The flat-iron hissed as Peggy tested it with a wet finger, and all she wanted in the world at nine o’clock that Tuesday morning was ten minutes’ peace to get the creases out of her cream rayon blouse before the street descended on number fourteen.
Outside, June was making a proper fool of itself. Grey Salford rain lashed the parlour window and weighed down the strings of red, white, and blue calico bunting strung between the bedrooms of Albion Terrace until the triangles sagged over the cobbles like wet washing. By half past eight, the men had already given up on the trestle tables in the roadway and carted the whole lot round to the Methodist chapel hall and under the tarpaulins rigged across the back yards.
The front door rattled under a fist heavy enough to belong to the rent man. Before Peggy could set the iron back on the trivet by the grate, the latch lifted and Mrs Brindle blew in off the flags, her best flowered apron pinned crooked under an old macintosh and her grey perm escaping its grips.
“Peggy, love, you’ve got to come,” Mrs Brindle said, not even wiping her boots on the mat. “It’s gone. It’s gone black on me.”
Peggy kept her hand on the iron handle. “Have you kicked the plug out under the sideboard again, Mrs Brindle? Because if I leave this blouse now, the iron’ll go cold, and I’ve only got the one bit of nutty slack left on the fire.”
“The plug’s fast in the wall and the speaker’s hissing away right enough, so it’s not the electric,” Mrs Brindle said, her fingers twisting in the hem of her macintosh. “I put it on at a quarter to nine just to warm the cabinet through, like the man from the shop told me when he brought it in March. Give it a good airing before the crowd comes, he says. And there was a little white spot in the middle, and then a crack like a whip, and now there’s naught but a hiss coming out of the dark. They don’t start sending till quarter past ten. Peggy, love, I’ve thirty folk coming in an hour. We’ve carried the extra chairs in from next door and everything.”
Peggy looked down at her left sleeve, half-pressed, then lifted the iron onto the hearthstone. “Right,” she said, reaching behind the scullery door for her canvas tool-roll and the shop keys on their split ring. “Don’t touch the knobs. And don’t let anyone else near the back of it before I get there, neither.”
Number fourteen smelled of lavender polish, damp wool, and the three dozen luncheon meat and tomato paste sandwiches stacked under damp tea-towels on the kitchen dresser. In the parlour, twenty-four chairs borrowed from half the houses on the terrace were wedged rank on rank between the piano and the coal-scuttle, all facing the corner where the twelve-inch walnut table model sat in state on a crocheted doily. The red, white, and blue crepe paper Mrs Brindle had pleated round the table legs was already beginning to bleed dye onto the skirting board where her wet umbrella had leaned against it.
The set was hissing softly to itself, the sound side warm and waiting for London to come on, while the convex glass of the tube stared back at the empty chairs as dead and grey as a pickled onion.
Half a dozen of the early arrivals were already craning through the parlour doorway. The Doyle twins, seven years old and wearing identical cardboard crowns covered in silver foil from milk bottle tops, had their noses pressed against the jamb. Behind them stood old Mr Pilling from number six, his bronze Mons star and Victory medal pinned neatly to the breast of his shiny Sunday serge.
“Out,” Peggy said, dropping to her knees on the hearthrug and unrolling the canvas wrap. “All of you, back in the kitchen. You too, Wilfred Doyle, unless you want twelve thousand volts up your jersey.”
“My dad says women don’t know naught about television sets,” Wilfred piped up, adjusting his foil crown. “My dad says you only mend wirelesses down at Ogden’s.”
“Your dad couldn’t mend a fuse with a yard of copper wire and a handbook,” Peggy said, fitting her stubby screwdriver into the slotted screws holding the perforated hardboard back onto the walnut cabinet. “Shift yourself, or you’ll be watching the Queen through the letterbox.”
“Go on, loves, into the scullery with you, I’ve got a plate of broken biscuits on the copper,” Mrs Brindle said, shooing them back and pulling the parlour door to, though she stayed inside herself, hovering over Peggy’s shoulder with a duster clutched to her chest like a poultice. “Is it broke bad, Peggy? It’s eighty-two pound ten, that set, when all the payments are done. Fifteen bob a week for two years I’ve signed for, and two pound down at the post office for the licence. And I told Annie Doyle and Mrs Pilling they needn’t trail all the way out to their cousin’s in Eccles.”
“Hush a minute, Mrs Brindle, let me look,” Peggy said.
She lifted the hardboard panel clear, breaking the safety interlock on the mains plug, and took her insulated jumper lead from the roll to bridge the pins so she could run the chassis live. The familiar smell of warm bakelite, resin solder, and scorched dust drifted out of the cabinet. Along the steel chassis, the line of receiving valves glowed with their steady, comforting orange heaters. Down at the bottom, the big line output valve was lit, and she could hear the faint, high-pitched mosquito whistle of the line transformer working away at ten thousand cycles.
So the drive was there. The sound was there. She leaned closer, careful to keep her left hand tucked into her cardigan pocket, the way her Uncle Frank had drilled into her when he came home from the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers in forty-six and set her to work stripping burnt-out IF transformers on his shed bench. One hand in your pocket round the high tension, Peg, or they’ll be carrying you out feet first.
To the side of the line transformer sat the little perforated aluminium box of the extra-high-tension cage. Peggy clicked on her pocket torch and shone the beam through the vent holes. Inside, suspended by its own stiff wire leads between the transformer tags like a glass spider in a tin web, hung the miniature rectifier valve. Its heater was black. Cold as a stone.
“Well?” Mrs Brindle whispered, as if they were in church.
“It’s the EY51,” Peggy said, sitting back on her heels and switching the mains off at the wall. “Little rectifier valve inside the cage there. Takes the kick from the line transformer and turns it into twelve thousand volts to light the screen up. Heater’s parted.”
Mrs Brindle let out a long breath that smelled of peppermint drops. “Well, thank the Lord it’s only a little thing. You’ve got your keys to Mr Ogden’s shop on your ring there, haven’t you, love? You can nip down Cross Lane and fetch one out of his drawers before the service starts.”
Peggy looked at the cold glass tube inside the cage, and her stomach went hollow. She didn’t need to go down to Cross Lane to look in the third drawer down under the counter. She knew what was in the little cardboard slots marked EY51, because at four o’clock on Saturday afternoon she had taken the last red-and-white carton out of that drawer herself, soldered the valve into the baker’s set on Phoebe Street, and written Re-order 6 off EY51 on the spike by Mr Ogden’s cash register. And Monday the wholesaler’s traveller hadn’t called because they were already gearing up for the Coronation holiday.
“Aye,” Peggy said, getting up and brushing the carpet fluff off her skirt. “I’ll go down to the shop now. Don’t let nobody touch the back while it’s off, the big condenser holds a charge enough to knock old Mr Pilling out of his boots.”
* * *
Cross Lane was dead as a Sunday under the streaming rain. The butcher’s steel shutter was down behind a portrait of the Queen bordered in greaseproof paper rosettes, and the pawnshop had three sodden Union Jacks sticking out of the brass balls above the door. Sweets had come off the ration in February, so the confectioner’s window was crammed with glass jars of pear drops and coltsfoot rock decorated with red ribbons, though the door was bolted fast for the bank holiday.
Peggy let herself into Ogden’s Radio & Electrical by the side entry in the ginnel. The shop smelled of battery acid, rubber cabling, and old Mr Ogden’s pipe tobacco. Out of sheer pig-headed hope she pulled open the third drawer under the counter anyway. Three empty dividers, a scatter of brass BA nuts, and a burnt-out dial bulb.
She went straight through the baize curtain and up the narrow stairs to the flat above. When she rapped on the bedroom door, a rattling wheeze answered her from under the eiderdown.
Mr Ogden was propped up against four pillows in his flannel nightshirt, a woollen muffler wound twice round his scrawny neck and the morning paper spread across his knees with the thick black headlines about Everest conquered right across the top. A blue glass bottle of Friar’s Balsam steamed on the washstand beside a kettle ring.
“Peggy?” he croaked, peering over his wire-rimmed spectacles. “What are you doing here, lass? You ought to be watching the procession.”
“Ida Brindle’s twelve-inch set has dropped its EHT,” Peggy said from the doorway. “The EY51’s gone open-circuit on the heater, and I used the last one out of the drawer on Saturday for Fletcher’s on Phoebe Street. Have you got an odd one stashed away in your desk, Mr Ogden? Even a weak one that’ll hold up for three hours?”
Mr Ogden coughed until the brass bedstead jingled, then wiped his moustache with a spotted handkerchief. “Naught in the desk but wireless octals and a handful of cat’s-whiskers from nineteen twenty-eight. Wholesaler’s in Miller Street’ll be bolted up tight till Wednesday morning.” He peered at her through the steam of the balsam. “There’s that scrap fourteen-inch chassis under the tarpaulin in the coal-hole. The one that fell off the carrier’s lorry at Easter. Neck’s snapped off the tube, but the cage wasn’t touched.”
Peggy didn’t wait for him to finish. She took the stairs three at a time, grabbed a hand-lamp from the workbench, and dragged the stiff tarpaulin off the wrecked chassis in the back scullery. Spiderwebs and coal dust blackened her knuckles as she pried the tin lid off the EHT box.
She shone the lamp inside. There was no wire-ended midget soldered between the tags. Instead, a squat valve sat in a moulded paxolin base. She wiped the soot off the glass with her thumb and read the white etching: U25. Different base, different heater voltage, different windings on the transformer. You might as well try to fit a bicycle chain into a pocket watch.
She went slowly back up the stairs. “It’s a two-volt heater, Mr Ogden. Won’t do without winding a new turn on the transformer, and there’s no room for that base in Mrs Brindle’s cage.”
The old man folded his paper down. “Well, then, lass. There’s only one road out of that hole. You’ll have to walk round to Regent Road and knock up young Kettle.”
Peggy’s chin came up half an inch. “I’m not going cap in hand to Stan Kettle.”
“He gets his parcels from the London factors on a Monday morning train,” Mr Ogden wheezed, reaching for his teacup. “And he does four tellies to our one since my chest packed in. He’ll have a dozen EY51s sitting on his shelf.”
“And he’ll tell everyone from here to the docks that Ogden’s girl had to come running to him because she couldn’t keep a set going on Coronation Day,” Peggy said. “Last month at the trade lecture in Manchester he asked me in front of thirty chaps if I used hairgrips when I ran out of split pins.”
“Let him talk,” Mr Ogden said mildly, leaning back into his pillows. “Talk don’t break no glass. Mrs Brindle paid us cash for her outdoor aerial, didn’t she? Go on round there and give him trade price plus ten per cent out of the petty cash tin. Tell him it’s for me if it sticks in your throat.”
“I’ll think of something else,” Peggy said, and shut the bedroom door carefully behind her so it wouldn’t bang.
She stood in the dark workshop downstairs for ten minutes, pulling open every drawer, tipping out coffee tins of salvaged resistors, even stripping the back off an old nine-inch pre-war London receiver that had sat on the top shelf since the blitz, though she knew fine well it used a mains high-tension transformer the size of a brick and a valve like a milk bottle. The clock on the mantelpiece ticked round to twenty-five to eleven.
When she walked back into number fourteen Albion Terrace with her tool-roll tucked dry under her coat and nothing in her pocket, the parlour was packed from the fender to the sideboard.
Twenty-six people were wedged onto the borrowed chairs, the piano stool, and the horsehair sofa, with six children sitting cross-legged on the linoleum border around the rug. The room smelled of wet serge, lavender water, and twist tobacco. Up on the corner table, the walnut cabinet had its face turned attentively towards the room, its glass screen still blind and grey, while the speaker beneath it filled the house with the brassy crash of military bands and the clip-clop of hundreds of hooves down Whitehall.
“...and now the carriages are passing the Cenotaph, and in spite of the driving rain the crowds stand ten deep under their forest of umbrellas, cheering every one of them as it goes by...”
Everyone in the parlour was staring straight at the dead glass screen anyway, as if by looking hard enough at the walnut veneer they could conjure up horses and gold braid. Old Mr Pilling sat bolt upright with his hands on his knees, nodding approval at the invisible carriages. The Doyle twins had already eaten the corners off their luncheon meat sandwiches.
Mrs Brindle met Peggy in the tiny vestibule by the coat hooks. She had put on her black silk blouse with the mother-of-pearl brooch at the collar, and there was a bright, flat patch of rouge on each cheek.
“Have you got it, love?” she whispered, her eyes dropping to Peggy’s empty hands.
“Mr Ogden’s out of them,” Peggy said, keeping her voice down under the roar of the crowd coming from the loudspeaker. “And the scrap one in the back is the wrong pattern.”
For a second Mrs Brindle’s mouth worked without a sound coming out, and she looked all of her sixty-one years and ten more on top. Then she straightened her brooch, patted Peggy sharply on the wet sleeve of her coat, and turned back into the parlour doorway.
“Now then, everyone,” Mrs Brindle called out over a fanfare of trumpets from London. “Mr Ogden’s shop hasn’t got the little lamp we need, and with the holiday we can’t get the van out from Manchester till tomorrow. So we’ll just have to listen to the wireless part of it, like we did for her dad back in thirty-seven. We can hear every word clear as a bell, and I’m going to mash the first pot of tea right now.”
A polite, murmuring chorus went round the room.
“Aye, sound’s grand, Ida, lovely tone on that speaker,” Mrs Pilling said stoutly, smoothing her skirt.
“Better than standing in the wet down in London, anyhow,” said Joe Doyle from the piano stool. “You don’t miss much with a good commentator.”
Nobody looked at the screen after that. They looked at their boots, or at the cabbage roses on the wallpaper, or out of the rain-streaked window at the sodden bunting sagging over the street. Back in the kitchen, Mrs Brindle lifted the big brown enamel teapot off the shelf, and Peggy saw the old woman’s thumb wipe quickly at the corner of her eye before she measured out the tea-leaves from her caddy. Fifteen shillings a week until March nineteen fifty-five, and eighty-two pounds ten shillings sitting dark in the corner while Annie Doyle stared at the wallpaper.
Peggy didn’t take her coat off. She picked her canvas roll off the hall table, took ten shillings out of her own purse to add to the petty cash in her pocket, and went back out into the rain.
* * *
Regent Road was twenty minutes’ hard walk over the railway bridge, against a wind that blew the smoke from the gasworks low across the slate roofs. Kettle’s Radio & Television had a newly painted royal blue fascia and a wide plate-glass window pasted round with cardboard cut-outs of golden coaches and Beefeaters.
The brass latch on the shop door was snicked shut, and the green roller blind was pulled three-quarters of the way down, but underneath the gap Peggy could see a bluish-white flicker dancing on the linoleum inside.
She stooped to peer under the blind. A fourteen-inch console model had been wheeled out from the window display and turned round to face the counter. Sitting in a neat semicircle on wicker armchairs in the middle of the shop floor were a stout woman in a feathered hat, two teenage girls in twinsets with bowls of tinned peaches on their laps, and Stan Kettle himself, his long legs stretched out onto a battery crate, a cigarette behind his ear, and his dark hair slicked back with a pound of brilliantine.
On the screen of the console set, clear and steady as a photograph, four greys in state harness were trotting past the Victoria Memorial.
Peggy stood up and rapped on the glass with the rim of a half-crown.
Inside, Stan turned his head, squinted through the rain on the window, and grinned at one of his sisters before he untangled his legs from the crate and strolled over to unbolt the door. He opened it three inches and leaned his shoulder against the frame. He had his best grey flannel trousers on and a yellow knitted waistcoat under his sports jacket.
“We’re closed for the Coronation, Miss Hulme,” he said, looking down at her sodden headscarf. “Unless you’ve come to buy a proper set?”
“I need an EY51, Stan,” Peggy said, rain dripping off the end of her nose. “Trade price, cash down. I’ve got the money in my hand.”
Stan reached up to touch the cigarette behind his ear, his eyebrows lifting. “Do you now? Thought old Albert didn’t let you loose inside the EHT cages. Bit different from fitting dial cord on a bedside wireless, isn’t it?”
“I know how to solder two wires without burning my fingers, thanks very much,” Peggy said, her jaw tight. “Have you got one on the shelf or haven’t you?”
“Stan, shut that door, there’s a wicked draught round my ankles and the Royal Marines are coming past!” his mother called from her wicker chair without taking her eyes off the screen.
Stan glanced back at the warm shop, then looked down at Peggy again. The cocky curl went out of his mouth a fraction. “Truth is, I haven’t,” he said. “Had a run on ’em last week when the damp got into the sets down by the canal. Put my last stock one into the landlord’s set at the Red Lion at eight o’clock last night. Miller Street’s shut till morning.”
Peggy stared past his shoulder at the glowing fourteen-inch screen. The Royal Marines were marching eight abreast through the puddles of Whitehall, bayonets catching the dull London light.
“That’s a standard chassis in that console, isn’t it?” she said.
Stan blinked at her, then barked a short laugh. “Have you gone clean daft? That’s my window demonstrator. My mam and our Brenda and Joan have come all the way down from Seedley to watch it.”
“There’s three of them sitting in there,” Peggy said, her voice rising slightly above the splash of a passing corporation bus. “And there’s thirty-two folk sitting in Ida Brindle’s parlour on Albion Terrace staring at an empty box. Old Mr Pilling’s got his Mons medals polished up, and Mrs Brindle’s been saving her sugar and margarine rations since Easter to bake for the whole street, and she’s in the scullery right now crying into her teapot because she’s paying fifteen bob a week for two years on a wireless with a dead mirror on the front.”
“Well, she should’ve got it on rental from me instead of buying off Cross Lane, shouldn’t she?” Stan said, though he didn’t look quite so pleased with himself now.
“You can have two brand-new ones back off me at nine o’clock tomorrow morning when the factor opens,” Peggy said, holding out the ten-shilling note in her wet fist. “And ten bob on top for the loan of it. You can bring your mam and your sisters round to Albion Terrace. We’ll find four chairs out of our house if we have to carry them on our heads.”
Behind Stan, the commentator’s voice rose as the bells of St Margaret’s began to peal through the loudspeaker.
“Stanley, what are you stood jawing on the step for?” his mother demanded, turning round in her feathered hat. “The Queen’s coach is coming into Parliament Square!”
Stan looked back at his mother, and at his two sisters with their spoons poised over their tinned peaches. Then he looked at Peggy, standing on the streaming pavement with her wool coat soaked black at the shoulders and the ten-shilling note shaking slightly in her cold fingers.
“Keep your ten bob,” he muttered, stepping back to pull the shop door wide. “Mam, put your coat back on. You too, Brenda.”
“Do what?” Brenda said, her spoon halfway to her mouth.
“Set’s got to have a valve took out of it for an emergency job down the road,” Stan said, already dropping to his knees behind the console with a pocket screwdriver. “There’s a bigger party on down Albion Terrace anyway, and they’ve got a proper fire lit. We’ll walk down under the big shop umbrella.”
“Stanley Kettle, you daren’t turn that picture off with the Queen getting out of her coach!” Mrs Kettle cried, heaving herself out of the wicker chair as the screen went black with a soft pop. “Oh, I’ll give you what-for when your father gets home from the club!”
“Wait till the glass cools or you’ll take the skin off your thumb,” Peggy said, stepping inside onto the mat and pulling her electric soldering iron and wire-cutters out of her canvas roll.
“I know when a valve’s hot, I was mending radar sets on a destroyer when you were still in ankle socks,” Stan said, wrapping his handkerchief round his fingers to reach into the demonstrator’s cage. He snipped the two tinned leads with her cutters, drew the tiny glass cylinder carefully out through the hatch, and laid it in the palm of his hand like a robin’s egg. Then he stood up and reached for his raincoat on the peg. “Right. Come on. I’ll bring my meter and stick it in for you.”
Peggy plucked the valve cleanly out of his palm and dropped it into an empty matchbox lined with cotton wool from her pocket. “It’s my job and my customer’s set, Stan Kettle,” she said. “I’ll solder it in. You can hold the torch for me if you want to make yourself useful.”
Stan stared at her for two seconds, his wet hair falling across his forehead, and then gave a slow shake of his head that ended in a crooked grin. “God help the fellow that marries you, Peggy Hulme,” he said. “Put that soldering iron in my pocket before you poke my eye out with it.”
* * *
It was twenty to twelve when they came pelting back over the railway bridge, leaving Mrs Kettle and the two girls picking their way through the puddles fifty yards behind under the big striped shop umbrella.
By the time Peggy pushed open the front door of number fourteen, the commentary from the parlour had hushed to the slow, echoing murmur of Westminster Abbey. The Queen had taken her oath, and the service was going on without them.
“Excuse me, Mr Doyle, shift your knees a bit, love,” Peggy panted, squeezing past the piano with water running out of the hem of her skirt and Stan right on her heels.
Thirty-two heads snapped round from the wallpaper.
“Peggy?” Mrs Brindle said from the kitchen doorway, a plate of paste sandwiches in her hands. “Who’s this young man?”
“It’s Stan Kettle from Regent Road, and he’s lent us the valve out of his own window,” Peggy said, already down on the hearthrug behind the corner table, plugging her electric soldering iron into the two-way adaptor on the skirting board. “Nobody touch the table while the iron heats up. Stan, shine that torch through the side slots, not from the back, or you’ll cast my hand across the tags.”
Stan knelt down beside her on the cramped strip of rug between the coal-scuttle and old Mr Pilling’s boots, clicking on his heavy rubber workshop torch and angling the beam neatly into the aluminium cage. The smell of wet wool from their coats mingled with the hot resin rising from the copper bit of Peggy’s iron.
Nobody in the room said a word, though the choir was singing somewhere far off inside the walnut speaker cabinet above their heads. Even the Doyle twins had crawled round the side of the horsehair sofa to watch the tiny blue sparks of resin spit as Peggy tinned the two bare wire tails of the new valve against a scrap of brass.
Her fingers were stiff with the cold rain, and the space inside the cage was scarce three inches square. If she held the iron on the wire for five seconds too long, the heat would run straight up the nickel lead and crack the glass seal at the pinch, and there wouldn’t be another EY51 between Cross Lane and Manchester Exchange.
“Hold your pliers on the wire right against the glass to draw the heat off,” she murmured to Stan.
“Got it,” he said quietly, his big knuckles steady alongside hers inside the narrow tin box, the nose of his long-nosed pliers clamping the lead just below the glass bulb as a heat-sink while she touched the copper bit of the iron and a bright bead of solder to the transformer tag. One lead fast. She shifted her wrist, careful not to brush the waxed paper windings of the over-wound coil, and soldered the second lead to the brass standoff pillar.
“Clear,” she said, drawing the iron back and laying it on the iron stand on the hearth tiles.
Stan clicked off the torch and screwed the perforated tin lid back onto the cage with two turns of his thumb. Peggy fitted the hardboard back panel onto the cabinet to engage the mains plug, pushed the switch down on the wall socket, and stood up, wiping her brow with the back of her wrist.
“Is it mended?” Wilfred Doyle demanded loudly.
“Hush, our Wilfred,” his mother hissed, giving his knee a tap. “It takes a minute to get hot, same as the oven.”
In the hall, the front door opened tentatively, and Mrs Kettle and the two girls in their twinsets peered round the jamb, shaking their wet umbrella onto the door-mat. Mrs Brindle took one look at the feathered hat, set her sandwich plate down on the sideboard, and went straight out to them.
“Come right in out of the wet, loves, don’t stand on the step,” she whispered fiercely. “Joe Doyle, move up on that piano stool and give this lady the armchair, and the two lasses can share the settle by the fire.”
Inside the cabinet, the heaters crept up from dull red to bright orange. Twelve past twelve by the chiming clock on the mantelpiece. In the Abbey, the Archbishop was reading the prayers before the anointing, his voice echoing faintly off the great stone piers two hundred miles away in London.
Thirty seconds. A minute. Then, from the back of the walnut box, came the sharp crackle of static as twelve thousand volts of extra-high-tension hit the glass anode cap of the tube, like someone stripping a silk petticoat off in the dark.
Across the round grey face of the screen, a bright white horizontal line leaped out from side to side, opened out like a Venetian blind, and broke into a frantic diagonal tearing of black and white stripes.
A collective gasp went up from the twenty-four borrowed chairs.
“Hold your horses, the line hold’s just cold,” Peggy said, reaching round the side of the cabinet with two fingers to touch the preset knob recessed in the wooden rail. She eased it a hair’s breadth to the left.
The diagonal bars slowed, shuddered once, and locked solid into three hundred and seventy-seven crisp lines of silver-grey light.
There was King Edward’s Chair in the middle of the sanctuary carpet, and four Knights of the Garter in their velvet mantles holding a canopy of cloth of gold over a small, still figure in a plain white linen dress.
Nobody cheered. Old Mr Pilling took his pipe out of his mouth and laid it carefully in the brass ashtray on his knee. Mrs Kettle took her feathered hat off so the Doyle twins behind her could see over her head.
The golden canopy was borne away. One by one, the great lords came forward with the spurs, and the jewelled sword, and the golden cloth of the robe royal, and the orb with its cross, while the rain beat steadily against the parlour window of number fourteen Albion Terrace and nobody heard a drop of it.
At twenty-six minutes to one, the Archbishop lifted St Edward’s Crown high above the altar in his two hands, the diamonds catching the television lights in sharp white stars, and brought it slowly down onto the dark head beneath him.
“God save the Queen!” cried the voices in the Abbey, and a great brass fanfare tore out of the little walnut speaker, along with the booming thud of the guns firing from the Tower of London.
Peggy stood squashed between the parlour door-post and the corner of the dresser, her damp coat still buttoned to her chin. After the first glance to make sure the frame wasn’t rolling at the top edge, she didn’t look at the screen at all.
She watched old Mr Pilling’s chin come up as he got to his feet and stood to attention by the coal-scuttle, his rheumy eyes fixed bright and fierce on the twelve-inch glass. She watched the Doyle twins sitting utterly motionless with their cardboard crowns slipping down over their ears. And she watched Ida Brindle, standing by the kitchen door with her hands folded over her best apron, looking round the packed room with her chin high and a slow, triumphant smile spreading right across her face.
In the vestibule behind Peggy, Stan Kettle leaned his wet shoulder against the wallpaper among the hanging macintoshes, his hands in his trouser pockets, watching the white flicker of the screen reflected on their faces. He caught Peggy looking round at him, and gave a tiny nod towards the set, the corner of his mouth lifting: good picture.
Then the fanfare died down into the organ music, and the spell broke in a sudden clatter of teacups and shifting chairs as everyone let their breath go at once.
“Well, I never thought I’d see inside Westminster Abbey from Albion Terrace,” Mrs Pilling declared, wiping her spectacles on her cuff. “You could see the very pearls on her glove!”
“Peggy Hulme, you sit right down there before your legs give out,” Mrs Brindle commanded, marching across the hearthrug to pull Mr Pilling out of the plush fireside chair by his elbow and steering Peggy firmly into it by the shoulders. Before Peggy could protest, a saucer with a thick square of fruit cake topped with real white icing and three silver sugar balls was planted on her knee. “I saved half a pound of icing sugar from Christmas for that top, and you’re having the corner piece. And your young man from Regent Road can come through to the scullery for a mug of tea with a drop of rum in it before he catches his death.”
“He’s not my young man, Mrs Brindle, he’s the competition,” Peggy said, though her ears went warm as Brenda Kettle giggled from the settle.
While the teacups went round from hand to hand and the endless column of troops formed up outside the Abbey for the two-hour march back through the London rain, Peggy balanced her saucer on the arm of the chair and pulled her little oilskin job book and a stub of indelible pencil out of her cardigan pocket. She liked to keep the ledger square before she went home.
Under Tuesday 2nd June, she licked the purple lead and wrote neatly in her round workshop hand:
14 Albion Terrace (Brindle). 12-inch table model. No raster, sound OK. Replaced EHT rectifier (EY51). Valve on loan from Kettle’s, Regent Rd.
A shadow fell across the lined page, smelling of brilliantine, wet gabardine, and navy rum. Stan was leaning over the back of the plush chair with an enamel mug in his hand, reading upside down.
“Cross that bit out,” he said quietly in her ear.
Peggy glanced up at him. “Which bit?”
“That on loan business,” Stan said, taking a sip from his mug and looking over at his mother, who was already deep in conversation with Mrs Pilling about the price of mutton chops while watching the Life Guards trot across the screen. “Put it down as square between shops. You can owe me a favour next time my van breaks down on Cross Lane.”
Peggy looked at him for a moment, then turned back to the page, drew two neat purple lines through on loan, and wrote with thanks above it in small letters. She shut the oilskin book with a snap, slipped it back into her pocket, picked up her iced cake, and went back to watching the faces while the band of the Coldstream Guards came swinging down Whitehall through the rain.