Churchill’s Angels (10 page)

‘My Sam’s a sergeant, Daisy.’ Her parents were sitting side by side on the sofa and Fred was holding Flora’s hand tightly. ‘Can’t drink my tea if you don’t let go, Fred. Oh, this is nice, Daisy, you’ve put sugar in. I never take sugar, gave it up for Lent once and never went back to it.’

‘The first-aid manual says to put sugar in,’ said Daisy, gulping her own tea.

‘Told you you’d know what to do, our Daisy.’ Flora sobbed a little but drank more tea. ‘A sergeant. They only made him a corporal a few months ago.’

‘Sam’s a good soldier, Mum.’

Flora put down her cup so fiercely that some tea slopped out into the saucer. ‘He’s only missing, my Sam, only missing, and there’s nothing about Ron and Phil so they must be all right.’

Fred stood up. ‘Maybe you should have a wee lie-down, Flora, love. Daisy, I’ll mind the shop if you stay with your mum.’

Daisy stayed sitting by her mother’s bed long after Flora had fallen into a fitful sleep. She forced herself to be positive. Buying the costume would have been a ridiculous waste of money. How glad she was that she had not done that. She would not be joining the WAAF, not for the present. How could she leave her parents while Sam was missing? When they heard that he had been found then she might try again, but for the moment her place, whether she liked it or not, was by her mother’s side.

Was there anyone in the entire nation who was happy? Daisy found the next few months almost unbearable. Flora seemed unable to cope without news of her sons, and her care and most of the work in the shop fell on Daisy’s narrow shoulders. She and Mr Fischer became even closer friends as he came into the shop almost every day and stayed to discuss news items with Daisy, and even to laugh over a programme they had both heard on the wireless. Both found Tommy Handley very funny, but they loved Mona Lott and her catchphrase, ‘It’s being so cheerful as keeps me going.’ It was even funnier spoken in Mr Fischer’s light German accent.

Each day they started up in hope when the cheerful ping of the door handle alerted them to the arrival of the postman and, at last, just as Daisy thought she would go out of her mind, there was a letter for her parents, not from the War Office, as promised, but from their middle son, Phil.

‘If you trust me, Daisy, I will mind the shop while you run upstairs.’

‘Can’t think of anyone I trust more, Mr Fischer. I’ll only be a minute.’

Daisy took the stairs to the flat two at a time. ‘Mum, look, it’s from Phil, from his ship.’

Flora held the letter to her heart for a moment before opening it. ‘Read it to me, our Daisy. My eyes is watering.’

Daisy thought quickly. Who usually popped in at this time? The vicar? He’d be all right with Mr Fischer. ‘It’ll have to be quick, Mum; I’ve left poor Mr Fischer minding the shop.’

‘He’s a clever man, Daisy, very educated, your dad says, with letters an’ all after his name. He’ll yell up the stairs if he needs you.’

‘Sorry I haven’t written as I’ve been busy and was sick a lot on the boats at first. That’s all gone now and I even walks jaunty like a real sailor. We’ve been in action is all I can say and you never heard the likes of the noise and I hopes you don’t never hear it, but we did well. Our captain who’s a really posh guy but very decent with it says we all ought to get a medal and maybe we will.

Learning to be on a ship was fun but a bit scary, like when we used to play Tarzan up the woods. Remember how you used to yell at us for jumping from tree to tree but some of the blokes I sail with has never seen a blooming tree, never mind climbed one. It’s easier than the way we did it. We got this thing called a breeches buoy – looks a bit like one of your apple fritters but on a rope. It’s better than Tarzan except when there’s

‘Next bit’s scraped out, Mum, and then he talks about learning all the aeroplanes. I must go.’ She handed her much happier mother the thin water-damaged sheet of paper and started down the stairs just as the siren went again.

The Petries, having no garden in which to put an Anderson shelter, had been forced to prepare a refuge room to which they could run if there was an air raid. The kitchen had only one window and only two outside walls and so they had thought that would be the best choice. But they were told that, on no account should the refuge room be on the top floor.

‘Incendiary bombs will probably burn through your roof and then through to the ground floor,’ they were told. ‘Have you got a basement? Best place, but if not, on the ground floor.’

There was no basement but there was a storeroom between the shop and the back door, which they were told would be perfect. It had a small window, which was there only to allow a little natural light to enter from the back door and only one outside wall. The Petries put as many of the stored goods as possible into the small corridor and carried everything else, especially the tins, upstairs. Daisy did not look forward to having to carry tins downstairs each time they needed to restock but, as her father reminded her, ‘There’s a war on.’

Into the rather claustrophobic refuge room they put candles, matches, an ancient oil lamp and a tin of oil, several air-tight tins in which food could be stored, and bottles of water. Every night before bedtime, Flora or one of the twins filled a Thermos flask with tea and put it inside the door of the room. It had been suggested that a wireless set might be a good idea as it was likely that the family would spend several hours at a time cooped up, but there was no electrical outlet for their precious Bakelite wireless and so it remained on Grandma Petrie’s old dresser in the kitchen. Instead they took playing cards and some old board games: Snakes and Ladders, and their favourite, The Farmyard Game with the awful Freddie the Fox. All of them were heartily sick of rushing into the room at the first wail of the siren, only to find that it was one more false alarm. One day soon, it would be real, if this was not the day.

But now Flora and Daisy sped down to the shop. Flora hurried to the refuge room but Daisy saw that Mr Fischer was still standing behind the counter and wearing Fred’s apron. ‘Oh, Mr Fischer, you should have gone to your shelter.’

‘It’s a street away, Daisy. I’m safer here under the counter.’

Daisy thought quickly. She locked the shop door. ‘Quick, into the refuge room with me and Mum. Dad’ll have gone to a shelter and there’s plenty of room.’

If Flora was surprised to have one of her customers in the room with them, she showed only pleasure at seeing the old man. ‘So much better than the Anderson shelter you’ll have, I think, Mr Fischer.’

‘Indeed, this is most luxurious, Mrs Petrie. There is an entire family of cockroaches in my shelter and various other species of entomological life.’ He looked at his companions’ puzzled faces and laughed. ‘Sorry, ladies, old habits die hard. Creepy-crawlies, Daisy.’

‘Ugh,’ mother and daughter said together.

‘Were you a teacher, Mr Fischer, in Germany, I mean?’ Daisy asked.

Flora mumbled something about nosiness but Mr Fischer didn’t seem to mind the question. ‘In a way, I suppose,’ was all he said.

‘Let’s see if that tea’s kept warm, Daisy, and there’s a biscuit in the tin, Mr Fischer.’

The tea was barely warm but they pretended to enjoy it and Flora asked Daisy to read their guest Phil’s letter.

‘Can you believe that I too played in the trees like Tarzan? I know, I look too old and stooped, but I was once a boy like Phil.’

Just then the ghastly high-pitched droning stopped and silence fell sweetly. They looked at one another, smiled, but waited for the all clear to sound before getting up and returning to the shop.

‘You’ll take a hot cuppa, Mr Fischer?’

‘Thank you, no, Mrs Petrie. I have promised to show the vicar how to use his stirrup pump. He is determined to be the best fire-watcher in Dartford. It’s not a popular job, as you know – hours and hours alone in a church tower or some such place – but he says if the vicar won’t take his turn to protect the church, how can he expect anyone else to do it?’

They said goodbye and Daisy promised to see him in the morning.

She worked in the shop all the next day but he did not come. He did not come the day after or the day after that, and so, without telling her parents, Daisy went round to The Rectory to speak to the vicar. She worried that the old man might have become ill.

‘Come in and sit down, Daisy.’

‘He’s not dead?’

‘No, my dear. A large motorcar came the night before last, very late. I was on the church roof but it was still quite light, you know, and I saw it. Two men went into the building and later they came out with poor Mr Fischer.’

Daisy’s world was turning upside down. ‘But why? Who took him away? Were they policemen?’

Mr Tiverton patted her hand. ‘I don’t know, my dear. They were plainly dressed and Mr Fischer did not seem frightened or concerned. You must know that all aliens have been rounded up, especially Germans. Frankly, I’m surprised that he was here so long.’

‘Where have they sent him?’

‘I have no idea where he is, Daisy. Many aliens have been put into camps, some have been sent away, even as far as Australia. But many have been questioned and allowed to return home – to their home here, that is, not the country from which they originally came.’

‘Or fled.’

‘Indeed. Or fled.’

‘When will we know?’

‘Oh, Daisy, I know so little. Perhaps someone will inform his landlady; perhaps she has already been told.’

But a very angry Mrs Porter had heard nothing and was extremely annoyed. ‘Best lodger I ever had. Near fifteen years he’s been with me, causes no trouble, reads ’is books, ever such fat ones, listens to ’is music, bit ’ighbrow for me but nice, and pays his rent on time. They just knocked on the door, came in and went up to ’is room – I ’eard them talking, quiet, like, and then they came down, without a by-your-leave and was gone.’

‘He wasn’t … they weren’t holding him, Mrs Porter?’

‘No, pet. He ’ad his old leather suitcase – ever such good quality – and ’is spare clothes is gone, some photographs, I think, but none of ’is books, but then I wouldn’t really know, would I?’

‘If you hear anything, Mrs Porter, would you let us know? We have his ration book and he’s bound to need that.’

In tears Daisy returned home.

‘Alien is not a nice word,’ she added after she had told her parents the news. There had to be a nicer word that meant someone from a different country.

‘He’ll be fine, Daisy, love. He’ll write to us to ask for his ration book and then we’ll be able to keep in touch.’

But he did not write and for a while the little book remained in the drawer of Fred’s splendid till. Eventually Fred took it round to Mrs Porter, to keep with the rest of Mr Fischer’s things, and the Petries stopped talking about Mr Fischer’s disappearance; it was just one more tragedy of this ghastly war.

Daisy, however, thought of him often.

The family had grown so accustomed to false alarms that they were taken completely by surprise when the first attack actually came.

The siren sounded.

‘C’mon, Daisy, run,’ Fred shouted, but she went on counting cash and nodded to him, which was her way of saying, ‘I’ll be there in a jiff.’

But then the coppers fell from her hands and rolled in every direction across the floor as they heard an ominous droning sound, a sound that they had never heard before.

‘God Almighty, Daisy Petrie, leave that bloody money and move, girl.’

Possibly more stunned by her father’s language than by the sound of the planes overhead, Daisy seemed rooted until they heard another sound, a splattering sound as if the biggest hailstones the world had ever seen were being thrown ferociously at the taped windows.

‘Guns, Daddy,’ screamed Daisy as she vaulted over a barrel of barley, which she had been repackaging, and fled after him through the shop door. She stopped dead in the hallway, turned and ran to the stairs. ‘Mum,’ she screamed. ‘Come down quickly.’ She was leaping upstairs as she called.

Flora was on her hands and knees crawling under the kitchen table. ‘I were just peeling potatoes, Daisy, and the table was right here.’

Daisy got down and held out her hand. ‘We’ve got to go to the refuge room, Mum; it’s safer. C’mon, before Dad comes to fetch us.’

Still clutching her potato peeler, Flora allowed herself to be led downstairs. They waited for a breathless moment just inside the shop, listening to the planes, and there was Fred, obviously about to look for them. Unceremoniously, Fred grabbed them both, pulled them through the back door and shoved them into the old storeroom. They slumped to the floor and then Fred, red in the face from exertion and sweating with fear for his family, said very quietly. ‘I panicked there, us not being in the same place.’ He turned on Flora, in anger. ‘What was you doing, not running down? You know the drill. First sound, wherever you are you head for this place.’

‘I were under the table.’

‘Gimme the knife, Mum,’ said Daisy, but her speaking brought her father’s wrath down on her.

‘And you, Daisy. You move when that damned thing goes. My God, I haven’t smacked you since you was about five but you do that again, my girl …’ He could not continue but reached over and awkwardly patted her foot, the only part of her he could reach.

Daisy stayed where she was on the floor waiting for her heart to stop beating so quickly. She could not believe how terrified she had been. Was it fear for herself or for her mother? As if she could read her daughter’s mind Flora reached out and took one of her hands. ‘Is this the real war then, Fred?’

She was answered by the sound of an explosion, and she burst into tears. Fred stopped glaring at his daughter and turned to comforting his wife. ‘There, love, don’t hear no more planes. Blighters have gone over. Be battering London by now.’

‘But it’s broad daylight, Dad. There’s people out shopping, children playing in the parks. It’s inhuman, that’s what it is.’

‘It’s war, Daisy.’ He was quiet for a moment and then voiced all their thoughts. ‘Rose’ll be all right; they have a big shelter at Vickers.’

No one spoke until the all clear sounded. They sat, each alone with his or her worries, but their hopes and prayers were for the same family members.