Small Island Read online

  But Auntie Dorothy said he was a gentleman. She spent most of our evenings together explaining to me why. Did he or did he not open doors for me? Only a gentleman would do that. He walked on the outside of me when going down the road. ‘You’ll not get splashed by a carriage,’ Auntie Dorothy told me.

  ‘Auntie, when did you last get splashed by a carriage?’

  ‘Well, a motor-car, then, or a tram. And don’t be cheeky.’

  He stood up if I stood up and wouldn’t sit down until I sat down. And for two months all he did was shake my hand when we said goodnight. And when he did pluck up the daring to kiss me, he puckered his lips so tight it felt like kissing a chicken’s beak.

  ‘He don’t talk much, Auntie.’

  ‘That’s good – you’d not want a chatterbox.’

  But, crikey, he lived in Earls Court with his father, he was a clerk at Lloyds Bank and he liked fresh air. Surely after four months there was more to know about him than that?

  He spoke more with Auntie Dorothy than with me. First time he came for tea there she was sitting upright on her lounger, her corset back on but not doing much, wishful-thinking red lips painted on way past her natural mouth and an inch of grey roots on her hair that gave the impression that the rest of it, which was dyed black, was hovering, waiting to land. All three of us were listening to the dog licking its private parts when Bernard piped up to tell Auntie how his great-great-grandfather changed their family name from Blight to Bligh in the hope of reversing a run of bad fortune.

  ‘Did it work?’ Auntie asked. And he laughed all jolly. I just sat with my mouth open. He’d never said anything near half as interesting to me. ‘Do you think there’ll be a war?’ Auntie asked him. And he talked for a good ten minutes on how, unfortunately, he thought it unavoidable. Alone with Bernard I only ever heard my silly voice, making no more sense than when my teeth chattered with the cold, but the silence was just too loud for me.

  ‘He’s shy with you, love, and that’s as it should be,’ Auntie assured me. ‘You’re lucky there, Queenie. That man is a brick – you’ll be safe as houses with him.’

  So I asked her, ‘Do you think we’re courting?’

  ‘Of course you’re courting,’ she told me.

  ‘Is that all courting is?’

  And she said, ‘Well, what did you think it was?’

  I’d seen girls who were courting. They looked dreamy-eyed on the world, floating on feet that never felt the ground. They plucked at daisies for most of the day, sighing, ‘He loves me, he loves me not, he loves me’. When they danced, their best boys held them so close you couldn’t pass a paper between them. And when they kissed, it was rapture that made their legs buckle, delight that made it taste of nectar. Courting girls thought their best boys to be fashioned by the hand of God Himself.

  I moved the dressing-table mirror to see what all the other Queenies thought of courting Bernard. Not much. They were all a bit down in the mouth about it.

  ‘Bernard, I’ve enjoyed our little trips but I don’t think we should see each other any more.’ I said it on a park bench, as a drizzle of rain was just starting to polka-dot his coat. Like a baby who’s just been slapped but doesn’t know it smarts yet, it happened ever so slowly. His face went from plain-day, through quizzical, then headlong into hurt. I never thought Bernard could be caught by feelings but there they were. Unmistakable it was, the quivering lip, the watering eye. He was about to cry. It was the most exciting thing he’d ever done.

  ‘No, Queenie, please don’t say that. I’ve grown very fond of you. Our walks mean a lot to me.’

  ‘I didn’t know you’d be so upset,’ I said. I thought only women felt emotion – all men far too practical for such silliness.

  ‘Yes, Queenie, I really am very fond of you. I know I’m older than you and perhaps not as gay as you’d like. But over these months . . .’ He stopped, turned his head away from me and there it was, the back of his neck.

  ‘It’s just, Bernard . . .’ I began, but he spun back fast, held my hands tight in his.

  ‘Please, please don’t say any more. Just give me another chance. Please, please, Queenie . . .’ And he was crying, only one tear but crying none the less when he said, ‘I was hoping to persuade you that we should get engaged.’

  Oh, blinking heck, I thought, which is not what you should think when your best boy’s just proposed. ‘Well, never mind, then, I’ll see you again on Thursday, Bernard,’ was what I said. And that was how it was left.

  We’d been for a walk along the river up to Big Ben. It wasn’t late when Bernard and I reached the sweet shop. I couldn’t get the door open. I thought it was just stiff – we’d had a lot of rain. It cracked an inch but then wouldn’t budge. There was something behind it. Bernard had a go using his shoulder as I called out for Auntie. I was about to yell again when Bernard said, ‘She’s behind the door on the floor.’

  And I teased him, ‘That rhymes – you’re a poet, Bernard,’ before I’d quite realised what he’d said.

  She was laid out on the floor clutching the closed sign to her breast. Pale as sorrow apart from her wishful-thinking red lips. And as out of place as a fallen tree trunk on a road. I thought if I could just return her to her natural position on the lounger she’d be all right.

  ‘Auntie, get up?’ I said, as Bernard knelt beside her feeling her pulse and putting his cheek right to her nose.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I asked him, but I got no reply. It was then I noticed the two coiffured back paws of Prudence sticking out from under her like the wishbone on a chicken. Bernard jumped when I screamed at her, ‘Auntie, you’ve fallen on the dog!’

  And then I’m not quite sure what happened. But Bernard was there, pulling me away from Auntie, taking me into the back room, sitting me down on the lounger and saying twice, maybe three times or more, ‘Queenie, are you listening? Just stay here. It will be all right. Just sit here until I come back.’ I could see him through the window glass in the door putting a blanket over her. Then leaving the shop and coming back in with Mr Green from the greengrocer’s next door. Some other people came in, I know they did – whispering and shaking their heads while Bernard was trying to make me drink some foul sweet tea.

  ‘What’s happened to her?’

  ‘There’ll be an ambulance coming soon.’

  ‘Will she be all right? What about the dog? Should you fetch her in here? Only she’ll fret and bark when they come.’

  ‘Mr Green’s kindly taken the dog,’ he said. And then he sat by me to hold my hand.

  Auntie Dorothy had had a stroke. They assured me at the hospital that she was killed outright and, honestly, truly, wouldn’t have known that when she fell she crushed poor Prudence flat. She’d only got off her lounger to put the closed sign up and measure out some of her blinking coconut ice.

  At her funeral, burly, broad-shouldered, fat-handed butchers – Father and four of Auntie’s brothers – were gasping and sweating to lift her in her coffin. They had to rope in Bernard, who stepped forward without a word to put his skinny clerk’s shoulder under one end. Our singing of ‘Abide With Me’ was accompanied by their grunting and grumbling as they carried her up the aisle. She would have laughed. Her Montgomery, Auntie Dorothy would have told them, would have had no trouble lifting her because she was his Duchess.

  Mother’s funeral outfit looked to be last worn for King Ted’s or his late mother’s passing. With her hand on my arm, which still clasped a damp, tear-stained handkerchief, she said, ‘Don’t worry, Queenie. You can come back home now. There’s plenty for you to do around the farm.’ And I’m not sure if I said it out loud because my elocution teacher would have despaired, but I know I thought it – Not on your nelly, Mother! You’ll not get me back there. I looked over at Bernard, smoking in a huddle with Father and the other men.

  ‘No,’ I told her. ‘I’ve some good news for you. I’m getting married, Mother, to Bernard Bligh.’

  Twenty-five

  Queenie


  Bernard would untie his pyjama bottoms, loosen the cord then bunch the fabric into his hand so they didn’t drop and spoil the surprise. ‘Darling . . .?’ It was said as a question but the rest of it was never uttered: the shy missing words hanging between us were too lewd to show themselves. I’d stop reading to loosen my nightdress while he got into bed. He’d kiss me, in the early days, full on the lips with a timid tongue slipping gingerly into my mouth. Later it was the peck from a chicken’s beak. His hand would slide under the covers tracing my nightie until it could go no further. He would ruckle up the material, pulling it up and up until he slipped his hand between my legs to part them. Then he’d roll himself on top of me. In the early days his eyes gazed down on mine – his soft, warm breath panting. Later he looked into a distance in the headboard, the corners of his mouth filling with two spots of spit as white as breadcrumbs. With the concentration of searching for a light switch in the dark, he’d fumble about until eventually, located, he’d stick it in. Slippery as a greasy sausage sometimes but mostly it was the bark of a tree. And he’d sigh as if lowering himself into a hot bath, his hand creeping up my nightie to lie awkward on my left breast. A held breath that turned him pink, then a grunt that slathered spittle all down my neck, and it was all over. In the early days he kissed me before he rolled off but later he just left me with the indent from his pyjamas buttons.

  All that lily-of-the-valley scent. Hours spent waving my hair and powdering my face to porcelain perfection. Silk stockings, red lips, and hands as soft as lah-di-dah. And I was married to a man who wouldn’t have noticed if I’d come to bed in my gas mask. If I could have asked Auntie Dorothy, ‘Is that all sex is?’ I know what she would have said: ‘Well, what did you think it would be?’

  Babies, that’s what I thought! All those warnings of things that could leave me in the family way. I’d been scared simple from the time my breasts first poked up in my jumper. Kissing at the garden gate, canoodling at the pictures. If he stuck his tongue in your mouth that was definitely a baby. If he touched your breast, well, that was twins. And what girl didn’t know you could fall pregnant sitting on a toilet seat? So sex every Saturday, Sunday and sometimes twice in the week for over a year should surely have left me with child.

  ‘Do you take pleasure in conjugal relations?’ the doctor asked me.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ I said.

  ‘You’re not sure if you find it pleasurable, Mrs Bligh?’

  ‘Not sure what it is, Doctor.’

  I was the most bothersome thing he’d had in his dingy surgery since he last squashed a buzzing bluebottle against the glass. If I didn’t partake fully and enjoy relations with my husband I would never get pregnant, he assured me. ‘A young, pretty, healthy woman like you cannot have a problem. My advice to you is to go home and try harder.’

  The vicar at St John’s Church wondered if it was wise to want to bring a child into the world when there was almost certainly a war coming. Told me to go away and think very carefully about it. So I went to the Roman Catholic church instead and lit a candle. I knew they wouldn’t mind.

  ‘I would like children, Queenie,’ Bernard told me more than once. Accusing me or near as. He thought I didn’t realise that he searched in my chest of drawers to see if the packets of sanitary towels were open or still shut. He always knew when it was my time of month. But what he didn’t know was that with every curse that came and went I cried over those bloody rags.

  From the basement to the top there were sixty-five stairs in the house in Earls Court. I told Bernard after I’d counted them. ‘Indeed,’ he said. And that was not counting the five up to the front door. Sixty-five stairs and endless rooms. But Bernard and his father, Arthur, lived like a couple of unwelcome mice in the few rooms in the basement. All the other rooms, except one, were empty. They used to have lodgers – men, mostly, who came to London for work, stayed a few weeks or months and then moved on. With every vacated room Bernard closed the curtains, covered the chairs and beds with newspaper and shut it up.

  The wedding confetti had hardly finished floating to the ground when Bernard told me, ‘I don’t want my wife to go out to work.’

  I’d hugged him. Who wouldn’t after so many years as a skivvy? I was to be a housewife. I could hear Auntie Dorothy: ‘Oh, Queenie love, you’ve landed on your feet there.’

  ‘Let’s open up the house,’ was this new bride’s suggestion. Wielding my lavender polish and duster all day I tried to show Bernard how it could be. I put flowers and a cloth on the table. Changed the heavy red brocade curtains for modern ones with roses climbing up. ‘We could have a sitting room for ourselves.’ I persuaded Bernard to move out some of the enormous old-fashioned bookshelves and cupboards that lurked like the ghosts of families past. ‘You could have a study, Bernard, use one of the rooms for somewhere to read.’ Let in some light. Open the windows. ‘It could be a proper home again,’ I said. But most things I suggested were met with Bernard’s shaking head. ‘Why not?’ I’d ask him.

  ‘I’ve got my reasons.’ But I never really got to hear them. Didn’t I have enough to do to look after him and his father, what with the shopping, the cooking, the cleaning? And, silly woman that I am, didn’t I know that there was a war coming? Or sometimes he’d mutter something about wanting to move to the suburbs.

  Twenty-six

  Queenie

  That blinking grandfather clock went off every fifteen minutes. I’d near as begged Arthur not to keep winding it up. Bernard said it was his father’s clock and it had always been kept wound even when he was away in France. I think those two were deaf to it, it being so familiar to them. So with those ruddy bells tolling for me again I nearly missed Chamberlain’s speech. I was knitting. Bernard kept looking over to my needles as they clacked away. I could see they were annoying him. He pulled his chair a little closer to the wireless. Then slyly looked over at them again. You’ll have to say, I thought. You’ll have to open your mouth and make conversation. Queenie dear, could you please stop knitting for a little while? I can’t hear what is being said properly. But I knew he wouldn’t. He’d tut, maybe, but that would be it. I’d knitted this wool three times. ‘This morning the British ambassador in Berlin handed the German Government the final note . . .’ Every time I finished I unravelled it and knitted it up in another style. ‘. . . withdraw their troops from Poland or a state of war would exist between us . . .’ He did ask once, ‘You’ve been knitting that garment for a long time?’ which made me smile. ‘. . . I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received and that consequently this country is at war with Germany.’ So that was it, just ding-dong, ding-dong, clack, clack, clack, and there you go, we were at war.

  Then blow me if the air-raid siren didn’t go off! For a good few seconds all three of us stared at each other. We’d heard it before, taken no notice of it. But that was before the war, which was only a few minutes ago. Now it was the war, so there was every chance that we were going to die.

  Bernard moved first – not towards me: he lunged for Arthur’s gas mask, grabbed it from the sideboard and threw it at his father. I waited for him to throw me mine but it was his next. I had to grab mine myself and Bernard was yelling, ‘Gas masks! Gas masks!’ And any loud noise made Arthur shake. So ‘Gas masks! Gas masks,’ and the siren made Arthur tremble so much his fumbling hands could make no sense of the box let alone the mask – even though we’d practised it often enough. And I was wondering, Will he start coughing, choking, spluttering with the poison while I’m putting on mine?

  Bernard was still shouting although his voice sounded like it was coming from a deep hole with his mask over his face. And for the first time I had to tell him, ‘Oh, please, shut up,’ which was a bit of a turn-up considering they might have been the last words I ever said to him. But he didn’t hear, too busy unlocking the back door. I couldn’t breathe with the gas mask on – no air let alone poison gas was getting through. Arthur’s was round the back of his head, the straps pressing down over
his nose and he was shaking so much that anyone else seeing him might have thought he was trying to make us laugh.

  Then I heard, ‘Schnell, schützen Sie sich!’ being yelled. And I thought, the war’s on for, what? no more than five minutes, and there’s Germans coming down our stairs. I was trembling then. ‘Bernard,’ I shouted, as he heard it – ‘Schützen Sie sich!’ and some other foreign words. And I swear he looked startled, which is odd because he had a gas mask on. It was me that remembered, ‘It’s Mr Plant!’ just before our lodger, a refugee from outside Berlin, ran into the room. I let out such a long breath it steamed up my mask. And Mr Plant’s arms were flapping like someone was pulling them on a string from the ceiling.

  ‘Gas mask?’ Bernard asked him. And he looked at us one at a time, then slapped his hand to his forehead muttering something nobody could understand – except Hitler if he was here. ‘You’ll be gassed alive, man,’ Bernard shouted at him. And this gent started to walk out of the room, to go up the sixty-five stairs to get his blinking mask.

  I grabbed him. ‘No, get in the shelter, there’s no time now.’

  Bernard shouted at me then: ‘He’ll need his mask.’

  He was not a young man. ‘It’ll take him till next Tuesday to get it,’ I said. ‘There’s no time.’

  With the door open I looked up at a blue sky. Dazzling sun threw the shade of next door’s tree across the garden, while a blackbird on the wall held its head up to let out its song. Until, that is, it saw the four of us scrambling across the yard. I thought the sky would be blackened with the gently floating wings of parachuting Nazis. But nothing. Just the bird watching us silently from the safety of the tree.