The Safest Place in London by Maggie Joel

Author:Maggie Joel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2016-07-29T04:00:00+00:00

After his three days adrift in the North Atlantic he had spent three months at home recuperating. One month for each day—that had seemed the least the navy could do; three months for the entire ship’s company lost, eighty-five men, roughly one day for each man. Two or three days each, he reckoned, for the few who had survived and been picked up by the Itchen only to be torpedoed a day or so later, and a day or two for the petty officer whose body he had tipped out of the lifeboat and who lay now at the bottom of the ocean. And with each day of his leave some part of him had thought, The navy has forgotten about me, they have forgotten I am here. If I just keep my head down they will let me be. For, by then, he had learned how to be at home with his family, and they had learned how to be with him.

It had not been easy. He had been married so short a time before his call-up that all he wanted on his return was to be alone with his wife, to remember who she was, to learn what it meant to be a husband. But they were not alone. There was Emily, who had grown up in a house with only her mum and the Rosenthals upstairs, who had no place in her world for a dad, had no use for one. She had screamed when he had arrived home in his uniform with his sun-blistered skin and his bristly chin and smelling of the sea. Nancy knew how to handle her and he did not. He learned, quickly, to resent how much of his wife’s time, his wife’s energy, the kid gobbled up.

It was not a happy house that first week or two.

Then Harry turned up.

He appeared one evening at Joe’s local when Joe had not even told his brother he was home with an offer of work down the docks. It was extra money, Harry said, and Joe welcomed the idea, though Nancy, when she found out, was furious.

But a convoy had come in and after his first shift Joe arrived home with two tins of peaches in syrup and a tin of Carnation milk and his wife and child fell on him like he had won the Victoria Cross. The kid ran to him, screaming with delirious excitement. After this they had got along just fine, he and the kid. He took her to the park, though it was all dug up for the war effort. He carried her on his shoulders through the stalls on market day and sat with her on his lap at his local letting her lick the froth from his beer. He marvelled at all the things she could do and say, this tiny perfect creature that was a part of him and a part of his wife, at times almost a miniature of Nancy the way she became cross

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