Magnolia Square (46 page)

‘What’s a corkem?’ Hettie hissed to Miriam.

‘A fine man. A man worthy of admiration.’

‘Blimey.’ Hettie was impressed. ‘I’ve heard people call Jack a lot of things but never that little lot!’

‘I’m very pleased to meet you,’ Jack was saying inadequately to Christina’s mother and grandmother, still pole-axed with shock. Tina’s mother and grandmother! And
they’d been in London, living near the Thames, ever since 1938!
Where
on the Thames, for God’s sake? And how had Bob Giles managed to track them down?

‘Where on the Thames?’ Doris was asking Ruth. ‘They weren’t down in Greenwich, were they? They weren’t only spitting distance away?’

Ruth shook her head. ‘I don’t know, Doris. I only know that Emily said Moshambo had told her they were living in London, near the Thames. Since then Bob’s visited every
synagogue and every Jewish shop and factory south of the river. When he went out tonight it was to make enquiries on nearly the very last place on his list, but he knew a Mrs Berger was at the
address he had been given and so we hoped, and prayed . . .’

Eva Frank was still holding Jack’s hand, looking at him with unnerving gravity. At last she nodded her head, as if to say that he would do. ‘Once it would have mattered,’ she
said quietly and he knew that she was referring to his non-Jewishness, ‘but now . . . now other things matter also. If you love
meine Tochter
, if you are good to her and make her
happy, then I am happy, too.’

‘What a Christmas!’ Charlie was saying, shaking his head in disbelief. ‘What a wonderful, wonderful Christmas.’

‘Can we have some more carols?’ Rose asked, wanting things to get back to normal.

‘Can we show your ma and grandma a good old-fashioned knees-up?’ Nellie asked Christina, hoping a knees-up wouldn’t be thought disrespectful on such a monumentally emotional
occasion.

‘Can I have another mince pie?’ Billy asked Kate, mindful that it was Kate’s house they were in. ‘They weren’t ’alf scrumptious.’

As Daniel and Albert ushered Jacoba Berger towards the comfy easy chair that Daniel had vacated, and Jack told Eva that he hoped she and Jacoba would immediately leave wherever they were living
and move into number twelve with him and Christina, so that they would all be living together as a proper Jewish family should live together, there came another sharp rat-a-tat on the front
door.

Leon looked down at Kate, his arm around her shoulders. ‘Any idea who that can be, sweetheart? You haven’t invited anyone else, have you?’

She shook her head. No-one she could possibly think of had yet to arrive.

‘I’ll get it,’ Billy said, darting out of the room and into the hall, eager to make himself useful and to perhaps cadge another mince pie as he did so.

‘It looks as if we’re going to have two new neighbours,’ Leon said, looking towards Eva and Jacoba and knowing this was a Christmas no-one present would ever forget.

Kate turned to face him, saying lovingly, ‘And someone else who is going to be living pretty close to us is making their presence felt.’ Gently she took one of his strong dark hands
and laid it against her rounded stomach. ‘Can you feel those movements, darling? Like a little butterfly fluttering its wings? It’s our new son.’

‘Or our new daughter,’ Leon said, loving her with all his heart, knowing he would love her as long as he lived.

Billy charged back into the room. ‘It’s a policeman!’ he announced at the top of his voice. ‘’E thought Nellie might like to know there’s a young man on
’er doorstep. ’E says ’e’s got a kit-bag on his shoulder and that ’e don’t ’alf look tired.’

‘Oh, my giddy aunt!’ Nellie heaved herself exuberantly to her feet. ‘Ain’t this Christmas just the best ever? Ain’t this Christmas the bee’s knees? It’s
my ’Arold! It’s my ’Arold, ’ome at last!’

And as Hettie sat herself down at the piano again, Nellie lumbered out of the house faster than anyone had ever seen her move before, intent on ensuring that her nephew would be part and parcel
of the best, most memorable Christmas party Magnolia Square had ever had.

the third novel in Margaret Pemberton’s ‘The Londoners’ trilogy is out now.

It is early summer in 1953, and the friends and neighbours of Magnolia Square are looking forward to celebrating the coronation. The war has become a distant memory and the
future seems rosy. Kate Emmerson looks on with pride at her growing family, including Matthew, whose father was killed during the war. But Matthew’s wealthy relations have never really
forgiven Kate for marrying Leon, a West Indian who works as a Thames lighterman, and when Matthew runs away from his smart boarding school in Somerset, the tensions which exist between the two
families come to a head.

Meanwhile Zac, the wonderfully talented and handsome new signing at the local boxing club, is being watched hopefully by all the young women of Magnolia Square. But he has eyes for only one
– Carrie Collins, who has teenage children of her own and whose husband, Danny, seems more interested in the boxing club and his market stall than in her.

In the weeks leading up to the coronation, Magnolia Square is once again the centre of conflict and drama.

The first chapter follows here.

‘So I shall be wearing red, white and blue for the coronation, just as I did for VE Day,’ Mavis Lomax said breezily to her younger sister. They were in Lewisham
High Street.

Carrie, five years Mavis’s junior, was behind the family’s fruit and vegetable stall, polishing up a fresh delivery of apples on the corner of her gaily patterned, wrap-around
overall. ‘You’ll look ridiculous,’ she said bluntly, placing a nicely gleaming Cox’s at the centre of her apple display. ‘You looked ridiculous on VE Day, and you were
only in your thirties then. As I remember it, your red skirt was split halfway to your thighs and your blue-and-white spotted blouse had a cleavage so low, it nearly met it. Now you’re in
your forties you should show a bit of sense.’

‘I’m forty,’ Mavis said with emphasis and a toss of her bottled-blonde, poodle-cut curls, ‘not forty-two or forty-four or ’alfway to fifty, and I shall wear wot I
bloomin’ well like.’ She was visiting the stall as a customer and she transferred a wicker shopping basket laden with potatoes and carrots and a couple of pounds of the apples Carrie
had polished earlier from one scarlet-nailed hand to the other. ‘You should try taking a leaf out of my book and tart yourself up a bit. You’re getting to look quite frumpy. Next thing
you know you’ll be like our mum, wearing curlers all day and only taking your pinny off when you go to bed.’

She stood with her weight resting on one leg, the curve of her hips lushly voluptuous beneath the tightness of her caramel-coloured pencil skirt. ‘Me and Ted are off down The
Bricklayer’s Arms tonight,’ she continued, noticing for the first time that Carrie, usually so buoyant and ready for a laugh, looked as fed-up as she sounded. ‘Why don’t you
and Danny come with us? We could have a bit of a knees-up, just like the old days.’

Carrie shook her head. ‘Thanks, but no thanks,’ she said, grudgingly appreciating the spirit in which the offer had been made. ‘Danny’s coaching at the club tonight, and
I don’t want Rose sitting in on her own.’

Mavis was about to suggest that Carrie bring her fourteen-year-old daughter with her but then decided against it. She and Carrie were as different as chalk and cheese and, whereas she had quite
happily often taken her two youngsters for a drink when they were still under age, it wasn’t something Carrie was ever likely to do. ‘See yer then,’ she said, about to turn on her
heel and begin the walk home. A thought occurred to her and she paused. ‘’Ave yer seen the new boxer the club’s signed up? Our Beryl says he’s a smasher – tall, blond
and ’andsome, with shoulders on him as wide as a street.’

Carrie suppressed a spurt of irritation. Despite her long and apparently happy marriage, Mavis had always been an outrageous flirt and – if the rumours were true – worse, and turning
forty hadn’t cured her.

‘If he is, he’ll be fifteen years too young for you,’ she said unkindly.

Mavis chuckled, laughter lines crinkling the corners of cat-green eyes. ‘That’s what you think, our Carrie. If he’s twenty-five, I think he’ll be just the right
age!’ Still chuckling throatily, she walked off down the High Street, not the focus of quite as many masculine, head-turning glances as she had once been, but still the object of a good
many.

Carrie shook her head in despair. How Ted, her quiet-spoken brother-in-law, endured his rackety home life, Carrie couldn’t even begin to imagine.

‘Three pahnds o’ carrots, dearie, and ’alf a stone o’ spuds,’ a customer said, opening her shopping bag so that Carrie could tip the veg straight into it off the
scales. ‘Was that your Mavis I saw you chatting to a minute or so ago? What’s she done with ’er ’air? Permed it? I’ve never seen so many curls on a grown woman before.
She’ll be able to play Goldilocks in the next Christmas panto, won’t she!’

With an effort, Carrie summoned a laugh and agreed with her. She didn’t truly feel like laughing, though. Mavis couldn’t possibly have known it, but her remark about her becoming
frumpy had hit home very hard. That morning, for the first time ever, her husband Danny had addressed her as if she wasn’t his wife but his mother. It was something lots of south-east London
men did, of course, but usually only after they were well into middle age. Her own father nearly always referred to her mother as ‘Ma’, rarely as Miriam. ‘Put the kettle on,
Ma,’ he would say lovingly to her. ‘Me stomach finks me froat’s bin cut.’ Daniel Collins, her father-in-law, was just the same. ‘I’m off down to The Swan for a
couple of jars, Ma,’ he would say to Hettie in his breezy, genial manner. ‘Do you want me to bring some fish and chips in on my way home?’

Until now, Carrie had never really given it much thought. Her mother and Hettie were both well in their sixties, and somehow their husbands referring to them by the all encompassing
‘Ma’ didn’t seem odd. But she wasn’t in her sixties! And she didn’t want her husband referring to her as if all sexuality had gone out of their relationship and only
loving mateyness remained. Across the pavement from the Jennings’ family fruit and vegetable stall were the large plate-glass windows of Marks & Spencer’s, and, as the stream of
pedestrians passing up and down lulled, Carrie could see her reflection quite clearly. She chewed the corner of her lip. Was she beginning to look like her mother? She was big, certainly, but then
she’d always been big, and the capacious leather cash-bag she wore for her daily stint at the stall didn’t help. Tied around her waist, it was so bulky it would have made a ballerina
look as ungainly as an elephant. ‘But at least you’re not fat, Carrie,’ her best friend, Kate Emmerson, always said to her whenever she bemoaned her size. ‘You’re just
splendidly Junoesque.’ Carrie folded her arms and, with her head a little to one side, studied her reflection. It was quite true that she wasn’t fat in the way many contemporaries of
hers and Kate’s had suddenly become fat, but then she hadn’t had the number of children most of their old schoolfriends had had. A nasty miscarriage some years after Rose was born had
ensured there’d been no more babies, though she had dearly wanted more.

A light May breeze tugged at her hair. Coal-dark and thick, with a strong wave to it, she wore it as she had worn it ever since she was a young girl, untidily loose and jaw-length. Sometimes she
clipped it back, but only rarely, and she certainly never experimented with it the way Mavis did hers, following every hair fashion that came out and, in-between times, copying the style of whoever
was her favourite film star.

‘I said, a bunch o’ radishes and two boxes o’ cress,’a customer said irately, rattling her carrier bag for Carrie’s attention. ‘Cor blimey, gel, but you
ain’t ’alf wool-gathering! An’ if those lettuces are fresh an’ there’s no slugs in ’em, I’ll take two.’

For the rest of the day, until her father came to pack up the stall at five-thirty and to clear up all the debris that had accumulated around it, Carrie did her best to rise above the depression
she was feeling. People didn’t come shopping down the market to be served by someone with a long face. They came not only for cheap, fresh produce, but for a smile and a cheery word as
well.

‘Yer can tell Danny I’ll be dahn the club tonight to watch this new bloke spar,’ Albert Jennings said, relieving her of the day’s takings and paying her handsomely out of
them, as he always did. ‘It’ll be interestin’ to see ’ow ’e shapes up. Jack seems to think ’e’s got ’imself a real winner.’

Jack was Jack Robson, local rogue; owner of Lewisham’s Embassy Boxing Club; Danny’s boss; their neighbour and, ever since she and Danny were school kids, their friend.

‘Well, if Jack thinks he’s the bee’s knees, he probably is,’ Carrie said, not overly interested. She picked up her raspberry-pink swing-back coat from off a stool,
slipped it on and kissed Albert on his leathery cheek. ‘See you in the morning, Dad,’ she said, grateful that it was he, not her, who trekked up to Covent Garden in the early hours for
produce and who always set the stall up. ‘Ta-ra.’