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Chapter One
AS EVER, AT seven thirty on a working day, the signature tune of the BBC Home Service’s Up in the Morning Early programme drifted out from the Bush radio on the dresser. Ida Brogan, already dressed in her workday skirt and jumper and with her bouncy chestnut-brown hair encased in a turban scarf, flipped a slice of yesterday’s bread in the frying pan.
It was the second Monday in October and Ida was standing in the kitchen of number 25 Mafeking Terrace, the three-up three-down Victorian workman’s cottage that had been her family’s home for the past dozen years.
Mafeking Terrace was situated between Cable Street to the south and the Highway to the north, just a short walk from London Docks. The narrow street was lined on both sides by houses identical to Ida’s. Every front door opened straight on to the pavement, without the benefit of a small garden or railing for privacy, while at the rear, each house had just a square paved yard with an outside toilet. A shared alleyway ran between each house and the one either to the left or to the right of it.
Before Chamberlain announced the country was at war with Germany a little over two years ago, families used the open space behind their homes to store their prams, tools and bicycles, but now the small yards were cluttered with stirrup pumps and sand-filled buckets ready to extinguish incendiary bombs, while barrels filled with soil were used for growing potatoes and iron drinking troughs for sprouting winter cabbage.
Life in the street had changed, too, since that fateful broadcast to the nation. Men had received their call-up papers and had gone off to the army, Ida’s eldest son Charlie among them, while children and expectant mothers and those with babes in arms were evacuated to the country.
Last year, when the Luftwaffe blitzed East London nightly, the Brogans’ terraced house had been packed to the gunnels as all the family took shelter there, but now that her two eldest daughters, Mattie and Cathy, were married with babes of their own, there was more room to spread out. Jo, her youngest daughter, had a bedroom to herself at the front of the house while Billy, the baby of the family, no longer had to share with his big brother.
Of course, as Queenie, Ida’s argumentative and contrary mother-in-law, occupied the front parlour, it was still a bit of a squeeze, but they were better off than many of their neighbours, who might emerge from their shelters after a visit from the Luftwaffe to find their houses reduced to a pile of rubble and all their worldly goods gone.
The blackout would still be in force for another hour, so the curtains across the window overlooking their backyard were closed as was the one across the back door. Therefore, the room where the Brogan family ate their meals, drank tea and exchanged gossip was illuminated by a 40-watt bulb which hung from the ceiling above. What with the blackout coming into force at half five in the evening and lasting until most people were arriving at work in the morning, you barely had time to draw back the curtains before you had to shut them again. What with that and the low-wattage output from the power station to conserve coal for the factories, the inhabitants of East London – well, in fact the whole country – were living in a dull twilight land.
‘Looks like the fog’s lifting,’ said Jerimiah, dabbing his freshly shaven face as he stood by the sink in his trousers and vest.
Ida raised her eyes from his breakfast sizzling in the lard and studied her husband of twenty-five years.
At forty-four Jerimiah Boniface Brogan was two years older than her and although he sported a few grey hairs at his temple and amongst the curls on his chest, he was as easy on the eye as he had been when they’d met all those years ago. A lifetime of heaving discarded household items on and off the back of his wagon meant his big-boned frame was still tightly packed with muscle and he towered above most of the men in the area by a good three inches.
‘Pity,’ said Ida. ‘The German bombers are bound to be back tonight, then.’
‘Pity too,’ he winked, ‘because I was hoping perhaps to have another night with you in the same bed.’
Suppressing a smile, Ida turned her attention back to the frying pan. ‘Honestly, Jerry, fancy thinking of such things and at your time of life!’
‘What can you be meaning, woman?’ he replied, an expression of incredulity spreading across his square-boned face. ‘I’m as frisky as a man half me age.’
‘Are you now?’ said Ida, making a play of moving the pan on the gas.
He flipped the towel over his shoulder and, striding across the space between them, grabbed her around the waist.
‘Sure, don’t you know the truth of it, me lovely girl?’ he said, pressing himself against her. ‘And a woman of your age shouldn’t be complaining either.’
‘Get away with you,’ she laughed, shoving him. ‘I’m the mother of four grown-up children not some slip of a girl to be dazzled by your Irish charm.’
‘That you may be,’ he replied, nuzzling her neck, ‘but you’re still a pleasing armful.’ He gave her an exaggerated kiss. ‘And as to my Irish charm: isn’t it the very same reason we have a quiverful in the first place.’
Laughing, she pushed him away again and he released her.
With his dark eyes still twinkling, Jerimiah grabbed his canvas shirt that was draped over the back of the chair and shrugged it on.
The back-door handle rattled and the curtain covering it billowed out as Queenie and a chill of icy air came into the room.
‘’Tis cold enough out there to freeze the hooves off the devil,’ she said, stomping into the room from her daily trek to the Jewish baker in Watney Street. She dumped her basket on one of the kitchen chairs and took out a tissue-wrapped tin loaf which she placed on the table. ‘Is there a cuppa in the pot going spare?’
Small and wiry and with her head barely reaching her enormous son’s shoulders, Jerimiah’s mother was in her sixty-fourth year. She had moved in with the family a decade ago after her husband Fergus was found face down in the mud at low tide having drunk his own body weight in Guinness after a three-day drinking spree.
At first glance, with her wispy white hair, twig-thin legs and a face like an apple left out in the sun, you’d be forgiven for thinking Queenie Brogan was one of those soft and gentle sorts of grannies who tickled babies under the chin and fed stray cats, but that’s where you’d be wrong.
From the time the first air raid had sounded, Queenie had refused to go to the air raid shelters. Her only concession to having the Luftwaffe rain death down on her each night was to pop in her false teeth when the siren went off so that if she arrived at the Pearly Gates before dawn she wouldn’t be embarrassed to greet St Peter.
Like Ida, Queenie was kitted out in her workday attire: a seaman’s greatcoat, so large it skimmed the floor as she walked; a brown serge dress and lace-up men’s boots, which looked way too heavy for her spindly legs to lift off the floor. To keep the cold at bay, she also wore the balaclava Mattie had knitted for Charlie, one of Jo’s old school scarves around her neck and fingerless leather gloves like the market traders wore.
‘The tea’s just brewing,’ Ida replied, as Queenie hung her outer garments on the nail behind the door. ‘I’ll pour you one after I’ve dished up Jerry’s breakfast.’
‘Well, before you do, you might want to throw one of these in for good measure.’ Reaching into the basket again she pulled out a screwed-up sheet of paper with three eggs nestling in the middle.
‘Where did you get those?’ asked Ida, scooping the fried bread out of the pan and on to a plate.
Queenie’s wrinkled face lifted in a toothless grin. ‘I found them.’
‘Where?’
‘Probably better not to ask,’ said Jerimiah, fastening the top button of his collarless shirt and winding his red neckerchief around his throat.
Ida regarded the precious eggs for a moment then picked up the large brown one. When all was said and done, Jerimiah was a working man with a hard day’s graft in front of him, plus a patrol with the Wapping Home Guard in the cold later, so he needed to be fed.
Ignoring her conscience about where the egg might have been found, Ida broke it into the pan and while it was crackling in the fat she poured Jerimiah and her mother-inlaw a mug of tea each.
‘You’ll have to have it without sugar as I’m saving the rations for Christmas,’ she said, placing the steaming mugs in front of them. ‘And no, don’t see if you can “find” me some, Queenie, as I don’t want the police knocking at the door asking about the black market.’
‘Sure, don’t you be worrying about the police now, Ida,’ said Queenie, in the soft Irish brogue that forty-plus years in London hadn’t yet softened. ‘For aren’t I on the best of terms with all those lovely lads at the station?’
‘Only because they’re forever arresting you for running bets for Fat Tony,’ replied Ida. ‘And I doubt that poor wet-behind-the-ears lad they sent down last time has recovered from the experience yet.’
A soft look stole across the old woman’s face. ‘Ah, he was a sweet lad, right enough, and very polite, too.’
‘Well, if that’s the case why did you scare him half to death by pretending to have a funny turn when he locked you in the cell?’ said Ida, splashing fat over the top of the egg.
Queenie waved her words away. ‘Because, Ida, a run-in with the law would be no fun at all if you didn’t get one over on a rozzer from time to time.’
Ida rolled her eyes and turned back to her task. Satisfied the egg was cooked she scooped it out of the pan and deposited it on the fried bread just as the eight o’clock pips sounded out from the wireless.
‘I ought to be off,’ she said, placing her husband’s breakfast in front of him. ‘I’ve put your sandwiches in the tin and topped up your flask.’
‘You’re a grand woman, so you are,’ said Jerimiah, spearing a piece of eggy bread with his fork.
As he ate his breakfast Ida pulled down a plate and bowl in readiness for their son Billy’s breakfast. Then she put the cover over the butter dish and wiped the crumbs from the breadboard.
‘Are you back for tea or going straight to the Methodist Hall?’ asked Ida, taking her coat from the back of the door.
Putting the last morsel of his breakfast in his mouth, Jerimiah stood up.
‘Our squad’s not on patrol until seven so I’ll have a j...
