A fine man that,’ Liza concluded, closing the gate of the Cathedral behind them. ‘And mind you, Janie, hurry home with my shilling for the essay the morn.’
‘There was a man looking for you, Liza,’ Poll greeted them, when they arrived back at the Lane. ‘I didn’t see him myself, but wee Lil here was speaking to him. He came back and fore three times.’
‘It was the Cruelty Man,’ wee Lil broke in, ‘asking me questions about you and Janie, there. But I’m not the one to meddle with my neighbours’ affairs. He got small change out of me,’ Lil ended quickly, frightened by the sudden tallness and glint that had come over Liza.
‘He couldn’t get much out of you, could he, Lil?’ Liza burned Lil up in a look. ‘Nor from you either, Poll.’ Her anger extended itself to Poll. ‘Because none of you know anything about Janie and me. Do you, now? Except, of course, the kind of things that would interest the Cruelty. And I bet you let him have the lot. I bet you did. You’d have licked his boots all right, and would have licked his arse too, if your tongue had been a bit longer.’
Liza strode up to 285, declining Janie’s company. ‘You run and play yourself for a while.’
‘She’s a dark horse that, and no mistake,’ Poll condoled with wee Lil. ‘I can’t make her out at all. But you’ll see, she won’t get herself out of this lot. She’s lost that Janie. It’ll be a Home for her. Or my name’s not Poll Pyke.’
‘And the bairn would be better in a Home,’ wee Lil agreed. ‘She’d be sure of a bite and a sup. And God only knows there can be no example for a bairn up at 285. There’s no’ much of a life for any bairn in the Lane, if it comes to that.’
If Janie had heard Lil’s sentiments she would have been entirely out of agreement with them. The Lane was home and wonderful. And even more home and more wonderful in moments like these, when it seemed at stake. A long line of men drifted out of the Labour Exchange, throwing their usual sallies over to the women in the causeway: ‘Where’s your Ramsay MacDonald now, Poll?’
‘Up my clothes,’ Poll flung back in kindred mood.
‘By God, he’ll get fair lost there, then, Poll.’ Their rising laughter covered Janie’s apprehension. A group of bairns, showing off, chanted their ball game on the cobbles:
One, two, three a-leerie,
Four, five, six a-leerie,
Seven, eight, nine a-leerie,
Ten a-leerie. Postman!
‘I’ve been looking for you all over, Janie,’ Gertie’s voice broke through the noises. ‘Where did you get to?’
‘Down to the Cathedral for the essay,’ Janie said quickly, for the essay no longer seemed important. ‘I think I’ll have to go away to a Home,’ she added, partly to shock Gertie, and partly to put her own apprehension into real words. ‘Cruelty Man was looking for me. He was up here three times.’
‘That’s nothing.’ Gertie remained disappointingly unshocked. ‘Cruelty Man’s often up at our house. He looks through all the blankets, then inside the cupboards, and if he catches you he looks in your head as well. He’s never catched me. My Dad bawls him out of it. Come on, Janie, I’ve something to show you down High Street. There’s going to be a ball in the Assembly Rooms. They’re all lit up. And there’s a new frock in your shop. But the frock’s mine because I saw it first.’
Down High Street took the edge off apprehension. Gertie and Janie ‘owned’ many of the shops in High Street. Ownership of the same being acquired by merely being first to reach and touch a shop window, laying the formal vocal claim: ‘My Shop.’ Janie’s proudest property was a small dress shop, which only displayed one dress at a time, a grown-up, Cinderella creation, at which Janie and Gertie would stare, snub-nosed and appreciative, seeing themselves so adorned in the miraculous, but far-off time of grown-upness. Today, the dress in the window surpassed its predecessors. It was white, glowing and glimmering with silver sequins. Passing girls stopped to look at it, oh-ing and ah-ing in little groups, edging the children away, to get a better look, never dreaming that Janie owned the shop and Gertie owned the white dress because she had seen it first.
Down at the Assembly Rooms, the lights lit up she street, dancers flitted past the windows, sudden whirls of bright colour. The music drifted down to those watching from the street. When You and I Were Seventeen. Some of the girls sang the words, some of them waltzed on the pavements to the tune, the policeman edging them away, to let the lawful dancers pass through. A new distraction arrived on the scene. Forty Pockets, with his barrel organ and his monkey in its bright red petticoat. Janie and Gertie, delighted to see him, forsook their hard-won position with its view of the Ball. The music from the barrel organ drowned out the music from the Ball. Back to the land where the skies are so blue. Please give the monkey a penny, too.
‘Move along,’ the policeman shouted. ‘No obstruction here, now. Keep moving, all of you.’
‘And don’t you follow us,’ Gertie threatened some children from a rival lane. ‘Because Forty Pockets is more ours than yours. Him and the monkey stays in the next Lane to us.’
‘Beat it,’ Forty Pockets snarled, unmoved by Gertie’s loyalty. ‘Don’t you two be trailing after me all night.’ The monkey stared at them brightly, his red bonnet on one side, his red petticoat hanging on one side too.
‘I bet you Forty Pockets beats that poor monkey,’ Gertie said as they ran towards the Lane. ‘And he smells terrible with all that dirty old coats he’s got on. No wonder everybody calls him Forty Pockets.’
Back at the Lane the children bounced their ball to a perpetual chant. A week ago they had skipped to A Big Ship Came to the Eelie, Ilie O. Next week they would be running round in rings to She is the Girl of the Golden City. But no chant ever overstepped its own mysterious season, and this week it would be a bouncing ball and One, Two, Three A-Leerie.
‘Can Gertie and me get a game?’ Janie asked the owner of the ball, formally, as strict etiquette in the matter of street games required.
‘If you take the last turn,’ the ball owner answered, ‘because you two joined in last.’
To be a leader in street games required not so much personal ability, as personal possessions. The owner of a ball or a skipping rope invariably got off to a good start in the race for being ‘Boss’. Janie had savoured the powers of leadership for brief spells, usually broken by some irate mother: ‘You and your bloody Ghost in the well! My Rosanna didn’t get a wink of sleep last night.’ You had to be very humble when you were not the Boss of a game. The least unwitting word of criticism brought forth the dreaded and irrevocable judgment: ‘Out of this game, You. It’s my ball.’
There were rare moments, though, needing much self-denial, when you could take the initiative first, and shout: ‘I’m not playing. It’s just a lousy game.’ More, the Boss of a game could always cheat and get away with it, saying that it was a bad turn of the rope or that the ball was thrown too low, too high, too fast or too slow. This you patiently endured for the sake of getting your turn. When your turn was over you could get your own back by deliberately throwing the ball too hard, too fast, too high all at the same time and getting the Boss ‘accidentally’ but firmly in the place where it hurt her most.
Janie seldom resorted to such brutal methods: she had a more subtle and effective method of dealing with the Boss: ‘I know a game. A new one. You don’t have to wait your turn, you can all play at once. Who’s coming to my game?’
They all came, of course, lured by the promise of an equal share, except the Boss of the previous game. ‘And you can’t come,’ Janie would inform her, becoming as much of a Boss herself, as the Bosses she thought she despised. ‘You can’t come, because this is my game.’
When your turn was last, as Janie’s turn was now, no such tactics were practicable. The game might end long before your turn came, and then, of course, it wouldn’t matter. On the other hand if the game didn’t end, you didn’t want to ruin your chance of a turn. In those eternities of being ‘last’ Janie stared at the walls of the causeway and at t
he cobbles round her feet so long and hard that, in after years, she could still recall the patterns of cracks on the walls and the shapes of the cobblestones in the Lane. Meantime, the voices of the Lane’s women drifted through and over the chant of the ball game.
‘I can tell you one thing,’ the Duchess was affirming, ‘and I’ll tell you it for nothing. If this strike goes on, they won’t be sitting so cooshy on their thrones. I heard Nelly’s Bert vow just the other day that he’d tear Royalty to bits with his own two bare hands. And you know what Bert’s like when he’s in a paddy. And he’s been in a paddy all right since the tweed mills had to close down. What’s more, he’s off now on the hunger march to London.’
‘You can never tell what will happen,’ Poll marvelled, as if Nelly’s Bert might both end the strike and ‘do’ the Royal family the moment he arrived in London. ‘If the mines don’t start up by winter, we’ll all die off like flies.’
‘It’s bad enough,’ the Duchess agreed, ‘when you haven’t got the price of a bag of cinders, but it’s even worse when there’s no cinders to be got, even though you haven’t the price of them. It’s them not being there that gets you down.’
‘My Hugh’s old man won’t last through another winter,’ Poll cheered up. ‘I can see him failing under my eyes. Mind you, he’s had a good innings. And I’m not going to pretend I’m sorry he’s going. There’ll be more room left for the rest of us. I’ve put up with a lot from the old cove. But it’s his spitting and slavering all over that I just can’t abide. It’s all on account of his catarrh. But still, you forget that when you’ve got to clean up after him.’
‘Do you know something?’ the Duchess broke in, with the eagerness of discovery. ‘It’s just a week tomorrow since Mysie Walsh did for herself. And, by God, I haven’t had time to miss her yet.’
‘It all happened so quick,’ Poll agreed, ‘that you still kind of expect her to come jazzing through the causeway, acting the goat, the way she used to.’
‘My Mother went off sudden,’ wee Lil recalled. ‘It was her heart though. One moment she was as living like as you, Poll. She’d been down to the Ham Factory for a tanner’s worth of pigs’ trotters. It was a Saturday. We always had pigs’ trotters on Saturday. She got home with them, slumped down on her chair, and died there and then. I’ve never been able to eat pigs’ trotters since. What with the shock and one thing and another, the worry of getting all her relations on the spot for the funeral, and getting the Insurance money from her death policy to bury her, for she’d got a week or two behind with her payments. And you know what like the Insurance are when you’re a bit behind. Especially if you die. Though God knows she’d paid it regular for over thirty years, enough to bury three folk. And what with Pinner the undertaker, and you know him. Has to see the colour of his money first, before he measures you. No cash and you can keep your corpse. And scurrying around everywhere looking for a cheap bit of black, since I was chief mourner, of course. My Mother was buried for weeks before I realised she was really dead. I picked up her coat one day, it smelled all of her. That was the first time I knew she was dead and gone. I cried terrible when it came home to me.’
‘Death’s always worse when it hits sudden,’ the Duchess assured them. ‘Because it just gives you a wee push at first, then it gets tore right into you and knocks you flat on your face.’
‘You can have the rest of my turn, Janie. My Mam’s shouting me. I’m at “Open the gates, and let me through, Sir”.’
The rare thing had happened in the street game, an accidental and ‘preferred’ turn. ‘Janie’s got to get the rest of my turn,’ Maikie Stewart informed the Boss. ‘Because I’ve got to go. And I’ve just had half a turn. And that’s fair, because I waited here for ages.’
The game came to a standstill, while the legal aspects of such an infrequent contretemps were debated.
‘That’s fair enough,’ Poll suddenly refereed the squabble that had arisen, threatening to become a free-for-all, from the vantage point of her grown-upness. ‘It’s fair enough. If you’re due a thing and can’t take it yourself, you can hand your due over to anybody you name.’
‘All right,’ the Boss agreed reluctantly, her personal wishes thwarted by such a powerful adversary as Poll, but still holding on to some of her dignity of office. ‘But Gertie Latham still has to wait till last for her turn.’
Gertie didn’t have to wait till last. But neither she nor anybody else knew that, as Janie caught the ball for her turn.
One, two, three a-leerie.
‘Not from the beginning, Janie! Maikie did that.’ The squabble rose renewed. ‘You’ve only got half a turn. It’s from “Open the gates”.’
Open the gates, and let me through, Sir
Open the gates.
The causeway was very quiet. Even the women had a sudden interest in this controversial turn. The watchful quietness unnerved Janie. The end of the chant seemed so far away:
Open the gates, and let me through, Sir
Open the gates.
‘The ball’s down. Janie dropped the ball at “Open the gates”. She’s out. She just went and dropped it.’ The cries rose through the causeway in mingled accents of triumph and regretfulness. Gertie’s voice rising in admonishment. ‘Getting to “Open the gates” and going and dropping it, Janie. Your turn’s gone now.’
‘I meant to drop it,’ Janie informed them, ‘because I’m needing the lavatory in a hurry. Gertie can have the rest of my turn,’ she cried as she flew up the causeway. An argument which not even Poll had the power to settle rose fierce and furious behind her. But Janie flew beyond it all, as if compelled, to the lobby of 285. Only to the lobby, apprehensive of her Mother’s reception of this most urgent question.
‘Mam,’ she shouted up the stairs. ‘Will you die soon?’ And lest the answer should be in the dreaded affirmative, added: ‘Just say this one time that you won’t die soon.’
The answer, when it came, was hurried and irritable.
‘I don’t know when I’ll die. For goodness’ sake run and play.’
Janie didn’t. She stood for a long time in the lobby, getting her face quiet and ordinary again, to meet the other bairns. It took a long time to get your face ordinary so that no one would know anything had happened. And, in the longness, Liza’s voice came down again, with laughter and assurance in it: ‘Of course I won’t die soon. What on earth would I do going and dying?’ Janie ran from the lobby, lest death should change its mind again.
‘I thought you was off to the lavatory,’ Gertie was accusing. ‘Did you get a penny?’
‘No. I had to go to speak to my Mam, that’s all.’
‘You look as if you’d got a penny or something.’ Gertie’s suspicions were unallayed. And although Gertie was Janie’s very best friend, Janie sensed that not even to Gertie could she confide the truth: ‘I’ve just got a promise from my Mam that she won’t die soon.’
A promise that lit and warmed the Lane for the rest of the night, that put the apprehension of the Cruelty Man completely out of mind, that made Woolworth’s bangles shine more brightly on the young girls’ arms, that whirled herself and Gertie faster round the street lamp than ever, singing as they whirled:
We’re two little piccaninnies,
Real gems you know,
We’re the real dusky diamonds,
Only from Iohio.
seven
THE worst had happened. Liza stared silently at the blue summons in her hands. She had sat there staring at it for a long time now, discovering from it that Janie was neglected, and in need of care and protection.
To Janie it seemed that Liza, numbed and white and bewildered, was really the one who needed care and protection. Janie found herself able to provide both.
‘We’ll go away, Mam. Miles and miles away together. Where nobody will ever find us. They can’t take me away from you if they can’t find us,’ she reasoned.
‘They’d catch up on us sometime,’ Liza answered dully, but not dogmatically.
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And Janie pressed her ‘prospect’ home.
‘Not for years and years, maybe. We could sell bowls and bootlaces, like Beulah does. Nobody worries about tinker children. So they wouldn’t worry about us any more. Not if we become real tinkers.’
‘I know a place,’ Liza said tentatively. ‘It’s a long walk from here. But I know we could get a cheap bed in this place.’
It was dusk when they slipped together away from the Lane. It was difficult to hear Liza say casually to Poll as they passed through the causeway:
‘I’ve got one of yon heads of mine coming on. I thought we’d take a turn round the Green for a bit of air.’
Difficult not to blurt excitedly out to Poll:
‘We’re really going away forever, Poll. You’ll never see us again ever.’
Difficult, because that was the only exciting bit of ‘news’ they had ever had to impart to Poll.
Each familiar landmark loomed up in supplication of farewell. Janie said goodbye silently to the chip shop and all the buildings that couldn’t speak and report them to the police, and still gave them a sense of ‘belonging’, till they reached the Toll Booth on the outskirts of the town.
‘We’re real tinkers at last,’ Janie thought, with a great sigh of relief, when they had passed through the gates.
The relief of being a real tinker communicated itself to Liza. She lit her pipe. The first ‘light up’ for a long time.
The road they took was strange to Janie. ‘It leads to the next town,’ Liza explained. ‘There’s a Diddle Doddle there. With a bit of luck, we’ll get a bed for ninepence.’
The White Bird Passes Page 7
