Chapter 9: Life Before Mary

“I JOINED the Metropolitan Police as a temporary officer helping typing up policeman’s reports, bagging and processing Crown evidence,” I said to Mary after the all-clear sirens had sounded and guests were permitted to return to their rooms or suites for the remainder of the night. We had changed into our bed wear and donned respectable dressing gowns supplied to the suite and resting in her sitting room.

Mary was curled up with her legs comfortably tucked under her on a chaise langue, and I had snagged one of the comfy armchairs in her suite. Before she retired for what was left of the night, Milly had obtained for us another jug of cocoa, real cocoa like I remembered from before the war, not the adulterated stuff we had become used to as imports became difficult to acquire and therefore too expensive for common folk to afford. Somehow, the hotel did not have to obey the rationing laws for foreign guests and appeared to have access to unlimited secret sources of everything somewhere, for a price, of course.

“For some reason, as I was typing up all this Police stuff, evidence, eye-witness reports, coroner’s notes, etc, as part of my rehabilitation, I showed that I had an excellent eye for detection, seeing leads to follow up, solutions or other clues left out of the submission that would strengthen the case when it got to court. So, when my six month period of War Office-paid temporary work ended, a blind eye was turned to my disability and I was admitted as a police constable detective while the war was still on, two years earlier than I should have been allowed to had I joined conventionally during peacetime.”

“Was that because they were desperate for police officers and prepared to bend the rules?” Mary said as she stretched her shapely legs out in front of her.

“Partly, but also because my War Office regimental ‘discharged unfit’ papers had my made-up birth date on it dating from 1914 when I had lied about my age, pretending to be two years older than my real age.”

“Oh, that was neat,” Mary giggled, pulling her feet up and hugging her arms around her knees.

“It may have been fortunate at the time, but when I was laid off from the Met in 1937, my compensation, according to the time I had left until my Police and state pension kicked in, was a couple of years short, so I had to get a print out of my birth certificate from Somerset House, that’s where all the registers are kept for the country.”

“Oh, I think that information is kept in each State capital in the United States because, for example, divorces can be easily obtained in some states, no questions asked, and impossible in others, even the youngest age to marry varies from State to State, there’s no real Federal standard. So, tell me more about your life before you joined the police.”

“You really want to hear about Mildred, Tom and me, even though it is well past our bedtime, don’t you?” I grinned.

“The eternal triangle, Edgar, it has fascinated readers, filmgoers and listeners around camp fires ever since cavemen walked the earth.”

“Like Adam, Eve and The Serpent?” I suggested.

“Something like that, we all need our regular doses of romance, intrigue, seduction, and scandal. It’s the only thing that gets us up in the mornings, to read the celebrity pages in the local press.”

“All right then, but it is all very plain and unexciting, not scandalous at all. We were just children who grew up together in a relatively small rural village in Kent, quite close to London. So close, that, as the factories for the Royal Ordnance at Woolwich grew, the houses for the workers spread out and our village was swallowed up by the larger town. This made the local children stick together more closely, I think. Mildred, Tom and me were always close, we went everywhere together, we did everything as one, like Dumas’ Musketeers. When we reached puberty, it dawned on us that Mildred gradually became a lot less like us and relatively more attractive, and Tom and I turned into rivals for her affections. As you know, Mild and I became more intimate, mainly through the medium of dance.”

“And you asked her to marry you?”

“I did, and she accepted, sort of.”

“Sort of? What does that mean?”

“When we were about 13 and in our last year of school, the schoolteacher thought we should all learn to dance a number of common ballroom dances. After we left school, both Mild and I worked in a grocery store, while Tom got a better job, or at least better potential paying job, starting as an errand boy in a drawing office.”

“So you saw a lot more of Mildred than Tom did?”

I nodded. “In a way, yes, but they still saw each other regularly and we all got on together well. They actually both attended evening classes together at Woolwich Technical College, Mild doing a secretarial course and Tom mechanical drawing, which balanced us up more time-wise as they shared the bus journeys both ways. I just worked extra hours at the store during those evenings, with my ambitions set on following my father into the Kent Constabulary, marking time until I reached twenty-one. But come the village dances every Saturday night, Mildred was mine for around eight out of ten dances. But I was still worried that I could lose her to Tom, who had better long term job prospects, so I asked her to marry me when I felt we were old enough to become engaged.”

“How old were you?”

“Fifteen.”

“And how old do you have to be to marry over here?”

“Sixteen, by special marriage licence, twenty-one without parental approval.”

“And how old were you when you joined up at the start of the war?”

“Almost sixteen, short by a couple of months. Mild is three months younger than me. Tom was a month older than me. We had nowhere to live except my Dad’s place, but being a police house, I would have had to ask him to apply for permission —”

“Why permission?”

“My father was the village policeman, and I had secretly examined the terms and conditions printed in the back of the rent book. If I had married and moved my wife into my old bedroom as a married couple, I would be interpreted as constituting a separate family and subletting a tied police house was particularly prohibited.”

“Really? That seems harsh.”

“It is, but I have since found out that in subletting to close family usually invokes the ‘blind eye’, like my long protection from disqualification through disability, but I didn’t know that at the time. Besides, I had my only rival for her affections joining up beside me in the Army that day in August 1914, I thought, Mild was safe from him.”

“And when you had your leave a few weeks later?”

“By then our relationship had changed, her feelings for me had already cooled I suppose. We argued about my new interpretation of her feelings, but she said I was being silly, they were just friends like we all three had been all along, and that we were still the happy couple that I expected. So she kept my ring and my shilling and I kept my hopes alive for as long as I could.”