by Graham Swift
The saloon bar of the Walpole was a known theatricals’ haunt and Eddie Costello occasionally slipped in for a pint of Bass and a shufty.
As they sat in the Walpole, the eyes of the current Flora would now and then catch those of Evie, or vice versa. Or Evie might notice the girl looking at the engagement ring on her finger. The girl might be eighteen or nineteen. Evie was by this time a seasoned twenty-five, but she’d once, not so long ago, linked arms with a troupe of prancing young things—all of them proper little Floras. She would give the girl clinging so determinedly to Jack’s arm a complicated smile.
Oh yes, put Ronnie down beside this friend of his, Jack Robbins, and which one would any foolish girl go for? If she was a foolish girl. But Ronnie had something, Evie knew it by now. And didn’t they anyway just have something between them? Their act was becoming quite a success, and wasn’t this its simple secret? They had something anyway. They were good together, they were a natural pair. You know this, you feel it. She liked to think that when they were on stage people could see this something they had. And look, there was even her engagement ring, glinting on her finger, to clinch it.
The girl would blink back at Evie’s smile and, still gripping Jack’s arm, bury her nose in her drink.
When Jack introduced their act, whether as first spot after the interval or in its later enhanced status, he would sometimes say, ever the soul of magnanimity, ‘And now, boys and girls, I want you to meet the real Mr Magic. Not like me, eh?’ And give the nutcracker grin.
* * *
—
Jack Robbins and Evie White were two of a kind and perhaps, in those days, of a quite numerous breed. Like her, Evie would discover, Jack had had a mother who’d wound him up from the earliest age, like a little toy, to go on stage.
It was an option. If you had nothing else, you had at least your own person, you might use it to perform and entertain. Mothers of a certain upbringing themselves seemed to know this and, especially if there was no father any longer available—here too Evie and Jack would discover they were similar—might be keen to pass this knowledge on.
Evie had had such a mother, who had coaxed her and coached her and taken her along to little cattle-market auditions. Evie would always remember her mother saying after these occasions, ‘Life is unfair, my darling, always was, always will be,’ but then saying, with a beaming smile, ‘but don’t you worry, my sweetheart, your turn will come.’
What was she to believe in: the unfairness or the turn that was coming? And what did ‘turn’ mean? It sounded temporary. It sounded like what she did anyway. Easy! She could get up and, without hesitation and almost by second nature, twirl and smile and do things with her arms and even, in the right shoes, click her little heels and toes, and open her mouth to sing. But so far none of the men and sometimes women who sat at the tables with their pencils had singled her out from all the other striving elbowing girls of eleven or twelve, all primed and tarted up by their mothers, who could do much the same. Or better. ‘Next please!’
‘You must look after your legs, Evie. But I think they can look after themselves. And you must keep smiling, never forget your smile. You have the legs and you have the looks, my angel, but I think it’s your voice we must work on.’
It was true. She had the legs, they would only get longer and lovelier, and she had the looks and knew how to use them. She could smile, she could dance, but—life is unfair—she could never sing, no matter how much she opened her mouth and struggled to use it. So she would have to do things that wouldn’t expose this deficiency.
Which wasn’t in fact so difficult when she found herself at last locking arms with some of those other girls who’d once been eleven and twelve, high-kicking and wheeling and swaying this way and that with them—and always smiling, smiling! If they had to sing, well, she could let the others carry her while she mimed enthusiastically.
Keep your sunny side—up—up!
Evie White. Wasn’t she just a chorus girl once? Wasn’t she in some act once? In variety.
But Jack, who’d had the same sort of start in life and gone through the same early maternal training, could do all sorts of things and could sing too.
There’ll be no more sobbin’ when he starts throbbin’ ...
* * *
—
Ronnie Deane was a different kettle of fish and as Evie, but only with some persistence, would find out, had had a different introduction to the world of entertainment, and a different kind of mother.
Once, when he was only five, Ronnie’s mother had taken him, gripping his hand, round a few corners from where they lived to the gates of a school, where she believed he would learn things that would guarantee him a better life than either his put-upon mother or his father, who was not often to be seen, had achieved.
Those mornings, sometimes touched by a bracing frost, would seem later to Agnes Deane to have been some of the few bright interludes in her parental life.
‘Be good, Ronnie, be a good boy,’ she would say, with a final squeeze of his hand. A sound and well-meant instruction, and Ronnie was up for abiding by it. Soon he would be able to take himself, eagerly and proudly, to those once-feared school gates. But it would not be long before his mother, once again clutching his hand and still trying to assuage his fears (as well as her own), would have to take him to another place of depositing.
Agnes Deane. Life had not been fair and never would again. She lived with Ronnie and, if only occasionally, with Ronnie’s father in the humblest of houses in Bethnal Green, but it was at least a house. It even had a tiny backyard that contained a necessary outhouse, an ever-diminishing heap of coal and, propped against the outhouse wall, a tin tub which was the only means of general ablution.
Ronnie’s father was called Sid. Agnes’s father was called Diego. Sid was a merchant seaman. Agnes was a charwoman. Though she was herself thoroughly English, even thoroughly East End, her Spanish descent was enough to have given her once for Sid a touch of exotic allure, and was enough to have given Ronnie his most noticeable features, his sleek black hair and penetrating dark eyes.
Since what happened with Agnes had happened in his own town, Sid was unable to escape his responsibilities in the traditional way of sailors. To his credit, though with some persuasion from Diego (Sid had once claimed that Diego intended to cut his throat), he’d shouldered these responsibilities by marrying Agnes and always returning, if after long absences, to her and his son. And he made sure that, even during his time at sea, a portion of his modest pay packet regularly reached his wife.
Thus Ronnie would remember his father as a mere visitor, a figure who might suddenly turn up, then just as suddenly be gone again. Almost because of their brevity, these periods of his father’s presence could be indelibly vivid.
* * *
—
Once, Sid Deane had come home with a parrot, and with all the bluster of a man who thought that coming home with a parrot would be a very good idea. The parrot’s name was Pablo, and it could even confirm it by saying so: ‘Hello, I’m Pablo!’ And Pablo was the Spanish form of Ronnie’s middle name. So—this was an important but never clearly answered question for Ronnie—was the parrot essentially a father’s gift to his son? Or was it a tribute to his mother’s Spanish ancestry?
It was a beautiful bird, its feathers a brilliant mix of green and blue with flashes of red and on its throat a bib of glowing yellow. Even if it hadn’t been able to tell you its name, could you ever forget such a creature?
Ronnie’s mother did not like the parrot. It was not welcome in her house and no sooner had his father left again than, to Ronnie’s consternation, she sold it to a pet dealer eager to acquire such a rarity.
This was not so long after Ronnie had started school, but he was present, one evening, when the man came to collect the parrot, cage and all. He watched when the man took curled-up notes from his poc
ket and gave them to his mother. He did not know how the price had been agreed, or the value of a parrot, and he did not know how to protest or intervene. He hadn’t been taught about such things at school, yet he was conscious that he was getting a sharp lesson in the ways of the world at which he was miserably unproficient. His helplessness made a nothing of him.
Later, lying in bed, he was full of the most vehement reckonings. He would cease trying to be a good boy. His mother was not the woman he thought he knew. Who should he hate more, her or the pet man? He imagined a scene—though it was useless to imagine it now—in which he might have forestalled all this pain in a way that was perhaps just as painful, but might have been the only decent expedient. He might have seized some moment while his mother was out and opened the door of the cage, having first opened the window or back door. He might at least have offered Pablo his freedom and choice in the matter.
‘Off you go, Pablo!’
He was barely six. These thoughts boiled up inside him, then boiled down again, but never entirely went away. And the moment had to come when his father next arrived home to find no parrot.
Ronnie wisely resolved that he would not say anything. It was up to his mother. It was the moment of truth.
Where was it then, Sid Deane had naturally enquired. Where was Pablo? In its brief residency the parrot had been capable, amazingly, of voicing both that question and its confident answer: ‘Where’s Pablo? Here I am!’
But now, to Ronnie’s astonishment, his mother had a quick answer too: ‘It flew away.’
This was a brazen lie, but, once more floored by events, Ronnie thought it best to maintain his silence—he was dumbstruck anyway—and did not say she had sold it to the pet man. Thus, in effect, he took his mother’s side, and when his father had looked at him for corroboration he had stared sheepishly at his feet as if he might even have been the one to have let the bird escape. This, after all, had been his fantasy.
He was too young to think it through, but had he adopted this pose more thoroughly and even turned his fantasy into a lie of his own, he might have self-sacrificingly reconciled his parents. Though how would that have helped him? His silence was self-sacrificing and painful enough.
In her defence Mrs Deane might have said that Sidney Deane had only left her with another mouth to feed. What did parrots eat? And it was a squawking mouth too.
When, much later, Evie asked Ronnie about his early years, she would get only certain things out of him. He was a secretive man, perhaps magicians need to be. Getting him to talk about his mother or father was not easy, and yet it had nothing, surely, to do with magic. She was happy to talk about her own parents—though there was not much to say about her father. She was even happy, when the time came, for her mother to meet Ronnie. He was her future husband, wasn’t he?
But Ronnie was a cards-to-the-chest man. For example, Evie would never know anything, though it had made a formative and lasting impression on Ronnie, about the parrot. Yet in one sense whenever she looked at Ronnie she was looking straight at it. Pablo was Ronnie’s stage name.
‘Why Pablo, Ronnie?’
‘It’s my middle name, isn’t it?’
It felt like only half an answer.
Even without the parrot as a bone of contention, those intervals when Ronnie’s father was at home could be full of altercation, and not what they ought to have been—happy and domestically complete. They rarely passed without some explosive argument in which it would seem that though his mother might have been glad, even relieved that her husband had deigned to make one of his appearances, she might be even gladder when he left again.
After these outbursts she might sometimes collapse into tears or, more often, simply look as though she were breathing fire. And after them Sid might draw Ronnie aside and, as if to secure some understanding and solidarity with his son before he departed again, say philosophical things such as ‘Spanish blood, Ronnie’ or even ‘Spanish passion’, and generally imply that Ronnie should not make the same mistakes in life as he had.
Ronnie would come to miss his father, rarely seen as he was, and would try to soothe the pain of it through his own philosophical reflection that surely he could only miss his father in the same way that he missed the parrot: as one might miss an apparition and not a permanent fixture, as one might miss something that might not have been there in the first place. But then wasn’t that true of everything?
And he missed the parrot.
* * *
—
One day in 1939 Agnes took the eight-year-old Ronnie to a railway station, knowing that she must part with him in a serious way, but not knowing that, except for one more snatched visit, she would never see her husband again. Nor, though in a different sense, would she ever see again, since he would have changed, the son she was now relinquishing.
He was still, when all was said, her good little boy, her only child, her pride and joy, and she said to him more than once again now, ‘Be a good boy, Ronnie.’ Though she knew this was not like taking him to school. His education, his future, was now entirely unknowable. But so was everyone’s.
She had invested—and for Agnes such a thing was not a trivial purchase—in a new white cotton handkerchief which she’d tucked into her sleeve. Word had got around among the mothers that it might be a good item to bring, since it would assist in the act of waving and make them more visible to their departing children. Its other, more obvious purpose was not emphasised.
She hadn’t had to do this thing, it was not compulsory, but a great national plan was afoot to remove children to places of safety, and what mother wouldn’t want to do the safest thing for her child?
The moment came when the women had to remain behind the barrier, so they could only wave, while the children were herded and counted on the platform before being assigned their places on the train. They all wore labels and had gas masks in cardboard boxes round their necks, so that even before they departed they were already lost and indistinguishable in their general similarity and milling. Agnes could no longer pick out her son’s head. At the same time the children could no longer pick out their own mothers among the press at the barrier. The flurry of handkerchiefs, like a frantic flock of white birds, only made it more difficult, as did—working in both directions—the blurring caused by tears. Some mothers didn’t know which use to put their handkerchiefs to.
But Agnes, even though she could not discern Ronnie any more, kept waving while trying not to weep—even when the children were all packed onto the train and could not be seen anyway, even when the train clanked out of the station and disappeared.
When she could wave no more she returned across London (Paddington itself was quite a journey) to the sudden marooning emptiness of the house in Bethnal Green. How she missed her Ronnie. She hadn’t had to part with him, yet she had. It was the best thing. This is what motherhood could sometimes mean: acts of dutiful resignation. She dried her tears. Her misery hardened, as it so often had before, into a sense of her own long-suffering fortitude.
Why should she weep if her Ronnie was safe? Now it would be her lot—and she didn’t know the half of it yet—to endure air raids. She would have to scurry to shelters where she would cower with equally terrified neighbours while bombs fell, any one of which might reduce this home of hers to nothing or, if she was so unlucky, even obliterate herself (sometimes she might even wish one would). But at least her Ronnie, though far from her, would be well out of it.
She dried her eyes on the now-grubby handkerchief and made a vow: that she would not use it again, but nor would she wash it or fold it away. She would merely keep it as it was, with all this day’s anguish still in it, until the war was over, like some charm. But she had no more use for tears.
Meanwhile Sid—and how like him—would be even further away and even more well out of it. Out there on the blue ocean. Safe as houses.
* * *
—
Ronnie, on his packed train, wept and snivelled a good deal. It was hard not to when so many around him were doing the same. It was now clear to all of them that this dreaded event was not a hoax or mere threat, but a cruel fact. Perhaps their lamenting was mixed with a surge of infant outrage. How could their mothers have possibly done this to them?
Perhaps at the same time the mothers had been visited by some chilling premonition of the hellish stage in its history the world was now reaching, such that their handkerchief-waving might have served another half-conscious function: an act of propitiatory surrender. Please can we have our children back? But it was too late.
Perhaps the children also had been touched by truths far beyond their actual situation. In any case, the more they were separated from their mothers by the clacking train, the more they wept for these women who had done this monstrous thing to them, the more they conjured up unbearably sweet images of them. Ronnie felt again the squeeze of his mother’s hand as she’d left him, that first time, at the school gates. What terrible gates awaited him now?
Round his neck was the label declaring where he had come from and where he was being sent. And of course who he was. Though it seemed to Ronnie that during this period of his transportation, of this general harsh reshuffling of lives, even his identity had become uncertain.
He had no clear idea where he was going. ‘Oxfordshire’. Where was that? And the address of his destination began not, like most addresses, with a number, but with a baffling name: ‘Evergrene’. What did that tell him?
