Winter of the World

But it made her miserable. Her work for the Red Cross filled her days, but in the evenings she had nowhere to go and nothing to do. She went to the movies twice a week. She tried to read Moby Dick but found it tedious. One Sunday she went to church. St James’s, the Wren church opposite her apartment building in Piccadilly, had been bombed, so she went to St Martin-in-the-Fields. Boy was not there, but Fitz and Bea were, and Daisy spent the service looking at the back of Fitz’s head, reflecting that she had fallen in love with two of this man’s sons. Boy had his mother’s looks and his father’s single-minded selfishness. Lloyd had Fitz’s good looks and Ethel’s big heart. Why did it take me so long to see that, she wondered?

The church was full of people she knew, and after the service none of them spoke to her. She was lonely and almost friendless in a foreign country in the middle of a war.

One evening she took a taxi to Aldgate and knocked at the Leckwith house. When Ethel opened the door, Daisy said: ‘I’ve come to ask for your son’s hand in marriage.’ Ethel let out a peal of laughter and hugged her.

She had brought a gift, an American tin of ham she had got from a USAF navigator. Such things were luxuries to British families on rations. She sat in the kitchen with Ethel and Bernie, listening to dance tunes on the radio. They all sang along with ‘Underneath the Arches’ by Flanagan and Allen. ‘Bud Flanagan was born right here in the East End,’ Bernie said proudly. ‘Real name Chaim Reuben Weintrop.’

The Leckwiths were excited about the Beveridge Report, a government paper that had become a bestseller. ‘Commissioned under a Conservative Prime Minister and written by a Liberal economist,’ said Bernie. ‘Yet it proposes what the Labour Party has always wanted! You know you’re winning, in politics, when your opponents steal your ideas.’

Ethel said: ‘The idea is that everyone of working age should pay a weekly insurance premium, then get benefits when they are sick, unemployed, retired or widowed.’

‘A simple proposal, but it will transform our country,’ Bernie said enthusiastically. ‘Cradle to grave, no one will ever be destitute again.’

Daisy said: ‘Has the government accepted it?’

‘No,’ said Ethel. ‘Clem Attlee pressed Churchill very hard, but Churchill won’t endorse the report. The Treasury thinks it will cost too much.’

Bernie said: ‘We’ll have to win an election before we can implement it.’

Ethel and Bernie’s daughter, Millie, dropped in. ‘I can’t stay long,’ she said. ‘Abie’s watching the children for half an hour.’ She had lost her job – women were not buying expensive gowns, now, even if they could afford them – but, fortunately, her husband’s leather business was flourishing, and they had two babies, Lennie and Pammie.

They drank cocoa and talked about the young man they all adored. They had little real news of Lloyd. Every six or eight months Ethel received a letter on the headed paper of the British embassy in Madrid, saying he was safe and well and doing his bit to defeat Fascism. He had been promoted to major. He had never written to Daisy, for fear Boy might see the letters, but now he could. Daisy gave Ethel the address of her new flat, and took down Lloyd’s address, which was a British Forces Post Office number.

They had no idea when he might come home on leave.

Daisy told them about her half-brother, Greg, and his son, Georgy. She knew that the Leckwiths of all people would not be censorious, and would be able to rejoice in such news.

She also told the story of Eva’s family in Berlin. Bernie was Jewish, and tears came to his eyes when he heard about Rudi’s broken hands. ‘They should have fought the bastard Fascists on the street, when they had the chance,’ he said. ‘That’s what we did.’

Millie said: ‘I’ve still got the scars on my back, where the police pushed us through Gardiner’s plate-glass window. I used to be ashamed of them – Abie never saw my back until we’d been married six months – but he says they make him proud of me.’

‘It wasn’t pretty, the fighting in Cable Street,’ said Bernie. ‘But we put a stop to their bloody nonsense.’ He took off his glasses and wiped his eyes with his handkerchief.

Ethel put her arm around his shoulders. ‘I told people to stay home that day,’ she said. ‘I was wrong, and you were right.’

He smiled ruefully. ‘Doesn’t happen often.’

‘But it was the Public Order Act, brought in after Cable Street, that finished the British Fascists,’ Ethel said. ‘Parliament banned the wearing of political uniforms in public. That finished them. If they couldn’t strut up and down in their black shirts they were nothing. The Conservatives did that – credit where credit’s due.’