The People on Privilege Hill Read online

  But he rang the bell and after a time a faint light under the door went out. The door opened and in the shadows stood his mother.

  She was smaller and had neater hair, and the hand she laid on his sleeve had polished nails and she smelled of scent, but the voice, the stance, were his mother’s. “Oh—hullo, Auntie Nelly? I’m Jim.”

  “Well!” said the woman who at once was not his mother but her cousin Nell. “So you’re here! You’d better come in. It’s a clear night, I’m afraid. The raid will start soon. You may not get your interview tomorrow if they hit the main line again. You’ll be stuck here. Buses are hopeless. That’s what we’re all afraid of for you.”

  “Mum sent me with my ration book in case. Oh yes, and some ham. I’ve had my interview today. The tubes are running, and King’s Cross Station. I’ll get home first thing if I can.”

  “Well, I think you’re marvellous,” said Nell, loosening up. “Just marvellous. Never been to London before. And your accent’s just like your poor mother. And ham!”

  She led him down basement steps and opened a door. Facing them was a blast wall of stone slabs and walking round it—Nell led on—four people sat silent at a high iron table. Before each of them on the bare metal were knife, fork and spoon, and place settings for two more. There was a jug of water and four glasses reflecting the black surface, and a light hung down under a shade of ruched silk, once in a better room than this old staff kitchen. At one chair sat a petulant little bag of bones wiping her eyes and on the table in front of her stood a bottle of gin. The walls of the room were tobacco-coloured and, in the ceiling, gratings were covered over with oily brown paper criss-crossed with tape. With his back to an inner door sat a large and shambling old man, a pipe in his hand and a purple stain on his lower lip. One eyelid drooped. Even so, he had a certain air of bonhomie and the remnants of power. He was the retired dentist. Next to him sat the gin drinker and opposite them a man and a woman, staring at their knife and fork.

  It was macabre.

  “Yes,” said the man who was not the dentist. “It’s a Goya, isn’t it?”

  Jim Smith had not heard of Goya and thought that here was another, less-pleasant Jew calling him a goy.

  “This is your Uncle Bob,” said Nell of the dentist. “Well, perhaps he’s your great-uncle. This is Cis. She has eye trouble. She’s very ill. And these are Mr. Shaw and Miss Gowland, our long-term lodgers.”

  Nobody moved or spoke.

  “Mr. Shaw is retired from commerce and now works as a Fine Artist. Miss Gowland has been ever-employed by the Royal Mail in the local post office.”

  The dentist cleared his throat and flung himself back in his chair. Cis sniffed hopelessly and pulled her shawl about her. Jim Smith noticed that there was nothing to eat on the iron table and that everyone looked desperately tired.

  “Auntie Cis—here’s Jim. Jim,” said Nelly. “Betty’s Jim from the north. He’s going to be a doctor,” and Cis began to snivel quietly exactly at the moment the dentist bellowed out, “Hullo, hullo. Hullo, young Jim. Glad you arrived safe. Greetings. Soon we’ll go upstairs and listen to Churchill. Don’t suppose you bother up where you live. It’s nil desperandum here, old boy.” Then he seemed to implode upon himself and Auntie Cis sobbed out, “I’m sorry. I can’t talk. I’ve been so ill. I was never a well woman, never. Ask your mother.”

  “I’m sorry. Yes, I will.”

  “Betty’s lot. You up there. You’ve no idea what we’re going through down here.”

  “Hush,” said Nell. “There’s been Coventry.”

  “Mother said to say you’re all very welcome to come north to us. She said she wrote it in her letter. She meant to come and live. But we’re in the middle of airfields. It’s not very safe. My school’s being evacuated.”

  Cis opened up her lace handkerchief and inspected it for auguries. “We’re finished, you know,” she said. “They’ll win. We’re all as good as dead.”

  “She’s right,” said Mr. Shaw. “All this about our morale. Churchill—all he is is a warmonger, always was. An actor. This is Guernica here. On the flight path. We’re finished.”

  But the dentist was jovial. “Come along, come along, what’s all this? It’s not over yet. They’re not here yet. We’ll fight them on the beaches and in the dentist’s chair. A dentist is always king, boy. Right? I’ve enough gas in this house to fill a bunker. Have you plaque, boy, by the way? It’s in the family. I’ll see to it for you in the morning, if you like. Five shillings or near offer.”

  Nell and Jim Smith sat down, and all sat on. On and on. Someone poured a glass of water. Jim Smith asked if he could use a telephone to ring his mother. If they had one.

  “Oh yes, we have one. But you can’t ring now, I’m afraid. The next raid will be starting in a minute. You’d have to hold on for an hour to get connected. And you’d be monopolising the line. Sorry, boy.”

  Jim Smith ached with hunger. He had not eaten since early morning. There had been nothing on the train. Someone—a pretty woman—had offered him a marmite and bread sandwich but he hadn’t taken it. He thought of the ham in his case in the hall and asked if he could wash somewhere but was shown a cupboard place under the stairs: the old servants’ lavatory.

  I could eat the soap, he thought, but there was no soap. He was almost hallucinating as he tottered back to the table, where they all still sat. I am among the dead, he thought, the uncaring dead. Or I am part of a seance. Or I was killed on the Underground and I’m in hell.

  The door behind the dentist all at once banged open and a cloud of warmth flooded in with a glorious smell of cooking and a goddess filled the doorway. She bore a big blue oval cooking pot. She was tall and blonde. A figure of gold.

  Composed as Venus, she carried the casserole dish towards the dentist and set it before him, retired and returned with two big vegetable dishes. She removed lids and the dishes were brim-full of steaming potatoes, carrots and greens. She handed round heaped-up plates as Jim Smith gazed at her. And gazed.

  The goddess was old. She might even have been thirty. She looked at nobody, half smiling to herself.

  “This is the most wonderful, wonderful food,” he said.

  Nobody spoke. The goddess returned to the kitchen. Cis messed with her fork and sipped her gin.

  The dentist preened. “Yes, we didn’t do too badly finding Mac,” he said. “Can’t remember how she found us, as a matter of fact. ‘Mac,’ she’s called. Scotch lady. Second sight and all that. Knows everything. Always gets the washing-up done before the raid starts. Can’t believe our luck. Plenty of room here, of course, for her to lead her own private life and no questions asked. Child around, of course.”

  “She looks, well, sort of Germanic.”

  “Germanic? No. Couldn’t have that. We don’t ask questions though. The thing we like is that neither does she. She knows her place.”

  In moments all the food was gone. Bulldog Miss Gowland leaned across to take the remains of Cissie’s. Mr. Shaw belched. Nell rang a bell that stood on the iron table. It was a brass lady in a crinoline and rang beneath her skirts. The goddess re-entered and stood looking intently at Jim Smith, who stood up in a trance and helped clear the dishes. Nobody else moved.

  In the kitchen, among clean cooking pots and saucepans, sat a little girl about four years old, eating a slice of bread and margarine. Her eyes were as blue and her hair as gold and curly as her mother’s. Mac stood by the stove, untying a hot wet cloth from round a dripping basin. She turned the basin upside down over a serving dish and lifted it away from a shiny suet pudding that oozed with sticky golden apples and the child stared and stretched an arm towards it. The goddess pushed away the small hand with her own that held a knife and cut the pudding into six exact slices, and the child went back to her bread and marg.

  “Mac!” cried the dentist. “Bravo! Whatever would we do without you!”

  “They’re our own apples from the back garden,” said Cis.

  “Yes—but the suet! Where do
es she get the suet?”

  “I wonder what she gives the butcher?” said Miss Gowland, speaking for the first time.

  “I suppose there’s no custard?” asked Mr. Shaw, the Fine Artist.

  “I’ll go and see,” said Jim Smith, and picked up his plate and its helping of pudding, carried it to the kitchen and set it before the child.

  “They are wanting custard,” he told the goddess.

  “No. There is no custard.”

  The child sat staring amazed at her slice of pudding.

  “I don’t like pudding,” lied Jim Smith and the child smiled. He went back to the dining room where conversation suddenly halted.

  “Sorry,” said Jim Smith. “I’m allergic to suet.”

  Nobody asked what had happened to his plate but Cissie, sipping from a topped-up glass, said, “She has no ration book, you know. Not one we have ever seen. Neither mother nor daughter. The child’s not registered for orange juice. We took them in from the goodness of our hearts. I’m ill, you see.”

  “Where’s the little girl’s father?”

  “Ah, well,” said the dentist, leering, “we ask no questions. And she knows her place.” Miss Gowland was licking her spoon with a fat, pale tongue.

  “They don’t sleep in the house now,” said Nell. “Not since the raids began. They go up to the shelter on the Common. Well, it’s none of our business.”

  “There’s something she doesn’t care for here,” said Mr. Shaw.

  “That’s why you’re having her room tonight,” said Nell. “That, and because Cissie’s so much better, of course. Tonight we all sleep at Hilly Mead in our beds.”

  “Or in the cage,” said Mr. Shaw, patting the table top. “The Morrison. I’m for the cage.”

  “There’s more to fall on you in a basement,” said Cis.

  The goddess and her child now appeared at the kitchen door, Mac carrying bed rolls, a bag and a foreign-looking rag doll. The child clutched at her mother’s skirt. Mac surveyed the black table.

  “Wonderful dinner, Mac!” said the dentist. “Wonderful, yet again. Good girl.”

  “We are leaving for the shelter now,” said Mac, “but I need help. I am unable to hold her hand while I’m carrying bed rolls.”

  “I’ll carry them.” Jim Smith was on his feet.

  “More sense for you to stay here,” said Nell.

  “Mr. Shaw?” Mr. Shaw did not move.

  “You can’t go, Jim. You won’t find your way back. What would your mother think of us? They’ll be here any minute now. We’re right on the flight path in Wimbledon. To the city. We’ve a very high death rate here but it’s kept quiet. We’re not much safer than the East End.”

  “Yes, you’d have done better where you came from, round St. Paul’s,” Miss Gowland volunteered.

  The air-raid sirens began.

  Fat Miss Gowland slid off her chair and down inside the table cage, and Mr. Shaw joined her at once. Auntie Cis sat frozen and stared at the dentist, who took her hand and said, “Cis—down we go. Or up. Whichever you want.”

  “Come,” said the goddess to Jim Smith, “take the bed rolls,” and she lifted the child in her arms and left the room. Jim followed up the basement steps, Nell running behind him with a tin hat.

  “Take this. Put it on. Where’s your gas mask?”

  Mac was striding ahead up the hill in full moonlight and the child’s bright face over her shoulder staring back at Jim.

  “Your mother will never—”

  “Come with us,” said Jim all at once. “Come with us Auntie Nelly.”

  But she said, “Oh, I couldn’t. They’d never forgive me. I hate quarrels,” and shut the door.

  He followed the whiteness of the woman and her child up the hill until the houses stopped and darkness spread before them like the sea. They stepped into it and came to a door with a sloping back standing all by itself like a cupboard on the grass, and inside a steep cement stair disappearing into the earth. On the stair the smell of earth and grass gave way to the smell of urine. At the foot of the steps they batted against a blast curtain and a double brick passage, and inside were row upon row of people sitting quietly, one or two reading, one or two busy with a rosary, many sleeping for they’d been here for hours to get a good place.

  Mac was greeted, space was made, the child was taken and embraced. The bed rolls were spread.

  “Stay here,” said Mac to Jim Smith. “Soon you will be warm. Here, take her,” and she lifted the child into his arms. Her hair was sweet and clean and soft, and she leaned against his shoulder and closed her eyes.

  “Here,” said the goddess again and passed him a flask with brandy in it. Then she drank some herself. “The raid will be a long one tonight.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I know.”

  It grew quiet. Only a few grunts and mumblings from the sleepers. “Listen,” she said and, even so, very far below he heard the heavy, steady drone of planes.

  “I’m cold,” said the child and the three lay down close together. The droning went on and on, a sickening lulling. Then, far, far above along the elected flight path the bombs began to fall—and fall—upon the suburban streets, along the railway, along the bending river, upon the palaces and slums and churches and hospitals and prisons of the city. Even down here, buried beneath the coarse green grass, the muffled juddering shook the humped and mostly brave backs of the people waiting.

  “Lie here with us,” said Mac and drew the boy close to her with her child, and in the end, long, long after, morning came.

  But there was no morning for those at Hilly Mead.

  THE MILLY MING

  I hope you don’t mind my asking,” said Mrs. Stott (we talked like this then: it was the sixties, in the suburbs and Mrs. Stott was a Churches’ Parish Visitor), “but we have to make sure. This is a tricky little job. You aren’t pregnant, are you, Mrs. Ainsley?”

  “You flatter me,” I said. “I’m forty-five.”

  “Good. And why are you volunteering?”

  “I heard you needed drivers.”

  “And you are a good driver?”

  “I am. I drove my children to school for years.”

  “And other people’s children?”

  “Yes. It was called the School Run.”

  I was beginning to get annoyed. There had been a pencil on a string in the church porch and a notice saying “Volunteers wanted for Amelia Menzies Babies. Occasional drivers needed. Sign here.”

  Amelia Menzies had been a Victorian spinster living in a large house on the Common and looking after her father, a retired clergyman. When he died she went travelling abroad for a time and came home only to die shortly afterwards herself. She had left the house and its enormous grounds and a lot of money to set up a Home for unmarried mothers. It had been a sensational idea at the time.

  At first the girls were the ones who wanted to hide away or whose parents wanted them hidden away. They came to the Home only for the last months of their pregnancy. They were well fed and cared for, went to the local hospital for the birth, came back to the Home briefly afterwards. All was free and the Amelia Menzies Trust saw to it that they had funds to start a new life. The Amelia Menzies (we all called it the Milly Ming) was amazingly liberal. There was nothing said about penitence, only a recommendation that the girls attend church with the matron on Sundays and a firm rule that the coming child must be their first. A second illegitimate baby was not to be thought of. While at the Milly Ming, visits from outside were not allowed either. The girls had to come from places at least twenty miles away. Amazingly, when I arrived half a century on, the system was still in place.

  I first noticed the girls when I came to the parish rather an outsider myself, for I had just gone through a divorce. I went to church alone and sat at the back, and I was a bit surprised during the first hymn when a string of heavily pregnant women filed in and settled in the pew across the aisle. I remember noticing that there was a Green Man carved on a pillar above their
heads, leering down at them. Outside—it was a hot day and the church door stood open—you could hear radios playing all down the street: the Beatles singing about love. The girls shuffled out during the final hymn and didn’t stay for coffee.

  Adoption was the big recommendation at the Milly Ming, though I could never find out what Amelia had thought of it. Mrs. Stott believed in it utterly. “The ones who are hard to convince, of course,” she said, “are the ones who are hardly more than babies themselves. No job, no roof, no family. But they don’t understand. You have to show them that it is better for the child. It will have a settled family and a good education. And the childless have their rights, too. Up to now we’ve been very successful at persuasion but—I don’t know—things are changing. They often want to keep the baby now. It’s the Caribbeans all floating in. They believe in extended families.”

  My job was to take the mothers who had been persuaded, sometimes two together, which Mrs. Stott said was always easier, with their babies to the Adoption Centre. It was in central London and she warned me that it could be upsetting. “They dress them up, you know, the babies, in the most incredible clothes. I don’t know where they get the money, some of them. We take them up into a waiting room and after a few minutes a very nice, experienced woman comes in and says, ‘Here we are then. Off we go. Give her a kiss,’ and takes the baby away. And that’s it.”

  “And then?”

  “Well, the adopting parents are very happy and excited, of course, across the corridor—door tight shut—in another room and do you know, the first thing they always do is take off all the clothes and dress the baby in other ones they’ve brought with them. It’s quite wasteful really. Of course we don’t see any of that. Our job is the girls. I’ll always come with you. It’ll be me or the vicar.”