Irrepressible by Leslie Brody Read Free Book Online Page B

mood, and she would have preferred to have spent her days in a Lyons tea shop poring over the newspapers. The banner headline announcing the Munich Pact signed on September 29, 1938, quoted British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s speech: “Peace in Our Time.” There was an eerie placidity that day in the population of Southampton. Where were the outraged crowds? Listening to the radio, Decca homed in on news about the latest wave of refugees. She was shocked to learn that some people, including one young woman in her market research group, took the Munich Pact not as tragedy but as reassurance and with a sense of relief. “Oh—Chamberlain,” she said vaguely. “But the paper says he’s for peace. That’s good, isn’t it?” All the stillness seemed such a topsy-turvy response.
    Decca liked to move on things. She had so much energy, and much of it was concentrated in her politics. Politics gave her inspiration, but waiting while someone else made the decisions, old men who had gotten so many things so wrong so often before—men like her father—made her feel like jumping out of her skin. The misguided power at the top grated; the apathy and lethargy of the bourgeoisie was maddening.

    Decca had never seen Esmond so depressed and restless. His sadness must have been painful for her to absorb since he was naturally so sure of himself. His moods were so intense, and he was unable to let his guard down except with her. On October 9 and 10, 1938, they read in the papers about violent mobs that were led by German storm troopers who shattered the windows in Jewish synagogues, shops, and homes in Germany and Austria. Orchestrated by the Nazi leadership, Kristallnacht —crystal night, a strangely poetic name for such terror and anguish—was a German pogrom that signaled the start of a systematic anti-Semitism, leading to the so-called Final Solution. In the days that followed, observers noted the shattered glass layered over the streets, in some places deep as their ankles.
    The previous autumn, Decca had been full of hope. Now, the first anniversary of Julia’s birth was approaching.

    SOMETIME THAT AUTUMN, Decca had an abortion. With five one-pound notes and an address in her handbag, she traveled alone by bus and tube to the East End of London. Sheila sent me , she said to the woman who opened the door and who then checked the street for prying neighbors or police. There had been no telephone to reserve an appointment, and if Decca had felt apprehension or dread, she was relieved just to have found the address. Paying her money in advance—five pounds was the going rate that day in the East End for a soap-induced abortion—she was ushered into where the deed would be done. It interested her to find the practitioner no “Dickensian crone,” but “an ordinary middle-aged English woman plying her trade”:
    At her direction I undressed and lay on a bed. I was a bit surprised that there was no sign of sterilization of the instruments, which she fished out of her underclothes drawer. Never mind, I thought, she knows what she’s doing; and she went to work.
    The deed itself consisted of the abortionist introducing grated carbolic soap into Decca’s womb through a syringe. It was “horribly painful,” and after several hours finally induced labor. It was also horribly dangerous for the patient and for the practitioner, the latter risking arrest, imprisonment, and capital punishment. Death by hanging was still the punishment for the crime.
    Why hadn’t Esmond accompanied her or, at the very least, sent her in a taxi? At the time, Decca and Esmond had been together for nearly two years. Defiant as she may have been to others, it was unusual for her to oppose him, but it would have been even less likely for him to leave her to have an abortion on her own. The idea that this might have been another man’s child (a drunken night in Corsica?) is possible but seems unlikely.
    Esmond didn’t help her find a more