been high time she proved to a few people who thought they were so much better than her that they weren’t. People like Edith, and Olive, and some of the girls at work, who thought they could look down on her and get away with it. And him too, that Raphael, who had tried to make out he was so much better than she was. Well, they weren’t ’cos it was her that had had the guts to stand her ground and helped old Mrs Manelli, and not them!
Rick was just about to leave the boxing club and make his way home, when Raphael found him, having heard the story of Mrs Manelli’s rescue whilst he’d been at the headquarters of the Italian Fascist Organisation.
He’d gone there in the hope of picking up some information about what had happened to the men who had been arrested in the early hours on 10 June, taken from their homes without warning under suspicion of being active Fascists. One of those men had been his grandfather, and naturally Raphael was concerned for him, an old man of eighty-one who was stubborn enough and foolish enough to cling to Fascism out of sheer cussedness.
The Italian communities, in Britain’s main cities were all in shock over the night-time raids on their homes, their men being removed by the police, taken from their homes in the clothes they’d pulled on after being woken from their sleep, with no information being given about what was going to happen to them except that they were to be interned as enemy aliens.
Raphael had telephoned his father in Liverpool to discover that the situation there was even worse than it was in London. In London it was only those who were believed to be active Fascists who had been arrested. In Liverpool there had been a wholesale taking into custody of a huge swathe of the entire Italian adult male population. Only those, like his father, who had naturalised and become British citizens legally had escaped arrest.
Naturally the Italian community had flocked to their Fascist clubs, both for information and for comfort, especially those women whose husbands or fathers or sons had been taken.
In the heightened atmosphere within the club, the tale of Rick’s heroic bravery spread like wild-fire, causing Raphael to ask where he might find him. Since the Manellis were distant relatives and had no son of their own, it fell to him to thank Mrs Manelli’s rescuer for his timely intervention.
Armed with the information, from a couple of young Italians who knew him, that he would more than likely find Rick Simmonds at his boxing club, and instructions about which bus he would need to catch to get there, Raphael headed for the bus stop, recognising only after he had left the club that Mrs Manelli’s rescuer had the same surname as Dulcie. Raphael shrugged. Perhaps Simmonds was as common a surname to the East End as his own was to the Italian community. He had no intention of wasting time allowing someone like Dulcie to take up residence in his thoughts.
The warmth of the light June nights had brought people out into the city to stroll in its parks and see its shows, perhaps, Raphael suspected, aware of what was happening to France and thinking that they might as well enjoy their freedom whilst they could, although it was obvious that the people’s mood was sombre. Everyone you talked to spoke in hushed or anxious voices about their belief that Hitler would try to invade Britain, often without admitting to their unspoken fear that he might succeed.
Like all those who had been rescued from the beaches of Dunkirk, Raphael had been granted two weeks’ leave. That leave was already half over and in another few days he would be rejoining his unit of the Royal Engineers. He just hoped that before that happened they would know what had happened to his grandfather, not only for his grandfather’s sake but, more importantly, for his father’s. Raphael knew how desperately worried his father would be and how guilty he would feel, even though in Raphael’s opinion his father had no reason to feel any guilt. He had, after all, over the years made endless attempts to be reconciled with his father, and it was the older man who had stubbornly refused all Raphael’s father’s attempts to make peace.
In the boxing club, Rick let the conversation going on all around him wash over him, as he stood at the bar. The club was busy tonight with young men in shorts and singlets working on the club’s three punch bags, or lifting weights whilst the club’s hopeful bantam weight contender for a local title was sparring in the ring under the stern eye of one of the ex-professional boxers who trained the young talent.
The building was run down, with chunks of plaster missing from the walls here and there, left like that, so the story went, by a pro from before the Great War, who’d had a habit of punching the wall if one of his sparring bouts hadn’t gone well. Worn dark brown linoleum covered the stone floor, and in the winter the club got damp from the leak in the roof, which had been repaired with a sheet of corrugated iron.
It was here that deals were done that weren’t always strictly on the right side of the law, from matches that were fixed to the selling of black market cigarettes. There was a small room off the bar that everyone knew not to go into when the door was closed because that meant that there was a ‘meeting’ going on that involved ‘business’.
Rick still came to the club because he had boxed there for a while as a boy, and it was where his friends gathered, but his membership was merely a social one now. Tonight, though, Tom, his comrade in arms who had joined up with him and who had also gone through the hell of Dunkirk, wasn’t in, and Rick wasn’t in the mood to join in the speculation and talk of the possibility of Hitler invading England. Unlike him the other lads here hadn’t tasted the reality of war as yet, some of them still raw recruits who had only just finished their basic training, others still waiting for their call-up papers and several in reserved occupations. How could they know how it felt to have been driven back by the Germans – to have to retreat as the BEF had done, abandoning its weapons and its artillery as it did so.
Rick knew he would never forget the silence that had greeted them when they had finally been put ashore in England, or the way that those dealing with the practicalities of their repatriation had avoided looking directly at them, as though ashamed of them. A shame they had all shared.
And if the shame of the retreat was hard to bear then the memories of what that retreat had involved were even harder to endure.
Rick was just about to leave when Raphael walked into the club, heading straight for the bar where he asked after Rick.
‘Rick Simmonds?’ the barman repeated. ‘He’s over there, heading for the door,’ nodding his head in Rick’s direction, and then adding warningly, ‘If you’ve come here looking for trouble, mate, you’ve chosen the wrong place and the wrong man. Well thought of hereabouts, Rick is.’
‘It’s nothing like that – quite the opposite,’ Raphael assured him, the sound of his Liverpool accent causing a couple of the regulars who were in the Merchant Navy to glance across at him in recognition of a voice from a well-known port.
Rick was outside before Raphael caught up with him, turning round when Raphael called out, ‘Wait up, mate.’
Like the merchant seamen, Rick recognised Raphael’s Liverpool accent. A quick glance at Raphael revealed a tall dark-haired broad-shouldered man with a soldier’s bearing and stride, wearing army uniform and the badge of the Royal Engineers. Rick wasn’t really in the mood for company but something about the other man’s determined stride made him wait.
‘Rick, Rick Simmonds?’ Raphael asked. When Rick nodded, Raphael extended his hand to shake Rick’s.
‘Raphael Androtti. I just heard down at the local Italian club about what you did tonight for Caterina Manelli, and I wanted to thank you. She’s family – a distant cousin.’
‘It isn’t me you should really be thanking,’ Rick told him. ‘It’s my sister Dulcie. She was the one that got in between the mob and the shop.’ Rick shook his head,
