The Safest Place in London (40 page)

AFTERWORD

Joe Levin tasted seawater on his lips and, oddly, it made him smile. The B&I steampacket bucked and rolled as it headed into a squall and the seagulls swooped excitedly, trying to keep pace.

The Irish Sea was gunmetal grey, as welcoming as a day out at the seaside in winter. But Joe smiled. He sat on the deck and pulled his coat tighter around his shoulders and concentrated, a pencil wedged between his teeth, a postcard on his knee. The postcard showed a view of Liverpool's Royal Liver Building on one side. He had bought it just before he had boarded the steamer and he studied it now. It had been strange to be back in Liverpool, however briefly. The week he had spent in the naval hospital after being torpedoed now seemed like another world, seemed like it had happened to another person.

He sucked on the end of the pencil, thinking. After a time, he began to write to his wife and child.

AUTHOR NOTE

London experienced a ‘little Blitz' between January and April of 1944, which began with the raids on Friday 21 and Saturday 22 January. This raid did not hit the Bethnal Green area and the events I describe in Bethnal Green are entirely fictional. Bethnal Green Station was still under construction at the start of the war and was used extensively as a shelter during this period though it escaped any direct hits. The ‘
horrible death by suffocation
' to which Nancy Levin briefly alludes at the end of Chapter One refers to the 173 civilians killed in a crush entering Bethnal Green Station during a raid on 3 March 1943, an incident that falls outside the scope of this novel but which is well-documented, as are the fates of the
Polyanthus
, the
St. Croix
and the
Itchen
.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks are due—as ever—to my agent, Clare Forster, and my publisher, Annette Barlow, for your invaluable and continuing support, guidance and belief in me; to my editor-extraordinaire, Ali Lavau; to my dearest friend and supporter, Tricia Dearborn; to my dear friends Liz Brigden and Sharon Mathews who will appreciate the underground/overground reference; to my mother Sheila Joel who made the arduous journey with me by public transport to Chalfont St Giles, and my aunt, Anne Benson who was on the train that got stuck outside Neasden; to Peter Brigden for allowing me to use the story of the midwife; to Brian Christie who supplied invaluable information on Chalfont St Giles; to all the wonderful people at Curtis Brown and Allen & Unwin for your assistance, support, expertise and encouragement during the writing and publication of this book; and to the fine people at the Australia Council for the Arts who continue to provide me with encouragement and inspiration and who allow me the space to write, in particular Carolyn Watts and Michelle Brown.

SOURCES

The following publications, histories and memoirs proved invaluable in the writing of this book.

A Bethnal Green Memoir: Recollections of Life in the 1930s–1950s
by Derek Houghton, The History Press, Gloucestershire, UK, 2009.

A Short Guide to the Parish Church of Chalfont St Giles: An Outline of the History of the Church
by Anon.

An Underworld at War: Spivs, Deserters, Racketeers and Civilians in the Second World War
by Donald Thomas, John Murray, London, 2003.

Bombers and Mash: the Domestic Front 1939–45
by Raynes Minns, Virago, London, 1980.

Cairo, Biography of a City
by James Aldridge, edited by Jimmy Dunn, Little Brown and Company, Boston and Toronto, 1969.

Carry on London
by Ritchie Calder, English Universities Press, London, 1941.

Desert Rats: The Desert War 1940–3 in the Words of Those Who Fought There
by John Sadler, Amberley Publishing, Gloucestershire, UK, 2012.

Going Green—The Story of the District Line
by Piers Connor, published by Capital Transport Publishing, London, 1993.

London's East End—Life and Traditions
by Jane Cox, Seven Dials, 1994.

Many Histories Deep: The Personal Landscape—Poets in Egypt, 1940–45
by Roger Bowen, Associated University Presses, Cranbury, NJ, USA, 1995.

Our Street: East End Life in the Second World War
by Gilda O'Neill, Viking, London, 2003.

Social History of the Jews in England 1850–1950
by V.D. Lipman, Watts & Co., London, 1954.

The Bull's Eye
by Reginald Bell, Cassell, London, 1943.

The Jewish East End, 1840–1939
edited by Aubrey Newman, The Jewish Historical Society of England, London, 1981.

The Story of the London Underground
(Unapix Entertainment Inc., 1999)

Wartime Women: Sex Roles, Family Relations and the Status of Women During World War Two
by Karen Anderson, Greenwood Press, Connecticut, USA, 1981.

Whistling in the Dark: Memory and Culture in Wartime London
by Jean Friedman, University of Kentucky Press, USA, 1999.

Women in Wartime—The Role of Women's Magazines 1939–1945
by Jane Waller, Macdonald Optima, London, 1987.

And the following history websites:

http://www.desertrats.org.uk/history.htm

http://ww2history.com/testimony/Western/desert_rat

http://www.flamesofwar.com/hobby.aspx?art_id=700

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_Tank_Mk_VI

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panzer_III

http://www.griffonmerlin.com/2011/02/11/recreating-wartime-cairo/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Polyanthus_(K47)

http://uboat.net/allies/merchants/crews/ship3075.html

http://www.leithshipyards.com/ships-built-in-leith/1939to-1945/114-hms-polyanthus-yard-no-309-flower-classcorvette-royal-navy-built-1940.html

http://ianchadwick.com/blog/the-sinking-of-the-st-croixseptember-1943/