Winter of the World

Daisy sat at the window of her apartment in Piccadilly, watching the celebrations. The street was thronged with people, making it almost impassable to cars and buses. The girls would kiss any man in uniform, and thousands of lucky servicemen were taking full advantage. By early afternoon many people were drunk. Through the open window Daisy could hear distant singing, and guessed that the crowd outside Buckingham Palace was singing ‘Land of Hope and Glory’. She shared their happiness, but Lloyd was somewhere in France or Germany, and he was the only soldier she wanted to kiss. She prayed he had not been killed in the last few hours of the war.

Lloyd’s sister, Millie, showed up with her two children. Millie’s husband, Abe Avery, was also with the army somewhere. She and the children had come to the West End to join in the celebrations, and they took a break from the crowds at Daisy’s place. The Leckwith home in Aldgate had long been a place of refuge for Daisy, and she was glad to have a chance to reciprocate. She made tea for Millie – her staff were out there celebrating – and poured orange juice for the children. Lennie was five now and Pammie three.

Since Abe had been conscripted, Millie had been running his leather wholesaling business. His sister, Naomi Avery, was the bookkeeper, but Millie did the selling. ‘It’s going to change, now,’ Millie said. ‘For the past five years the demand has been for tough hides for boots and shoes. Now we’re going to need softer leathers, calf and pigskin, for handbags and briefcases. When the luxury market comes back, there’ll be decent money to be made at last.’

Daisy recalled that her father had the same way of thinking as Millie. Lev, too, was always looking ahead, searching out the opportunities.

Eva Murray appeared next, with her four children in tow. Jamie, aged eight, organized a game of hide-and-seek, and the apartment became like a kindergarten. Eva’s husband, Jimmy, now a colonel, was also somewhere in France or Germany, and Eva was suffering the same agonies of anxiety as Daisy and Millie.

‘We’ll hear from them, any day now,’ Millie said. ‘And then it will really be all over.’

Eva was also desperate for news of her family in Berlin. However, she thought it might be weeks or months before anyone could learn the fates of individual Germans in the postwar chaos. ‘I wonder whether my children will ever know my parents,’ she said sadly.

At five o’clock Daisy made a pitcher of martinis. Millie went into the kitchen and, with characteristic speed and efficiency, produced a plate of sardines on toast to eat with the drinks. Eth and Bernie arrived just as Daisy was making a second round.

Bernie told Daisy that Lennie could read already, and Pammie could sing the National Anthem. Ethel said: ‘Typical grandfather, thinks there have never been bright children before,’ but Daisy could tell that in her heart she was just as proud of them.

Feeling relaxed and happy halfway down her second martini, she looked around at the disparate group gathered in her home. They had paid her the compliment of coming to her door without an invitation, knowing they would be welcomed. They belonged to her, and she to them. They were, she realized, her family.

She felt very blessed.

(ii)

Woody Dewar sat outside Leo Shapiro’s office, looking through a sheaf of photographs. They were the pictures he had taken at Pearl Harbor, in the hour before Joanne died. The film had stayed in his camera for months, but eventually he had developed it and printed the pictures. Looking at them had made him so sad that he had put them in a drawer in his bedroom at the Washington apartment and left them there.

But this was a time for change.

He would never forget Joanne, but he was in love again, at last. He adored Bella and she felt the same. When they parted, at the Oakland train station outside San Francisco, he had told her that he loved her, and she had said: ‘I love you, too.’ He was going to ask her to marry him. He would have done so already but it seemed too soon – less than three months – and he did not want to give her hostile parents a pretext for objecting.

Also, he needed to make a decision about his future.

He did not want to go into politics.

This was going to shock his parents, he knew. They had always assumed he would follow in his father’s footsteps and end up as the third Senator Dewar. He had gone along with this assumption unthinkingly. But in the war, and especially while in hospital, he had asked himself what he really wanted to do, if he survived; and the answer was not politics.