Last Rights

Barbara Nadel

Copyright © 2005 Barbara Nadel

The right of Barbara Nadel to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

First published as an Ebook by Headline Publishing Group in 2012

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library

eISBN: 978 0 7553 7851 7

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Trained as an actress, Barbara Nadel used to work in mental health services. Born in the East End of London, she now writes full time and has been a regular visitor to Turkey for over twenty years. She received the Crime Writers’ Association Silver Dagger for her novel Deadly Web in 2005. She is also the author of the highly acclaimed Inspector İkmen series set during World War Two.

Praise for Last Rights:

‘Nadel has made a sizeable impact on the crime and mystery field with her fascinating series of thrillers set in Istanbul . . . Her new series, set during the London blitz, ably navigates different psychological waters; it conjures up a moving character in Francis Hancock . . . A great depiction of the period and a touchingly reluctant new sleuth’ Guardian

‘Gripping and unusual detective story . . . vivid and poignant’ Literary Review

‘Nadel has created an atmospheric setting and a fascinating insight into the lives of Londoners struggling against the Luftwaffe’s nightly onslaught. The book’s intelligent original theme and empathetic characterization make for a compelling read’ Good Book Guide

‘Excellent’ Birmingham Post

Praise for Barbara Nadel:

‘The delight of the Nadel book is the sense of being taken beneath the surface of an ancient city which most visitors see for a few days at most. We look into the alleyways and curious dark quartiers of Istanbul, full of complex characters and louche atmosphere’ Independent

‘This is an extraordinarily interesting first novel’ Evening Standard

‘Belshazzar’s Daughter, with its brilliantly realised Istanbul setting and innovative protagonist was a hard act to follow. But she pulls off the trick triumphantly’ The Times

‘Inspector Çetin kmen is a detective up there with Morse, Rebus and Wexford. Harem is the fifth in the series, and the most compelling to date . . . Gripping and highly recommended’ Time Out

‘One of the most intriguing detectives in contemporary crime fiction . . . The backdrop of Istanbul makes for a fantastic setting’ Mail On Sunday

‘Unusual and very well-written’ Sunday Telegraph

‘Intriguing, exotic . . . exciting, accomplished and original’ Literary Review

‘A bewitching style . . . a story that carries the reader forward willingly along until the well-sprung denouement’ Scotsman

‘As before, Nadel presents a gallery of richly created characters along with the superb scene-setting we have come to expect from her’ Good Book Guide.

Also by Barbara Nadel

The Inspector kmen series:

Belshazzar’s Daughter

A Chemical Prison

Arabesk

Deep Waters

Harem

Petrified

Deadly Web

Dance with Death

A Passion for Killing

Pretty Dead Things

River of the Dead

Death by Design

A Noble Killing

Dead of Night

The Hancock series:

Last Rights

After the Mourning

Ashes to Ashes

Sure and Certain Death

To my dad.

Although he’s been dead for almost four years now,
I couldn’t have written this book without him.

Acknowledgements

This book was an entirely new, unknown and scary venture for me and I have been fortunate in having had a lot of help from a lot of people. Ron Hart, Publicity Officer of the East of London Family History Society, was a great help. He readily shared some of his wartime experiences with me and put me in touch with others who also had great tales to tell. Foremost amongst these were Sylvia Ramage, Ivy Alexander and Eric Vanlint. Ivy and Eric were also kind enough to give me copies of their books Maid in West Ham and While Pigeons Cooed in Hackney Wick respectively – both of which were most useful. I would also like to thank Sharon Grimmond from the New Deal for Communities and her very welcoming History Committee.

Michael Grier, Community Relations Manager at Tate and Lyle was kind enough to show me around part of the plant and allow me access to the company archives. Steve Maltz of London Jewish Tours was also a mine of information as well as being a very entertaining fellow walker. Susie, Philip and Pam at the Spitalfields Centre have my undying thanks for introducing me to 19 Princelet Street – a truly life altering experience. I also have to thank the Newham Bookshop for the help they gave me when I needed it and just for being there with the right books when I didn’t.

Brian Parsons PhD is a funeral service educator and author of the book The London Way of Death. He answered many often badly couched questions for me and was a mine of funeral service information. Thanks to him.

My family, both the living and the dead, were crucial to this project. Thanks especially to my mother for her memories, to my son for his vision and my husband for his patience. Finally, thanks also to my agent, Juliet Burton and my editor at Headline, Martin Fletcher.

N.B. Readers unfamiliar with words or expressions used in this novel can turn to the Glossary at the end of the Ebook.

Chapter One

Ever seen a man’s face smashed in? It explodes. I’ve seen it done with bullets more times than anyone should. Going up, over the top, mud in your mouth, your eyes, your ears. The bloke next to you pokes his head over and then, bang! A bullet, one of Jerry’s, one of ours sometimes, it hardly matters when his brains are all over your battledress. Not this time, though. This time I could see it was a fist. Burrowing into his nose, a big, hard docker’s fist, pushing straight through to the back of the poor bloke’s head.

I screamed. Bombs hammering down all around us, Canning Town, Silvertown, Custom House – every bloody inch of London’s docklands – but they heard me. Men with faces like sweat-slicked potatoes. They turned and saw a thin, dark man in the shadow of one of the trees, a man shaking from his hat to his boots.

You hear some people say that war is different now. They say that with all the bombing it’s not the same as what happened in the first lot. They say it’s worse. Depends on how you see war, I suppose. For me there’s no difference. When I was in the trenches in the Great War, people died. Now people are dying again. Not only soldiers this time, I’ll grant you, ordinary men, women and kiddies. But at the end of the day I wonder what’s the difference. People talk about the old Kaiser being better than Adolf Hitler and I don’t know about that either. I was twenty when I went off to fight for King and Empire, just a nipper in the scheme of things. I grew up, grew old and most of me died out there in the mud.

‘Who’s there?’ one of the potatoes said.

Somebody ran over to me and looked into my face. I couldn’t move, not with the terror on me. He was small, the one who came over, and even through my fear I knew I could have had him if I’d needed to. But then he smiled. Middle of the night, but I could see every inch of his leathery old face thanks to all the fireworks down at the docks.

‘Aw, it’s only the Morgue’s son,’ the old man said, with a dismissive wave of his hand.

‘What? The wog?’

‘Yus.’

And then they all laughed. Because it was funny.

So how did the ‘Morgue’s son’ come to be shaking in his boots on the edge of a bare-knuckle fight in a graveyard in East Ham? I don’t know any more than anyone else. All I do know is that ever since all this bombing started on the seventh of the month, this is what I’ve had to do. I’d known it was coming. Ever since Dunkirk I’ve woken up shaking. Seems almost unbelievable all that happened only back in June. Even the weather’s gone off now, as if we’ve suddenly crashed into winter before autumn’s really out. Thrown down into the darkness . . .

But, anyway, this raid started and I had to get out same as always. My mum, my sisters and our apprentice boy Arthur went down the Anderson shelter in the yard. But it’s like the trenches down there – bombs going off in your head, blood dripping down the side of your brain. I ran. I had to get out of it and I ran. It’s what I’ve always done. It’s what I do.

That I ended up in a graveyard was funny. St Mary Magdalene’s is an ancient, creepy one too. Half the tombs are broken and sinking, and in places there are weeds up to your neck. All dressed in black, my top hat with its veil on my head, I must have looked like something out of a ghost story.

‘Your dad buried my mum,’ one of the potatoes said, as he took his cap off his head to show respect. ‘Done her handsome.’

I tried to thank him but nothing would come out. When I run like this, my mind sort of goes back to the first lot, and while I’m there I don’t know what I might be doing here. And even when it stops, as it had done when the men spoke to me, I’m still not right. My sister Aggie’s old man used to say I was a basket case – and that was before any of this madness was even on the cards. Sometimes he’d say it to my face.

The man whose mug had caved in came over to look at me. He was holding something up to his nose to catch the blood. I think it was a vest.

‘Blimey,’ he said. ‘Gone bleedin’ white by the look of him.’

The men laughed again – and so did I. You have to.

‘What you doin’ out here, Mr H?’ It was a familiar voice, although I couldn’t for the life of me place it at the time.

‘I-I-I went for a walk,’ I stuttered. I hate it when I do that.

‘Funny time to go strolling,’ another voice cut in, ‘in the middle of a raid. Do this often, do you?’

‘Y-yee . . .’

‘Does it all the time so I’ve heard. Barmy!’ someone else said, and they all laughed yet again.

Barmy. Yes. There’s so much about me that is barmy. Funny, really, when you look at it. Francis Thomas Hancock, old soldier at forty-seven, undertaker, wog – out of his tiny mind.

There was one of those long whistling sounds then and a breathless moment before the bomb hit something close. Like I imagine an earthquake, like the endless pounding of the guns in the trenches.

‘Blimey, that was close!’

‘I think that’s going to be that for tonight, gents,’ someone said.

Men, some of them bloodied, started to walk towards the cemetery gates. The old leather-faced geezer, still in front of me, said, ‘Come on, Mr H, get you ’ome. Don’t want to have to answer questions from no nosy coppers or none of them bleedin’ wardens, do we?’ He took one of my elbows in his hand and led me on behind the others.

I’d heard that bare-knuckle fights sometimes took place in graveyards at night – you pick up whispers about such things in my trade – but I hadn’t expected to come across one during a raid. Not that I’d ever really thought about coming on one at all. I’m not a betting man myself. There’s enough risk in life without courting it.

When we got out on to High Street South, the old fellow let my arm go and pushed ahead. Suddenly I was totally alone. I stopped. There had to have been at least thirty men at the fight, but as I began slowly to walk back up towards the Barking Road, in the general direction of my home, I couldn’t see a soul. Funny that, in the middle of a raid, no one about. Of course, most people were down the shelters or hiding under their stairs. You would’ve thought you’d see police and firemen and wardens about, though – at least, that’s what I’d thought before the raids got going. But there couldn’t ever be enough of them: the fires and the destruction are like the end of the world, what can they do?

When I think about it now, I suppose I don’t know what I thought it would be like coming under attack from the Germans by air. In the first lot you could see their faces, frightened just like ours, scrambling to their deaths over the top of the trenches. But at such a distance it’s different. Faceless machines come, drop bombs, people die. And yet in spite of this you get up, go to work and carry on – at least, that’s what we’ve done so far. But not in a normal way. Normal ways for me used to include going to the house of the deceased, sometimes, sometimes not, laying them out and then burying them – not being given a head and a bag of bits by some copper telling me to ‘Cobble this bloke together for his family, will you, Mr H?’

And they call me mad . . .

It was only a matter of a couple of minutes later when I met him. Lurching, just like I was, over piles of something that had once been someone’s home. The sky was red and yellow with him silhouetted black against the beauty of the bombing. If he hadn’t been waving his arms around so much, I wouldn’t have taken any notice of him. But he was, and even though I don’t always stop and help – you can’t – this time I did. Perhaps I thought he was raving. There’s a sort of bond between madmen that almost forces you to get involved. I was in a couple of hospitals during the first lot. Gassed twice. But I knew who my own were in those places. They were the ones who ran like me, who howled and screamed like this chap now.

As I got closer to him, I could hear that he was shouting something. And even though I knew he wouldn’t be able to hear me any more than I could hear him, I said, ‘It’s all right, pal, I’m coming.’

I don’t know how old I thought he was at the time. Flames always, in my experience, draw the features down making people look much older. What I did know was that he was in trouble. He kept clawing at his chest as if there was something in there he wanted rid of.

‘What is it?’

‘I’ve been fucking stabbed!’ He was a Londoner, I could tell from his voice, and now that I was next to him I could see that he was dark. Black hair and a long, thin nose. I thought that maybe he was a Jew – either that or he was like me, us not being unlike each other.

‘Stabbed? How?’

It was bright now, the ground lit by I don’t know how many fires, some madness going on in the sky. Like daylight some of the raids, like the world melting into white heat. He was dirty, covered in brick-dust, and his hair was reeking of cordite, just like mine must have been, but I couldn’t see any blood on him.

Mad.

‘Look here!’ he said, and he moved his hand away from his chest. ‘Look at it, there!’

There wasn’t much blood. Not like an artery hit or anything like that.

‘Nasty flesh wound is all you’ve got,’ I said.

One thin, sinewy hand reached out and grabbed me by the collar. ‘She fucking stabbed me, I tell you,’ he said, through gritted teeth.

‘Hold on!’

His breath smelled of beer and there were gaps in his mouth where some of his teeth had once been. A fighter, maybe even one of them I’d just come upon in the graveyard. I didn’t recognise him, but I wouldn’t have recognised any of them at the time had my life depended on it. What I wouldn’t forget, though, even in my dreams, was the look of hatred on his face as he turned away from me with a curse. ‘Fucking whore!’

And then he was off. He pushed past me, skidding down a pile of bricks, heading for Beckton and the real heart of the inferno. To be honest, I didn’t try and stop him. I knew he was hurt, but he was in the grip of something too – and I know all about that and how unwise it can be to interfere with it. Sometimes helping those in the grip of madness can be worse than just letting the thing take its course. But then sometimes you read the situation wrong and it all goes phut. So I made my way home. I didn’t see the man with hate on his face and beer on his breath again until two days later when he turned up unexpectedly at my shop.

Chapter Two

Hancocks have been burying people in the London Borough of West Ham for two generations, three if you count me. Apart from the Hitchcocks’ firm, which also has premises on the Barking Road, I think we’re the oldest undertaker’s shop around these parts. My grandad, Francis, who I’m named for, started the company in 1885. Back in those days Hancock’s was a building firm as well as an undertaker’s, but Francis got out of the bricking and chippying around the turn of the century. So when Grandad died in 1913, my old dad took over the burying of poor men and women for a living. Because our shop is, and always has been, roughly at the centre of the borough, we’ve always got business from all over. And although in more recent years other firms have opened up in Stratford, Plaistow and further down towards the docks around Canning Town, we’ve managed to stay close to the people we serve.

Tom Hancock, my dad, was a lovely chap. All the old wags round here used to call him ‘The Morgue’, but he always took it in good part. When I was a nipper at school you couldn’t count the number of lads whose dads took their belt off to them. Not my dad, though. He loved us: Mum, my sisters Nancy and Aggie and me. He didn’t care what people round here said and they’ve always said quite a lot about most things.

Before Dad joined Francis in the business, he was a soldier and was posted out to India. He liked it there – partial to the heat Dad was – and when he met a local girl called Mary Fernandez, he liked it even better. They met in Calcutta, Mum and Dad – she was working at a convent that looked after orphans. Dad, Tom, wasn’t exactly honest when he told his parents about her in one of his letters. He used to say, ‘I wrote it like this: “I’ve met this smashing girl. She’s a good Christian but a little bit dark. I’m going to marry her.”’ Then he’d laugh. Gran and Grandad nearly died when they saw Mum for the first time. Nancy was a year old and Mum was pregnant with me when they first arrived in West Ham. Grandad was nice about it, but Gran always called us wogs – all except my younger sister Aggie, the only one of us who took Dad’s light hair and fair skin.

All through my life I’ve been called ‘wog’. Not by everyone, and not always in bad spirit. I’ve had some very good mates in my time, still do. But some of these names and comments have hurt my sister Nancy who is the darkest and, in truth, the most Indian-looking of us all. I know this has held her back from maybe finding a bloke or bettering herself in some way and I must say it does make me angry at times. Although not that often now. There’s worse things than names in this world. I learned that on the Somme; I learned that when my mates dragged me kicking and screaming back to our trench that first time I lost what was left of my mind and made a run for it. At the time I hated those lads, called them every name a man can lay his tongue to. But they saved me – Ken White, Stanley Wheeler, Georgie Pepper and Izzy Weisz. The top brass would have done me for deserting as sure as eggs is eggs. Then I’d have been shot – not blown up like Stanley, not drowned in mud like Georgie and Izzy: shot.

What none of them could have known, though, was that running was going to become a way of life for me. Loud noises, violence – it all makes me want to do it. The Great War started me doing it and I’ve never stopped running since. Ken, who was the only mate of mine to get out with me, knows. We talk about it on occasion. It’s as if my head, sometimes like that night at the knuckle fight in the graveyard, is bringing my body along with it – running. From life, from my own thoughts, now from bombs and guns, from women’s screams and men’s cries of despair – Mr H the undertaker runs and runs and then when he gets back to his shop he hides among any bodies he might have out the back. We’re one of the few firms who can take bodies on the premises round here. I even know a bloke up West who embalms for a price – not that there’s much call for that in West Ham. We’re a poor borough. People here, even before rationing, have never had much that wasn’t essential.

Of course, where you’ve got poverty you’ve also got ignorance so quite a lot of people in the borough believe in ghosts and spirits and all that rubbish. But not me. The dead are gone and can’t harm anyone – perhaps that’s why I like to work with them. Innocent. I make sure the dead get where they want to be in spite of the actions of the living. I’ve seen it all. Widows digging in their old men’s pockets for every last farthing, drunks burying their kids in paupers’ graves, and now the Luftwaffe bombing the departed up into the light again, spinning their shredded grave clothes into the yew trees. The cruelty of the living is something that has no end.

I was back in our parlour with a pot of tea almost brewed when Mum, my sisters – the girls, I call them – and our lad Arthur came up out of the Anderson the following morning. Nancy went straight away to look to our horses, who had bashed themselves silly against their stall again in the night. Poor creatures, there’s no knowing what they’ll do to themselves once a raid begins. Aggie, as usual, was more concerned about what she looked like. She has a pretty, heart-shaped face with big blue eyes, the image of Dad’s. Not that she’s satisfied with what she’s got. Stood in front of the fan-shaped glass in the parlour she pulled faces at herself, mucked about with her hair and went on about how ‘rotten’ everything was.

‘I hate this rotten war with its rotten food and rotten muck all over the place,’ she said. ‘Blimey, I look as if I’m about Mum’s age!’

‘What? That young?’ I said, trying to be playful.

Aggie turned towards me and glared. Then, when I told her I’d made a rotten pot of tea, she stomped off into the kitchen, her harshly bleached-up hair, full of brick-dust, flapping behind her like a dull mat. Poor Aggie, with her husband gone off with another woman, her little ’uns evacuated away somewhere in Essex, all she wants is a little bit of fun, but every time she looks in a mirror she gets depressed. Little or no sleep doesn’t do a lot for anyone’s looks, including Aggie’s. There’s a shadow of loneliness that hangs around her lovely eyes sometimes too.

Mum poured out for everyone into cups and saucers she’d come straight in and slowly washed up at the sink. You never know whether or not you’re going to have water on after a raid but on this occasion we did. Aggie carried her tea up to her room while Arthur took his own and Nancy’s out to the yard. Mum, her cup trembling on its saucer in her hand, looked at me as I stood against the door-post and said, ‘I’m going to make you something to eat, Francis.’

‘I’m all right.’

‘No, you’re not, you’re skin and bone!’ Her eyes started to fill then, but she held it back gamely. Mary Hancock, my mum, nearly seventy years old and still beautiful. Tall and slim, like me, she has the most amazing black hair – she uses no dyes to my knowledge – pleated up into a long, thick roll at the back of her head. Nicely spoken, with an Indian accent still, and a real lady. Like a duchess, my old dad used to say and he called her that too, just like I started doing after he passed away.

She took some bread out of the larder then, with what little Stork margarine there was left.

‘Sit down, my son,’ she said to me, as she pulled Dad’s chair out from its place at the head of the table.

‘Duchess . . .’

She walked up to me, limping a bit like she does when her arthritis is bad, her long black skirts swishing against the lino as she moved. The Duchess has never worn short dresses in her life or anything other than mourning since Dad died. Her dignity, as well as what she always calls her ‘convent training’, just won’t allow it.

‘Sit down, Francis, and please do eat,’ she said, as she ran one knotted brown hand across my forehead. Her arthritis had started young, when she was about thirty. Our doctor, O’Grady, said at the time that she needed to go back to the dry, hot climate of India if she was to have any chance of beating it. But she didn’t even want to mention that to Dad. She didn’t want to make him give up his business and she would never have left him or us children. But she suffers for that decision. ‘I wish you didn’t have to run all the time,’ the Duchess murmured, as she placed the bread and marge in front of me. ‘I wish you could have your health back again.’

I didn’t answer her. What was there to say? Some time, sooner rather than later, the raids would start again and I would run. Sure as night follows day. We both knew it.

I started on the bread and marge, more out of duty than hunger, but it made Mum smile, which was the object of the exercise. Then Nancy, or Nan, as we all call her, came in from the yard and, frowning as she almost always is, took over the tea with her usual well-meaning bossiness. ‘You’ve got to go and pick up Mr Evans at eleven,’ she said to me as, unbidden, she refilled my cup with tea and sugar.

‘I know,’ I said, as patiently as lack of sleep would allow. As if I could forget to pick up the deceased who, if indirectly, was paying for us all to go on existing.

‘You conducting?’

‘Yes.’ I always had, ever since Dad died, which is fifteen years ago now. Out in front of the hearse, my wand in my hand – the conductor, the master of the final earthly ceremonies. The wand or cane, which is what it looks like to most people, doesn’t serve any purpose these days. In the past it was used as a weapon to ward off grave robbers and as a sort of magical tool to keep away evil spirits. Hence the dramatic and mysterious name.

But I knew what she was getting at and I knew that she meant well. These days there aren’t always enough men to carry a sizeable coffin like Gordon Evans’s. Sometimes a funeral has to go without a conductor. But not this time.

‘Joe and Harry Evans are going to bear with Arthur and Walter,’ I said. ‘They want to do it for their dad.’

‘Yeah,’ Nan said acidly, ‘all very well as long as Walter don’t fall over.’

Mum and I looked at each other and smiled. Although never a part of the business, Nan has always taken what we do very seriously. Ever since we’d lost our cousin Eric to the navy, she had been concerned about how we were managing. Eric had driven for us for a number of years and was a strong, sure-footed pall-bearer. But he’d been called up so I’d done what I could, which was to employ Walter Bridges, a single bloke with badly fitting teeth who, though getting on a bit and, it must be said, partial to a drop or two, is a good enough driver and not too bad a bearer. There is also Arthur, our boy, fifteen and nearly six foot tall in his stockinged feet. Dying to have a go at Jerry, Arthur can put a good gloss on a coffin, provided he doesn’t drop fag ash over it afterwards. We also got Doris Rosen, our office girl, as soon as Eric and another of our blokes, Jim, left for the services. Had she been well enough, the Duchess could have managed the office and the bookwork, but most of the time now her arthritis is so bad she can’t do much. More often than not Nan has to feed her, put her to bed, turn the pages of her book, take her to the privy … That’s Nan’s job, the Duchess – and the cooking and cleaning. Apart from feeding the horses sometimes, she doesn’t have time for the shop and its doings, however much she might want to be in there, however much I know she envies Doris – who, in spite of being married, is a lot freer than Nan. In some ways, this war has freed a lot of women to do things other than look after men and kids.

Aggie came back in then and rolled herself a fag on the table. Nan watched her all the time, her hooded eyes, so brown they’re almost black, scrutinising her younger sister for each and every sign of what she would call ‘coarseness’ – heavy makeup or too much perfume.

‘I’m going to work,’ Aggie said. She was indeed heavily made up now and her hair was encased in one of those net snoods the girls like so much. She looked, to me, as if she would be more at home in Hollywood than London. To my way of thinking, it takes courage to make yourself so bright outside when you feel so rotten within.

But as Aggie left, I could see the word form in Nan’s mind – ‘slut’: written all over her face it was. And what a face. Bitterness is a horrible thing. It’s not her fault. Again, it’s to do with the way she looks. People made comments when she was a youngster and she hid herself away, looking after first Dad, then Mum and me and Aggie’s two little ’uns when they were still at home. Aggie might be glamorous now, but Nan, with her long black hair and tiny delicate features, had been beautiful. But that was a long time ago. Now she’s a spinster, a bitter one, and although I’ve always loved her, her spite is difficult to bear. I hate the way she disapproves of any fun Aggie might have. It’s not wrong for a girl to wear makeup or even like a drink once in a while – especially not in these times.

‘Oh, well,’ I said, after I’d finished what I hoped was enough of the food to satisfy the Duchess, ‘I’d best get on.’

I went downstairs into the parlour and spent a bit of time knocking brick-dust off the black curtains in the front window. A lot of windows had gone out opposite so there was a lot of glass all over the place. Doris, breathless and red-faced after her walk over from her home in Stepney, said, ‘Looks like a bleedin’ snow scene out there.’

And it did. In fact, if you looked at the pub on the corner from the right angle, it almost looked like something you’d see on a Christmas card.

Gordon Evans’s funeral was what has come, even in such a short space of time, to pass for normal. Tired, hand-picked flowers, a coffin scarred by millions of tiny glass shards and Walter, reeking of booze, swaying gently by the graveside. I suppose I should count myself lucky he sets off on the proper foot, the left, when he’s bearing, even if he is three sheets to the wind. But it isn’t good. Dad would have died of shame had he still been around. After all, when Hancock’s started, funerals were probably as elaborate as funerals had ever been – with the exception of the Egyptians, Tutankhamun and all that. When old Francis died in 1913, Dad sent him off in a hearse pulled by four black horses followed by mutes carrying ostrich feather wands and a procession of friends and family in the deepest mourning imaginable. You used to see so many flowers at funerals before the Great War. But, then, during and what seemed like for years afterwards, there were so many dead there weren’t enough flowers in the world for all of them.

Having said that, I did perform one big old-fashioned do back in late March. For an old bookies’ runner, it was, Sid Nye. The bookie coughed up for the funeral – he could – but Sid had been popular with his many customers in and around the Abbey Arms pub so a lot of people wanted to pay their respects with heavy mourning, flowers and what-have-you. Funny to think how hot it was back then. Hard on the heels of that terrible winter, the diggers had a real problem getting old Sid’s grave dug in time. Funny weather. But maybe that’s what you get around wars. In Flanders the locals used to say that they’d never seen so much rain and mud, not in living memory. Thinking about it now, Sid Nye’s funeral wasn’t just the last big do I’ve done, it was also the last normal one. Ever since then there’ve been few flowers and much talk, not of the deceased but of war and how we all think we’re going to survive.

Still the widow Evans was grateful for what we did, and their two boys, both in reserved occupations, were generous to my lads. But it was still a frightening and depressing way to send off a loved one. So many trophies of war all around. I could see the shrapnel embedded in some of the trees and memorials, even if the bereaved could not. I could see a foot I remember too – lying all white and lonely on top of a watering can. But no one else saw it so maybe it wasn’t really there. Maybe it was just a foot left over from the Somme, still lodged in my mind like a splinter.

Aggie had only been home for five minutes from her shift down at Tate & Lyle’s sugar factory when the sirens went off. I’d dropped Walter at his lodgings after the funeral, but Arthur was still with us so yet again he went down with Mum, the girls and this time Doris too.

I went up on the roof. Something made me not go so far on this occasion. Perhaps I was afraid of meeting wild-eyed fighting men again or maybe I just wanted to watch people doing something rather than sitting in a hole in the ground. There’s a fire-watching post on the next roof, over the bank. Mr Deeks, the manager, is in charge. ‘Good evening, Mr Hancock,’ he said to me, as he watched me lie down on the flat bit of roof over Aggie’s bedroom.

‘G-Good evening, Mr, er, D-Deeks,’ I replied.

I saw him smile briefly before he and his lads went on about their business. He must have thought I was mad, lying down on a roof in a raid – no tin hat, no gas-mask, nothing. He must have thought I had some sort of death-wish. Depending on the day, sometimes he’s on the money there.

As the throbbing drone of the bombers came ever closer, I shut my eyes. I’ve always thought that if I’m going to die, I don’t want to have to watch myself do it. Sometimes people ask me whether or not I’m afraid of death and my answer always surprises them. I am. Just because it’s familiar to me, just because sometimes I even want it, doesn’t mean I can’t fear it. How can you not fear something you know nothing about?

But this time closing my eyes had a bad effect. I kept seeing that bloke I’d met the night before, the one who said he’d been stabbed. I hadn’t thought about him much since, but now here he was in colour and detail like a frightening villain in a creepy picture. Just his face, twisted in anger, playing over and over in my mind until I couldn’t bear it any more and had to open my eyes. Even then, I think now, I was starting to feel guilty about him.

What I saw, the blackness of the night pierced by the searchlights picking out the even blacker ranks of bombers, was really a lot more frightening than anything in my head. But I preferred it because it was real. When I was in the trenches, just waiting as we could do for months sometimes before actually fighting, one of the worst things was not being able to see the enemy. You know they’re there – you can hear them, feel the fear coming from them, even smell them at times – but you can’t see them and gradually you build hideous pictures in your mind of things more monster than human. When you go over the top you’re half mad with fear, which, maybe, was the whole point of all that. After all, what sane person would climb over a mountain of mud, then throw himself willingly at thousands of men armed with guns?

The noise was so loud it felt as if it was in your body. Explosion – like the sound of silk ripping across the sky – the crackling of the fires, Mr Deeks’s lads shouting at each other. ‘Where the bloody hell are our guns?’ one asked. But no one could answer, because no one knows. There’s only ‘taking it’, which we do every night and sometimes in the daytime too. The East End taking it for the whole country, mopping up pain like a sponge. Christ, it’s only been a matter of weeks all this, but sometimes I think that at the end there’ll be nothing left – only flatness, the whole place gone back to the marshes it grew out of all those centuries ago. I’ve conducted funerals for people made flat by falling buildings. I’ve done funerals for a leg, an arm and what’s left of a head thrown into a coffin and given a name – Alf, Edie, Ruth, Sammy. Some poor old dear crying over what’s left of probably three different people. But for her it is Ruth or Sammy, and that person is dead as sure as eggs is eggs. Some people, see, they vaporise: there isn’t anything left, not a thing.

I lay listening to and watching that hell for I don’t know how long. But some time I must have gone to sleep because the next thing I really remember is the daylight shining on to all the glass shards that were covering my body. As I sat up, I heard someone laugh and I looked down into the street where I could see Alfie Rosen, Doris’s husband. With his cap stuck casual like on the back of his head and his ever-present fag on the go, the only way you’d ever think he was a bus conductor and not a wide-boy was because of the ticket machine hung round his neck.

‘She down your Anderson, Mr H?’ he said, anxious through his laughter about his big, buxom Doris.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Stay there, Alfie, I’ll come and let you in.’

As I walked back down through the flat and into the shop, I wondered as I always did at how we’d survived another night. Mum and Nan, I knew, would put it all down to the grace of God and the Blessed Virgin. Like Aggie, I just felt we’d been lucky, got away with it again.

I unlocked the front door and looked into Alfie’s smiling, grimy face. Like his father, Herschel, Alfie Rosen is one of those red-haired Jews with very pale, almost colourless, skin. But then as I moved aside to let him in, another person turned up – big Fred Bryant, constable at the local nick. ‘Hello, Mr Hancock,’ he said, as he respectfully removed his helmet. ‘Can I come in for a mo?’

I said yes, let him in and my life changed.

The police brought the body round about an hour later in a mortuary van. Fred said the morgue couldn’t take any more – not that the morgue was the morgue any more. That couldn’t cope so other places had had to be pressed into service for the reception of the dead. Poplar swimming-baths was now used as the morgue, a nice big area with tiles you could wash down easily.

But, that day, it was full too.

‘I don’t know who he is,’ Fred said, as two of his blokes and the mortuary-van man placed the body in one of my coffins, ‘but he’s all in one piece and Dr Cockburn’s done him a certificate, so I thought that if he could rest here for a bit someone might come along and claim him.’

‘I can’t keep him long, Fred,’ I said. ‘At least, not open. I can’t risk maggots everywhere.’

Maggots breed quickly in a corpse that isn’t preserved in any way. Unpreserved and open in the coffin this happens even more rapidly so you have to be careful to make sure you close up as soon as you can. Maggots underneath the lino is not a pleasant experience, especially if people, like my family and me, have to live in the property.

‘Nah.’ Fred’s heavily jowled face broke into a smile. ‘If no one claims him you can make arrangements in a bit. But he’s quite a good-looking fella – hard, you know – and I can’t believe no one’ll miss him. Take a gander.’

Fred pulled away the cloth they’d used to cover his face and there he was, no more at rest in death than he had been when I’d seen him that night after the bare-knuckle fight. His eyes still stared at me with the same hatred I’d seen then. Like with the poor buggers who’d tried to desert from the trenches, nobody had taken the care to close the eyes after death. But that’s what you get if you’re nameless, like this bloke, and shamed like the poor bastards my comrades and I were terrified into executing. Made me jump at first, and the rest if Fred Bryant was any judge.

‘Christ, Mr H, you ain’t ’arf gone pale,’ he said. ‘Look like you’ve seen a ghost.’

‘You could say that,’ I said, as I closed the man’s eyes and covered his angry features once again. Then I told Fred about my strange encounter with this man and his apparently barmy belief that he’d been stabbed.

‘He ain’t been stabbed,’ Fred said dismissively. ‘Got a bit of blood on him, but who ain’t these days?’ He laughed. ‘No, it’s blast what killed him, Mr H. Look at the shock on his face. I’ve seen it before. Blast takes all the wind out of their bodies, stops their hearts dead, it does. Heart failure’s what the doc’s put on his certificate so there’s no arguing with that. Bloody blast!’

Fred was probably right. I’d seen a few who’d died from blast myself and they were generally as he’d described. Of course there were stories about blast that had to be ridiculous – like the one about the bloke whose clothes had been ripped off his body, or the other bloke who, apparently, had been blown up his own chimney. But deaths like this were not and still aren’t uncommon so I left the body out in the back room and took Fred through into the shop. By this time, Doris had been reunited with her Alfie so I had to clear my throat as I went into the office – they had been really worried about each other and were enjoying a good kiss.

‘Mind getting me and Fred a cuppa, Doris?’ I said.

‘Can I make my Alfie one too?’ she said.

‘Course you can.’

When she’d gone, that left the three of us. Fred offered round the fags, a bit reluctantly to Alfie, I noticed. Alfie was born and bred, like Doris, in Spitalfields, but his parents had come from Germany originally. Poor Jews they were, who came to England to get a better life. But Alfie’s old dad was put in an internment camp as soon as war broke out. Six months and him nearly eighty and a Jew. It’s well known Hitler doesn’t like Jews, so why Herschel Rosen was interned is beyond me. But Fred, maybe because he is a policeman and is paid, especially in these times, to be suspicious wasn’t happy in ‘German’ Alfie’s company.

‘I’ll give him a bit of a clean-up in a while,’ I said, more than anything else to break the silence.

‘Who?’

‘The deceased,’ I said, tipping my head back in the direction we’d just come from.

‘Oh.’

He’d lost interest, too busy looking at Alfie sucking at a Woodbine. When Doris came back with the tea, the mood got a bit better. Tea can always do that, tea and the fact that Fred has always liked Doris. Only a couple of days before he’d said to our Nan, ‘I like that Doris Mankiewicz, as was, she’s a good, straight girl.’ If he’d added ‘for a Jew’, I wouldn’t have been surprised, but Nan never reported any more than what was said. Both Doris and Alfie are in their thirties. He’s on the buses on account of his age and not being fit enough for the forces. There’s some sort of heart problem. Not that it was, according to Doris, that much of a problem until his dad was sent away.

‘We’ve got Florrie Starr at ten, Mr H,’ Doris said, as she sat down and rolled herself a fag. ‘Do you want my Alfie to stick around?’

‘Yes, please.’

Florrie Starr had lived with her daughter in a flat in Plaistow, Inniskilling Road. A wife and mother who took in a bit of washing, Florrie had been perfectly ordinary in every way – except her size. She was what Dad would have called a ‘whopper’. Florrie had to have been over twenty stone. And with only Arthur and Walter, with me conducting, we needed all the help we could get.

Fred left soon after that. I had to organise a suit for Alfie and get the other two lads in order and then we were off. I didn’t have time to think much about the man out the back until well after Florrie’d been interred. In fact, I waited until I was on my own that night before I unwrapped him and this time had a good proper look. This man had, after all, if briefly, entered one of my waking nightmares. And although I don’t believe in ghosts, shades or any rubbish like that, I felt I owed this fellow madman a bit more than just closing his eyes.