Noose

by Bill James

  ‘What’s the matter?’ he said.

  ‘A woman I don’t want to meet,’ she said.

  ‘Which woman?’

  ‘One I don’t want to see or speak to.’

  ‘Who? Why?’ Ian said.

  ‘She has no right to be here. It’s close to a disgrace.’

  ‘Why? The people here are only a crowd in the street. Anyone has a right.’

  ‘She shouldn’t be here. It’s insulting, and hurtful.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Insulting. Cheek.’

  ‘But who?’

  ‘We’re going.’ The woman who knew so much about hangings wanted to talk some more about them but Mrs Charteris said: ‘No time for that, I’m sorry. We have to leave – urgently.’

  The woman made a ‘hark-at-her!’ face. ‘I listened to you going on about your son, didn’t I?’ she replied. ‘Now if someone else wants to talk, nothing doing – so hoity-toity.’

  When his father came home from working on the sand dredger later in that day, Ian told him about the notice on the prison gate and the crowd. ‘But we couldn’t stay very long because Mum saw someone, a woman, who she didn’t want to meet.’

  ‘Who?’ his father asked, but he said it in a strange, weak sort of voice, as if he knew who, but had to ask, and had to pretend he didn’t know which woman.

  ‘Someone I didn’t want to see,’ his mother said. ‘You know who.’

  ‘Oh,’ Mr Charteris said.

  ‘I don’t know who it was,’ Ian said. ‘I couldn’t see. There were too many people.’

  ‘Your father knows who.’

  ‘Do you, Dad?’

  ‘You get all sorts at that kind of event I should think,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, all sorts,’ his mother said. ‘Absolutely all sorts.’

  She spoke like she was talking about muck. In the crowd this morning she’d said: ‘We’ll go now, Ian,’ and they went home on the tram. His mother wouldn’t talk any more about the hanging or the woman and in a while Ian gave up asking questions.

  FOUR

  That encounter with the hospital sister brought unpleasant memories of all this back to Ian, of course, and once he’d phoned over his story about Daphne West to the Mirror, he went home on the Underground and thought some more about those events of 1941. Obviously, the episode at the prison gates wasn’t something that could stand alone. What had led to the trial mentioned by his mother and to the hanging?

  What had led to them was the knife murder in the public air-raid shelter in the street where the Charteris family lived. It was still there, naturally, at the time of the execution. The war went on. They had walked past the shelter when they left the tram after that trip to the prison gates. But there had been no trouble like that in it since the terrible incident. These shelters were meant to keep people safe from bombs and anti-aircraft-gun shrapnel, not to get someone stabbed to death in. But this is how it had been.

  That night at the beginning of January 1941, up at the other end of the big public shelter, an argument had started between two men Ian did not recognize. Most of the people in the shelter were neighbours, but not these two. They stood face to face, close, too close – not like friends but full of hate, trying to stare each other out. Everyone else in the shelter sat on wooden benches around the walls. There’d be about ten in the shelter altogether, including the two men. Ian sat with his mother and his brother, Graham, and Clifford Hill from the house next door. Clifford was fifteen, older than Ian and Graham.

  Occasionally, Ian could pick out some words of the men’s argument above the big noise of bombs and anti-aircraft guns outside. The quarrel seemed to be about money and nothing to do with the German raid. Mr and Mrs Bell sat near them. Ian thought Mr Bell must have shut his chip shop on the corner of Barton Street when the bombs started. Ian and his friends called him Mr Chip Shop, but not to his face, out of respect. He would not want to stay open when bombs were near. All that glass in the shop windows could get smashed and pieces skim around. Most people put strips of brown paper on the windows of their house to try to stop the glass going into dangerous flying splinters if there was a blast from a bomb. But you could not do that with the big front window of a chip shop.

  Ian stared towards the arguing men. He couldn’t see them properly, but thought the way they spoke showed they definitely did not come from these streets. They were too old to be in the army, one about his father’s age, the other a little bit younger. The shelter had one central, poor, yellowy electric light. Smoke from burning houses drifted in through the shelter’s open doors at each end. Usually the street shelter smelled of pee because people would slip in there for one, out of sight of the houses. The bitter burning smell took over, though. Even pee that had been well soaked into the bricks during many months could not put up a fight against the stink of burning houses in the next street – timber, clothing, mattresses, sheets and blankets.

  Now and then the smoke almost hid the men. Ian thought sometimes they did not look real. They were like shadows or dark pictures of mysterious characters in one of his adventure books. They made him think of that unusual word, ‘looming’. He’d found it the other day in a story and liked the sound when he spoke it to himself, the double o and the m, nice and round, but also frightening. When something loomed it might not be nice at all. He could work out from the story what ‘looming’ meant – something quite big, not very clear and, maybe, dangerous would slowly appear. Every so often each of these men would loom out of the smoke and shadows.

  Near him on the bench, his mother watched them for a few minutes, then turned her head away. He could tell they frightened her – the sharp hate in their voices, but also poshness. She liked some poshness, but the men’s poshness seemed to hide very bad temper, and did not hide it very well. Mrs Charteris wanted to pretend they were not there, not even as shadows or pictures. She seemed more afraid of these two men than of the raid and Jerry bombs that whistled and screamed down and exploded outside. People said if you heard the whistle you’d be all right. It was the one you didn’t hear that would do you. This seemed to Ian just something people wanted to believe because, otherwise, the sound of the whist-ling could really scare you – you knew something was coming and you knew it couldn’t be far away or you wouldn’t hear it so well. The other thing was, how could you know whether people killed by the bomb had heard it coming or not? They couldn’t tell you. He’d noticed that grown-ups invented all kinds of tales to comfort one another now life had become dangerous, tales such as Hitler really liked the British and was only bombing them because he wanted to make Mr Churchill ask for peace and a meeting and then everything would be OK. Maybe they’d divide France up between them.

  Ian, his mother, his younger brother, Graham, and Clifford from next door, had run to this big, public street shelter because they did not like it on their own in the house as the raid and the whistling and explosions went on and got worse. Their metal Anderson shelter was flooded. It had been sunk into a shallow back garden pit and always flooded after a lot of rain. Although his mother had wanted the company in the Barton Street shelter, now she must think these two men were a new danger, extra to the Blitz. She put her face close to Ian’s and whispered, ‘Just ignore them.’ He heard it all right. A pause had come in the din of the bombs and guns.

  Maybe she thought that if the men saw Ian looking at them, and noticing how they loomed, they would forget their argument and turn on him, although just a kid. She’d think they would not like his curiosity. His mother could be like this sometimes. She believed that if you did not take any notice of something bad it might go away, like the bird that buried its head in the sand and thought it couldn’t be seen because it couldn’t see. Mothers were stupid sometimes. Mothers got very frightened. They needed to be looked after,

  Of course, the bombs sounded bad and you had to take notice of them, and the sight and harsh smell of burning in the next street, and the glass bits under their feet from blown-out windows as they ran to the st
reet shelter from the house. But these two men – they might get tired of arguing if people ignored them. Or, if the pause in the bombing outside went on, perhaps they would leave the shelter and try to get somewhere else, such as to the pub or a lane where they could fight if they wanted to, and one of them did sound as though he wanted to fight.

  Graham sat on the other side of their mother, his face turned in against the top of her arm, as if he wanted to sleep or hide. He was seven. Clifford Hill sat next to Ian. Clifford was with them for a special reason. When the bombing started, he had been by himself in the Hills’ house. His mother and father had gone out to see Down Argentine Way at the Regent this evening, a cinema sometimes called the Bug and Scratch. Clifford had seen it already and he hadn’t wanted to go again.

  When the bombing got worse and very close, he had become scared in their house by himself. Their Anderson had flooded, too. So did everybody’s. Clifford began yelling, to see if anyone was in the Charteris house. Ian, Graham, and their mother had crawled for shelter under the big wooden kitchen table, and just sat there on the mat. In a quiet few minutes, Mrs Charteris got out from under the table, unbolted the kitchen door to the back garden and shouted to Clifford to come in if he wanted to. Clifford climbed over the wall between the two gardens and the three made room for him under the table after his mother had bolted the door again.

  Ian’s father would be on his way home by train from Newport after a day’s sand dredging on the boat in the Bristol Channel. A lot of sand was needed these days for street air-raid shelters, runways for planes and pillbox defence posts. Mrs Charteris said the train would most likely be stuck somewhere because of the raid. His father had told them to get under the kitchen table if the Anderson was no good and a bad raid came. But, after a while, when the bombing seemed to go on and on, his mother said it might be better to be with other people. And there was not really enough room under the table for four if the raid lasted a long time. The public shelter stood quite near, on what used to be a grass island in the middle of Barton Street.

  They got out from under the table and, when there was some peace for a few minutes outside, his mother opened the front door and the four of them hurried to the big shelter. Kids had drawn love hearts with boys’ and girls’ names in them when the cement was still wet on the outside of the shelter a few months ago. Ian had liked the idea that those hearts would stay there until the end of the war and the shelter was torn down, unless it had a hit before then. The kids liked to think the love hearts and what they meant would last longer than just drawing hearts with chalk on an ordinary wall. Ian hadn’t done a love heart because he was a bit too young to have the kind of girlfriend whose initials he wanted with his own in cement.

  Searchlights swung about in the sky, hunting the bomber planes for the guns to shoot at. He thought that in peacetime these lights would have been very exciting and pretty, but now he had the feeling they were just useless. They never seemed to find Jerry. Although the anti-aircraft guns boomed and boomed, they might be firing anywhere into the darkness, hoping they’d get the enemy by luck. Houses on fire in the next street, Larch Street, lit up Ian’s own street – a strange yellow, red and blue light, with black smoke at its edges. Everybody knew that if the bombs made a fire it would be seen through the blackout by the next gang of German pilots tonight, who’d use it for a target.

  As they reached the shelter, Ian heard a cracking sound, then a funny rushing, roaring, and he thought this must be a Larch Street house as it collapsed. That noise didn’t seem as bad as all the banging of the bombs and the anti-aircraft guns. It was gentler, not so crackly, not hurting the ears. It reminded Ian of when he saw and heard a big waterfall on an outing to the Brecon Beacons. But he knew it would not be like that for anybody in the house when it came down on them. In fact, he changed his mind. That sound was worse than the explosions from guns and bombs because it meant somebody’s house had got it, and maybe the people in the house had got it, too. He thought of the guns and bombs as being like fireworks. Or he tried to.

  Now, the two men still argued. They didn’t seem to take much notice of what was happening outside. All they thought about was each other, and they thought about each other with true hate, anyone could tell this. In some quarrels the hate could be very strong at the start, but then it would die away. Things would get back to the ordinary. This didn’t happen with these two, though. They would move even closer, as if they meant to fight, and then back away, but still grunting and muttering about money, and doing their looming.

  One said half the money should be his, that this ‘stood to reason’, but the other replied that he was the one who found it and that was that, finders-keepers, and in any case, it was all gone now. Ian did not know which money they spoke about. He thought it must be a lot if it made them posh-snarl so badly, and not caring who heard. No, they didn’t, and there was swearing. The man didn’t say just finders-keepers, but finders-fucking-keepers. That was a terrible word, but Ian definitely heard it – things outside had gone quiet once more.

  The men’s voices seemed different from the ones he was used to around here – more like the headmaster’s in the grammar school, where Ian had started last year, or even like people reading the News on the wireless. One of the men turned his back on the other. It looked as if he would walk to the doorway of the shelter and at last try to see how the raid was going. Maybe he suddenly got fed up with the argument, or felt sick of looking at the other man and did not believe him worth talking to any more. That’s how it seemed when he turned his back – not just to walk away, or find out about the raid, but to tell the other man he was not worth talking to any more. It had to be a rude thing to do. It was what his mother would call ‘a pig-ig thing to do’, but she didn’t say that now. He knew she didn’t want to say anything that might get one or both of these men more cross.

  Everybody knew turning your back on someone might be rude. With kings and emperors and sultans, their court people would walk backwards after meeting them, so as not to turn their backs. It was respect. But during quarrels people were often rude, because they wanted to hurt the other one, not always by hitting them, but by an action such as not taking any more notice. Perhaps the man who turned his back would go. Although the siren had not sounded All Clear yet, the raid might be finishing. For the last few minutes Ian had not heard any bombs and the ack-ack of the anti-aircraft guns had gone silent, so there would be no great lumps of jagged shrapnel coming down. These were pieces of metal that used to be the smooth, strong cases of anti-aircraft shells but had been ripped into chunks when these shells exploded in the sky. Some of this shrapnel had very sharp, spiky bits that made Ian think of the mouth and teeth of a shark he’d seen in photographs.

  These pieces were supposed to hit aeroplanes and their crew and cause crashes, of course. But if they missed they would fall into the streets and lanes and would be dropping very fast. They were dangerous. This was one reason air-raid wardens had tin helmets. Some boys collected shrapnel. They thought that after the war there wouldn’t be any anti-aircraft guns firing, so shrapnel would not be around in the streets and lanes. It would become rare and would help to show what war and raids had been like. Ian collected army badges instead. He knew regiments and their emblems and mottos. If the war lasted another seven years he might have to go into the army himself. Because of these badges he’d know quite a lot about the different parts of it. He’d most probably try to join the Royal Artillery. He would be used to the sounds of guns if there were more raids like this. Of course, he knew something about bombs and bomber aircraft, too. Perhaps he’d decide to join the Air Force.

  Now that it had become quiet outside, with no shrapnel or bombs falling, Ian thought the men might go, or one of them, anyway. Perhaps his mother was right, and as long as nobody took any notice of the two this trouble would end. But then Clifford said: ‘He’s got a knife.’ He did not whisper. He just said it in an ordinary way but with some throaty phlegm, trembling, and Ian could hear it
, although his mother and Graham were between him and Clifford. Ian looked at the two men. One man seemed really angry because the other one had turned his back. He felt insulted, you could tell. Although Ian did not know their names at this time, he discovered what they were when the newspapers did reports on the stabbing, of course, and at the trial. When Ian was describing things to the court the judge told him to say, ‘The man I later learned was Martin Harold Main’, or the other one.

  The man who had turned his back probably knew it would make the other one more angry. That might be why he did it. He wanted to be rude. It was like telling Mr Main he didn’t matter. This did not mean Mr Main was right to do what he did. If he had been right he would not have been hanged after the trial, and that notice put up on the prison gates. This was obvious.

  The man stepped forward two paces very fast and got his left arm around the neck of the one who had turned his back. The man with the knife pulled the other one hard against himself. They both had black or dark overcoats on and now they were together like that and in the smoke they looked like one big, thick shadow of a creature with two heads. The one who had turned his back tried to struggle and shouted something, or it was nearly a scream, but Ian could not tell if there were words. It might have been just a shout of surprise or perhaps he had been trying to say something but could not because of the arm inside the overcoat sleeve pressing so hard against his throat. He might be able to get enough air to let him screech, but not enough for shaping the screech into words, not even the one short word: ‘Help!’ He could not fight free.