Sure and Certain Death (8 page)

Aggie it was, therefore, who turned to Nan. ‘You gonna tell him or am I?’ she said harshly.

‘Tell who?’ I said. ‘Me? And what?’

Nancy began to softly sob. Aggie stared at her with tight lips, and then she looked up at me and said, ‘She knows all the women what’ve been murdered.’

‘What . . .’

‘Even this Jewish girl they found today,’ Aggie said. She looked across at Nan and said, ‘Knew her too, didn’t you?’

Nan just hung her head. I sat down opposite her and began to tell her I’d suspected as much because of her reluctance to tell me about the fact that she’d been to school with Violet Dickens. Now of course I knew that Violet had been to New City Road . . .

‘Oh, that ain’t all of it,’ Aggie said with a lot of aggression in her voice. She and Nan don’t see eye to eye a lot of the time, but this was downright nasty as far as I could see.

‘Aggie,’ I said, ‘let her speak . . .’

Nancy snapped her head up and looked me straight in the face with her tear-soaked eyes. ‘Frank,’ she said, ‘you have to remember we was all just girls at the time. You was already at the front and . . .’

‘Hang on a mo,’ I said. I didn’t understand what she was talking about and I said so. ‘You talking about the Great War, are you, Nan?’

‘Yes.’ She put her head down again now. Nan had been twenty-four when the Great War began. She, like me at the time, had been an enthusiastic supporter of it. Dad, who’d lived a bit and seen what had happened with the Boers in Africa, hadn’t been so keen. Nan and myself were proved the fools. Her maybe, as I was shortly to find out, more so even than me.

‘So . . .’

I could see that she was really struggling. Words were there but they just wouldn’t or couldn’t come out of her mouth. Eventually, unable to take it any longer, Aggie said, ‘She was a White Feather girl, Frank. Her and the others, they all did it together.’

I felt nothing at first. It can be the way of things when a shock is so great it’s almost unbearable. All but one of the mates I joined up with in 1914 died in the trenches and I don’t think I really broke down over any of them. It was all too unimaginable for that. Like this.

‘Frank, I . . . We was young and silly and . . .’

‘You sent men to their deaths!’ Aggie said to her. ‘You and all them other silly bitches! What did you think you was doing?’

Nan began to cry again, but Aggie just went on.

‘Giving every bloke out of uniform a white feather to tell him you think he’s a coward?’ She put one fag out and then immediately lit up another. ‘Nancy, men not fit enough to walk across London Bridge went off and enlisted because of stupid women like you! They died!’

‘Aggie . . .’

‘Frank, I have only just found out,’ Aggie said to me breathlessly. ‘She never told no one, and with good reason! Dad would’ve been furious.
I’m
furious. What you must think of her . . .’

The White Feather movement, as it came to be known later on, began in September 1914. A retired admiral from Folkestone organised thirty women to present white feathers to any man of serving age they saw out of uniform. All fired up by stories of rape and murder as the Germans invaded Belgium, these women saw themselves as doing essential work shaming cowards in defence of innocent civilians – themselves, they imagined, included.

The white feather itself, as a symbol of cowardice, comes from cock-fighting. I’ve never been to such a thing myself, but it’s said that some cockerels have white feathers in their tails which they show when they ‘turn tail’ as it were, when giving up a fight. ‘Showing the white feather’ therefore is showing your fear and cowardice in the face of the enemy.

Once I’d been approached by a White Feather girl, when I was home on leave. I was out of uniform at the time because I wanted and in fact needed to forget about the bloody trenches for the sake of my sanity. It was early 1916, I’d been fighting for just over a year, and most of my mates were already dead. When the woman gave me the feather I was first stunned, then I felt such violence in me that I had to just run away from her as fast as I could. I’d wanted to rip her head off. It hadn’t occurred to me that maybe I might try to explain my situation to her or perhaps even shock her by telling her tales of men drowning in mud and giant rats feasting on corpses. I’d just wanted to end her.

I looked over at my older sister and saw immediately the fear in her eyes.

Aggie put a hand on my shoulder and said, ‘Frank . . .’

‘You have to tell the coppers about this,’ I said to Nancy.

‘What, about me being involved?’

‘You’ve got to tell them who was in your . . . your group,’ I said. ‘If that is why these women are being killed . . .’ I stopped to swallow. My sisters both looked at me, knowing that I wanted to say so much more about how that made me feel. ‘Women are in danger.’

‘Including her!’ Aggie said as she looked across at Nan, and then she added, ‘How could you be so stupid? All the men who could fight were doing so! Your own brother was out there, for Christ’s sake!’

Nan has never been one to back down when Aggie has a go at her. She changed from weeping misery to outright fury. Her face, reddened already by crying, became almost purple with rage. ‘What do you know, Agnes!’ she screamed. ‘You was just a kid at the time! Our men were fighting for their lives against the Hun and yet there were blokes all over this country who were too weak and too cowardly to do their duty!’

‘Oh, and it was up to you and a load of other mad bitches from West Ham to go out and put that right, was it?’ Aggie said. ‘Christ, you make me sick, Nancy! Sick!’

‘What is going on?’

We looked up and saw the Duchess standing in the kitchen doorway. She must have been disturbed by all the shouting.

‘Nancy?’

As soon as she saw the Duchess, Nan began to cry once again. My mother looked over to me for answers, but I couldn’t give her any. I didn’t know what I felt at that moment – about almost anything. I ran out of the kitchen, down into the yard and headed west towards Canning Town.

Chapter Six

I
was in Hannah’s bed when the sirens went off. Dot Harris, her landlady, has an Anderson in the back yard of the house she shares with Hannah and the other ‘old girls on the game’, as Hannah calls them. Not that Dot ever bothers to use it, or in fact any of the other women either. Prostitutes, even when not actually working at the time, are a fatalistic bunch. But that said, I asked Hannah if she wanted to go down the shelter anyway.

She shook her head. ‘No. But H, if you want to go out running . . .’

I’m generally pounding the streets during raids, but this time I was so exhausted, mainly by the emotions I was feeling, that I said I’d really rather stay put.

‘I’ve one of them tins of vegetable soup we can share if you like,’ Hannah said as she pulled a small saucepan out of the inside of her range and then put it up on the hob. She only has one damp little room in Dot’s house, but it does have a range and so Hannah can always have heat and hot – or rather more usually lukewarm – food and drink almost whenever she wants it.

‘That’d be nice,’ I said, as I reached one naked arm over to the table at the side of the bed and picked up my fags and matches.

‘Capstan?’

‘No, not for the moment,’ Hannah said as she rifled in the small cupboard over her sink and took out a tin of Heinz soup. God alone knew where she’d got that from, but I knew better than to ask. Like it or not, my lady friend is a prostitute and so her life is made possible often by means I prefer not to think about. After a bit of a struggle with the opener, Hannah got the tin undone and then poured its contents into the pan on the range. She added a bit of water from the kettle to make the soup go a little further.

‘I know you’re feeling angry at the moment,’ she said as she stood by the range and stirred the soup with a wooden spoon. ‘But I know you and so I know how much you love your family.’

I’d told her about Nan just before she’d pulled me into her bed and made it all, temporarily, better. Now, in the calm that always follows our lovemaking, she was getting me to talk about it. She’s a very wise lady, my Hannah. It’s one of the many reasons why I love her.

‘Your Nancy was a silly girl,’ Hannah said. Outside, the drone of Luftwaffe bombers could now just be heard. ‘But a lot of girls were silly then. There was what I suppose you could call love of soldiers among them.’

‘Not all girls handed out white feathers,’ I said as I lit up my fag and then lay back down in her bed once again.

‘No, I know that,’ Hannah said. ‘And H, I can see why you’re angry, believe me. But however you feel about it, you’re going to have to talk to Nancy.’

‘I don’t want to!’

‘No, I know you don’t, but you’re going to have to!’ Hannah looked over at me with a very straight, no-nonsense expression on her face. ‘If, as you think, this killer is going after the White Feather girls in Nancy’s old group, then she could be in danger. And whatever you might feel about her now . . .’

‘I could kill her myself!’

‘Whatever you say now,’ said Hannah, shouting above the roar of the Heinkels and Messerschmitts up above, ‘you do love her and . . .’

A massive explosion from somewhere very, very near cut short Hannah’s words as the blast threw both her and the saucepan in her hand across the room. Stark naked as I was, I jumped out of that bed and ran over to her. The gas was out by this time but I could just make her out as she groaned at the foot of the door leading on to the landing.

‘Hannah!’

For a few seconds she made no further noise. I began to panic.

‘Hannah!’

‘Christ Almighty, H!’ I heard her say. ‘Bloody . . .’

Another explosion that was far too close rocked the house again and I heard the sound of something splintering somewhere up above. Either the plaster on the ceiling or the boards up above were under strain from the blast.

Dot Harris from downstairs called up, ‘Hannah love, you and Mr Hancock all right, are you?’

I heard Hannah take a deep breath and then she yelled, ‘Yes, Dot, all all right here!’

‘Fucking Nazis!’ Dot said, and then I heard what was obviously the sound of her shuffling back into her parlour once again.

‘Hannah . . .’

‘Well, all I can say, H, is that it’s a good job that old range don’t work properly,’ Hannah said breathlessly. ‘Being covered in cold soup, I can stand. Hot soup . . .’

‘Hannah,’ I said as I began to pull her up to her feet, ‘are you hurt?’

‘Nah!’ The sleeve of her dressing gown was damp and a bit lumpy too, but that was probably the soup. ‘Blimey, H, are you wearing anything or are you in the buff?’

‘I’m, well, I’m, er, I . . .’

She laughed at my so very obvious embarrassment. Then, still in the pitch blackness, she found my lips and kissed me. So it was that I made love in a raid with a woman covered from head to toe in Heinz vegetable soup. Mad as it seems now, we laughed and joked a lot as we did it then too. Only in the morning, when the thin winter dawn broke over yet more death and destruction in the city, did Hannah and I speak of the White Feather girls again.

Just as I was leaving her, Hannah said to me, ‘H, if you don’t know who the other girls in the group were, then you have to find that out. Speak to Nancy. Take her to the coppers. Marie Abrahams must be the last to die like this. She must!’

I knew that.

There had been nine of them. All under twenty-five and all with a passionate love for ‘our boys’, as they had called them, brave men in uniform. As well as Nancy and the four murdered women, there had been twins, Esme and Rosemary Harper, from Forest Gate, a Margaret Cousins from East Ham and another girl from Canning Town who Nan could only remember as Fernanda.

‘Her people was Portuguese,’ she said. ‘I don’t remember what her surname was.’

It had taken a fair bit of courage for Nan to speak to me first when I’d come home that morning. I was still wild with her, which showed in how I responded now. ‘Well, you’d better try and remember,’ I said. ‘Because all these old mates of yours could be in danger.’

‘Frank, we don’t know that it’s because of the white feathers . . .’

‘How did you all get together?’ I asked. ‘How did you come to do this, this . . .’

Nancy, Violet Dickens, Dolly O’Dowd and Nellie Martin had all been to New City Road School together. Although Nan and Nellie had never got on, Nellie had been a good friend of Dolly O’Dowd and of Violet Dickens. Marie Abrahams also came in via Dolly O’Dowd, who met her shopping on Green Street and became her friend. The Harper twins were cousins of Nellie Martin, and Margaret Cousins had worked with Violet Dickens when they’d been in service together in a house up in Woodford.

‘Violet’s maiden name was Watts,’ Nancy told me. ‘One of the Harper girls, Esme I think it was, got married after the Great War, but I don’t know what her name became. Marie became very close with Margaret and later with Fernanda too.’

‘What about this Fernanda woman?’ I asked.

Nancy frowned. ‘I think she was a friend of Margaret’s first off,’ she said. ‘I expect Margaret got married in the end. She had a sweetheart in the forces.’

‘Do you know what his name was?’

She smiled. ‘Same as yours. Frank.’

‘Frank what?’

Nancy shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Can’t remember.’

I sighed. ‘Nan,’ I said, ‘you’re going to have to tell the coppers all of this.’

Her face turned white. ‘What, that I was a . . .’

‘Sergeant Hill knows you and so it’ll be . . . well, it’ll be all right,’ I said. A lot of the old coppers had been in the Great War and most of them felt much the same as I did about the White Feather girls. Even with Sergeant Hill over at Plaistow, who was basically a friend, Nancy wasn’t going to have an easy time of it.

‘Will you come with me, Frank?’ she asked.