by Neil Hegarty
‘Mrs Saunders, poor love, though she’s looking less sad nowadays. Isn’t she, Alfred?’ – and his dad paused in his filling of the kettle to look over his shoulder, and nod.
‘She is.’
Mr Saunders had fallen down the stairs while drunk, and broken his neck. He had signed and signed and signed the Pledge, but it never came to anything; and nobody was surprised to hear about the broken neck. It was a shame, but that’s the way it goes. The broken neck (‘snapped cleanly,’ they said, ‘snapped in two, like a twig’) was in May: now, in October, there was a touch of the merry widow about Mrs Saunders, so they said. She had never looked sad, though, not even for a minute in May.
‘And poor Mr Riegler,’ who had survived two wars, in spite of his German ancestry, by dint of being the greatest royalist in Deptford. They had smashed every single one of his windows, a score of times: he kept the glazier in business; he opened up again, a score of times, and an outsize Union Jack hung over his shop counter.
‘Where was he?’
‘Propping up the bar. Not too drunk, this time. I’ve seen him flat on his back, poor man. We saw the whole of Deptford tonight,’ she declared, ‘and every last one of them drunk.’ She paused. ‘The letters are flying around.’ The kettle sang in a cloud of steam, and Dad took it off the hob. ‘Flying through the air. Oh well, at least they put us first. We’re first on a list, somewhere, isn’t that nice.’
‘Sweetheart,’ said his dad.
‘We’re not moving.’
*
Cities in the sky, they were promised.
The brochures had arrived on the doormat a few weeks after the letters. They were promised cities in the sky: balconies and views, air and light, panoramas of the Thames and London and the whole wide world. The Eiffel Tower, if the air was clear enough. Hot water, central heating, fitted kitchens and the Formica that everybody talked about: it was all waiting for them. It was time to meet the future. All they had to do was say yes – and they wouldn’t have to lift a finger. Except to pick up the pen and sign on the dotted line. Just sign, and the County Council would do the rest.
No more outside toilets, was the lure. No more front doors that opened up onto the street. Who could say no to that?
Mum looked around her own kitchen, and her lip curled with distaste at the thought of what they were promising. An inside toilet was a disgusting thing. They had spent money on their outside toilet, converting it from a privy to something much better – and something more hygienic too, for who could live with a toilet in the next room, just standing there, under the same roof? That was the point. No, it was disgusting, she said, however you looked at it.
Someone had said, on the High Street, that if the Queen had an inside toilet, it perhaps couldn’t be too disgusting. Surely, this lady had said, surely if the Queen could settle herself comfortably and do her business on her inside toilet, maybe her gold toilet, up there at the Palace, surely that meant that they all could live with one?
‘The Queen will do as she pleases,’ was all his mum said in reply. She thought that this was disgusting too, that there were now two disgusting things going on. She didn’t like the idea of a toilet, sitting there in the middle of her house; and she didn’t want to have to think or talk about the Queen’s toilet habits. Did they have to talk about where and in what manner the Queen used her gold toilet?
‘It’s hardly gold, the Queen’s toilet,’ said his dad.
‘Lord’s sake,’ she said. ‘Can we please stop talking about toilets, for five minutes?’
And she didn’t want to live in the sky, either.
The letter gave them no choice, or hardly any choice – it was the sky, or nothing, that was the choice – but Mum told anyone who’d listen that this was England, they couldn’t just knock down your house while you were living in it, they hadn’t survived Hitler and the flying bombs only to see their front doors caved in with a wrecking ball. She had been just around the corner from the Woolworth’s at New Cross when the flying bomb hit it and did for, what was it, one hundred and fifty, two hundred people? – and that included some people she knew, some girls from primary school. And now, what, the English themselves were threatening to bulldoze her own house while she was sitting in it, having her cup of tea? The Nazis would be pleased to hear that, if there were any Nazis still about.
‘I don’t think they plan to bulldoze the house with us still in it, sweetheart,’ Dad said. ‘I don’t think that’s the plan, exactly.’
‘And what would I do, living up there in the sky? No,’ she said, ‘we’re stopping, and that’s flat.’
They had, in fact, been to view one such city in the sky, in the Pepys Estate. Nobody could point a finger and say that they weren’t open to ideas, to suggestions. They went. The shadow of the estate fell across the High Street these days. Slender, with balconies and windows – but too tall, and it loomed there, in the corners of all their eyes. It gave his mum, she said, trouble sleeping. ‘Just knowing it’s there.’ For John too it seemed to cast a shadow: across the neighbourhood, yes, but also across his mind. He could see this long shadow, slanting across his thoughts, by day, by night. There was a horror to the thing, it tied his mind and his imagination into a knot.
The lift moved up through the grey building: the colour reminded John of the shingle on the Thames beaches, when the tide was low. But lifeless: no strutting birds, no tidewrack, no white shells to lift the greyness; nothing up here. The lift stopped at last, on the sixteenth floor: it opened onto a narrow landing, with coloured doors spaced evenly beyond. The man from the County Council, who had maintained his silence through all sixteen floors, stepped out, stepped across, turned the key in a coloured door, pushed the door open. A small hall, and stairs – steep, narrow – and a big room, big windows, a balcony. A maisonette, with bedrooms upstairs. The view was wide, and bright. They all, mother and father and son, stepped back automatically from the windows.
The room looked east, across flatness, to a distant emptiness. London stretched below them: Greenwich and its park, the grey line of the widening Thames with its wharves and its sheds, and in the distance, grey fields, an expanse of sky, a hem of sea-brightened horizon.
To John, the view and the immensity vibrated with desolation. How was she expected to deal with this? He turned to her, composing his face; beside him, the little lines around his father’s eyes had vanished as his eyes widened. His mother’s face was set – in shock, perhaps, or anger, or (he thought, later) a premonition of loss and loneliness. Before any of them could speak, however, the man from the council spoke.
‘Of course, we wouldn’t house you here. Not in Pepys. It’s full up, already. No, you’d be housed in Charlton or somesuch,’ he went on, ‘where there’s capacity.’ He truly was oblivious to the expression on her face, on all their faces. ‘Far away from here,’ he said, and John watched as she gazed out at the wide view of river and city and sky.
The wind hissed, up here.
‘Would we all be housed in Charlton?’ she asked him.
‘All?’
‘The rest of us, the rest of us who live in Deptford now.’
‘Not all of you, no. It would depend upon resources.’ He paused, and then added smoothly, ‘The ones who returned the letters, they’ve been allocated places here, of course. First come, first served, is the way it works, really.’
John turned on a tap, and hot water and steam came out.
‘Turn that off,’ she told him, above the hissing sound. He turned it off; the taps clanked and groaned and fell silent.
‘Better than the little places you live in now,’ the man from the council said. ‘Dark, and no view, and outside toilet. Much better in a place like this. Look at that view.’
Toilets again, and his mum closed her eyes.
Later, at home, they talked about the letters doing the rounds. There had been other letters, was the talk, letters written by people on Giffin Street, complaining about the damp and the rats and the sewage, the bl
ack beetles and the dirt. Their children were sick, the letter-writers complained, and rats scuttled across the counterpanes as people slept in their beds. You have to help us, the letter-writers complained, you have to help our sick children.
But that was Giffin Street. Giffin Street was a black hole: you couldn’t say that one street stood for the whole of Deptford. Which was what the council was doing.
It was criminal. They were cooking up a conspiracy.
‘They want to plan the future,’ his dad said, and his mum said, looking across her neat house: clean carpet, tidy room shining with brass and tinkling with china, three-piece suite with its starched antimacassars, warm stove with tongs and shovel and poker, ‘But there’s nothing wrong with the future right here.’
The house had foundations in the actual ground. In the earth.
John thought about the city in the sky. They were going there, he knew.
6
Soon afterwards, at the end of autumn, Harry and his family left. Not for a city in the sky, but for somewhere else again: for a semi-dee in Beckenham. ‘Leafy Beckenham,’ Harry’s mum said, gaily. His father had a promotion, they were moving on, they were moving up, they were glad to leave. Soon afterwards again, the word went up and down the High Street that the first houses would be coming down. In Giffin Street, and in Adelaide Street, which was a little bit further away – but soon, the demolitions began and crept nearer. In Regina Road, another family left; then another, and then another. The windows of the empty houses and their front doors were fitted with corrugated sheeting; soon, half the street was boarded up. The street lights went out, and the services stopped.
‘They’re starving us out,’ said his mum.
The ice provided some relief, for a few weeks. Nothing happened in ice-frozen London for a little while: no pressure, no building, no more families packing their boxes and departing. John slipped and slid along Regina Road, and along to the river, and watched the skaters and the sleds, and the piled ice. The Quaggy was solid too, and the grey, coarse sand and shingle were slicked with ice. This was the last winter, he knew. He stood and watched the skaters in the blue-lit air, and watched his breath smoke, and then he went home to darkening Regina Road. This was it.
*
John sat on the stairs, his long legs bent, and listened. His father saw a way to make money from this city in the sky. They were building over Lewisham way, he said, and they needed hands and men. And he needed to make some money.
Mum threw a china cup against the wall. Her Royal Albert, with the pattern of red roses.
When his father started over at Lewisham, he and Mum didn’t speak for a week. A few more families moved out in the course of that same week; and a little pool of something shit-smelling gathered in a dip in the road; the sewers on Regina Road, they said, were no longer being maintained. They liked their outside privies, they were perhaps saying up at the council: so, let them live with privy smells right on the street. That would show them. They might not like these smells so much after a couple of days.
After a week of this, the silence was broken – by Mum, who baked a special pie, apple, with a dusting of cinnamon from the market, and crisp, buttery pastry; and Dad came home, and kissed her hand; and that was that. After another week, they went over to Lewisham on the bus, John and his mum, and walked over to where the city was rising into the sky. Hammering and scaffolding, ploughed, bare earth, yellow lorries and dust in the air; and the beginnings of another shadow – still fitful for now, but John could see the shape it would presently assume, a skeleton growing its flesh slowly, inexorably, and the lean and stretch of it, and the coarsening shadow growing across Lewisham’s hills.
‘Up there,’ the foreman said, ‘but you can’t go any closer.’
They stood and watched. His mum pulled at her headscarf, and buttoned and unbuttoned her spring coat.
*
‘What’s the first thing you can remember?’ Stella asked. Mildred’s was filling now – the usual crowd, and the dark air filling too with smoke, and voices, and the music would be beginning soon – but the crowd seemed to sense the need to give him some space, to keep away for a while.
She liked such opening gambits, such starters: who knew where they might lead? He didn’t know, he said, but she pushed him. Well, he said, what about you? – and she told him about a garden, and a picnic, all wicker and red gingham, and a race, and horses.
‘You’re making that up. Gingham, for God’s sake, you’re having me on.’
She turned to face him, on the quivering, jelly-surfaced banquette. ‘A picnic. Wicker,’ she said, ‘and gingham, and the races later. And probably I was wearing some sort of straw hat and making a daisy chain, though that I can’t remember for certain. But all the rest of it is true. A certain kind of English person does actually live like that, you know.’
‘With a nanny? Were you making a daisy chain with Nanny?’
‘No,’ Stella said, ‘not with Nanny. Nanny had kicked the bucket by then. Mummy had her sent to the knacker’s yard. Poor Mummy, she had to make the sandwiches herself at that stage. Imagine, shelling the eggs herself. The slumming of it. Mincing the cress, imagine,’ she added.
That was how they began talking about memory, about memories, in the smoky darkness at Mildred’s. About this memory, and that one. Gingham and picnics and daisy chains; and the Pepys Estate, and the flat on the sixteenth floor. And their first memories.
‘Your turn,’ said Stella, and he told her about the Thames foreshore at Deptford, and the branches bleached white, and the shingle and tidewrack and smell of salt, and the glossy brass knockers in the shape of salmon and dolphins, on the glossy doors of Regina Road.
‘All gone now,’ he said. In the darkness, she took his hand.
‘In thee, O Lord,’ he said, ‘have I put my trust,’ and Stella squeezed his hand a very little. For she had been brought up in the same way: the rhythms and the words, the liturgy and the stained glass gleaming on a Sunday morning. Little enough he had to explain to Stella – or so he sometimes felt. She seemed to know it all already. She seemed able to look through him, as through glass, the clear sort, and to bring the light shining through.
She was his last hope, as he later realised, and his best hope.
And yet.
They could quote the liturgy to one another all they liked, and feel pleased with this thought of their childhood selves bathed in the very same stained-glass glow of yellow and red, of the ties that were binding them together from afar—
And yet: there were certain thoughts that must remain unspoken, certain memories that must remain unarticulated. Stella had access to his heart, but only to a little bit of it.
Was she beginning to see this? Perhaps she was. She had given him access – to her heart, to her name. Was she beginning to see that there was an imbalance? Perhaps she was. But how could he talk about protruding bones, how could he talk about the dreams he still had, that he would always have, of white bones on a grey ground?
He would have to pour it into his work.
Surely she would understand.
*
The tower was clad in the same grey material as Pepys, something that was neither stone nor concrete. A sort of composite, he understood later, once he had learned the word. A sort of forcing together, a mixing of material to produce a greyness. There were winking glints embedded within: what looked like minute pieces of broken glass, and crushed specks of something white – seashells, perhaps. But the greyness dominated, overcoming the glinting glass and the hells. A grey shading to a light brown – and ugly, however you might look at it.
He stood, and forced himself to imagine the place in a different light, under a frosty winter sky, under a perfect sunrise. Surely he could capture such a scene, give it a new life on a piece of paper. But – no, there was no way to change this place. The glint in the composite faded away. The grey, fading to brown, was not the sort of shade to change itself.
They had travelled over from De
ptford on the top deck of an unaccustomed bus. His mother was wearing a light spring coat – the air was fresh, there was blue in the sky, but a shower might make an appearance, later – and she had on her street face. Which was what he called it, taking a cue from his dad, who laughed at his mum’s street face and her house face. ‘Stop it, Alfred,’ she would say, as she practised her face in the glass at the foot of the stairs, before stepping up to the Prince Regent on a Saturday night. She would smile a practice smile, and then glance over her own shoulder. ‘I’m only—’ ‘Putting your best foot forward, Dorothy. I know, love. Come on, now, chop chop.’ And out they would go into the lamplight on Regina Road, and a little puff of cold air would come in. ‘Take your time,’ his gran used to say. ‘We’re in no hurry to see you again. Are we, John?’
This was the face, today, as they left Deptford behind, and the hills rose and fell as the bus travelled south towards Lewisham. She had a job to do, today, and so did he.
And what now? He was a hale and energetic seventeen-year-old, as everyone was telling him nowadays, with his whole life in front of him, and the city in the sky, in Lewisham or Charlton or somewhere else, would be just a short period, a year or a couple of years, they said, before he pressed on into life and into London – but it was all he could do to keep his countenance, to turn to his mum with a smile. A big smile. That was his public face too.
‘Look at the size of this place.’
It was impressive if you could only take a step back, take it all in. The machinery, the men, the scale of the works. And this just one of many such operations now being duplicated all across London. The money being spent, and the materials being trucked and shipped, and the whole machine at work, pounding and sawing and humming. The people being shifted around, as though they were goods on a lorry, or a boat, by the hundreds and thousands. It was – if you could only step back – truly spectacular. And he could step back: there was a piece of him that was able to understand the ambition that lay behind all this.
