by Gerald Kersh
“St. Timothy’s, mum.”
“What does he mean, St. Timothy’s?”
“St. Timothy’s Home for Waifs and Strays, mum,” said the boy.
“Are you a waif? A stray? If you don’t mind my asking?” asked Belcher.
“Yes, sir, please sir.”
“What’s your name?”
“Henry Ford, sir, please sir.”
“No relation to the Henry Ford, I suppose?”
Betty Lou said: “Belcher, do shut up. The child doesn’t understand you’re only joking. And how old are you, Henry Ford?”
“Please, mum, thirteen years and five months.”
“And have you been at this place of yours for long?”
“Since I was seven and a quarter, mum.”
“And you like it there?”
After an uneasy pause, Henry Ford said: “Yes, mum, thank you, mum, very much indeed, mum.”
“Do you get enough to eat?”
“Oh, yes, mum.”
“Are you happy?”
“Yes, thank you, mum.”
“Then why don’t you eat your strawberries and cream?”
“We’re not supposed to take things from people, please mum.”
“What would happen if you did?” asked Belcher.
“If Mr. Bond found out, I dare say I’d get the stick, sir.”
“What’s that?” asked Gospel, “did I hear you say stick?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Do they beat you?”
“Not if you behave, sir.”
“Would you mind elucidating that?” asked Gospel.
The boy shook his head and Mr. Belcher said: “What do you mean by behave yourself? In other words, what do you have to do to get the stick?”
“ – or it might just be a smack on the head, sir, please sir,” said the boy.
“Well,” said Belcher, “what do you have to do wrong before they cane you or smack your head?”
The boy began tentatively: “You can get the stick for taking sweets and things from boys at school. Or you can get the stick again if you get the cane at school.”
He paused to think, and Betty Lou said, in a voice that trembled with pity: “I promise you nobody shall know if you eat your strawberries and cream.”
The boy raised a spoonful to his lips, hesitated, looked anxiously from side to side, and began to eat. In a minute or two Betty Lou took the empty plate and the spoon and said: “Now, nobody is going to punish you for that anyhow. But did you really mean it? Why? Why? I don’t understand. This is barbarism, barbarism! Why? Why, Peter John?”
“I suppose the idea is, to impress upon the world at large that they want for nothing,” said Belcher. “And tell me, Henry Ford, what else do they punish you for?”
The boy paused, still licking his lips, and left the pink tip of his tongue protruding, as an aid to calculation, from the left-hand corner of his mouth, as he continued: “We can get the stick for whispering on duty, or if we splash the floor when we’re washing, you might get a smack on the back; or if you use too much soap scrubbing the floor, well, sir, you might only get a smack round the ear just to remind you. The same as if you cry, or make too much noise getting coal or washing up, or if you clump your feet going upstairs or walking along the landings, or if you run about, or if you walk too slow . . . you can get it for that, the same as when you talk upstairs at any time, or if you make a hole in your socks or your jersey, or if you have an untidy locker or clothes basket. Or you could get punished for making your towel too dirty, sir, or your shirt collar, sir, or going about with your trouser buttons undone, mum, or your bootlaces undone, sir, or if you hold your knife and fork wrong, or if you say your prayers with your eyes open, or if you don’t sweep the lobbies and dust the ledges properly, mum. You get it for laughing when you ought not to laugh, or for not laughing when you ought to laugh – I mean looking miserable, being sulky. Or if you get your knees dirty, or go about with untidy hair, mum, or if you don’t learn Sunday Collect and the General Thanksgiving properly, sir, or if you lie in bed with your knees raised. And you can get the stick for not eating your dinner. I mean for leaving leavings, or if you eat up what somebody else leaves, or if you use too much boot blacking, or if you’re caught not wearing your apron for Duties. Or if you don’t keep your scrubbing bucket and floor-cloth clean, and specially if you wet the bed, mum.”
“Good God!” muttered Gospel, pacing the floor and lighting a fresh cigarette from the end of his last.
The boy slid off the chair. “You won’t say anything, sir?” he asked.
“Say anything? Say anything?” cried Gospel, in a rage, dashing his pale right fist into the pinkish palm of his left hand.
Henry Ford was opening the door. He said: “About the strawberries, sir, sometimes they ask people. We are not supposed to, mum. If they say did this boy go and eat strawberries at your house . . .” he was confused.
“No, no,” said Betty Lou, hurriedly fumbling in her purse, “no, no, don’t worry. Hadn’t you better run along now?” She found a half-crown and put it into the boy’s hand.
“Yes, mum, thank you, mum. I am much obliged to you,” he said.
“Well, run along now, Henry Ford, and if there is anything we can do for you, you will let us know, won’t you? Good-bye.”
“Yes, mum, thank you, mum.”
Henry Ford, having run himself to a standstill fell into a breathless, hopping walk at Six Ways Circus. He was late, and he would catch it. He was yearning now to avoid punishment, and panting to escape a beating, sweating heavily under his dark jersey and durable heavy knickers that marked him as one of the waifs and strays of St. Timothy’s. In his wet hand the yellow leaflets had been crumpled to pulp. He remembered that he ought to have delivered them, and now it was too late. What was he to say? He reasoned: If I tell the truth, I’ll cop it. I’ll get the stick for sure if I tell the truth. If I tell a lie, and say I put all these bits of paper in people’s letter-boxes because I couldn’t get an answer when I rang the bell, I might just about get away with it, with luck. But if I tell the truth, I cop it. Better tell a lie and chance it.
He rolled the sweaty leaflets into a hard ball and threw it as far as he could into the scrub. It disappeared in a gorse bush. There remained only the half-crown which the beautiful lady had given him at Honeysuckle Lodge. He opened his hand and looked at it. Half-crowns, strawberries and cream, and sugar; velvet chairs; there was a way to live! He would never forget how nice the lady was. Even the gentleman who shouted – he was only joking. But the lady – there was somebody for you. Her hands might have been modelled out of scented soap. The big yellow jewels on her fingers must be worth millions of pounds; and what a nice voice she spoke with! A lady, a proper lady if ever there was one. And the way she said: “Run along now, Henry Ford, and if there is anything we can do for you, you will let us know, won’t you? Good-bye!”
Henry Ford wanted to cry now. He had the half-crown, which was a lot of money; but the strawberries and the cream and the sugar and the velvet and the scent – these were gone, and St. Timothy’s stood red and square around the next corner. Mr. Bond and Mrs. Bond were waiting there. Looking from side to side to be sure that nobody was listening, Henry Ford said aloud: “Rotten old Bond, you bloody big bully! Why don’t you hit somebody your own size?” When he came in sight of the Home he whispered: “Our Father which art in Heaven, let me get away with it this time and I swear on my dying oath not to tell any more lies afterwards as long as I live, Amen.”
Then he was at the gate of St. Timothy’s Home for Waifs and Strays. He slid the half-crown into a pocket, wiped some of the dirt from his boots and went in.
It seemed that God had heard his prayer.
But it isn’t easy to get away with anything in Sixweston.
As you pass through the tiny town, curtains stir, little triangles of face appear, and then, as you look up, quickly disappear. You are being watched. Windows have eyes, walls have ears, and the
very stones seem to whisper. Woe to the transgressor in Sixweston! Nothing escapes the eyes of the watchers by day and ears of the listeners by night. For example, a certain lady, who had taken everybody in at first by an appearance of unassailable virtue, a soldier’s wife with three children, appeared, after a trip to London, in a smart fur coat. Sixweston knew her wardrobe to a handkerchief, and took a grave view of this coat. Some doer of good by stealth, signing himself or herself “Well Wisher”, wrote to the lady’s husband saying: “Far be it from me to make mischief, God forbid, but I think it is scandalous for your wife to go gallivanting around in expensive fur coats while you are roughing it at Camp . . .” The husband came roaring home with a bayonet, and there might have been bloodshed if his wife had not made it perfectly clear that the fur coat had been given to her by his own sister. He recognised the coat and was perfectly satisfied; but Sixweston was not, and to this very day the lady with the fur coat is regarded as a loose woman, and men leer knowingly at her when they pass her in the street.
Here you must weigh your word, measure your intonation, and watch your step.
The war had its effect on Sixweston, of course. Some of the population went away into the Services. Strangers came in. The Royal Barracks spread itself and became a training camp for recruits from all over the country. Gnashing and rattling, great tanks tore up sections of the common and the heath. On Sundays bored soldiers loitered about the Circus, occasionally whistling after the girls. Outlandish voices were heard – sententious Yorkshire voices, frozen-mouthed Midland voices, glottal Cockney voices; and later, the Oink-oink-oink of New Jersey and the drowsy Eeeah . . . eeeah . . . of South Carolina. Some of the inhabitants lost sons. Others made money. Like every other place in England, Sixweston got itself a gallon of private grief and a pint of recorded glory. A number of nobodies proved that they were great; several solid citizens demonstrated that they were shrewd. A farm labourer of Dogworth Hill went into the Commandos and got a posthumous V.C.; a poultry farmer of Dogworth Valley went into the black market and got his wife a mink coat. But – by God’s grace! – there is virtue left in the world! The pub called “The World’s End”, where World’s End Cottage is, in World’s End Way, still lives by the goodwill of the old beer-drinking men of Dogworth, Nether Bottom, and Sixweston Old Town; and sells most of its wines and spirits to ladies and gentlemen out of the Dogworth Hill Private Sanatorium – the quiet ladies and gentlemen who are allowed out between breakfast and lunch-time if they promise on their honour not to drink.
This sanatorium is a respectable cupboard for all kinds of skeletons – a lumber-room for living junk – a repository for every sort of hereditary – and acquired – stuffed owl, broken clock, chipped bust, rusty sabre, gutted sofa, and mouldy writing-desk with secret drawers. Here, storage is paid for certain useless heirlooms which one cannot in decency chop up and burn – husbands who cannot forget, wives who cannot remember, younger sons and stray daughters destroyed by lust, drugs, drink, love and hate. There are some mighty strange cases up in the Dogworth Hill Private Sanatorium; creatures of the twilight. But the inmates have one of the best views of all England. On one side they can see the pretty little town, plainly visible in the clear air, calm and yet remote, like a toy village inside a glass paper-weight. From Dogworth Hill in a summer twilight Sixweston is unbelievably tranquil, delicate and beautiful, as the rosy tail-end of the sunlight touches the roofs and the spires, and passes like a blush over the sturdy, square-blocked Saxon church. You can see the six winding roads running away from the Circus, and Martyr’s Hill surmounted by the stone cross which marks the place where the Sixweston Heretics were burned back to back in the days of Bloody Mary, singing to the last. Beyond the Hill, the Martyr’s Way runs down into the new grey road which goes, straight as a steel tape, to London.
Beyond the town the matted heath rolls away, full of strong, long-drawn curves; dark yet colourful, unkempt, alluring; familiar yet remote like a gypsy woman, it keeps itself to itself and has secrets. From time to time, in hot weather, a spark from a passing locomotive or a sunbeam focused through a dewdrop starts a heath-fire which soldiers from the Camp run out to quench. When the smoke has drifted away you may see unlikely objects that the gorse and the heather have kept hidden – tin cans, broken kettles, oil-drums, frying-pans, chamber-pots, buckets, and (once) a rusty revolver. Wherever the heath burns away, rubbish is uncovered.
Who knows what we might find if the canal dried up? It twinkles behind an elegant veil of silver birches – a languid ribbon of almost stagnant water, scummed with green in the proper season, and occasionally visited by swans that make their nests near the Old Bridge. In September, the stationer at Bullockbridge confidently mails an order for a gross of mixed autumnal tints in tubes; local water-colourists love this bit of countryside. He also sells a considerable quantity of metallic paints – ladies collect fir-cones, mount them on bits of wire, brush them with silver, gold, and bronze and give them to the Church Jumble Sale. Visitors buy this painted detritus to give, at Christmas, to people who don’t matter; who cry “Lovely!” and throw it in the dustbin.
Every year old soldiers out of the Barracks cut down young fir trees, stand them up in tubs of sand, and decorate them with empty boot-polish tins and rosettes cut out of old Army forms, in memory of Christmas. They have no legal right to mess about with the trees, yet nobody but Mrs. Obscot has ever tried to stop them. One December day when she was out looking at Nature she caught an infantryman in the act of hacking down a fir-sapling with a slash-hook.
“Are you aware that only God can make a tree?” she asked.
The soldier said: “Well, yes’m.”
“Did that poor little tree ever do anything to harm you?”
“No’m.”
“Then why are you torturing it?”
The soldier was embarrassed. How could he tell this woman that he and his friends wanted to stick the sapling in a tub of sand and decorate it with empty tins?
He said: “None of your business.”
She reported the case to the colonel, who announced in Part Two Orders that it had come to his attention that men had been cutting down trees: this practice should cease forthwith.
“Cease forthwith” became, thereafter, a standing joke. Raw recruits were awakened in the dead of the night and asked if they had been asleep. If so, this practice should cease forthwith.
The soldiers hated Mrs. Obscot for the sake of their Christmas tree.
Mrs. Obscot was a grinning, gaunt, staring, pouncing widow of fifty, who appeared to have been stretched and dried in the wind. Even her eyes and teeth looked dry. She rustled and crackled, hunting people down, wearing them to a standstill, sucking them to husks and hopping on from craze to craze. Her neighbours feared her for her maniacal charity, her inability to recognise a rebuff, and her frightful, persistent voice.
More or less intensely, she believed in everything inaudible and invisible. She could understand unspoken languages, reconcile the irreconcilable, and hear unheard-of noises – the brief shrieks of cut flowers, the thin yelping of sliced string-beans, and the Ow-owch! of flayed potatoes.
What the devil are they after, these people who weep for the tree and comfort themselves over the burning logs; who pity the lamb and fry the cutlet? Do they see themselves itemised in some celestial filing-system, collecting a muttered, perfunctory Thank you here and there with a gift scheme in view, as we used to collect vouchers out of cigarette-packets?
God knows. I cannot make head or tail of them.
Mrs. Obscot had a niece named Tina Pocock who lived with her and made herself useful about the house; she sewed, mended, and made clothes; went shopping, cooked, cajoled tradesmen, scrubbed floors, polished furniture, and laundered the best linen. As she worked, she sang. She was a natural, as they used to call them; a saintly woman of simple mind, pure of heart, who liked to please people. She shed tears of delight if she felt that she had made somebody happy. If you were satisf
ied, Tina was satisfied. She had a clear, warm, joyous contralto voice.
One afternoon, Mrs. Obscot heard Tina singing “Drink to me only”.
“Why, Tina,” she said, “you sing like an angel!”
“No, do I really, Aunt Phyl?” said Tina, smiling.
“You do! Oh, you do! Sing some more, please.”
Tina sang “Caller Herrin”. Her aunt said: “Tina, I am going to put you on the map.”
“Aunt Phyl; let me make you some tea.”
“Oh, yes, do make some tea. Make some tea like a good girl, Tina. But all the same, I am going to make a star of you. You’re not good-looking, but with a voice like yours – my goodness, they can fake you up to look like anything on earth. Most of these actresses are all paint and powder. You make some tea, Tina, and leave it to me. Why didn’t you tell me you could sing?”
Mrs. Obscot asked the vicar to let Tina sing in the concert.
“I’m going to get her on the stage, or into the films,” she said.
“Why not, why not indeed?” said the vicar. “Who knows? Why not? Our little concert is, after all, a start. One can never tell where such things may lead to, don’t you think, Mrs. Obscot? Everybody comes to our little concerts. For instance, the author, Peter John Gospel. He has highly influential friends. For example, the critic, Mr. Belcher, is stopping with Mr. Gospel for a week or two. A word from him, for instance, might go a long, long way.”
“I’ll go and see him at once,” said Mrs. Obscot, rising.
The vicar got between her and the door and said: “My dear Mrs. Obscot, I shouldn’t if I were you. Mr. Gospel is a shy man, a reticent man. He’ll come to the concert, Mrs. Obscot, have no fear.”
“Will he?”
“Oh, he will, I promise you, he will, he will! Apart from the posters pasted on the walls, Mrs. Obscot, we have our door-to-door canvassing, if I may employ the phrase. Mr. Bond sends the most reliable of his boys from house to house with leaflets, a fortnight before the concert. Good boys, grateful and reliable boys – they never fail us, Mrs. Obscot, so set your mind at rest.”
