Paradise Court

by Jenny Oldfield

  Chapter Four

  The gang of boys hanging around the front steps of the Duke was one reason why Charlie loathed this errand. Though he was older than most of them, it was hard to hold his own against the insults they chucked at him. And he usually had to dodge the odd hob-nailed kick.

  ‘Go boil your head!’ he muttered. He wrenched himself free from the grasp of a little O’Hagan, no more than nine or ten years old and desperate to rise in the gang’s estimation.

  The kid tried to link arms with him again.

  ‘Ooh!’ the others cried. ‘Shall we? Shall we stroll ‘cross the Common?’

  They swung their hips as girls did, mimicking a woman’s walk. ‘Get lost!’ Charlie yelled. He freed himself and practically fell forward into the passage leading into the bar. Quickly he made his way through the groups of men standing and sitting in the smoke-filled room. ‘How much does my pa owe?’ he asked. He had to raise his voice and yell over the sound of the pianola playing away in a far corner. The tune broke off before Duke had time to reply.

  Duke consulted the slate. ‘Well, young man, he downed five pints of Bass and two pints of half and half. Tell your ma she owes nine pence three farthing.’ His answer sailed loud and clear across the room. Charlie nodded his thanks. He felt the hairs at the nape of his neck prickle with embarrassment. He would never get used to this. All he could hope now was that the gang outside would be off down the street on a game of knock-down ginger, hammering on the door of some helpless old woman. As long as they found someone else to annoy he didn’t care. Stopping in the passage by the door to button his jacket and steel his nerves, he looked up and saw Sadie coming downstairs.

  ‘Hello, Charlie.’ She hugged a big cast-iron pan in front of her, but still stepped swift and sure through the door which he held open for her. She wore her tartan beret, a dark coat and a big blue woollen scarf wound high around her neck. Her long plait and short skirts swung as she turned down the street. ‘Are you on your way home?’ she called back.

  Charlie fell in beside her. ‘Yes. Where are you taking that?’ The gang had melted away, no fear of being kicked and put down in front of Sadie. It was because he stopped – at school and studied instead of hopping the wag with the rest. That’s why they called him names; he wouldn’t join in with the crowd.

  Sadie sighed and raised her eyebrows. ‘Frances says I have to take it down the court to the O’Hagans. One of the little ones ain’t right. I dunno.’ Her lace-up boots tapped along the stone pavement. ‘It’s a pan of broth,’ she explained. ‘Frances boiled the ham bones with some pearl barley. She says it’s good for you when you’re feeling under the weather.’

  Charlie strode along. He glared at the little O’Hagan kid, who scuttled on ahead of them now, barefoot, heading for home. He was skinny as a whippet in his threadbare rags. ‘Must’ve smelt the broth,’ Charlie noted. He stopped by the door of his own terraced house. At least the steps were clean and scrubbed. His ma did her best, not like some.

  ‘You going straight in?’ Sadie asked. ‘Why not come down with me instead?’ She felt she had to be bold with Charlie Ogden. He was too slow to take things up on his own account, with his nose always glued to a book.

  Just lately she’d noticed that behind the buttoned-up jacket and serious manner lurked something interesting and attractive. He was a good head taller than she was, with what she called a nice face. His features were fine and regular, unlike most of the lumpy-skinned, misshapen faces of many of the boys at school. She’d decided to set her cap at him.

  ‘No,’ Charlie said after a moment’s hesitation. He stared at his ma’s whitened steps. She made a border down each side with carefully applied donkey-stone. ‘Thanks.’ He took the three steps at once and disappeared through the door.

  ‘Thanks for nothing!’ Sadie huffed. She tip-tapped on down to the end of the court.

  ‘What’s that?’ Tommy enquired, sniffing the air. He’d appeared from the cellars of the tenement block like a jack-in-the-box. Now he poked his nose at Sadie’s pan and lifted the lid with a grimy hand.

  She smacked it smartly. ‘Leave off, Tommy. It’s broth for your sick brother, that’s what. Anyhow, what you got there?’ She pointed to a big square object sticking out from behind his back.

  He side-stepped, angling to get past without showing what he had hidden. But a tiny, pitiful cheeping sound gave his game away. ‘Cage birds,’ he said, giving himself over to a couple of minutes’ delay. Girls went soft over cage birds.

  ‘Oh, Tommy!’ Sadie said. Her face lit up. She put the soup down on the black, greasy pavement, ‘Let’s have a look. Oh, they’re pretty. Where did you get ‘em?’ Inside Tommy’s wire cage, with its bent and battered ribs, perched two ruffled larks. Their breasts sagged mournfully, their round, black eyes blinked with shock.

  Tommy held up his property for inspection. ‘Railway embankment,’ he told her proudly. ‘I limed ‘em myself.’

  ‘Oh.’ Sadie’s voice was less enthusiastic. ‘Poor little mires. But will someone buy them?’ She hoped the pathetic things would last the night. Knowing Tommy, he’d have no food to give them.

  He nodded. ‘I’m off back up the Palace to catch the crowd coming out. There’s always a lady there can get her beau to buy her a songbird.’

  Sadie sighed and picked up her pan of broth. ‘Best of luck then.’ She turned and went on her way. He was never short of ideas, but then you had to look out for yourself in a family like that. Funny, she thought, Tommy’s the same age as me and Charlie, but you’d never guess it. He had the face of a fifty-year-old stuck on the body of a runty little kid. She was still shaking her head as she climbed the narrow stairs with the broth, up to the top floor of the block. This was what Tommy called home.

  Mary and Joe O’Hagan and their family lived in two rooms at number 48 Paradise Court. It was a bleak, bare-fronted tenement of blackened bricks and grimy windows, butted up against a blank stretch of factory wall and facing out on to another identical block across the narrow cobbled street. Their two rooms, a kitchen and a bedroom, lay at the back of the building, shut off from fresh air and sunlight. Down on the ground floor they shared an earth closet with a dozen other families in the block. Up here in the garret, Mary O’Hagan brought in washing and stood at the wooden tub all day and most of the night with her board, her scrubbing brush and soap.

  Sadie tapped at the door and went straight in. Joe O’Hagan sat at the bare table, an empty look in his eyes. He was small and thin, with a hangdog bearing, as if kicks were all he ever expected from life, and all he ever got. Beaten down in body and soul, terrible things took place around him. It was as much as he could do each morning to stumble into his worn trousers and button up his frayed shirt. Then he would sit, bent over the table, vacant and listless, while Mary thumped at the washing-board. Meanwhile, Daisy would smarten herself up at the piece of broken mirror propped on the bedroom sill. Tommy would be out early to beg and scrounge, while the little ones swarmed from kitchen to bedroom, and up and down the dark stairs.

  Sadie put the broth on the table. ‘Frances sent it,’ she said quietly. Peering through the door into the bedroom, she saw a small child lying on a bed under an old blanket. ‘How is he?’ she asked.

  Mary came forward. She wiped her red hands on a coarse apron and shook her head. The pan lid rattled as she lifted it to peer inside. Again she said nothing, but took it to the mean fire in the grate and set it to heat there. Sadie bent and lifted a little one from the floor. She set the child against one hip. Another came and tugged at her skirt.

  ‘You heard the tale, did you?’ Joe O’Hagan opened his mouth and the flat, Irish voice drifted across the room. The silent, round-eyed children turned curiously towards him. ‘I expect that’s why you was sent.’

  ‘Joe, Sadie doesn’t want to listen to all our moans and groans,’ Mary reminded him. ‘We’re just waiting on the few shillings Daisy gives us each week, then we can fetch the doctor,’ she explained.

  Sadie nod
ded uncomfortably. The child in the bed coughed and turned.

  ‘Aye, but I went before the Board today.’ Joe insisted on telling the whole story, his peaky face pale and set. ‘I’ve lost three kids to Paradise Court, and I’ll be damned before it’s a fourth. We need a doctor. So I went before the Board. “My child has to see a doctor,” I tell them. “He has the fever bad. He sleeps five to a bed with the other children. Without a doctor I doubt he’ll last the weekend.”’ Joe paused to study the wood grain on the table. ‘“And have you no money at all coming into the house?” they ask me. “Nothing to pay for the care of your own child?” I explain we’re waiting for Daisy’s few shillings. They look me up and down. “And have you no better off family to help you?” Where would I have better off family? My three brothers are all in Dublin, and I wish I was too. I’ve been here fifteen years, in work and out. Why did I come to the Board if it wasn’t necessary, I say?’ Joe raised his fist and thumped it weakly on to the table. Mary raised her apron to hick her face. Sadie hugged the child.

  ‘So they turn me away at last. “Wait for your daughter to come home tonight with the money you need to pay your own way.” One of them marches me out of the office. “And next time you come before us, I advise you to wear a suit,” he says. I say to him, if I had a suit, I’d pawn it and pay for a doctor myself. I wouldn’t go to the likes of him.’

  A hush fell on the room as Joe stopped for breath. It was broken by the child coughing and Mary sniffing. ‘Daisy will bring us the doctor,’ she promised.

  ‘Aye, not those nice bastards over there.’ Joe sat, wrapped in misery.

  ‘Joe!’ Mary remonstrated. She turned and took the child from Sadie, then went and bent over the pot on the fire. Strands of greying hair fell forward on to her face. With a weary gesture she pushed them back. She was worn out. ‘Daisy’s a good girl, and she’s good to us,’ she told Sadie as she stirred the broth.

  ‘Oh aye,’ Joe said, hollow-voiced. ‘Working in a place like that!’

  Sadie left them while Joe issued dire warnings about the consequences of working at the Palace and Mary took a shallow bowl of broth through to her sick child. When she got back to the Duke, she ran straight upstairs to Frances, fell against her shoulder and cried her eyes out. Life was hard down Paradise Court.

  Hettie and Daisy came off-stage for the last time that night, just as Archie Small went on for his final session of wisecracks and songs.

  ‘Hello, girls!’ He winked as their paths crossed backstage.

  ‘I’m melting!’ Daisy gasped. ‘Gawd, them lights don’t half give off some heat!’ She still held the smell of hot dust and metal in her nostrils.

  ‘I’ll soon cool you down,’ Archie leered. ‘Just you wait!’

  Daisy glanced at Hettie and mirrored her friend’s expression of disgust. ‘Ugh!’ She gave a little shiver and they ran for the dressing room, jostled by the other girls, crying out their exhaustion.

  ‘Let’s have a bit of hush down there,’ the stage-manager warned. ‘Get yourselves off home before Mr Mills comes and catches you making all that racket.’

  ‘No need to tell us,’ Hettie called back. ‘You won’t see me for dust.’ She staggered ahead of Daisy into the room, jockeyed for a chair and fell backwards into it. ‘My poor feet!’ She moaned. The place was swirling with discarded silk dresses and petticoats, reeking of hot bodies and face powder. The amount of female flesh on view would fill fifty seaside postcards. Hettie bent double to pull off her heeled boots, snagged a nail on her stocking and sent a ladder shooting from ankle to thigh. ‘Oh gawd, bang goes my wages!’ she cried.

  ‘Come on, Hettie, help me out of this.’ Daisy stood over her, demanding help with the tight bodice. ‘I gotta get home.’

  ‘That’s a turn-up.’ Hettie hoisted herself out of the chair to loosen the lace that kept Daisy’s waist nipped in so tight. She heard Daisy groan. ‘Why, what’s the rush?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  Both women vanished for a few seconds beneath yards of crimson silk. They emerged, hairstyles miraculously intact. Then they hung the dresses on the rack and scrambled for their street clothes.

  ‘Anyone seen Freddie?’ Daisy asked.

  ‘Freddie’ was what they called Mr Mills when his back was turned. ‘Hasn’t he got them wages down here yet?’

  ‘Not bleeding likely,’ someone muttered. Greasepaint came off left, right and centre, leaving pale, tired faces in the mirror. ‘When did he ever rush down with the wages, you tell me!’

  Daisy shrugged herself into her dowdy jacket and set her hat at a sideways angle. She rubbed at her cheeks to encourage a faint pink glow. ‘Ready?’ she asked Hettie.

  ‘Blimey.’ Hettie eyed Daisy. ‘I said, where’s the fire?’

  ‘Nowhere. Only, I have to get back.’

  Hettie vaguely remembered Frances mentioning a little brother ill at home. She knew, too, that Daisy’s wage was practically all that kept body and soul together at number 48. Suddenly the rush to get off home made sense. ‘Half a tick,’ she said, ‘And I’ll be with you.’

  But they were still standing inside the stage door twenty minutes later, waiting for Freddie to show up. Archie Small was already off-stage, pursued by raucous laughter. He bounded down the corridor towards the bunch of girls who were kicking their heels by the door.

  ‘Still here, darling?’ He slid up to Daisy and snatched her by the waist. ‘Just waiting for Archie.’

  Daisy wriggled free. ‘Leave off, you horrible little man!’

  Archie wore a loud checked suit, with spats and patent leather pumps. His bow-tie nestled against several spare chins, and his waistcoat buttons strained against a large belly. His hair was slicked to one side to conceal a mottled bald patch. ‘She only says that because she likes me!’ He winked at the other girls.

  Daisy jabbed him hard with her elbow.

  ‘Hush, here comes Freddie!’ someone warned.

  They quietened down as the manager approached, and Archie went off to lounge in an alcove, where he lit up a cigarette. ‘Bleeding nuisance!’ Daisy muttered to Hettie. She stood anxiously in line to receive her wages.

  Fred Mills took his time. He made the most of the power of his position. Tonight he’d brought along some friends to ‘meet the girls’. Everyone knew what that meant. Most backed away, sullen and offhand.

  ‘Hettie, I’d like you to meet Mr White.’ Mills pressed a few coins into Hettie’s palm and drew her forward by the wrist.

  Hettie had already recognized Chalky and his gang. Just our luck, she thought, knowing that Daisy was keen to be off. It could mean having to stay behind for a drink at least. She wished she’d taken less care with her outdoor dress. The blue feathers on her hat winked and shone.

  ‘We already met,’ Chalky said. ‘In fact, we’re neighbours, you might say. Hello, Hettie.’ He glanced at his pals to measure their approval. ‘We was just having a chat with your Robert earlier, wasn’t we?’ As he turned back to study her, she felt every stitch of her clothing being removed in his mind’s eye. But she wouldn’t drop her gaze, not for a king’s ransom.

  ‘And Daisy!’ Chalky oozed the famous charm. He passed a hand through his hair, and when Daisy felt her own hand raised to his lips, she could smell the sickly sweet macassar oil that darkened and slicked down his short cropped style. He hung over her, standing much too close, as bandy-legged Mills passed on down the row of girls. Still, she’d got her wages clutched tight in her other hand.

  Jealousy was too strong a word to describe the sensation Archie Small felt when he saw Chalky and his mates ogling fresh-faced Daisy O’Hagan. But he was peeved. He’d set his own mind on that little girl. Anyway, he pushed himself dear of the cold brick wall and strolled towards the group. He approached warily. His difficulty was that Chalky White was a friend of the manager. Even Archie had to mind his p’s and q’s if he wanted to go on cracking jokes at the Palace alongside the performing Jack Russells and the fez-wearing conjurors. He couldn’t risk antagonizing
Fred Mills. ‘I found us that taxi-cab, girl,’ he said, sidling between Daisy and Hettie. ‘I got it waiting for us up on the street.’

  Chalky’s grin tightened. Daisy frowned. Hettie dug her in the ribs. ‘Come on!’ she whispered. This was their chance to get straight off. Once outside, they could ditch Archie and head for the tram.

  ‘What you girls want with a taxi-cab?’ Chalky wheedled. ‘We can walk you home, can’t we, boys?’

  A chorus of agreement followed.

  ‘See. We’re even going your way.’ Chalky looked down at Archie. ‘Run along to your old lady, why don’t you? Let a dog see the rabbit.’

  Archie felt his forehead break out into a sweat. He clenched his teeth. Daisy was a fool. She’d been slow to catch on and Chalky had got the better of him in full view of all the other girls. Well, she’d be sorry. He backed off in a foul temper, glaring at Hettie as if it were her fault.

  Hettie shrugged. Daisy was a fool if she thought Chalky White was any better than Archie Small. Hadn’t she heard the stories about him?

  ‘Ain’t you supposed to get straight back home, so they can fetch the doctor?’ she reminded her.

  ‘That’s right.’ Daisy still met Chalky’s bold gaze. ‘Another time, maybe.’

  But Chalky wouldn’t let it drop. He’d made up his mind that Daisy was his girl, for tonight at least. ‘Who’s sick?’ he asked, as he took her by the arm.

  ‘My little brother, Jim. Ma says he’s bad.’

  ‘He ain’t croaking, is he? Anyhow, what doctor would turn out at this time of night?’ Chalky winked at Fred Mills and turned Daisy around towards the door. ‘Now just be nice, Daisy girl, and keep a poor man happy!’

  The manager glared at Daisy.

  She sighed and shrugged. ‘Just for half an hour then.’

  Little fool, Hettie thought again.

  But Chalky paraded Daisy up to the stage door. He winked at Mills again, and glanced back to check that someone else had grabbed Hettie and the pair were following. Hettie found herself on the arm of a small-time crook called Syd Swan, who grinned at her like a lunatic and dragged her along.