Winter of the World

When the toasts were over and the men began to smoke, Lev, who as the father of the bride was paying the bill, looked along the table and said: ‘Well, Fitz, I hope you enjoyed your meal. Were the wines up to your standards?’

‘Very good, thank you.’

‘I must say, I thought it was a damn fine spread.’

Bea tutted audibly. Men were not supposed to say ‘damn’ in her hearing.

Lev turned to her. He was smiling, but Daisy knew the dangerous look in his eye. ‘Why, Princess, have I offended you?’

She did not want to reply, but he looked expectantly at her, and did not turn his gaze aside. At last she spoke. ‘I prefer not to hear coarse language,’ she said.

Lev took a cigar from his case. He did not light it at once, but sniffed it and rolled it between his fingers. ‘Let me tell you a story,’ he said, and he looked up and down the table to make sure they were all listening: Fitz, Olga, Boy, Daisy, and Bea. ‘When I was a kid my father was accused of grazing livestock on someone else’s land. No big deal, you might think, even if he was guilty. But he was arrested, and the land agent built a scaffold in the north meadow. Then the soldiers came and grabbed me and my brother and our mother and took us there. My father was on the scaffold with a noose around his neck. Then the landlord arrived.’

Daisy had never heard this story. She looked at her mother. Olga seemed equally surprised.

The little group at the table were all silent now.

‘We were forced to watch while my father was hanged,’ Lev said. He turned to Bea. ‘And you know something strange? The landlord’s sister was there as well.’ He put the cigar in his mouth, wetting the end, and took it out again.

Daisy saw that Bea had turned pale. Was this about her?

‘The sister was about nineteen years old, and she was a princess,’ Lev said, looking at his cigar. Daisy heard Bea let out a small cry, and realized that this story was about her. ‘She stood there and watched the hanging, cold as ice,’ Lev said.

Then he looked directly at Bea. ‘Now that’s what I call coarse,’ he said.

There was a long moment of silence.

Then Lev put the cigar back in his mouth and said: ‘Has anyone got a light?’

(vi)

Lloyd Williams sat at the table in the kitchen of his mother’s house in Aldgate, anxiously studying a map.

It was Sunday 4 October 1936, and today there was going to be a riot.

The old Roman town of London, built on a hill beside the river Thames, was now the financial district, called the City. West of this hill were the palaces of the rich, and the theatres and shops and cathedrals that catered to them. The house in which Lloyd sat was to the east of the hill, near the docks and the slums. Here, for centuries, waves of immigrants had landed, determined to work their fingers to the bone so that their grandchildren could one day move from the East End to the West End.

The map Lloyd was looking at so intently was in a special edition of the Daily Worker, the Communist Party newspaper, and it showed the route of today’s march by the British Union of Fascists. They planned to assemble outside the Tower of London, on the border between the City and the East End, then march east.

Straight into the overwhelmingly Jewish borough of Stepney.

Unless Lloyd and people who thought as he did could stop them.

There were 330,000 Jews in Britain, according to the newspaper, and half of them lived in the East End. Most were refugees from Russia, Poland and Germany, where they had lived in fear that on any day the police, the army or the Cossacks might ride into town, robbing families, beating old men and outraging young women, lining fathers and brothers up against the wall to be shot.

Here in the London slums those Jews had found a place where they had as much right to live as anyone else. How would they feel if they looked out of their windows to see, marching down their own streets, a gang of uniformed thugs sworn to wipe them all out? Lloyd felt that it just could not be allowed to happen.

The Worker pointed out that from the Tower there were really only two routes the marchers could take. One went through Gardiner’s Corner, a five-way junction known as the Gateway to the East End; the other led along Royal Mint Street and the narrow Cable Street. There were a dozen other routes for an individual using side streets, but not for a march. St George Street led to Catholic Wapping rather than Jewish Stepney, and was therefore no use to the Fascists.

The Worker called for a human wall to block Gardiner’s Corner and Cable Street, and stop the march.

The paper often called for things that did not happen: strikes, revolutions, or – most recently – an alliance of all left parties to form a People’s Front. The human wall might be just another fantasy. It would take many thousands of people to effectively close off the East End. Lloyd did not know whether enough would show up.

All he knew for sure was that there would be trouble.