Read Online The Safest Place in London by Maggie Joel - Free Book Online Page B

wasn’t room for him and her to live at his mum’s house and Nancy had been glad, but Joe knew of a family who had done a midnight bolt from a place in Odessa Street. Two rooms all to themselves, he’d said, if they acted sharpish. So they had acted sharpish and had moved in on the Tuesday. And on the Friday war had been declared.
    Ah well, Joe said, we had a nice three days, didn’t we?
    And so they had, and longer really, for the navy had taken their time sending Joe his call-up papers. But they had, eventually, and a week after he’d gone she’d found out she was carrying a child. She’d been angry with Joe then, angry with the navy and the government and Hitler, because Joe had left just when she needed him. But there was nothing to be done about it. She had the baby on her own, she looked after her little girl on her own. And they had done alright on their own for three years, she and Emily, aside from last winter when they had nearly starved and she had had to beg some shifts down the market and at a pub and had even, on occasion, gone out at dawn scavenging in bins and in the gutters for whatever she might find. Aside from that then, and even then, they had survived. It was surprising that you did survive. People were starving but mostly they did not actually starve. Still, there was no denying things had improvedafter Joe’s return. She had put on a little weight—she was about to put on a whole lot more.
    Her hand went to her lower stomach and rested there till she felt calm and still. She wanted this baby. Joe’s baby.
    ‘Mum!’
    Emily was tugging at her arm.
    Billy Rosenthal from upstairs was making his way across the mass of sleeping bodies towards them and he was carrying the baby. There were seven Rosenthal kids, Billy the eldest and the baby just three months old; at least with Len Rosenthal now in Burma Mrs Rosenthal was guaranteed a respite for a time. Len had got a twenty-four-hour pass just over a year ago and the baby was three months old. Please God, his wife had said, that Len get no more leave at least until the war was ended. Mrs Rosenthal, so paper-thin and yellow-tinged, hardly a tooth left in her head, her hair already grey with a permanent cough that racked her body, did not look like she would cope. Sometimes she didn’t cope and on those occasions Nancy, who only had the one to look after and who was just downstairs, helped out. This looked like being one of those times.
    ‘Mum says can you take him,’ Billy said when he reached them. He was a half-starved waif of a lad with eyes too large for a face gaunt with hunger, in a threadbare pullover and men’s trousers that hung off him and looked like they had been lifted from a corpse.
    ‘’Course we can, luv,’ Nancy said, and she gave Billy a smile as she took the baby. Billy disappeared back into the chaos of bodies. Emily, who had been oddly quiet all night, now perked up. She patted the baby’s head in a proprietorial way and launched intoa complicated rendition of a nursery rhyme that involved three mice and a clock. Nancy rocked the baby gently on her knee. Her own baby would come in July, which was no time at all away, and perhaps the war would be ended by then. She doubted she could even have got pregnant this time last year, the way things were, the two of them starving—and considering what had happened that was just as well . . .
    She had got some shifts working at the Black Bull in Silkweavers Row, one of the few public houses still open, still with an occasional supply of beer. On one particular night, the coldest night of the winter so far, a GI wandered into the bar. What the Americans were doing in Bethnal Green, Nancy didn’t ask. She presumed he was lost. She didn’t ask his name; if she had, he would have given her a false one. At closing time, they left the pub together and did it right there in the open in some dingy back alley, fumbling with clothes and stockings and underwear, wildly, like two people out