Coronation Summer

  Coronation

  Summer

  MARGARET

  PEMBERTON

  PAN BOOKS

  For my youngest daughter, Natasha Christina.

  With a grandfather, James Alfred Edward Pemberton,

  who boxed professionally in the 20s as ‘Stoker’

  Pemberton, and a father who also boxed, this book

  is very specially for you.

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  A Season of Secrets

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  Also by Margaret Pemberton

  Chapter One

  ‘So I shall be wearing red, white and blue for the coronation, just as I did for VE Day,’ Mavis Lomax said breezily to her younger sister. They were in Lewisham High Street.

  Carrie, five years Mavis’s junior, was behind the family’s fruit and vegetable stall, polishing up a fresh delivery of apples on the corner of her gaily patterned, wrap-around overall. ‘You’ll look ridiculous,’ she said bluntly, placing a nicely gleaming Cox’s at the centre of her apple display. ‘You looked ridiculous on VE Day, and you were only in your thirties then. As I remember it, your red skirt was split halfway to your thighs and your blue-and-white spotted blouse had a cleavage so low, it nearly met it. Now you’re in your forties you should show a bit of sense.’

  ‘I’m forty,’ Mavis said with emphasis and a toss of her bottled-blonde, poodle-cut curls, ‘not forty-two or forty-four or ’alfway to fifty, and I shall wear wot I bloomin’ well like.’ She was visiting the stall as a customer and she transferred a wicker shopping basket laden with potatoes and carrots and a couple of pounds of the apples Carrie had polished earlier from one scarlet-nailed hand to the other. ‘You should try taking a leaf out of my book and tart yourself up a bit. You’re getting to look quite frumpy. Next thing you know you’ll be like our mum, wearing curlers all day and only taking your pinny off when you go to bed.’

  She stood with her weight resting on one leg, the curve of her hips lushly voluptuous beneath the tightness of her caramel-coloured pencil skirt. ‘Me and Ted are off down The Bricklayer’s Arms tonight,’ she continued, noticing for the first time that Carrie, usually so buoyant and ready for a laugh, looked as fedup as she sounded. ‘Why don’t you and Danny come with us? We could have a bit of a knees-up, just like the old days.’

  Carrie shook her head. ‘Thanks, but no thanks,’ she said, grudgingly appreciating the spirit in which the offer had been made. ‘Danny’s coaching at the club tonight, and I don’t want Rose sitting in on her own.’

  Mavis was about to suggest that Carrie bring her fourteen-year-old daughter with her but then decided against it. She and Carrie were as different as chalk and cheese and, whereas she had quite happily often taken her two youngsters for a drink when they were still under age, it wasn’t something Carrie was ever likely to do. ‘See yer then,’ she said, about to turn on her heel and begin the walk home. A thought occurred to her and she paused. ‘’Ave yer seen the new boxer the club’s signed up? Our Beryl says he’s a smasher – tall, blond and ’andsome, with shoulders on him as wide as a street.’

  Carrie suppressed a spurt of irritation. Despite her long and apparently happy marriage, Mavis had always been an outrageous flirt and – if the rumours were true – worse, and turning forty hadn’t cured her.

  ‘If he is, he’ll be fifteen years too young for you,’ she said unkindly.

  Mavis chuckled, laughter lines crinkling the corners of cat-green eyes. ‘That’s what you think, our Carrie. If he’s twenty-five, I think he’ll be just the right age!’ Still chuckling throatily, she walked off down the High Street, not the focus of quite as many masculine, head-turning glances as she had once been, but still the object of a good many.

  Carrie shook her head in despair. How Ted, her quiet-spoken brother-in-law, endured his rackety home life, Carrie couldn’t even begin to imagine.

  ‘Three pahnds o’ carrots, dearie, and ’alf a stone o’ spuds,’ a customer said, opening her shopping bag so that Carrie could tip the veg straight into it off the scales. ‘Was that your Mavis I saw you chatting to a minute or so ago? What’s she done with ’er ’air? Permed it? I’ve never seen so many curls on a grown woman before. She’ll be able to play Goldilocks in the next Christmas panto, won’t she!’

  With an effort, Carrie summoned a laugh and agreed with her. She didn’t truly feel like laughing, though. Mavis couldn’t possibly have known it, but her remark about her becoming frumpy had hit home very hard. That morning, for the first time ever, her husband Danny had addressed her as if she wasn’t his wife but his mother. It was something lots of south-east London men did, of course, but usually only after they were well into middle age. Her own father nearly always referred to her mother as ‘Ma’, rarely as Miriam. ‘Put the kettle on, Ma,’ he would say lovingly to her. ‘Me stomach finks me froat’s bin cut.’ Daniel Collins, her father-in-law, was just the same. ‘I’m off down to The Swan for a couple of jars, Ma,’ he would say to Hettie in his breezy, genial manner. ‘Do you want me to bring some fish and chips in on my way home?’

  Until now, Carrie had never really given it much thought. Her mother and Hettie were both well in their sixties, and somehow their husbands referring to them by the all encompassing ‘Ma’ didn’t seem odd. But she wasn’t in her sixties! And she didn’t want her husband referring to her as if all sexuality had gone out of their relationship and only loving mateyness remained. Across the pavement from the Jennings’ family fruit and vegetable stall were the large plate-glass windows of Marks & Spencer’s, and, as the stream of pedestrians passing up and down lulled, Carrie could see her reflection quite clearly. She chewed the corner of her lip. Was she beginning to look like her mother? She was big, certainly, but then she’d always been big, and the capacious leather cash-bag she wore for her daily stint at the stall didn’t help. Tied around her waist, it was so bulky it would have made a ballerina look as ungainly as an elephant. ‘But at least you’re not fat, Carrie,’ her best friend, Kate Emmerson, always said to her whenever she bemoaned her size. ‘You’re just splendidly Junoesque.’ Carrie folded her arms and, with her head a little to one side, studied her reflection. It was quite true that she wasn’t fat in the way many contemporaries of hers and Kate’s had suddenly become fat, but then she hadn’t had the number of children most of their old schoolfriends had had. A nasty miscarriage some years after Rose was born had ensured there’d been no more babies, though she had dearly wanted more.

  A light May breeze tugged at her hair. Coal-dark and thick, with a strong wave to it, she wore it as she had worn it ever since she was a young girl, untidily loose and jaw-length. Sometimes she clipped it back, but only rarely, and she certainly never experimented with it the way Mavis did hers, following every hair fashion that came out and, in-between times, copying the style of whoever was her favourite film star.

  ‘I said, a bunch o’ radishes and two boxes o’ cress,’ a customer said irately, rattling her carrier bag for Carrie’
s attention. ‘Cor blimey, gel, but you ain’t ’alf wool-gathering! An’ if those lettuces are fresh an’ there’s no slugs in ’em, I’ll take two.’

  For the rest of the day, until her father came to pack up the stall at five-thirty and to clear up all the debris that had accumulated around it, Carrie did her best to rise above the depression she was feeling. People didn’t come shopping down the market to be served by someone with a long face. They came not only for cheap, fresh produce, but for a smile and a cheery word as well.

  ‘Yer can tell Danny I’ll be dahn the club tonight to watch this new bloke spar,’ Albert Jennings said, relieving her of the day’s takings and paying her handsomely out of them, as he always did. ‘It’ll be interestin’ to see ’ow ’e shapes up. Jack seems to think ’e’s got ’imself a real winner.’

  Jack was Jack Robson, local rogue; owner of Lewisham’s Embassy Boxing Club; Danny’s boss; their neighbour and, ever since she and Danny were school kids, their friend.

  ‘Well, if Jack thinks he’s the bee’s knees, he probably is,’ Carrie said, not overly interested. She picked up her raspberry-pink swing-back coat from off a stool, slipped it on and kissed Albert on his leathery cheek. ‘See you in the morning, Dad,’ she said, grateful that it was he, not her, who trekked up to Covent Garden in the early hours for produce and who always set the stall up. ‘Ta-ra.’

  As she walked off down the High Street towards the clock tower, she wondered if her lack of enthusiasm about what was going on at the club wasn’t, perhaps, part of her problem. To Danny, the club was his whole life. He was both manager and coach and had been ever since the day the club had first opened its doors. It meant that not only did he spend most of every day there, but nearly every evening, too.

  ‘Cheer up, Petal,’ a familiar voice shouted from the opposite side of the road. ‘It might never ’appen!’

  Carrie grinned and waved to old Charlie Robson, Jack Robson’s dad.

  ‘Are yer goin’ up town next month for the coronation or watching it on me and ’Arriet’s new telly?’ he persisted, bawling across the road like a town-crier, his gnarled thumbs hooked behind his braces as he stood on the edge of the pavement, making no effort to close the gap between them. ‘Only we’ll need ter be knowin’ ’cos I fink we’re goin’ to ’ave an ’ouse full and ’Arriet’ll need to know ’ow many sausage rolls to make.’

  ‘I’m going up town on Coronation Day, Charlie,’ Carrie called back, beginning to cross the road towards him. She stood still for a moment to let a Ford Anglia nip past her and then sprinted to safety.

  ‘Yer won’t see all of it like you will if yer watch it on the telly,’ Charlie said, put out. He was proud of his and Harriet’s new telly and wanted to show it off. ‘Yer’ll be able to see everyfink wot’s ’appening inside the Abbey, as well as outside, on the telly.’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ Carrie was unhappily aware that she was disappointing him, ‘but the atmosphere won’t be the same, will it? And I want to see the colours of the uniforms and regalia and flags and . . . oh, I don’t know, Charlie . . . I just want to be a part of it all.’

  ‘’Avin’ to sleep on a pavement the night afore to get a place to see ain’t wot I’d call atmosphere an’ colour,’ Charlie grumbled good-naturedly, ‘but if that’s wot you want, Petal, then I ’ope you enjoy every minute of it.’

  ‘Ta, Charlie.’ Carrie grinned at him affectionately. Like most of the neighbours in the square where she lived, Charlie was part and parcel of her life, and had been ever since she could remember.

  ‘An’ tell your Danny I’ll be dahn the club ternight to see this boy wonder my lad’s signed up. If ’e’s anything like this Rocky Marciano bloke the Yanks ’ave, we’ll all be on our way to a tidy fortune.’

  Carrie’s grin died. She knew that, apart from the legal fights Jack promoted, there were also other fights which didn’t get talked about quite so publicly. Fights where large sums of money were placed. Fights where what should have been her housekeeping money from Danny often went down the Swannee. Thoughtfully she watched Charlie amble away from her. Even in old age he was a bear of a man, and there were lots of stories locally about how, when he was young and in his prime, he’d been a criminal par excellence, the bane of every police constabulary for miles around.

  She began walking again, continuing on down the High Street until she reached the point where it ended, at the foot of Magnolia Hill. Was Jack Robson a chip off the old block? Did Jack also run outside the law and, if he did so, did he sometimes take her Danny with him? It was a disturbing thought and it wasn’t the first time it had occurred to her. She turned right into Magnolia Hill. Usually she enjoyed her walk home towards Blackheath, for the houses in Magnolia Hill were all elegant, nicely kept Edwardian houses with nearly every garden boasting one of the magnolia trees that had given the hill its name. The problem was, she reflected as she walked on, that she and Danny rarely had serious talks about anything any more, and bringing up a subject as touchy as whether or not all Jack’s business dealings were strictly kosher wouldn’t be easy. She wondered whether she should speak to Kate about her worries. Kate’s husband, Leon, though not employed at the club, was nearly as involved in it as Danny. He was a black ex-seaman, and during his naval days he had won medals galore for competitive boxing. And one thing was certain: Leon Emmerson wouldn’t be involved in any shady dealing. He was as straight as the proverbial arrow.

  She paused at the top of the hill, at the point where it opened onto a spacious square, debating with herself whether to go immediately home or to call in at Kate’s. From where she was now standing, her home was only yards away, the first house on the left-hand side of the square’s junction with the hill. The house on the immediate bottom right of the square was the house she was born in, and her mother and father and elderly gran still lived there. The first house going up the square on the right-hand side was Mavis and Ted’s house, conspicuous for its lack of paint and air of general dilapidation. Next to that was an empty gap where a house had been bombed to smithereens in the war. Then there was Jack Robson’s house. Like herself, he was born in Magnolia Square, and, despite the fact that he was obviously now doing very well for himself, he showed no signs of wanting to move away. There were then another three houses before, at the top end of the square, the houses changed character, becoming almost as large and gracious as those in Magnolia Hill. It was in one of these houses that the Emmersons lived.

  Carrie dithered for just one second longer and then made her decision. Rose would be home from school and well into her homework by now, but Danny would be home, too, waiting for her to come in and begin making him something to eat before he began his evening stint at the club. Carrie resolutely began walking past her old home. Tonight, if Danny wanted something to eat, he’d jolly well have to stop behaving like a man with two broken arms and make it for himself.

  There came the sound of an upstairs window being rapped, and Carrie looked upwards to see her gran waving at her. She waved back, mouthing and signalling that she hadn’t time to come in, that she was on her way to see Kate, but that she’d call by on her way home. Leah Singer made a typically Jewish, typically disparaging gesture. Carrie grinned. Her gran was bed-bound and, despite the constant visits of neighbours and grandchildren, always behaved as if she were a neglected prisoner in a medieval tower. It didn’t stop her getting to know all the gossip, though, and she would now be wanting to know all the latest about Jack Robson’s new boxer.

  Carrie glanced across the square, made elegant by the small Anglican church that graced its grassy centre island, to the house where Jack’s new protégé was going to take up lodgings. There was no sign of activity there, no youngsters hanging around, so presumably he hadn’t arrived yet. She gave a wry smile, aware that she was probably the only person in the square so uninterested, for the Embassy Boxing Club was viewed with affection and pride by Magnolia Square residents. Nearly all of them had helped Jack to get it off the ground in the early days after the wa
r.

  Leon had volunteered all his considerable expertise, Danny had done likewise, on a cash basis. Elisha Deakin, landlord of The Swan, had offered Jack the use of empty rooms above the pub. Her mother, Miriam, who cleaned St Mark’s Church twice a week, even though she said she was now too old to stand on her feet all day at the market, kept the new-found premises spick and span. Her mother-in-law and father-in-law, Daniel and Hettie Collins, had put a sizeable amount of their hard-earned life savings into it, as had Jack’s ultra-respectable, elderly stepmother. St Mark’s vicar, the Reverend Bob Giles, had given the club his blessing by saying he hoped it would be the means of keeping a lot of local tearaways off the streets and out of trouble, and the young doctor who had moved his practice into number seven in the spring of 1950 had offered his services to Jack free of charge.

  She turned in through Kate and Leon’s gateway. A magnolia sieboldii graced the small front garden and was in full flower, its delicate blush-coloured flowers heart-stoppingly beautiful. Like all the houses in the top half of the square, a flight of wide, shallow stone steps led up to the front door. At the side of each step was a small pot thick with lavender, rosemary or thyme, and the air was heavy with fragrance and the hum of bees. She didn’t bother to knock on the door. She’d been walking in and out of number four as if it were her own home ever since she’d been a toddler.

  ‘Hello there!’ she called out as she stepped into the hallway, adding unnecessarily, ‘It’s me, Carrie!’

  Kate Emmerson came down the stairs with a squirming child tucked under one arm, a large tin toy truck caked with garden dirt under the other. She didn’t look remotely harassed. Her hair was a deep natural gold and she wore it plaited and coiled into a bun. Instead of making her look older than her thirty-five years, the unfashionable style only served to emphasize her innate elegance and gracefulness. ‘I left him playing with it in the garden,’ she said wryly, obviously referring to the truck as the dusky-skinned, curly headed ‘him’ in question continued to struggle furiously, ‘and the next thing I know there’s a trail of dirt all the way up to my bedroom.’