Night of Triumph by Peter Bradshaw Read Free Book Online Page B

them a real chance. Their final chance. Tomorrow the party would be over, and it would be back to peacetime civvy street.
    Well, they had agreed in the end. That is, he had told Mrs Ware she would get another fourpenny one if she gave him gip. Last time that happened was when she had made a fuss about him carrying
on at the Club. She didn’t half get one that night, but she’d been provoking and provoking, for all the world as if she wanted one. She got one that night, all right. Actually, it was
more like a sixpenny one. Just occasionally she’d got a ninepenny one, and on one occasion the full shilling. Whump.
    Mr Ware felt for the bump in his belt, under his jacket, to check that what he’d stuffed down there was still in place. It was.
    After meandering aimlessly about for an hour or so, Mr Ware wheeled north, skipping off the pavement into the thronged street itself, where the crush of people was lighter. He walked up Lower
Regent Street in the direction of Piccadilly Circus. On the corner, a man was doing Find The Lady on an upturned cardboard box. Mr Ware recognised him, and exchanged a wink. The man threw a Queen,
an Ace and another Ace face down on the cardboard surface; the cards often overlapped. A crowd of people, all male, from old men to boys, had gathered. One relatively well-dressed man had evidently
been enticed to the front, and Mr Ware guessed that he would be the one of whom the card-player had great hopes. He wondered how many of the crowd were not stooges, and thought not many.
    ‘No money, no money, no money, just for fun, which d’you think?’ said the card-master, throwing the cards down once again.
    Bashfully, the well-dressed man pointed to the card in the middle and it was turned up. The Queen. There was an instant ragged cheer – part of the purpose of this part of the trick, apart
from lulling the mark into a false sense of security, was to attract a bigger crowd.
    ‘Ooh, you’re good at this, come on, how about making it interesting? What about a ha’penny?’
    To show he was a good sport, the man bet a halfpenny, and was successful again. There was another massive cheer, and the card-master, with a pantomime pout of astonishment at his
customer’s extraordinary, untrained skill at Finding The Lady, gave the man a penny and challenged him to have a real bet.
    ‘Go on! Be a sport! You can’t quit now! Give the poor feller a chance, sir,’ said the crowd who were bustling in behind him, physically preventing him from leaving. In the
distance, someone was singing ‘I’ve got a luverly bunch of coconuts.’
    ‘Come on. A quid.’
    Intimidated, the man agreed to bet a pound. He swayed somewhat, and Mr Ware made a mental bet of his own – that the man had not been drinking at all, but felt constrained to explain away
to the crowd and to himself the imminent disaster on the grounds that he was drunk. He betted a pound, pointed to one of the cards and of course on this occasion it was an Ace.
    ‘Come on! Have another go! Get your money back.’
    ‘No, no.’ The man, thoroughly ashamed, tried to leave, was jostled back, and when he persisted, was jostled on his way by the spiteful, vengeful mob.
    ‘G’wan then. On your way.’ Instinctively, simply to partake of the fun, Mr Ware came forward and joined in the shoving of this unfortunate man, whose VE Night had now been
entirely spoiled. An apprentice draughtsman, who lived in Ipswich and was up in the capital just for the evening, he went back to Ipswich on the early train the next morning and never came to
London ever again.
    Turning up into Great Windmill Street, Mr Ware found what he was looking for: the Butterfly Club. There was no sign or outward indication of any sort to the passer-by. To gain admission, Mr Ware
had to crouch down on his haunches and reach awkwardly through a row of rusty railings that ran alongside a tobacconist’s door and rap with his knuckle on a pane of glass. Presently, a figure
appeared