It was not hesitation that caused him to pause – it was his breath once more filling his lungs. ‘Oh, Hortense, perhaps you are right – I am a fool. And you wan’ know why? Come, I truly believe there is nothing else that we can do.’

Gathering the baby’s things into a drawer, Mrs Bligh kissed each of the garments as she folded them away. Then she hugged her baby to her until the embrace caused him to whimper, before handing him carefully to me. Michael Joseph would know his mother not from the smell of boiling milk, a whispered song or bare black feet but from the remembered taste of salt tears. Those tears that on that day dripped, one at a time, from her eye, over his lips and on to his tongue.

They made such a fuss with my trunk. ‘You mind if we just throw the damn thing out of the window?’ Gilbert asked me. He had managed to carry it up all the stairs those weeks ago but now it was too hard to get it down. I opened my mouth to cuss him when he said, ‘What, you still don’t know what is a joke?’

‘Oh, yes,’ I told him, ‘a joke is something that is funny.’

It was Winston who called for Gilbert to try lifting it again. ‘What you have in there, anyway?’ Gilbert wanted to know.

‘I have everything I will need, Gilbert Joseph, everything I will need.’

Oh, how they groaned and strained, banging my good trunk against the frame of the door, crashing it on the floor of the landing, and thumping it on each stair. The baby was shaken from his bed with the commotion. The drawer that was his crib bouncing around the room with each and every thud. I picked him from where he lay and hushed him with whispered words. Drowsy, he looked on my face with languid eyes before a smile briefly stretched his lips. One day this boy will want to look on a bird’s nest and I will have to lift him to show. He will torment spiders and dress up a cat. ‘Me sprigadee,’ I said, and I kissed his forehead.

As I was about to place him back down my hand rested upon something hard around his backside. Thinking his nappy needed straightening I tried to smooth it. But it would not. Laying him down I found, stitched into his garment, a knitted pouch. To release the item I was required to search for scissors so I might cut the ties. The baby was as good as Mrs Bligh promised he would be. He fell back into his sleep as I fumbled with the pouch. Opening it I found a bundle of money tied with soft pink wool and secured with a dainty bow. Three hundred pounds in dirty notes. Never before had so much money caressed my fingertips. But then at the bottom of this bundle was a photograph. It was of Mrs Bligh taken, I was sure, in a happier time. Head and shoulders, her eyes angled to the viewer, gazing out with a gentle smile. I had never thought to enquire about the father of Mrs Bligh’s child. Who was he? Some fool-fool Jamaican with an eye for the shapely leg on a pretty white woman. Where was he? As far from her as he could run? I thought to call Gilbert to show him this bounty. But this man’s pride would surely insist that the items were returned to her. And I had something else in my mind for them. Come, I would put them to good use when they were required. Placing them in my bag I determined to keep a secret of both the money and the photograph.

I held the baby awkward as I finally closed the door on that wretched little room. No compunction caused me to look back with longing. No sorrow had me sigh on the loss of the gas-ring, the cracked sink, or the peeling plaster. At the door to Mrs Bligh’s home I stopped. I tapped gently three times. There was no reply. I tapped again, this time calling her name. Still no one came. But with only a flimsy piece of wood between us I could feel her on the other side. The distress in a halting breath. A timorous hand resting unsure on the doorknob. She was there – I knew. ‘Goodbye, Queenie,’ I called, but still she did not come.

Gilbert nearly knocked me from my feet as he rushed towards me. His shirt outside his trousers and buttoned up badly, panting like a dog. ‘I have the trunk in the van,’ he said. ‘Come, hurry, nah.’ He took the baby from me. I adjusted my hat in case it sagged in the damp air and left me looking comical. A curtain at the window moved – just a little but enough for me to know it was not the breeze. But I paid it no mind as I pulled my back up and straightened my coat against the cold.

Never in the field

of human conflict has

so much been owed by

so many to so few

Winston Churchill

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the following people, publications and organisations for their help and assistance with this book – they were all invaluable: Pip Mayblin, Amy Levy, George Mutton, Ray Bousfield, Jim Munday, John Collier, Philip Crawley, Leone Ross, Michael Munday, David Reading, Danny Collier, Heinz Menke, Stephen Amiel, and Katie Amiel.

Robert Collins, The Long and the Short and the Tall: An Ordinary Airman’s War.

Squadron Leader ‘Bush’ Cotton, Hurricanes Over Burma.

Sam King, Climbing Up the Rough Side of the Mountain.

Donald R. Knight and Alan D. Sabey, The Lion Roars at Wembley. What did you do in the War, Mum? An Age Exchange publication. Robert N. Murray (Nottingham West Indian Combined Ex-services Association), Lest We Forget – The Experience of World War II West Indian Ex-service Personnel.

E. Martin Noble, Jamaica Airman.

Mike Phillips and Trevor Phillips, Windrush: The Irresistible Rise of Multi-racial Britain.

Ray Sansome, The Bamboo Workshops.

Graham Smith, When Jim Crow met John Bull.

The Burma Star Association; Kensington Central Library, Local Studies; Royal Air Force Museum, Hendon; Mass Observation Archive, University of Sussex; Post Office Heritage Archive; Colindale Newspaper Library; Prospero’s Books; Hansib Publications Ltd; and the Internet for, oh, so many little things.

I would also like to thank the Authors Foundation for their generous financial assistance, my agent David Grossman, and Albyn Hall and Bill Mayblin for their indefatigable support and guidance throughout the writing of this book.