Miss Carter's War Read online

  ‘Why did they take Rachel away, Maman?’

  ‘Because she is Jewish, and they are silly people who don’t like Jews, or anyone who is not like them.’

  ‘Will they hurt her?’

  ‘No, we are going to stop them. Papa and I and our friends.’

  ‘Can I stop them too?’

  Tony stood up and shouted, ‘For Christ’s sake, Dad. Listen to yourself. This isn’t you speaking. They’ve been feeding you all this rubbish. I’m telling you—’

  Marguerite stood up and clapped her hands and in her best schoolmistressy voice said, ‘Right, that’s enough, kids. Bedtime. Come on, Bert, put your boots on and I’ll take you down to bed.’

  Marguerite put her arm round him and led him out. As she opened the front door she heard Donald gasp, ‘Jesus – where did that spring from?’

  Having settled Bert, she was about to leave the room when he said, ‘I’m sorry if I spoke out of turn, lovey. I’m just feeling a bit nesh. I’ve worked hard all my life, but there’s nothing to show for it. They’ve even taken away threepenny bits, and half-crowns, and farthings. I haven’t got much brass, and I can’t understand what I have got. Bloody decimals or whatever. I don’t recognise me own home. I don’t seem to belong any more. I want things to be like they used to be.’

  ‘Me too, Bert. I often feel like that.’

  ‘Then, there’s our Tony. I want him to be happy. But it’s all strange to me – how he is, I mean. The wife dreams of grandchildren. The women round our way, they love all that. It gives them a fresh start. And a nice daughter-in-law. Like you – we had hopes we’d have you—’

  ‘You do have me, Bert. As a friend. And Donald too, who is a kind, loving man.’

  ‘I know, I know, lass. I’m a silly bugger – pardon my French. I know I’m stupid but I’m not a bad man. Am I?’

  Marguerite kissed him on the forehead.

  ‘Of course not, Bert. Things are changing so fast. It’s sometimes difficult to keep up.’

  Chapter 36

  Marguerite left it to Donald to talk Tony out of the depression he went into after his father’s departure. His working-class roots were the bedrock of Tony’s life and Bert’s outburst had made him question their strength. The neighbourliness, the kindness, the generosity in spite of need seemed to have been eroded, leaving him doubting something he had cherished – maybe sentimentally. Marguerite was relieved that he now had Donald with whom to build a more firm foundation.

  Any jealousy she had felt when Donald first appeared had completely dissipated. Their threesome worked perfectly. She enjoyed the privacy of her flat at the same time as knowing that the two people she loved most were one flight of stairs away. They consoled, amused, delighted one another. The only element missing for her in the relationship was sex, and now, approaching her fifties, she decided she could do without that. Unlike some of the present generation for whom sex had become a flippant pastime, she had always found it profound and disturbing. She wondered what her pupils would make of the fact that in all her life she had only had three lovers. Apart from the blissful one-night stand, the other two had caused her pain of which she now decided enough was enough, a sacrilegious stance in this frenzied post-Pill era of sexual freedom. Sexual intercourse was now almost obligatory. Chastity was the new frigidity. Delighted that the ignorance and inhibitions of the past were being eradicated, Marguerite was nevertheless fearful for the casualties of this revolution.

  Leaving Donald and Tony to have a quiet evening, Marguerite ventured back to Piccadilly to search for the woman she was sure was Elsie. Despite the rain, a bedraggled queue was huddled outside the chemist. Marguerite stood on the kerb scanning their faces. Late-night revellers passed, disdainfully pushing aside a dazed girl who had wandered into their path. A young man shouted obscenities at no one in particular, then lapsed back into vacant silence. Marguerite could not spot amongst these desperate faces the one that she had seen that night.

  She approached a shivering woman.

  ‘Excuse me. I wonder if you know someone called Elsie Miller?’

  The woman drew back.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘She’s a friend of mine.’

  ‘Are you the filth?’

  ‘No, I’m just a friend, I promise you.’

  ‘She’s not here anyway.’

  Marguerite looked across the street to Swan & Edgar’s. Outside were two young boys leaning on the railings, sharing an umbrella. Sheltering in the doorway of the department store she could see a woman in Salvation Army uniform with her arm around another lad.

  Marguerite splashed across the street to talk to her.

  ‘Excuse me. I wonder if you could help me.’

  ‘I will if I can.’

  ‘I’m looking for a woman I know that I thought I saw the other day in the queue outside Boots. Late thirties. Blonde, I think.’

  ‘What’s her name?’

  ‘Elsie Miller.’

  ‘Just a minute.’ She turned to the boy. ‘Alan, I have to talk to this lady. Excuse me. I’ll see you later.’

  The boy left them and joined the two under the umbrella.

  ‘Why do you want to find Elsie? Who are you?’

  ‘I was her teacher many years ago. I’m worried about her. She looked ill. You know her then?’

  ‘Yes. I know most of the lost souls who come here at night. I think I know where she might be.’ She looked at Marguerite, her round face smiling beneath her bonnet. She held out her hand. ‘Major Lily James.’

  ‘Marguerite Carter. Forgive me asking, but what are you doing here?’

  Matter-of-factly she said, ‘Saving souls for Jesus. And you?’

  ‘I’m looking for Elsie. I’m afraid she’s in trouble.’

  ‘Most of the people hanging around the Circus at night are in trouble. This is our Gomorrah.’

  ‘Is that boy you were talking to in trouble?’

  ‘Oh yes. The devil has him in his clutches. The devil in the shape of predatory men who prey on children. That railing is known as the meat rack. And those dear children are the flesh on sale.’

  Marguerite was mystified as to how the woman could be so cheerful as she said this, her eyes shining.

  ‘But Jesus is watching over them and will lead them back to his path. He loves them as much as I do and with his help we will fight the good fight.’

  ‘Well – let’s hope.’

  ‘No, let’s pray.’

  Marguerite fervently hoped that the woman didn’t mean here on the wet pavement with people watching. When she saw a small group of men and women in Salvation Army uniforms approaching, she was terrified they would hand her a tambourine and start singing ‘Who Is On The Lord’s Side?’. To Marguerite’s relief they merely informed Major Lily that the soup van had arrived.

  She put her arm round Marguerite.

  ‘Come with me, dear, we may find Elsie.’

  To Marguerite’s horror, they did. In an alcove in Jermyn Street under a sign saying, ‘Criterion Stage Door’, there were three people lying on the pavement, wrapped in newspaper and filthy blankets.

  Major Lily knelt on the wet ground and gently touched a matted head.

  ‘Elsie, here’s some soup, darling.’

  There was no response.

  ‘Elsie – it’s Lily. Look at me. Have something to eat.’

  ‘Not hungry. Go away.’

  Lily lifted the blanket to reveal a hypodermic syringe embedded in the woman’s arm. Calmly she removed it, got a box out of her satchel and, dabbing disinfectant from a bottle onto some lint, wiped the angry wound and put on an Elastoplast. The arm was covered in scabs, cuts and bruises. Elsie barely stirred.

  Lily stood up and said to Marguerite, ‘She must have collected her script earlier. We must try and make her eat.’

  Marguerite was struck dumb with horror; she could not move.

  Major Lily stood and put a hand on her arm.

  ‘Don’t cry, my dear. I know it’s shocking when you
first see the ravages wrought by these evil drugs that are polluting our fellow creatures, but God will prevail.’

  She knelt again and pulled the blanket away from the white sunken face. She lifted Elsie’s head with both hands to speak close up to her.

  ‘Now Elsie, come on. Wake up, wake up.’

  Trembling, Marguerite knelt the other side and spoke softly into Elsie’s ear.

  ‘Elsie my dear, look at me. Please.’

  Elsie’s eyes flickered.

  ‘It’s me, Elsie. Miss Carter.’

  The girl turned her face away.

  ‘No no no. You mustn’t see me. Please don’t.’

  Marguerite sat on the ground and pulled her into her arms.

  ‘Now listen to me, Elsie. You need help. I’ll get you help.’

  ‘Too late, too late.’ The girl clung to Marguerite, shivering and retching. ‘I’ve tried and I can’t stop.’

  Major Lily handed Marguerite the soup and she held it as Elsie took sips and struggled to swallow them.

  The major was watching closely.

  ‘Elsie – I think Jesus has sent you a guardian angel.’

  Elsie’s eyes were closing and she leant against Marguerite.

  ‘Major – what can we do? How can we help her?’

  ‘I’m afraid the sad truth is that no one can help her. We can only make suggestions and hope she will listen.’

  She produced a slip of paper from her pocket with a name and address printed on it. A Dr Peter Chapple.

  ‘He is a miracle worker. If she decides she wants to change, this is the man.’

  Marguerite took the piece of paper.

  ‘OK, I’ll get a taxi now and take her home with me.’

  ‘Forgive me, my dear, but you mustn’t. This is her rock bottom. She has to want to get out of this hell by herself. She knows we have a hostel if she decides to change, but so far she has chosen not to. If you make her comfortable she will have no reason to. Come back here tomorrow to see her. Sadly she will still be around – and see if you can be more successful in persuading her than I. It may take some time. Patience is a necessary virtue in this battle.’

  ‘But I can’t leave her like this.’

  ‘You must if you want to help her.’

  Marguerite looked down at Elsie. She supposed she had fallen asleep but she looked like a corpse. She knelt and kissed her on her icy forehead. Major Lily helped her up and led her away.

  Marguerite went back and poured her heart out to Tony and Donald.

  ‘I told you when I saw her in that club in Soho I was worried about her. I should have done something then. I should have done something when she got pregnant. I’ve let her down all along the line.’

  Tony handed her a brandy.

  ‘She is not now and never was your responsibility.’

  Marguerite shouted, ‘Oh shut up, Tony. My pupils are all I’ve got. I’ve got no children of my own. They are my children. I should have looked after her.’

  The brandy spilled as she fell back sobbing into the armchair.

  Donald took it gently and knelt in front of her.

  ‘Listen, Mags. The Sally Army woman is right. One of the corps de ballet got hooked on heroin. When we all faffed around making a fuss of her she got worse, but when we were told not to support her she eventually went to get help and now is better. It’s called tough love. Like Alcoholics Anonymous. Your Elsie will only get better when she is desperate to do so herself.’

  Major Lily and Donald were right. Over the months Marguerite tracked Elsie down to various of her squalid haunts, trying to persuade her that there was a way out of this vortex of degradation into which she had plunged. But it had no effect. As well as Jermyn Street, Elsie would sleep in shop doorways in the Strand, in the grubby park alongside an all-night portable snack bar on the Embankment, in the crypt or graveyard of St John’s Church in Waterloo, which ironically had been the Festival of Britain church. She eventually graduated to the nearby underpass, refuge to a number of homeless people. Marguerite helped her construct a room from cardboard packing boxes that Major Lily provided and brought her some cushions, a camp bed and a set of shelves for her growing collection of books. Helping her to arrange them she came across the book of war poems that she had given to Irene who had handed it on to Elsie. It reminded Marguerite of the sensitivity of her response to these and other poems as a young girl. Marguerite was appalled at the way she was now living, but Elsie assured her that the Bull Ring dwellers were a family and took care of one another.

  At first, the ‘family’ terrified Marguerite. There were alcoholics and drug addicts and those who were obviously mentally ill. One man, whose enclosure was unusually neat, left each morning in a creased pinstriped suit to a maybe mythical job ‘in the City’. She occasionally joined them round a brazier that they lit on freezing nights and heard their stories of decline, and soon her fear was replaced by profound pity. Having lost all connection, by choice or misfortune, with their previous lives, they had good reason to cling together in this bleak underworld, lit only by candles, and stinking of rot and urine. The police were tolerant of their encampment, preferring to have these outcasts where they could keep an eye on them. They even turned a blind eye to a group of small children who congregated in an archway up the road, living off petty thieving and late-night soup runs. One despairing policeman pointed out that this was preferable to abusive parents, or some uncaring care home.

  This insight into the Dickensian underclass existing beneath the hurly-burly of increasing affluence in the streets above filled Marguerite with disgust. And that Elsie, her beautiful Saint Joan, should be part of it broke her heart. It took all her self-control not to weep and somehow force Elsie to get treatment for her addiction, to rid herself of the octopus that was strangling the life out of her. When Elsie went into a rambling eulogy about the benefits of heroin, saying how she could manage perfectly well to live a normal life on drugs, Marguerite wanted to shake her and drag her by her hair to Dr Chapple’s esteemed day centre, but Major Lily always insisted that it would not help Elsie. She pointed out that it was an improvement that Elsie had moved from sleeping in doorways to creating some sort of home for herself in the underpass. She had even taken on the responsibility of a puppy that along with the rest of the dogs that roamed there was considerably more healthy than its owner. It, like her, was washed in Waterloo Station’s public lavatories.

  ‘Let us rejoice in small mercies.’

  Major Lily managed to find joy in everything. Whereas Marguerite would rage to Donald and Tony about her impotence to save Elsie – ‘Beware the Messiah complex, Mags’ – Major Lily James faced horrors with radiant confidence in her God. A God who was, Marguerite thought, at the very least, inefficient.

  Marguerite had almost given up hope that Elsie would ever propel herself out of the twilight world of living from one drug hit to the next, risking death through overdose, when she received a phone call from her. This time it was not to ask for money.

  ‘I’ve lost that piece of paper. I need to see that doctor.’

  ‘Elsie, he won’t give you a script unless you opt for treatment, so don’t even try. You are getting enough to sustain you. For heaven’s sake stop trying to get more.’

  ‘Honestly, Miss Carter, this is not a trick. If I want more gear I can get it on the street. I’ve decided I want to stop. Please help me.’

  Marguerite was used to Elsie using any lie or subterfuge to feed her habit but this time there was a new tone to her pleading.

  Marguerite phoned Major Lily.

  When she arrived at the Bull Ring Major Lily was already there.

  ‘Our lost sheep is returning to Jesus. She’s ready.’

  ‘But why, what happened?’

  Elsie was sitting on the edge of her filthy camp bed, trembling and staring ahead in a daze. The cardboard walls were down and folded in a pile and her books were in a bundle tied with string, her few clothes stuffed into a pillowcase. Marguerite sat next to Els
ie and took her fidgeting hands in hers.

  ‘What happened, Elsie?’

  Elsie didn’t look at her.

  ‘It was my son.’

  ‘Your son? But you told me you didn’t know where he was.’

  ‘Well I do now.’

  Elsie tried to continue and couldn’t. She said to Major Lily, ‘You tell her.’

  Major Lily put an arm round Elsie and spoke to Marguerite.

  ‘Well, Elsie OD-ed yesterday and they took her to St Thomas’s Accident and Emergency. It was apparently chaotic because there had been a bomb at the Ideal Home Exhibition and there were so many casualties they needed to use lots of hospitals. So I’m afraid they shoved poor Elsie into a corridor on a trolley with an oxygen mask and left her.’

  Elsie took up the story in an expressionless drone.

  ‘The nurse said, “People like you are not a priority.” I could hear groaning and weeping. Then two doctors came rushing by and the younger one knocked over my oxygen canister. He said, “What the hell is this? Why is this patient out here?” And then—’

  Elsie turned her head away from Marguerite.

  ‘The older one said, “Oh she’s a junkie. A regular. Bloody nuisance. Let her die. We’ve got people with limbs blown off who want to live. There’s a girl with shrapnel in her eyes who is going to be blind. Don’t waste time with this useless bitch.” And then he said, “Come on, Dr Miller, leave her. Don’t waste your time. You’re going to have to learn to prioritise.” ’

  Marguerite put her arm around Elsie.

  ‘They didn’t mean it, Elsie. They were in the middle of an emergency.’

  ‘As they ran off I heard the older one say, “How’s the new baby, by the way?” and Dr Miller said, “A joy.” ’

  Marguerite looked at Major Lily who smiled and said, ‘A miracle.’

  Elsie was mumbling, ‘Dr Miller. My son. Dr Miller.’

  ‘Your son?’

  ‘Yes. He was my son.’

  ‘But Elsie, Miller is a common name—’

  ‘No, I knew when I looked at him. He is exactly like his father. The bastard. His father, I mean – not him. Although that’s what he was. My baby. A bastard. Get rid of that bastard, he said.’