without a husband would not make much difference to her life, she figured. No doubt she would be crossed off the Fitzherbert family’s invitation lists, but they were not the only people in London society.
She bought crates of whisky, gin and champagne, scouring London for what little was available legitimately and buying the rest on the black market. Then she sent out invitations to a flatwarming party.
The responses came back with ominous promptness, and they were all declines.
In tears, she phoned Eva Murray. ‘Why won’t anyone come to my party?’ she wailed.
Eva was at her door ten minutes later.
She arrived with three children and a nanny. Jamie was six, Anna four, and baby Karen two.
Daisy showed her around the apartment, then ordered tea while Jamie turned the couch into a tank, using his sisters as crew.
Speaking English with a mixture of German, American and Scots accents, Eva said: ‘Daisy, dear, this isn’t Rome.’
‘I know. Are you sure you’re comfortable?’
Eva was heavily pregnant with her fourth child. ‘Would you mind if I put my feet up?’
‘Of course not.’ Daisy fetched a cushion.
‘London society is respectable,’ Eva went on. ‘Don’t imagine I approve of it. I have been excluded often, and poor Jimmy is snubbed sometimes for having married a half-Jewish German.’
‘That’s awful.’
‘I wouldn’t wish it on anyone, whatever the reason.’
‘Sometimes I hate the British.’
‘You’re forgetting what Americans are like. Don’t you remember telling me that all the girls in Buffalo were snobs?’
Daisy laughed. ‘What a long time ago it seems.’
‘You’ve left your husband,’ Eva said. ‘And you did so in undeniably spectacular fashion, hurling insults at him in the bar of Claridge’s hotel.’
‘And I’d only had one Martini!’
Eva grinned. ‘How I wish I’d been there!’
‘I kind of wish I hadn’t.’
‘Needless to say, everyone in London society has talked about little else for the last three weeks.’
‘I guess I should have anticipated that.’
‘Now, I’m afraid, anyone who appears at your party will be seen as approving of adultery and divorce. Even I wouldn’t like my mother-in-law to know I’d come here and had tea with you.’
‘But it’s so unfair – Boy was unfaithful first!’
‘And you thought women were treated equally?’
Daisy remembered that Eva had a great deal more to worry about than snobbery. Her family was still in Nazi Germany. Fitz had made inquiries through the Swiss embassy and learned that her doctor father was now in a concentration camp, and her brother, a violin maker, had been beaten up by the police, his hands smashed. ‘When I think about your troubles, I’m ashamed of myself for complaining,’ Daisy said.
‘Don’t be. But cancel the party.’
Daisy did.
But it made her miserable. Her work for the Red Cross filled her days, but in the evenings she had nowhere to go and nothing to do. She went to the movies twice a week. She tried to read
The church was full of people she knew, and after the service none of them spoke to her. She was lonely and almost friendless in a foreign country in the middle of a war.
One evening she took a taxi to Aldgate and knocked at the Leckwith house. When Ethel opened the door, Daisy said: ‘I’ve come to ask for your son’s hand in marriage.’ Ethel let out a peal of laughter and hugged her.
She had brought a gift, an American tin of ham she had got from a USAF navigator. Such things were luxuries to British families on rations. She sat in the kitchen with Ethel and Bernie, listening to dance tunes on the radio. They all sang along with ‘Underneath the Arches’ by Flanagan and Allen. ‘Bud Flanagan was born right here in the East End,’ Bernie said proudly. ‘Real name Chaim Reuben Weintrop.’
The Leckwiths were excited about the Beveridge Report, a government paper that had become a bestseller. ‘Commissioned under a Conservative Prime Minister and written by a Liberal
