Winter of the World

3

1936

It was a sunny Saturday afternoon in May, 1936, and Lloyd Williams was at the end of his second year at Cambridge, when Fascism reared its vile head among the white stone cloisters of the ancient university.

Lloyd was at Emmanuel College – known as ‘Emma’ – doing Modern Languages. He was studying French and German, but he preferred German. As he immersed himself in the glories of German culture, reading Goethe, Schiller, Heine and Thomas Mann, he looked up occasionally from his desk in the quiet library to watch with sadness as today’s Germany descended into barbarism.

Then the local branch of the British Union of Fascists announced that their leader, Sir Oswald Mosley, would address a meeting in Cambridge. The news took Lloyd back to Berlin three years earlier. He saw again the Brownshirt thugs wrecking Maud von Ulrich’s magazine office; heard again the grating sound of Hitler’s hate-filled voice as he stood in the parliament and poured scorn on democracy; shuddered anew at the memory of the dogs’ bloody muzzles savaging Jörg with a bucket over his head.

Now Lloyd stood on the platform at Cambridge railway station, waiting to meet his mother off the train from London. With him was Ruby Carter, a fellow activist in the local Labour Party. She had helped him organize today’s meeting on the subject of ‘The Truth about Fascism’. Lloyd’s mother, Eth Leckwith, was to speak. Her book about Germany had been a big success; she had stood for Parliament again in the 1935 election; and she was once again the Member for Aldgate.

Lloyd was tense about the meeting. Mosley’s new political party had gained many thousands of members, due in part to the enthusiastic support of the Daily Mail, which had run the infamous headline HURRAH FOR THE BLACKSHIRTS! Mosley was a charismatic speaker, and would undoubtedly recruit new members today. It was vital that there should be a bright beacon of reason to contrast with his seductive lies.

However, Ruby was chatty. She was complaining about the social life of Cambridge. ‘I’m so bored with local boys,’ she said. ‘All they want to do is go to a pub and get drunk.’

Lloyd was surprised. He had imagined that Ruby had a well-developed social life. She wore inexpensive clothes that were always a bit tight, showing off her plump curves. Most men would find her attractive, he thought. ‘What do you like to do?’ he asked. ‘Apart from organize Labour Party meetings.’

‘I love dancing.’

‘You can’t be short of partners. There are twelve men for every woman at the university.’

‘No offence intended, but most of the university men are pansies.’

There were a lot of homosexual men at Cambridge University, Lloyd knew, but it startled him to hear her mention the subject. Ruby was famously blunt, but this was shocking, even from her. He had no idea how to respond, so he said nothing.

Ruby said: ‘You’re not one of them, are you?’

‘No! Don’t be ridiculous.’

‘No need to be insulted. You’re handsome enough for a pansy, except for that squashed nose.’

He laughed. ‘That’s what they call a backhanded compliment.’

‘You are, though. You look like Douglas Fairbanks Junior.’

‘Well, thanks, but I’m not a pansy.’

‘Have you got a girlfriend?’

This was becoming embarrassing. ‘No, not at the moment.’ He made a show of checking his watch and looking for the train.

‘Why not?’

‘I just haven’t met Miss Right.’

‘Oh, thank you very much, I’m sure.’

He looked at her. She was only half joking. He felt mortified that she had taken his remark personally. ‘I didn’t mean . . .’

‘Yes, you did. But never mind. Here’s the train.’

The locomotive drew into the station and came to a halt in a cloud of steam. The doors opened and passengers stepped out on to the platform: students in tweed jackets, farmers’ wives going shopping, working men in flat caps. Lloyd scanned the crowd for his mother. ‘She’ll be in a third-class carriage,’ he said. ‘Matter of principle.’

Ruby said: ‘Would you come to my twenty-first birthday party?’

‘Of course.’

‘My friend’s got a little flat in Market Street, and a deaf landlady.’

Lloyd was not comfortable about this invitation, and hesitated over his reply; then his mother appeared, as pretty as a songbird in a red summer coat and a jaunty little hat. She hugged and kissed him. ‘You look very well, my lovely,’ she said. ‘But I must buy you a new suit for next term.’

‘This one is fine, Mam.’ He had a scholarship that paid his university fees and basic living expenses, but it did not run to suits. When he had started at Cambridge his mother had dipped into her savings and bought him a tweed suit for daytime and an evening suit for formal dinners. He had worn the tweed every day for two years, and it showed. He was particular about his appearance, and made sure that he always had a clean white shirt, a perfectly knotted tie, and a folded white handkerchief in his breast pocket: there had to be a dandy somewhere in his ancestry. The suit was carefully pressed, but it was beginning to look shabby, and in truth he longed for a new one, but he did not want his mother to spend her savings.

‘We’ll see,’ she said. She turned to Ruby, smiled warmly, and held out her hand. ‘I’m Eth Leckwith,’ she said with the easy grace of a visiting duchess.

‘Pleased to meet you. I’m Ruby Carter.’

‘Are you a student, too, Ruby?’

‘No, I’m a maid at Chimbleigh, a big country house.’ Ruby looked a bit ashamed as she made this confession. ‘It’s five miles out of town, but I can usually borrow a bike.’

‘Fancy that!’ said Ethel. ‘When I was your age, I was a maid at a country house in Wales.’

Ruby was amazed. ‘You, a housemaid? And now you’re a Member of Parliament!’

‘That’s what democracy means.’

Lloyd said: ‘Ruby and I organized today’s meeting together.’

His mother said: ‘And how is it going?’

‘Sold out. In fact, we had to move to a bigger hall.’

‘I told you it would work.’

The meeting had been Ethel’s idea. Ruby Carter and many others in the Labour Party had wanted to mount a protest demonstration, marching through the town. Lloyd had agreed at first. ‘Fascism must be publicly opposed at every opportunity,’ he had said.

Ethel had counselled otherwise. ‘If we march and shout slogans, we look just like them,’ she had said. ‘Show that we’re different. Hold a quiet, intelligent meeting to discuss the reality of Fascism.’ Lloyd had been dubious. ‘I’ll come and speak, if you like,’ she had said.

Lloyd had put that to the Cambridge party. There had been a lively discussion, with Ruby leading the opposition to Ethel’s plan; but in the end the prospect of having an MP and famous feminist to speak had clinched it.

Lloyd was still not sure that it had been the right decision. He recalled Maud von Ulrich in Berlin saying: ‘We must not meet violence with violence.’ That had been the policy of the German Social Democratic Party. For the von Ulrich family, and for Germany, the policy had been a catastrophe.

They walked out through the yellow-brick Romanesque arches of the station and hurried along leafy Station Road, a street of smug middle-class houses made of the same yellow brick. Ethel put her arm through Lloyd’s. ‘How’s my little undergraduate, then?’ she said.

He smiled at the word ‘little’. He was four inches taller than her, and muscular because of his training with the university boxing team: he could have picked her up with one hand. She was bursting with pride, he knew. Few things in life had pleased her as much as his coming to this place. That was probably why she wanted to buy him suits.

‘I love it here, you know that,’ he said. ‘I’ll love it more when it’s full of working-class boys.’

‘And girls,’ Ruby put in.

They turned into Hills Road, the main thoroughfare leading to the town centre. Since the coming of the railway, the town had expanded south towards the station, and churches had been built along Hills Road to serve the new suburb. Their destination was a Baptist chapel whose left-wing pastor had agreed to loan it free of charge.

‘I made a bargain with the Fascists,’ Lloyd said. ‘I said we’d refrain from marching if they would promise to do the same.’

‘I’m surprised they agreed,’ said Ethel. ‘Fascists love marching.’

‘They were reluctant. But I told the university authorities and the police what I was proposing, and the Fascists pretty much had to go along with it.’

‘That was clever.’

‘But Mam, guess who is their local leader? Viscount Aberowen, otherwise known as Boy Fitzherbert, the son of your former employer Earl Fitzherbert!’ Boy was twenty-one, the same age as Lloyd. He was at Trinity, the aristocratic college.

‘What? My God!’

She seemed more shaken than he had expected, and he glanced at her. She had gone pale. ‘Are you shocked?’

‘Yes!’ She seemed to recover her composure. ‘His father is a junior minister in the Foreign Office.’ The government was a Conservative-dominated coalition. ‘Fitz must be embarrassed.’

‘Most Conservatives are soft on Fascism, I imagine. They see little wrong with killing Communists and persecuting Jews.’

‘Some of them, perhaps, but you exaggerate.’ She gave Lloyd a sideways look. ‘So you went to see Boy?’

‘Yes.’ Lloyd thought this seemed to have special significance for Ethel, but he could not imagine why. ‘I thought him perfectly frightful. In his room at Trinity he had a whole case of Scotch – twelve bottles!’

‘You met him once before – do you remember?’

‘No, when was that?’

‘You were nine years old. I took you to the Palace of Westminster, shortly after I was elected. We met Fitz and Boy on the stairs.’

Lloyd did vaguely remember. Then, as now, the incident seemed to be mysteriously important to his mother. ‘That was him? How funny.’

Ruby put in: ‘I know him. He’s a pig. He paws maids.’

Lloyd was shocked, but his mother seemed unsurprised. ‘Very unpleasant, but it happens all the time.’ Her grim acceptance made it more horrifying to him.

They reached the chapel and went in through the back door. There, in a kind of vestry, was Robert von Ulrich, looking startlingly British in a bold green-and-brown check suit and a striped tie. He stood up and Ethel hugged him. In faultless English, Robert said: ‘My dear Ethel, what a perfectly charming hat.’

Lloyd introduced his mother to the local Labour Party women, who were preparing urns of tea and plates of biscuits to be served after the meeting. Having heard Ethel complain, many times, that people who organized political events seemed to think that an MP never needed to go to the toilet, he said: ‘Ruby, before we start, would you show my mother where the ladies’ facilities are?’ The two women went off.

Lloyd sat down next to Robert and said conversationally: ‘How’s business?’

Robert was now the proprietor of a restaurant much favoured by the homosexuals about whom Ruby had been complaining. Somehow he had known that Cambridge in the 1930s was congenial to such men, just as Berlin had been in the 1920s. His new place had the same name as the old, Bistro Robert. ‘Business is good,’ he answered. A shadow crossed his face, a brief but intense look of real fear. ‘This time, I hope I can keep what I’ve built up.’

‘We’re doing our best to fight off the Fascists, and meetings such as this are the way to do it,’ Lloyd said. ‘Your talk will be a big help – it will open people’s eyes.’ Robert was going to speak about his personal experience of life under Fascism. ‘A lot of them say it couldn’t happen here, but they’re wrong.’

Robert nodded grim agreement. ‘Fascism is a lie, but an alluring one.’

Lloyd’s visit to Berlin three years ago was vivid in his mind. ‘I often wonder what happened to the old Bistro Robert,’ he said.

‘I had a letter from a friend,’ Robert said in a voice full of sadness. ‘None of the old crowd go there any more. The Macke brothers auctioned off the wine cellar. Now the clientele is mostly middle-ranking cops and bureaucrats.’ He looked even more pained as he added: ‘They no longer use tablecloths.’ He changed the subject abruptly. ‘Do you want to go to the Trinity Ball?’

Most of the colleges held summer dances to celebrate the end of exams. The balls, plus associated parties and picnics, constituted May Week, which illogically took place in June. The Trinity Ball was famously lavish. ‘I’d love to go, but I can’t afford it,’ Lloyd said. ‘Tickets are two guineas, aren’t they?’

‘I’ve been given one. But you can have it. Several hundred drunk students dancing to a jazz band is actually my idea of hell.’

Lloyd was tempted. ‘But I haven’t got a tailcoat.’ College balls required white-tie-and-tails.

‘Borrow mine. It’ll be too big at the waist, but we’re the same height.’

‘Then I will. Thank you!’

Ruby reappeared. ‘Your mother is wonderful,’ she said to Lloyd. ‘I never knew she used to be a maid!’

Robert said: ‘I have known Ethel for more than twenty years. She is truly extraordinary.’

‘I can see why you haven’t met Miss Right,’ Ruby said to Lloyd. ‘You’re looking for someone like her, and there aren’t many.’

‘You’re right about the last part, anyway,’ Lloyd said. ‘There’s no one like her.’

Ruby winced, as if in pain.

Lloyd said: ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Toothache.’

‘You must go to the dentist.’

She looked at him as if he had said something stupid, and he realized that on a housemaid’s wage she could not afford to pay a dentist. He felt foolish.

He went to the door and peeped through to the main hall. Like many nonconformist churches, this was a plain, rectangular room with walls painted white. It was a warm day, and the clear-glass windows were open. The rows of chairs were full and the audience was waiting expectantly.

When Ethel reappeared, Lloyd said: ‘If it’s all right with everyone, I’ll open the meeting. Then Robert will tell his personal story, and my mother will draw out the political lessons.’

They all agreed.

‘Ruby, will you keep an eye on the Fascists? Let me know if anything happens.’

Ethel frowned. ‘Is that really necessary?’

‘We probably shouldn’t trust them to keep their promise.’

Ruby said: ‘They’re meeting a quarter of a mile up the road. I don’t mind running in and out.’

She left by the back door, and Lloyd led the others into the church. There was no stage, but a table and three chairs stood at the near end, with a lectern to one side. As Ethel and Robert took their seats, Lloyd went to the lectern. There was a brief round of subdued applause.

‘Fascism is on the march,’ Lloyd began. ‘And it is dangerously attractive. It gives false hope to the unemployed. It wears a spurious patriotism, as the Fascists themselves wear imitation military uniforms.’

The British government was keen to appease Fascist regimes, to Lloyd’s dismay. It was a coalition dominated by Conservatives, with a few Liberals and a sprinkling of renegade Labour ministers who had split with their party. Only a few days after it was re-elected last November, the Foreign Secretary had proposed to yield much of Abyssinia to the conquering Italians and their Fascist leader, Benito Mussolini.

Worse still, Germany was rearming and aggressive. Just a couple of months ago, Hitler had violated the Versailles Treaty by sending troops into the demilitarized Rhineland – and Lloyd had been horrified to see that no country had been willing to stop him.

Any hope he had that Fascism might be a temporary aberration had now vanished. Lloyd believed that democratic countries such as France and Britain must get ready to fight. But he did not say so in his speech today, for his mother and most of the Labour Party opposed a build-up in British armaments and hoped that the League of Nations would be able to deal with the dictators. They wanted at all costs to avoid repeating the dreadful slaughter of the Great War. Lloyd sympathized with that hope, but feared it was not realistic.

He was preparing himself for war. He had been an officer cadet at school and, when he came up to Cambridge, he had joined the Officer Training Corps – the only working-class boy and certainly the only Labour Party member to do so.

He sat down to muted applause. He was a clear and logical speaker, but he did not have his mother’s ability to touch hearts – not yet, anyway.

Robert stepped to the lectern. ‘I am Austrian,’ he said. ‘In the war I was wounded, captured by the Russians, and sent to a prison camp in Siberia. After the Bolsheviks made peace with the Central Powers, the guards opened the gates and told us we were free to go. Getting home was our problem, not theirs. It is a long way from Siberia to Austria – more than three thousand miles. There was no bus, so I walked.’

Surprised laughter rippled around the room, with a few appreciative handclaps. Robert had already charmed them, Lloyd saw.

Ruby came up to him, looking annoyed, and spoke in his ear. ‘The Fascists just went by. Boy Fitzherbert was driving Mosley to the railway station, and a bunch of hotheads in black shirts were running after the car, cheering.’

Lloyd frowned. ‘They promised they wouldn’t march. I suppose they’ll say that running behind a car doesn’t count.’

‘What’s the difference, I’d like to know?’

‘Any violence?’

‘No.’

‘Keep a lookout.’

Ruby retired. Lloyd was bothered. The Fascists had certainly broken the spirit of the agreement, if not the letter. They had appeared on the street in their uniforms – and there had been no counter-demonstration. The socialists were here, inside the church, invisible. All there was to show for their stand was a banner outside the church saying The Truth about Fascism in large red letters.

Robert was saying: ‘I am pleased to be here, honoured to have been invited to address you, and delighted to see several patrons of Bistro Robert in the audience. However, I must warn you that the story I have to tell is most unpleasant, and indeed gruesome.’

He related how he and Jörg had been arrested after refusing to sell the Berlin restaurant to a Nazi. He described Jörg as his chef and longtime business partner, saying nothing of their sexual relationship, though the more knowing people in the church probably guessed.

The audience became very quiet as he began to describe events in the concentration camp. Lloyd heard gasps of horror when he got to the part where the starving dogs appeared. Robert described the torture of Jörg in a low, clear voice that carried across the room. By the time he came to Jörg’s death, several people were weeping.

Lloyd himself relived the cruelty and anguish of those moments, and he was possessed by rage against such fools as Boy Fitzherbert, whose infatuation with marching songs and smart uniforms threatened to bring the same torment to England.

Robert sat down and Ethel went to the lectern. As she began to speak, Ruby reappeared, looking furious. ‘I told you this wouldn’t work!’ she hissed in Lloyd’s ear. ‘Mosley has gone, but the boys are singing “Rule Britannia” outside the station.’

That certainly was a breach of the agreement, Lloyd thought angrily. Boy had broken his promise. So much for the word of an English gentleman.

Ethel was explaining how Fascism offered false solutions, simplistically blaming groups such as Jews and Communists for complex problems such as unemployment and crime. She made merciless fun of the concept of the triumph of the will, likening the Führer and the Duce to playground bullies. They claimed popular support, but banned all opposition.

Lloyd realized that when the Fascists returned from the railway station to the centre of town they would have to pass this church. He began to listen to the sounds coming through the open windows. He could hear cars and lorries growling along Hills Road, punctuated now and again by the trill of a bicycle bell or the cry of a child. He thought he heard a distant shout, and it sounded ominously like the noise made by rowdy boys young enough still to be proud of their new, deep voices. He tensed, straining to hear, and there were more shouts. The Fascists were marching.

Ethel raised her own voice as the bellowing outside got louder. She argued that working people of all kinds needed to band together in trade unions and the Labour Party to build a fairer society step by democratic step, not through the kind of violent upheaval that had gone so badly wrong in Communist Russia and Nazi Germany.

Ruby re-entered. ‘They’re marching up Hills Road now,’ she said in a low, urgent murmur. ‘We have to go out there and confront them!’

‘No!’ Lloyd whispered. ‘The party made a collective decision – no demonstration. We must stick to that. We must be a disciplined movement!’ He knew the reference to party discipline would carry weight with her.

The Fascists were nearby now, raucously chanting. Lloyd guessed there must be fifty or sixty of them. He itched to go out there and face them. Two young men near the back stood up and went to the windows to look out. Ethel urged caution. ‘Don’t react to hooliganism by becoming a hooligan,’ she said. ‘That will only give the newspapers an excuse to say that one side is as bad as the other.’

There was a crash of breaking glass, and a stone came through the window. A woman screamed, and several people got to their feet. ‘Please remain seated,’ Ethel said. ‘I expect they will go away in a minute.’ She talked on in a calm and reassuring voice. Few people attended to her speech. Everyone was looking backwards, towards the church door, and listening to the hoots and jeers of the ruffians outside. Lloyd had to struggle to sit still. He looked towards his mother with a neutral expression fixed like a mask on his face. Every bone in his body wanted to rush outside and punch heads.

After a minute the audience quietened somewhat. They returned their attention to Ethel, though still fidgeting and looking back over their shoulders. Ruby muttered: ‘We’re like a pack of rabbits, shaking in our burrow while the fox barks outside.’ Her tone was contemptuous, and Lloyd felt she was right.

But his mother’s forecast proved true, and no more stones were thrown. The chanting receded.

‘Why do the Fascists want violence?’ Ethel asked rhetorically. ‘Those out there in Hills Road might be mere hooligans, but someone is directing them, and their tactics have a purpose. When there is fighting in the streets, they can claim that public order has broken down, and drastic measures are needed to restore the rule of law. Those emergency measures will include banning democratic political parties such as Labour, prohibiting trade union action, and jailing people without trial – people such as us, peaceful men and women whose only crime is to disagree with the government. Does this sound fantastic to you, unlikely, something that could never happen? Well, they used exactly those tactics in Germany – and it worked.’

She went on to talk about how Fascism should be opposed: in discussion groups, at meetings such as this one, by writing letters to the newspapers, by using every opportunity to alert others to the danger. But even Ethel had trouble making this sound courageous and decisive.

Lloyd was cut to the quick by Ruby’s talk of rabbits. He felt like a coward. He was so frustrated that he could hardly sit still.

Slowly the atmosphere in the hall returned to normal. Lloyd turned to Ruby. ‘The rabbits are safe, anyhow,’ he said.

‘For now,’ she said. ‘But the fox will be back.’

(ii)

‘If you like a boy, you can let him kiss you on the mouth,’ said Lindy Westhampton, sitting on the lawn in the sunshine.

‘And if you really like him, he can feel your breasts,’ said her twin sister, Lizzie.

‘But nothing below the waist.’

‘Not until you’re engaged.’

Daisy was intrigued. She had expected English girls to be inhibited, but she had been wrong. The Westhampton twins were sex mad.

Daisy was thrilled to be a guest at Chimbleigh, the country house of Sir Bartholomew ‘Bing’ Westhampton. It made her feel that she had been accepted into English society. But she still had not met the King.

She recalled her humiliation at the Buffalo Yacht Club with a sense of shame that was still like a burn on her skin, continuing to give her agonizing pain long after the flame had gone away. But whenever she felt that pain she thought about how she was going to dance with the King, and she imagined them all – Dot Renshaw, Nora Farquharson, Ursula Dewar – poring over her picture in the Buffalo Sentinel, reading every word of the report, envying her, and wishing that they could honestly say they had always been her friends.

Things had been difficult at first. Daisy had arrived three months ago with her mother and her friend Eva. Her father had given them a handful of introductions to people who turned out not to be the crème de la crème of London’s social scene. Daisy had begun to regret her overconfident exit from the Yacht Club Ball: what if it all came to nothing?

But Daisy was determined and resourceful, and she needed no more than a foot in the door. Even at entertainments that were more or less public, such as horse races and operas, she met high-ranking people. She flirted with the men, and she piqued the curiosity of the matrons by letting them know she was rich and single. Many aristocratic English families had been ruined by the Depression, and an American heiress would have been welcome even if she were not pretty and charming. They liked her accent, they tolerated her holding her fork in her right hand, and they were amused that she could drive a car – in England men did the driving. Many English girls could ride a horse as well as Daisy, but few looked so pertly assured in the saddle. Some older women still viewed Daisy with suspicion, but she would win them around eventually, she felt sure.

Bing Westhampton had been easy to flirt with. An elfin man with a winning smile, he had an eye for a pretty girl; and Daisy knew instinctively that more than his eye would be involved if he got the chance of a twilight fumble in the garden. Clearly his daughters took after him.

The Westhamptons’ house party was one of several in Cambridgeshire held to coincide with May Week. The guests included Earl Fitzherbert, known as Fitz, and his wife, Bea. She was Countess Fitzherbert, of course, but she preferred her Russian title of Princess. Their elder son, Boy, was at Trinity College.

Princess Bea was one of the social matriarchs who were doubtful about Daisy. Without actually telling a lie, Daisy had let people assume that her father was a Russian nobleman who had lost everything in the revolution, rather than a factory worker who had fled to America one step ahead of the police. But Bea was not taken in. ‘I can’t recall a family called Peshkov in St Petersburg or Moscow,’ she had said, hardly pretending to be puzzled; and Daisy had forced herself to smile as if it was of no consequence what the princess could remember.

There were three girls the same age as Daisy and Eva: the Westhampton twins plus May Murray, the daughter of a general. The balls went on all night, so everyone slept until midday, but the afternoons were dull. The five girls lazed in the garden or strolled in the woods. Now, sitting up in her hammock, Daisy said: ‘What can you do after you’re engaged?’

Lindy said: ‘You can rub his thing.’

‘Until it squirts,’ said her sister.

May Murray, who was not as daring as the twins, said: ‘Oh, disgusting!’

That only encouraged the twins. ‘Or you can suck it,’ said Lindy. ‘They like that best of all.’

‘Stop it!’ May protested. ‘You’re just making this up.’

They stopped, having teased May enough. ‘I’m bored,’ said Lindy. ‘What shall we do?’

An imp of mischief seized Daisy, and she said: ‘Let’s come down to dinner in men’s clothes.’

She regretted it immediately. A stunt like that could ruin her social career when it had only just got started.

Eva’s German sense of propriety was upset. ‘Daisy, you don’t mean it!’

‘No,’ she said. ‘Silly notion.’

The twins had their mother’s fine blonde hair, not their father’s dark curls, but they had inherited his streak of naughtiness, and they both loved the idea. ‘They’ll all be in tailcoats tonight, so we can steal their dinner jackets,’ said Lindy.

‘Yes!’ said her twin. ‘We’ll do it while they’re having tea.’

Daisy saw that it was too late to back out.

May Murray said: ‘We couldn’t go to the ball like that!’ The whole party was to attend the Trinity Ball after dinner.

‘We’ll change again before leaving,’ said Lizzie.

May was a timid creature, probably cowed by her military father, and she always went along with whatever the other girls decided. Eva as the only dissident was overruled, and the plan went ahead.

When the time came to dress for dinner, a maid brought two evening suits into the bedroom Daisy was sharing with Eva. The maid’s name was Ruby. Yesterday she had been miserable with toothache, so Daisy had given her the money for a dentist, and she had had the tooth pulled out. Now Ruby was bright-eyed with excitement, toothache forgotten. ‘Here you are, ladies!’ she said. ‘Sir Bartholomew’s should be small enough for you, Miss Peshkov, and Mr Andrew Fitzherbert’s for Miss Rothmann.’

Daisy took off her dress and put on the shirt. Ruby helped her with the unfamiliar studs and cufflinks. Then she climbed into Bing Westhampton’s trousers, black with a satin stripe. She tucked her slip in and pulled the suspenders over her shoulders. She felt a bit daring as she buttoned the fly.

None of the girls knew how to knot a tie, so the results were distinctly limp. But Daisy came up with the winning touch. Using an eyebrow pencil, she gave herself a moustache. ‘It’s marvellous!’ said Eva. ‘You look even prettier!’ Daisy drew side-whiskers on Eva’s cheeks.

The five girls met up in the twins’ bedroom. Daisy walked in with a mannish swagger that made the others giggle hysterically.

May voiced the concern that remained in the back of Daisy’s mind. ‘I hope we’re not going to get into trouble over this.’

Lindy said: ‘Oh, who cares if we do?’

Daisy decided to forget her misgivings and enjoy herself, and she led the way down to the drawing room.

They were the first to arrive, and the room was empty. Repeating something she had heard Boy Fitzherbert say to the butler, Daisy put on a man’s voice and drawled: ‘Pour me a whisky, Grimshaw, there’s a good chap – this champagne tastes like piss.’ The others squealed with shocked laughter.

Bing and Fitz came in together. Bing in his white waistcoat made Daisy think of a pied wagtail, a cheeky black-and-white bird. Fitz was a good-looking middle-aged man, his dark hair touched with grey. As a result of war wounds he walked with a slight limp, and one eyelid drooped; but this evidence of his courage in battle only made him more dashing.

Fitz saw the girls, looked twice, and said: ‘Good God!’ His tone was sternly disapproving.

Daisy suffered a moment of sheer panic. Had she spoiled everything? The English could be frightfully straight-laced, everyone knew that. Would she be asked to leave the house? How terrible that would be. Dot Renshaw and Nora Farquharson would crow if she went home in disgrace. She would rather die.

But Bing burst out laughing. ‘I say, that’s terribly good,’ he said. ‘Look at this, Grimshaw.’

The elderly butler, coming in with a bottle of champagne in a silver ice bucket, observed them bleakly. In a tone of withering insincerity he said: ‘Most amusing, Sir Bartholomew.’

Bing continued to regard them all with a delight mingled with lasciviousness, and Daisy realized – too late – that dressing like the opposite sex might misleadingly suggest, to some men, a degree of sexual freedom and a willingness to experiment – a suggestion that could obviously lead to trouble.

As the party assembled for dinner, most of the other guests followed the lead of their host in treating the girls’ prank as an amusing piece of tomfoolery, though Daisy could tell that they were not all equally charmed. Daisy’s mother went pale with fright when she saw them, and sat down quickly as if she felt shaky. Princess Bea, a heavily corseted woman in her forties who might once have been pretty, wrinkled her powdered brow in a censorious frown. But Lady Westhampton was a jolly woman who reacted to life, as to her wayward husband, with a tolerant smile: she laughed heartily and congratulated Daisy on her moustache.

The boys, coming last, were also delighted. General Murray’s son, Lieutenant Jimmy Murray, not as straight-laced as his father, roared with pleased laughter. The Fitzherbert sons, Boy and Andy, came in together, and it was Boy’s reaction that was the most interesting of all. He stared at the girls with mesmeric fascination. He tried to cover up with jollity, haw-hawing like the other men, but it was clear he was weirdly captivated.

At dinner the twins picked up Daisy’s joke and talked like men, in deep voices and hearty tones, making the others laugh. Lindy held up her wine glass and said: ‘How do you like this claret, Liz?’

Lizzie replied: ‘I think it’s a bit thin, old boy. I’ve a notion Bing’s been watering it, don’t you know.’

All through dinner Daisy kept catching Boy staring at her. He did not resemble his handsome father, but, all the same, he was good-looking, with his mother’s blue eyes. She began to feel embarrassed, as if he were ogling her breasts. To break the spell she said: ‘And have you been taking exams, Boy?’

‘Good Lord, no,’ he said.

His father said: ‘Too busy flying his plane to study much.’ This was phrased as a criticism, but it sounded as if Fitz was actually proud of his elder son.

Boy pretended to be outraged. ‘A slander!’ he said.

Eva was mystified. ‘Why are you at the university if you don’t wish to study?’

Lindy explained: ‘Some of the boys don’t bother to graduate, especially if they’re not academic types.’

Lizzie added: ‘Especially if they’re rich and lazy.’

‘I do study!’ Boy protested. ‘But I don’t intend actually to sit the exams. It’s not as if I’m hoping to make a living as a doctor, or something.’ Boy would inherit one of the largest fortunes in England when Fitz died.

And his lucky wife would be Countess Fitzherbert.

Daisy said: ‘Wait a minute. Do you really have your own airplane?’

‘Yes, I do. A Hornet Moth. I belong to the University Aero Club. We use a little airfield outside the town.’

‘But that’s wonderful! You must take me up!’

Daisy’s mother said: ‘Oh, dear, no!’

Boy said to Daisy: ‘Wouldn’t you be nervous?’

‘Not a bit!’

‘Then I will take you.’ He turned to Olga. ‘It’s perfectly safe, Mrs Peshkov. I promise I’ll bring her back in one piece.’

Daisy was thrilled.

The conversation moved on to this summer’s favourite topic: England’s stylish new King, Edward VIII, and his romance with Wallis Simpson, an American woman separated from her second husband. The London newspapers said nothing about it, except to include Mrs Simpson on lists of guests at royal events; but Daisy’s mother got the American papers sent over, and they were full of speculation that Wallis would divorce Mr Simpson and marry the King.

‘Completely out of the question,’ said Fitz severely. ‘The King is the head of the Church of England. He cannot possibly marry a divorcée.’

When the ladies retired, leaving the men to port and cigars, the girls hurried to change. Daisy decided to emphasize how very feminine she really was, and chose a ball dress of pink silk patterned with tiny flowers that had a matching jacket with puffed short sleeves.

Eva wore a dramatically simple black silk gown with no sleeves. In the past year she had lost weight, changed her hair, and learned – under Daisy’s tuition – to dress in an unfussy tailored style that flattered her. Eva had become like one of the family, and Olga delighted in buying clothes for her. Daisy regarded her as the sister she had never had.

It was still light when they all climbed into cars and carriages and drove the five miles into the town centre.

Daisy thought Cambridge was the quaintest place she had ever seen, with its winding little streets and elegant college buildings. They got out at Trinity and Daisy gazed up at the statue of its founder, King Henry VIII. When they passed through the sixteenth-century brick gatehouse, Daisy gasped with pleasure at the sight that met her eyes: a large quadrangle, its trimmed green lawn crossed by cobbled paths, with an elaborate architectural fountain in the middle. On all four sides, timeworn buildings of golden stone formed the backdrop against which young men in tailcoats danced with gorgeously dressed girls, and dozens of waiters in evening dress offered trays crowded with glasses of champagne. Daisy clapped her hands with joy: this was just the kind of thing she loved.

She danced with Boy, then Jimmy Murray, then Bing, who held her close and let his right hand drift from the small of her back down to the swell of her hips. She decided not to protest. The English band played a watery imitation of American jazz, but they were loud and fast, and they knew all the latest hits.

Night fell, and the quadrangle was illuminated with blazing torches. Daisy took a break to check on Eva, who was not so self-confident and sometimes needed to be introduced around. However, she need not have worried: she found Eva talking to a strikingly handsome student in a suit too big for him. Eva introduced him as Lloyd Williams. ‘We’ve been talking about Fascism in Germany,’ Lloyd said, as if Daisy might want to join in the discussion.

‘How extraordinarily dull of you,’ Daisy said.

Lloyd seemed not to hear that. ‘I was in Berlin three years ago, when Hitler came to power. I didn’t meet Eva then, but it turns out we have some acquaintances in common.’

Jimmy Murray appeared and asked Eva to dance. Lloyd was visibly disappointed to see her go, but summoned his manners and graciously asked Daisy, and they moved closer to the band. ‘What an interesting person your friend Eva is,’ he said.

‘Why, Mr Williams, that’s what every girl longs to hear from her dancing partner,’ Daisy replied. As soon as the words were out of her mouth she regretted sounding shrewish.

But he was amused. He grinned and said: ‘Dear me, you’re so right. I am justly reproved. I must try to be more gallant.’

She immediately liked him better for being able to laugh at himself. It showed confidence.

He said: ‘Are you staying at Chimbleigh, like Eva?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then you must be the American who gave Ruby Carter the money for the dentist.’

‘How on earth do you know about that?’

‘She’s a friend of mine.’

Daisy was surprised. ‘Do many undergraduates befriend housemaids?’

‘My goodness, what a snobbish thing to say! My mother was a housemaid, before she became a Member of Parliament.’

Daisy felt herself blush. She hated snobbery and often accused others of it, especially in Buffalo. She thought she was totally innocent of such unworthy attitudes. ‘I’ve got off on the wrong foot with you, haven’t I?’ she said as the dance came to an end.

‘Not really,’ he said. ‘You think it’s dull to talk about Fascism, yet you take a German refugee into your home and even invite her to travel to England with you. You think housemaids have no right to be friends with undergraduates, yet you pay for Ruby to see the dentist. I don’t suppose I’ll meet another girl half as intriguing as you tonight.’

‘I’ll take that as a compliment.’

‘Here comes your Fascist friend, Boy Fitzherbert. Do you want me to scare him off?’ Daisy sensed that Lloyd would relish the chance of a quarrel with Boy.

‘Certainly not!’ she said, and turned to smile at Boy.

Boy nodded curtly to Lloyd. ‘Evening, Williams.’

‘Good evening,’ said Lloyd. ‘I was disappointed that your Fascists marched along Hills Road last Saturday.’

‘Ah, yes,’ Boy said. ‘They got a bit over-enthusiastic.’

‘It surprised me, when you had given your word that they would not.’ Daisy saw that Lloyd was angry about this, underneath his mask of cool courtesy.

Boy refused to take it seriously. ‘Sorry about that,’ he said lightly. He turned to Daisy. ‘Come and see the library,’ he said to her. ‘It’s by Christopher Wren.’

‘With pleasure!’ Daisy said. She waved goodbye to Lloyd and let Boy take her arm. Lloyd looked disappointed to see her go, which pleased her.

On the west side of the quadrangle a passage led to a courtyard with a single elegant building at the far end. Daisy admired the cloisters on the ground floor. Boy explained that the books were on the upper floor, because the River Cam was liable to flood. ‘Let’s go and look at the river,’ he said. ‘It’s pretty at night.’

Daisy was twenty years old and, though she was inexperienced, she knew that Boy did not really care for gazing on rivers at night. But she wondered, after his reaction to seeing her in men’s clothing, whether he might really prefer boys to girls. She guessed she was about to find out.

‘Do you actually know the King?’ she asked as he led her across a second courtyard.

‘Yes. He’s more my father’s friend, obviously, but he comes to our house sometimes. And he’s jolly keen on some of my political ideas, I can tell you.’

‘I’d love to meet him.’ She was sounding naive, she knew, but this was her chance and she was not going to miss it.

They passed through a gateway and emerged on to a smooth lawn sloping down to a narrow walled-in river. ‘This area is called the Backs,’ Boy said. ‘Most of the older colleges own the fields on the other side of the water.’ He put his arm around her waist as they approached a little bridge. His hand moved up, as if accidentally, until his forefinger lay along the underside of her breast.

At the far end of the little bridge two college servants in uniform stood guard, presumably to repel gatecrashers. One of the men murmured: ‘Good evening, Viscount Aberowen,’ and the other smothered a grin. Boy responded with a barely perceptible nod. Daisy wondered how many other girls he had led across this bridge.

She knew Boy had a motive for giving her this tour and, sure enough, he stopped in the darkness and put his hands on her shoulders. ‘I say, you looked jolly fetching in that outfit at dinner.’ His voice was throaty with excitement.

‘I’m glad you thought so.’ She knew the kiss was coming, and she felt aroused at the prospect, but she was not quite ready. She put a hand on his shirt front, palm flat, holding him at a distance. ‘I really want to be presented at the royal court,’ she said. ‘Is it difficult to arrange?’

‘Not difficult at all,’ he said. ‘Not for my family, at least. And not for someone as pretty as you.’ He dipped his head eagerly towards hers.

She leaned away. ‘Would you do that for me? Will you fix it for me to be presented?’

‘Of course.’

She moved in closer, and felt the erection bulging at the front of his trousers. No, she thought, he doesn’t prefer boys. ‘Promise?’ she said.

‘I promise,’ he said breathlessly.

‘Thank you,’ she said, then she let him kiss her.

(iii)

The little house in Wellington Row, Aberowen, South Wales, was crowded at one o’clock on Saturday afternoon. Lloyd’s grandfather sat at the kitchen table looking proud. On one side he had his son, Billy Williams, a coal miner who had become Member of Parliament for Aberowen. On the other was his grandson, Lloyd, the Cambridge University student. Absent was his daughter, also a Member of Parliament. It was the Williams dynasty. No one here would ever say that – the notion of a dynasty was undemocratic, and these people believed in democracy the way the Pope believed in God – but, just the same, Lloyd suspected Granda was thinking it.

Also at the table was Uncle Billy’s lifelong friend and agent, Tom Griffiths. Lloyd was honoured to sit with such men. Granda was a veteran of the miners’ union; Uncle Billy had been court-martialled in 1919 for revealing Britain’s secret war against the Bolsheviks; Tom had fought alongside Billy at the Battle of the Somme. This was more impressive than dining with royalty.

Lloyd’s grandmother, Cara Williams, had served them stewed beef with home-made bread, and now they sat drinking tea and smoking. Friends and neighbours had come in, as they always did when Billy was here, and half a dozen of them stood leaning against the walls, smoking pipes and hand-rolled cigarettes, filling the little kitchen with the smell of men and tobacco.

Billy had the short stature and broad shoulders of many miners but, unlike the others, he was well dressed, in a navy-blue suit with a clean white shirt and a red tie. Lloyd noticed that they all used his first name often, as if to emphasize that he was one of them, empowered by their votes. They called Lloyd ‘boyo’, making it clear that they were not over-impressed by a university student. But they addressed Granda as Mr Williams: he was the one they truly respected.

Through the open back door Lloyd could see the slag heap from the mine, an ever-growing mountain which had now reached the lane behind the house.

Lloyd was spending the summer vacation as a low-paid organizer at a camp for unemployed colliers. Their project was to refurbish the Miners’ Institute Library. Lloyd found the physical work of sanding and painting and building shelves a refreshing change from reading Schiller in German and Molière in French. He enjoyed the banter among the men: he had inherited from his mother a love of the Welsh sense of humour.

It was great, but it was not fighting Fascism. He winced every time he remembered how he had skulked in the Baptist chapel while Boy Fitzherbert and the other bullies chanted in the street and threw stones through the window. He wished he had gone outside and punched someone. It might have been stupid but he would have felt better. He thought about it every night before falling asleep.

He also thought about Daisy Peshkov in a pink silk jacket with puffed sleeves.

He had seen Daisy a second time in May Week. He had gone to a recital in the chapel of King’s College, because the student in the room next to his at Emmanuel was playing the cello; and Daisy had been in the audience with the Westhamptons. She had been wearing a straw hat with a turned-up brim that made her look like a naughty schoolgirl. He had sought her out afterwards, and asked her questions about America, where he had never been. He wanted to know about President Roosevelt’s administration, and whether it had any lessons to teach Britain, but all Daisy talked about was tennis parties and polo matches and yacht clubs. Despite that, he had been captivated by her all over again. He liked her gay chatter all the more because it was punctuated, now and again, by unexpected darts of sarcastic wit. He had said: ‘I don’t want to keep you from your friends – I just wanted to ask about the New Deal’, and she had replied: ‘Oh, boy, you really know how to flatter a girl.’ But then, as they parted, she had said: ‘Call me when you come to London – Mayfair two four three four.’

Today he had come to his grandparents’ house for the midday meal, on his way to the railway station. He had a few days off from the work camp, and he was taking the train to London for a short break. He was vaguely hoping he might run into Daisy, as if London were a little town like Aberowen.

At the camp he was in charge of political education, and he told his grandfather he had organized a series of lectures by left-wing dons from Cambridge. ‘I tell them it’s their chance to get out of the ivory tower and meet the working class, and they find it hard to refuse me.’

Granda’s pale-blue eyes looked down his long, sharp nose. ‘I hope our lads teach them a thing or two about the real world.’

Lloyd pointed to Tom Griffiths’s son, standing in the open back door and listening. At sixteen, Lenny already had the characteristic Griffiths shadow of a black beard that never went away even when his cheeks were freshly shaved. ‘Lenny had an argument with a Marxist lecturer.’

‘Good for you, Len,’ said Granda. Marxism was popular in South Wales, which was sometimes jokingly called Little Moscow, but Granda had always been fiercely anti-Communist.

Lloyd said: ‘Tell Granda what you said, Lenny.’

Lenny grinned and said: ‘In 1872 the anarchist leader Mikhail Bakunin warned Karl Marx that Communists in power would be as oppressive as the aristocracy they replaced. After what has happened in Russia, can you honestly say Bakunin was wrong?’

Granda clapped his hands. A good debating point had always been relished around his kitchen table.

Lloyd’s grandmother poured him a fresh cup of tea. Cara Williams was grey, lined and bent, like all the women of her age in Aberowen. She asked Lloyd: ‘Are you courting yet, my lovely?’

The men grinned and winked.

Lloyd blushed. ‘Too busy studying, Grandmam.’ But an image of Daisy Peshkov came into his mind, together with the phone number: Mayfair two four three four.

His grandmother said: ‘Who’s this Ruby Carter, then?’

The men laughed, and Uncle Billy said: ‘Caught out, boyo!’

Lloyd’s mother had obviously been talking. ‘Ruby is membership officer of my local Labour Party in Cambridge, that’s all,’ Lloyd protested.

Billy said sarcastically: ‘Oh, aye, very convincing’, and the men laughed again.

‘You wouldn’t want me to go out with Ruby, Grandmam,’ Lloyd said. ‘You’d think she wears her clothes too tight.’

‘She doesn’t sound very suitable,’ Cara said. ‘You’re a university man, now. You must set your sights higher.’

She was just as snobbish as Daisy, Lloyd perceived. ‘There’s nothing wrong with Ruby Carter,’ he said. ‘But I’m not in love with her.’

‘You must marry an educated woman, a schoolteacher or a trained nurse.’

The trouble was that she was right. Lloyd liked Ruby, but he would never love her. She was pretty enough, and intelligent, too, and Lloyd was as vulnerable as the next man to a curvy figure, but still he knew she was not right for him. Worse, Grandmam had put her wrinkled old finger precisely on the reason: Ruby’s outlook was restricted, her horizons narrow. She was not exciting. Not like Daisy.

‘That’s enough women’s chatter,’ Granda said. ‘Billy, tell us the news from Spain.’

‘It’s bad,’ said Billy.

All Europe was watching Spain. The left-wing government elected last February had suffered an attempted military coup backed by Fascists and conservatives. The rebel general, Franco, had won support from the Catholic Church. The news had struck the rest of the continent like an earthquake. After Germany and Italy, would Spain, too, fall under the curse of Fascism?

‘The revolt was botched, as you probably know, and it almost failed,’ Billy went on. ‘But Hitler and Mussolini came to the rescue, and saved the insurrection by airlifting thousands of rebel troops from north Africa as reinforcements.’

Lenny put in: ‘And the unions saved the government!’

‘That’s true,’ Billy said. ‘The government was slow to react, but the trade unions led the way in organizing workers and arming them with weapons they had seized from military arsenals, ships, gun shops, and anywhere else they could find them.’

Granda said: ‘At least someone is fighting back. Until now the Fascists have had it all their own way. In the Rhineland and Abyssinia, they just walked in and took what they wanted. Thank God for the Spanish people, I say. They’ve got the guts to say no.’

There was a murmur of agreement from the men around the walls.

Lloyd again recalled that Saturday afternoon in Cambridge. He, too, had let the Fascists have it all their own way. He seethed with frustration.

‘But can they win?’ said Granda. ‘Weapons seem to be the issue now, isn’t it?’

‘Aye,’ said Billy. ‘The Germans and the Italians are supplying the rebels with guns and ammunition, as well as fighter planes and pilots. But no one is helping the elected Spanish government.’

‘And why the bloody hell not?’ said Lenny angrily.

Cara looked up from the cooking range. Her dark Mediterranean eyes flashed disapproval, and Lloyd thought he glimpsed the beautiful girl she had once been. ‘None of that language in my kitchen!’ she said.

‘Sorry, Mrs Williams.’

‘I can tell you the inside story,’ Billy said, and the men went quiet, listening. ‘The French Prime Minister, Leon Blum – a socialist, as you know – was all set to help. He’s already got one Fascist neighbour, Germany, and the last thing he wants is a Fascist regime on his southern border too. Sending arms to the Spanish government would enrage the French right wing, and French Catholic socialists too, but Blum could withstand that, especially if he had British support and could say that arming the government was an international initiative.’

Granda said: ‘So what went wrong?’

‘Our government talked him out of it. Blum came to London and our Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, told him we would not support him.’

Granda was angered. ‘Why does he need support? How can a socialist prime minister let himself be bullied by the conservative government of another country?’

‘Because there’s a danger of a military coup in France, too,’ said Billy. ‘The press there is rabidly right wing, and they’re whipping their own Fascists into a frenzy. Blum can fight them off with British support – but perhaps not without.’

‘So it’s our Conservative government being soft on Fascism again!’

‘All those Tories have investments in Spain – wine, textiles, coal, steel – and they’re afraid the left-wing government will expropriate them.’

‘What about America? They believe in democracy. Surely they’ll sell guns to Spain?’

‘You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But there’s a well-financed Catholic lobby, led by a millionaire called Joseph Kennedy, opposing any help to the Spanish government. And a Democratic president needs Catholic support. Roosevelt won’t do anything to jeopardize his New Deal.’

‘Well, there’s something we can do,’ said Lenny Griffiths, and a look of adolescent defiance came over his face.

‘What’s that, Len boy?’ said Billy.

‘We can go to Spain and fight.’

His father said: ‘Don’t talk daft, Lenny.’

‘Lots of people are talking about going, all over the world, even in America. They want to form volunteer units to fight alongside the regular army.’

Lloyd sat upright. ‘Do they?’ This was the first he had heard of it. ‘How do you know?’

‘I read about it in the Daily Herald.’

Lloyd was electrified. Volunteers going to Spain to fight the Fascists!

Tom Griffiths said to Lenny: ‘Well, you’re not going, and that’s that.’

Billy said: ‘Remember those boys who lied about their age to fight in the Great War? Thousands of them.’

‘And totally useless, most of them,’ Tom said. ‘I recall that kid who cried before the Somme. What was his name, Billy?’

‘Owen Bevin. He ran away, didn’t he?’

‘Aye – to a firing squad. The bastards shot him for desertion. Fifteen, he was, poor little tyke.’

Lenny said: ‘I’m sixteen.’

‘Aye,’ said his father. ‘Big difference, that.’

Granda said: ‘Lloyd here is going to miss the train to London in about ten minutes.’

Lloyd had been so struck by Lenny’s revelation that he had not kept an eye on the clock. He jumped up, kissed his grandmother, and picked up his small suitcase.

Lenny said: ‘I’ll walk with you to the station.’

Lloyd said his goodbyes and hurried down the hill. Lenny said nothing, seeming preoccupied. Lloyd was glad not to have to talk: his mind was in turmoil.

The train was in. Lloyd bought a third-class ticket to London. As he was about to board, Lenny said: ‘Tell me, now, Lloyd, how do you get a passport?’

‘You’re serious about going to Spain, aren’t you?’

‘Come on, man, don’t muck about, I want to know.’

The whistle blew. Lloyd climbed aboard, closed the door, and let down the window. ‘You go to the Post Office and ask for a form,’ he said.

Lenny said despondently: ‘If I went to the Aberowen post office and asked for a passport form, my mother would hear of it about thirty seconds later.’

‘Then go to Cardiff,’ said Lloyd; and the train pulled away.

He settled in his seat and took from his pocket a copy of Le Rouge et le Noir by Stendhal in French. He stared at the page without taking anything in. He could think of only one idea: going to Spain.

He knew he should be scared, but all he felt was excitement at the prospect of fighting – really fighting, not just holding meetings – against the kind of men who had set the dogs on Jörg. No doubt fear would come later. Before a boxing match he was not scared in the dressing room. But when he entered the ring and saw the man who wanted to beat him unconscious, looked at the muscular shoulders and the hard fists and the vicious face, then his mouth went dry and his heart pounded and he had to suppress the impulse to turn and run away.

Right now he was mainly worried about his parents. Bernie was so proud of having a stepson at Cambridge – he had told half the East End – and he would be devastated if Lloyd left before getting his degree. Ethel would be frightened that her son might be wounded or killed. They would both be terribly upset.

There were other issues. How would he get to Spain? What city would he go to? How would he pay the fare? But only one snag really gave him pause.

Daisy Peshkov.

He told himself not to be ridiculous. He had met her twice. She was not even very interested in him. That was smart of her, because they were ill-suited. She was a millionaire’s daughter and a shallow socialite who thought talking about politics was dull. She liked men such as Boy Fitzherbert: that alone proved she was wrong for Lloyd. Yet he could not get her out of his mind, and the thought of going to Spain and losing all chance of seeing her again filled him with sadness.

Mayfair two four three four.

He felt ashamed of his hesitation, especially when he recalled Lenny’s simple determination. Lloyd had been talking about fighting Fascism for years. Now there was a chance to do it. How could he not go?

He reached London’s Paddington Station, took the Tube to Aldgate, and walked to the row house in Nutley Street where he had been born. He let himself in with his own key. The place had not changed much since he was a child, but one innovation was the telephone on a little table next to the hat stand. It was the only phone in the street, and the neighbours treated it as public property. Beside the phone was a box in which they placed the money for their calls.

His mother was in the kitchen. She had her hat on, ready to go out to address a Labour Party meeting – what else? – but she put the kettle on and made him tea. ‘How are they all in Aberowen?’ she asked.

‘Uncle Billy is there this weekend,’ he said. ‘All the neighbours came into Granda’s kitchen. It’s like a medieval court.’

‘Are your grandparents well?’

‘Granda is the same as ever. Grandmam looks older.’ He paused. ‘Lenny Griffiths wants to go to Spain, to fight the Fascists.’

She pursed her lips in disapproval. ‘Does he, now?’

‘I’m considering going with him. What do you think?’

He was expecting opposition, but even so her reaction surprised him. ‘Don’t you bloody dare,’ she said savagely. She did not share her mother’s aversion to swear words. ‘Don’t even speak of it!’ She slammed the teapot down on the kitchen table. ‘I bore you in pain and suffering, and raised you, and put shoes on your feet and sent you to school, and I didn’t go through all that for you to throw your life away in a bloody war!’

He was taken aback. ‘I wasn’t thinking of throwing my life away,’ he said. ‘But I might risk it in a cause you brought me up to believe in.’

To his astonishment she began to sob. She rarely cried – in fact, Lloyd could not remember the last time.

‘Mother, don’t.’ He put his arm around her shaking shoulders. ‘It hasn’t happened yet.’

Bernie came into the kitchen, a stocky middle-aged man with a bald dome. ‘What’s all this?’ he said. He looked a bit scared.

Lloyd said: ‘I’m sorry, Dad, I’ve upset her.’ He stepped back and let Bernie put his arms around Ethel.

She wailed: ‘He’s going to Spain! He’ll be killed!’

‘Let’s all calm down and discuss it sensibly,’ Bernie said. He was a sensible man wearing a sensible dark suit and much-repaired shoes with sensible thick soles. No doubt that was why people voted for him: he was a local politician, representing Aldgate on the London County Council. Lloyd had never known his own father, but he could not imagine loving a real father more than he loved Bernie, who had been a gentle stepfather, quick to comfort and advise, slow to command or punish. He treated Lloyd no differently from his daughter, Millie.

Bernie persuaded Ethel to sit at the kitchen table, and Lloyd poured her a cup of tea.

‘I thought my brother was dead, once,’ Ethel said, her tears still flowing. ‘The telegrams came to Wellington Row, and the wretched boy from the post office had to go from one house to the next, giving men and women the bits of paper that said their sons and husbands were dead. Poor lad, what was his name? Geraint, I think. But he didn’t have a telegram for our house and, wicked woman that I am, I thanked God it was others that had died and not our Billy!’

‘You’re not a wicked woman,’ Bernie said, patting her.

Lloyd’s half-sister, Millie, appeared from upstairs. She was sixteen, but looked older, especially dressed as she was this evening, in a stylish black outfit and small gold earrings. For two years she had worked in a women’s wear shop in Aldgate, but she was bright and ambitious, and in the last few days she had got a job in a swanky West End department store. She looked at Ethel and said: ‘Mam, what’s the matter?’ She spoke with a Cockney accent.

‘Your brother wants to go to Spain and get himself killed!’ Ethel cried.

Millie looked accusingly at Lloyd. ‘What have you been saying to her?’ Millie was always quick to find fault with her older brother, whom she felt was undeservedly adored.

Lloyd responded with fond tolerance. ‘Lenny Griffiths from Aberowen is going to fight the Fascists, and I told Mam I was thinking about going with him.’

‘Trust you,’ Millie said disgustedly.

‘I doubt if you can get there,’ said Bernie, ever practical. ‘After all, the country is in the middle of a civil war.’

‘I can get a train to Marseilles. Barcelona’s not far from the French border.’

‘Eighty or ninety miles. And it’s a cold walk over the Pyrenees.’

‘There must be ships going from Marseilles to Barcelona. It’s not so far by sea.’

‘True.’

‘Stop it, Bernie!’ Ethel cried. ‘You sound as if you’re discussing the quickest way to Piccadilly Circus. He’s talking about going to war! I won’t allow it.’

‘He’s twenty-one, you know,’ Bernie said. ‘We can’t stop him.’

‘I know how bloody old he is!’

Bernie looked at his watch. ‘We need to get to the meeting. You’re the main speaker. And Lloyd’s not going to Spain tonight.’

‘How do you know?’ she said. ‘We might get home and find a note saying he’s caught the boat train to Paris!’

‘I tell you what,’ said Bernie. ‘Lloyd, promise your mother you won’t go for a month at least. It’s not a bad idea anyway – you need to check the lie of the land before you rush off. Set her mind at ease, just temporarily. Then we can talk about it again.’

It was a typical Bernie compromise, calculated to let everyone back off without backing down; but Lloyd was reluctant to make a commitment. On the other hand, he probably could not simply jump on a train. He had to find out what arrangements the Spanish government might be making to receive volunteers. Ideally, he would go in company with Lenny and others. He would need visas, foreign currency, a pair of boots . . . ‘All right,’ he said. ‘I won’t go for a month.’

‘Promise,’ his mother said.

‘I promise.’

Ethel became calm. After a minute she powdered her face and looked more normal. She drank her tea.

Then she put her coat on, and she and Bernie left.

‘Right, I’m off too,’ said Millie.

‘Where are you going?’ Lloyd asked her.

‘The Gaiety.’

It was a music hall in the East End. ‘Do they let sixteen-year-olds in?’

She gave him an arch look. ‘Who’s sixteen? Not me. Anyway, Dave’s going and he’s only fifteen.’ She was speaking of their cousin David Williams, son of Uncle Billy and Aunt Mildred.

‘Well, enjoy yourselves.’

She went to the door and came back. ‘Just don’t get killed in Spain, you stupid sod.’ She put her arms around him and hugged him hard, then went out without saying any more.

When he heard the front door slam, he went to the phone.

He did not have to think to recall the number. He could see Daisy in his mind’s eye, turning as she left him, smiling winningly under the straw hat, saying: ‘Mayfair two four three four.’

He picked up the phone and dialled.

What was he going to say? ‘You told me to phone, so here I am.’ That was feeble. The truth? ‘I don’t admire you at all, but I can’t get you off my mind.’ He should invite her to something, but what? A Labour Party meeting?

A man answered. ‘This is Mrs Peshkov’s residence. Good evening.’ The deferential tone made Lloyd think he was a butler. No doubt Daisy’s mother had rented a London house complete with staff.

‘This is Lloyd Williams . . .’ He wanted to say something that would explain or justify his call, and he added the first thing that came to mind: ‘. . . of Emmanuel College.’ It meant nothing but he hoped it sounded impressive. ‘May I speak to Miss Daisy Peshkov?’

‘No, I’m sorry, Professor Williams,’ said the butler, assuming Lloyd must be a don. ‘They’ve all gone to the opera.’

Of course, Lloyd thought with disappointment. No socialite was home at this time of the evening, especially on a Saturday. ‘I remember,’ he lied. ‘She told me she was going, and I forgot. Covent Garden, isn’t it?’ He held his breath.

But the butler was not suspicious. ‘Yes, sir. The Magic Flute, I believe.’

‘Thank you.’ Lloyd hung up.

He went to his room and changed. In the West End most people wore evening dress, even to go to the cinema. But what would he do when he got there? He could not afford a ticket to the opera, and anyway it would be over soon.

He took the Tube. The Royal Opera House was incongruously located next to Covent Garden, London’s wholesale fruit and vegetable market. The two institutions got along well because they kept different hours: the market opened for business at three or four o’clock in the morning, when London’s most determined revellers were beginning to head for home; and it closed before the matinee.

Lloyd walked past the shuttered stalls of the market and looked through glazed doors into the opera house. Its bright lobby was empty, and he could hear muffled Mozart. He stepped inside. Adopting a careless upper-class manner, he said to an attendant: ‘What time does the curtain come down?’

If he had been wearing his tweed suit he would probably have been told that it was none of his business, but the dinner jacket was the uniform of authority, and the attendant said: ‘In about five minutes, sir.’

Lloyd nodded curtly. To say ‘Thank you’ would have given him away.

He left the building and walked around the block. It was a moment of quiet. In the restaurants, people were ordering coffee; in the cinemas, the big feature was approaching its melodramatic climax. Everything would change soon, and the streets would be thronged with people shouting for taxis, heading to nightclubs, kissing goodbye at bus stops, and hurrying for the last train back to the suburbs.

He returned to the opera house and went inside. The orchestra was silent, and the audience was just beginning to emerge. Released from long imprisonment in their seats they were talking animatedly, praising the singers, criticizing the costumes, and making plans for late suppers.

He saw Daisy almost immediately.

She was wearing a lavender dress with a little cape of champagne-coloured mink over her bare shoulders, and she looked ravishing. She emerged from the auditorium at the head of a small clutch of people her own age. Lloyd was sorry to recognize Boy Fitzherbert beside her, and to see her laugh gaily at something he murmured to her as they stepped down the red-carpeted stairs. Behind her was the interesting German girl, Eva Rothmann, escorted by a tall young man in the kind of military evening dress known as a mess kit.

Eva recognized Lloyd and smiled, and he spoke to her in German. ‘Good evening, Fräulein Rothmann, I hope you enjoyed the opera.’

‘Very much, thank you,’ she replied in the same language. ‘I didn’t realize you were in the audience.’

Boy said amiably: ‘I say, speak English, you lot.’ He sounded slightly drunk. He was good-looking in a dissipated way, like a sulkily handsome adolescent, or a pedigree dog that is fed too many scraps. He had a pleasant manner, and probably could be devastatingly charming when he chose.

Eva said in English: ‘Viscount Aberowen, this is Mr Williams.’

‘We know each other,’ said Boy. ‘He’s at Emma.’

Daisy said: ‘Hello, Lloyd. We’re going slumming.’

Lloyd had heard this word before. It meant going to the East End to visit low pubs and watch working-class entertainment such as dog fights.

Boy said: ‘I bet Williams knows some places.’

Lloyd hesitated only a fraction of a second. Was he willing to put up with Boy in order to be with Daisy? Of course he was. ‘As a matter of fact, I do,’ he said. ‘Do you want me to show you?’

‘Splendid!’

An older woman appeared and wagged a finger at Boy. ‘You must have these girls home by midnight,’ she said in an American accent. ‘Not a second later, please.’ Lloyd guessed she must be Daisy’s mother.

The tall man in the military outfit replied: ‘Leave it to the army, Mrs Peshkov. We’ll be on time.’

Behind Mrs Peshkov came Earl Fitzherbert with a fat woman who must be his wife. Lloyd would have liked to question the earl about his government’s policy on Spain.

Two cars were waiting for them outside. The earl, his wife, and Daisy’s mother got into a black-and-cream Rolls-Royce Phantom III. Boy and his group piled into the other car, a dark-blue Daimler E20 limousine, the royal family’s favourite car. There were seven young people including Lloyd. Eva seemed to be with the soldier, who introduced himself to Lloyd as Lieutenant Jimmy Murray. The third girl was his sister, May, and the other boy – a slimmer, quieter version of Boy – turned out to be Andy Fitzherbert.

Lloyd gave the chauffeur directions to the Gaiety.

He noticed that Jimmy Murray discreetly slipped his arm around Eva’s waist. Her reaction was to move slightly closer to him: obviously they were courting. Lloyd was happy for her. She was not a pretty girl, but she was intelligent and charming. He liked her, and he was glad she had found herself a tall soldier. He wondered, though, how others in this upper-class social set would react if Jimmy announced he was going to marry a half-Jewish German girl.

It occurred to him that the others formed two more couples: Andy and May, and – annoyingly – Boy and Daisy. Lloyd was the odd one out. Not wanting to stare at them, he studied the polished mahogany window surrounds.

The car went up Ludgate Hill to St Paul’s Cathedral. ‘Take Cheapside,’ Lloyd said to the driver.

Boy took a long pull from a silver hip flask. Wiping his mouth, he said: ‘You know your way around, Williams.’

‘I live here,’ said Lloyd. ‘I was born in the East End.’

‘How splendid,’ said Boy; and Lloyd was not sure whether he was being thoughtlessly polite or unpleasantly sarcastic.

All the seats were taken at the Gaiety, but there was plenty of standing room, and the audience moved around constantly, greeting friends and going to the bar. They were dressed up, the women in brightly coloured frocks, the men in their best suits. The air was warm and smoky, and there was a powerful odour of spilled beer. Lloyd found a place for his group near the back. Their clothes identified them as visitors from the West End, but they were not the only ones: music halls were popular with all classes.

On stage a middle-aged performer in a red dress and blonde wig was doing a double-entendre routine. ‘I said to him, “I’m not letting you into my passage.” ’ The audience roared with laughter. ‘He said to me, “I can see it from here, love.” I told him, “You keep your nose out.” ’ She was pretending indignation. ‘He said, “It looks to me like it needs a good clean-out.” Well! I ask you.’

Lloyd saw that Daisy was grinning widely. He leaned over and murmured in her ear: ‘Do you realize it’s a man?’

‘No!’ she said.

‘Look at the hands.’

‘Oh, my God!’ she said. ‘She’s a man!’

Lloyd’s cousin David walked past, spotted Lloyd, and came back. ‘What are you all dressed up for?’ he said in a Cockney accent. He was wearing a knotted scarf and a cloth cap.

‘Hello, Dave, how’s life?’

‘I’m going to Spain with you and Lenny Griffiths,’ Dave said.

‘No, you’re not,’ said Lloyd. ‘You’re fifteen.’

‘Boys my age fought in the Great War.’

‘But they were no use – ask your father. Anyway, who says I’m going?’

‘Your sister, Millie,’ Dave said, and he walked on.

Boy said: ‘What do people usually drink in this place, Williams?’

Lloyd thought Boy did not need any more alcohol, but he replied: ‘Pints of best bitter for the men and port-and-lemon for the girls.’

‘Port-and-lemon?’

‘It’s port diluted with lemonade.’

‘How perfectly ghastly.’ Boy disappeared.

The comedian reached the climax of the act. ‘I said to him, “You fool, that’s the wrong passage !” ’ She, or he, went off to gales of applause.

Millie appeared in front of Lloyd. ‘Hello,’ she said. She looked at Daisy. ‘Who’s your friend?’

Lloyd was glad Millie looked so pretty, in her sophisticated black dress, with a row of fake pearls and a discreet touch of make-up. He said: ‘Miss Peshkov, allow me to present my sister, Miss Leckwith. Millie, this is Daisy.’

They shook hands. Daisy said: ‘I’m very glad to meet Lloyd’s sister.’

‘Half-sister, to be exact,’ said Millie.

Lloyd explained: ‘My father was killed in the Great War. I never knew him. My mother married again when I was still a baby.’

‘Enjoy the show,’ Millie said, turning away; then, as she left, she murmured to Lloyd: ‘Now I see why Ruby Carter has no chance.’

Lloyd groaned inwardly. His mother had obviously told the whole family that he was romancing Ruby.

Daisy said: ‘Who’s Ruby Carter?’

‘She’s a maid at Chimbleigh. You gave her the money to see a dentist.’

‘I remember. So her name is being romantically linked with yours.’

‘In the imagination of my mother, yes.’

Daisy laughed at his discomfiture. ‘So you’re not going to marry a housemaid.’

‘I’m not going to marry Ruby.’

‘She might suit you very well.’

Lloyd gave her a direct look. ‘We don’t always fall in love with the most suitable people, do we?’

She looked at the stage. The show was approaching its end, and the entire cast was beginning a familiar song. The audience joined in enthusiastically. The standing customers at the back linked arms and swayed in time, and Boy’s party did likewise.

When the curtain came down, Boy still had not reappeared. ‘I’ll look for him,’ Lloyd said. ‘I think I know where he might be.’ The Gaiety had a ladies’ toilet, but the men’s was a back yard with an earth closet and several halved oil drums. Lloyd found Boy puking into one of the drums.

He gave Boy a handkerchief to wipe his mouth, then took his arm and led him through the emptying theatre and outside to the Daimler limousine. The others were waiting. They all got in and Boy immediately fell asleep.

When they got back to the West End, Andy Fitzherbert told the driver to go first to the Murray house, in a modest street near Trafalgar Square. Getting out of the car with May, he said: ‘You lot go on. I’ll see May to her door then walk home.’ Lloyd presumed that Andy was planning a romantic goodnight on May’s doorstep.

They drove on to Mayfair. As the car was approaching Grosvenor Square, where Daisy and Eva were living, Jimmy told the chauffeur: ‘Just stop at the corner, please.’ Then he said quietly to Lloyd: ‘I say, Williams, would you mind taking Miss Peshkov to the door, and I’ll follow with Fräulein Rothmann in half a minute?’

‘Of course.’ Jimmy wanted to kiss Eva goodnight in the car, obviously. Boy would know nothing about it: he was snoring. The chauffeur would pretend to be oblivious in the expectation of a tip.

Lloyd got out of the car and handed Daisy out. When she grasped his hand he got a thrill like a mild electric shock. He took her arm and they walked slowly along the pavement. At the midpoint between two street lamps, where the light was dimmest, Daisy stopped. ‘Let’s give them time,’ she said.

Lloyd said: ‘I’m so glad Eva has a paramour.’

‘Me, too.’

He took a breath. ‘I can’t say the same about you and Boy Fitzherbert.’

‘He got me presented at court!’ Daisy said. ‘And I danced with the King in a nightclub – it was in all the American newspapers.’

‘And that’s why you’re courting him?’ Lloyd said incredulously.

‘Not only. He likes all the things I do – parties and racehorses and beautiful clothes. He’s such fun! He even has his own airplane.’

‘None of that means anything,’ Lloyd said. ‘Give him up. Be my girlfriend instead.’

She looked pleased, but she laughed. ‘You’re crazy,’ she said. ‘But I like you.’

‘I mean it,’ he said desperately. ‘I can’t stop thinking about you, even though you’re the last person in the world I should marry.’

She laughed again. ‘You say the rudest things! I don’t know why I talk to you. I guess I think you’re nice under your clumsy manners.’

‘I’m not really clumsy – only with you.’

‘I believe you. But I’m not going to marry a penniless socialist.’

Lloyd had opened his heart only to be charmingly rejected, and now he felt miserable. He looked back at the Daimler. ‘I wonder how long they’re going to be,’ he said disconsolately.

Daisy said: ‘I might kiss a socialist, though, just to see what it’s like.’

For a moment he did not react. He assumed she was speaking theoretically. But a girl would never say something like that theoretically. It was an invitation. He had almost been stupid enough to miss it.

He moved closer, putting his hands on her small waist. She tilted her face up, and her beauty took his breath away. He bent his head and kissed her mouth softly. She did not close her eyes, and neither did he. He felt tremendously aroused, staring into her blue eyes as he moved his lips against hers. She opened her mouth slightly, and he touched her parted lips with the tip of his tongue. A moment later he felt her tongue respond. She was still looking at him. He was in paradise, and he wanted to stay locked in this embrace for all eternity. She pressed her body to his. He had an erection, and he was embarrassed in case she might feel it, so he eased back – but she pushed forward again, and he understood, looking into her eyes, that she wanted to feel his penis pressed against her soft body. The realization heated him unbearably. He felt as if he was going to ejaculate, and it occurred to him that she might even want him to.

Then he heard the door of the Daimler open, and Jimmy Murray speaking with slightly unnatural loudness, as if giving a warning. Lloyd broke the embrace with Daisy.

‘Well,’ she murmured in a surprised tone, ‘that was an unexpected pleasure.’

Lloyd said hoarsely: ‘More than a pleasure.’

Then Jimmy and Eva were beside them, and they all walked to the door of Mrs Peshkov’s house. It was a grand building with steps up to a covered porch. Lloyd wondered if the porch might give shelter enough for another kiss, but as they climbed the steps the door was opened from the inside by a man in evening dress, probably the butler Lloyd had spoken to earlier. How glad he was that he had made that phone call!

The two girls said goodnight demurely, giving no hint that only seconds ago they both had been locked in passionate embraces; then the door closed and they were gone.

Lloyd and Jimmy went back down the steps.

‘I’m going to walk from here,’ Jimmy said. ‘Shall I tell the chauffeur to drive you back to the East End? You must be three or four miles from home. And Boy won’t care – he’ll sleep until breakfast-time, I should think.’

‘That’s thoughtful of you, Murray, and I appreciate it; but, believe it or not, I feel like walking. Lots to think about.’

‘As you wish. Goodnight, then.’

‘Goodnight,’ said Lloyd; and, with his mind in a whirl and his erection slowly deflating, he turned east and headed for home.

(iv)

London’s social season ended in the middle of August, and still Boy Fitzherbert had not proposed marriage to Daisy Peshkov.

Daisy was hurt and puzzled. Everyone knew they were courting. They saw one another almost every day. Earl Fitzherbert talked to Daisy like a daughter, and even the suspicious Princess Bea had warmed to her. Boy kissed her whenever he got the chance, but said nothing about the future.

The long series of lavish lunches and dinners, glittering parties and balls, traditional sporting events and champagne picnics that made up the London season came to an abrupt end. Many of the new friends Daisy had made suddenly left town. Most of them went to country houses where, as far as she could gather, they would spend their time hunting foxes, stalking deer, and shooting birds.

Daisy and Olga stayed for Eva Rothmann’s wedding. Unlike Boy, Jimmy Murray was in a rush to marry the woman he loved. The ceremony was held at his parents’ parish church in Chelsea.

Daisy felt she had done a great job with Eva. She had taught her friend how to choose clothes that suited her, smart styles without frills, in plain, strong colours that flattered her dark hair and brown eyes. Gaining in confidence, Eva had learned how to use her natural warmth and quick intelligence to charm men and women. And Jimmy had fallen in love with her. He was no movie star, but he was tall and craggily attractive. He came from a military family with a modest fortune, so Eva would be comfortable, though not rich.

The British were as prejudiced as anyone else, and at first General Murray and Mrs Murray had not been thrilled at the prospect of their son marrying a half-Jewish German refugee. Eva had won them over quickly, but many of their friends still expressed coded doubts. At the wedding Daisy had been told that Eva was ‘exotic’, Jimmy was ‘courageous’, and the Murrays were ‘marvellously broad-minded’, all ways of making the best of an unsuitable match.

Jimmy had written formally to Dr Rothmann in Berlin, and had received permission to ask Eva for her hand in marriage; but the German authorities had refused to let the Rothmann family come to the wedding. Eva had said tearfully: ‘They hate Jews so much, you’d think they’d be happy to see them leave the country!’

Boy’s father, Fitz, had heard this remark, and had later spoken to Daisy about it. ‘Tell your friend Eva not to say too much about Jews, if she can avoid it,’ he had said, in the tone of one who gives a friendly warning. ‘Having a half-Jewish wife is not going to help Jimmy’s army career, you know.’ Daisy had not passed on this unpleasant counsel.

The happy couple went off to Nice for their honeymoon. Daisy realized with a pang of guilt that she was relieved to get Eva off her hands. Boy and his political pals disliked Jews so much that Eva was becoming a problem. Already the friendship between Boy and Jimmy had ended – Boy had refused to be Jimmy’s best man.

After the wedding, Daisy and Olga were invited by the Fitzherberts to a shooting party at their country house in Wales. Daisy’s hopes rose. Now that Eva was out of the way, there was nothing to stop Boy proposing. The earl and princess must surely assume he was on the point of it. Perhaps they planned for him to do so this weekend.

Daisy and Olga went to Paddington station on a Friday morning and took a train west. They crossed the heart of England, rich rolling farmland dotted with hamlets, each with its stone church spire rising from a stand of ancient trees. They had a first-class carriage to themselves, and Olga asked Daisy what she thought Boy might do. ‘He must know I like him,’ Daisy said. ‘I’ve let him kiss me enough times.’

‘Have you shown any interest in anyone else?’ her mother asked shrewdly.

Daisy suppressed the guilty memory of that brief moment of foolishness with Lloyd Williams. Boy could not possibly know about that and, anyway, she had not seen Lloyd again, nor had she replied to the three letters he had sent her. ‘No one,’ she said.

‘Then it’s because of Eva,’ said Olga. ‘And now she’s gone.’

The train went through a long tunnel under the estuary of the River Severn, and when it emerged, they were in Wales. Bedraggled sheep grazed the hills, and in the cleft of each valley was a small mining town, its pithead winding gear rising from a scatter of ugly industrial buildings.

Earl Fitzherbert’s black-and-cream Rolls-Royce was waiting for them at Aberowen station. The town was dismal, Daisy thought, with small grey stone houses in rows along the steep hillsides. They drove a mile or so out of town to the house, Tŷ Gwyn.

Daisy gasped with pleasure as they passed through the gates. Tŷ Gwyn was enormous and elegant, with long rows of tall windows in a perfectly classical façade. It was set in elaborate gardens of flowers, shrubs and specimen trees that clearly were the pride of the earl himself. What a joy it would be to be mistress of this house, she thought. The British aristocracy might no longer rule the world, but they had perfected the art of living, and Daisy longed to be one of them.

Tŷ Gwyn meant White House, but the place was actually grey, and Daisy learned why when she touched the stonework with her hand and got coal dust on her fingertips.

She was given a room called the Gardenia Suite.

That evening, she and Boy sat on the terrace before dinner and watched the sun go down over the purple mountaintop, Boy smoking a cigar and Daisy sipping champagne. They were alone for a while, but Boy said nothing about marriage.

Over the weekend her anxiety grew. Boy had plenty more chances to speak to her alone – she made sure of that. On Saturday the men went shooting, but Daisy went out to meet them at the end of the afternoon, and she and Boy walked back through the woods together. On Sunday morning the Fitzherberts and most of their guests went to the Anglican church in the town. After the service, Boy took Daisy to a pub called The Two Crowns, where squat, broad-shouldered miners in flat caps stared at her in her lavender cashmere coat as if Boy had brought in a leopard on a leash.

She told him that she and her mother would soon have to go back to Buffalo, but he did not take the hint.

Could it simply be that he liked her, but not enough to marry her?

By lunch on Sunday she was desperate. Tomorrow she and her mother were to return to London. If Boy had not proposed by then, his parents would begin to think he was not serious, and there would be no more invitations to Tŷ Gwyn.

That prospect frightened Daisy. She had made up her mind to marry Boy. She wanted to be Viscountess Aberowen, and then one day Countess Fitzherbert. She had always been rich, but she craved the respect and deference that went with social status. She longed to be addressed as ‘Your Ladyship’. She coveted Princess Bea’s diamond tiara. She wanted to count royalty among her friends.

She knew Boy liked her, and there was no doubt about his desire when he kissed her. ‘He needs something to spur him on,’ Olga murmured to Daisy as they drank their after-lunch coffee with the other ladies in the morning room.

‘But what?’

‘There is one thing that never fails with men.’

Daisy raised her eyebrows. ‘Sex?’ She and her mother talked about most things, but generally skirted around this subject.

‘Pregnancy would do it,’ Olga said. ‘But that only happens for sure when you don’t want it.’

‘What, then?’

‘You need to give him a glimpse of the Promised Land, but not let him in.’

Daisy shook her head. ‘I’m not certain, but I think he may have already been to the Promised Land with someone else.’

‘Who?’

‘I don’t know – a maid, an actress, a widow . . . I’m guessing, but he just doesn’t have that virginal air.’

‘You’re right, he doesn’t. That means you have to offer him something he can’t get from the others. Something he’d do anything for.’

Daisy wondered briefly where her mother had got this wisdom, having spent her life in a cold marriage. Perhaps she had done a lot of thinking about how her husband, Lev, had been stolen from her by his mistress, Marga. Anyway, there was nothing Daisy could offer Boy that he couldn’t get from another girl, was there?

The women were finishing their coffee and heading to their bedrooms for the afternoon nap. The men were still in the dining room, smoking their cigars, but they would follow in a quarter of an hour. Daisy stood up.

Olga said: ‘What are you going to do?’

‘I’m not sure,’ she said. ‘I’ll think of something.’

She left the room. She was going to go to Boy’s room, she had decided, but she did not want to say so in case her mother objected. She would be waiting for him when he came for his nap. The servants also took a break at that time of day, so it was unlikely that anyone would come into the room.

She would have Boy on his own, then. But what would she say or do? She did not know. She would have to improvise.

She went to the Gardenia Suite, brushed her teeth, dabbed Jean Naté cologne on her neck, and walked quietly along the corridor to Boy’s room.

No one saw her go in.

He had a spacious bedroom with a view of misty mountaintops. It felt as if it might have been his for many years. There were masculine leather chairs, pictures of airplanes and racehorses on the wall, a cedar wood humidor full of fragrant cigars, and a side table with decanters of whisky and brandy and a tray of crystal glasses.

She pulled open a drawer and saw Tŷ Gwyn writing paper, a bottle of ink, and pens and pencils. The paper was blue with the Fitzherbert crest. Would that one day be her crest?

She wondered what Boy would say when he found her here. Would he be pleased, take her in his arms, and kiss her? Or would he be angry that his privacy had been invaded, and accuse her of snooping? She had to take the risk.

She went into the adjoining dressing room. There was a small washbasin with a mirror over it. His shaving tackle was on the marble surround. Daisy thought she would like to learn to shave her husband. How intimate that would be.

She opened the wardrobe doors and looked at his clothes: formal morning dress, tweed suits, riding clothes, a leather pilot’s jacket with a fur lining, and two evening suits.

That gave her an idea.

She recalled how aroused Boy had been, at Bing Westhampton’s house back in June, by the sight of her and the other girls dressed as men. That evening had been the first time he had kissed her. She was not sure why he had been so excited – such things were generally inexplicable. Lizzie Westhampton said some men liked women to spank their bottoms: how could you account for that?

Perhaps she should dress in his clothes now.

Something he’d do anything for, her mother had said. Was this it?

She stared at the row of suits on hangers, the stack of folded white shirts, the polished leather shoes each with its wooden tree inside. Would it work? Did she have time?

Did she have anything to lose?

She could pick the clothes she needed, take them to the Gardenia Suite, change there, and then hurry back, hoping that no one saw her on the way . . .

No. There was no time for that. His cigar was not long enough. She had to change here, and fast – or not at all.

She made up her mind.

She pulled her dress off.

She was in danger now. Until this moment, she might have explained her presence here, just about plausibly, by pretending that she had lost her bearings in Tŷ Gwyn’s miles of corridors and gone into the wrong room by mistake. But no girl’s reputation could survive being found in a man’s room in her underwear.

She took the top shirt off the pile. The collar had to be attached with a stud, she saw with a groan. She found a dozen starched collars in a drawer with a box of studs, and fixed one to the shirt, then pulled the shirt over her head.

She heard a man’s heavy footsteps in the corridor outside, and froze, her heart beating like a big drum; but the steps went by.

She decided to wear formal morning dress. The striped trousers had no suspenders attached, but she found some in another drawer. She figured out how to button the suspenders to the trousers, then pulled the trousers on. The waist was big enough for two of her.

She pushed her stockinged feet into a pair of shiny black shoes and laced them.

She buttoned the shirt and put on a silver tie. The knot was wrong, but it did not matter, and, anyway, she did not know the correct way to tie it, so she left it as it was.

She put on a fawn double-breasted waistcoat and a black tailcoat, then she looked in the full-length mirror on the inside of the wardrobe door.

The clothes were baggy but she looked cute anyway.

Now that she had time, she put gold links in the shirt cuffs and a white handkerchief in the breast pocket of the coat.

Something was missing. She stared at herself in the mirror until she figured out what else she needed.

A hat.

She opened another cupboard and saw a row of hatboxes on a high shelf. She found a grey top hat and perched it on the back of her head.

She remembered the moustache.

She did not have an eyebrow pencil with her. She returned to Boy’s bedroom and bent over the fireplace. It was still summer, and there was no fire. She got some soot on her fingertip, returned to the mirror, and carefully drew a moustache on her upper lip.

She was ready.

She sat in one of the leather armchairs to wait for him.

Her instinct told her she was doing the right thing, but rationally it seemed bizarre. However, there was no accounting for arousal. She herself had got wet inside when he took her up in his plane. It had been impossible for them to canoodle while he was concentrating on flying the little aircraft, and that was just as well, for soaring through the air had been so exciting that probably she would have let him do anything he wanted.

However, boys could be unpredictable, and she feared he might be angry. When that happened, his handsome face would twist into an unattractive grimace, he would tap his foot very quickly, and he could become quite cruel. Once, when a waiter with a limp had brought him the wrong drink, he had said: ‘Just hobble back to the bar and bring me the Scotch I ordered – being a cripple doesn’t make you deaf, does it?’ The wretched man had flushed with shame.

She wondered what Boy would say to her if he was angered by her being in his room.

He arrived five minutes later.

She heard his tread outside, and realized she already knew him well enough to recognize his step.

The door opened and he came in without seeing her.

She put on a deep voice and said: ‘Hello, old chap, how are you?’

He started and said: ‘Good God!’ Then he looked again. ‘Daisy?’

She stood up. ‘The same,’ she said in her normal voice. He was still staring at her in surprise. She doffed the top hat, gave a little bow, and said: ‘At your service.’ She replaced the hat on her head at an angle.

After a long moment, he recovered from the shock and grinned.

Thank God, she thought.

He said: ‘I say, that topper does suit you.’

She came closer. ‘I put it on to please you.’

‘Jolly nice of you, I must say.’

She turned her face up invitingly. She liked kissing him. In truth, she liked kissing most men. She was secretly embarrassed by how much she liked it. She had even enjoyed kissing girls, at her boarding school where they did not see a boy for weeks on end.

He bent his head and touched his lips to hers. Her hat fell off, and they both giggled. Quickly he thrust his tongue into her mouth. She relaxed and enjoyed it. He was enthusiastic about all sensual pleasures, and she was excited by his eagerness.

She reminded herself that she had a purpose. Things were progressing nicely, but she wanted him to propose. Would he be satisfied with just a kiss? She needed him to want more. Often, if they had more than a few hasty moments, he would fondle her breasts.

A lot depended on how much wine he had drunk with lunch. He had a large capacity, but there came a point when he lost the urge.

She moved her body, pressing herself to him. He put a hand on her chest, but she was wearing a baggy waistcoat of woollen cloth and he could not find her small breasts. He grunted in frustration.

Then his hand roamed across her stomach and inside the waistband of the loose-fitting trousers.

She had never before let him touch her down there.

She still had on a silk petticoat and substantial cotton underdrawers, so he surely could not feel much, but his hand went to the fork of her thighs and pressed firmly against her through the layers. She felt a twinge of pleasure.

She pulled away from him.

Panting, he said: ‘Have I gone too far?’

‘Lock the door,’ she said.

‘Oh, my goodness.’ He went to the door, turned the key in the lock, and came back. They embraced again, and he resumed where he had left off. She touched the front of his trousers, found his erect penis through the cloth, and grasped it firmly. He groaned with pleasure.

She pulled away again.

The shadow of anger crossed his face. An unpleasant memory came back to her. Once, when she had made a boy called Theo Coffman take his hand off her breasts, he had turned nasty and called her a prick-teaser. She had never seen that boy again, but the insult had made her feel irrationally ashamed. Momentarily she feared that Boy might be about to make a similar accusation.

Then his face softened and he said: ‘I am dreadfully keen on you, y’know.’

This was her moment. Sink or swim, she told herself. ‘We shouldn’t be doing this,’ she said with a regret that was not greatly exaggerated.

‘Why not?’

‘We’re not even engaged.’

The word hung in the air for a long moment. For a girl to say that was tantamount to a proposal. She watched his face, terrified that he would take fright, turn away, mumble excuses, and ask her to leave.

He said nothing.

‘I want to make you happy,’ she said. ‘But . . .’

‘I do love you, Daisy,’ he said.

That was not enough. She smiled at him and said: ‘Do you?’

‘Ever such a lot.’

She said nothing, but looked at him expectantly.

At last he said: ‘Will you marry me?’

‘Oh, yes,’ she said, and she kissed him again. With her mouth pressed to his she unbuttoned his fly, burrowed through his underclothing, found his penis, and took it out. The skin was silky and hot. She stroked it, remembering a conversation with the Westhampton twins. ‘You can rub his thing,’ Lindy had said, and Lizzie had added: ‘Until it squirts.’ Daisy was intrigued and excited by the idea of making a man do that. She grasped a bit harder.

Then she remembered Lindy’s next remark. ‘Or you can suck it – they like that best of all.’

She moved her lips away from Boy’s and spoke into his ear. ‘I’ll do anything for my husband,’ she said.

Then she knelt down.

(v)

It was the wedding of the year. Daisy and Boy were married at St Margaret’s Church, Westminster, on Saturday 3 October 1936. Daisy was disappointed it was not Westminster Abbey, but she was told that was for the royal family only.

Coco Chanel made her wedding dress. Depression fashion was for simple lines and minimal extravagance. Daisy’s floor-length bias-cut satin gown had pretty butterfly sleeves and a short train that could be carried by one pageboy.

Her father, Lev Peshkov, came across the Atlantic for the ceremony. Her mother, Olga, agreed for the sake of appearances to sit beside him in church and generally pretend that they were a more or less happily married couple. Daisy’s nightmare was that at some point Marga would show up with Lev’s illegitimate son Greg on her arm; but it did not happen.

The Westhampton twins and May Murray were bridesmaids, and Eva Murray was matron of honour. Boy had been grumpy about Eva’s being half Jewish – he had not wanted to invite her at all – but Daisy had insisted.

She stood in the ancient church, conscious that she looked heartbreakingly beautiful, and happily gave herself to Boy Fitzherbert body and soul.

She signed the register ‘Daisy Fitzherbert, Viscountess Aberowen.’ She had been practising that signature for weeks, carefully tearing the paper into unreadable shreds afterwards. Now she was entitled to it. It was her name.

Processing out of the church, Fitz took Olga’s arm amiably, but Princess Bea put a yard of empty space between herself and Lev.

Princess Bea was not a nice person. She was friendly enough towards Daisy’s mother, and if there was a heavy strain of condescension in her tone, Olga did not notice it, so relations were amiable. But Bea did not like Lev.

Daisy now realized that Lev lacked the veneer of social respectability. He walked and talked, ate and drank, smoked and laughed and scratched like a gangster, and he did not care what people thought. He did what he liked because he was an American millionaire, just as Fitz did what he liked because he was an English earl. Daisy had always known this, but it struck her with extra force when she saw her father with all these upper-class English people, at the wedding breakfast in the grand ballroom of the Dorchester Hotel.

But it did not matter now. She was Lady Aberowen, and that could not be taken away from her.

Nevertheless, Bea’s constant hostility to Lev was an irritant, like a slightly bad smell or a distant buzzing noise, giving Daisy a feeling of dissatisfaction. Sitting beside Lev at the top table, Bea constantly turned slightly away. When he spoke to her she replied briefly without meeting his eye. He seemed not to notice, smiling and drinking champagne, but Daisy, seated on Lev’s other side, knew that he had not failed to read the signs. He was uncouth, not stupid.

When the toasts were over and the men began to smoke, Lev, who as the father of the bride was paying the bill, looked along the table and said: ‘Well, Fitz, I hope you enjoyed your meal. Were the wines up to your standards?’

‘Very good, thank you.’

‘I must say, I thought it was a damn fine spread.’

Bea tutted audibly. Men were not supposed to say ‘damn’ in her hearing.

Lev turned to her. He was smiling, but Daisy knew the dangerous look in his eye. ‘Why, Princess, have I offended you?’

She did not want to reply, but he looked expectantly at her, and did not turn his gaze aside. At last she spoke. ‘I prefer not to hear coarse language,’ she said.

Lev took a cigar from his case. He did not light it at once, but sniffed it and rolled it between his fingers. ‘Let me tell you a story,’ he said, and he looked up and down the table to make sure they were all listening: Fitz, Olga, Boy, Daisy, and Bea. ‘When I was a kid my father was accused of grazing livestock on someone else’s land. No big deal, you might think, even if he was guilty. But he was arrested, and the land agent built a scaffold in the north meadow. Then the soldiers came and grabbed me and my brother and our mother and took us there. My father was on the scaffold with a noose around his neck. Then the landlord arrived.’

Daisy had never heard this story. She looked at her mother. Olga seemed equally surprised.

The little group at the table were all silent now.

‘We were forced to watch while my father was hanged,’ Lev said. He turned to Bea. ‘And you know something strange? The landlord’s sister was there as well.’ He put the cigar in his mouth, wetting the end, and took it out again.

Daisy saw that Bea had turned pale. Was this about her?

‘The sister was about nineteen years old, and she was a princess,’ Lev said, looking at his cigar. Daisy heard Bea let out a small cry, and realized that this story was about her. ‘She stood there and watched the hanging, cold as ice,’ Lev said.

Then he looked directly at Bea. ‘Now that’s what I call coarse,’ he said.

There was a long moment of silence.

Then Lev put the cigar back in his mouth and said: ‘Has anyone got a light?’

(vi)

Lloyd Williams sat at the table in the kitchen of his mother’s house in Aldgate, anxiously studying a map.

It was Sunday 4 October 1936, and today there was going to be a riot.

The old Roman town of London, built on a hill beside the river Thames, was now the financial district, called the City. West of this hill were the palaces of the rich, and the theatres and shops and cathedrals that catered to them. The house in which Lloyd sat was to the east of the hill, near the docks and the slums. Here, for centuries, waves of immigrants had landed, determined to work their fingers to the bone so that their grandchildren could one day move from the East End to the West End.

The map Lloyd was looking at so intently was in a special edition of the Daily Worker, the Communist Party newspaper, and it showed the route of today’s march by the British Union of Fascists. They planned to assemble outside the Tower of London, on the border between the City and the East End, then march east.

Straight into the overwhelmingly Jewish borough of Stepney.

Unless Lloyd and people who thought as he did could stop them.

There were 330,000 Jews in Britain, according to the newspaper, and half of them lived in the East End. Most were refugees from Russia, Poland and Germany, where they had lived in fear that on any day the police, the army or the Cossacks might ride into town, robbing families, beating old men and outraging young women, lining fathers and brothers up against the wall to be shot.

Here in the London slums those Jews had found a place where they had as much right to live as anyone else. How would they feel if they looked out of their windows to see, marching down their own streets, a gang of uniformed thugs sworn to wipe them all out? Lloyd felt that it just could not be allowed to happen.

The Worker pointed out that from the Tower there were really only two routes the marchers could take. One went through Gardiner’s Corner, a five-way junction known as the Gateway to the East End; the other led along Royal Mint Street and the narrow Cable Street. There were a dozen other routes for an individual using side streets, but not for a march. St George Street led to Catholic Wapping rather than Jewish Stepney, and was therefore no use to the Fascists.

The Worker called for a human wall to block Gardiner’s Corner and Cable Street, and stop the march.

The paper often called for things that did not happen: strikes, revolutions, or – most recently – an alliance of all left parties to form a People’s Front. The human wall might be just another fantasy. It would take many thousands of people to effectively close off the East End. Lloyd did not know whether enough would show up.

All he knew for sure was that there would be trouble.

At the table with Lloyd were his parents, Bernie and Ethel; his sister, Millie; and sixteen-year-old Lenny Griffiths from Aberowen, in his Sunday suit. Lenny was part of a small army of Welsh miners who had come to London to join the counter-demonstration.

Bernie looked up from his newspaper and said to Lenny: ‘The Fascists claim that the train fares for all you Welshmen to come to London have been paid by the big Jews.’

Lenny swallowed a mouthful of fried egg. ‘I don’t know any big Jews,’ he said. ‘Unless you count Mrs Levy Sweetshop, she’s quite big. Anyway, I came to London on the back of a lorry with sixty Welsh lambs going to Smithfield meat market.’

Millie said: ‘That accounts for the smell.’

Ethel said: ‘Millie! How rude.’

Lenny was sharing Lloyd’s bedroom, and he had confided that after the demonstration he was not planning to return to Aberowen. He and Dave Williams were going to Spain to join the International Brigades being formed to fight the Fascist insurrection.

‘Did you get a passport?’ Lloyd had asked. Getting a passport was not difficult, but the applicant did have to provide a reference from a clergyman, doctor, lawyer, or other person of status, so a young person could not easily keep it secret.

‘No need,’ Lenny said. ‘We go to Victoria Station and get a weekend return ticket to Paris. You can do that without a passport.’

Lloyd had vaguely known that. It was a loophole intended for the convenience of the prosperous middle class. Now the anti-Fascists were taking advantage of it. ‘How much is the ticket?’

‘Three pounds fifteen shillings.’

Lloyd had raised his eyebrows. That was more money than an unemployed coal miner was likely to have.

Lenny had added: ‘But the Independent Labour Party is paying for my ticket, and the Communist Party for Dave’s.’

They must have lied about their ages. ‘Then what happens when you get to Paris?’ Lloyd had asked.

‘We’ll be met by the French Communists at the Gare du Nord.’ He pronounced it gair duh nord. He did not speak a word of French. ‘From there we’ll be escorted to the Spanish border.’

Lloyd had delayed his own departure. He told people he wanted to soothe his parents’ worries, but the truth was he could not give up on Daisy. He still dreamed of her throwing Boy over. It was hopeless – she did not even answer his letters – but he could not forget her.

Meanwhile Britain, France, and the USA had agreed with Germany and Italy to adopt a policy of non-intervention in Spain, which meant that none of them would supply weapons to either side. This in itself was infuriating to Lloyd: surely the democracies should support the elected government? But what was worse, Germany and Italy were breaching the agreement every day, as Lloyd’s mother and Uncle Billy pointed out at many public meetings held that autumn in Britain to discuss Spain. Earl Fitzherbert, as the government minister responsible, defended the policy stoutly, saying that the Spanish government should not be armed for fear it would go Communist.

This was a self-fulfilling prophecy, as Ethel had argued in a scathing speech. The one nation willing to support the government of Spain was the Soviet Union, and the Spaniards would naturally gravitate towards the only country in the world that helped them.

The truth was that the Conservatives felt Spain had elected people who were dangerously left-wing. Men such as Fitzherbert would not be unhappy if the Spanish government was violently overthrown and replaced by right-wing extremists. Lloyd seethed with frustration.

Then had come this chance to fight Fascism at home.

‘It’s ridiculous,’ Bernie had said a week ago, when the march had been announced. ‘The Metropolitan Police must force them to change the route. They have the right to march, of course; but not in Stepney.’ However, the police said they did not have the power to interfere with a perfectly legal demonstration.

Bernie and Ethel and the mayors of eight London boroughs had been in a delegation that begged the Home Secretary, Sir John Simon, to ban the march or at least divert it; but he, too, claimed he had no power to act.

The question of what to do next had split the Labour Party, the Jewish community, and the Williams family.

The Jewish People’s Council against Fascism and Anti-Semitism, founded by Bernie and others three months ago, had called for a massive counter-demonstration that would keep the Fascists out of Jewish streets. Their slogan was the Spanish phrase No pasaran, meaning ‘They shall not pass’, the cry of the anti-Fascist defenders of Madrid. The Council was a small organization with a grand name. It occupied two upstairs rooms in a building on Commercial Road, and it owned a Gestetner duplicating machine and a couple of old typewriters. But it commanded huge support in the East End. In forty-eight hours it had collected an incredible hundred thousand signatures on a petition calling for the march to be banned. Still the government did nothing.

Only one major political party supported the counter-demonstration, and that was the Communists. The protest was also backed by the fringe Independent Labour Party, to which Lenny belonged. The other parties were against.

Ethel said: ‘I see the Jewish Chronicle has advised its readers to stay off the streets today.’

This was the problem, in Lloyd’s opinion. A lot of people were taking the view that it was best to keep out of trouble. But that would give the Fascists a free hand.

Bernie, who was Jewish though not religious, said to Ethel: ‘How can you quote the Jewish Chronicle at me? It believes Jews should not be against Fascism, just anti-Semitism. What kind of political sense does that make?’

‘I hear that the Board of Deputies of British Jews says the same as the Chronicle,’ Ethel persisted. ‘Apparently there was an announcement yesterday in all the synagogues.’

‘Those so-called deputies are alrightniks from Golders Green,’ Bernie said with contempt. ‘They’ve never been insulted on the streets by Fascist hooligans.’

‘You’re in the Labour Party,’ Ethel said accusingly. ‘Our policy is not to confront the Fascists on the streets. Where’s your solidarity?’

Bernie said: ‘What about solidarity with my fellow Jews?’

‘You’re only Jewish when it suits you. And you’ve never been abused on the street.’

‘All the same, the Labour Party has made a political mistake.’

‘Just remember, if you allow the Fascists to provoke violence, the press will blame the Left for it, regardless of who really started it.’

Lenny said rashly: ‘If Mosley’s boys start a fight, they’ll get what’s coming to them.’

Ethel sighed. ‘Think about it, Lenny: in this country, who’s got the most guns – you and Lloyd and the Labour Party, or the Conservatives with the army and the police on their side?’

‘Oh,’ said Lenny. Clearly he had not considered that.

Lloyd said angrily to his mother: ‘How can you talk like that? You were in Berlin three years ago – you saw how it was. The German Left tried to oppose Fascism peacefully, and look what happened to them.’

Bernie put in: ‘The German Social Democrats failed to form a popular front with the Communists. That allowed them to be picked off separately. Together they might have won.’ Bernie had been angry when the local Labour Party branch had refused an offer from the Communists to form a coalition against the march.

Ethel said: ‘An alliance with Communists is a dangerous thing.’

She and Bernie disagreed on this. In fact, it was an issue that split the Labour Party. Lloyd thought that Bernie was right and Ethel wrong. ‘We have to use every resource we’ve got to defeat Fascism,’ he said; then he added diplomatically: ‘But Mam’s right, it will be best for us if today goes off without violence.’

‘It will be best if you all stay home, and oppose the Fascists through the normal channels of democratic politics,’ Ethel said.

‘You tried to get equal pay for women through the normal channels of democratic politics,’ Lloyd said. ‘You failed.’ Only last April, women Labour MPs had promoted a parliamentary bill to guarantee female government employees equal pay for equal work. It had been voted down by the male-dominated House of Commons.

‘You don’t give up on democracy every time you lose a vote,’ Ethel said crisply.

The trouble was, Lloyd knew, that these divisions could fatally weaken the anti-Fascist forces, as had happened in Germany. Today would be a harsh test. Political parties could try to lead, but the people would choose whom to follow. Would they stay at home, as urged by the timid Labour Party and the Jewish Chronicle? Or would they come out on to the streets in their thousands and say No to Fascism? By the end of the day he would know the answer.

There was a knock at the back door and their neighbour, Sean Dolan, came in dressed in his churchgoing suit. ‘I’ll be joining you after Mass,’ he said to Bernie. ‘Where should we meet up?’

‘Gardiner’s Corner, not later than two o’clock,’ said Bernie. ‘We’re hoping to have enough people to stop the Fascists there.’

‘You’ll have every dock worker in the East End with you,’ said Sean enthusiastically.

Millie asked: ‘Why is that? The Fascists don’t hate you, do they?’

‘You’re too young to remember, you darlin’ girl, but the Jews have always supported us,’ Sean explained. ‘In the dock strike of 1912, when I was only nine years old, my father couldn’t feed us, and me and my brother were taken in by Mrs Isaacs the baker’s wife in New Road, may God bless her great big heart. Hundreds of dockers’ children were looked after by Jewish families then. It was the same in 1926. We’re not going to let the bloody Fascists come down our streets – excuse my language, Mrs Leckwith.’

Lloyd was heartened. There were thousands of dockers in the East End: if they showed up en masse it would hugely swell the ranks.

From outside the house came the sound of a loudspeaker. ‘Keep Mosley out of Stepney,’ said a man’s voice. ‘Assemble at Gardiner’s Corner at two o’clock.’

Lloyd drank his tea and stood up. His role today was to be a spy, checking the position of the Fascists and calling in updates to Bernie’s Jewish People’s Council. His pockets were heavy with big brown pennies for public phones. ‘I’d better get started,’ he said. ‘The Fascists are probably assembling already.’

His mother got up and followed him to the door. ‘Don’t get into a fight,’ she said. ‘Remember what happened in Berlin.’

‘I’ll be careful,’ Lloyd said.

She tried a light tone. ‘Your rich American girl won’t like you with no teeth.’

‘She doesn’t like me anyway.’

‘I don’t believe it. What girl could resist you?’

‘I’ll be all right, Mam,’ Lloyd said. ‘Really I will.’

‘I suppose I should be glad you’re not going to bloody Spain.’

‘Not today, anyway.’ Lloyd kissed his mother and went out.

It was a bright autumn morning, the sun unseasonably warm. In the middle of Nutley Street a temporary platform had been set up by a group of men, one of whom was speaking through a megaphone. ‘People of the East End, we do not have to stand quiet while a crowd of strutting anti-Semites insults us!’ Lloyd recognized the speaker as a local official of the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement. Because of the Depression there were thousands of unemployed Jewish tailors. They signed on every day at the Settle Street Labour Exchange.

Before Lloyd had gone ten yards, Bernie came after him and handed him a paper bag of the little glass balls that children called marbles. ‘I’ve been in a lot of demonstrations,’ he said. ‘If the mounted police charge the crowd, throw these under the horses’ hooves.’

Lloyd smiled. His stepfather was a peacemaker, almost all the time, but he was no softie.

All the same, Lloyd was dubious about the marbles. He had never had much to do with horses, but they seemed to him to be patient, harmless beasts, and he did not like the idea of causing them to crash to the ground.

Bernie read the look on his face and said: ‘Better a horse should fall than my boy should be trampled.’

Lloyd put the marbles in his pocket, thinking that it did not commit him to using them.

He was pleased to see many people already on the streets. He noted other encouraging signs. The slogan ‘They shall not pass’ in English and Spanish had been chalked on walls everywhere he looked. The Communists were out in force, handing out leaflets. Red flags draped many windowsills. A group of men wearing medals from the Great War carried a banner that read: ‘Jewish Ex-Servicemen’s Association.’ Fascists hated to be reminded how many Jews had fought for Britain. Five Jewish soldiers had won the country’s highest medal for bravery, the Victoria Cross.

Lloyd began to think that perhaps there would be enough people to stop the march after all.

Gardiner’s Corner was a broad five-way junction, named for the Scottish clothing store, Gardiner and Company, which occupied a corner building with a distinctive clock tower. When he got there, Lloyd saw that trouble was expected. There were several first aid stations and hundreds of St John Ambulance volunteers in their uniforms. Ambulances were parked in every side street. Lloyd hoped there would be no fighting; but better to risk violence, he thought, than to let the Fascists march unhindered.

He took a roundabout route and came towards the Tower of London from the north-west, in order not to be identified as an East Ender. Some minutes before he got there he could hear the brass bands.

The Tower was a riverside palace that had symbolized authority and repression for eight hundred years. It was surrounded by a long wall of pale old stone that looked as if the colour had been washed out of it by centuries of London rain. Outside the walls, on the landward side, was a park called Tower Gardens, and here the Fascists were assembling. He estimated that there were already a couple of thousand of them, in a line that stretched back westward into the financial district. Every now and again they broke into a rhythmic chant:

One, two, three, four,

We’re gonna get rid of the Yids!

The Yids! The Yids!

We’re gonna get rid of the Yids!

They carried Union Jack flags. Why was it, Lloyd wondered, that the people who wanted to destroy everything good about their country were the quickest to wave the national flag?

They looked impressively military, in their wide black leather belts and black shirts, as they formed neat columns across the grass. Their officers wore a smart uniform: a black military-cut jacket, grey riding breeches, jackboots, a black cap with a shiny peak, and a red-and-white armband. Several motorcyclists in uniform roared around ostentatiously, delivering messages with Fascist salutes. More marchers were arriving, some of them in armoured vans with wire mesh at the windows.

This was not a political party. It was an army.

The purpose of the display, Lloyd figured, was to give them false authority. They wanted to look as if they had the right to close meetings and empty buildings, to burst into homes and offices and arrest people, to drag them to jails and camps and beat them up, interrogate and torture them, as the Brownshirts did in Germany under the Nazi regime so admired by Mosley and the Daily Mail’s proprietor, Lord Rothermere.

They would terrify the people of the East End, people whose parents and grandparents had fled from repression and pogroms in Ireland and Poland and Russia.

Would East Enders come out on the streets and fight them? If not – if today’s march went ahead as planned – what might the Fascists dare tomorrow?

He walked around the edge of the park, pretending to be one of the hundred or so casual onlookers. Side streets radiated from the hub-like spokes. In one of them he noticed a familiar-looking black-and-cream Rolls-Royce drawing up. The chauffeur opened the rear door and, to Lloyd’s shock and dismay, Daisy Peshkov got out.

There was no doubt why she was here. She was wearing a beautifully tailored female version of the uniform, with a long grey skirt instead of the breeches, her fair curls escaping from under the black cap. Much as he hated the outfit, Lloyd could not help finding her irresistibly alluring.

He stopped and stared. He should not have been surprised: Daisy had told him she liked Boy Fitzherbert, and Boy’s politics clearly made no difference to that. But to see her obviously supporting the Fascists in their attack on Jewish Londoners rammed home to him how utterly alien she was from everything that mattered in his life.

He should simply have turned away, but he could not. As she hurried along the pavement, he blocked her way. ‘What the devil are you doing here?’ he said brusquely.

She was cool. ‘I might ask you the same question, Mr Williams,’ she said. ‘I don’t suppose you’re intending to march with us.’

‘Don’t you understand what these people are like? They break up peaceful political meetings, they bully journalists, they imprison their political rivals. You’re an American – how can you be against democracy?’

‘Democracy is not necessarily the most appropriate political system for every country in all times.’ She was quoting Mosley’s propaganda, Lloyd guessed.

He said: ‘But these people torture and kill everyone who disagrees with them!’ He thought of Jörg. ‘I’ve seen it for myself, in Berlin. I was in one of their camps, briefly. I was forced to watch while a naked man was savaged to death by starving dogs. That’s the kind of thing your Fascist friends do.’

She was unintimidated. ‘And who, exactly, has been killed by Fascists here in England recently?’

‘The British Fascists haven’t got the power yet – but your Mosley admires Hitler. If they ever get the chance, they’ll do exactly the same as the Nazis.’

‘You mean they will eliminate unemployment and give the people pride and hope.’

Lloyd was drawn to her so powerfully that it broke his heart to hear her spouting this rubbish. ‘You know what the Nazis have done to the family of your friend Eva.’

‘Eva got married, did you know?’ Daisy said, in the determinedly cheerful tone of one who tries to switch a dinner-table conversation to a more agreeable topic. ‘To nice Jimmy Murray. She’s an English wife, now.’

‘And her parents?’

Daisy looked away. ‘I don’t know them.’

‘But you know what the Nazis have done to them.’ Eva had told Lloyd all about it at the Trinity Ball. ‘Her father is no longer allowed to practise medicine – he’s working as an assistant in a pharmacy. He can’t enter a park or a public library. His father’s name has been scraped off the war memorial in his home village!’ Lloyd realized he had raised his voice. More quietly he said: ‘How can you possibly stand side by side with people who do such things?’

She looked troubled, but she did not answer his question. Instead she said: ‘I’m late already. Please excuse me.’

‘What you’re doing can’t be excused.’

The chauffeur said: ‘All right, sonny, that’s enough.’

He was a heavy middle-aged man who evidently took little exercise, and Lloyd was not in the least intimidated, but he did not want to start a fight. ‘I’m leaving,’ he said in a mild tone. ‘But don’t call me sonny.’

The chauffeur took his arm.

Lloyd said: ‘You’d better take your hand off me, or I’ll knock you down before I go.’ He looked into the chauffeur’s face.

The chauffeur hesitated. Lloyd tensed, preparing to react, watching for warning signs, as he would in the boxing ring. If the chauffeur tried to hit him, it would be a great swinging haymaker of a blow, easily dodged.

But the man either sensed Lloyd’s readiness or felt the well-developed muscle in the arm he was holding; for one reason or the other he backed off and released his grip, saying: ‘No need for threats.’

Daisy walked away.

Lloyd looked at her back in the perfectly fitting uniform as she hurried towards the ranks of the Fascists. With a deep sigh of frustration he turned and went in the other direction.

He tried to concentrate on the job at hand. What a fool he had been to threaten the chauffeur. If he had got into a fight he would probably have been arrested, then he would have spent the day in a police cell – and how would that have helped defeat Fascism?

It was now half past twelve. He left Tower Hill, found a telephone box, called the Jewish People’s Council, and spoke to Bernie. After he had reported what he had seen, Bernie told him to make an estimate of the number of policemen in the streets between the Tower and Gardiner’s Corner.

He crossed to the east side of the park and explored the radiating side streets. What he saw astonished him.

He had expected a hundred or so police. In fact, there were thousands.

They stood lining the pavements, waited in dozens of parked buses, and sat astride huge horses in remarkably neat rows. Only a narrow gap was left for people who wanted to walk along the streets. There were more police than Fascists.

From inside one of the buses, a uniformed constable gave him the Hitler salute.

Lloyd was dismayed. If all these policemen sided with the Fascists, how could the counter-demonstrators resist them?

This was worse than a Fascist march: it was a Fascist march with police authority. What kind of message did that send to the Jews of the East End?

In Mansell Street he saw a beat policeman he knew, Henry Clark. ‘Hello, Nobby,’ he said. For some reason all Clarks were called Nobby. ‘A copper just gave me the Hitler salute.’

‘They’re not from round here,’ Nobby said quietly, as if revealing a confidence. ‘They don’t live with Jews like I do. I tell them Jews are the same as everyone else, mostly decent law-abiding people, a few villains and troublemakers. But they don’t believe me.’

‘All the same . . . the Hitler salute?’

‘Might have been a joke.’

Lloyd did not think so.

He left Nobby and moved on. The police were forming cordons where the side streets entered the area around Gardiner’s Corner, he saw.

He went into a pub with a phone – he had scouted all the available telephones the day before – and told Bernie there were at least five thousand policemen in the neighbourhood. ‘We can’t resist that many coppers,’ he said gloomily.

‘Don’t be so sure,’ Bernie said. ‘Have a look at Gardiner’s Corner.’

Lloyd found a way around the police cordon and joined the counter-demonstration. It was not until he got into the middle of the street outside Gardiner’s that he could appreciate the full extent of the crowd.

It was the largest gathering of people he had ever seen.

The five-way junction was jammed, but that was the least of it. The crowd stretched east along Whitechapel High Street as far as the eye could see. Commercial Road, which ran south-east, was also crammed. Leman Street, where the police station stood, was impenetrable.

There must be a hundred thousand people here, Lloyd thought. He wanted to throw his hat in the air and cheer. East Enders had come out in force to repel the Fascists. There could be no doubt about their feelings now.

In the middle of the junction stood a stationary tram, abandoned by its driver and passengers.

Nothing could pass through this crowd, Lloyd realized with mounting optimism.

He saw his neighbour Sean Dolan climb a lamp post and fix a red flag to its top. The Jewish Lads’ Brigade brass band was playing – probably without the knowledge of the respectable conservative organizers of the club. A police aircraft flew overhead, an autogyro of some kind, Lloyd thought.

Near the windows of Gardiner’s he ran into his sister Millie and her friend, Naomi Avery. He did not want Millie to become involved in any rough stuff: the thought chilled his heart. ‘Does Dad know you’ve come?’ he said in a tone of reproof.

She was insouciant. ‘Don’t be daft,’ she replied.

He was surprised she was there at all. ‘You’re not usually very political,’ he said. ‘I thought you were more interested in making money.’

‘I am,’ she said. ‘But this is special.’

Lloyd could imagine how upset Bernie would be if Millie got hurt. ‘I think you should go home.’

‘Why?’

He looked around. The crowd was amiable and peaceful. The police were some distance away, the Fascists nowhere to be seen. There would be no march today, that was clear. Mosley’s people could not force their way through a crowd of a hundred thousand people determined to stop them, and the police would be insane to let them try. Millie was probably quite safe.

Just as he was thinking this, everything changed.

Several whistles shrilled. Looking in the direction of the sound, Lloyd saw the mounted police drawn up in an ominous line. The horses were stamping and blowing in agitation. The police had drawn long clubs shaped like swords.

They seemed to be getting ready to attack – but surely that could not be so.

Next moment, they charged.

There were angry shouts and terrified screams from the people. Everyone scrambled to get out of the way of the giant horses. The crowd made a path, but those at the edge fell under the pounding hooves. The police lashed out left and right with their long clubs. Lloyd was pushed helplessly backwards.

He felt furious: what did the police think they were doing? Were they stupid enough to believe they could clear a path for Mosley to march along? Did they really imagine that two or three thousand Fascists chanting insults could pass through a crowd of a hundred thousand of their victims without starting a riot? Were the police led by idiots, or out of control? He was not sure which would be worse.

They backed away, wheeling their panting horses, and regrouped, forming a ragged line; then a whistle blew and they heeled the flanks of their mounts, urging them into another reckless charge.

Millie was scared now. She was only sixteen, and her bravado had gone. She screamed with fear as the crowd squeezed her up against the plate-glass window of Gardiner and Company. Tailor’s dummies in cheap suits and winter coats stared out at the horrified crowd and the warlike riders. Lloyd was deafened by the roar of thousands of voices yelling in fearful protest. He got in front of Millie and pushed against the press with all his might, trying to protect her, but it was in vain. Despite his efforts he was crushed against her. Forty or fifty screaming people had their backs to the window, and the pressure was building dangerously.

Lloyd realized with rage that the police were determined to make a pathway through the crowd regardless of the cost.

A moment later, there was a terrific crash of breaking glass and the window gave way. Lloyd fell on top of Millie, and Naomi fell on him. Dozens of people cried out in pain and panic.

Lloyd struggled to his feet. Miraculously, he was unhurt. He looked around frantically for his sister. It was maddeningly difficult to distinguish the people from the tailor’s dummies. Then he spotted Millie lying in a mess of broken glass. He grasped her arms and pulled her to her feet. She was crying. ‘My back!’ she said.

He turned her around. Her coat was cut to ribbons and there was blood all over her. He felt sick with anguish. He put his arm around her shoulders protectively. ‘There’s an ambulance just around the corner,’ he said. ‘Can you walk?’

They had gone only a few yards when the police whistles blew again. Lloyd was terrified that he and Millie would be shoved back into Gardiner’s window. Then he remembered what Bernie had given him. He took the paper bag of marbles from his pocket.

The police charged.

Drawing back his arm, Lloyd threw the paper bag over the heads of the crowd to land in front of the horses. He was not the only one so equipped, and several other people threw marbles. As the horses came at them there was the sound of firecrackers. A police horse slipped on marbles and went down. Others stopped and reared at the banging of the fireworks. The police charge turned into chaos. Naomi Avery had somehow pushed to the front of the crowd, and he saw her burst a bag of pepper under the nose of a horse, causing it to veer away, shaking its head frantically.

The crush eased, and Lloyd led Millie around the corner. She was still in pain, but she had stopped crying.

A line of people were waiting for attention from the St John’s Ambulance volunteers: a weeping girl whose hand appeared to have been crushed; several young men with bleeding heads and faces; a middle-aged woman sitting on the ground nursing a swollen knee. As Lloyd and Millie arrived, Sean Dolan walked away with a bandage around his head and went straight back into the crowd.

A nurse looked at Millie’s back. ‘This is bad,’ she said. ‘You need to go to the London Hospital. We’ll take you in an ambulance.’ She looked at Lloyd. ‘Do you want to go with her?’

Lloyd did, but he was supposed to be phoning in reports, and he hesitated.

Millie solved the dilemma for him with characteristic spunk. ‘Don’t you dare come,’ she said. ‘You can’t do anything for me, and you’ve got important work to do here.’

She was right. He helped her into a parked ambulance. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes, I’m sure. Try not to end up in hospital yourself.’

He was leaving her in the best hands, he decided. He kissed her cheek and returned to the fray.

The police had changed their tactics. The people had repelled the horse charges, but the police were still determined to make a path through the crowd. As Lloyd pushed his way to the front they charged on foot, attacking with their batons. The unarmed demonstrators cowered back from them, liked piled leaves in a wind, then surged forward in a different part of the line.

The police started to arrest people, perhaps hoping to weaken the crowd’s determination by taking ringleaders away. In the East End, being arrested was no legal formality. Few people came back without a black eye or a few gaps in their teeth. Leman Street police station had a particularly bad reputation.

Lloyd found himself behind a vociferous young woman carrying a red flag. He recognized Olive Bishop, a neighbour in Nutley Street. A policeman hit her over the head with his truncheon, screaming: ‘Jewish whore!’ She was not Jewish, and she certainly was not a whore; in fact, she played the piano at the Calvary Gospel Hall. But she had forgotten the admonition of Jesus to turn the other cheek, and she scratched the cop’s face, drawing parallel red lines on his skin. Two more officers grabbed her arms and held her while the scratched man hit her on the head again.

The sight of three strong men attacking one girl maddened Lloyd. He stepped forward and hit the woman’s assailant with a right hook that had all of his rage behind it. The blow landed on the policeman’s temple. Dazed, the man stumbled and fell.

More officers converged on the scene, lashing out randomly with their clubs, hitting arms and legs and heads and hands. Four of them picked up Olive, each taking an arm or a leg. She screamed and wriggled desperately but she could not get free.

But the bystanders were not passive. They attacked the police carrying the girl off, trying to pull the uniformed men away from her. The police turned on their attackers, yelling: ‘Jew bastards!’ even though not all their assailants were Jews and one was a black-skinned Somali sailor.

The police let go of Olive, dropping her to the road, and began to defend themselves. Olive pushed through the crowd and vanished. The cops retreated, hitting out at anyone within reach as they backed away.

Lloyd saw with a thrill of triumph that the police strategy was not working. For all their brutality, the attacks had completely failed to make a way through the crowd. Another baton charge began, but the angry crowd surged forward to meet it, eager now for combat.

Lloyd decided it was time for another report. He worked his way backwards through the crush and found a phone box. ‘I don’t think they’re going to succeed, Dad,’ he told Bernie excitedly. ‘They’re trying to beat a path through us but they’re making no progress. We’re too many.’

‘We’re redirecting people to Cable Street,’ Bernie said. ‘The police may be about to switch their thrust, thinking they have more chance there, so we’re sending reinforcements. Go along there, see what’s happening, and let me know.’

‘Right,’ said Lloyd, and he hung up before realizing he had not told his stepfather that Millie had been taken to hospital. But perhaps it was better not to worry him right now.

Getting to Cable Street was not going to be easy. From Gardiner’s Corner, Leman Street led directly south to the near end of Cable Street, a distance of less than half a mile, but the road was jammed by demonstrators fighting with police. Lloyd had to take a less direct route. He struggled eastward through the crowd into Commercial Road. Once there, further progress was not much easier. There were no police, therefore there was no violence, but the crowd was almost as dense. It was frustrating, but Lloyd was consoled for his difficulties by the reflection that the police would never force a way through so many.

He wondered what Daisy Peshkov was doing. Probably she was sitting in the car, waiting for the march to begin, tapping the toe of her expensive shoe impatiently on the Rolls-Royce’s carpet. The thought that he was helping to frustrate her purpose gave him an oddly spiteful sense of satisfaction.

With persistence and a slightly ruthless attitude to those in his way, Lloyd pushed through the throng. The railway that ran along the north side of Cable Street obstructed his route, and he had to walk some distance before reaching a side road that tunnelled beneath the line. He passed under the tracks and entered Cable Street.

The crowd here was not so closely packed, but the street was narrow, and passage was still difficult. That was a good thing: it would be even more difficult for the police to get through. But there was another obstruction, he saw. A lorry had been parked across the road and turned on its side. At either end of the vehicle, the barricade had been extended the full width of the street with old tables and chairs, odd lengths of timber, and other assorted rubbish piled high.

A barricade! It made Lloyd think of the French revolution. But this was no revolution. The people of the East End did not want to overthrow the British government. On the contrary, they were deeply attached to their elections and their borough councils and their Houses of Parliament. They liked their system of government so much that they were determined to defend it against Fascism, even if it would not defend itself.

He had emerged behind the barrier, and now he moved towards it to see what was happening. He stood on a wall to get a better view. He saw a lively scene. On the far side, police were trying to dismantle the blockage, picking up broken furniture and dragging old mattresses away. But they were not having an easy time of it. A hail of missiles fell on their helmets, some hurled from behind the barricade, some thrown from the upstairs windows of the houses packed closely on either side of the street: stones, milk bottles, broken pots, and bricks that came, Lloyd saw, from a nearby builder’s yard. A few daring young men stood on top of the barricade, lashing out at the police with sticks, and occasionally a fight broke out as the police tried to pull one down and give him a kicking. With a start, Lloyd recognized two of the figures standing on the barricade as Dave Williams, his cousin, and Lenny Griffiths, from Aberowen. Side by side they were fighting policemen off with shovels.

But as the minutes passed, Lloyd saw that the police were winning. They were working systematically, picking up the components of the barricade and taking them away. On this side a few people reinforced the wall, replacing what the police removed, but they were less organized and did not have an infinite supply of materials. It looked to Lloyd as if the police would soon prevail. And if they could clear Cable Street, they would let the Fascists march down here, past one Jewish shop after another.

Then, looking behind him, he saw that whoever was organizing the defence of Cable Street was thinking ahead. Even while the police dismantled the barricade, another was going up a few hundred yards farther along the street.

Lloyd retreated and began enthusiastically to help build the second wall. Dockers with pickaxes were prising up paving stones, housewives dragged dustbins from their yards, and shopkeepers brought empty crates and boxes. Lloyd helped carry a park bench, then pulled down a noticeboard from outside a municipal building. Learning from experience, the builders did a better job this time, using their materials economically and making sure the structure was sturdy.

Looking behind him again, Lloyd saw that a third barricade was beginning to rise farther east.

The people began to retreat from the first one and regroup behind the second. A few minutes later the police at last made a gap in the first barricade and poured through it. The first of them went after the few young men remaining, and Lloyd saw Dave and Lenny chased down an alley. The houses on either side were swiftly shut up, doors slamming and windows closing.

Then, Lloyd saw, the police did not know what to do next. They had broken through the barricade only to be confronted with another, stronger one. They seemed not to have the heart to begin dismantling the second. They milled around in the middle of Cable Street, talking desultorily, looking resentfully at the residents watching them from upstairs windows.

It was too early to proclaim victory but, all the same, Lloyd could not suppress a happy feeling of success. It was beginning to look as if the anti-Fascists were going to win the day.

He remained at his post for another quarter of an hour, but the police did nothing more, so he left the scene, found a telephone kiosk, and called in.

Bernie was cautious. ‘We don’t know what’s happening,’ he said. ‘There seems to be a lull everywhere, but we need to find out what the Fascists are up to. Can you get back to the Tower?’

Lloyd certainly could not fight his way through the massed police, but perhaps there was another way. ‘I could try going via St George Street,’ he said doubtfully.

‘Do the best you can. I want to know their next move.’

Lloyd worked his way south through a maze of alleys. He hoped he was right about St George Street. It was outside the contested area, but the crowds might have spilled over.

However, as he had hoped, there were no crowds here, even though he was still within earshot of the counter-demonstration, and could hear shouting and police whistles. A few women stood in the street talking, and a gaggle of little girls skipped a rope in the middle of the road. Lloyd headed west, breaking into a jog-trot, expecting to see crowds of demonstrators or police around every bend. He came across a few people who had strayed from the fracas – two men with bandaged heads, a woman in a ripped coat, a bemedalled veteran with his arm in a sling – but no crowds. He ran all the way to where the street ended at the Tower. He was able to walk unhindered into Tower Gardens.

The Fascists were still here.

That in itself was an achievement, Lloyd felt. It was now half past three: the marchers had been kept waiting here, not marching, for hours. He saw that their high spirits had evaporated. They were no longer singing or chanting, but stood quiet and listless, lined up but not so neatly, their banners drooping, their bands silent. They already looked beaten.

However, there was a change a few minutes later. An open car emerged from a side street and drove alongside the Fascist lines. Cheers went up. The lines straightened, the officers saluted, the Fascists stood to attention. In the back seat of the car sat their leader, Sir Oswald Mosley, a handsome man with a moustache, wearing the uniform complete with cap. Rigidly straight-backed, he saluted repeatedly as his car went by at walking pace, as if he were a monarch inspecting his troops.

His presence reinvigorated his forces and worried Lloyd. This probably meant that they were going to march as planned – otherwise, why was he here? The car followed the Fascist line along a side street into the financial district. Lloyd waited. Half an hour later Mosley returned, this time on foot, again saluting and acknowledging cheers.

When he reached the head of the line, he turned and, accompanied by one of his officers, entered a side street.

Lloyd followed.

Mosley approached a group of older men standing in a huddle on the pavement. Lloyd was surprised to recognize Sir Philip Game, the Commissioner of Police, in a bow tie and trilby hat. The two men began an intense conversation. Sir Philip must surely be telling Sir Oswald that the crowd of counter-demonstrators was too huge to be dispersed. But what then would be his advice to the Fascists? Lloyd longed to get close enough to eavesdrop, but he decided not to risk arrest, and remained at a discreet distance.

The police commissioner did most of the talking. The Fascist leader nodded briskly several times and asked a few questions. Then the two men shook hands and Mosley walked away.

He returned to the park and conferred with his officers. Among them Lloyd recognized Boy Fitzherbert, wearing the same uniform as Mosley. Boy did not look so well in it: the trim military outfit did not suit his soft body and the lazy sensuality of his stance.

Mosley seemed to be giving orders. The other men saluted and moved away, no doubt to carry out his commands. What had he told them to do? Their only sensible option was to give up and go home. But if they had been sensible they would not have been Fascists.

Whistles blew, orders were shouted, bands began to play, and the men stood to attention. They were going to march, Lloyd realized. The police must have assigned them a route. But what route?

Then the march began – and they went in the opposite direction. Instead of heading into the East End, they went west, into the financial district, which was deserted on a Sunday afternoon.

Lloyd could hardly believe it. ‘They’ve given up!’ he said aloud, and a man standing near him said: ‘Looks like it, don’t it?’

He watched for five minutes as the columns slowly moved off. When there was absolutely no doubt what was happening, he ran to a phone box and called Bernie. ‘They’re marching away!’ he said.

‘What, into the East End?’

‘No, the other way! They’re going west, into the City. We’ve won!’

‘Good God!’ Bernie spoke to the other people with him. ‘Everybody! The Fascists are marching west. They’ve given up!’

Lloyd heard a burst of wild cheering in the room.

After a minute Bernie said: ‘Keep an eye on them, let us know when they’ve all left Tower Gardens.’

‘Absolutely.’ Lloyd hung up.

He walked around the perimeter of the park in high spirits. It became clearer every minute that the Fascists were defeated. Their bands played, and they marched in time, but there was no spring in their step, and they no longer chanted that they were going to get rid of the Yids. The Yids had got rid of them.

As he passed the end of Byward Street he saw Daisy again.

She was heading towards the distinctive black-and-cream Rolls-Royce, and she had to walk past Lloyd. He could not resist the temptation to gloat. ‘The people of the East End have rejected you and your filthy ideas,’ he said.

She stopped and looked at him, cool as ever. ‘We’ve been obstructed by a gang of thugs,’ she said with disdain.

‘Still, you’re marching in the other direction now.’

‘One battle doesn’t make a war.’

That might be true, Lloyd thought; but it was a pretty big battle. ‘You’re not marching home with your boyfriend?’

‘I prefer to drive,’ she said. ‘And he’s not my boyfriend.’

Lloyd’s heart leaped in hope.

Then she said: ‘He’s my husband.’

Lloyd stared at her. He had never really believed that she would be so stupid. He was speechless.

‘It’s true,’ she said, reading the disbelief in his face. ‘Didn’t you see our engagement reported in the newspapers?’

‘I don’t read the society pages.’

She showed him her left hand, with a diamond engagement ring and a gold wedding band. ‘We were married yesterday. We postponed our honeymoon to join the march today. Tomorrow we’re flying to Deauville in Boy’s plane.’

She walked the few steps to the car and the chauffeur opened the door. ‘Home, please,’ she said.

‘Yes, my lady.’

Lloyd was so angry he wanted to hit someone.

Daisy looked back over her shoulder. ‘Goodbye, Mr Williams.’

He found his voice. ‘Goodbye, Miss Peshkov.’

‘Oh, no,’ she said. ‘I’m Viscountess Aberowen now.’

She just loved saying it, Lloyd could tell. She was a titled lady, and it meant the world to her.

She got into the car and the chauffeur closed the door.

Lloyd turned away. He was ashamed to realize that he had tears in his eyes. ‘Hell,’ he said aloud.

He sniffed, swallowing tears. He squared his shoulders and headed back towards the East End at a brisk walk. Today’s triumph had been soured. He knew he was a fool to care about Daisy – clearly she did not care about him – but, all the same, it broke his heart that she was throwing herself away on Boy Fitzherbert.

He tried to put her out of his mind.

The police were getting back into their buses and leaving the scene. Lloyd had not been surprised by their brutality – he had lived in the East End all his life, and it was a rough neighbourhood – but their anti-Semitism had shocked him. They had called every woman a Jewish whore, every man a Jew bastard. In Germany the police had supported the Nazis and sided with the Brownshirts. Would they do the same here? Surely not!

The crowd at Gardiner’s Corner had begun to rejoice. The Jewish Lads’ Brigade band was playing a jazz tune for men and women to dance to, and bottles of whisky and gin were passed from hand to hand. Lloyd decided to go to the London Hospital and check on Millie. Then he should probably go to the Jewish Council headquarters and break the news to Bernie that Millie had been hurt.

Before he got any further he ran into Lenny Griffiths. ‘We sent the buggers packing!’ Lenny said excitedly.

‘We did, too.’ Lloyd grinned.

Lenny lowered his voice. ‘We beat the Fascists here, and we’re going to beat them in Spain, too.’

‘When are you leaving?’

‘Tomorrow. Me and Dave are catching a train to Paris in the morning.’

Lloyd put his arm around Lenny’s shoulders. ‘I’ll come with you,’ he said.