Lenny Griffiths was another who had never returned from Spain. No one had any idea where he might be buried. It was even possible he was still alive, in one of Franco’s prison camps.
Now the radio reported Prime Minister Chamberlain’s statement to the House of Commons last night, but nothing further.
‘You’d never know what a stink there was afterwards,’ said Billy.
‘The BBC doesn’t report stinks,’ said Lloyd. ‘They like to sound reassuring.’
Both Billy and Lloyd were members of the Labour Party’s National Executive – Lloyd as the representative of the party’s youth section. After he had come back from Spain he had managed to gain readmission to Cambridge University, and while finishing his studies he had toured the country addressing Labour Party groups, telling people how the elected Spanish government had been betrayed by Britain’s Fascist-friendly government. It had done no good – Franco’s anti-democracy rebels had won anyway – but Lloyd had become a well-known figure, even something of a hero, especially among young left-wingers – hence his election to the Executive.
So both Lloyd and Uncle Billy had been at last night’s committee meeting. They knew that Chamberlain had bowed to pressure from the Cabinet and sent the ultimatum to Hitler. Now they were waiting on tenterhooks to see what would happen.
As far as they knew, no response had yet been received from Hitler.
Lloyd recalled his mother’s friend Maud and her family in Berlin. Those two little children would be eighteen and nineteen now, he calculated. He wondered if they were sitting around a radio wondering whether they were going to war against England.
At ten o’clock, Lloyd’s half-sister, Millie, arrived. She was now nineteen, and married to her friend Naomi Avery’s brother Abe, a leather wholesaler. She earned good money as a salesgirl on commission in an expensive dress shop. She had ambitions to open her own shop, and Lloyd had no doubt that she would do it one day. Although it was not the career Bernie would have chosen for her, Lloyd could see how proud he was of her brains and ambition and smart appearance.
But today her poised self-assurance had collapsed. ‘It was awful when you were in Spain,’ she said tearfully to Lloyd. ‘And Dave and Lenny never did come back. Now it will be you and my Abie off somewhere, and us women waiting every day for news, wondering if you’re dead yet.’
Ethel put in: ‘And your cousin Keir. He’s eighteen now.’
Lloyd said to his mother: ‘Which regiment was my real father in?’
‘Oh, does it matter?’ She was never keen to talk about Lloyd’s father, perhaps out of consideration for Bernie.
But Lloyd wanted to know. ‘It matters to me,’ he said.
She threw a peeled potato into a pan of water with unnecessary vigour. ‘He was in the Welsh Rifles.’
‘The same as me! Why didn’t you tell me before?’
‘The past is the past.’
There might be another reason for her caginess, Lloyd knew. She had probably been pregnant when she married. This did not bother Lloyd, but to her generation it was shameful. All the same, he persisted. ‘Was my father Welsh?’
‘Yes.’
‘From Aberowen?’
‘No.’
‘Where, then?’
She sighed. ‘His parents moved around – something to do with his father’s job – but I think they were from Swansea originally. Satisfied now?’
‘Yes.’
Lloyd’s Aunt Mildred came in from church, a stylish middle-aged woman, pretty except for protruding front teeth. She wore a fancy hat – she was a milliner with a small factory. Her two daughters by her first marriage, Enid and Lillian, both in their late twenties, were married with children of their own. Her elder son was the Dave who had died in Spain. Her younger son, Keir, followed her into the kitchen. Mildred insisted on taking her children to church, even though her husband, Billy, would have nothing to do with religion. ‘I had a lifetime’s worth of that when I was a child,’ he often said. ‘If I’m not saved, no one is.’
Lloyd looked around. This was his family: mother, stepfather, half-sister, uncle, aunt, cousin. He did not want to leave them and go away to die somewhere.
Lloyd looked at his watch, a stainless-steel model with a square face that Bernie had given him as a graduation present. It was eleven o’clock. On the radio, the fruity voice of newsreader Alvar Lidell said the Prime Minister was expected to make an announcement shortly. Then there was some solemn classical music.
‘Hush, now, everyone,’ said Ethel. ‘I’ll make you all a cup of tea after.’
The kitchen went quiet.
Alvar Lidell announced the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain.
The appeaser of Fascism, Lloyd thought; the man who gave Czechoslovakia to Hitler; the man who had stubbornly refused to help the elected government of Spain even after it became indisputably obvious that the Germans and Italians were arming the rebels. Was he about to cave in yet again?
Lloyd noticed that his parents were holding hands, Ethel’s small fingers digging into Bernie’s palm.
