Free After the Mourning by Barbara Nadel Page A

to go, and the Duchess and Nan were anxious not to be caught far away from home if or when the bombers came over. Neither of them had ever been inside a public shelter and they didn’t plan to do so now.
    ‘You can’t breathe in some of them places for the smell of, you know, the toilet,’ Miss O’Dowd said, to my scandalised sister, as we all made our way back to my car. ‘And there’s women down there no better than they should be, allowing men all sorts!’
    Hannah and I, following the Duchess and the other two women, gripped each other, laughing silently. What Miss O’Dowd would have done had she known about Hannah I didn’t dare think about and as for my sister . . .
    ‘Oh, blimey, it’s a hearse!’ I heard Miss O’Dowd say, as we all turned into the Snaresbrook Road and she beheld the Lancia.
    ‘Well, you know our Frank’s an undertaker, Dolly,’ Nan said, in my defence.
    ‘I can’t get in no hearse! I thought you said your brother had a car!’
    ‘He does. It is a car,’ Nan said.
    Miss O’Dowd crossed her arms across her chest and shook her curly red head in disapproval. ‘Oh, no, Nan,’ she said. ‘I can’t get in there. Hearses are for the dear departed. I’ll get the bus.’
    ‘It is getting dark, my dear,’ the Duchess said, as she tapped Miss O’Dowd’s arm. ‘I don’t think we should leave you here alone.’
    ‘I’ll be all right, Mrs Hancock,’ Miss O’Dowd replied, with only a tiny shudder at my mother’s foreign touch. ‘I’ve got me rosary and a St Christopher for journeys, and with Our Lady so close by, I can’t come to no harm, I don’t think.’
    ‘Not bothered that the visions might be part of that Gypsy magic the priests say come straight from the devil?’ I couldn’t resist asking.
    Not that Dolly O’Dowd gave me an answer: she just stuck her nose in the air, told Nan she’d see her at Mass on Sunday, then headed off up towards the Eagle pub.
    The Duchess shrugged, then turned to Hannah. ‘Well, you, I hope, will accept a lift, Miss Jacobs. It is so cold and damp now. If I recall correctly, you live in Canning Town, don’t you?’
    Hannah accepted my mother’s offer so I drove back through Forest Gate, Leyton, through Stratford and back into the rubble and filth that is now the Royal Docklands. One other thing I noticed from that drive was that people get thinner the closer you come to the river. Further south from Canning Town, right on the Thames, had to be home to people who were all but transparent, I thought.

Chapter Six
    S tella Hancock is my dad’s older brother Percy’s girl. In her early fifties, like our Nan, Stella is a spinster who, until that terrible night for her in late October 1940, lived with Uncle Percy in New City Road, Plaistow. There’s a lot of women Stella’s age without husbands or children. Victims, you could say, of the Great War, although not all of them see themselves in that light. My cousin Stella is one who does, her single misery displaying itself as a propensity to ‘nerves’. It didn’t take a great stretch of the imagination to picture what the ARP found when they dug out the stair cupboard Stella had been hiding in when the house next door took a direct hit.
    ‘I’ve never seen nothing like it,’ the warden, a local tailor in his other life, said. ‘Stood up with her hands braced agin the ceiling of the cupboard, hair on end, pinny in shreds, her gob wide open like a bleedin’ cod.’
    ‘There’s no sign of anyone else, I suppose?’ I asked, as Doris came into the shop with tea for the warden, Johnny Webb.
    ‘You mean your Uncle Percy?’ The warden shook his head sadly. ‘No, sorry, Mr H. Just your Stella, I’m afraid. Barmy as a coot too, which is why she’s down the cop shop.’
    I waited for Doris to go before I asked, ‘But why didn’t they bring her here? The police know our family.’
    ‘Coppers only managed to stop her screaming half an hour ago.’ Johnny moved his head close to mine.