Bless ’Em All Page 17

  Jimmy felt light-hearted as the Number 34 tram rumbled down Cedars Road into Battersea. He wouldn’t be seeing Helen at Hodders any more, but he knew where he could find her. He got off the tram and stepped out along Latchmere Road, turning off into the maze of small dwellings that fell in the concrete valley below. He found the street where he had taken Helen the night they went to the pictures, found the corner where they had kissed, and the thought of that pleasure made him smirk. He knocked at the door. She would be surprised to see him – delighted, he hoped. Nobody answered the door. He knocked again, more vigorously, but no reply. He stood back and looked up at the bedroom windows, criss-crossed with sticky tape. She wouldn’t be at work, that was for sure. But there was nobody in. What about her dad and mum? After another brisk knock brought no reply, he sat down on the coping-stone of the small front garden. He could wait five minutes. He could wait ten minutes. He could wait the whole afternoon if needs be.

  Some young boys were playing Spitfires in the street, zooming down the centre of the road with their arms out, making throttling noises, bashing into each other and shouting, ‘You’re dead.’ It wasn’t so long ago that he was indulging in similar antics, but the kids of his time were aping the last war, with trenches in hollows, going over the top to the opposing trenches on a piece of waste land. It was good fun at the time, until that soppy Stanley kid got a brick on his head and ran home crying with blood streaming down the side of his face.

  A bread van was delivering, but he didn’t bring anything to Helen’s house. Jimmy banged the knocker again, hard. The next-door neighbour opened her door.

  ‘Christ Almighty,’ she said. ‘When are you going to stop banging?’ She had a rough-wool dressing-gown on, and her hair was mussed up as though she’d been sleeping.

  ‘There’s nobody in,’ Jimmy said.

  ‘All the more reason to stop banging the bloody knocker then. I’m on night-shift tonight.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Jimmy said. ‘I’m looking for Helen.’

  ‘They’ve gone away,’ said the disgruntled woman. ‘She’s lost her job. Bombed out.’

  ‘So am I,’ said Jimmy. ‘I worked near where she was. Do you know when they’ll be back?’

  ‘They’ve gone to Reigate,’ said the woman. ‘To her sister’s to get a bit of peace and quiet.’

  This was bad news. ‘But how long for? When will they be back?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ the woman replied, scratching her back with a long shoe horn she was carrying in her hand. ‘It’s nothing to do with me. They don’t tell me everything.’ And she went in and closed the door.

  He found a tin can in the gutter and kicked it along the street. He kicked it all the way up to the high street. Another fairy-tale gone west. Would he see her again? Where the hell was Reigate? Was it a big place? What chance would he have of bumping into her? The bloody war was spoiling everything again. Sodding Hitler with his bleeding bombs. Putting him out of work was bad enough, but now the war had cost him his girlfriend. He went into the pictures on Lavender Hill. It was a miserable film with Sylvia Sydney. Every film with Sylvia Sydney was miserable. She had a face made for misery. She could cry real tears at will, and there wasn’t even a Laurel and Hardy to cheer it up. Just more news of how our soldiers enjoyed being shot at and splattered in mud. Poor buggers. They might as well make a joke of it.

  Maybe he could find out where Hodder’s had gone. A firm like that wouldn’t just pack up, would they? They would set up somewhere else. But where?

  He went home, trailing across Clapham Common with his hands deep in his trouser pockets. There were kids flying kites. Kites were all right. They didn’t drop things on you, just floated in the air like butterflies.

  His mum had got kippers for tea. He liked the smell of kippers. His new copy of the Gem had arrived: Tom Merry and the rest hadn’t caught up with the war yet. Would they be unmasking spies, catching parachutists, or would they pretend that the war wasn’t happening? His dad came down in his vest and trousers. He shaved in the scullery with his cut-throat razor. You weren’t suppose to say anything while he was doing it in case he cut his throat. His dad rarely said anything these days, and his mum had never had much to say at any time. Jimmy sat down and started scraping the kipper.

  ‘What you going to do?’ said his mum, not stretching herself.

  ‘What about?’ he said, thinking she might have read his mind about his abortive trip to Battersea.

  ‘About getting a job,’ she said. ‘No taste in nothing.’ It was one of her miserable collection of sayings. What she meant was find a job quick as you can’t live here without making a contribution.

  ‘I don’t know what’s going to happen yet, do I?’ he said defensively.

  His mother munched away while his dad ate his kipper, with bread and strawberry jam.

  Suddenly his mother said, ‘What d’you mean?’ But it was so long after that Jimmy had lost the connection. His mind was wandering into Woolworth’s, where he saw Helen on the cosmetics counter, her light hair shining under the electric light, slipping him a sly glance while she served a customer. He smiled at the thought.

  ‘What you laughing at?’ said his mother. ‘No fun being out of work.’

  There was a long silence, then his dad said: ‘Need some copy boys at the Telegraph.’

  The next day Jimmy went to the Labour Exchange. There was a queue right out into the street. He bought a packet of five Player’s Weights. He had never smoked before, but he felt he’d like to try, but after the first draw nearly choked him, he gave up. Anyway, there was no joy at the Labour Exchange. He wasn’t old enough to draw the dole. They hadn’t got any information about Green’s. He decided to walk around there; he might see Maurice or somebody. The last time he saw Maurice the poor old bugger looked done for, but he might have got over it by now. As his mother often said, ‘No use crying over spilt milk.’

  But Green’s was still the same mess. Workmen had cleared the site. It looked as though everything that was left had sunk into the basement, the place where they used to go when the siren sounded. There was a blonde woman there, looking upset. What was she upset about? Nothing to do with her. He heard her ask one of the workmen about Green’s. ‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘What’s left of it.’ The woman wandered off, looking sad and lost.

  Miss Tcherny had given Maurice their addresses, so if he wanted to get in touch he could. Would he send his money? It wasn’t his fault that he didn’t work the full week. Was it worth going around to the Telegraph? Nothing to lose.

  Maurice, left in a wilderness of broken buildings, started walking. There was no sign of civilization, not even on the horizon. It was certain that buses did not come along these roads any more. It was difficult to find the boundaries of the road. Here and there were reminders of a previous life: a sheet-metal sign for Sharp’s Toffee and Bovril hung at crazy angles from a blasted wall, while one for Ovaltine lay flat on its back. Maurice was looking for some sense of direction. There must be some sign, some indication of where the rest of London had got to.

  As he walked he heard a scuffle behind him. He turned around, but he couldn’t see anything. He turned back. There. There it was again. It was the Ovaltine sign, shifting slightly, and yet there was no wind. He bent down to lift it, to prop it up against something, but before he could grasp it the sign moved, seemingly of its own accord, and a head popped out from underneath. It was a dirty, scruffy head, with a clown’s white face and one bloodshot eye. ‘You all right, mate?’ it said.

  ‘Eh?’ said Maurice, startled.

  The mouth opened to show a dentist’s nightmare of jagged black teeth, with gaps in between. ‘There’s not much room, but you can come down if you like.’ The invitation was accompanied by a quirky wink.

  ‘What are you doing down there?’ said Maurice.

  ‘We live here,’ said the odd-looking man. ‘They don’t come over here any more. There’s nothing left to bomb.’ He cackled insanely. ‘Safe as houses we are, ain�
��t we, Mum?’

  Maurice peered into the hole. There were steps down. Might have been a basement or a cellar. At the bottom there was a bundle of what appeared to be old clothes. It was the body of an old woman but practically shapeless, with a grey head lolling forwards on to the chest, slumped on the steps. The body didn’t move. There was a stillness about the lumpish figure that seemed unnatural.

  ‘Is that your mother?’ Maurice said. ‘Is she all right?’

  ‘Right as rain,’ said the odd man, looking up at Maurice. ‘You got a fag?’

  ‘How long have you been down there?’ Maurice said.

  ‘We came down here about three nights ago. I said to her, “They won’t be bombing down there any more. They’ve done it. Done it to death.”’

  By this time Maurice had grave misgivings about the man and his silent mother. ‘Ask her if she wants anything. Ask her.’

  The man levered himself out of the hole. He was short, wearing a collarless shirt and nondescript trousers. He had a couple of day’s growth of whiskers, and Maurice thought he looked like a comic’s stooge in a music-hall act.

  ‘Here,’ said the comical little man. ‘What’s your game?’

  ‘Game?’

  ‘Coming round here interfering with respectable people. Sling your hook.’ His indignation rang hollow. The bloodshot eye looked wild.

  ‘I’m concerned about your mother. She shouldn’t be down there on those steps.’

  ‘You leave her alone. She’s dead, ain’t she? She can’t fool me. I know her too well. Died as soon as we got here. Couldn’t stand it. All that noise. Bang bloody bang all bloody night. Flesh and blood can’t stand it, mister.’ There was a tear in his eye. His thin body shook with rage.

  ‘What have we done, eh? What’s it to do with us? I don’t know any Germans. Why should they do this? Tell me that. Go on.’

  ‘There’s no sense in it,’ said Maurice.

  ‘You bet your life, mister. There’s no sense in it. Bloody hell. They can have a bloody war if they wants, but why drag us into it?’

  Suddenly Maurice felt unutterably weary. He realized that he had been on the go since mid-morning. The ridiculous episode with the brassy woman and her mad husband, then getting stuck in the middle of nowhere, and now this demented creature with his dead mother. He needed to get home. To have a bath and a change of clothes.

  ‘Which way is the main road?’ he said.

  ‘That’s a question,’ said the silly old devil, puckering his face like a circus clown registering surprise.

  ‘I need to get home,’ said Maurice. ‘As soon as I get somewhere I’ll make sure somebody comes for you and your mother.’

  ‘She’s dead,’ said the mad little man. ‘No use to man or beast.’

  ‘But she’ll have to be buried,’ Maurice said.

  The little man was clearly out of his mind. He pointed vaguely in several directions. So Maurice set off, feeling out on his feet. He knew that if he walked directly away from the river that he must stumble on a proper road in the end. Eventually, he saw a fire engine. It was standing, on its own, with the crew sitting on the running-boards or laying on the flat body of the appliance. The crew were clearly exhausted. They had probably been fighting fires all night and most of the day. Maurice approached them, thankfully.

  ‘Where am I?’ said Maurice.

  The fireman pointed him in the right direction. ‘There’s a poor old man over there who’s gone crazy. He’s got his mother with him and she’s passed away.’ The fireman received this information with a show of indifference. Just another tragedy in days and nights of such incidents. One of them started coughing and retching until he went red in the face and then blue. None of his comrades took any notice. There was an air of hopelessness about the unit. Maurice staggered on. He felt that if he stopped and sat down that he would fall asleep. It seemed ages before he saw a moving vehicle. It was a beer dray. The sight was like something from a lost world. He watched it and heard the clomp of the horses’ hooves, relishing the sign of normality in a world that had gone mad.

  He didn’t much care how he got home. He got on the first bus and found himself in Hackney. He caught another bus to Camberwell and another to Brixton. From there he knew he could get to Clapham Common and the Northern Line.

  He fell asleep on the Tube and had to be woken up at Morden. It was twilight when he got back to street level. He briefly contemplated taking a taxi as there was a quarter of an hour to wait for a bus, but Clare might see it and then there would be a row about his extravagance. So he waited, and was glad that he had. He climbed on to the top deck and was able to contemplate the landscape as town turned into suburb on the way to turning into country.

  There were thousands of little houses, with neat gardens back and front, with sharply cut lawns and garden sheds, flower beds, privet borders, dividing one garden from the next, rows of rose bushes and kitchen gardens, laid out military style. There were miles of red roofs, stretching into the sunset. It was comfortable, secure and settled. Contrasted with the devastation of the East End it was like another country, another world. This was England, the solid mass of the middle class, the England he knew. These houses, with their mock-Tudor façades, looked as if they had always been there. He knew that they were, in fact, only five years old, and they didn’t represent the English middle classes, rather slightly-more-affluent-than-most working class. Anybody who could muster up a fifty-pound deposit and pay five pounds a month for the mortgage could have moved into one of these houses only five years ago. It needed a second wage, but there were bus drivers with daughters with secretarial skills and train drivers with wives who liked to work. The strange thing was that as soon as these people lifted themselves out of Clapham, Peckham or Battersea they saw themselves as gentry, aspiring to a stage of respectability that they would have scorned as pretentious in their previous abode.

  And yet, this was the heart of England, a uniform landscape: no council housing, no blocks of flats, no tall buildings, no scrubland; everything clean and ordered and safe. There were no military installations, no factories, even. There were railway lines, but they only led to even calmer and more picturesque towns and miles of open country. This was the land of village fêtes, bell ringing and allotments, of conkers and maypoles, cricket and bowls, Boot’s library books, pubs like old royal palaces and carol singers at Christmas. Was this what it was about? Preserving this way of life for those who had only just acquired it?

  Maurice reached home in a calmer frame of mind. People’s lives had been destroyed. He had lost his warehouse. It was important to him, but how important in the greater scheme of things? He was alive. He hadn’t been driven mad like the man he had seen with his dead mother. Somehow he had to rebuild the business, start somewhere else.

  When he got into the hallway he sensed that something was wrong. Clare greeted him, which was unusual, as she usually did not even register his presence at all. It wasn’t effusive; she merely brushed his cheek with hers but stared at him as though she was, somehow, on his side. When he went into the sitting-room he saw at once the reason for the change of attitude. On the sofa was someone whom he hadn’t seen for a while and had been glad for that. It was the mountainous form of his sister Bella. She wore a pleated plaid skirt, a Paisley blouse and a knitted waistcoat. Another Wodehouse aunt of a more formidable variety? No, perhaps one of Somerset Maugham’s emotionally retarded spinsters. Bella wasted no time in getting to the point of her visit.

  ‘I hope you’re satisfied,’ she said, her eyes sparking with spite. ‘You wouldn’t sell, would you? You knew that was what I wanted – Bernard, too – but no. You wanted to go on playing at being a librarian. Now look what’s happened. There’s nothing to sell.’

  15

  BERNARD was having a trying evening. The actress who called herself Gloria persisted in treating him as an oaf. She had said that it wasn’t her real name – probably Nellie or Alice – but she behaved as though she had royal connections and he was
one of the serfs. After all, she’d picked him up, and he was paying for everything. This place, somewhere off the Edgware Road, wasn’t as expensive as Claridge’s, but at the rate she was knocking it back it would be a fair bill at the end. They’d had a good dinner, some fish with white wine. He didn’t like white wine, but when he ordered red she practically went into hysterics.

  ‘Really?’ she had said. ‘What next?’

  ‘I can have what I like,’ he said gruffly. ‘I’m paying, aren’t I?’

  She was furious. Two red spots appeared on her cheeks. ‘There’s no need to be quite so coarse,’ she said. When she’d had a couple of glasses things got a bit easier and her accent began to slip. She gossiped about Evelyn Laye and Sonnie Hale and their duel with Jessie Matthews. In fact, she was full of gossip, and Bernard soon became bored with her endless tittle-tattle.

  ‘Where do you live?’ he broke in brutally.

  ‘Don’t worry, darling,’ she flashed at him. ‘You’ll get your pound of flesh.’

  He’d had a busy time. Ringing around the publishers, putting in orders, ringing his clients to tell them his new address and phone number, ringing to secure the services of Miss Tcherny, although that was not fixed up yet. He had managed to do all this while the Gloria bitch was getting herself ready to go out to dinner. He was looking forward to getting her into bed – bring her down a peg or two, that would. He was as good as anybody at that game.

  Gloria, it was clear, wanted to go on drinking. She kept looking at all the bottles behind the bar, selecting a fresh novelty: ‘That pretty green one, darling.’