‘Evening Stinker,’ said the barman. ‘What’ll it be?’
‘Two halves o’ best. You don’t want stout again, do you Mr Cormack? I doubt Eric’s got an aspidistra to water.’
Cal did the merest double-take at this and accepted the offer.
‘Chief Inspector…’
‘Call me Walter, lad.’
‘Why do they call you Stinker?’
Stilton grinned. ‘It’s not what you were thinking.’
‘I wasn’t thinking anything.’
‘Cheese, lad. Cheese. Where I come from, up north, Derbyshire way, they make four or five varieties of cheese. Two of ‘em called Stilton. A white one and a blue one. The blue does niff a bit.’
‘Niff?’
‘Stink.’
‘Derbyshire?’
‘Aye.’
‘So you’re not a cockney?’
‘Nay lad, or did you think I talked like this for the fun of it?’
‘I thought you talked like that guy on the radio.’
Stilton took this quizzically.
‘What guy on the radio?’
‘The late-night guy. Priestley. J.B. Priestley.’
‘No, no. He’s Yorkshire. Not the same thing at all. They still live in mud huts in Bradford. Now, the wife’s a cockney though. She was born in that house we live in, and all her brothers and sisters along with her. And all our kids too.’
They carried two brimming halves of best bitter to a table. Three chairs, one of them occupied by a morose-looking man with a glass of fat beer in front of him, as though he had spun it out since opening time and now given up on it.
Stilton knew him. Made the introductions.
‘This is the sheriff, Station Sergeant George Bonham. He runs the local nick, don’t you, George? Mr Cormack. Our Yank.’
Bonham looked up. Did not smile, did not object to their presence.
‘We saw your protégé today, George.’
‘Me what?’
‘Protégé. The wunderkind. Sergeant Troy.’
Something resembling a smile rose and withered on the man’s face.
‘I’ve not seen him in a while,’ he said. ‘Not since…’
He left the sentence unfinished. Stilton elbowed his beer. A minute passed with neither of them speaking, then Bonham bent down under the table, picked up a policeman’s helmet from the floor and stood up. Cal was in awe. At six foot and more he was quite accustomed to being one of, if not the tallest in any room. But this man had to be six foot six, and that was without the silly hat.
Bonham muttered goodnight and vanished.
‘Was it something I said?’
‘Nay, lad. It was me. I was only trying to cheer him up, but I should have known when he and Troy last met. His wife’s funeral. Ethel Bonham copped it in the Blitz just before Christmas. George is taking it very hard. I shouldn’t have mentioned Troy. Troy was his boy at the local nick, trained him up from nowt. Now he’s the darling of the Yard, just when old George needs him.’
‘I had kind of meant to ask you about that.’
‘About what?’
‘Well, the Blitz, the street. Your street. How many people died?’
‘Oh, I see. One, as a matter of fact. Just the one. Mrs Bluit at number 72. But she was ninety. Died in her sleep. When the all clear sounded, there she was, stretched out in her bed. Stone dead. Natural causes, the doctor said. Her house lost its windows and its roof and most of one wall, and in the end Heavy Rescue bulldozed it before it could fall on anybody, but there wasn’t a mark on her.’
‘I don’t get it. It looks like… like Armageddon.’
‘Everyone else was down the tube station at Liverpool Street. Now, don’t get me wrong. The Jerries blew the street to buggery. We were lucky. It was December, day after Boxing Day-same raid as killed Ethel Bonham. I reckon there was more’n a bomber a minute for the best part of four hours. That makes about two
hundred and fifty planes. Biggest raid I’d ever heard till last Saturday. Now, if it’d been September, then it might’ve been a different story. We weren’t expecting ‘em then. Everybody’d pulled out or sent their kids to the country in ‘39. By 1940, when nothing much had happened, they were drifting back. Last September we weren’t ready. We lost a lot of people. There’s plenty of folk ‘round here lost someone. George, if he’d just snap to and take a look around him, would realise he’s not the only one, that everybody in Stepney Green knows how he feels. Everybody’s lost someone. Or everybody knows somebody who’s lost someone. We’ve lost more civilians so far than soldiers-and that includes Dunkirk.’
Cal let this one settle. He’d never felt more like an outsider.
‘You know,’ he said, ‘I’d hate to have to explain that back home.’
‘You don’t have to. That’s why we’ve got Ed Murrow.’
Cal heard the silent touché in Stilton’s remark. They’d touched swords again.
‘I am trying, you know. I know that to the English I represent a rich, complacent nation with no commitment to the war. I know that to the English I’m “Yank” or “lad”-but I’m trying.’
‘Would you rather I called you Captain Cormack?’
‘No. I’ll settle for lad, and only because I don’t think I could ever stop you. But my name’s Cal.’
Stilton roared with laughter and slapped him on the back. As the breath burst from his lungs, he could just hear the barman calling for order.
‘Right, shut up you lot, the bugger’s on again!’
The room fell silent. A crackle of static filled the air, someone tuning a wireless set, then the burble, hiss and hum of a station found and the first words of speech upon the airwaves.
‘Garmany calling, Garmany calling.’
The room went mad. A deafening explosion of noise.
‘Garmany calling, Garmany calling. Haw bleedin’ haw bleedin’ haw!!!’
A noise rippled forth like a thousand farts as every man in the room stuck his tongue between his lips and blew a Bronx cheer. Two jokers in Wellington boots, their trousers stuck into the tops, inarched up and down in front of the bar with black combs pressed (o their top lips, the other arm out to the heavens, legs kicking higher and higher with every goose’s step.
Two short, fat men nipped smartly in front of them. ‘I zay, I zay, I zay. Mein hund has kein nose!’
‘Your hund has kein nose. How does he smell?’
‘Like ein true-bred Aryan!’
They stomped off holding their noses. Their entire audience yelled ‘Phwooarrr!’ and another thousand farts rippled forth.
§ 24
One end of Edna Stilton’s kitchen was occupied by a vast round table, the other end by Edna Stilton. She stood in front of the cooking machine she called ‘me Aga’, stirred, grumbled and served, while her daughters scurried back and forth between the cooker and the table. Around the table a baffling array of faces greeted Cal, a serial chorus of ‘pleased to meet you, I’m sure’, and no amount of bonhomie from Stilton would make introduction or remembering any the easier for him.
‘My girls, Rose and Reenie.’
Two women Cal put at about his own age-late twenties-looking like younger versions of their mother, smiled at him from the far side; a flutter of the eyelashes, a coy tilt of the head. One in an ATS uniform, the other, the coy one, in a maternity smock. Stilton worked his way clockwise round the table.
‘Tom. Our Rose’s husband.’
A short man in a neat black suit-thinning hair, tight lines around the eyes-a good few years older than his wife.
‘Ministry of Works,’ he said, as though sharing a confidence. A limp handshake followed.
‘Our Mr Bell. Top floor front. Organist at the Gaumont cinema in the Haymarket, Mondays to Saturdays, and at St George’s-in-the-East, Limehouse, on Sundays.’
A thin man, a neglected man, a threadbare man, leather elbow patches on an old tweed coat-his socks probably needed darning too. He reached over, held out his hand to Cal. A reedy voice-the perfect organist down to his larynx and tonsils.