Once upon a time in Chinatown

by Robert Ronsson

  ‘— and he couldn’t be there in person—’

  ‘—they said it had to stay blank.’

  ‘It’s not a problem though, is it, Mum? It won’t stop me getting an ID card.’

  She shook her head and smiled but her eyes were sad. ‘No. It’s not a problem, son.’

  She applied at the post office for my British Visitor’s Passport, which was basically a fold-out card with my name and picture in it, and I went on the school trip, a free-lunch oik on the coach to Dover with the other boys ragging me as they compared their fancy holdalls to my scruffy suitcase.

  In France, I stood on the promenade overlooking one of the beaches imagining a place at the high-tide mark where my dad was killed. No doubt he was leading a platoon like in the war comics. ‘Come on, lads. We’re outnumbered but we’ll make the Jerries sorry they ever stood in our way.’ The rat-a-tat-tat of fire from a hidden machine gun zig-zagged across the imagined page. ‘We’re caught in cross-fire! Aaargh!’ He stumbled forward and down.

  I picked my way across pebbles to the place where I imagined he fell. The stones thinned out and waves lapped up to dark sand. A line of pollution foam marked the water margin and bubbled like the tissue in an open chest wound. It wasn’t a picture in a comic book anymore.

  I was alone in the house in Aquinas Street. Earlier that September Sunday morning, I had walked to the middle of Hungerford Bridge with the plastic urn the undertakers had delivered. The river carried the zest-fresh scent of the sea and the sun, spying on me from between fluffy clouds, was still low over the skeletons of the new buildings at Canary Wharf. The wafting breeze came from behind and I upturned the container so that Mum’s ashes cascaded, in a grey, gritty shower, onto the turbulent water below. The heavier stuff went straight to the fishes, but the powder settled as a surface scum and, softly singing Mum’s favourite song Waterloo Sunset, I followed its progress towards Waterloo Bridge. I was hardly more than mouthing the final words, As long as I gaze on Waterloo sunset, I am in paradise, as the lace-thin membrane dispersed. I turned for home. A mass of dark cloud churned over Vauxhall Bridge to the south threatening the end of summer.

  Mum’s house – mine when probate was complete – was a two-bedroomed terrace. When it was new, it had probably been built for the sort of people who didn’t know how to use a bathroom and hung torn newspaper on a string in the backyard privy. The original upstairs box-room became the bathroom where Mum died.

  Downstairs was open-plan, one-room with a front door directly on the pavement. I’d had the partition walls removed in the early 80’s. The furniture was low, minimal, dominated by my television and the bookcase containing my video collection. I had cleared the things away after a late breakfast during which I’d read the colour supplement from the Mail on Sunday while eating eggs on toast. The coffee was strong and black.

  I loaded the dirty crockery into the dishwasher – the fitted kitchen was another part of my modernisation – before returning to the living room and, with a sigh, climbed the stairs. There was no stair gate to climb over. Up here, the house was stuck in 1977 – a time even before Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister. Mum couldn’t have dealt with change. The wallpaper was floral and curled at the corners. The skirting and dado rail were painted to create the illusion of woodgrain. The single light fitting had a slurried-pink, glass shade.

  The dust-must of heavy, brown furniture clogged my tubes and my mood flatlined in the gloom. I had charity-shopped her clothes, so the wardrobe and all the drawers of the chest save one were empty. The house-clearance dealer was coming to take her furniture away the next day and I’d arranged to take time off to be there. I couldn’t put it off again.

  I pulled out the drawer containing her personal papers and placed it on the stained mattress. The walls closed in and my eyes filled with tears. Rushing out, gasping for breath, with both hands holding the drawer, I leaned into the wall as I stumbled down the stairs. Safely at the bottom, once under the kitchen’s bright lights, I placed the drawer on the worktop. With my hands flat on the surface and my head bowed, I waited for my breathing to slow.

  There were three cardboard boxes – a shoe box that reached to the top and two that were shallower, wedged in to fill the base. Four smaller jewellery cases slid about on top. There were no loose papers or envelopes.

  I lifted out the jewellery cases, placed them on the work surface; which should I open first? In my imagination, Mum held my thin, childhood wrist and shifted my finger from one to the other. ‘Eeny-meeny-miney-moe. Catch a tigger by the toe…’ I plumped for the long narrow one. It was blue, its lid embossed in gold with the name of a jeweller I didn’t recognise. The resistance of the spring lid was enough to have prevented Mum from looking inside even if she had wanted to.

  A single strand of pearls lay on a blue velvet cushion. The jeweller’s name was repeated on the inside of the lid with a Bond Street address. I poked the beads with my forefinger and picked them up by the clasp. I knew there was a way of verifying genuine pearls and gently bit across the surface of a larger one. It was rough and grainy. Did this mean it was real or synthetic? Rebuking myself for knowing only half the test, I decided to have the necklace properly valued.

  I imagined my father in his army uniform – a smudge where his face should have been – standing behind my mother. She held her dark curls in a bunch to one side while he fiddled the two halves of the clasp together with his soldier’s fingers. It was an intimacy that was easy to picture but my father’s lack of identity made the scene fade, like in a movie when a scene dissolves into a drift of virgin snow.

  The second box was a garish red and, when I opened it, the lining was made of frayed white satin with no cushioning. I recognised the tracery of gold-coloured metal wound around a large red stone. It was the brooch Mum wore when we went to the pictures together. I had given it to her for her birthday when I was about ten. I’d saved up my pocket money and bought it at Woolworths. I had to swallow hard as I closed the box.

  Number three was more promising. It was navy-blue again, from the same jewellers as the necklace but this time the box was smaller, deeper. It revealed a pair of drop pearls on clasps similar but not identical to that on the necklace. A later purchase perhaps? No, I decided. This was the earlier present. My dad’s relationship with Mum would have been getting serious with the earrings. But the necklace cemented it.

  The fourth box was the clincher. If only Mum had shown it to me when I was a teenager. It was maroon leather with the words ‘Asprey’ and ‘London’ gold-embossed on the lid. Two rings nestled together in the opulent velvet as they might have looked on Mum’s finger. The plain gold wedding band snuggled up against a solitaire engagement ring with the stone offset to give the pair a singularity that explained why Mum had never worn either. The diamond ring would have looked odd, unfinished, without its partner. She never became a bride. If anything made me legitimate, surely it was these twin rings.

  The story of Mum’s relationship with Dad told in three items of jewellery. And the final piece – Asprey’s – never worn. I decided to take the rings and the pearls to a jeweller.

  It was probably the jewellery collection that prompted me to track down my father. I needed to know something about the man who had contributed half to make me and was so committed to my mother that he had married her in every possible way bar the ceremony. If only he hadn’t died on that Normandy beach.

  I set the jewellery cases to one side. Perhaps I wouldn’t sell the three expensive pieces. They were my proof of him until I reached a better understanding of who he was. I tossed the Woolworth’s trinket into the waste bin and lifted out the shoebox with the words Arding and Hobbs on the lid. I vaguely remembered a department store that was a short train ride from Waterloo on the Surrey line. Was it in Wimbledon? I had always thought the first name was ‘Harding’ and Mum adopted a Cockney accent and dropped the aitch whenever she talked about going there but, on the box, the name really was, Arding. A collection of black and whit
e photographs lay inside. We never had a photo-album. This was Mum’s equivalent.

  The earliest picture of me was a full-length studio portrait of mum holding a baby. I was struck by how dark her skin was alongside the white of my christening shawl. Obviously, I was aware from an early age that she was different to other mums, with her brown skin and recognisably African features. When she talked about her foundling origins, she guessed that her mother was probably white and felt she had no option but to abandon her mixed-race child. I could have gone through school as a darker, frizzier-haired version of the others, but for Mum’s appearance when she attended parent-teacher events.

  It was after the first of these that I was teased in the playground. The other kids tugged my hair, waggled their forefingers against their lips and called me a wog. The bullies were only satisfied when I burst into tears or lashed out at the nearest of them. The name-calling only stopped at the grammar when a teacher, trying to be helpful, admonished my classmates, ‘You shouldn’t call Cross a Wog, you know, chaps. The letters ‘W’, ‘O’ and ‘G’ stand for “Worthy Oriental Gentleman”. Young Cross here is of African descent. Your name for him only emphasises your ignorance.’ It didn’t take long for them to come up with an alternative: Sambo.

  The new nickname stuck and the boys would have said that they used it affectionately but, when one of them shouted, ‘Oi, Sambo!’ across a crowded bus, it didn’t feel that way.

  Flicking through the other photographs, I found the earliest I remember being taken. It was of me standing in the back yard swamped inside my first infant school uniform. Mum must have stood in front of the kitchen door, wearing her housecoat, hunched over a Kodak Box Brownie, shielding the viewing screen from the sun with the curled palm of her left hand. A hand bare of rings.

  One Christmas, in my early teenage years, Mum gave me a sleek modern Brownie 127 with its eye-level view-finder. The holiday snaps of Mum – some with Aunty Millie – in Shanklin on the Isle of Wight or on the beach at Brighton, were taken by me using that camera. Aunty Millie – this was the first time I’d thought of her for ages – was Mum’s best friend from the cosmetics factory and in the snaps she appeared as vivacious and attractive as I remember. I blushed, recalling that, when I was thirteen or fourteen, I had a crush on her even though she must have been at least twice my age. She died the week England won the World Cup. Cancer. She was thirty-something and I was twenty-one.

  Mostly though, the snaps recorded my achievements: the primary school nativity; the grammar school drama productions; receiving the sixth form essay prize. There was one of me in my first suit – brown with flared trousers – that I wore the day I started at Scotia Mutual aged 17. I did the sums. I’d worked in the same building for the same company for something like 28 years. The pictorial record continued to skitter across the high points in my life, never dipping down into the murk of its lows.

  What to do with these pictures? As I tossed them back into the shoe box, I thought that I might compile the album that should have been. The one I could have placed on Mum’s lap and coaxed her, ‘Here, Mum. Look at this. Perhaps you’ll remember. Can you remember Millie?’

  The flat boxes next. They were both tray-shaped and one layer deep. The first had a reproduction of The Haywain on the lid, the other The Blue Boy; my mother’s life in chocolate-box clichés.

  The Haywain contained correspondence from a solicitor that alluded to Mum’s purchase of this house in 1948 when I was three. The original purchase price was smaller than my monthly salary today. Its ownership now made me worth over half a million pounds.

  I made a mental note to look for the deeds to the house. I was going to need them for title to be transferred. Perhaps the solicitor in the letterhead would know their whereabouts – provided the firm still existed forty-plus years on.

  A paragraph in one of the letters shone out as if it were marked by a celestial highlighter. It told Mum that, the third-party funds making up the bulk of the completion monies have been transferred into our client account and we are ready to proceed on your confirmation that you wish us to finalise the purchase. Who was this ‘third-party’? Was my father’s family involved in financing the house? If so, why weren’t they involved in my later life?

  The last box, The Blue Boy, was mine. Obviously. It must have been the one she looked in when we needed my birth certificate for the school trip. There it was on top. The gaps where my father’s name and signature should have been might as well have carried the word ‘bastard’. School reports tracked my undistinguished academic life from ‘happy and bright’ primary to ‘must try harder’ and ‘could do better’ at the local grammar.

  From beneath the thin layers of school certificates and cub and scout achievements, the yellowing edge of a white card peeked out. With the tentative fingers of an archaeologist lifting an artefact, I nudged aside the papers of later years and revealed the shiny finish of a certificate that Mum had never shown me. Its heading was a picture of Christ with children gathered around the hem of his robe. The caption was: Suffer little children to come unto me. Further down, beneath the heading Baptismal Certificate, the gold, gothic text read: This certifies that (my name was handwritten in black ink) was this 11th March 1945 BAPTISED by me in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, and is thus acknowledged as a member of the Church, to be brought up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. Place and date of birth: Clapham, London. January 10th, 1945. Minister: The Revd. John Maley (or Haley? The signature wasn’t clear.) Mother: Estelle Cross. Father: Anthony Kellie-Smith (Deceased).

  For the first time since Mum died, my breathing stalled and then surged up in a choking cry of misery and elation. Dad had a name.

  3

  On the Friday after I learned Dad’s identity, the sales guys and I went out to lunch to celebrate the previous month’s record production. They had given the girls a bottle of bubbly each before we left for the blue-smoke fug of the Golden Fleece. We’d reserved a table and before long I was digging into sausages and mash and knocking back a pint of Young’s bitter.

  As was usual with these events I sat apart with Peter Dell. We’d joined Scotia as trainees at roughly the same time and he’d negotiated the route into sales while I’d stayed on the clerical side. Right from those early days, I felt most comfortable in his company. His kindly eyes and gentle manner were so unlike the rugger-bugger aggression of the others, which reminded me of the torments I had suffered at school.

  The other salesmen were posturing and jabbing, like cocks in a fighting pit, as they debated the cases for and against Britain joining the European Exchange Rate Mechanism. In the calm of our table, between mouthfuls of gammon, egg and chips, Peter was emphasising how important one of his brokers called Alvie Sessions was to Scotia Mutual and how his end of year bonus depended on my department’s ability to speed the final three months’ business through the administration process.

  I took a deep swig of ale. ‘Do you mind if we talk about something other than business?’ I asked.

  He nodded and his posture shifted as if to encourage confidence. I could see why Peter was so successful. He not only listened; he gave every effort to the act of listening.

  ‘You come from a military background, don’t you?’

  ‘Why d’you say that, old chap?’

  ‘You’ve mentioned your Dad’s medals in the past – from World War Two.’

  He put down his knife and fork and frowned. ‘Yes, my father was in the Life Guards – his father and his uncle too.’

  I nodded. ‘I thought I’d remembered.’

  ‘Father was in the second show, Gramps bought it in the first.’ He took a swallow of beer to wash down the food. ‘They both got gongs.’ He adjusted his tie. While the others went for the paisley-patterned, wide sort, Peter’s were always narrow, striped – regimental.

  ‘Is your dad alive?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Father has a place in Cobham.’

  ‘He got through the war, then.’
Now I had the opening. ‘My father was killed.’

  ‘Really?’ He wiped a piece of bread around his plate.

  ‘Yes. D-day. On the beaches.’

  ‘That was a tough show, old chap.’ His brow furrowed. ‘You must have been a baby.’

  ‘Conceived. But not born.’ It was a phrase I had dreamt up in my teens but perhaps this was the first time I’d said it aloud.

  ‘You never saw him? Rough business. And now your mother…’ He looked at me with a new appreciation. ‘But you’ll have his campaign medals to remember him by.’

  ‘No nothing. Mum didn’t keep anything. Perhaps his parents did.’

  ‘He’ll be on the Honour Roll though. The army doesn’t forget its fallen comrades.’

  ‘Honour Roll?’

  ‘In the Public Records Office.’

  Armed with my knowledge of the existence of the Honour Roll and my dad’s name from my Baptismal Certificate, the following Tuesday lunchtime I stood outside the Gothic frontage of the Public Records Office with the London traffic bustling behind me. The building was a strange mix of styles. At the lower levels, the mullioned windows and complicated corners and buttresses brought the Houses of Parliament to mind. But, when I looked up, squinting against the sun, the cupolas and towers looked as if they’d been imported from a Rajah’s palace in colonial India. It reminded me of pictures I’d seen of Victorian railways stations in far-flung corners of the Empire.

  I followed the signs for the search office and entered an anteroom. A polished teak counter top extended across from the left-hand wall to a doorway on the right. Scuffed linoleum covered the floor. The base of the counter and the walls and window frames were painted in governmental green. The door through to the room beyond the counter was marked ‘No entry without authorisation.’

  The indifference that seeped from the walls settled around me. The anteroom would not have been out of place in 1984 and I shared Winston Smith’s despair. On the other side of the counter there sat two desks, the type my schoolteachers had used twenty-five years before, and two similar desks carrying microfiche machines. None of the four chairs was occupied.