After the Mourning Read Online Free PDF Page B

their faces. Not even my mates were immune. Almost the last thing an old Jewish pal of mine said to me was that he’d seen a rabbi moving among the dead in the mud, all robed up and floating three feet off the ground. My pal, like the people who were now flocking to Epping Forest to see Lily Lee and her ‘miracle’, was convinced that what he had seen meant something good. He died the next morning and the Great War dragged on for another two years.
    A lot had happened since Rosie’s funeral the previous Thursday. For a start-off, or so it was said, the Military Police had been obliged to cut down on their other duties in favour of crowd control. The forest around Eagle Pond was, apparently, packed out, not just with the inevitable crop of newspaper reporters but with thousands of Londoners and lots of other people from all over. Every one of them wanted the same thing: some sign from the Virgin Mary that the end of the bombing was at hand. No one wants to live with the fear we have – no one. It was a busy day for me the following Monday when I heard our family priest, Father Burton, enter the shop.
    ‘Hello, Father,’ I heard Doris reply, to the priest’s customary dour greeting. ‘Mr Hancock’s just about to go out. He’s laying to rest poor old Mrs Ewers – don’t know whether you knew her but—’
    ‘It’s not really Mr Hancock I’ve come to see,’ I heard Father Burton say. ‘It’s Mrs Hancock and Miss Nancy.’
    ‘Oh, well, that’s nice,’ Doris said. ‘The ladies like to have company, ’specially, yours, I know, Father.’
    ‘Just want to make sure that none of my parishioners is getting hoodwinked by this nonsense up in Epping Forest.’
    ‘Oh, the Gypsy with the—’
    ‘The Gypsy no one has been able to wrest from her filthy tent since her so-called vision last week,’ the priest said stiffly. ‘As if a savage like that would be granted the privilege of miracles! She’s not been to see a priest or a divine of any sort since this all began. It’s most irregular. How can the Bishop make a judgement about such a thing without talking to the person involved? Now, or so I hear, the Gypsy camp is awash with the ignorant and gullible, touching the tree the girl was staring at and, no doubt, being roundly fleeced by the Gypsies for doing so!’
    ‘I’ll go and tell Mrs Hancock you’re here, Father,’ Doris said, as she pushed her way through the black curtains at the back of the shop and into the place where we sometimes keep our deceased. Most people, of course, keep their dear departed at home with them until the day of the funeral. But sometimes, as in Rosie Lee’s case and with bombing victims too mangled for their families to bear, that isn’t always possible. So I have, not a nice posh Chapel of Rest like some more prosperous firms, but something as close as I can afford to it. I was just reaching over to retrieve the lid of May Ewers’s coffin when Doris went past me towards the stairs. Knowing how I feel about priests and suchlike, she mouthed at me, ‘Miserable old git,’ and I smiled.
    The tiny shrunken woman in the coffin had been, it was said, a music-hall hall singer in the years before drink took up her every waking moment. I’d known her a bit and she was a loud, coarse and funny old girl. She’d had no family, which was why she was on her own with me in our room. Just before I put the lid over her dried-up old mug I leaned in to the coffin and said, ‘Tell you what, May, I’ll go up to the forest after work and see what’s going on for both of us, shall I? If Father Burton doesn’t like it, it must be quite a carry-on.’
    I was intrigued, I admit. Work and family commitments had meant that I hadn’t been able to get far beyond the shop for some days. But now I had some time I resolved to go and find out what was going on. I thought I might also collect some twigs for the fire while I was at it.
    I called out into the yard for Arthur to bring me a handful of