War Crimes for the Home Read online

  WAR CRIMES

  FOR THE HOME

  LIZ JENSEN

  First published 2002

  This electronic edition published in June 2010

  by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  Copyright © 2002 by Liz Jensen

  Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following for permission to reprint extracts from previously published material:

  ‘Blue Skies Across Are Round the Corner’ Words and Music by Ross Parker and Hughie Charles © copyright 1937 Dash Music Limited, 8/9 Frith St, London W1. Used by permission of Music Sales Ltd. All Rights Reserved. International Copyright Secured.

  ‘Smoke, Smoke, Smoke (That Cigarette)’ Words and Music by Merle Travis and Tex Williams © 1947 by American Music Incorporated, USA. Campbell Connelly and Company Limited, 8/9 Frith St, London W1. Used by permission of Music Sales Ltd. All Rights Reserved. International Copyright Secured.

  ‘That Lovely Weekend’

  Words by Moira Heath

  Music by Ted Heath

  © 1941 Chappel Music Ltd, London W6 8BS

  Reproduced by permission of International Music Publications Ltd.

  All Rights Reserved.

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 36 Soho Square, London W1D 3QY

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  All rights reserved You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may beliable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages

  ISBN 978 1 4088 1363 8

  Visit www.bloomsbury.com to find out more about our authors and their books

  You will find extracts, author interviews, author events and you can sign up for newsletters to be the first to hear about our latest releases and special offers

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title

  Copyright

  Dedication

  By The Same Author

  Joke

  I Fell in Love

  Sea View

  The Hallelujah Monster

  Slut Fairy

  Blue-Eyed Boy

  Old Nazi

  Chicago Box

  No Irish No Dogs No Jehovah’s Witnesses

  The Big Smoke

  Boiling Soap

  Is Not a Crime

  Like We are Children

  Dr Kaplan Comes to Play

  Shellshock

  I Must’ve Slept

  Fish and Chips

  The Windy City

  Gadderton Lake

  Acknowledgement

  About the Author

  A Note on the Type

  For my mother, Valerie Jensen, and in memory of my father, Niels Rosenvinge Jensen

  ‘Magnificent . . . a clever, complex novel, skilfully managed . . . impressively capricious and imaginative’

  Guardian

  ‘Jensen is becoming one of our best writers, sometimes surreal, sometimes down to earth, always with a great and embracing human sympathy’

  Fay Weldon in Mail on Sunday

  ‘Jensen manages successfully to depict a personality in many ways dislikable – anarchically misanthropic, cruel, self-deluded – but with whom we feel sympathy. Above all Jensen conveys with poignancy but no sentimentality the pain and guilt that Gloria clearly feels despite all her denials’

  Sunday Telegraph

  ‘Liz Jensen has abundant skill and a jet-black sense of humour to give this quirky, compelling novel its edgy intelligence’

  Mail on Sunday

  ‘Gloria’s voice comes through with remarkable consistency: brash, brassy, but above all compassionate . . . A delicious story, beautifully crafted, mixing suspense with tenderness in just the right proportions’

  Daily Express

  ‘A sentimental tale, but a steady one, guided in its darker moments by a creeping despair, and enlivened by the residual fight of a woman broken by her experiences . . . compelling’

  Independent on Sunday

  ‘A dark comedy about memory loss and self-preservation . . . gripping . . . burns with incandescent clarity’

  Time Out

  ‘It shines with its exceptional prose . . . fiction this challenging is too often ignored’

  Scotland on Sunday

  ‘If you dig deep enough, all our secrets are the same’

  – Amos Oz

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  Egg Dancing

  Ark Baby

  The Paper Eater

  JOKE

  Here’s a good one, Hank told it me.

  Man goes to the doctor, and the doctor says, I have two pieces of very bad news for you.

  OK, fire away, says the man.

  Well, says the doctor. The first piece of very bad news is you have cancer. You are one hundred per cent riddled with it and you’re going to die.

  Oh, says the man. So what’s the second piece of bad news then?

  Well, says the doctor. It’s this. You’re also in the final stages of Alzheimer’s disease. Your memory is full of holes.

  Man thinks about that for a minute. And then he turns to the doctor.

  Oh well, he says, best look on the bright side. At least I haven’t got cancer!

  That’s a good joke, that is. But you know Hank’s Wife? She didn’t even laugh when Hank told it me. All she said was, What’s got into you, Hank? What d’you want to go telling your poor old mum a tasteless joke like that for? You sick or what?

  But me and Hank, we thought it was bloody funny. We laughed and laughed.

  Here’s another joke. There’s this innocent lady seventy-nine and three-quarters, hasn’t done nothing wrong, gets locked up in an old folks’ home called Sea View cos she’s losing her marbles.

  But there ain’t no humorous punchline, I’m afraid.

  I FELL IN LOVE

  I fell in love the same day a girl at the factory lost a quarter of herself.

  Quite a day for maiming, quite a day for surprises. A dark winter morning, no lighting on the streets what with the blackout. Before you even reach the gates the sulphur crawls into your lungs, drainy and gaggy. In the locker room we call The Slops we wind on our cotton turbans. Different colour according to the shift you do, and I’m blue today, because I’m on the six-till-six, hair right up inside. Mr Simpson says the turbans is washed once a week but them nits aren’t half breeders and there’s no itching like nits under a turban. The Lousy Nitwits, we are.

  —Mum would never’ve stood for this, I say to my sis Marjorie when we swap shifts. —Can you imagine what she’d say to Hitler?

  —She’d say, Is it true you’ve only got one ball, mister? goes Marje.

  Which is rubbish, because Mum was quality, she didn’t have no dirty mouth, but it makes us laugh. Marje has Mum’s mouth – the shape of it I mean, not the nicely-spokenness. But today she looks all in, in her orange turban. I’m prettier than Marje, and I notice it then. I even think: if it was marks out of ten she would be a six and I would be an eight-and-a-half. With lipstick and powder, nine, I am not boasting I am just telling the truth here.

  Before Mum’s illness and ‘To Be a Pilgrim’ at the funeral, there was ironed sheets, proper scones, polished doorknockers, all the fusspot stuff that me and Marje used to laugh at which was also sneering. But with the war coming so soon after that, things got buggered and stayed that way, me and Marje not having any of Mum’s famous elbow grease or whateve
r it was stopped mould growing indoors and butter going off. Just me and Marje in charge – just two stupid girls – and Dad posted off to Singapore to fight the Enemy, and then his letters that stopped coming. Sheets rumpled as they come, hens turning up in the kitchen to peck and splatter and Marje no longer a virgin because of Bobby.

  Mum would’ve died.

  Anyway Marje was lucky not to be on the day-shift as it turns out, wearing an orange turban and not a blue one like me and Iris. Lucky to be leaving to go home, so that all she heard was a faraway noise, and even then, she said, she never made the connection. She was tired, reckoned it was just a bomb, paid no notice. And when I mentioned it in Chicago later, she’d clean forgotten it. Funny the things you wipe out.

  But I remembered. I was there.

  There’s a whole row of us working in blue turbans. Maisie Wheeler on one side of me, and Iris Jones on the other, and Maisie’s yakking about a blast in Sheffield, hit a tram and got the driver and the conductress electrocuted.

  —It shrank them both to the size of dolls! says Maisie. —I swear.

  —Load of bollocks, says Iris, how can an electric current do that?

  And I’m puzzling it over, it sounds true to me, because no one understands electricity, it is that close to magic, and then the ten o’clock bell goes which is our cue for a sing-song so we forget about tram conductors shrunk to the size of dolls and away we go.

  Along the street she wheels a perambulator,

  She wheels it in the springtime and in the month of May,

  And if you ask her why the hell she wheels it,

  She wheels it for a soldier who is far, far away.

  Far away, far away, far away, far away.

  She wheels it for a soldier who is far, far away.

  Iris is singing too. I know, because I’m standing right next to her. But my turning-blade has some muck in it, and all of a sudden I need a better rag, so I go up the line to get one from Mr Simpson, still singing.

  Above the shelf her father keeps a shotgun,

  He keeps it in the springtime and in the month of May,

  And if you ask him why the hell he keeps it,

  He keeps it for a soldier who is far, far away,

  Far away, far away –

  I’ve got my rag, and I’m just coming back. My mouth’s still open from singing the chorus when it happens.

  The bang’s so loud it splits your head in half.

  Then a big whoosh, and the whole world gets sucked up and thrown. And there’s Iris, being chucked into the air like a little scrap. Torn apart, she is, because out gushes the red blood and there’s bits that looks like meat from the butcher’s. Maybe mince.

  And you see her whole arm and shoulder spat sideways and flop to the floor. And there, look. There’s her arm and her hand that has a ring on its finger which is not allowed in here because it says clearly in the rules, No jewellery permitted.

  An engagement ring, it looks like. There’s another surprise, see. She’s a dark horse, ain’t she?

  I try to shut my mouth which is still open from the singing, but I can’t. It’s gone dry.

  I just stare at Iris’s arm and hand and shoulder on the floor, not wanting to look at the mince bit that’s left behind possibly still alive cos it’s screaming.

  Damage: Total loss of one arm and one shoulder, because like Mr Simpson says, the manufacture of munitions is not a blinking joke, girls.

  Talking of jokes, here is one. There’s an optimist and a pessimist. The pessimist puts his head in his hands and moans, Oh God, things just can’t get any worse! And you know what the optimist says, with a big smile on his face? He says, Oh yes they can!

  Jokes cheers me up, so does food. No one knows how I can put away so much food, being so bloody old and with only half a duodenum, but I do. I am making up for when I was hungry. It’s like there’s this black hole inside me, won’t never get filled no matter how much I shovel in.

  SEA VIEW

  In hospital after my duodenum, there was a window. Look out, and all you saw was a demolition site. They were pulling down a row of shops called The Parade, with a newsagent’s and a dry cleaner’s and Woolworth’s. They emptied all the rubbish out in skips – furniture, metal desks and old strip-lights and uprooted carpeting. Then one morning – it must’ve crept in during the night – this big orange crane was on the site, planted behind Woolworth’s like an iron tree. And the wrecking started. The crane, it had a wrecker ball. From where I was, I could watch it, this wrecker ball. It swung and it swung, knocking down roofs and brick walls, chucking out clouds of plaster and brickdust, and the walls tumbling sudden but slow, like butter melting in the microwave. Wrecking and wrecking. Watching it made you feel wild and a bit wuzzy, but you couldn’t stop, your eyes stayed glued to it. Whole hours went by when all I did was watch it. I missed the bombs in the war. We heard violence all the time, the Moaning Minnies wailing, the Germans overhead, the sound of doodlebugs. Marje always said it was like the sound of silk being ripped. But we didn’t see what they did till after the raid.

  Then one morning I look out and the orange crane’s gone, and the site’s just a big empty space, just puddles and mud, and I’ve forgotten how it all looked before. I must’ve missed something. Missed the doodlebug, maybe the whole war, slept through it or been otherwise out to lunch. Because there was suddenly nothing. No crane, no nothing. No nothing left to wreck.

  The wrecking was over.

  And then the doctor told me I wasn’t going back to Hank’s place. It wasn’t just my duodenum, see. It was a small stroke. A nice home called Sea View was waiting for me, and as soon as I was back to rights I could go out into the world again.

  What world is this he’s talking about, I thought. Do I know it?

  I mean, is there jokes there? Is there decent food?

  One thing I’ll say is, it’s a proper TV here, a big one with good strong colours that don’t meddle with each other. That Marty Lone was on again, you remember him, he confessed he was a gay homosexual. He was saying he and his mother have a very close relationship, they’re best friends, hers is the only tuna bake he’ll eat. His lips look like they’re made of rubber, the inside of a hot-water bottle if you’ve ever seen one slashed.

  Cauliflower cheese for lunch. Mine had specks in it, I hate specks and I don’t care who knows it, reminds me of the National Loaf in the war. When Ron first tasted it he spat it out, he said, You call that bread, man? Jeez, tastes like something died. Boy, are you a bunch of suckers.

  —It’s pepper, a half-dead old drooler called Doris piped up. —Stop making such a song and dance.

  —I like to add my seasoning and condiments myself, as it happens, I told her. —Why’s everyone so blinking old in here?

  That corner of blue over there, that’s the View part. You can see the ferry going past, you can smell the cooking from it because holidays make you hungry and they’d best get a good meal down them before they go abroad which is where Hank used to go by HGV long-haul. He was doing the lorries then, red lorry yellow lorry I used to say to him, a tongue-twister when he was little. Must’ve had an influence.

  —Hank’s Wife hasn’t seen fit to visit, I tell Doris. —Better things to do with her time. She’s got a lover. He’s got one of them red cars with eyelids, comes and gives it her every Thursday.

  —A change is as good as a rest, says Doris, letting her eye shut down like a little sash window.

  —And that baby Calum’s out of my hair too, I tell her. —They should get rid of that fake nipple of his, it’s infested with germs. Just me and Hank.

  —Hank?

  —My son. American connections. Chicago. The windy city. I always said to Hank, if you shut your eyes, you’ll remember it. Skyscrapers and blueberry muffins and all that. I call him Hank from those days, it’s what his dad would’ve called him, it’s what Americans call children.

  —How long did you live there? she goes.

  —What, Bristol?

  —Americ
a.

  —Never been there.

  —What?

  —Seen it on TV, Chicago and that. I had a GI boyfriend once. He fought in Tunisia and then he bombed Germany. Had a big scar on his thigh from shrapnel.

  Doris looks at me.

  —One Yank, she says. —Remember that? One Yank and they’re off.

  * * *

  It’s that night, the same day Iris gets blown up, that I begin to learn more about maiming. But it’s not munitions this time. It’s love.

  I was never the brightest. But I wasn’t stupid neither. I was middling.

  —I hope he’s not too clever for you, says Marjorie helping me get ready, going pish pish at my neck with the phoney black-market Chanel that don’t even begin to smell like the real McCoy but it’s better than nothing, ain’t it. She’s still shivering and shaking a bit from Iris, and so am I, but I’m not pulling out of my date, not on your nelly. Life goes on.

  —A girl like you doesn’t want to hang around with someone too clever, says Marje. —Know what I mean, Gloria? (Full of instructions, she is, the war’s made her bossy.) —Don’t let him French-kiss you the first time or he’ll take you for a loose woman. You know what they say about the GIs and English girls’ knickers, one Yank and they’re –

  —Ha blinking ha, I snap at her. She knows how to try and spoil your fun, she does.

  Me and Marje’ve helped ourselves to a few nips of Dad’s brandy to swallow down Iris, so I’m ready to escape into the air and leave it behind now. I’m impatient for my date, I need some laughs after seeing that arm getting blown off, and wouldn’t say no to getting blotto. His name is Ron, but the way he says it, it’s Raan.

  —I hope he’s a gentleman anyway, she says, yawning like a cat, with Mum’s mouth.

  Meaning she can’t wait to look him over and see if she can nick him – Bobby or no Bobby. My sis wants the best for me but she wants the best for herself too, so she has what you’d call dilemmas. But I’m prettier than her, always have been. Very similar, but better-looking, because my features is regular and hers is a tiny bit conked. Except her mouth. I would like to do swaps for that mouth.