—she married a boy she had only just met. At a dance. Eighteen, the two of them were. And then the following weekend they had gone to the pictures. Next thing we heard, she was engaged. She had a Woolworth’s ring on her finger which she waggled in our faces while hitching up her skirt and parading up and down the canteen as if she were, oh … I don’t know—as if she were a Norman Hartnell model at a West End fashion show, or something. We did laugh. They married the very same week, and then the boy—can’t remember his name—was stationed in Africa, Egypt it might have been, and that, I am afraid, is the very last she heard of him. A more common story than you’d like to think. She didn’t really seem to be too put out. Her main concern appeared to be whether still she would pass as virginal to the next young man who came along. It makes her sound so terribly awful, doesn’t it? But she wasn’t. It was just how people were. How they came to see things. Nowadays … what is it …? Fifteen, eighteen years later, it all just seems so utterly unthinkable. But then—well, life was hanging on a thread, you see. This is what you have to remember. So fine a thread. Everyone—and particularly the young and untried—was terribly aware of that.

  Jim, well … I had known him for a little bit. Not too long. Later, he used to say to me “Do you remember? Ay? Do you? Ay? That evening we met, Mill? That were an evening, ay?” Yes, I’d say—course I do, Jim. But I didn’t. Had no recollection of it at all, and normally I’m very good about that sort of thing. Observant. Very retentive. But there. Speaks volumes, I daresay. Anyway—Jim, he was what my mother, had she still been alive at the time, would have dismissed as common. And she would have been right, of course. He still is. It seems unbelievable to me now, but I’m not at all sure that I noticed at the time. The way he spoke. His table manners, or the total lack of them. The unspeakable things he would do with his fingers. And, of course, the fact that we had no interests whatever in common. Or more to the point, the fact that Jim had and continues to have no interests at all that I’ve ever divined, beyond his ironmonger’s shop. Beer and budgerigars, if you count such things. I am sure he has never read a book. I mean in his life.
I really do mean that. He called me Mill. Never Milly, just Mill. Which I absolutely hated, and I told him so. Made not a blind bit of difference. And still he persists with it. But … he was quite good-looking in those days, I suppose, in a roughish sort of a way. I thought if we married, we’d at least have beautiful children. And he had this way of cocking an eyebrow that for some reason or another would always make me laugh. In the manner of a budgerigar, conceivably. It doesn’t now, make me laugh. I’m not even sure if still he does it. Couldn’t tell you.

  Anyway, he was amusing enough. He must have been. We had one night, just the one night together before he had to get back to barracks. He never did leave these shores though, Jim. Never was posted abroad. Something to do with his feet, he told me. Or his ankles. Something. But that night, though—that one single night … oh dear God, that I well remember. How could I ever forget it? It had only been a Registry Office wedding—over before it got started. Eunice was there—can’t remember who else. Some rather awful friend of Jim’s. Very few, though. And Jim, he had booked this room, little room, above a pub. The smell of stale ale rose up through the floor. The bed, it nearly filled the whole of the space—though still, I remember thinking, it did seem very narrow. For two people, I mean. It creaked, the metal frame, even when you so much as touched it. Jim was down the corridor “attending to nature,” as he called it. He still does say that: “Won’t be a jiffy—just got to attend to nature.” Oh dear Lord. Anyway—I sat on the corner of the bed … not sure there even was a chair … and I felt so cold. In every sense, really. There was a draft from the grimy window, there was linoleum on the floor—no hint even of a bedside mat. And within me, of course, I was utterly frozen. I had thought about this moment—women do, I think. And you wonder. Well you go through very many moods, I suppose: curiosity, dread … embarrassment, chiefly. A sort of excitement, just possibly. But not in my case. Here was simply something to be got through: we were good at that, during the war—getting through things. There was rarely any choice in the matter. So here, I thought, was just one more little thing to be endured: couldn’t last forever, could it? Everything comes to an end. And it wasn’t going to kill me. Was it? He still smelt of beer when finally he came to me. He told me to be brave. “Be brave,” he said to me, as he fooled around with his braces. And I had to laugh. What a buffoon, I thought: what an utterly perfect buffoon. Bravery was not required, which is just as well. I still am not quite sure that he even managed what I would say to be penetration. And then he was snoring, and hogging the eiderdown. Anyway, I thought, with not inconsiderable satisfaction: it is done. I have got over it. As I knew I would. For I am, as I say, a capable woman.

  On the small table in that vile little room, I had set out all of my things. Coty powder and lipstick. A little bottle of scent that Eunice had given to me—Paris Soir. I still have the bottle, kept it all these years. There is a tiny very dark residue at its base, and the label now is yellowed. My brand-new nightgown—so terribly pretty. Pink, with little satinette bows at the neckline and a sort of ruching to the cuffs. Saved up coupons for, oh—it seemed like just ever. I didn’t even get to putting it on. He just came at me, Jim. He still was wearing his boots. This was not, I remember thinking, how Clark Gable would generally go about things. Anyway—never mind: it was over.

  Up until this time, I had been living with Eunice in a couple of rooms with kitchenette and shared bathroom above Amy’s the hairdresser in England’s Lane. She had begged me not to do it—marry Jim. But I didn’t listen. I don’t know why I didn’t listen—hers was the only opinion I would have respected, and always I knew how very much she loved me. It’s not as if I even wanted to, particularly. She didn’t have a boyfriend, Eunice—and that was very surprising in itself, because she was always the better-looking of us, and by a good long way. Two years older than I, and quite the beauty. All the mashers would give her the eye—but it was always me she linked arms with, me who went with her to the Odeon, the Gaumont, the Empire. I only realized—how very stupid I was—I only realized after my ridiculous wedding that I would be living apart from her, that no longer would we be able to share our sisterly little rituals—and that instead I’d be with Jim, in the flat above his ironmonger’s. In the very same street—that was the funny thing. Maybe that’s how we came to meet …? I honestly can’t remember. Anyway, the ironmonger’s was all boarded up for the duration, and he was away in the army, thank God. So I did go on living with Eunice. It was all as if nothing had happened. “Yes,” she said, “but when the war is finally over, it’ll be different. I’ll lose you. When Jim comes home.” I looked at her with love. I took her hand and touched her hair. “Well,” I said. “Maybe he won’t.”

  But he did, of course. Many didn’t, so very many didn’t, but Jim was only in Minehead, you see. And so he did. But before all that of course, there was the bombing. God knows we had already had to withstand so very much ceaseless bombardment. It is really so awfully hard—impossible, really—to explain to anyone who has not themselves been through such a thing … but after a while, when you’ve had night after night of it, there comes upon you a sort of peace, an inner serenity. Sounds so mad—but I talked to Eunice about it, one of those terrible nights, and she agreed with me, Eunice, she agreed with what I said. At the very start of the war, back in ’39, we all of us were quite terrified, of course. Even on the day that Chamberlain told us that now we were at war with Germany—beautiful morning, warm summer sunshine, it’s not at all a day you could ever forget—within hours the blessed siren was setting up its wailing. Londoners, I think, they all thought that their number was up. Nothing happened, though—nothing happened for a good long time, and that’s when people started laughing about it all. Calling it “the phony war” and saying that the blasted politicians had worried us half out of our wits, and all for nothing. I knew quite a lot of people—Marion, who sometimes worked in Mr. Levy’s greengrocer’s, Eunice’s friend from work, and another woman I used to meet most mornings on the train—who straightaway went to collect their children from wherever they had been evacuated to, and only just a few weeks earlier. But soon it started. There was nothing phony about it then. And once it had begun, no one could ever see an end to it. Except when London would be engulfed in a firestorm, and all of us must die: it’s only a matter of when.

  I suppose, though, that it was the very regularity of the bombing that after a while made us see things quite differently. We had got through another night somehow—well hadn’t we? So who’s to say we can’t do it again? There entered into our standard resilience a reckless sort of bravado: Come on Hitler! Do your worst! We can take it! All that sort of thing. Which I think, on reflection, is far from healthy, overall. When the Blitz took grip, Eunice and I, at the first great mournful rising moan of the siren, would pick up the battered old suitcase that we always kept packed with all our little essentials, and hurry to the cellar. It was, of course, quite awful down there. Well it was where we kept the coal, after all, and all sorts of broken chairs and other bits of rubbish you never have time to get rid of. We had put down a few blankets and there was a hurricane lamp and a paraffin heater that always made me feel so very queasy. And piles of old Womans and Woman’s Owns from the salon just above us. I may be painting a cozy little picture, but believe me, it was very far from that. We really hated sitting down there—and more often than not it would be for the whole of the night: only at dawn would you hear the all-clear. And so one evening, later than usual, when it all started up again, Eunice and I, we just looked at one another, and I think we must have had exactly the same thought at the identical moment. “Blow it,” she said. “I’m not going down. I just can’t face going down there again. I’m staying here. If they get us, they get us.” I had just washed my hair, I remember, and was trying to dry it with a towel in front of just the one bar of the fire—that meter, I am telling you, it just ate up the shillings. And so we didn’t. We simply stayed upstairs, trying not to wince at the whistle and then the crumping
of bombs, some of then falling really rather close. At the summit of Primrose Hill, you see, which is awfully near, there were anti-aircraft guns, and always these were a target. And from that night on, we never went down to the cellar again. So you see what I mean: reckless, very, and goodness we were lucky, because Mr. Lawrence, the newsagent, he took a direct hit, completely took the roof off, and he’s only just three doors down. He wasn’t hurt, though—just a few scratches miraculously, thank the Lord.

  We were very different, really—my sister and me. Well we were in some ways, anyway—mentally generally in tune, more like twins in that respect—but she was always so much more … how can I say? Feminine, I suppose, for want of a better expression. Very dainty in the movement of her hands—always smelling sweetly of Lily of the Valley. She had a way with tweezers that made her eyebrows always just so. She even used eyeshadow, which I thought was very racy. Me, I could never really be bothered. I’m not saying I wasn’t always very nicely turned out—my costumes were very becoming, and I could never abide a laddered nylon. But with Eunice, her grace and beauty seemed to come from within—all the cosmetics merely a perfectly natural extension of it, if that isn’t contradictory. And when it became clear, early on in the war, that all we women were required to do our bit, I didn’t at all mind being shunted off to Hayes every morning on the five o’clock train, there to inspect twenty-five-pound field guns, if you please! And we were even sworn to secrecy as to the exact location. But Eunice, oh dear me no: she was having none of all that sort of very unladylike malarkey. She eventually secured a job in Marshall & Snelgrove for the duration, advising hard-put housewives on how best to eke out their precious clothing coupons—taught them how, in terms of dressmaking, making do and mending—to quite literally cut their coat according to their cloth. Often she’d bring home a few remnants and fashion them into the most extraordinary creations: flair, that’s what she had. Me, I would just have consigned all those very unpromising scraps of material to the duster drawer.