The London Unemployed Aid Committee had been founded in the early forties to provide food parcels, clothes and holidays for the children of the four million unemployed. Sarah was on the sub-committee that organized Christmas presents for needy children in the North. Sometimes she wondered how the parents must feel, passing on presents from unknown do-gooders; but otherwise the children might get nothing. Sarah was good on committees, and occasionally she deputized for the Chairwoman, Mrs Templeman, a redoubtable businessman’s wife. Mrs Templeman was firmly in charge today, though, a little round hat perched on her permed grey hair, a roll of thick pearls on her stout bosom. She nodded encouragingly as Sarah reported on her correspondence with the big toy stores about discounts for bulk orders. Sarah said it was important to try to ensure the children got a variety of toys – they didn’t want every child in a Yorkshire pit village to end up with the same teddy bear or toy train. She explained that ensuring variety was a bit more expensive, but would make a difference to the families. She smiled at Mr Hamilton, a plump little man with a carnation in his buttonhole who was Charity Officer of a large toy store. He nodded thoughtfully, and Mrs Templeman watched her with approval.
After the meeting Mrs Templeman came over to Sarah, thanked her in her fulsome, patronizing way for all she had done and asked if she would like to come to lunch. She was wearing a heavy coat and, round her neck, a fox-fur stole, a horrible thing with glass eyes that stared at Sarah, tail in its mouth. Mrs Templeman looked disappointed when she declined; Sarah knew that like her she was bored and lonely, but when she had lunched with her before, Mrs Templeman talked endlessly, about her husband and her committees and her church activities – she was a committed Christian and Sarah always felt she looked at her as a possible convert. Sarah didn’t feel she could put up with it today.
She didn’t want to go home, though. She had lunch on her own in a Corner House, then went for a walk; the weather was cold and clear, an icy tang in the air. Quite often, since Charlie died, Sarah had gone into central London, to escape the loneliness of the house; usually she walked around the old streets of the city, with its warehouses and offices and the tiny narrow streets Dickens had written about, the lovely Wren churches like St Dunstan’s and St Swithin’s where she would sit in quiet, if secular, contemplation. Today Sarah decided to walk to Westminster Abbey; she hadn’t been there in years. She turned down Gower Street, past the great white tower of Senate House, the second-tallest building in London. The former London University headquarters now housed the largest German embassy in the world, two giant swastika flags hanging halfway down the building from poles on the roof. Grim-faced Special Branch policemen with sub-machine guns stood on guard all along the high railings with their covering of barbed wire in case of a Resistance attack; inside, an official in brown Nazi Party uniform stepped from a limousine. He was being welcomed by a group of men, some in suits, a couple in military field-grey, one in the glistening black beetle’s carapace of the SS uniform. Sarah hurried past. When uniformed German officials had started arriving in England in 1940 Sarah had been astonished by the vibrant slashing colours, the black swastika armbands with the bright red hooked cross worn in its white circle; before, of course, she had only seen the Nazis on film, in black and white and grey. They knew how to use colour.
Walking along she thought, by contrast, how tired and cold and grey most people looked. A one-legged man sat on the pavement playing a violin, a cap at his feet, 1940 Veteran Please Help scrawled on a piece of cardboard. The police would move him on presently; beggars had been a growing problem in London until a few years ago, when after a Daily Mail campaign they had been forcefully removed to the ‘Back to the Land’ agricultural settlements Lloyd George had set up to grow food on wasteland in the countryside. She dropped half a crown in the man’s cap. She noticed the depressing signs of poverty and oppression more and more these days. For years she had shut her eyes. When she had met David her days of political activism were already over, it was too dangerous. She and David both thought, after they returned from New Zealand, that there was nothing to do but wait until things changed, as surely, eventually, they must.
She walked on towards Westminster, noticing again that there were a lot of Auxiliary Police around. Several times she saw a new poster advertising Mosley’s Fascists; it was garish and horrible, a woman in the foreground shielding a baby from a gigantic, King Kong-like ape with the long nose of a cartoon Jew, a helmet with a red star on his head. Fight Bolshevik Terror! Join the BUF Now! She passed down Whitehall, looking up at the windows of the Dominions Office where David would be working. She had been growing more and more angry with him in recent weeks, but her talk with Irene had made her realize the depth of her love, how much she feared losing him.
She went past the Palace of Westminster, down to the abbey. Inside it was cool and dark, her footsteps echoing. There were few people around. The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier was still piled high with wreaths from Remembrance Day. She looked around the vast spaces. They would hold the Coronation here, some time next year. She pitied the Queen, young and alone in the middle of this mess. She had a sudden memory of the Christmas broadcast by her father, George VI, in 1939, that one wartime Christmas. The family had been sitting round the radio, wearing paper hats but in sombre silence. The King, struggling , quoted from a poem:
‘I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year,
“Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.”
And he replied, “Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the hand of God.
That shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way.”’
The poor King, she thought, who had never wanted the throne, had had to take it after his brother, the irresponsible Nazi sympathizer Edward VIII, had abdicated. Edward and Wallis Simpson still lived an easy life in the Bahamas, where he was governor. King George, over the years since 1940, had seemed, like so many figures from the thirties, to fade away, seldom appearing in public, looking sad and strained when he did.
Some chairs had been set out for a service and Sarah sat down. In the cold half-light, she found herself praying for the first time in years. ‘God, if you do exist, give us another child. It would be such a little thing for You but it would be everything to us.’ She began, silently, to cry.
Sarah had had a happy childhood. She was the baby of the family, a pretty blonde girl adored by her mother and elder sister, though she knew that for all of them her father came first: Jim, whose disfigured face had sometimes frightened her when she was small.
Jim was an accounts clerk at the Town Hall, and spent much of his spare time working for pacifist causes, the League of Nations Union and later the Peace Pledge Union. He was devoted to preventing another war, convinced humanity could not survive a next time.
What she learned at home was different from what they taught at school. She would argue it out with her sister. ‘Irene, Mrs Briggs at school says the Kaiser started the war, he had to be stopped.’