by Dawson, Jill
Climbing out at the house, Annie leans at the driver’s window and says to Uncle Charlie, “Tommy won’t squeal. I can’t speak for that young Toby Jug. But I know Tommy.”
Annie clicks unsteadily towards the house, beckoning me to follow. Gloria stays in the car with the others. I gave her a wave, a flutter. Gloria seems scared; she stares straight ahead.
That night I can’t sleep at all. Our bedroom, overflowing already with Bobby’s nightmares, is now swarming with fresh ones. I suddenly remember one of our teachers, telling Bobby off, ages ago, at Lauriston School, for scrumping apples from a garden. “You’ll end up in borstal, my boy, that’s where you’ll end up.” She said it not like a warning, but a fact. Sometimes I wonder why they do this all the time, why teachers and grown-ups do it and how on earth they expect us to fight it. Fight the picture they have for us, like a tunnel, a route they’re carving out in the earth for us to crawl along. We picture it, too, when they say it, of course. How else does the future happen? “You’ll end up in borstal. Mark my bloody words.”
He did, too. Not then, but later. He got off with a warning, after the day at the Dogs, but Dad got six months. And I got my promise: I got to see Mum.
Gloria arrives with no warning, and no explanation. The doorbell goes: Gloria is there. She’s wearing a hat, I see it through the bubbled glass window in the door, and as I open it, she’s standing on our step, blotting her red lipstick on a folded piece of paper, pulled from a neat little pack.
She looks over my shoulder and she seems nervous. “Annie in?”
Yes, Annie is, but I tell Gloria that I’m all alone, and she seems relieved, tells me to get my coat, and hurry up, she has George the Greek waiting.
George, she explains as we climb in the car, has kindly agreed to take us to the station. A great stink of cigar smoke nearly suffocates me as I open the door, but from Gloria’s mood—tense, quiet—I somehow know that I’m to say nothing and so I smother my coughs in the sleeve of my coat.
At the station she leans over to kiss George the Greek lightly and tell him with a wink that she’ll pay up later. He turns his curly head to watch us both go and suddenly winds down the window to shout in his powerful accent: “Yes, you will, baby—with knobs on!”
It’s such an odd remark that Gloria and I suddenly put our heads together and giggle as we run for the platform. I’ve worked out what a brass is by now. I’ve figured out that all the Ten Green Bottles do it when it suits them, although Gloria, being proud and vain, is the one who’d like me to believe otherwise.
On the train she’s sober again, and drawing on her cigarette and checking that the corridor is empty before closing the door again and sitting back down beside me.
“Now, Queenie, you done good. You never told a soul, and that’s the only reason I’m doing this for you.”
Yes, a deal, I understand those.
“God knows Annie wouldn’t thank me, and your dad would skin me alive.”
He would, too. I know that.
She snaps open her crocodile-print handbag with a loud click to put her cigarette case away, and find the slim white holder she likes to use to smoke. I peep inside her bag to see if the lovely suede purse is in there, and Gloria softens and offers me a comb and tells me to make myself look respectable.
“I’m doing this for Moll,” she says. “Not that she deserves it. No, she fucking well don’t. Excuse my French. But—a deal’s a deal. You’ve no idea how hard this was, Queenie. I had to write to the Medical Superintendent. I’ve had to cadge money off of George the Greek. You mind you’re grateful to me, you hear?”
I do, I am. I nod hard, flipping the comb to the floor by accident and folding over to pick it up. But I’m scared now, too.
The train rolls on and the chimneys and bricks roll into fields and once, a shinning fox—flashing into a hedge and disappearing. Once, Gloria says, “You didn’t go to the trial, then?” and I say, “What trial?” and she shuts her mouth, fast, and when she opens it again there’s a little smear of lipstick on her top teeth. I ponder this for a moment, wondering if she means Dad’s recent trial (no, no one ever takes me to those) or something else.
The last thing she says as we get out is the thing that troubles me most. She understands at last, she says, that no one has told me anything; no one ever tells children anything. I suppose she is trying to prepare me.
“How old was she then? Your baby sister—Vera?”
“I don’t know.”
“Was she older than a year? Thirteen months? Had she had her first birthday?”
“Yeah. I remember her birthday. Nan knitted her a hat. I made the pom-pom, you know winding it round cardboard. It was pink with orange flecks—”
“Gawd. Over a year, was she? That’s a shame. That’s why. Under a year would of been better . . . it’s a different law, then, see?”
I don’t see, but I know better than to ask. We’ve now walked from the little country station all overgrown with brambles and with a lonely feel, all horrible blackbirds pecking at empty fish and chip newspaper, and dog-ends, and have walked up a hill. Now I realize, staring up at the big fortress of a building in front of us, that if Gloria had warned me today, if she’d told me we were coming, I’d have said I’d changed my mind.
It looks like a whole town, not one building. It has high walls and two towers and sort of iron-railed balconies and walled gardens. Is it a hospital? It looks like a prison. The only big building I’ve ever seen is Ely Cathedral. This is bigger. And dark. And no one would ever want to make a model of it. I glance up at the windows, see the bars, and my eyes immediately spring with tears. I have never thought to ask, at this point, why no one took me to visit Dad whenever he was away; but now, at this moment, I decide that they’re quite right never to think of it, never to speak of it, never to ask me. I don’t want to visit. I don’t want to be here.
“Did you tell your brother you was coming?”
This surprises me. I didn’t tell Bobby, no. And I don’t know why.
“Don’t you think he would of wanted to come, an all?”
Yes. I do think that. It’s just . . .
Gloria grabs my hand in her leather gloves and snaps towards the gates. I somehow know from the way she does it that she’s thinking I’ve been mean, and I have, I know I have, but Bobby’s sulky at the moment and to tell the truth: I want something just for myself.
We fill out a visitor’s book—or Gloria does. She gives Mum’s maiden name—Windsor. Is she pretending to be related? That must be it. Mum’s sister, maybe. A lady comes, with a heap of heavy keys, a lady in a uniform who looks to me like a nurse. Like the nurse that other time, the one who called Mum a dipso. There is a tiny little Indian man shouting at the entry desk: he wants to see his wife. “Shh, sir, please,” the lady on the desk says, but he doesn’t stop.
Gloria is asked to empty her pockets, and show inside her handbag and when they spy matches, the nurses tut and say that matches aren’t allowed in the visitors’ room. “In case . . . you know,” they say, looking pointedly at me.
“How’s she supposed to light her fags then?” Gloria sounds annoyed.
“We do it. We have matches. And there’s a special brick for striking. Safer, you know . . .”
We’re hurried away and another door is unlocked; we all wait in the cramped space while this is done, and then we burst into the visitors’ room. Every time a key is turned and a door opened, I expect her to be there. Mum. I expect her to look just as she did, or just as she does in my dreams of her. With her hair all in auburn curls, on top of her head, wearing stockings and straight seams. I’m working hard on this, on picturing this, on this lovely statue I sometimes see, that looks like her, in Homerton. Instead some weird smell keeps wafting up to me, a frightening petrol smell, or is it gas? A smell of that day, the day I failed to steal enough milk to keep us all together—and then suddenly
here she is. And it is her, and she looks beautiful, but fatter and softer, and in a big tent-like dress made of dark brown material, and not like Mum at all.
Two nurses—both men, one with grey curling eyebrows like the barber at the Clip Joint on Well Street—are either side of her. As if propping up a giant doll. They bring her to our table, which is a small green table, like a card table, and they put her on a chair. Her head sort of dives forward just as if she is really a doll and they’ve dropped her. I think she’s going to hit the floor, face first. But instead she grabs for me.
I hadn’t expected that. I haven’t said a word but now a little “ow!” squeezes out of me and I almost pull away as she does it. I have to make myself sit still. She’s sobbing. Her body shakes and her wet mouth is in my hair, her hot breath all over me.
I sit frozen and long for someone to peel her off.
Gloria’s kind voice finally does it. I feel Gloria’s fear, crackling beside me; she’s murmuring, “Moll—how are you, gel? There now—calm down, gel—let her breathe now, Moll, there you go . . .”
Mum does at last release the lock on me and looks up. Behind her head are some drawings done by children. Piles of games—Monopoly, Scrabble. Mum gives me a weird grin.
“There she is. My big gel! Take a look at you. All grown up. Where’s your brother? Where’s Bobby?”
I should have known she’d ask for him first. A little stab, under my ribs. Is that why I didn’t tell him? Didn’t want to share her.
“Where’s the baby?” she carries on. “Was it your dad as brought you? Or Ida . . .”
I glance terrified at Gloria. “Keep mum she’s not so dumb” pops into my head. What does Mum know about Nan? What should I say?
“Another day, Molly.” Gloria rescues me. “You’re only allowed two visitors at one time . . .”
“Huh?”
Mum glances around as if expecting someone else, then slumps back into her seat. Her face is wet and Gloria offers her a handkerchief, which she takes and then flaps against her face, the way you’d slap a face you wanted to wake up.
“Darlin’!” Mum says, suddenly.
It’s an odd sound, her voice. It comes out in a blurt, as if not from her mouth but somewhere else, like a voice from a film. Darling. That’s not what I hear. I have such a clear bright picture of her, from a time in our kitchen, standing with that leaflet in her hand, the one about evacuation, and sending your kids away and fanning her face with it, saying, “Shall I then, shall I send ya?”
I’m not your darling. You never loved me. You never even think about me.
I must be the wickedest girl who ever lived, to think such a thing. I want to cry.
A couple of feet away a chair scrapes horribly as two nurses settle down beside us with notebooks. Later, Gloria, on the train home, says to me, “Never give you a minute’s privacy, did you see that? Every word we fucking said.” But then she just glanced over, a fierce look, narrowing her eyes.
“Got any fags?” Mum asks, now, abandoning the crumpled hankie and instead slapping the table, groping towards us. Her hand is fatter, too. Her fingers puffed up, and the skin grey.
“All right if we smoke, then?” Gloria asks the nurses, lifting her eyebrows. The one with the eyebrows, the barber one, gets up, strikes a match on a brick by the window, and, cupping it with his hand, walks over to us, lights Mum’s cigarette. Gloria seems thrilled that Mum’s shown a bit of mischief, any of her old spark. I think Gloria is more shaken than she’s letting on. I swallow down tears and smile brightly at Mum, at anyone who might be looking my way.
The room fills with the smell of Player’s cigarette tobacco. Almost, for a second, if I close my eyes, I can believe I’m there again, things are back how they were, with Mum, sloshing her rum around in her coffee cup, Dad reading The Greyhound Life, baby Vera snoozing by the fire, the Children’s Hour rumbling away on the radio in the corner, and Nan knitting . . .
Instead of here, going back, on the train, remembering. Gloria sniffing beside me, patting my hand occasionally, saying, “It’s the drugs, you know. She can’t help it. They keep them drugged to the eyeballs like that; that’s why she’s that fat.” And then suddenly, in a snort: “She was always such a beauty, your mum, such a fucking beauty!”
I stare out of the window, gently shaking off Gloria’s hand on mine. Nan used to read tea leaves sometimes, for a laugh. Swilling the cup around, tipping it up, poking with her finger amongst the soft black sludge. “I see a ship,” Nan would say. “That’s you, Bobby, going on a long journey.” Or: “There, see. One day your ship will come in.”
Always a blinkin’ ship, it was. Why did she never see this?
The train slides through a tunnel and instead of green and trees it’s my own face for a second in the black glass: my snub nose, my freckles. No, I can’t remember anything more about Nan. She’s fading, like a ball of wool unraveling until the last thread comes away and in the end there’s nothing there. I close my eyes and sleep for a second or two but jerk awake suddenly. As I open my eyes I see myself—I think it’s me, it’s a girl my age, or is it another girl?—standing right in front of me, staring at me. A sick feeling creeps over me. Whoever she is, she’s wearing my red flannel nightie with the drawstring ribbon at the neck, and behind her is the chest of drawers in my bedroom, dragged open, as if she’s been looking for something. I don’t like the way this girl is peering at me, so I squeeze my eyes shut to get rid of her, and open them again—stare out of the window. The track smears into a wobbling line in front of me.
Then at last there’s just Gloria again, and the green outside the window changes to the burnt and splintered city with its jagged pillars, its piles of charred bricks. I stare down at the railway track. It doesn’t feel as if we’re traveling along it. It feels like it’s chasing us, just out of reach.
In the end, I wished I’d never gone. I felt so guilty that I had to tell Bobby about it, a week or so later, and he just shouted at me. He said Mum was a dipso and an Alka-Seltzer and he didn’t care that no one took him; then he burst into tears. The visit spoiled my ability to picture Mum the way I wanted to as well. I wanted to picture her like the statue of the Immaculate Heart of Mary on the church in Homerton on Kenworthy Road. That statue had eyes like Mum’s: eyes that were glancing down, sarcastically, as if she wanted to laugh. Passing it always made me think of her.
You know it never ceases to amaze me how little information that people—adults—see fit to tell children. That really was it. The end of our explanation about her. The end of the subject. She loomed large for us, she was a statue with sarcastic eyes and a stone heart carved on her chest that colonized our dreams, but honestly, she could never be mentioned.
I spent more and more time with the Green Bottles, and Bobby, being a boy, somehow couldn’t, and that’s when our lives seemed to divide, along strictly boy/girl lines. Bobby spent time with mates he’d made at the Dogs, or trailing Jimmy the boxer, or just watching at the ring of the Repton Boys Club and bunking off school. Dad and Annie had some “news,” they told us, one day, all smiles and secret looks; they were expecting a little baby brother or sister for us.
We thought of Vera, and said nothing.
I was supposed to be at big school by then and Bobby, too, but most of the time we both bunked off. I thought of Nan telling me to look after Bobby, and not get separated from him, and I tried, but the boys Bobby wanted to be with were a bit scary to me, and wouldn’t let me hang around them. And he didn’t like to be in school.
One day about a month later I heard from Annie that Bobby had been nicked for stealing an air rifle. He had to go to court and of course no one paid the fine for him, so that made matters worse. Dad was away at that point, doing his time for his part in the dog-racing fixing, and money had dried up. I can’t now remember the sequence of events—I remember a bright autumn day near Bonfire Night when Dad returned and took me
to the brand-new Lesney’s factory in Hackney Wick to show me where the matchbox toys were made, and said, wistfully, “Think your brother’s too old for a matchbox car these days?” and I agreed that I thought he was. So Dad said he’d get one for the new baby when it came, instead.
Then there was the day—a day when the weather perked up and daffodils appeared at Vicky Park—that Bobby nicked a bike and cycled past the Jewish Boys Club on Fordham Street and got nicked by two coppers who recognized him. He abandoned the bike and tried to run and they chased him easily and caught him, and tumbled him to the ground, where one held him down while the other administered some good old British justice.
Oh, in those days you could do what you wanted to tearaways; you could get them in the car with a kindly “Come on, son, let’s be having you,” and once in you could pin their arms behind their backs and say to your mate, “Right, I’ve got him, let the little bastard have it!”
By the time he got to the police station Bobby had bloodstains all over him, but the arresting officers just shrugged, as if to say, “Well? How’d you expect us to bring him in?”
Bobby was in court the next morning, and fined a pound or two. This fine wasn’t paid either—who had a pound to spare, when every penny was needed for the new baby?—and so his old schoolteacher at Lauriston finally got what she predicted: her picture for Bobby came true. Bobby was taken to an Approved School in Hertfordshire. When—a year later—he absconded from there one night with his new friend Robby, he ended up at the police station again, and from there was taken to the Allocation Center at Wormwood Scrubs, where borstal boys awaited their fate.
PART TWO
5
My Further Education
Me, too. I ended up at a girls’ Approved School, eventually. I think Bobby went to his school around the spring of ’46, and me a year later. I tried writing to Bobby, piecing together from snippets Annie told me that after he’d run away from the school he ended up in Hollosey Bay, a big farm borstal in Suffolk, but Bobby’s letter-writing never improved and I didn’t hear back. I waited for that letter, and when it didn’t come I threw myself into learning all that I could from the Green Bottles about hoisting.
