Abdication A Novel

Chapter SEVEN





May had been working for the Blunts for two weeks when news of the king’s illness prompted the cancellation of their weekend guests and May was given the next few days off. It seemed very strange to May that after only two weeks in a new job, and barely a month in a new country, a decision about her own working hours had depended on the health of the king. As she left Polegate and once again watched the country stations pass by her window, she reflected for a moment on how well the train served her as the connection between her two contrasting lives. And then she remembered how much she was looking forward to taking up Sarah’s offer of a haircut.

All along the length of Oak Street the customary preparations for the weekend were under way as women in floral aprons crouched on their knees, a pail of soapy water beside them as they scrubbed a half-moon of cleanliness into the pavement outside their front doors. Despite the king’s illness nothing was going to interrupt number 52 Oak Street’s weekly observance of the Sabbath, when for twenty-four hours, from sundown to sundown, the family would gather together to say prayers, eat well and remove themselves from all the small anxieties of life.

Before the Sabbath feast, May and Sarah joined the crowds taking their weekly walk before sundown along the Whitechapel Road. Children were out in the streets, swinging from lamp-posts and eating hot chestnuts from twists of newspapers bought from the temporary braziers on every street corner. Butchers had laid out their displays of kosher meat in the front of their shops, and no one seemed to mind that flies crawled all over the jointed chicken and slabs full of tripe. The atmosphere in Petticoat Lane Market resembled a carnival. Contortionists wriggled their way out of straitjackets, china salesmen threw entire dinner services into the air, catching them just before they smashed on the ground, women stood with their arms folded behind stalls packed with bagels, kippers, salted herring and salt beef. An Indian man with a turquoise turbaned headdress and a barrowful of tiger nuts and liquorice root was attracting a healthy custom. A blacksmith was clamping red-hot shoes onto the sole of a horse. A boy balancing on one leg leant on a battered crutch muttering “Thanks, ma’am” every time a well-dressed woman put a coin in the small cap that lay at his feet. After five minutes May saw the child reach behind himself as if fiddling with a knot. As his second leg dropped to the ground the boy carefully picked up his cap so as not to spill the morning’s takings and ran off into the crowd.

Rachel prepared the Sabbath dinner each Friday afternoon, and May knew from her mother that for gentiles such as herself and Sam it was an honour to be included. The Greenfelds did not follow the strict Orthodox rules of some Jewish families that forbad all modern intrusions, not even so much as a lightbulb was turned on, let alone a wireless. But for the Greenfelds the Sabbath nonetheless remained a sacred day.

May watched the elaborate preparations wide-eyed. Sarah’s hairdressing tools had been temporarily removed and the long table had been covered in a delicately embroidered cloth. The best plates had been taken out of the glass-fronted cabinet in the front room and been dusted off, the double candlestick had been lit and a new loaf of challah, the sweet eggy bread, lay under a piece of linen as white as an old rabbi’s newly washed beard. Plates of pickled herring, chopped liver and thinly sliced smoked salmon were brought to the table by Sarah as soon as the prayers were over. The buttery smell of a chicken cooking had been filling the whole house for the past hour or two and Simon’s hand was making little circular motions of hunger round and round his large stomach. Simon was rarely hungry. His wife made sure of that. But on the Sabbath the cooking smells got the better of him.

“Have you made any matzo balls for our guests?” Simon asked as he moved round the table, filling the glasses. “Better watch out for Rachel’s matzo balls, Sam,” he cautioned. “They’re what you’d call a dumpling. Stop you up for a week they will!”

May watched the wax drip and pool in a small hardening mass at the base of the candlestick as at the conclusion of the meal, Sarah brought the noodle-based lokshen pudding to the table. The sweet vanilla taste was pronounced by Simon to be more splendid even than Rachel’s splendid orange-flavoured lokshen of the week before and a sense of pleasure received by a group of people comfortable in each other’s company filled the room. Rachel dominated the proceedings, ever busy with the ceaseless open-handed gesticulations that illustrated her speech.

“Be careful when you go out in the street, won’t you, May? You need to hang on to your purse, May, and keep that driver’s cap firmly on your head. Gives you an air of knowing what you are about. Otherwise some fool will have the whites of your eyes if you aren’t careful.”

The following evening Nat and Sarah took May and Sam out to the Queen’s Arms near Petticoat Lane. They wanted to know how her job was going but May was careful not to say too much beyond the beauty of the car, mindful of Sir Philip’s caution that discretion was a paramount rule for those in his employ. Daniel, the publican, or Danny Boy as everyone called him, was popular with all his regulars. He was a handsome fellow, Jewish, and originally from Liverpool but with an Irish accent picked up in the various pubs in which he had worked all his adult life. With his sealskin-black hair, smoothed and centrally parted, a sharp-edged moustache and a physique to make other men wilt in envy, he had the kindest heart in the business. The pub was often the warmest place to go on a wintry afternoon for someone who had no job. Survival on bread and dripping, and without a penny to spare to activate the gas fire, led the poor, lonely and despairing to the welcoming embrace of the Queen’s Arms. No predicament was overlooked by Danny, or his gentle wife, Ruth, and as a result the pub was always full of misfits and people down on their luck, confident of a kind word or a slice of pie. Most Saturdays the pub was packed and on May and Sam’s first visit they had to push their way through rows of flat-capped drinkers. Sitting on the long oak bar, and swinging the bruised and scratched knees endemic to one of his generation, was a young boy of about eight years old.

“Hallo, Howard,” said Nat. “Had a good week at school? Been schmoozing those lady teachers, I bet?”

Danny and Ruth’s young son blushed.

“Go on, Hoppy Teddy, move over a bit,” Nat said to a man with a peg leg who was chewing on a cooked chop.

Behind the bar were three framed pictures. The first was of Queen Mary wearing the familiar five-stranded pearl necklace that habitually hung just above her impressive embonpoint. The second was of George V, taken on the day of his coronation in 1911, his shoulders weighted down with gold braiding, his dark full beard in contrast to the thin and pointy grey version in the third picture that showed the king and queen together, taken during last year’s silver jubilee. Danny had been in the crowds when the royal couple had come to the East End and the crush had been so great that people had fainted before getting the chance to glimpse them. Beneath the earlier picture of the king were two lines from Lord Tennyson.



One with Britain, heart and soul!

One life, one flag, one fleet, one Throne!



Danny caught Nat’s eye as he looked away from the photographs.

“Yes, I know. If the news I heard on the wireless is correct, we may need to put a new model on display if the poor old king snuffs it. Ruth wants to wait until Edward chooses himself a wife, but I told her we might be waiting till the cows come home.”

“Even so,” Nat said, “we better keep an ear out later on for the evening news.”

May was listening to this conversation, watching the smoke that Danny had inhaled from his cigarette a good five minutes earlier make its slow, thin reappearance through the corners of his mouth. During the two weeks May had been working for Sir Philip she had heard him speaking earnestly on the telephone on several occasions while discussing the intricacies of the constitution. Twice Sir Philip had asked May to put a call through to the prime minister’s office before asking her, with the utmost politeness, if she would mind leaving the room for a few minutes. There was clearly considerable anxiety around something that concerned the Prince of Wales’s personal life although May had not yet discovered the truth of the problem. However, she had heard enough to realise that people like Sir Philip, with their status of privileged authority, knew a lot more about the prospects of a Princess of Wales taking up her position than anyone in the Queen’s Arms or, for that matter, anyone else in the entire Bethnal Green community.


The Castors and their cousins were making a weekend of it. On Sunday at noon the shrimp and winkle man had called by on his weekly rounds, his horse pulling a cart laden with shrimp and winkles, cockles, whelks and mussels. Bunches of watercress and sticks of flowery green-tipped celery were laid out next to the molluscs on a white cloth, providing the better-off residents of Oak Street with a feast for Sunday tea.

“Rachel’s got an eye for a nudge and a winkle,” Nat said, grinning at May before pushing a pin into the shell of a particularly tenacious whelk. Rachel loved these flirty exchanges with her son-in-law. Nat was always having a laugh but while his easy male attractiveness was impossible to ignore, he reserved his most loving looks for Sarah.

That evening, Sunday 19 January, the family went into the front room and gathered round the wireless, listening to the tunes played by Radio Luxembourg, tapping their feet and sometimes standing up to dance, cheek to cheek, to the accompaniment of Fred Astaire’s romantic song from the new movie Top Hat. They hummed along to the heart-tugging notes of “These Foolish Things” that floated into the room from Leslie Hutchinson’s creamy voice. The West Indian singer known as Hutch was a glamorous figure whose voice, according to the popular press, had attracted the admiration of the Prince of Wales himself. As Hutch sang of the scent of gardenia perfume and the taste of wild strawberries, May’s thoughts drifted away from the reality of cold winter days to dreams of a life of romance. She could not help noticing Nat’s eyes resting on the figure of his sleepy wife in the chair opposite.

As the song came to an end Nat went over to the brown wooden set and twirled the dial, watching the small line flickering hesitantly along the concentric coloured circles visible through the glass window at the front. Passing by Florence, Fécamp, Paris and Stuttgart, the little needle arrived at the point marked “Home Service.” The leading BBC broadcaster Stuart Hibberd was speaking. George V’s life was moving peacefully towards its close. They were barely able to believe their ears. No one had realised the full seriousness of the king’s illness. Last year’s silver jubilee celebrations and George V’s recent Christmas broadcast had lulled people into the belief that national life was entering a settled phase and that the long years of the Depression were a thing of the past.

Big Ben tolled with the passing of every quarter of an hour, and with each set of chimes a further bulletin on the king’s health was made. Rachel made everyone a cup of tea but the plate of homemade cinnamon buns sat untouched beside the wireless. Sarah put some more coal on the cinders of the fire before going to lie down for a while. The others remained close by the wireless set, chatting and reading a little, and all the while listening out for the next bulletin from Buckingham Palace. At the sound of the sombre voice they would all stare fixedly at the set, as if the disembodied speech was coming from a visible person and not from an inanimate brown box. A further two and a half hours elapsed before another even deeper voice came across the airwaves; beginning with the words, “It is with great sorrow …”

They all knew what Sir John Reith, the director-general of the BBC, was going to say next.

So much death was in the air. Only three days earlier May had read of the grand funeral plans for Rudyard Kipling. Florence would be sad to know that her favourite storyteller had died. Perhaps May could follow Mr. Hooch’s practice of reading aloud some of those magical stories to Florence. The idea of a bedtime story being a time to develop friendship and affection appealed greatly to May, and perhaps the experience would help to excise the memories of Duncan’s bedtime nips.


Ten days after the king’s death May was once again given a couple of days off. The Blunt family and the Cuckmere staff had been equally shaken by the news. But when Mrs. Cage had remarked to Sir Philip how at least the Prince of Wales was a first-rate successor to good old King George, Sir Philip had replied rather ominously that he hoped she was right. Oak Street had been equally curious about the character of the new king.

“He really cares, Edward does,” said Rachel with conviction. “He’s got the welfare of us all in his heart, he has. And I think we cannot be alone in wishing that a nice girl will come his way soon. The whole world, especially his mother, must be hoping that a foreign princess will melt his heart and give him that son and heir.”

The voices around her acknowledged their mutual sympathy for poor Queen Mary.

“Mind you, it’s a good thing we haven’t got that brother instead. Half-baked, he is, if you ask me. Can’t even string two sentences together without losing his way. I heard him on the wireless the other day. Stumbling all over himself, he was.”

Rachel always had a great to deal to say about the royal family. They were one of her pet fancies. That Bertie, he needed feeding up a bit, she thought, although the Duchess of York, now she was all right. Maybe she would be in the procession tomorrow. Rachel would love to see her in the flesh. No. She would not be dissuaded by Simon from going up to watch the funeral tomorrow, even if he tried. Nothing, not even her painful bunions, was going to prevent her from going into the West End for a royal funeral. She might even pick up a mourning mug to add to her royal china collection.

The Greenfelds made preparations for the following day as chicken sandwiches were made into portable greaseproof parcels and black armbands were retrieved from drawers where they had been put away on Armistice Day in 1918. On the wireless the gay patter of music-hall comedians and the sound of dance bands had been replaced by the mournful tune of “Oh God our Help in Ages Past,” the long thump of lament broken by official statements concerning arrangements for the state funeral.

On Tuesday 28 January 1936, Rachel, Simon, Sarah, Nat, May and Sam took the underground train, up west to St. James’s Park, emerging to find themselves surrounded by flags flying at half-mast and black bunting hung between the gas lamps. The cheerfully decorated streets of the silver jubilee six months earlier were no more than a cherished memory. Menacing-looking crows touched down briefly onto the boot-worn grass only to be airborne again within moments. In some places the pavements were ten deep with people. All cinemas and theatres had been closed for the week but there was promise of enough of a real-life spectacle to make up for the temporary lack of entertainment on stage and screen. May had never seen so many flowers as she gazed at the mass of bunches lying dozens deep along the pavements on the approach of Westminster Abbey. A policeman informed the party from Oak Street that the queue to get into Westminster Hall for the lying in state stretched for two and a half miles. Instead Nat led his family back into the underground.

At Paddington Station they waited for what seemed like an age for the royal coffin to arrive to pay their respects to George V before his final journey on board the royal train to Windsor. May’s eye fell on two exhausted-looking women half-kneeling on the pavement beside her. One wore a battered mauve felt hat that looked as if it had been put through a mangle while her friend was equally down at heel in a brown coat of limp and ragged fur.

“Funny how things can change in a jiffy, isn’t it? Seems like only the other day we were cheering George for sticking around for twenty-five years,” the mauve-hatted woman murmured. “God bless his soul.”

“Mind you, it’ll be a nice change to have a young one on that throne,” her friend replied.

“Young?” spluttered the mauve hat as people around her stared and uttered a reprimanding shush. “You must be having a laugh!” she continued, dropping her voice to a more respectful pitch. “Edward’s going on more than forty if I’m a day. Should be married by now. It’s not natural at his age, if you ask me. A king needs a wife, just as I need a husband.”

“You volunteering then, Dot?” asked the woman in the fur coat.

“If only,” was the wistful reply from the battered mauve hat.

Slowly the mood of the jostling crowd began to change from anticipation to irritation. Impatient mutterings grew louder as the procession for the dead king continued to fail to appear. With a sort of inevitability it was not long before someone bellowed “Where’s George?” from somewhere deep within the crowd. The words broke into the solemn shuffling and neck craning and prompted a wave of laughter. Someone else shouted that George himself, such a stickler for punctuality, was not the sort of man to be late for his own funeral.

“He must be shuddering with horror in his coffin,” they tittered, the previously restless mood restored to good humour.

Despite the sadness of the funeral, May could not help thinking it was a bit of luck to be present at such an occasion so soon after her arrival in England. Never in all her wildest dreams had she expected to find herself so close to royalty. Judging by the sound of weeping all around her, she realised the old king must have been much loved. But instead of feeling tearful, May was exhilarated by it all.

Eventually the gun carriage arrived at the station, the coffin resplendent with its glinting crown, a giant sword of state and a large cross fashioned from white flowers all laid on the top. May found herself thrilling to the spectacle. The procession formed by sailors, so smart in their uniforms, who had been chosen to escort George V on his final journey was equally impressive, although May’s first glimpse of the new fair-haired king himself, so alone, his slight figure weighed down by a floor-length woollen overcoat, was definitely a letdown. He was so small. But the carriage bearing Queen Mary had an altogether different effect on her.

May watched the dowager queen, her peaked coif just visible through the window of her carriage. Her black clothes, elaborate, lacy, stifling, looked as if they should be on exhibit in a costume museum. They were the sort of clothes pictured in the piles of yellowing British magazines, their pages curling at the edges in the damp heat of the doctor’s surgery back home. Queen Mary’s face was almost entirely hidden from public view behind a thick crêpe veil but as the carriage passed by her May caught a sudden glimpse of the woman’s eyes. They were brimming with tears. May wondered if she herself would ever love a man enough to feel as sad as Queen Mary looked in that moment.

That night after a day of such excitement May found it difficult to sleep. She did not think she would ever get used to the passing traders who called by at all hours. There was the man who sold caustic stinking carbolic, the thick white liquid used for keeping everything in the bathroom and kitchen clean, and the old gent who pushed around a grubby supply of sticky tape in an old tin pram. Her favourite callers were Loafy, who brought the bread still warm from his oven at midnight, and the lavender lady, a clear, summery smell floating up from the purple-headed stalks in her wicker basket. Standing on her bed to peer through the skylight into the darkness, May could just make out the street’s human alarm clock, an elderly woman who earned her living by shooting dried peas at windows behind which men slumbered too deeply, anxious not to oversleep and miss the working day.

May rammed the window shut against the sound of pinging pulses. She was looking forward to catching the train to Cuckmere early the following morning, conscious of the contrast between her two lives. Nothing was ever hidden in Oak Street; people spoke their minds, wore their hearts on their sleeves. The Blunts’ way of doing things, however, was secretive. The glass dividing screen in the Rolls was perpetually sliding backwards and forwards; information was classified into categories for those either permitted or prevented from hearing it; open doors were closed with confusing regularity. And yet May had begun to feel herself part of the Cuckmere community, enjoying the friendships she was making not only with Florence but also with Mr. Hooch, Cooky, the chatty cook, and the somewhat inscrutable Mrs. Cage. Even Vera Borchby, the gardener who kept to herself for much of the time, had responded with enthusiasm when May had asked if she may see the rose garden.

“My mother loves roses,” May had ventured one day when Vera came into the garage to ask Mr. Hooch for some poison for the pesky rabbits. “And I would love to be able to watch them come alive so I can tell my mother about them.”

“It would be a pleasure to show you, May,” the deep-voiced gardener had replied, as Mr. Hooch gave May a little wink of approval behind Vera’s back.

“Vera’s very choosy about who she shows her roses to,” he had told May later. “You should be honoured that she’s taken a liking to you.”

Sir Philip and Lady Joan had also treated May with the utmost consideration, and she was starting to derive equal enjoyment from her seat at the wheel of the Rolls-Royce as she did from her desk in Sir Philip’s study.

Above all, May was looking forward to seeing Mr. Richardson again. As a friend of the Blunts’ son, he had been staying at Cuckmere for much of the university holidays and had taken to popping in and out of Sir Philip’s office on a very regular basis. He was always asking questions. He was the most curious man she had ever met. On reflection, she liked almost everything about him. Perhaps it was his unusual honey-coloured hair that attracted her? Or maybe it was his long low laugh as he talked to Lady Joan at the breakfast table when May brought in the post in the mornings? Or was it simply that May was curious to see what he looked like without glasses?

When Mr. Hooch met May at the station he let slip that both the young men had already returned to Oxford for the new term. She tried not to betray her disappointment at this news, while Mr. Hooch passed on Sir Philip’s instructions for the following day. She was to pick up Miss Nettlefold in London and continue on to an address in Sunningdale. May could see the inkling of a conspiratorial smile form at the edges of Hooch’s twisted mouth and uncertain of its implication, she smiled straight back at him. She had grown accustomed to looking at his face and no longer flinched at the sight.