3

WITH HIS BLEEDING COLONIAL HEART, CHARGED AS HE was with war guilt, Jake, when he had first come to London twelve years ago, had asked everywhere about the blitz. “How you must have suffered …” But everyone spoke longingly about the blitz. “People were so friendly then.”

Only Harry, his co-defendant, spoke with rancor about the blitz.

Say “evacuee” and Jake, in his Canadian mind’s eye, instantly conjured up an image of huggable Margaret O’Brien, shrinking in the corner of a foreign station platform that was forever England, a tattered golliwog in her hand, only to be redeemed by Robert Young and Dorothy McGuire, parents enviable because, unlike Jake’s, one didn’t belch at the table and the other didn’t nag.

Oh to be blitzed, Jake used to dream, orphaned and adopted by M-G-M; but it was something else for prickly Harry Stein. Even before the Luftwaffe struck, ten-year-old Harry, scruffy and sty-ridden, was uprooted from his Stepney council school, tagged, issued a gas mask, and shoveled into a train crammed with squealing mums and babes, other slum kids (some covered with septic sores, still more lice-infested), and frantic teachers; a train without food and insufficient toilets, each one at flood-tide, the floor slithery; to be finally disgorged on a station platform in the outer wilds of Buckinghamshire, where the ill-tempered gentry, aghast to discover such urban pestilence in their midst, had nevertheless foregathered to take their pick.

“It was a bloody selection ramp,” Harry was fond of saying, “but, in lieu of old Eichmann, there were market farmers and shopkeepers to poke and prod us, choosing the healthiest lads, the most promising-looking workhands. And unspeakable old biddies to snatch the girls who would make the best unpaid maids.”

Insolent and disheveled Harry, naturally, was among those urchins rejected, still left shivering in the cold after the second pick, ultimately forced on a late-to-arrive family by an irate billeting officer.

“The way they looked at me, you’d think I was going to steal their silver or shit on their carpets.”

Harry was immediately lowered into a bath and then deposited in an unheated attic room, though decidedly more agreeable quarters lay empty. But he exacted retribution by slipping into the library and tearing pages out of the reactionary old bastard’s collection of first editions. And wetting his bed triumphantly.

“You think the war was all fun and games, don’t you? After the raid, cockneys crawling out of the rubble with a wisecrack. Churchill traipsing through the bomb damage and asking, ‘Are we downcast?’ the forelock-touching workers shouting back, ‘No!’ ”

Unwisely, Jake once tried to tease Harry out of his denigrating mood.

“Why, Hershel,” he said, calling him by his Yiddish name. “Bai Jove, Hershel, how you disillusion me. I cherish the notion of you surviving the war at Greyfriars, admittedly not so much a swell as the Bolshy of the Remove. Thick with Harry Wharton and Billy Bunter, but standing up for the proles and nignogs all the same. Out there on the pitch, Hershel, proving your mettle to Fisher T. Fish and other cads, secretly proud of the old gray stones …”

His sojourn in Buckinghamshire cut short, Harry, like so many other East End kids, was returned to Stepney in time for the blitz, where his father, no Churchill-idolater but an avid Left Book Club subscriber, dragged him out to absorb all the anti-Semitic sights, from the walls scrawled with “It’s a Jewish War” to the poster that read

altered by the Mosleyites to read JEW VICTORY.

While Jake, in Montreal, learned Stuka recognition from chewing gum cards and thrilled to hear, on Carry On, Canada, that when Churchill returned to his post as First Lord of the Admiralty, out to the Fleet went the signal, “Winston is back,” Harry, in Stepney, looked up to see the sky aflame and plunged into the throng rattling the gates to Liverpool Street tube station, where he was to bunk down almost every night of the blitz.

As Jake joined his father and mother, his aunts, his uncles, to huddle around the radio and hear the great man say, “Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘this was our finest hour,’ ” Harry, a ferret in search of novelty, ventured from ‘mickey’s Shelter’ to fetid Tilbury, where around the darkening bend in the tunnel you either unzipped for a tart against the wall or squatted to defecate. Given unfavorable winds, the stench of urine and excrement was overpowering. Mosquitoes abounded, lice proliferated. But meanwhile – as Harry’s father explained to him – meanwhile, in the bacchanalian cellars of the Savoy and the Dorchester, the rich stuffed themselves with smoked salmon and vintage wines, they danced, and consumed debs in comfort.

“Never in the field of human conflict,” Jake was stirred to hear the great man crackle over the BBC, “was so much owed by so many to so few,” but Harry had other tales to tell. “Did you know that among the Brylcream Boys, the so-called few, class distinctions more than survived?”

“No, Hershel, I didn’t know. I count on you for enlightenment.”

“If a pilot officer and a pilot sergeant, both flying Spitfires, shone in combat, the former got the Flying Cross, but the latter only a Flying Medal.”

“Yes, yes. It’s the rich what takes the plunder, ’arry, and the poor that gets the blame.”

“A commissioned R.A.F. officer could travel free and first class, naturally, on the railroads, but a pilot sergeant had to go third class.”

If, before rationing, the rich only ventured into Stepney to load their Bentleys down with sugar, now they streamed into the East End to see the blitz sights, especially the Tilbury Arches. Jake, in Montreal, laughed at the Happy Gang, and in London Harry became an ITMA addict, but the one real giggle of the war, Harry said, was Red Army Day, the Lord Mayor praising Stalin in the Royal Albert Hall and Harry Pollitt enthusing over Churchill, the Sword of Stalingrad being on exhibit in Westminster Abbey.

“This island race, this happy breed, did not stand alone in 1940, or ever,” Harry liked to say. “We stood niggyback on the Empire, if you get my meaning?”

“Yes, Harry. I do.”

“Did you know that in 1939 a penny an hour was a normal industrial wage in India and that their per capita income was something like seven quid a year?”

“I never question your figures, Hershel.”