by Peter Rimmer
To Len, it had always seemed in England as if everyone was doing something for somebody else. Like bringing in the raw rubber on the Runnymede. In the very old days, people ate what they grew. They hunted for their meat. Caught fish for themselves. Picked the blackberries and mushrooms from the fields. Len thought there would have been more satisfaction in that kind of life. Fewer arguments. People would not have been able to cheat each other so easily.
He would have preferred to see the shrimp boats come in under sail as they had once done when he was a small boy. Or had his father told him about the sails? He had not thought about his father for a long time. He wondered why Germans had killed his father and why his father had gone out to kill Germans. He was sure none of the soldiers had anything personal against each other. Not at the beginning. Before they started shooting others dead.
For five minutes he looked for a round flat stone to bounce over the water of the river. Finally, he gave up. Stones were rare in the black mud at the edge of the water. One of his brothers had said there were more stones in the Welsh bank of the river. He could not remember which brother. None of them had ever been to Wales in their lives.
It was time to go home.
No one was interested in where he had been. Tim and John were home. Len had dawdled as long as he could before letting himself in the back gate. The washing had gone but the wooden pegs were still on the line.
“The water was too cold. Shrimps don’t like cold water.” He had not seen Tim for two years and this was his greeting.
“That’s bad luck. How are you?”
“Bloody fishin’ don’t pay. No room on boat for you, Len. Don’t think of trying to come with us.” John the elder of the two had a shifty look. His right eye wandered off which made him look shifty.
“Thanks for the lunch, Mum.” He gave her back the empty box.
“You all want to go down pub?” he asked them all, remembering his seven pounds.
“Closes in an hour,” said Tim.
“Get down a couple.”
No one seemed interested. Tim and John were wearing long trousers attached to thick braces that ran up over their shoulders. Neither of them had on a shirt. They had washed off the saltwater and put on trousers. Neither wore shoes. They were like ugly strangers to him.
“You’re too late for supper,” said his mother.
“Anyone hear from our Jenny?” It was the only thing in common he could think of on the spur of the moment. Strange the boys did not want a drink.
“She’s in Rhodesia. Nursin’.” His mother had spoken.
“Does she write?”
“Not much point when I can’t read. That no-good Cousin Mildred gone too, so they say. With ’er bastard. Good riddance to bad rubbish, I say.”
With a deep shock, Len remembered holding Cousin Mildred naked in the bed that was soaked with her fever sweat. He remembered the doctor who had made her well. The doctor had been old and kind. The little boy’s name was Johnny. After Johnny Lake who had died in the war before his son was born.
“Excuse me,” he said to them all.
Upstairs in his room, he packed everything back into his duffel bag. He was crying again for Mildred. And for himself. He kept the boots on and went downstairs. Nobody noticed the duffel bag over his shoulder. He kissed his mother on her red-blotched face. He had wiped the tears from his eyes before coming downstairs.
“I’ll get something to eat in the pub,” he said to them. No one even looked at him as he went out of the front door.
The next day he went back to the docks to look for a ship that was going to Africa. He had not gone home. He had not gone to the pub. He had walked back to the field where the cows were still gone and laid himself down under the oak. By the time he fell asleep, plans for his future were formulating.
When the sun had come up Len was full of hope. He had made up his mind to go to Africa while sitting under the oak. The squirrel had gone.
He was hungry and very happy. As if his life had just begun.
He soon found out Liverpool was not the port to look for a ship that would take him to Africa. That the Runnymede rounding the Cape with a cargo of raw rubber was an exception. They told him to go down south. To Southampton.
With the strength of his mind, he wanted to see Cousin Mildred again. He had saved her life. She had not died of pneumonia. There was a bond.
Instead of wasting money on a train ticket he made for the road and hitched a ride in a truck. He could smell the fish in the truck. The fish were packed in ice.
It took Len four days to get to Southampton. Always he slept under a hedge. It had not rained in the night and during his journey.
Len found a cheap room. Every day he went down to the port looking for a berth. In his pocket, he carried the discharge papers signed by the captains of the Runnymede and the Matilda. With them were certificates of character. Both captains had said his character was good. It was just a matter of time before he found himself a ship.
His family had made him turn his back. It was not his fault. He would have liked to say more to his mother. With a sharp pang in his heart, he knew he would never see her again. All that pain she had been through for him and he would never see her again. He was not sure what was worse: being a bad mother, or being a bad son. Then he had remembered the lunch box on the scrubbed white kitchen table and felt even more terrible. He wanted more from life than pain and feeling terrible. He wanted to be happy. His family in Neston were not happy. He sadly wondered to himself if they ever would be happy. Whether they would ever see the point of life.
The days dragged into weeks, and still Len Merryl could not find a berth on a ship that would take him to Africa. They all wanted crew for round trips or discharge in the Far East. He thought of buying himself a passage but was jealous of his seven pounds.
The money began to dwindle as July came and went. He was strangely content.
Merlin St Clair felt comfortable. He had never felt so comfortable. Esther had left Mickleham at the end of August and came up to London. Merlin had taken a thirty-year lease on a small flat for them and given Esther a housekeeping allowance. It was like a marriage though they were not married and Merlin did not spend every night in the small flat. He had allowed Esther to choose her own furniture and curtains and though much of it was not to his taste, it made Esther happy. When Esther was happy all three of them were happy, which was all the time. The strangest thing to him was Genevieve loved her father. Merlin had never been loved by anyone before. Never been told before.
She sat at his feet or on the side of the bed he shared with her mother and looked at him with the same strange eyes that looked back at her. It was as if they both knew what was going on inside the other one. The child liked to listen to what he had to say. Merlin liked a good listener. Merlin was willingly taken in by his daughter.
Esther, aware of the alternatives in her life, was happy to play second fiddle to an eight-year-old. She liked the flat in Chelsea. She liked the River Thames flowing down below at fifty yards from her bedroom window. She liked being lazy. She liked not having to think what was going to happen to them.
At twenty-six she was too fat for some men. Her large breasts hung lower. Her face was red, the cheeks more pronounced. She did not have the energy to make herself attractive to men as she had done in her teens when it was all new. The arrangement suited her, especially the days when Merlin stayed at his Park Lane flat and she could be alone without having to smile and pretend all the time. She had not been to the Park Lane flat and did not wish to go there. Any more than she wished to mingle with his upper-class friends. Not that his friends would have talked to her. She even giggled at the thought. They were bigger snobs than Merlin.
“This is my friend Esther. The mother of my child. She was the barmaid at the Running Horses at Mickleham. During the war, she married a corporal…” All said with his eyeglass screwed into his one dark eye and staring at them, daring them to say anything. Every time, the thought ma
de Esther go into giggles or peals of laughter.
They lived a quiet life, and that was fine by Esther. When he visited, she had the supper ready. She never complained. He could do what he liked. He paid the rent and gave her enough money to buy their food and clothes and once in a while go to a musical on her own. The flat was quite safe for Genevieve for a few hours the child was left alone.
What Merlin did not know and would never be told by Esther was the act put on by their daughter was more monumental than her own. They both liked being kept. They acted their parts. They paid for their supper. Or, as she told her one friend Joan who visited from Lambeth in the East End each time they were alone, “It’s a job, ducks. A job. Better than a whore. Better than a wife. Needs doing well. Let him feel he is the most important sod on earth and he’ll do what you want. Sick I was of the drunks in the Running Horses’ bar. Tell you, Joan, every man’s a pain in the arse drunk. Pain in the arse when they’re not drunk but that’s another story. Fact is, Merlin is not unkind. Never raises his voice. Never hits me. Likes to cuddle with the lights out more than fuck.”
“You going to ’ave another kid by ’im?”
“Not bloody likely. That Genevieve is more trouble than a pack of monkeys. You know what she did last week? Brought ’ome a cat. In comes Father. Cat sees Father and jumps out the bloody window. Now you ’ave a look, Joan. It’s two storeys up. Never seen the cat again. Hit the lawn down there runnin’ it did. Animals don’t like Merlin. Only owls, he says. Only owls.”
“It’s that funny eye of his.”
“You can say that again.”
“Gives me the creeps.”
“Wasn’t so bad when I first met ’im.”
“Should think not.”
“Want another gin?”
“Never say no to someone else’s gin… Where is Genevieve?”
“Down by the river. Likes feeding them ducks. Got ’er father around her little finger, she ’as.”
“Maybe she loves ’im.”
“You think so?”
“If she don’t, she’s a bloody good actress.”
“She says to me it’s a game.”
“Pullin’ both your legs, I’d think… Just look at ’em together. Peas in a pod. Not even the devil would say they weren’t father and daughter. I felt a bit jealous, Esther. No one loved me like that before.”
“Well, I never. Life really is a strange thing.”
“You never know what’s in another person’s head. Even a kid’s head.”
Genevieve saw life at the level of her mother’s belly button. Which was once a week when the tub in what was called the bathroom was filled with hot water from the kitchen. They both took a bath in the same water. The water was heated on the kitchen stove. The flat they lived in was old. The even older flats, her mother had told her, had a tin tub they put in the middle of the kitchen floor to have a bath. Genevieve thought the older flats were more sensible. Not so far to hump the hot water. Her father told her his other flat had running hot water, whatever that was. The idea of hot water running around the house gave Genevieve an even weirder view of her father. When she looked at the top of his trousers she wondered if her father even had a navel. She thought of asking her mother. The idea of asking her father never crossed her mind.
Her view of life had really started at Mickleham. The Running Horses was a small hotel and once she had heard a child tell her father that she loved him. The result had astonished Genevieve; the father, who the night before had hit the mother hard across the face and told her she was something called a bitch, dropped down on one knee and gazed into the girl’s face. The big, nasty man was crying he was so happy. Or so it seemed to Genevieve.
“Can I have a tricycle?” the little girl had asked, looking lovingly into the horrible face with the big whiskers and the tears.
“Of course you can, my darling.”
And so it was. The next day to Genevieve’s astonishment the little girl was riding around the parking lot on a bright red tricycle. It was all so wonderfully easy. The little girl was six years old.
When Genevieve was told she had a father who wasn’t dead, all she could see was that tricycle. At first, she had been shy with the man with the round piece of glass stuck over his eye. Tentatively, she had used the magic word ‘Daddy’ even before they went to live in London. She didn’t mind London as the river was nice to look at. There was a path along the side of the river that was flat. Just right for a tricycle. With excitement building up to burst she bided her time.
She was alone by the river with the man who liked to hold her hand while they both stared at the river. He was not wearing the piece of glass in his eye. The piece of glass when it was in his eye was the size of a penny. Her mother was nowhere to be seen. If it went all wrong, it would not matter.
“I love you, Daddy,” she said in her smallest voice, fluttering her eyes down to look at his big hand holding hers.
To Genevieve’s surprise and joy it worked. The man she called Daddy went down on one knee and looked adoringly into her face. With great effort, mental and physical, she managed to squeeze out a tear. Which made it happen. The man now at her head level was crying. Big tears were going down between the dark brown side whiskers that came to the line of his jaw. Almost holding her breath she went on with her plan.
“Can I have a tricycle?”
“Of course you can, darling. What colour would you like it to be?”
“Red, Daddy.” Then she flung herself at her father’s chest so he would not see the triumph in her eyes.
After that, it was the easiest game of her life. She followed him wherever he went when he came to the flat. Only the idea of finding a cat had been wrong. Even if she had taken the cat from a house down the river. After the cat jumped out of the window, she just fluttered her eyes at him and called him Daddy.
After the first time, she was careful not to tell him again that she loved him. Once was enough. Whatever she asked for she was given. She did not have to use the magic words again.
Life for Genevieve had never been more beautiful. What she liked most about the new game in her life was not having to do anything in return. Just make him feel she loved him whenever he came for a visit.
For a while, she wanted to ask her mother what the word ‘love’ meant. It was a very powerful word whatever it was so she kept it to herself. The red tricycle was perfect. So were the little red dresses he gave her that went with the red tricycle.
When she heard Aunty Joan ask her mother about another child, she went quite cold. Looking up from the lawn at the open window, she made up her mind. If another child came into her life, she would kill it. No one else was going to call her daddy, Daddy. To make her point clear, she got off her red tricycle and stamped her foot hard on the lawn. She had not even listened to the bit about the cat.
Getting back on the tricycle, she pointed it through the towpath and rode as fast as it would go across the lawn. A family of ducks jumped into the river as she passed. He was hers to get what she wanted. No one was going to interfere.
14
Journey Home, September 1922
By the end of September, the swallows were lining up along the telephone lines. Len Merryl had watched them from his rooftop room in Southampton while he waited for a ship to Beira. For days the small birds had been sweeping around the evening sky chasing the late summer insects.
The day Len signed up on the SS Corfe Castle the birds were twittering in a long line, their tails dipping up and down to keep their balance on the wire. The next day there was not a swallow in the English sky. Len sat in the window on his last night in England, lonely for the birds, wondering what had become of them.
“Gone to Africa, Len,” said his landlady in the morning when he made his goodbyes. She had been kind to him in the weeks of his waiting. “They’ll be in the Cape before you reach Beira. Most of them. The strong. By February they’ll be winging back to England. Now make sure you send me a postcard when you reach S
alisbury safe and sound.”
“How do you know all these things, Mrs Steadham?”
“I’m an old woman, Len Merryl. Since Andy died my company has been my tenants, young men like you. With dreams. Going out to the empire. They talked to a lonely old widow. One of them knew all about the swallows… All that way on a wing. Stuck in my mind. When they come back in the spring, I asked them how they’d been. Even when I’m sick in the cold winters, I think of the birds coming home. Gives me a purpose to live… Andy and I never had children, we didn’t. No, we never had no children… Now, you have a good life, Len Merryl. You go with my blessing. Don’t forget that. I’ll think of you on your journey as I think of them swallows. God bless you.”
At eleven o’clock that morning the SS Corfe Castle was due to sail. From Len’s vantage point on the upper deck, he could see it all. Late provisions were still coming up the lower gangplank, the porters hurrying up into the ship, pushing past other porters coming down. The gangplank to the first-class deck was still open. The brass band had been playing a medley of old tunes for half an hour. For some reason, the captain and officers were lined up at the entrance from the first-class gangplank looking down on the deck side. The hawsers fore and aft were still holding the ship to shore. Both funnels were making smoke. Len could smell the sulphur. They would need to swab the deck again at first light. The new worsted of his seaman’s sweater made his skin itch. He had forgotten to wash the new sweater before wearing it. To the passengers, Len leaning on his broom was invisible. The passengers saw passengers, never the crew. One of the prettiest girls Len had ever seen was standing at the rail ten yards away looking down at the last-minute commotion on the dockside. A part of the customs shed was wide open. A last pile of luggage came out on a trolley and was rushed to the lower gangplank. A man and two women came out of the shed and walked to the bottom of the first-class gangplank. The man let the older woman go first. Then the younger. Len guessed they were mother and daughter. Both had looked up to see where they were going and shown Len their faces. The man who was too young to be the father came up last. He was the last passenger to board the ship. He did not look up as if he knew where he was going.
